From the Guardian

New legal rights for unwed couples
Press Association
Wednesday May 31, 2006 2:13 PM

Unmarried couples could be ordered to sell their home, pay lump sums and share pensions in the event of a break-up, the Government's law reform advisers said.

The Law Commission said the two million Britons who "live in sin" should be able to make financial claims against each other in some circumstances.

A partner should generally be able to make a claim if they made "economic sacrifices" during the relationship such as giving up a career to raise children, and the benefits were unfairly shared at a split.

The Commission said the new set-up would apply to heterosexual and gay couples who had been together for a minimum period, but it did not set out what the minimum should be.

It also recommended allowing couples to opt out of being liable to the new rules providing they signed a written agreement.

The measures would be "more limited in scope" than divorce laws, but the courts would be able to order sale of property, lump sums, monthly payments, pension sharing and interim payments.

[snip]
"We think that a new scheme should only provide eligible applicants with a remedy on separation if they can show that the effects of the contributions and associated economic sacrifices they made during the relationship would otherwise be unfairly shared on separation," said the report.

"In many cases, neither party would be able to establish this and no claim would therefore be tenable."

The Commission headed by High Court judge Sir Roger Toulson insisted the measures would not damage the institution of marriage by encouraging couples to live together rather than take vows. They could actually encourage more people to wed because partners would no longer avoid financial responsibilities to lovers by living together instead of getting hitched, it suggested.

There's been a huge uproar about this from the likes of Melanie Phillips, and I have to say I have some sympathy with her views. (Did I really write that? Bloody hell, it looks like I really did. I'll be writing letters to the Daily Mail soon at this rate. Real ones instead of fake rants to see if they publish them). After all, it's pretty damn easy for cohabiting couples to get the same rights as married ones - get married.

But I also have sympathy with partners who split after ages cohabiting and come away with nothing. If there are children involved and one partner has given up their job to bring them up, then they should surely have a right to something?

It also formalises something that mostly would never be a formal arrangement, more something you fall into. I've lived with four blokes. In the first three cases I was young, and had no intention of settling down for life. As I was always the one with the money and the job, there's no way I'd risk letting some bloke get his hands on my dosh just because I'd spent time shacked up with him. I can imagine there's loads of people who will feel the same way. So I think an unexpected consequence of this legislation might be less cohabiting rather than more. That sounds a bit unromantic to me.

Oooh, I know I shouldn't be whittering on about Alastair Campbell, but I just can't help it, because he's only gone and hurt his shoulder!

So if Alastair Campbell wants an excellent physio to treat him, I am reluctantly putting myself forward as an option. Well, that is if reluctant has its tongue hanging out and its arm raised shouting 'pick me, pick me!'

Craniosacral therapy doesn't require the removal of clothes. I won't be using that on him then.

I'm not going to be around much next week as Little 'Un is on half-term. But I wanted to mention placebo effect a bit more.

Because of the way placebo is referred to in trials, it is often assumed that this is a bad thing. Yet in fact I think it is the most amazing thing ever.

The placebo effect is what happens when you give any treatment that isn't the result of that treatment (I will dispute this later!). So if you give any treatment to patients, even an inactive one (like a sugar pill) about 30 per cent of people will get well anyway. So to be an active treatment, you have to get better results than that.

Yet no one seems interested in how to increase the placebo effect. When I treat patients, placebo is part of my treatment. I *want* a placebo effect. I want them to heal themselves, and I take great pains to be the best placebo I can, because placebo had no side effects. So I am nice to them, I listen to them, I believe them, I let them tell me their story. I am professional, I am older, I am smart and I treat them with my hands. All these things somehow help a person to heal. I used to use hypnosis, but I'm not allowed to do that now as the Chartered Society has decided it is beyond the scope of physiotherapy practice.

The brain is the most fantastic thing. It believes that fantasy is reality, and it can make your body believe it and then turn it into reality. For example, you can imagine people don't like you, and you end up being defensive in posture and gesture, and lo and behold, people back off. Or the brain can imagine you are going to get better, and you do. Yet this one is harder to explain, and there is no zeal to explain it.

