So let’s look at Labour’s offering first. I was incensed by reports from the Labour Party conference which suggested Ed Miliband had nailed his true blue credentials to the mast, and Caroline Flint proved she’d never progressed from being one of Blair’s Babes.

First, Caroline Flint told a fringe meeting that it was difficult to come up with a housing policy because the country was so divided on it. I’m sorry – the Labour Party cannot sit down and work out for itself what is right, and then sell that to the voters? It’s going to portray itself as the lapdog of whichever lobby shouts loudest? Well, OK, it’s been doing that for years, but on something as crucial and fundamental as housing? Shame on them!

However, worse was to come. Labour leader Ed Miliband then said that the unemployed shouldn’t get access to housing. What he actually said was that workers should have higher access – but given we all know there’s a housing shortage of crisis proportions, caused in large part by the last Labour government continuing Thatcher’s shameful right-to-buy policy and forcing local authorities to give up their housing stock to the private sector, if Ed’s great idea ever saw the light of day the unemployed, sick, disabled, single parents, care-leavers and those in greatest need of support wouldn’t get it. Because there aren’t enough houses to go round. In 13 years of government, Labour took their eye off the ball in housing terms (with Gordon Brown suggesting it was fundamentally a private sector issue!!). Less affordable housing was built, more red tape constrained the hands of social landlords, and housing waiting lists grew.

It seems that Ed Miliband had forgotten – or perhaps never knew, that within social housing there already is a key worker scheme so that workers in certain professions get accelerated access to whatever housing is available. Beyond that, the priority is to house the homeless – those in greatest need – which aren’t necessarily those who are earning a good and steady wage. Housing providers don’t have a choice, because they don’t have enough houses.

Under the UN Declaration of Human Rights everyone has the right to shelter. It’s a basic need. If you’re homeless you’ve less chance of getting a job. If you don’t have a job, it would seem that the Labour Party don’t want to help you get a home.

It’s OK though, Ed softened the blow by saying that people involved in community activities should also have priority access to housing. How exactly does one get involved in their community if they don’t yet have a community to get involved with because they haven’t got a roof over their head?

I’m genuinely disappointed. I have always expected the Labour Party to be outspoken about protecting the poorest and most vulnerable in our society, particularly given some of the noises from the Conservative part of the Coalition government. Under Blair it lost its way – ‘I’m Tory Plan B’ – and continued some of the worst and most iniquitous housing policies initiated by Margaret Thatcher. I’d expected that under new leadership it would start to wave its socialist banner once more. Instead it seems to be playing to the Daily Mail reading part of the gallery with policy ideas that would not be out of place in the manifestoes of the BNP and UKIP.

Utterly, utterly disappointing.

Compare that, then, with announcements from Grant Shapps at the Conservative Party conference, that the Tories will make it easier (again) for council house tenants to exercise their right-to-buy but this time all receipts from RTB sales will be spent building new affordable housing, on a house-for-house basis. This is partly what was wrong with Thatcher’s original RTB policy. It wasn’t just that tenants would get a ridiculous level of discount on a house for which they’d already enjoyed a rent subsidy compared to those renting in the private sector, but that the proceeds of sale could not then be reinvested in replenishing the housing supply. Meanwhile, local authorities were left paying the costs of building houses that they no longer owned!

I’ll maybe blog about why right-to-buy is inherently wrong separately, but for now suffice it to say that I am surprised to find the Tories – albeit with their more sympathetic coalition partners – making positive noises about increasing the supply of social housing, including supporting local authorities to build and manage it. In some strange political plot twist, if Labour was playing to the Daily Mail gallery, it seemed that the Tories were playing to the Guardian!

The Tories’ other policies on housing – some may have merit, but others are fundamentally wrong.

Charging market rent for tenants earning over £100k springs to mind as a good idea, but Shapps really needs to get his maths right on this before formulating a proper proposal. This isn’t going to be the nice little earner he thinks it will – he needs to be proposing this because it’s the equitable thing to do and not because of the ££ signs in front of his eyes.

