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A snapshot of your ideas from last week - several of which we're looking at following up.
This comment on infant immunisation in particular. Leave us a note or email us if you've experienced something similar or know someone we should talk to.
All comments, musings and especially new story ideas to investigate very welcome.
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What about the Police PACE review.
In particular:
1. Interviewing children without waiting for parents.
I would prefer it if they arrested the parent also, and locked them up together. Safer for the police. In some cases it might help start a parent dialog!
2. Refusal of ID procedures: adverse inference.
Absolute right to refuse, if during incident the suspect suffered facial injuries. Unless all the others in the parade were injured to match! However, using photos all pictures could be "blobbed" at the point of injury.
3. Plain clothes officers entering premises.
I think with all the impersonation of officials this is a dangerous step for the police. Easy to make a fake warrant card that can fool through a window but harder to fake a marked police car and uniforms.
4. Non-involvement of the courts in property searches if the person has not been arrested.
So the hurdle of carefully considering if an arrest is really warranted or getting a court order is bypassed. Worrying removal of checks and balances.
5. In the case of missing persons powers to search all houses connected with the person with only a superintendents OK.
6. Use of short term remote holding facilities (in shopping centres) for up to 4 hours for fingerprint and DNA.
This is a very dangerous step and assumes very low numbers of officers present. No peer pressure or control monitoring. Dangerous step.
7. Bail by post.
Ridiculous considering family break down and the lack of postal security due to the sealing of secure internal letter boxes in troubled areas. Even Harry Potter's post was ruled by his Uncle! Easy way to get rid of the unwanted tenant.
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Here's one for us to have a little chew on.
Rose Gibb is still due to recieve a nice big pay-out despite of being in charge of the hospitals in Kent where 90 people died.
To put it into context, that is rearly twice the number who died on 7/7
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Topic for a programme.
UK and World Population - it amazes me that in all the discussion and coverage of the global warming topic (and related ones like food and water shortages etc.) no-one ever seems to question whether the current (let alone the future, projected) world population is sustainable?
World population is around 6.5Billion - rising to 9 billion it is thought by 2050.
Leading scientists (including Lovelock) have suggested that just 2 billion is truly sustainable!
Instead of us relying on technological or social changes to switch away from fossil fuels; why does no-one ask the fundamental question:
Are there just too many of us for the planet we are on?
Is it too big a question to be asked by some? Or fear of religious groups such as the Roman Catholics? Is it because governments with greying populations worry about paying their pensions and healthcare and so they actively want more younger people in a form of Ponzi scheme to fund the elders? (Bpth Germany and Italy recently took action to increase their birthrate!)
Please consider the ramifications of this - why are we in Western Europe with our falling birthrates now encouraging more people to be born or live here despite our stretched infrastructures and high population densities?
Could the best chance for the Third World be limiting population and helping them to teach, feed and employ themselves so as to avoid the famines, war and other aspects of too many, chasing too little?
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New story idea:
Marbles on foreign fields.
The issue of the return of museum pieces to their country of origin is a recurring and apparently increasingly vexatious issue. In the case of European museum pieces, I believe that there is a case for developing new the Museum of Europe into a holding body for such disputed national treasures. It would be interesting to learn whether such an idea has already been proposed and if not, whether the EU Commission/"Parliament executive" would care to offer an opinion on such a proposal?
Paul Mc Crory
p.s. Such an institution would have to take care not to open the flood gates and limit itself to recognised, disputed pieces.
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Does ipm not need its astrology column? I couldn't help noticing the credit crunch began exactly as jupiter (wealth) left its own sign (happy, expansive) and moved into miserable, restrictive capricorn. And now it's moving backwards (retrograde - an optical illusion showing it moving backwards as seen from the earth) so it's in a very bad state. But it stops going backwards on Sept 8th so that should mark the nadir of events. It moves into aquarius 16th October, which is a little bit better than being in capricorn, and then moves into pisces 27th December. Pisces is almost as good as its own sign so things ought to improve from then on. 60 years? Pshawww!
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Food manufacturing and meat processing is under threat from shortages of migrant workers as many return home or head elsewhere. 'The Grocer' magazine picked up on it this week with particular regard to meat processing.
One in 10 food and drink sector workers is classified as a migrant.
Working in food manufacturing myself, I am aware that we would struggle to replace the migrant workers who make up around 80% of our workforce. Like many other food companies we have deliberately moved away from using temporary agency workers in an attempt to maintain some stability in labour numbers. This has led to a switch in numbers -the majority of permanent workers are now migrants, and if you do need to get hold of agency staff, they are more likely to be unskilled, poorly motivated, UK workers. We also find that we are not fully utilising the skills of many of our (mainly) Polish workers who are highly qualified.