The drug companies are happy to use placebo - by colouring pills the colours people think effective medicine should be - but of course, they don't want to find out how it works, because you can't patent it.

When I was working on the Burns Unit, I learned that wounds always heal, given enough time (and with a large full thickness burn that would be so long that the patient would die first unless they are grafted). When you treat wounds, you just have to find a way to optimise that healing - you can't 'speed it up', you can only give it the best environment. I think that holds true for all illnesses and injuries - our bodies can heal them, but placebo makes the environment more favourable.

If all NHS staff were made to be good placebos, then some treatments might lose all their stigma. One of my consultants used ot refer people for craniosacral therapy using the term 'hocus pocus treatment'. He would tell me, 'I believe it works when *you* do it, but I'm less sure about anyone else.' I wish I'd thought to tell him I felt the same about his drugs.

I have received the honour of having been tagged by purple dragon. So apparently you have to list the top ten fictional people you would like to shag. Then tag five other people.

Well, ten fictional shags should be damn easy:

Jay Gatsby (The Great Gatsby): Totally been in love with him for years. Bloody Daisy isn't good enough.

Sidney Carton (Tale of Two Cities): A recent addition to the fictional lust list. He's so debauched and yet so sensitive. And I'm a born rescuer.

The Vampire Lestat (book of the same name, amongst others): NOT the film one, just the book one. But come to think of it, any vampire will do. Oh, especially....

The Compte de St Germain (Chelsea Quinn Yarbro vampire books): Not just a vampire, he's an alternative healer and he is pretty damn hard too.

Alec D’Urberville (Tess of the D’Urbervilles): So much more of a man than that bloody sexless hypocrite Angel Clare.

Heathcliffe (Wuthering Heights): Dark, smouldering, quite possibly evil, but I’m more a Cathy than an Isabella, so I’ll take my chances.

The Vicompte de Valmont (Dangerous Liaisons): Especially as portrayed by John Malkovitch. Can’t imagine him any other way. A stud, and a man in existential turmoil – an irresistible combination.

Robert Lovelace (Clarissa): NOT as portrayed by Sean Bean (I think it was Sean Bean). What was Clarissa playing at? He’s a total catch –and (like Valmont) he likes writing letters.

Anton Skrebensky (The Rainbow): Hmm, I seem to have a penchant for the rich and titled. After reading The Rainbow, I had dreams of shagging this bloke – probably not surprising as it gets a bit steamy in the novel even. Not like Thomas Hardy, where a character once got pregnant, and even when I found that out, I STILL couldn’t work out when she’d had sex. Which could be quite scary for a less experienced lass.

Sebastian Flyte (Brideshead Revisited): I suppose I'd have to pay him, but by the end of the novel he'd probably accept.

So now the hard part because most people have done this already. I'll tag:

Dennypoos (I'm aiming for 'pondlife' status, and this just might help)
roza_f
hanneviken
nonnie
nixie

and hope they've not got around to it yet......

The ‘scientists’ are at it again, suggesting that alternative therapies like homoeopathy, acupuncture and chiropractic should not be available on the NHS as there is no ‘scientific’ evidence in support of it.

What they mean is that there are few double-blind randomised controlled trials in support of them – in fact there are few at all, for good reasons (aside from the fact that drug companies aren’t keen to fund them). The double-blind randomised controlled trial is the scientific Gold Standard. Patients with a particular illness are randomly assigned to either a group receiving the treatment to be studied, or a group receiving a placebo – a fake treatment. Neither the provider of the treatment nor the patient knows which they are receiving.

This is only an appropriate method of experimentation if you are using the standard ‘scientific’ (orthodox western) way of treating people: you treat the symptom rather than the person.

Most alternative therapies such as craniosacral therapy, Chinese Medicine and homoeopathy do not work in that way. We look at the person as a whole. Even ‘conventional’ physiotherapists do this to a certain extent – a person may have back pain because of fallen foot arches for example. In alternative medicine, someone with identical symptoms may receive entirely different ‘prescriptions’ depending on personality type, emotional state or surroundings, for example. Given the effect which emotions have on the whole body (see, for example, Candace Pert's 'Molecules of Emotion'), I would have thought that this is more scientific than to treat a symptom in isolation.

