Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ

"People who take drugs need medical help, not criminal retribution."

Not the sentiment of some soft-hearted liberal, but a clarion call to the world's governments from the executive director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).

Antonio Maria Costa has long argued for the toughest action to control drugs.

"Drugs are not harmful because they are controlled - they are controlled because they are harmful," he proclaims in his passionate preface to the latest annual UN report on drugs.

He attempts to counter what he describes as the "growing chorus" among politicians, press and public that drug control is failing and that legalisation is the answer:

"I urge governments to recalibrate the policy mix, without delay, in the direction of more controls on crime, without fewer controls on drugs."

His argument sets up what some might argue is a bogus choice between total legalisation or tough criminal sanctions. But he makes it with conviction:

"Why unleash a drug epidemic in the developing world for the sake of libertarian arguments made by a pro-drug lobby that has the luxury of access to drug treatment?"

So far, so familiar. But what do you make of this?

"I appeal to the heroic partisans of the human rights cause worldwide, to help UNODC promote the right to health of drug addicts: they must be assisted and reintegrated into society," Mr Costa demands:

"Addiction is a health condition and those affected by it should not be imprisoned... in order to reduce the security threat posed by international mafias."

Calling for a "shift of focus" in law enforcement from drug users to drug traffickers, Mr Costa says:

"...arresting individuals and seizing drugs for their personal use is like pulling weeds - it needs to be done again the next day. The problem can only be solved by addressing the problem of slums and dereliction in our cities."

This attitude is a surprise from a man who has previously demanded that no quarter be given in the global war on drugs.

The UNODC recently congratulated the British government for reclassifying cannabis as a Class B rather than a Class C drug. But the only change affected by reclassification was to increase the maximum sentence for possession - from two to five years.

How does that square with Mr Costa's argument that "drug courts and medical assistance are more likely to build healthier and safer societies than incarceration"?

The idea that Britain's criminal justice system should decriminalise possession while retaining tough sanctions against those who sell illegal drugs is not a new one.

Anabolic steroids are Class C drugs, but it is legal to possess or import them for personal use. On the other hand, if people possess or import them "with intent to supply" it could lead to 14 years in prison.

The decision not to create an offence of simple possession followed advice from the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs back in 1993. The committee told ministers that penalising users would be "undesirable as it would criminalise a whole group of people".

The Chief Executive of the independent UK Drug Policy Commission, Roger Howard, tells me that Antonio Maria Costa's comments "open the door to non-criminal sanctions and decriminalisation for simple possession".

He adds that "they also raise the possibility of non-penal or non-criminal sanctions for offenders committing low-level crimes to fund an addiction" while pointing out that "growing international evidence supports alternatives that address the underlying problems of drugs and social exclusion."

Next week, I am going to Portugal - which decriminalised the possession and personal use of all drugs in 2001.

A recent Cato Institute report on the policy said:

"None of the parade of horrors that decriminalization opponents in Portugal predicted, and that decriminalization opponents around the world typically invoke, has come to pass. In many cases, precisely the opposite has happened, as usage has declined in many key categories and drug-related social ills have been far more contained in a decriminalized regime."

I shall, of course, report back - so watch this space.

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With the start of Wimbledon fortnight, one of England's proudest boasts is once again showcased for the world - the perfect lawn.

The grass court exemplifies not just a horticultural phenomenon but a cultural one: within its striped symmetry is a display of power as emphatic as a column of North Korean tanks.

But is the lawn's appeal now in decline, its potency failing in straitened and troubled times?

The small, rectangular sward at the centre of the championships is as famous and influential as any of the sports stars who have graced it.

Here, embodied in London SW19, is the Englishman's claim to have authority over nature; not just the triumph of good (grass) over evil (weeds) but an exhibition of how order may defeat chaos.

The English lawn was invented in the early 17th Century as a way for the Jacobean gentry to assert their superiority. Hugely labour intensive, only the wealthiest and most powerful could afford to maintain the immaculate turf.

The traditional use of sheep or other livestock to graze pasture lacked the precision to create the closely-cut finish that amazed the rival gardeners of France and beyond. The perfect lawn was hand-produced by scything and shearing the grass.

So began an obsessive relationship between man and plant. And it does tend to be a man - there is something decidedly male about the botanic and geometric totalitarianism involved.

