At being astounded, despite my worst fears, at the Extraordinary antics of the Coaliation govt, witness the latest Tory Nightmare Initiative, Dumping World Abuse Monitoring... Bah!

[MadameDefarge]

Its becoming almost pantomime,.. Off with the Head of Public Services! Off with the head of International Monitoring of Abuse! (More to follow is some weird Spitting Image Vernacular)

Cunts.

Discuss.

MadameD: your views are so radically opposed to what mine would be that there is no point in either of us wasting our typing-time!

Hm, oracle, I hate to think that we have no common ground! I can get vexed and jump up and down over all sorts, it doesn't mean I don't get that others get vexed over other things that leave me indifferent!

I'd like to think we could use our joint experiences (being mums and other stuff, like work etc ) to explore each others differing views...

Sucked in........Frankly, has it made any difference anywhere? Us being on the panel. It cost us a fortune to be there and no one listens to us anyway.

Why bother? While we suck up to the people who commit the atrocities and let the henchmen come shopping in London it seems a futile gesture.

Or am I being simplistic..........on my day off.

Alouiseg, that is really interesting...and not particularly surprising, given the amount of corruption rampant in the world.

Just a bit sad making. It is easy to forget how compromised these things are, and the decide where the pay off really is.

I suppose my feeling is that at least something is being done, however, compromised it is, and to lose it seems awful.

Because we an only build on what there is, however fallible it is. If is goes, where are we then?

MadameD, I get vexed - hideously, horrendously vexed - about the very existence of the Labour party. If they had had another term in office, I would probably have needed Prozac. But I am most decidedly not getting sucked in to this as I have my piano to play.

MD if you want to sub out the rest of the world feel free, however, it is not the role of government to spend money they don't have on your charity of the day.

Ah, now, Oracle, I am seriously jealous! Piano! My sodding parents left my piano out in the rain when I was a child (don't ask!) and then the lessons ended...have felt the lack ever since!

Oh dear, Norwegian, its not really a question of subbing the rest of the world though, is it? Its more a rather unfashionable, and distinctly unleftwing concept of cultural rectictude... I reckon our notions are are good deal better than others when it comes to human rights etc...(despite our hideous history of abuse and colonialism)

So I would be quite keen to keep on embracing my own particular version of cultural unrelativism....

Madam Defarge. Yes! The country reports are far more important as they are the ones from which resource allocations flow, policy is decided and action plans made.

Confusion of newspapers: my bad. I quoted web page title from the link.

Fascinating. So if the country reports remain, and the overview goes, where does that leave everybody?

It sounds from the report like the country reports (compiled by embassies) are being abolished, not just the overview.... "The word has already gone out to the embassies that we need to concentrate on trade. It's not surprising, but it's very sad."

Ah. That is a bit worse then.

Managed to actually read the Observer this morning and miss the article, cunningly hidden on the front page. Think I read the headline and thought, yeah yeah, more cuts, next article.

But it's more about not being interested in what countries do, as long as we can keep selling them arms, isn't it. Guess that's that for the short-lived 'ethical foreign policy' Robin Cook tried to start.
As DH keeps reminding me (as I'm a Lib Dem), Labour did a lot of good, liberal stuff, they just didn't publicise it so as not to frighten the DM horses. Course, they did some shitty stuff too, don't get me wrong...!