So the usual way of investigating these therapies is to take this into account. There are various methods of doing this such as longitudinal studies comparing treated patients with untreated ones over a period of time. Or patients undergoing alternative treatments can be compared to those receiving conventional treatments. The difficulty is that these trials are not double-blinded – at the very least, the therapist knows what sort of treatment the patient is getting, and it is usually obvious to the patients themselves.

What the ‘scientists’ like to do is to then denounce these studies as being lacking in rigour, and set up their own weirdy double-blind randomised controlled trials, where everyone with a headache gets either the same homoeopathic remedy or a sugar pill. Of course, in these circumstances the homoeopathic remedy doesn’t do too well.

Now even this would all be fine and dandy if the ‘scientists’ applied the same standard of rigour for other treatments. For instance, if there were a treatment available on the NHS which had been found in double-blind RCT to be less effective than old-fashioned tricyclic antidepressants, less effective than placebo, and was the subject of various class actions over its side effects, these ‘scientists’ would surely be clamouring for it to be banned (especially since its mode of action is not really understood)? Oh, but there is – and I don’t hear the ‘scientists’ condemning Prozac.

And if there was a highly expensive treatment available on the NHS that had rarely been subject to even a single-blind RCT, and that had performed poorly on the few times it had been assessed in such a way, then surely the ‘scientists’ would be asking for it to be withheld from patients in favour of more proven techniques? I await the letters from ‘scientists’ to NHS Trusts regarding surgery.

Of course, if alternative treatments go wrong, the usual result is that the patient doesn’t get better and may be out of pocket. That’s not the case with drugs, where side-effects are common and include death.

I probably have at least as much right as anyone else to call myself a scientist. I know how to write a paper, I know how to read one. I have a science background and I was trained in a scientific profession. But I know that ‘scientists’, like anyone else, naturally look for evidence which confirms their beliefs rather than challenges them. They just don’t like to admit it. Worse, they then use their 'scientific' status to elevate their opinion above those who disagree with them. That's not science - that's religion.

This one so far has to be right up there in the entertainment stakes. Has there ever been a contestant less self-aware than Shahbaz? A forty year old (and the rest) who hasn't yet learned the lesson most five year olds have sussed - that temper tantrums don't work. Has there ever been a funnier scene than when he announced to an 'am-I-bothered' Sezar that 'I'm leaving, just to make you happy,' (or something along those lines. When Big Brother said this would not be possible rather than pointing out that this was false imprisonment and that he would go out and call the Police via the cameras in the house, he went to bed. Then when no-one came to 'comfort' him, he stropped about a bit. Then ostentatiously went and cried in the toilets. WHAT A LAUGH! Only trumped by his telling Glyn that he was going to touch him whether he liked it or not. UGH!

Which brings me on to Nikki. She cries because she has no make-up remover. She threatens (in a surprisingly scary way) because she 'can't' drink twice-filtered tap water, and is 'dehydrated'. Someone send her to Darfur.

On the other hand, Richard is bloody gorgeous. Kind of like Dan in BB5, but even better.

Yeah, this 1984 book has got me right into it again, and the resonances for today are pretty scary.

Last week was some kind of BBC tribute to animal torture week, with the Today programme having a 'scientist' on defending animal experimentaltion pretty much every day. Of course, not even John Humphries had the necessary scientific understanding to question their assertions, and the director of the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection was never allowed to debate with any of them - only once was he allowed a statement IIRC, and even then the 'scientist' was given a reply which was left unchallenged even though the lies within it were blatant.

The 'scientists' really only have two arguments:
1)animal tests protect humans
2)animal tests lead to the discovery of life saving treatments.

As I've argued before at length (click the 'vivisection' tag to review), animal tests would not and have not prevented human deaths and illnesses caused by drugs, and animal tests lead to the dicsovery of life-saving drugs for animals, not humans. Animal tests could have caused many valid human treatments to be discarded because they are lethal to animals (penicillin being the most famous example).

Only later in the week was the reason for all this pandering to the 'scientists' (read: 'people who like to publish as many papers as possible to increase their pay and research grants') made clear. On Thursday a group of 'experts' came out with a statement that the research team running the infamous trials on TGN1412 should have taken greater safety precautions. Apparently, even though the aniimal tests gave no grounds for concern, they should have still known the drugs were capable of causing huge damage to humans.