With the invention of the mowing machine in 1830, the lawn escaped the bonds of England's great estates and became a key component of the Victorian enthusiasm for games, sports and pastimes.

Croquet, cricket, bowls and lawn tennis required immaculate grass playing surfaces and the art of lawn-making was developed and exported around the world along with imperial expansion.

However, domestic dominance was largely retained because a key component of a soft lawn is soft weather - drizzly English rain.

In the 20th Century the United States, in keeping with its acquired super-power status, mobilised the masses to defy this metrological handicap and strive for global lawn domination.

The American Garden Club convinced its members that it was their civic duty to maintain a beautiful lawn: "a plot with a single type of grass with no intruding weeds, kept mown at a height of an inch and a half, uniformly green and neatly edged".

A battery of fungicides, insecticides and herbicides were deployed. Ten million sprinklers sprinkled.

In suburban Britain, no garden was complete without its square of striped green, tended to within an inch of its life. The lawn had become a ubiquitous part of the English landscape, as this map of Wimbledon from 1933 shows.

The All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club had only moved to its Church Road site 11 years before, but the courts were encircled by other examples of professional lawn construction - the bowling green, the cricket square, the golf greens on the Wimbledon Park course.

Gardens of homes to the south of the club would almost certainly have boasted lawns front and back - framed by a few roses, perhaps. This part of SW19 was lawn central.

Is the English love-affair with the lawn fading, though?

At the Chelsea Flower Show this year, not one of the show gardens featured a lawn. "I would advise someone with a small garden to use artificial grass if they insist on a lawn" presenter Alan Titchmarsh tells me.

This strikes me as cheating, missing the point.

"We like our stripes", he concedes. "There is something therapeutic about the repetition involved in caring for a lawn. We mow it today knowing that in a week we will have to mow it again. People like that."

But his fellow presenter Joe Swift articulates the anti-lawn argument. "Lawns are basically mono-cultural - they really are not that great for biodiversity." He could have added that they consume huge amounts of water and for most gardens are almost impossible to maintain without chemicals.

Joe tells me how he feared a lynching a few years ago when he advised the Islington Gardening Club to dig up their lawns in favour of something more interesting. But I wonder if the reaction would be as negative today.

With US First Lady Michelle Obama ploughing the White House lawn to plant organic vegetables, with climate change making lawn maintenance more problematic in Britain, with the fashion for the natural and with a global economic downturn, it may be that what was once a status-symbol is now a little bit naff.

The pampered lawn looks increasingly like an unsustainable relic from an era of excess.

The most pampered of all, of course, is the golf green. In an academic paper published in 1993, Professor Wolf Grossmann explained how a survey of 52 golf courses on Long island in New York had revealed that "collectively they applied 21 different herbicides, 20 fungicides, and eight insecticides annually, totalling around 50,000 pounds of active chemical ingredients".

He quoted the Chief of New York's Department of Environmental Conservation Joseph Okoniewski: "If you scraped a golf green and tested it, you'd have to cart it away to a hazardous waste facility".

That said, I was out with my mower this weekend, decapitating the daisies and skidding on the moss that approximates for turf in my postage-stamp garden. It is a pretty sorry excuse for an English lawn, but I did feel a slight sense of pride as I inhaled the summer-sweet smell of fresh-cut grass and sized up my stripes.

The image of Centre Court in 2009 is courtesy of the All England Lawn Tennis Club. You can see the full map in and format at the . The image of Wimbledon in 1933 was provided by the .

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A couple of days ago in Bedfordshire, uniformed immigration officers surrounded Melchior Singo as his screaming children looked on. They dragged him away as his wife Ethol tried to stop them, to talk to her husband, to keep the family together.

Amid highly charged and chaotic scenes inside the Yarl's Wood detention centre on Wednesday afternoon, two officers were injured - one claims to have been bitten, another stabbed in the neck with a pen. Children were vomiting and weeping as a number of men were marched away.

Ethol then took nine-year-old Olger and seven-year-old Renee into a side room and instructed them to pray.

It was the dramatic end to .

The Singo family is from Malawi. Their claims to stay in Britain have all but come to an end after living for the past five years in Leyland near Preston in Lancashire. They were active members of a local church and the children both attended the scout troop. Melchior worked at the local hospital; Ethol had a job in Tesco.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of their residency application, the family has been shown support by people in Leyland.

shows what can happen when people are asked to choose between friendship and the system:

"The PPC and the monks think that it is our Christian duty to support them in their hour of need, and we know how many of you are concerned for them. There will be fund-raising events happening. As usual this Sunday we will attempt to talk to them through the computer."

