From the Guardian:
Cardinal Keith O’Brien said the increasing abortion rate in Scotland was equivalent to “two Dunblane massacres a day”.
In a sermon this afternoon at St Mary’s Cathedral in Edinburgh, he urged politicians at Westminster to change the current abortion legislation.
The Scottish parliament’s MSPs should also refuse to allow Scottish health services to participate in the “wanton killing of the innocent”, he said.

From Catholics for a free choice (in the States, but you get the idea):
Only 25% of Catholics believe that church leaders should have the final say on abortion
87% of Catholics support abortion when a pregnancy poses a serious threat to a woman’s health and 79% support it in cases of rape.
Less than one-quarter (22%) of Catholics in the US agree with the bishops’ position that abortion should illegal.

I’m glad sensible people, and sensible politicians, are ignoring the good Cardinal. After all, chances are most of his flock are ignoring him too.

YWCA today launched a great new campaign - more than one rung. About time someone started talking about supporting low-paid low-skilled young women to get a better deal. It’s incredibly timely, given Gordon Brown’s focus on increasing skills for work, and upping the number of modern apprentices, and the new talk that’s beginning to come out of DWP about sustaining people in employment and supporting them to progress to better jobs rather than staying in entry levle jobs. After all, the government could hit its 70% target for lone parent employment tomorrow if it could just keep lone parents in jobs once they got them.

I’ve recently been looking for someone to rent the spare room in my flat. By the time you’ve shown them round, pointed out that there’s no shower just a bath but enthusiastically thrown in free wireless broadband to make up for it, you’re beginning to get an idea of what they’re like and whether you could live with them. My situation demands, however, that I flag up a few more things: specifically, that homophobes really really aren’t welcome, and that they’d be living with a councillor, and a Labour one at that. Most people give you that look, a mix of why on earth would you want to do that and why on earth would you feel the need to tell me the dirty little secret about your fetish for meetings, gloss over your indiscretion quickly, and move on to safe topics like the expected magnitude of utility bills. Some, however, react poorly to my choice of leisure pursuit, and, shrieking “Baby-murderers! Anyone who still votes Labour is responsible for the murder of Iraqi babies!”, stampede out of the door.

I was reminded of this when reading the Don on a Green with bright ideas about building the anti-war movement.

(By the way, this really happened. Once. Although there’s a bit of poetic licence; anyone who’s gingerly navigated the loose carpet on my stairs knows that stampeding down them is really out of the question.)

Occasionally, I post up comments which deserve a wider audience. Here’s Sid Whitworth, talking about why we need a recession to combat climate change:

“I will be campaigning at this year’s Big Green Gathering under the banner: Global recession - the only solution to global warming.
I have been campaigning on environmental issues for three years and have come to realise that government and local council efforts to curb carbon emissions have totally failed. Renewable energy and fuel efficiency initiatives have also failed. Friends of the Earth are now a corporate-friendly group with few ideas other than continuing to extol the good of recycling (waste continues to grow) and using low-energy light bulbs (energy demand continues to grow).
Past experience has shown that it is only during recessions that emissions dip.
You cannot build your way out of climate change. You can only cut back and use less. Sorry guys. It’s a fact. But what politician is going to promise you less, hard times, unemployment, other than Churchill?”

This is the guy last heard of standing for the Legalise Cannabis Alliance in Carmarthen East and Dinefwr. We’ll trust his remedies for the big problems of our day, then, eh?

There seems to be a bit of confusion in the blogosphere about why members of the Labour party can have more than one vote for Deputy Leader. Specifically, some Tories have failed to understand that our party is a membership organisation consisting of constituency Labour parties, affiliated trade unions, socialist societies and the Co-operative party, with whom we have an electoral agreement, and that all those sections get to ballot their members.

So, here’s a meme for the Labour blogosphere: how many votes do you get? (Some help here and here, if you need it.)

Me? Oxford East CLP, tick. Unite the Union, TGWU section, tick. Labour campaign for lesbian and gay rights, tick. All first prefs for Mr Cruddas.

Anyone else been watching? In fact, I reckon they were all pretty impressive in one way or another. My first preference is of course spoken for, but this vote’s going to come down to transfers, so I’m carefully pondering my second, third and subsequent choices.

Mr Cruddas was great, despite being by far the least polished (and wearing a slightly odd shiny suit). Every time he talks about his priority being building tens of thousands of council houses, I’m reconfirmed in my decision to vote for him first.

Ms Harman has had to start thinking about how she can adapt to a campaign that’s more about rebuilding the party than about policies, and it felt like her comments about rebuilding her own CLP had been slipped in. But, and I know I’ve said this before, when it comes to women’s issues, she is the real deal - one of just 3% of women in parliament in 1982. And yet, I can’t help but think that if it came down to it, she’d bend to Gordon, just as she did over lone parent benefits as he implemented Tory spending plans nearly a decade ago. I’m comforted in the knowledge that even if she isn’t DL, more likely than not she’ll get to be the new Justice Secretary, looking after prisons, sentencing, courts and probation.