Yet no-one thought to ask, if you are supposed to disregard the results of animal tests, then what the hell was the point of testing on animals anyway? Or if we accept the research team's protests that the results of animal tests are supposed to be reliable protection for humans, what is the point of doing them when they blatantly aren't?

So come on, 'scientists', where's the science in vivisection?

It is a coincidence that this particular piece of prolefeed starts just as I am preparing to lead an e-mail discussion on '1984' for the yahoo 'classics' group.

What was most interesting last night was the behaviour of the crowd. I see that rent-a-boo were back in force (or is that just the Press?), which is a particular bore. But the crowd's preferences were quite revealing.

Firstly, you can be a total pain in the tits, but if you have a diagnosis, that is ok. Pete would be shunned by most members of that crowd if they met him in 'real life'. He was completely annoying last night, from his video to his meetings with other housemates. Yet because he has Tourette's, the crowd gave him a big cheer. He's the token 'mad person' that everyone is going to like for his disability alone. The greatest cause for hilarity found by Davina and the crowd was how 'Bonneh' and George reacted to him. And we look down on Victorian Bedlam viewers.

Then we get Lea, supposedly 35 (one of a clutch of housemates claiming to be in their 30s when they are patently nearer 50 than 30). She is clearly just as disturbed, and probably more fragile than, Pete. She's lost loads of weight, had tummy tucks, massive boob implants, lots of facial works that have left her looking not unlike she is a Sims 2 alien, and she thinks that ugly people should spend ten thousand pounds on getting their faces fixed. She got resoundingly booed into the house. Poor lass. In all her 48, sorry 35 years, no one has ever told her that ugliness is nothing to do with how you look. If only she'd played the 'struggling with body dysmorphia' card, the crowd would have loved her.

And finally George. Posh kids are always going to be booed, for their accident of birth was a happy one for them. It's ok to be a needy wannabe aiming for wealth, fame and influence through Big Brother; it's ok to then flaunt your new-found goodies in the mags; but just you try quietly having royalty as family and you'll be on to a hiding from the great British public. Not that he'll care.

Even so, I'll be watching over the next 13 weeks (unless it goes into outrageous bully mode like BB5 did). Maybe with some older (MUCH older) people it will be more interesting. At least it won't be BB4.

Watching Big Brother2, and wondering who would be evicted (Josh or Paul) got me through labour with Little 'Un. Ooops, I've just realised, 'I loved Big Brother.' Pass the Victory Gin!

I suppose it's not really the words I hate, but how they are used. There are certain words that make me physically cringe when I hear them, and modernise is one of them.

The dictionary definition of 'modernise' is: 'to bring up to date in respect of technology, appearance, style or character.' In current usage it appears to mean: 'pointless and ultimately destructive change to grab a few cheap headlines in the Daily Mail, preferably instigated by someone with no knowledge or understanding of the organisation they are changing.'

Then again, since Bliar appears to think we are still in the 1980s and has no interest in either technology or character, he's probably using it accurately.

Last year I started keeping a record of the books I read, scoring them out of 100. So this year I thought I'd make a few comments on them too - well, I just decided it, so I thought this blog would be a good place to do it. Since the decision has only just been taken, I'll begin with last month's books.

The Society of Others by William Nicholson excellent book, well written, a kind of combination of 1984 and Catcher in the Rye. So many themes running through it, and a literary feel to it - no cliches or crappy supposed suspense bits. I have no clue what the end was al about though. I think about it when I can't sleep, so useful too.

86/100

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
I'm not a great Dickens fan - I've started this book more times than I can remember and never got further than the first few pages. I read this with an e-mail 'Classics' list, which gave me the impetus to keep going. Well worth it - the story and the language were fantastic. Less so the characters, especially the ones we were supposed to be rooting for. Lucie and Charles are insipid and boring. The Defarges were brilliant and I loved her to pieces. Sidney Carton likewise, the most gorgeous romantic hero - but his drinking and degeneracy means I probably wasn't supposed to feel that way. The ending wasn't to my liking either, but I@m sure others will disagree.