Others are simply wrong. It cannot be right to allow the evictions of whole families from social housing because of the actions of one family member in this summer’s riots. Housing is a human right, and all that happens by evicting someone is that another social housing provider has – by law – to pick up the problem and provide some form of shelter to that homeless family.

Nor can it be right to impose a blanket cut in housing benefit to workless tenants. There are undoubtedly cases where landlords are getting very rich, thank you, from inflated rents paid for by housing benefit, and I understand that it’s this that is driving Tory thoughts on reforming HB. Giving tenants less money with which to pay those rents is not the answer: allowing local authorities to set rent ceilings for properties in the private rented sector in their area may be a fairer and more workable option.

And what of the Liberal Democrats? Their conference was first, and I missed some of their pronouncements, but anything which brings empty homes back into use has to be a good thing. Using the Green Deal to raise energy efficiency in homes in the private rented sector may also be a good thing – but let’s see the final Energy Act before passing judgement.

Of course, much of what’s been spoken about at the party conferences is irrelevant here in Scotland, where housing is a devolved matter. Which explains why the shameful and uncaring SNP government here in Holyrood is CUTTING investment in social housing, despite there still being an urgent and desperate need to find homes for everyone on the waiting lists.

Plenty to think about – and good to see that housing is no longer a Cinderella issue, but central to government thinking. Because, after all, everyone has a right to a home, and if we want everyone to be able to contribute to society, it all begins at home.

My grandfather loved poetry and used to read to me when I was little. I hold him responsible for my own love of poetry. My grandmother loved to hear me sing even though singing in public – even for the family – was embarrassing for me. And what are songs if not poems set to music?

I miss them both terribly at times, because I was able to talk to them more easily than talking to my parents sometimes, and even now I am an adult I could sometimes really benefit from their advice and their unconditional love.

My grandparents were buried together in the same plot and the family discussed long and hard what should be on their headstone. The best words that described how I felt then – and now – are contained within Christina Rossetti’s poem.

Christina Rossetti

Remember
REMEMBER me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land;
When you can no more hold me by the hand,
Nor I half turn to go, yet turning stay.
Remember me when no more day by day
You tell me of our future that you plann’d:
Only remember me; you understand
It will be late to counsel then or pray.
Yet if you should forget me for a while
And afterwards remember, do not grieve:
For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad.

Attention has turned once more to gang culture, and it’s being seen as a negative. Certainly we’ve seen examples this week of the bad things that gangs can do, but that doesn’t mean that all gangs are bad.

We need to look more at why people join gangs. I suggest it’s because everyone feels a need to belong, to have their existence on this earth recognised and validated. Some people are lucky enough to live in families that provide this validation and make them feel a sense of belonging rather than isolation. They’re increasingly in a minority though, whether through family breakdown or geographic mobility.

As a society I think we’ve got it wrong over the past generation or so. I think the youth service – whilst excellent – has got its priorities wrong. I think that much of my own work on young people’s participation in civil society was looking at the wrong things. We have spent lots of money helping the kids in our deprived urban areas to have experiences they could never otherwise hope to enjoy, trying to compensate for their poverty and perhaps less than ideal family circumstances. But most of these – it seems to me – have focused on the individual, and encouraged more self-interest whilst ignoring the fact that many people want – more than anything – to be involved with others.

I grew up in a family that on the face of it looked utterly respectable and middle class, but internally was quite disorganised, even dysfunctional at times, and I don’t think this is unusual. A high achiever, it still seemed to me that no matter what I did it was never good enough to satisfy my parents. So – encouraged by my family – I joined a series of gangs from an early age.

First there was the Brownies. Then the Guides, the church choir and the youth fellowship. Each of them provided me with a structure, a routine and a sense of belonging and self-worth that I wasn’t getting at home. And of course they gave me an opportunity to mix and spend time with my peers – something that again I couldn’t get at home. But I think most importantly each of them recognised, nurtured and valued my talents.

