Liberal Democrat MP Evan Harris, with parliamentary colleagues, at an event in support of the Human Fertility and Embryology Bill, which will protect and extend the right of scientists to perform crucial stem-cell research.

More about all this at the Coalition for Choice website.

Not long after I moved to Hackney, I witnessed an armed robbery. From a range of about three feet, the fact that the robber was a crackhead was as obvious as the hammer and kitchen knife he was waving about.

A few years later, my partner and baby daughter were abducted outside my house. Continue reading…

John Prescott has made eating disorders news again by coming out as bulimic. This, of course, is a perfect opportunity for me to latch myself on to my favourite look-at-this-damn-issue horse. Eating disorders need celebrity chic to be news these days, but they don’t cease to be a dangerous epidemic when someone famous hasn’t just bared their soul in a lucrativebook deal.

The thousands of brilliant young, and not so young people who are killed or mentally crippled by bulimia, anorexia, bulimarexia, binge-eating and other disorders every year fail to make regular headlines for one reason only: it’s a ‘girl’s illness.’
Continue reading…

Before my granddad died, he suffered for around nine years with Alzheimer’s. The worst thing wasn’t the forgetting things, the not recognising people or the needing round-the-clock care. The worst symptom of Alzheimer’s was the depression.

He knew he was a burden to those who cared for him, he knew what was happening to him and it broke his heart every day.
Continue reading…

One message on the Tory ‘Whole Campaign’ key messages page tickles me above all the others: ‘Can work - will work: help people into jobs and cut benefits for those who won’t work‘.

Which is nice, but I wonder if sorting out welfare dependency will be quite that straightforward. What would liberal lefties think about this?

I recently interviewed a number of people who’d been on benefits long-term. I asked these people about their lives, and what they thought of government plans to cut welfare.
Continue reading…

Many left-liberals will have been indulging in some top-level indignation at the totally unstartling news that the Tory hereditary peer Lord Mancroft is a creaking frothing shouty plonker who shouldn’t be allowed into public spaces, never mind a legislative assembly.

First off, he has a go at the nurses who treated him in an NHS hospital in Bath for being “grubby“. If not exactly civil, this is at least a legitimate concern and the nursing profession, unsurprisingly, is up in arms at the slur. So his fartship has been on the Today programme on Saturday morning doing what presumably passes among Tory peers for retrenchment; no, he was not actually complaining about the treatment he received; yes, he fully acknowledges not all nurses are grubby, and made this clear elsewhere in his speech.

No, the true horror of all this grave frothing is yet to reveal itself. This is how he goes on to talk about these young working women whose life choices are absolutely none of his business.
Continue reading…

This piece was first published two years ago at The Sharpener and in an edited form in this book (as “Talk amongst yourselves, we couldn’t possibly comment”). It’s main hope – that Westminster politicians stop ducking the abortion issue – has come to pass. That is a development I welcome; and I stand by (most of) what I wrote then (some of it now in lost, much missed links). The piece also tries to define “what’s so special” about 24 weeks, though perhaps less elegantly than Unity. So now’s a good time for a re-run. It does seem, alas, that what we’re about to get elsewhere is tabloid drivel (via) rather than proper debate. I guess that’s what happens when professional politicos get involved.

One word absolutely not on the lips of political hacks, not even Tory political hacks, is… Abortion. Not this week, not any week. It’s impolite conversation inside the beltway.

But a post here last year (picked apart here) attracted over 250 comments. Just publishing the word is pure Google-juice. Everyone in the real world has an opinion, so why does nobody in political Britain want to discuss abortion in public? It can’t be that 186,274 (2001 data; pdf) annual terminations don’t warrant justification or inquiry. Continue reading…

For what it’s worth, I think that the new proposal from the Conservatives is actually rather good. It entails each newborn and their mother having the services of a maternity nurse for the first week after leaving hospital.

According to the Observer, it would cost ‘at least £150m a year’. I think a closer figure is £212m per year* (my workings are at the end of this post). Whether or not it survives, I think the Conservatives - and I mean this genuinely - are to be congratulated on putting forward an ambitious, policy proposal. I hope that full, detailed costings and implementations are brought forward.
Continue reading…