It seems clear that, this week, Melchior's resilience snapped. After staying with his family for over a month in Yarl's Wood, with the threat of imminent deportation hanging over them, he was among twenty detainees who took part in .

Ethol, who I spoke to last night, says it was a period of "fasting and praying", but it was undoubtedly a challenge to the system. There were demands from a number of the families held in the centre for better healthcare, but their decision to boycott the centre's canteen and to move their mattresses into the corridors looks to many like a protest borne of desperation.

It was clearly a potentially dangerous situation for the staff at Yarl's Wood, too. Children and parents were sitting and lying around the centre and staff could not clean or go about their normal duties.

They had tried to calm the situation with the offer of one-to-one meetings with any detainee who had a grievance or a problem about their treatment. However, a small number of protesters had convinced the rest that they should all stick together. Their sit-in would continue until someone from the Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Office addressed them as a group.

According to Ethol, with the impasse continuing, the management from the private security firm Serco decided to take action just after lunch on Wednesday.

"At about 2.15, twenty to thirty officers came in, rushing to where were sitting," she told me. "They were wearing black and white Serco uniforms. Someone was filming it all."

Ethol was having her hair braided by another detainee and her two children were sitting playing cards when the operation began.

"They saw it all happen. People were being sick everywhere, throwing up, crying and screaming. My children were really traumatised."

The Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Office described the operation this way:

"Officers separated a small number of detainees from the general population who were disrupting the normal operation of Yarls Wood. The separation was conducted by staff trained in conflict resolution. It was undertaken with the utmost sensitivity and there have been no injuries to detainees."

Ethol and the children were escorted from Yarl's Wood that evening and taken by van to Kingsley House near Gatwick. They were apparently told that Melchior would join them shortly afterwards.

In fact, he had been taken to Colnbrook near Heathrow. Ethol's attempts to contact her husband were rebuffed, one officer telling her that her husband was not allowed to make or accept any calls. I am told that the UK Border Agency later apologised for what it accepted was a mistake.

What strikes me about all of this is how easy it is to demand deportations and tough sanctions against those who attempt to live in Britain without permissions, and also how hard it is for those professionals charged with making the system work in the face of the emotions and apparent desperation of those caught up in it. Particularly the children. (It is Ethol Singo's birthday today.)

PS: The Children's Commissioner for England, Sir Al Aynsley-Green is urging the UK Border Agency to rethink its treatment of children caught up in the deportation process following his hard-hitting report which I posted on recently.

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When journalists are faced with a story that doesn't fit the accepted script, they tend to bin it - to pretend it hasn't happened.

That may be why received pretty much zero coverage.

We have been constantly told that it stands to reason: recession = more people homeless. So the alternative story was spiked.

It is, I admit, unexpected. I am at a housing conference in Harrogate today, and when I told delegates about the statistics, jaws dropped. They didn't know. It didn't compute.

• a 15% fall in people declaring themselves homeless to the local councils in England between January and March compared with the same period in 2008;
• a 26% fall in the number accepted as homeless;
• and the proportion of that dwindling number of cases which were down to people defaulting on their mortgage is also down - less than 3%, lower than at any time since 2007.

So where are the "middle-class homeless" we were warned about? Where are the thousands of rough sleepers the charities told us would be on the streets?

Leslie Morphy, Chief Executive of Crisis, stood at a soup kitchen last December and said "our fear is that as the recession bites in the new year, we are going to see more people in the same situation as those relying on our Christmas centres today".

Shelter offered a similarly gloomy prediction - soaring numbers in temporary accommodation.

Well, the number in temporary housing was actually 17% lower at the end of March than it was a year earlier - more than a third down on where it was in 2004.

The much-trumpeted policy that the government was relying on to stop the most vulnerable families losing their homes and going through the trauma of repossession was the Β£285m .

But the number of households in England which have accepted an offer through the scheme in its first four months is precisely two.

Yes, just two families have a roof over their head thanks to MRS, so ministers can hardly argue that that explains the fall in homelessness. (A similar scheme in Wales has been a little more successful, but would not affect the English homelessness stats.)

So there is a mystery.