Those are the things that all gangs are good at. It’s what those gangs do once they exist that is at issue.

As an adult my need for involvement in a gang has grown. As a single woman living alone, hundreds of miles from my nearest family member, I crave the sense of belonging that being a member of the Edinburgh Festival Chorus provides. We turn up week after week throughout the year to learn the pieces we must perform in the Festival each August. Sometimes we really don’t want to be there. Sometimes we don’t like the music we’re being made to learn. Some of us don’t like where we’re made to sit. And sometimes we all hate the chorus master for taking us to task when we can’t get it right (and, to be fair, he probably doesn’t like us much either when we don’t do as he wants). But still we turn up, week after week. Then in August, when we stand shoulder to shoulder taking the applause from a packed Usher Hall, the sense of euphoria in those all-too-brief moments is enough to keep me going back to more rehearsals, to sacrifice the social life throughout the year, to put much of my life on hold for a month every August. I don’t want to let the rest of my gang down by giving less than total commitment, and I crave that precious moment of hard-earned and well-deserved glory.

If the gangs of kids running amok in our streets this week feel even a tenth of what I feel when I’m sitting in the middle of my gang, then I totally get why they’re in gangs.

Our challenge as a civil society is not to close the gangs down, but to find more positive, productive ways to help our young people find that sense of belonging and empowerment and self-worth that is clearly lacking in their lives.

Wouldn’t it be great if, instead of locking up those kids who rioted and looted this week, we found more creative ways of dealing with them? Like sentencing them to join a choir or a dance troupe or the Scouts or the Cadet Corps for a period of time. Force them into different gangs, ones which have the ability to reinforce positive attributes. And enforce those sentences – a community order or an acceptable behaviour order with a difference.

We are already seeing in the UK that culture and the arts don’t need to be the preserve of the wealthy. The El Sistema programme on Stirling’s Raploch estate, bringing music tuition – and providing instruments – to kids in one of the most deprived areas in Scotland, is a fantastic example of what can be done. We’ve seen community choirs built from scratch for various arts projects throughout the UK – the problem with these is that they tend to disperse after the project’s completion – why not find a way to keep them going permanently? We have some fabulous opportunities such as youth choirs and youth orchestras – if only we could find ways of opening these up to children and young people from less well-off backgrounds. We have some amazing individuals who have done and continue to achieve wonders in their field – like my own chorus master, Christopher Bell, who founded the National Youth Choir of Scotland – let’s harness their expertise to find ways of engaging meaningfully with those that are maybe harder to reach but may have most to gain.

Of course we used to have this, at least in the North of England where almost every community had its own brass band, often funded and supported by local business, with the band being one of the focal points of the community, valued and respected, where being a member was something to take pride in. It’s something we’ve mislaid but I don’t believe it has to be lost forever.

This takes resourcing. It won’t be cheap. But if we took the money we’ve been spending on sending kids on Outward Bound courses and the like, and invested it instead in long-term projects that look at developing our young people through sustained and supported group creative and cultural activities, I suspect it would be money well spent.

I’d already been taught from an early age never to talk to strangers, and that if ever I was in trouble I could talk to the nice policemen and women. Because even though I didn’t know them, they weren’t the strangers I should never talk to.

So fast forward to the revelations of the past few weeks. The judiciary applied laws in such a way that the defence team of Milly Dowler’s killer could drag her family’s suffering into court and twist it to try and cast doubt on his guilt. What parents get up to behind the bedroom door should be of no concern in a criminal trial trying to find out whether the man in the dock (not a family relative) murdered a teenage girl.

The press, we then find, hacked Milly Dowler’s phone when she was missing and nobody knew whether she was dead or alive. Some sick individual, acting with encouragement if not direct orders from above, decided to play God, and deleted messages that might have helped the police and the Dowler family find their missing daughter. That was an appalling and unjustified invasion of someone’s privacy and a family’s grief. But worse was to be revealed.