On policy, matters, there were some revealing points. The answers on Iraq were interesting - Cruddas, Harman and Hain talked about how, knowing what they know now, they might reconsider how they voted on the ward, whilst Benn, Blears and Johnson held the line. Interestingly, Cruddas, Blears and Benn would remove the charitable status of private schools, with Harman going for a halfway house, and Benn and Johnson staying clear. Cruddas talked about inequality, as did Harman, and was rebuked by Johnson and Blears for having the temerity to consider curtailing the seemingly-inexorable of the incomes of the very rich. Hain was interested in having an employment rights commission to enforce the rights of the most vulnerable workers, including migrants and agency workers, which is both an interesting idea and a real response to the challenges of globalisation and pressures on wages.

Mr Benn talked about redistributing power, wealth and opportunity. He is, apparently, standing on his record. Can any ex-student hacks remember which NEC candidate stood on their record, with lots of cardboard LPs all over the place in the Wintergardens, sometime in the late nineties or early 00s? Puzzling about that meant that I missed out on the rest of his speech, I’m afraid. I was also mentally absent for Mr Johnson, who wants to be Robin to Gordon’s Batman. Mr Hain said something curious about being an umbilical cord, and then went pretty far out for a government minister, saying that he’d “listen to grassroots as they’ve not been listened to as much as they ought to have been recently.”

Finally, I won’t vote for Ms Blears, but she’s utterly incredible on the stump - personable, witty, on top of the issues, and quick off the mark. As the others fumbled to answer Paxman’s final joker question, she got straight in there with “If I wasn’t standing, I’d vote for Jon’s campaigning, Alan’s politics and Harriet because she’s a woman. But I am standing, and you get the chance to vote for someone who cares about the grassroots, has great politics and is a woman.” What a great candidate she makes, even if I don’t reckon she’d be a great deputy leader.

So, where does that leave my second and other preferences? Well, I don’t need to make my mind up yet, and I still have the youth hustings (yes, I am still young enough to attend!) in Oxford on 10 June to help me decide. I may well make my mind up not on their speeches but on how good the candidates are on the stump when we take them out in the city, to be honest.

With a well-deserved attack on the numpties who run Compass (no surprises there, then).

John Denham made a fascinating speech earlier this week about what we need to do to win back the south of England. In particular, he talks about the greater gap between rich and poor in the south, pointing out that although the poorest areas in this region don’t score as highly on the indices of deprivation, they are more deprived relative to their surroundings. He also has some interesting ideas about thinking about the cost of childcare, elderly care and council tax as a proportion of household income, and continuing to encourage solidarity across the generations. Worth a read - but do ignore the final point about PR, which I’m not sure adds much to his argument.

My new-ish job occasionally requires me to think deep thoughts about big issues with my brow furrowed and a cute moue of concentration on my face. This afternoon was one such occasion. In an attempt to stimulate thought, I went looking for challenge amongst the comment pages of newspapers I usually avoid, such as the Telegraph and the Independent. (I’m sure, by the way, that the Independent is a sneaky but immensely effective brand extension of the Socialist Worker newspaper franchise targeted at the homeowning but still angry demographic).

Anyway, I thought this was an interesting way of thinking about the housing issue, albeit perhaps one that plays to my fond imaginings:

Mr Brown … hints that he doesn’t share Mr Blair’s laissez faire approach to the gap between rich and poor, a problem exacerbated by the gulf between the housing “haves” and “have nots”. […]
There are growing Labour demands for a return to council house building. For Mr Blair, that smacked too much of Old Labour. But it could happen under Mr Brown, who is looking at giving local authorities more freedom as he tries to show he is not a “control freak”. Younger ministers are alive to the issue, too. Liam Byrne, a Home Office minister and an early “Blairite for Brown”, warns his colleagues: “Housing is the new NHS.” In other words, it could be the big issue at the next general election.
Mr Byrne is right. The Tories, slowly, are getting the message too. David Cameron is trying to persuade Tory traditionalists to drop their long-standing opposition to housebuilding in the green belt.
David Willetts, the shadow Education Secretary, is trying to persuade Mr Cameron to make his “big idea” the anxiety among the “baby boomers” generation born after the Second World War that their children will never be able to buy their own homes. “The danger is that the baby boomers are pulling up the ladder of opportunity behind them,” Mr Willetts told me yesterday.[…]
So the party which gets there first with serious policies to open up the housing ladder will reap the benefit. Forget Bill Clinton’s famous mantra about the economy; It’s housing, stupid.

When you think about it, it’s not a stupid assertion: the interests of low-paid and middle income working people who don’t have secure housing are beginning to coincide, and the traditional opposition to housebuilding has the potential to be neutralised because many of the people that will benefit are the children of the people who object (in the most crudely generalised terms).

Cllrs Paul Sergeant and Tia McGregor, having left the Lib Dems to become independents, are now set to become Tories, according to the Oxford Mail. So, Oxford’s not a Tory-free zone any longer.