Last year, repossessions hit a 12-year high at about 40,000. Now the Council of Mortgage Lenders is suggesting that this year may see 75,000. Perhaps the January-to-March data reflect the lull before the storm.

Even so, it seems odd that England has apparently escaped the kind of scenes being witnessed in America: tented villages of homeless people; motels requisitioned to house the destitute.

I recently attended a Cabinet Office briefing on the likely impact of the recession at which Tony Blair's former adviser Geoff Mulgan reminded the audience that homelessness actually went down in the last recession too. The private rented sector came to the rescue, he suggested. But he also offered a more sociological explanation: that British people are more tolerant and generous when times are hard. (See also the Young Foundation's , for which Mr Mulgan wrote the preface.)

Look at the main reason people gave for finding themselves without a roof over their head: 38% said it was because parents, relatives or friends were unable or unwilling to accommodate them.
It is far from ideal, but perhaps families are putting up with surplus children and grandchildren because they know how frightening it is to be homeless in a recession.

So I offer you a Map of the Week which tells the story of a dog which has not yet barked.

Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔlessness acceptance rates are down in every region of England, with the biggest falls in the north west and the east Midlands, down 38% and 34% respectively.

The north east had the smallest decrease, down 9%.

The area with the highest proportion of its households which are homeless is London (0.9/1000), while the south east and south west of England have the lowest (0.3/1000).

Sometimes it is the stories which don't get written that tell the tale.

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Equalities Minister Harriet Harman has been accused of over-stating the plight of women in the workplace: using misleading statistics to make it look as though female workers are having a tougher time than they really are.

After the debacle over the use of knife crime statistics last year, one would have thought that ministers might have learned their lesson.

But I am reliably informed that when the National Statistician Karen Dunnell went to the Government Equalities Office last November and told them that their way of calculating gender pay differences might be confusing and potentially damaging, the GEO ignored her and published anyway.

So instead of the Office for National Statistics (ONS) pay-gap figure of 12.8% (hardly something to crow about), the department which stated that women are paid, on average, 23% less per hour than men.

Now by Sir Michael Scholar, the chair of the UK Statistics Authority (the official watchdog on the use of government stats), saying that her use of the 23% figure "may undermine public trust in official statistics" and "risks giving a misleading quantification of the gender pay gap".

The GEO's version of events is rather different to that of my source. They claim that they "ran the 23% past the ONS and they approved the calculation".

They may have ticked the maths, I pressed, but did they approve the use of the figure? "As far as I am aware," said a spokesperson, "no-one from the ONS has ever suggested we should not use the figure." However, the official promised to check.

What the GEO and ONS agree is that the UK's official statisticians are currently reviewing how they can best present the gender pay gap - a review which is ongoing.

Both the ONS and the GEO number come from the same data source, but the equalities department and Britain's top statisticians interpreted them very differently.

The 2008 Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE) attempts to provide the detail needed to get a true picture of how men and women fare in the workplace. For me, this is a key table:

Comparing men and women who work full-time, the gender pay gap is 12.8%, the ONS preferred measure.

Looking at part-time workers, women actually do better than men: their hourly rate is 3.4% higher than their male counterparts.

But when you add the two together, because part-timers get paid less than full-timers and because there are nearly four times as many part-time female workers as there are male, the gap appears to jump to 22.6%, which the GEO rounds up to 23%.

The GEO justifies its approach to me in a short statement:

"The 23% gender pay gap figure used by the Government Equalities Office includes both full and part-time employees. With women representing over three-quarters of the UK's part-time workforce, we believe this figure gives the fullest picture of the country's gender pay gap."

Nowhere in the press release, though, is the point made that those part-time workers are actually outstripping men who work part-time.

There is clearly some quiet fury at the ONS that Harriet Harman should have apparently rebuffed the country's foremost statistician. My source tells me: "The most important point is that the GEO has no statisticians inside it." The question, then, is: who did approve the 23% figure? One of Ms Harman's officials promised to find out for me, but did say that the decision was made "across government".

If one accepts my ONS source's version of events, this was not a professional difference of opinion between two statistical experts. Harriet Harman's officials preferred their in-house interpretation of the data to the independent and professional one because, one might assume, it made the case for their controversial Equalities Bill look a little stronger.

Attached to the letter from Sir Michael Scholar are the notes from the Monitoring and Assessment team at the authority which investigated the case. This suggests that it is not just the GEO which may occasionally get political with the numbers.