The now defunct News of the World had been hacking into phones for years, looking for tittle tattle and gossip that might sell papers. The Metropolitan Police were not only aware of this but by their lack of action were complicit in it. And then they took backhanders from News International – and how many other media stables – with some of their number even making it onto the NI payroll.

While this car crash was unfolding, we already knew that our political leaders were up to their necks in it too. Tories and Labour alike have danced to the Murdoch tune for decades in the hope of currying favour and getting his endorsement at election time. Like Icarus and Daedalus they flew too close to the Sun, and their wings have melted.

We’re going to have a series of reviews to find out exactly what happened. Great. They need to happen. We need to learn. But we also need to move forward.

At the 2010 election Nick Clegg said it was time to clean up the mess in British politics. He was right, but the bits that he chose to prioritise – the voting system and House of Lords reform – are but the cherry on the icing on the Establishment cake. And the entire cake is sinking. We need to get the cake right before we think about decorating it. I suspect that the AV referendum was lost because the public could see this and the politicians didn’t.

The idea of the separation of powers remains just as valid as it has ever done. Sadly over the past generation, possibly longer, all the different bits of the establishment have all become far too close through informal networking and socialising and the thought of money and/or power. We have had newspaper editors being entertained at the Prime Minister’s country residence. We have had our political leaders feted at media summer parties, and even at family weddings. It’s all grown far too close for comfort.

We need to redefine the parameters, relationships between and limitations of the Establishment. There is a debate to be had – and there’s no time to lose. David Cameron talked about ‘broken Britain’ – well it’s as broken at the top as it is the bottom – so let’s set about fixing it.

Because I don’t want to have to warn children that they shouldn’t talk to strangers OR police officers. Do you?

On Thursday, Parliament debated whether the United Kingdom should obey the European Court of Human Rights and lift a blanket ban that removes the right to vote from all prisoners. In what was clearly a poorly attended debate (shame on so many of our political representatives for not bothering to turn up to debate a human rights issue), the vote went overwhelmingly in favour of ignoring our commitment to the ECHR. Unsurprisingly, most Liberal Democrats who voted (again not many), voted in favour of giving some or all prisoners the vote. Four voted against – including Stephen Gilbert, from whom I personally had expected better.

I disagree with Parliament’s decision for many many reasons. I can accept – grudgingly – that some MPs will have voted the way they did because they don’t like ‘Europe’ telling the UK what to do, and this was an opportunity to rebel. I would, however, ask those MPs to reconsider the wider consequences of their actions.

Firstly, if we sign up to be bound by another body – as we did in terms of agreeing to be bound by decisions of the European Court of Human Rights – we can’t then pick and choose which of that body’s decisions to be bound by. That’s just stupid. If you want to drive a car, you get a licence and pass a test, and in doing so implicitly agree to be bound by the terms set out within the Highway Code. One of them is that in this country we drive on the left hand side of the road. As an individual driver I can’t arbitrarily decide I don’t like that particular rule so I’ll disregard it and drive on the right. Similarly, we can’t pick and choose which human rights our citizens should have.

Secondly, the European Court of Human Rights is not telling the UK that all its prisoners must be given the right to vote. Rather, it is telling the UK to review the rationale for its position because ECHR finds it indefensible. And so do I.

I’ve been debating this one a little with friends on Twitter. We’ve had the following defenses so far.

Criminals have committed a crime so should not have the right to vote.
But not all convicted criminals are given a prison sentence, and only those who sent to prison lose the right to vote. There’s an inconsistency here.

Prison is a punishment; removal of the right to vote is too.
Really? Isn’t prison – for all but the most serious of crimes – meant to be about rehabilitation and preparing prisoners for their return into society? Doesn’t denying prisoners in that position every last vestige of citizenship rather make a mockery of that?

