She asked whether I’d been following the debate in the US media about torture, which has hardly been reported in this country. I have and it’s jaw-dropping stuff: a Newsweek columnist recently reflected that “in this autumn of anger, even a liberal can find his thoughts turning to .. torture”. I have to say I never find my thoughts tending in that direction, although the writer went on to say he was not personally advocating the use of “cattle prods or rubber hoses” on terrorist suspects who refuse to talk. I suppose we should be grateful for small mercies.The Fox News Channel has asked viewers whether law enforcement officers should be allowed “to do anything, even terrible things” to get information. On CNN’s Crossfire programme, a conservative commentator went even further and asked whether torture might not be the lesser of two evils. At this rate, it can’t be long before General Pinochet is on the phone to President Bush, offering his expertise with electrodes and cattle prods. Abortion has been legal for more than three decades, yet the NHS still fails to provide a proper service. Guidelines say that women seeking a termination should see a gynaecologist within five days, but the first audit of NHS services shows that this does not happen in a third of clinics.
The audit also suggests that one woman in four risks acquiring an infection after the procedure.More women than ever (180,000 a year in England and Wales) are having abortions. Obviously there is a need for better education about contraception, but it’s hard to resist the conclusion that patients are being given a bad deal because of the unspoken assumption that the NHS shouldn’t make abortion too easy If that is the case, it isn’t working. Somewhere between a quarter and two-fifths of women under the age of 45 have had an abortion, and they deserve a safer, more efficient service.A TV researcher telephoned me last week, and invited me to take part in a new programme for couples who aren’t getting on, to discuss their problems with a panel of experts. I was being approached, she explained, in my capacity as an authority on how to have a happy divorce – an expertise I wasn’t previously aware I had.It wasn’t until after I’d turned her proposal down that I realised I could have had a lucrative new career as a TV agony aunt. But the only really useful piece of advice I can think of was passed on by a friend ages ago: “Leave him (or her) Get a car.”
More from Joan Smith. Like most official publications these days, last week’s White Paper on the future of the Lords is got up to look like a building-society brochure, with big pages containing few words, acres of white space and a foreword, complete with picture and facsimile signature, by the chairman of the board, Mr Tony Blair. The bulk of the text is, however, the work of the company secretary, Lord Irvine of Lairg.
He lately sold his commodious residence in St John’s Wood, though he still has an even more spacious abode in Scotland. There we are.”We authors, ma’am,” Disraeli remarked to Queen Victoria following the publication of her Journals. None of us likes to get a bad review, however much we may pretend to the contrary. Not since the memoirs of Ms Anthea Turner has any work been so universally excoriated.This is perhaps unfair Lord Irvine is clever and industrious. Though his production is not the liveliest of reads – Lord Jenkins’s report on voting systems shows it is perfectly possible to be lively – at least it does not take too long to get through.
If it is any consolation to Lord Irvine, Lord Wakeham’s report, to which he makes full and generous acknowledgement, received an almost equally bad press.The best point the Government can make – this is very much the case for the defence – is that at last, a century after the formation of the Labour Party and five periods of government and several false starts, Labour is “doing something” about the Lords. Indeed, it has already done something, with the 1999 Act which expelled the hereditary peers but retained 92 of them. The trouble is that most people think it is the wrong thing.The more complicated a reform is – and Lord Irvine’s proposals are even more elaborate than the newspaper reports had led one to imagine – the more numerous are the objections likely to be. A simple reform will, by contrast, have its adherents and its opponents.