The Equalities and Human Rights Commission refers to a gender pay gap of 35.6% for women working part-time. It comes to this conclusion by comparing the mean hourly earnings of female part-time workers with those of male full-time workers.

As the Statistics Authority document so delicately puts it:

"While we see value in providing a range of measures to present the differences between the earnings of women compared with men, a gender pay gap that compares the hourly earnings of women part-time employees with men full-time employees needs particularly careful explanation and justification if it is not to mislead."

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It is a toxic cocktail. As thousands of people lose their jobs each week in Britain, the vast majority of voters think that the country's MPs are on the make, milking the system for their own gain, putting self-interest ahead of the country, of constituents - even of their own party.

reveals a nation which has lost patience with its Parliament. A remarkable 85% of people want to strip MPs of their power to police themselves. They would prefer an independent judicial body to scrutinise the activities of members, an idea which turns democracy on its head.

Such is the crisis of confidence in the Westminster system that, instead of elected representatives controlling Parliament, the public apparently prefers unelected judges. Only 8% of people positively oppose the concept of external scrutiny - although one suspects that many, if not most, MPs would side with the 8%.

It is one thing to feel angry at politicians on the fiddle, quite another to blame the Parliamentary system and demand such revolutionary reform.

Six out of ten voters support the idea of an independent inquiry into the whole expenses scandal - however much it costs and however long it takes.

Again, this reflects a belief that only people from outside the Westminster bubble can be trusted to sort out this mess.

Three years ago, just 46% of people said that they thought that MPs used their power for personal gain. Today, it is 78%.

The poll reveals an electorate which believes in large measure that MPs are liars and cheats while our system of Parliamentary democracy is in desperate need of radical reform.

Not since the heady days of the have so many voters said that they think the system of governing Britain needs substantial improvement - 35% felt it did in 1995 and 37% think so now.

If there is any positive news from this poll, it is that 84% of people still think members need expenses in order to ensure that people from all walks of life can become MPs. Some hope too for those politicians who emerge unscathed from the scandal - asked whether they trusted their own MP to tell the truth, 40% agreed they did (compared with 20% who thought MPs generally were honest).

On a sunny day in SW1, visitors pose in front of the Palace of Westminster smiling for the cameras. Across the road on Parliament Square, visible protest is limited to a few anti-war protesters and a handful of Tamils.

But the picture painted by this poll suggests that there is nothing benign about the British people's relationship with its Parliament at the moment.

Surrounded by the paraphernalia of security - counter-terror barriers, concrete blocks, and armed police - the Palace of Westminster has not in living memory appeared so separated from the people it supposedly serves.

Deep distrust of our democratic system comes just at the time when the country needs to trust its representatives to steer them through an economic crisis. It would be unwise, perhaps, to underestimate the danger we may be in.

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Not so long ago there was . The suggestion was that "non-white" acts suffered from an undercurrent of prejudice and racism among the voting public.

Watching the final of ITV's Britain's Got Talent this weekend, I saw a stage for everything that is tolerant and inclusive about contemporary British society and identity.
The winners proclaimed multi-racial roots in their name.

Diversity's success spoke of something we should never forget about our country. While the press and our politicians too often demonise "gangs" of young men in their baseball caps and hoodies, this group from East London and Essex danced for the nation with discipline, wit, intelligence and joy.

The hard work and humility on display were at odds with the common portrayal of youth.

When the voting public was asked to select an act to represent Britain in front of the Queen, a million people chose Diversity.

Look at some of the other finalists: the 12-year-old singing sensation Shaheen Jafargholi may have an Iranian name and father, but the lad from Swansea is being hailed as the next Tom Jones.

Comedy dancers Stavros Flatley featured a man with "Cyprus" tattooed on his chest.

But the performance of Demetrios Demetriou and his son Lagi surely emanated from a very British school of clowning, an act built upon gentle self-mockery and plain daftness.

No-one suggested they were too Greek to represent Britain.

However, if you are a professional footballer, it appears that you can be too Scottish, Welsh or Northern Irish to represent Britain.

The news this weekend that means brilliant young footballers from other parts of the UK will not get the chance to go for gold.

The decision was made by football associations worried that Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland might lose the chance to win the World Cup on their own.

Britain's Got Talent, but when it comes to playing for team GB, only English footballers are allowed on stage.

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