Not everyone in prison has committed serious crimes like murder or rape. A woman in Northern Ireland this week was sentenced to three months’ imprisonment for stealing a pair of £10 jeans from a supermarket. Should her punishment be the same as, say, a rapist’s? Should they both lose the right to vote?

What about people who are in prison on remand, waiting for trial? They’re innocent until proven guilty – so they shouldn’t be treated as any less of a citizen, than you or me, surely?

Some people are in prison for non-payment of bills or fines. Arguably they shouldn’t be in prison at all, and in most European countries they wouldn’t be. So should they be treated in the same way as a mass murderer?

We (the vast majority of the British people) don’t like the idea of prisoners having the vote
We (the vast majority of the British people) think the death penalty should be restored, that immigration is bad, that homosexuality is immoral and that all Muslims are terrorists. But that doesn’t stop us from passing laws axeing state institutionalised murder, allowing people to express their feelings and desires for the person of their choosing, regardless of gender, and preventing the police from locking up anyone with darker skin. We are able to separate individual (albeit collective) prejudices from the law of the land on so many issues, so why should this one be any different?

I am not advocating an amnesty for all prisoners and immediate restoration of voting rights. There is clearly a debate to be had about which categories of prisoners should or should not be able to have the vote. Perhaps those serving life sentences with no hope of release should have the vote removed – after all they’re never again going to be part of society. Perhaps the vote should be reinstated to those in the last 12 months of their sentence as part of their rehabilitation. Perhaps anyone with a sentence of under, say 4 years, should not have their right removed in the first place.

I happily confess I don’t have the right answers – I just know that this week on this one the vast majority of our Parliamentarians got it fundamentally wrong.

I didn’t really need much persuading – after all I’m a huge Colin Firth fan. However, I wasn’t expecting to see him rolling round the carpet, jumping up and down and swearing frustratedly. I wasn’t expecting to see, close up, his face and neck contorted awkwardly as he fought to form the words his character was desperate to spit out. There was a physicality to his performance that was truly awe-inspiring, and I share the view that this is worthy of an Oscar.

My youngest brother has a stammer – though thanks to speech therapy as a child it’s largely under control these days. Since it’s not something anyone’s born with, I suspect it was a legacy of being the youngest in our household. He was taught to project – to speak loudly and clearly – and even now he often shouts as a way of getting the words out.

I would never have thought that silencing the brain by listening to music whilst speaking might quell a stammer; or that singing the words could help – and yet it makes so much sense. I’ve done a lot of singing, with a lot of people, but I’ve never heard anyone stammer whilst singing. The power of the brain is marvellous to behold, but being able to overpower it on occasion must be so liberating. It’s something I’d like to be able to do, albeit for a different reason.

Although this is really Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush’s film, the entire cast was extremely strong. I was surprised to find Guy Pearce playing the older prince, although he was very good.

The abdication crisis of 1936 and the build-up to the second world war is a period in British history that interests me greatly. A few things didn’t quite gel with other accounts I’ve seen, but the only real howler was The Kilt – but how lovely to see Colin Firth back on familiar ground in that scene as the hapless awkward soul so utterly out of their depth – echoes of so many of his other films!

I found this film to be charming and challenging. It was funny. It was thought provoking. It was a joy to watch. I laughed, I raged, I cried. I came out of the cinema a little less of a republican than I went in.

The film caused something of a stir when it was first released, and was banned from several international film festivals because of its shocking content – surely this kind of thing could never actually happen in reality, could it? 50 years later and what got to me about the film was exactly how reality has emerged to echo the film – throwing up parallels between the early lives of both Pope John Paul II and the current Pope Benedict, and the struggle by many Christians to keep the faith while religion was outlawed in so many countries behind the Iron Curtain.

This film, made in black and white, has none of the special effects that modern films have. Its depiction of ‘torture’ is almost entirely psychological – there’s no waterboarding or humiliation here – and yet it’s somehow more shocking for that. It’s all about words, and the power of twisting what people say, of repressing their freedom to think and speak their minds. It’s about faith and the human condition, and the strength that someone can get from their beliefs.

