Evil Surfer

Some melted the bars to feed spoonfuls to infants who refused milk bottles. No wonder we grew up to believe Cadbury’s made the best chocolate in the world. Poncy Belgian chocsdon’t come close, though I pretend to love them when I am given gift boxes by middle-class sophisticates.Today, the brand is blighted I have had to throw away my cache. This reputable company failed to tell long loyal customers about their salmonella problems I am probably going to die soon Love has been betrayed; trust shredded. I wonder about those glasses of full cream milk too?y.alibhai-brown independent.co.uk

More from Yasmin Alibhai-Brown. Let us now praise Tam Dalyell.

An MP for more than 40 years, he rose to be the Father of the House of Commons, but first and foremost, he was a great parliamentary nuisance. In their expletives to convey the scale of his nuisance value, many ministers in all governments would have outdone Margaret Beckett For Tam was not a casual, will-o-the-wisp, mayfly nuisance This was the man who put the tenacity into pertinacity. As relentless as he was courteous, when he espoused causes, it was a lifetime vow Decade after decade, he went on and on and on. He ought now to be continuing his efforts in the House of Lords But Tam is neither a hack nor a crony nor a paying guest. As his sole claims to a peerage are independence, integrity and cussedness, Tony Blair would have appointed him.

Instead Mr Blair – and Mr Brown – will increasingly be pressed to answer the question which won Mr Dalyell immortality: the West Lothian one. It was named after his constituency and he first asked it 30 years ago, during the then Labour government’s failed attempt to bring about Scottish devolution At first sight, it might have seem simple. Why should a Scottish MP be able to vote on legislation which affected England but not Scotland, when an English MP would have no such rights on a Scottish matter?

More from Bruce Anderson. Even in our Attention Deficit Democracy, where barely a single issue stays in our minds beyond a 24-hour news cycle, prisons scandals will not go away.

The headline-snatching “scandals” this year have been the failure to deport foreign criminals at the end of their stretch and the bitter row about the early release of violent offenders The real scandals are actually far worse. Our prisons are so bad at rehabilitation that 70 per cent of inmates leave jail with the reading age of an eight-year-old or worse, and reoffend within two years. What other public service fails so comprehensively? Last week’s report of the public inquiry into the bludgeoning to death of Zahid Mubarek by his psychopath cellmate in Feltham young offender institutionexposed the scores of “systemic failures” in the prison service that allowed this murder to happen. And there is another bad moon rising – Anne Owers, the chief inspector of prisons, warns that our prisons are at “bursting point”. This could yet be a summer of jailhouse riots.
So in this situation, the Government is doing the logical thing. No, it is not increasing funding for prison education and rehousing. No, it is not easing overcrowding by stopping the senseless jailing of fine defaulters, sex workers and the mentally ill It is doing something much better.

It is shutting down the independent Prisons Inspectorate, the men and women who have been warning about all this for years. It’s an age-old piece of wisdom – kill the messenger and the problem will go away.Until now, Britain’s Prisons Inspectorate has been a model for the world, one of the few things we do right in our jails. Set up in the 1980s after a long government review, our jails inspector is an independent figure who can go anywhere, see anything behind Her Majesty’s bars. His (or, currently, her) remit is to make sure prisoners are not abused, and that rehabilitation is taking place.Our prisons inspectors have exposed and rectified dozens of abuses over the past decade, from prisons that “lost” 15-year-old girls somewhere within their walls to women being shackled as they gave birth, to the dangerous practice of forcing menstruating women to use buckets and “slop out” in the morning. Dozens of countries have sent delegations to learn from the British model The UN, Amnesty International and others have praised it. And it is all about to be thrown away.The Government is going to “merge” the Prisons Inspectorate into a new super-regulator, which will include the inspectors who watch over our courts, police and probation officers.