79/100

Closed Circle by Robert Goddard
If you know Robert Goddard, you know what to expect - good page turner, no need to engage brain all that much. Nothing wrong with it, nothing brilliant about it either.

The most interesting thing for me was that I never heard of Maundy Gregory until a radio programme the week I picked up this book, and then by total coincidence, here he was in it.

56/100

The Definitive Book of Body Language by Alan and Barbara Pease
Useful if you know little about body language. I didn't learn much, and you'll probably have learned a lot of it from women's magazines anyway.

Some useful tests to check what you know.

55/100

A topic I never thought I would be writing on. Ho hum, I decided last week to put £3 on West Ham, out of pure nostalgia. Anyway, you might guess this isn't really about football, it's about Alastair Campbell again.

That charity footie match is apparently a big media event, and there's going to be training shown daily starting on 22nd May at 9pm on ITV1. So what's even better than Alastair Campbell in shorts? Alastair Campbell in shorts EVERY BLOODY NIGHT FOR A WEEK!

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH! I feel like a parched man in the desert about to reach an oasis!

From the Guardian

Lords to clash on right-to-die Bill
Press Association
Friday May 12

Supporters of right-to-die legislation are set to clash with top doctors, faith leaders and leading Anglican bishops in the House of Lords.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, is among those due to take part in a marathon Second Reading debate on the Assisted Dying for the Terminally Ill Bill, sponsored by crossbench peer Lord Joffe.

Lord Joffe says doctors should be able to prescribe drugs that a terminally-ill patient suffering terrible pain could take to end his or her own life. But opponents say that if the Bill becomes law it could be open to abuse.

Dr Williams, Catholic Cardinal Cormac Murphy O'Connor and Chief Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks have written a letter to The Times in which they oppose any measure to legalise assisted suicide or euthanasia.

In the letter they warn: "Such a Bill cannot guarantee that a right to die would not, for society's most vulnerable, become a duty to die."

A petition is to be handed in at 10 Downing Street signed by more than 100,000 people demanding an end to attempts to change the law.

Care Not Killing, which represents more than 30 charities and healthcare groups, is warning that the Joffe Bill would put the old and sick under intolerable pressure to end their lives, not least because of severe pressures on health and long-term care services.

Care Not Killing campaign director Dr Peter Saunders said: "We believe that this is a very bad Bill and one that would create great problems for old and sick patients and the medical and nursing professions.

"Over the past few days, as the public has become aware of the issues at stake, people have been signing our petition opposing the Bill at the rate of 10,000 a day."

Although peers do not by convention vote on the Second Reading of a Bill, Liberal Democrat QC and ex-MP Lord Carlile of Berriew - another opponent of the Bill - is expected to ask the House to back his "sunset clause" amendment. All the political parties are allowing a free vote on this issue and, if passed, the amendment would delay the measure by six months.

Whilst Steven was dying, I changed my views twice on this, so I'm back where I started.

I've always felt that euthanasia, or doctor-assisted suicide or whatever would be a very easy get out for the kind of nursing staff who say of demented patients, 'if she were a dog, they'd put her down.'

If Steven had been able to use a prescribed drug to kill himself, he very well might when he was taken in to hospital. As it was, he only got a few extra weeks, but those weeks were really important, especially to his Partner, who still wishes they'd had more time together.

When people say in advance that they want to die a 'dignified' death (personally I don't think it is dignified to die by lethal injection or whatever, but that's just me), what they are really saying is that they are afraid of the unknown. None of us know what it is like to die, however many deaths we've seen. Some of us are better at facing the unknown. But I think that more could be done to allay some of the fears people have.

People are afraid of pain - and nowadays there is no excuse for someone to die in pain unless they want to. I feel much the same about the pain of dying as I did about childbirth: I want to see what it is like and see if I can do without medication, but I'd like the option there for if I really need it.

Patient controlled analgesia (PCA) would be ideal - and there is plenty of evidence that people use less analgesia if they are in control of it. This is because of you are worried about when medication will be available, you ask for it as soon as you feel pain returning/increasing. If you are in charge of it, you are willing to let a certain amount of pain build up, knowing that you can whack it whenever you choose to. It is also better in that pain causes the release of natural painkillers in the body, so when you do take medication after feeling pain for a while, you need less for it to be effective.