It’s a very very dark film, and it’s served with a very interesting twist. My mother first saw this film when she was 11, taken by mistake by her parents who thought that – because that nice Alec Guinness was in it – it would be a comfortable Ealing Comedy. She didn’t understand half of it at the time. Last year she came across it on DVD by accident and remembered the film vividly so bought it to watch again. We watched, and spent a couple of hours afterwards discussing it and agreed that there was a lot of ambiguity as to how much of what was confessed was the truth.

It’s a film I wholeheartedly recommend. I hope that it’s never re-made because I don’t believe modern film makers could do it justice.

They also have a growing collection of pre-recorded DVDs, though as these reflect my mother’s somewhat dated tastes there is a limited selection that’s worth watching.

This is a brief review of what I watched.

First: the first two episodes of Jeeves and Wooster starring Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry. More accurately, I dozed off in front of two episodes. I had never really got into Wodehouse, I didn’t watch these when they were originally on television and the fact that I fell asleep during BOTH episodes suggests that I’m still far from gripped by the storylines. However, from what I remember, both Fry and Laurie were excellent – as always – and it was the plots that were somewhat unremarkable.

Second: two early episodes of To the Manor Born starring Penelope Keith, Peter Bowles and Angela Thorne. I enjoyed watching these as a child, and they’ve aged well. Very enjoyable tucked up on the sofa with a rather nice glass of wine! These episodes had been freebies from the Daily Mail (so I have no idea where my mother got them from!) but I shall have to consider finding a box set for her.

I know it won’t be easy, but it might be fun, inspiring, awesome and wonderful. Therefore I’m promising to make use of The DailyPost, and the community of other bloggers with similar goals, to help me along the way, including asking for help when I need it and encouraging others when I can.

If you already read my blog, which let’s face it is unlikely as you don’t even know it’s here, I hope you’ll encourage me with comments and likes, and good will along the way.

The report’s author, Lord Browne, advocates lifting the cap on the tuition fees universities can charge students, so they can charge more. He also advocates changing the earnings threshold at which graduates start repaying the fees, and introducing some kind of tiered repayment system so that those who earn more pay more.

The report was commissioned in 2009 by the Labour government with the support of the Conservatives in opposition. Its remit was quite narrow in that it seems to have focused on how students pay for university education, and not about what universities are for and how best to fund their work.

I’ll blog about my own views another time, but at the moment there is uproar because Lib Dem policy is to phase out tuition fees entirely, not to lift the current cap. Moreover, before the General Election every Lib Dem candidate signed the NUS pledge to vote against any proposed increases in tuition fees. Suddenly it looks as though an increase in tuition fees will become the policy of the coalition Government, and Lib Dem MPs don’t like it.

The Coalition Agreement makes allowance for the Lib Dems to abstain in such a situation: it was drawn up after the election and in the full knowledge that the Lib Dems had previously pledged to vote against. So why did the Lib Dem negotiating team not hold out to vote against, given that they had all signed the same pledge?

Personally I think that our candidates were well-intentioned but misguided in signing up to the NUS pledge. I have a problem with making promises I can’t be sure I can keep, and I have a problem with others making similar commitments. I’ve been let down too many times by good people making bad calls.

The problem now is that our parliamentarians DID sign up to this pledge and are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. If they support whatever proposals come from the coalition government, they’ll be seen to be breaking their promises. If they vote against whatever proposals are put forward, they’re breaking the coalition agreement – another set of promises.

Meanwhile NUS – never regarded as fans of the Liberal Democrats but more generally as a vehicle for students to fast-track their way to office in the Labour Party – is having a field day, having played such a fabulous hand at the expense of the Liberal Democrats. Today their members were even held responsible for having hijacked the official party website.

Dear oh dear. I am reminded of these lyrics from the musical Chess. Having recently been to see a revival of the show, I think it should be required viewing for anyone seeking political office.