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http://sarahpalin.typepad.com/my_weblog/
McCain's VP Sarah Palin apparently has a blog. Or is it too naieve to be real?
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Airline flight is a nightmare for us tall people. I am 6-4 and sitting in the tourist class seats in a normal shorthaul flight is literally painful. Longhaul is a bit better, but then its longer! There are a limited number of seats with extra legroom on flights, and one of the sights which drives me to distraction is to see those seats occupied by short people with no real need for them, who just happened to check in before i did. You could reasonably argue that this ia a matter of discrimination. i can do something about my weight, so would never cry foul in relation to my girth, but i can do litterally nothing about the length of my body or legs.
Here is a suggestion.
At the time of booking airlines could ask travellers to specify their height, no compulsion required, but by you only become eligeable for the extra legroom seat if you do specify your height. The seats are then allocated to the tallest people on the flight - sounds pretty simple to me!
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I just heard a woman who I think may have been called Jude Kelly on PM waxing lyrical about how inspiring the olympic games and paraolympics are.
Coming from the North of England, I can inform her most people I know are wondering how they can keep their cars, a roof over their heads with the luxury of a bit of heat there as well and their,and their families' stomachs fed.
I consumed, I estimate, 600 minutes of coverage of Hull's football and rugby teams for every minute of coverage of the olympics in China.
I imagine the opening ceremony for the London olympics will be as inspiring as the celebrations that greeted the new millenium and I'm sure most British children's access to sporting facilities will continue to decline up until and after the London olympics. Most British olympians will, I suspect come from the middle classes in sports inaccessible to the majority of kids such equestrian events, sailing and rowing.
If working class, British kids currently have access to an interested parent with time, energy, money and a car to take them to training facilities (that may or may not exist at all or be within reach if they DO exist), the demands of working harder and longer to cover the average families increased expenses will make such olympic or sporting ambitions an expensive luxury.
I know from my own experiences funding for many childrens' access to sports facilities is being cut as I write.
Does Britain have a world class vocalist to sing at the opening ceremony? The US has Spielberg who the Chinese tried to hire as their "artistic director". I sense the UK is bankrupt and think this will either show during the London olympics or the state of the UK during the olympics will be so dire the money spent on the olympics will seem a grotesque abuse of funds that could have built schools, railways, power stations. The priorities of successive governments have been too Londoncentric and most of the UK will feel quite disassociated from the London olympics.
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Idea:
The WI went all the way to New Zealand, but they were still way off.. I've heard about prostitution and Harriet Harman on R2 and R4 several times this week. Someone should ask the 'working girls' themselves.
If possible, I suggest a visit to manchester for the ipm team.. Britain's No. 1 massage parlour is reputed to be there (I won't name it here).
There are brothels in manchester where women work in comfortable, clean settings, with all-female staff, and there are coffee bars and lounges.
Legalization would encourage such places where there is a safe atmosphere and problematic behaviour and stereotypes are naturally avoided.
No need to go to NZ to find out.
Women's Hour missed the opportunity to inspect the thinking behind this question... I think something about the psychology of double standards would be an interesting comparison to what the girls themselves say. Perhaps a notable who got caught in a scandal (why not), a sex worker, or a punter could talk about how they resolve the two elements of their life. While I think double standards encourage the sense of sleaze and are the centre of the whole problem, I honestly don't really appreciate how they work in people's minds.
I'd like something quiet, not strident, so ipm is ideal? What prompts me is the reported double standard between the perceived acceptability of paying for sex and having a female relative who is a sex worker. I'd like to hear that unpicked a little bit. Is there a parallel with the perception of violence against women (in which case, it's a question of respect not sexwork). Surely these women are women, just like any other;
do we think that they are not so, and maybe even that sex taints women...
Harriet Harman's presumption of these women's victimhood might be similarly patronising and denigrating in the end. Aren't there some (expert) feminist contradictions to gently explore here? Get them on the show too. I'm still not sure if there's anyone who genuinely, truly believes that
that forcing prostitution underground won't make things worse, but what do the girls and receptionists at the parlours honestly think? I'd like to hear some reality.
I had a girlfriend who was formerly a sex worker, and things went wrong when this emerged. I do suspect (though i can't know) that the proposed criminalization is not in the interests of respect for women. Surely it only delights the prurient. So... I'd just like to hear something non-prurient and non-politicized on this topic. For once.
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Here's something I think you should investigate, because I think it affects your impartiality and reflects very badly on BBC News.
I live in Canada. I just turned on the BBC NEWS home page and I saw an advert for an American news show with Jim Lehrer, sponsored by CHEVRON.