There is always the thing about dual effect - that doctors can give a high enough dose of pain medication to kill someone when they are relieving pain. If that's how much it takes to take the pain away, and if that is explained to the patient, I think that is fine. People are so afraid of dying in pain that I think this sort of thing is justified. It happens nowadays, without needing a change in the law.

People are also afraid of becoming demented, and I think this is mainly down to the lack of dignity suffered by patients in nursing homes and hospitals. Yet wouldn't it be better to make these places wonderful places to be, rather than killing ourselves to avoid them? It can be done easily, using, for example, Snoezelen techniques. (I was going to give a link for Snoezelen, but they are all far too concerned with the Snoezelen multisensory environments - it's far more than that - it's about using multi-sensory cues to minimise the distress of dementia.)

Whatever proponents of euthanasia say, I know very well that patietns would come under real pressure to 'do the right thing' - the 'duty to die' quote is right on the money.

Interestingly, this morning when this was debated on Radio 4's Today programme, the speakers on both sides of the debate (both Christians) said that they had discussed this with God, and he agreed with their views. Are the speaking ot the same person?

My Biology teacher always used to say, 'whenever I pray, I feel like I'm talking to myself.' Though I suspect he nicked that line from Dave Allen or someone.

My own opinion is that you can only be sure God is speaking to you when She's telling you 'no'.

As I was cleaning my floors juts now, Tamsin Outhwaite was on TV talking about how doctors had to not get emotionally involved with their patients. I think this is another one of those myths that everyone believes but isn't true.

All the really good doctors (and generally all the really good healthcare professionals ) I've worked with do get emotionally involved. It's a part of seeing a patient as a person. Add to that also the situations you see people in. For instance, I've recently been spending ages talking to my mum's GP because of her mystery illness, and he has known me since I was about 14. You can tell he is hoping almost as much as we are that she doesn't have anything life-threatening.

When you are a nurse or a physio and you work day in, day out, with someone in a Burns Unit; when you see them struggle to get over such a debilitating injury; you really get to know that person and their family. My first patient who'd been burned (Tom), when he died of a pulmonary embolus just after going home, that was the most I have ever cried over a patient. He had worked so hard, he (and his family) had been through so much, and all for nothing in the end.

But even in-patients with broken legs that you get to know - I still keep newspaper clippings of my patients, and I exchange Christmas cards with some.

There are even patients who become stalkers. I have to say these have been from when I worked with head injurred patients (one of whom tracked me down from Birmingham to Scotland), or when I worked in mental health (my boss decided things were getting our of hand when 'Jesus Christ' sent me a Christmas card with a drawing of a gallows on it).

Now working in chronic fatigue, anxiety and chronic pain, people are often patients for quite long time. You can't help but be involved in the minutiae (sp?) of their lives. I've ended up getting people's shopping for them, or cat sitting when they are in hospital. Because of their ilnesses, most of these patients have little or no support network outside of their professional carers.

So rather than not getting emotionally involved, I think what you do is keep a professional distance. You don't let them into details of your own life (I've found this a heard one to learn!). You don't let them presume you are their friend - you are their physio, or doctor, or nurse or whatever. But you do care what happens to them, and you do see them as people, because if you forget that, then you can't really care well.

Then again, I've always been one of those people who moves on with their lives and leaves old friends and relationships behind (with a few notable exceptions). Maybe I just don't care about anyone all that much.

I found this at the Mirror

9 May 2006
ANT AND DEC SIGN COLLINA
By Cameron Robertson

BALD football legend Pierluigi Collina is to referee Ant and Dec's Soccer Aid TV match.

The Italian will blow the whistle when Gordon Ramsay's World XI play Robbie Williams's England.

Each squad has 11 celebrities and five World Cup greats. Ant and Dec host the charity spectacle which kicks off on ITV on May 27. An insider said: "Collina is probably the only guy who could handle Ramsay."

Former Labour spin doctor Alastair Campbell will play for the World XI in the game, at Old Trafford, Manchester. Tickets from 0870 162 6883. All profits to Unicef.

