UR TV CAST

Try this: following the cold spring, greenfly are down to their lowest level for five years.. Probably failing the unusuality test, too, is the magnificent cross-channel swim by David Walliams, of Little Britain, although in my queue yesterday morning we did have a pleasant few moments contemplating which other entertainers we would like to have a go, without benefit of preparation.I am able to tell you that today is National Kissing Day, but that might be too exciting. There is, after all, even after Cristiano Ronaldo’s much-remarked effort, only so much interest in the wider social significance of the wink.
I think we have also probably done, too, the search for a sport that we’re good at. So what else is not new? Well, there’s been a streaker at Wimbledon and John Prescott is in trouble, but even that seems more serious than usual. As you know, for many years, we have relied upon the weather for familiar, safe discussions, the ones you can smile amiably through without paying much attention, just slipping in the occasional “warm enough for you?” or “lovely weather for ducks!”

These past few days, though, it’s been far too exciting: tropical, unusual, un-islandish, with the result that we have all been left struggling for something desultory to talk about, especially now we’ve lost the World Cup.

In this climate, arguments that were previously the sole province of the extreme right have found space within mainstream political discourse. The past is reinterpreted so as to deny Islam any place in the creation of Western identity which is now frequently redefined as purely Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian.. Time to address a crisis in our national conversation. The scars left by this atrocity and other terrorist attacks, and the ongoing “war against terror”, have combined to portray Islam as a threat to Western societies. Fear, and the emotions that accompany it, has become a part of the public mindset. But the basic mindset remains.What has been lost is the honesty and integrity that once characterised the development lobby. In the old days if Oxfam’s head of research, Kevin Watkins, wrote a report and its campaigns director, Justin Forsyth, lobbied on it, everyone took notice.

So much so that Watkins was taken into the UN and Forsyth into Downing Street, where he has been instrumental in Tony Blair’s large-scale adoption of an agenda that was once pushed only by idealist campaigners.Today some agencies seem intent on providing ammunition for the “aid doesn’t work” lobby They have become figures of fun. Or at least they would be were not the lives of millions of poor people at stake.p.vallely independent.co.uk. This is an appeal to Western Muslims, but also to our non-Muslim fellow citizens. One year after the London bombings we have good reason to be concerned. Water privatisation may be a bad idea but there are far more important things to get the UK supporter base worked up about. It’s why, of all the vast array of trade issues, agencies concentrate on trade liberalisation disproportionately.In part their behaviour is tactical. The received wisdom is that the more extreme their demands, the more change will come.

At Gleneagles they had written their condemnatory press releases in advance, having, the key people privately admitted, decided that a negative response was the best way to keep the campaign alive They have since had to revise that judgement. “The campaigning NGOs who queued up to dismiss the pledges to Africa at Gleneagles last year have been proved wrong,” as Simon Maxwell of the Overseas Development Institute put it. Even the more sensible agencies like Oxfam, Cafod and Save the Children – whose analysis is generally sound and useful – occasionally succumb to peer pressure from other agencies to exaggerate. In a world where every agency is battling for “market share”, no one wants to be left behind.That explains the fixation on issues which have domestic political resonance, such as water privatisation This makes big waves in the UK.

But in Africa only the top richest few per cent of the population get their water piped. The really poor buy it from street vendors at vastly inflated prices or get it from dirty streams. It highlights just £101m over five years – out of an annual £5bn budget – paid to big accountancy firms like KPMG or Deloitte but fails to say what it was spent on. You need top accountants to design good accounting systems to combat corruption in Africa.