No mention of what network the news show was from - only the Chevron logo. I Googled the name Jim Lehrer - I see he's on PBS. But I wouldn't have known that. It was as if it were an advert for "Chevron News."
I'm shocked to see adverts on the BBC. I can imagine their justification: the news that they were reporting to Britons anyway is more expensive to deliver to foreigners, and we don't pay the licence fee.
I don't agree with this argument. If you're a licence fee funded organisation running a website, world wide views should be part of your business plan within the licence fee.
But much more importantly, it affects BBC News's independence and impartiality. It never occurred to me before that the BBC would compromise its journalistic integrity for fear of offending an advertiser. But now BBC NEWS is being sponsored by an OIL COMPANY?
I'm upset to see an advert of any kind, but particularly one for a company that has an interest in affecting how the news is reported.
This is why, while adverts are allowed to continue to support the BBC's costs, I will never be able to fully trust their independence.
Whose idea was this - to change something so fundamental about the BBC and without public consultation with the licence fee payers? How can that be justified?
Rupert Howe
BC, Canada
PS
Wait... I see that there's a link at the very bottom of the iPM page saying "Advertise with us" which gives contact details for agents all over the world and a link to a site called bbcreachingmillions.com. So perhaps this request will be buried... you've already been taken over by the pod people. Scary. Prove your independence and investigate this creeping menace.
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Is it me, or wishful thinking? Since our terrific results at the Tour de France, the Olympics and Tour of Ireland (yes that does probably make me a fanatic), there seem to be a lot more cyclists around - in full tour kit. It would be interesting to learn how much cycling and other sports have increased over the summer and whether this could help the nation to become less over weight?
Phiala
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http://networks.silicon.com/telecoms/0,39024659,39284219,00.htm?r=3
What will snooping by the government achieve? Criminals and terrorists will encrypt their communications.
So surely it's just another case of Labour having an unhealthy interest in our everyday activities?
The Land Girls farmed Britain through WW2 so New Labour could replicate the Stasi, with neighbours informing on each other here?
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Cutting back!
When is this all going to stop? I heard today on R4 a man saying how his retired parents are changing their body clocks to use off-peak electricity! We have politicians telling us to use cars less, insulate our homes, save more for pensions, pay more tax etc. At the same time we hear today that some foods have gone up in price 40%.
Soon we will be told to eat less (woops they've already done that).
This is all consumer (demand) centred thinking.
What will be suggested when we are drinking rain water out of old chipped cups reclaimed from the local tip, and keeping warm by sharing a sleeping bag in communal shelters and still paying out more and more just to exist?
I am 100% behind going green, we waste a tremendous amount of stuff, we over-use power and many eat unhealthily. BUT when, for goodness sake, are we going to tackle the real reasons behind our growing problematic issues? Its time to review the strangle hold the oil companies, the insurance companies, the quango govt. agencies etc. that simply do nothing of any value have on all of us.
HSBC Canary Wharf leave all their lights on 24/7 and make obscene profits, pay obscene bonuses and give no customer service whatsoever. Tesco pay little or no Corporation Tax in the UK! Odd to note the accountant for Tesco is or was a Blair advisor. But you and I have to spend out to extra-insulate our homes, not against the cold, but against the constant price hikes of the energy companies many of which are not UK based. Windfall taxes are not the answer. We need real-hard corporate law to restrict these monoliths in a realistic meaningful way.
The taxes are simply passed on, just hidden from obvious view. Its time to look at "supply" instead of constantly penalising the "demand" end of the economy. Perhaps the economists are happy to pay 40% more for their chicken breasts, 30 pence more per lt of diesel than the rest of europe 10% more for their public transport in London.
Years ago, there was a play on R4 about nuclear war. The old couple shivering under cardboard boxes under their stairs put the kettle on for a cup of tea, then a cup of hot water, then lastly to look at it and remember what it was like before the bomb....then they died. Now, we don't have a nuclear war .... or do we call it another name now? Suggestions welcome....
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For a story about prostitution you might want to have a chat with fellow R4 presenter Laurie Taylor for academic sources on the subject. He's covered it a few times on Thinking Allowed:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/factual/thinkingallowed/thinkingallowed_20080730.shtml
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/factual/rams/thinkingallowed_20050914.ram
I was particularly intrigued by this interview:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/factual/thinkingallowed/thinkingallowed_20071212.shtml
"Laura Marķa Agustin talks about her latest book Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry and exposes the myths surrounding ?human trafficking?." (she suggests for many 'trafficked' women prostitution is a choice - not an ideal one but a rational choice given their circumstances)
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