It has been a long time since Upton Park was graced with my presence, and I have been a complete stranger to the beautiful game since the 1992 World Cup, when I finally realised that footballers just weren't as fanciable as they had been in the glory days of Billy Bonds and Allan Clarke (where are they now?).

And now we have Alastair Campbell and Gordon Ramsay on the same team. I can barely type, I am so excited!

And yes, I do realise I am totally missing the point of the game. But I've always understood the offside rule.

This morning was a usual news morning: Blair's Labour wheels out its automaton (in this case Jacqui Smith) and she spouts all the right on-message stuff. Except they forgot to reprogramme her between BBC 'Breakfast' and Radio 4's 'Today'. All the same words in the same order - but not going down half so well with John Simpson (or was it James Naughtie?). Always likely to be a problem, going on 'Today' without being able to think on the hoof.

What these Blairites don't think about when they spout all that rubbish about how Blair was voted in and given a mandate 12 months ago, is that the only reason Labour won that election (and probably the previous one also) was that the Tories had become unelectable. And why were they unelectable? Because Thatcher carried on long after she'd become hated by the majority of the country. She clung onto power even though she was a liability, and in the end, her clinging on only served to highlight the sleaze, split the party and make it a laughing stock.

John Major was a decent bloke (for a Tory) with a terrible legacy. We'll probably end up saying the same about Gordon Brown.

Kind of related to the last post about happiness, I was thinking about how I've been a lot happier since I started forgiving people. There's this spell you can do where you get all your feelings about how a person has hurt you, and put it in a spell, then bind it and free it to be transformed into love. Well, it took me a hell of a long time to get my head around that. I wanted to hold onto that anger, I certainly didn't want to let the offender off the hook! He/she/it deserved all the bad things that would happen to them as a result of my bad vibes!

But it really does work. Those bad feelings were only hurting me, and once they are gone, you just feel better, it's on the past, it can;t harm you.

Now I have this idea which I don't think is too far fetched, that my God should be a better 'person' than me. So if I am able to forgive people, why can't the Christian God? Why does he need some sort of sacrifice?

This character defect God has is obviously why the death penalty is so popular in a country as Christian as the USA. Come to think of it, does Jesus ever question God (himself, obviously) on why he doesn't turn the other cheek to man's sins? Because it doesn't really count as turning the other cheek if what you are really doing is waiting for your chance (Judgement Day) to catch the perpetrator unawares and give him a damn good hiding.

Loads of talk on Radio 4 and telly-that-I-don't-watch about how to be happy, can it be taught, blah-di-blah-di-blah.

Well happiness can be taught, but you have to be ready to learn. You have to be ready to learn delayed gratification. You have to be ready to learn that happiness isn't about getting the things you think you want. You have to be ready to look for happiness within rather than expecting it to appear from outside.

It's a bit like that song where if you can't be with the one you love, then love the one you're with. We've been conned over the years into thinking that hapiness comes from stuff, and that love means never having to tell your children 'no'. So we end up with a bunch of people who've never had to learn to make do, and for whom delayed gratification can only be some kind of sexual technique, dimly heard of and never tried.

Thing is, when you end up with very little (though enough to fulfil your basic needs), you find that you miss very little. The new clothes, the best trainers, thie nights on the tiles; all that stuff actually doesn't contribute that much to happiness. Yet when someone tells you that, unless you're ready, then it is too scary. So you think 'I'll just do that stuff about having lots of good friends and family.' But nothing really changes until your head changes.

In 1993 I realised that I had a choice. I could change my head or I could live my life depressed and probably end up committing suicide. When you're not happy, it means there is something really wrong, and you can avoid it and faff about for years with tablets and whatever, but until you decide to sort out what is wrong, nothing will ever change for real.

For me, happiness came from learning to say no. It came from learning to accept that I am not perfect, and that it doesn't matter. It came from realising that I get a buzz from rescuing people, but that this is not necessarily a good thing for either me or them. It came from working less and having less.

