Not so long ago a pub in rural England was trashed by a gang of yobs as they indulged in a drunken brawl. Some of them spent the night in cells at Abingdon police station.
Forget the credit crunch. The biggest issue facing us right now is how to feed the world, given a global food bill that has leaped by 57% in 12 months. We grumble about rising grocery prices. In the developing world, the middle class cancel holidays and reduce their meat consumption. Those on $2 a day (1.5 billion) take their children out of school and cut back on vegetables. Those on $1 a day (one billion) struggle to afford one bowl of food. Without help, many of them could starve.
The Reverend Jeremy Wright, erstwhile local pastor to Senator Barack Obama, and current bogeyman of choice for Fox News, is not a man temperamentally inclined to let slumbering controversies lie. You need not have been a fly on the wall of the Obama campaign's inner sanctum to imagine the gloom with which they observed his impromptu speaking tour of studios and televised engagements these past few days. Unrepentant, humorous and mildly belligerent at the National Press Club, reflective and measured on the non-commercial PBS radio, firebrand preacher at the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People. Which is the essential Wright?
Not so very long ago, almost to the moment Northern Rock began to crumble, experts in the money business would explain the facts of life to anyone who cared to listen. Contrary to any of your misconceptions, they would say, there isn't much in the way of a serious return to be had from retail banking. Impressive, even mind-boggling, profit statements had given the man in the street the wrong idea entirely.
You would have to look hard to find the thin black line that keeps Scotland moving - a pipeline
buried between Cruden Bay and Grangemouth. We start to notice it only when it is switched off, and learn it has been steam-driven all these years. For a two-day strike, not only are the unions getting lots of bang for their strike-pay buck, but the consequences have forced us to ask some big questions about an industry located somewhere over the North Sea horizon.
Poor Irvine Laidlaw. He's the victim of sexual addiction. Did you read his confession? Did your heart bleed for him after hearing of the drug-fuelled orgies with prostitutes he's endured
during the battle he's been fighting with sex obsession his "whole adult
life"? Did you find yourself nodding
sympathetically when he said: "Many people suffer different types of this disease. There is no cure
for it"? Did you applaud the
baring of this tax exile's soul on the eve of a newspaper expose? No? Me neither.
Here we go, here we go, here we go!"It's back to the seventies, with key energy workers on strike, a Labour government collapsing, an oil-price crisis, growing inflation and a banking crisis. For the
miners in the seventies, read oil workers at Grangemouth, who have a stranglehold on the nation's power supplies.
Things ain’t what they used to be. Ten thousand people are expected to converge on the Royal Highland Showground in Ingliston at the weekend for an event which is modelled on Scotland’s big indie music festival, T in the Park.
SARAH WOOTOON
RECENTLY, MSP Margo MacDonald stated during a debate in the Scottish Parliament that she would wish for the option of receiving medical assistance to die, should her Parkinson's disease ever reach the stage where she would consider her suffering to have become unbearable. In this debate, Margo highlighted a dilemma that many terminally ill people face, knowing that their illnesses are going to progress, and raised an important issue that needs to be discussed and addressed.
Our world - the developed west - has plenty to fret about right now. Our financial system, led by over-exuberant banks, has got itself into a state of sudden and careless disarray. The store of spectacularly-rising value created in our houses threatens to crumble around our ears, as mortgages become harder to get and more expensive, too. The cost of heating and lighting our homes and filling up at the pumps continues to rise, as oil tops $120 a barrel. And that's before any serious efforts are made to price carbon at levels which might help curb on-rolling climate change. Food-price inflation has become a Daily Mail cause celebre, as even the middle classes notice the additional hit in basics, such as bread and cheese, each time they get the plastic out at the supermarket.
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