Happiness isn't an easy life, and that was something else I found hard to learn. It comes from doing the right things rather than from doing nothing. It comes from being more aware of your surroundings, not less aware due to dulling them with mind altering substances. It comes from finding that there's no constant formula - the more you learn, the more you find that makes you happy - and strangely it always seems to come down to 'giving up' things that, once they are gone, you find you don't miss.

So when people learn how to be happy, they find that happiness is all about learning.

Here’s a piece by Roy Hattersley that appeared on Monday May 1st in the Guardian

Right now, we need Blair

A disorderly abdication would damage the prospects for a genuine Labour government

Nobody, with the possible exception of Gordon Brown, has been more impatient for the departure of Tony Blair than I. But, during the last week, the political world has changed. The interests of the Labour party - the underlying reason for wanting the prime minister to go - now require him to stay. The deeper the so-called crisis, and the worse the local election results, the more important it is for him to remain in Downing Street. [snip]

…the orderly transition all sensible Labour supporters wish to see would be impossible against a background of headlines proclaiming that the Blair administration had ended in abject failure.
[snip]

…if his near-absolute reign ended with a forced abdication, the damage to the prospects of a genuine Labour government would be immense.
[snip]

The immediate obligation is to close ranks. New Labour MPs, who have never needed to fight for their political lives, are incapable of standing up to a hard pounding. But character defects are only part of the problem. Ideological commitment is important in good times and absolutely essential in bad. It provides a reason to fight on, whatever the odds.

[snip] MPs with no beliefs except the importance of winning elections naturally panic when the opinion polls move. Though cowards flinch, the people who can sing every verse of the red flag ought to stand firm.

This from someone who allowed the abolition of Clause Four. And no, I can’t get over it!

[snip] Only Labour's enemies would benefit from Charles Clarke's resignation. The idea that a sacrifice would propitiate the angry gods of public opinion is wishful thinking. Clarke deserves to survive; but even if he did not, Labour MPs, with an instinct for their own survival, would still defend him.

I think finally we’re getting to somewhere near the truth. What is wrong with this administration is that they fear a resignation would shake the faith of the public in the entire government. In fact, the reverse is true. When confronted with a bunch of power-crazed incompetents feathering their own nests and clinging onto power at any cost, the public begin to feel that it’s about time someone paid for the mistakes. Not just a faceless civil servant; a government minister. You can’t take responsibility for something and then not take the consequences. If Charles Clarke genuinely wants to clear up his mess, I’m sure no one would object to him doing the honourable thing and clearing it up in a junior position.

Labour MPs ought to consider the embarrassing behaviour of the nurses who barracked Patricia Hewitt last Wednesday.

They should also consider the embarrassing behaviour of a minister who never consults with those truly on the ground. And her embarrassing manner of constantly addressing herself to a retarded five year old who has long since left the room.

What did the shouters and screamers hope to gain - a change of policy, a ministerial resignation, or enough damage to the government to increase the prospect of Cameron becoming prime minister?

Oh Roy, now you’re rumbled. You’ve been letting Alastair Campbell write your copy for you again, haven’t you? We all know how much Alastair fears another Tory government - he kept on telling us during the last election campaign. It was pretty much the only slogan Labour had: 'We're crap, but the Tories are worse'. Sadly, it's not true any more. Labour's crap and the Tories are the same.

This is the second time Hattersley, who's ostensibly anti-Blair, has conspicuously been eulogising the PM. In October 2005 he was singing from Campbell's hymn sheet too. I'm wondering, does he actually read these columns Campbell writes for him?

Oh, and maybe, just maybe, the 'shouters and screamers' hoped their voices might be heard for once. Big Fat Chance.

The same question can be asked of those teachers who reacted to the education bill by announcing that, because the government rejects their view of education, they intend to desert the Labour party. They ought to think of the possible consequences of their actions.

Shouldn’t someone be asking the government why it thinks it is alienating so many people who actually do the jobs the government keeps on tinkering with?

As for actions having consequences - it would appear to be the happy trio of Hewitt, Clarke and Prescott who should be dwelling on that.

So should the dissident Labour MPs. And they should think about what Labour can still become - as long as it secures a fourth election victory.

Yeah, well, I’m thinking Stalinist Russia and Hitler’s Germany. I suppose Roy is imagining some combination of the two?