A revised broadcast advertising code will force anti-abortionists to make their dangerous bias clear: 

We pro-choicers were happy to note that the BCAP's just-closed consultation on a revised advertising code included a proposal to allow abortion providers to advertise abortion services on radio and TV.

Equally cheering was the news that the code would include this new rule (11.11 in the code):

'Advertisements for post-conception pregnancy advice services must make clear in the advertisement if the service does not refer women directly for abortion.'

BCAP's argument - rightly - is that there ain't time to waste if you're thinking of getting an abortion: the longer you leave it, the riskier the procedure is likely to be (the BCAP reference is the renowned 2004 Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists' paper on abortion safety and standards).

In other words - you need to know immediately if the ad you're seeing is for a provider who offers balanced, accurate, post-conception information and abortion (or a referral for one) if that is what you want, or if you're about to be drafted by an outfit that hopes to pull one back for Jesus Christ by neglecting to mention safe, legal abortion is available, and pumping you full of romantic notions about the realities of an unwanted child.

Will add to this:

Yours truly is already keen to know the outcome of BCAP's just-closed consultation on permitting ads for abortion services on radio and the telly.  

As BCAP observes, the code as it stands indirectly bans TV ads for some categories of family planning centres, because of its restriction on ads for commercial services offering individual advice on personal problems.
 
BCAP proposes to relax that restriction for providers that can prove suitable credentials. The aim is to 'fulfill two policy objectives: to allow post-conception pregnancy advice services the freedom to advertise [a freedom that the time has long been right for - the public overwhelmingly supports legal abortion] and to ensure that ads make clear whether the service refers women for abortion.'

This last is much-needed recognition of the fact that women who want abortions should face no delays. They need to know if the post-conception advice service whose ad they've seen performs and/or refers for abortion, or wants women to abandon the idea altogether.  
 
The rule the BCAP proposes is:
 
'Advertisements for post-conception pregnancy advice services must make clear in the advertisement if the service does not refer women directly for abortion.'
 
I'm quietly confident of pro-choice victory, me. If anything is going to knock Jesus H Christ and the pro-life moral minority out of the picture for eternity, it'll be man's religious desire to flog advertising space. Once there, promotion of abortion becomes a simple matter of finance. If abortion providers can afford TV advertising, they'll be able to engage in it. There will be no room for pro-life's so-called moral objections in that environment: abortion will be identified as the vital service it is for women, and sold. The assumed sensitivities and staged outrage of the likes of Nadine Dorries will be neither here nor there. 

More on sheltered housing warden cuts in Barnet - an example of the sort of Tory public service cuts we'll see more and more:

We go now to a tall, brutalist council building in Barnet's Totteridge and Whetstone, where yours truly is holed up at a cabinet meeting in a large committee room, watching Cllr Mike Freer, the spiritual void who runs Barnet council, brush aside the concerns of elderly sheltered housing residents who are about lose their cherished onsite warden service in Freer's latest cost-cutting wheeze.  

As reported here recently, Barnet council and its financial team - that group of fiscal legends best known for investing (riskily) £27m in Icelandic banks, where the whole pile tanked - claim they need to find £12m in savings to balance books compromised by inadequate central government settlements (ie, it's Labour's fault - a point that Labour rubbishes, for what it's worth), inflation, and a desire to keep council tax increases below three percent as local and national elections loom.

The council believes it can save £950,000 (re-forecast to £400,000 in a rapidly revised proposal for this evening's meeting) by removing onsite residential wardens (whose tasks include dealing with health and security emergencies, organising GP visits, organising social activities, and checking on residents at least once a day) from sheltered housing scheme. They'd be replaced with a ‘floating’ support service where support workers based at hubs would visit elderly people who met eligibility criteria.

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It's a proposal that sheltered housing residents hate and have complained bitterly about since it was announced. Many feel that tonight's their last shot at putting cabinet members off. That's why hundreds of residents and their family members have turned up to this cabinet meeting to fight the mighty Freer.

Alas - Freer is unmoved before the hordes.

In a 'prearranged answers to questions from residents' session - with unarranged audience cries of 'have you got a mother?' and 'what about all the money you threw away in Iceland?' and 'I'm going to hold you personally responsible for my mother's health' ringing round the room - the disdainful Freer lays out the council's case for forcing residents to give up the wardens they trust and depend on.

And now over at LC with the sheltered housing story.

There will be another protest in Barnet at the council's plans to cut the sheltered housing warden service soon. Will post location details, etc, as soon as I have them.

Updated 28 May 2009

A bit more about the realities of Tories on the ground:

Parked high outside Hendon Town Hall is one of those wretchedly dated, revolving billboards that councils use to spam the masses with unsubstantiated PR bilge: at various turns of the loop, this one proclaims that the Tory Barnet council is 'working for a healthy community,' and 'supporting the vulnerable to live independent and active lives,' and screeds of other modernisation tripe.

All is not lost, though. There is this evening a nice, large protest group under the billboard - a protest group that is made up of exactly the vulnerable Barnet residents that the council purports to so fervidly support.

These protestors are very pissed off. They are Barnet sheltered housing residents, and they're picketing this evening's Barnet council AGM to protest at a council proposal to remove on-site wardens (people who help in emergencies, organise GP visits and appointments, and check in with each resident at least once a day) from their sheltered housing blocks and replace the wardens with a 'floating' support service, whatever the hell that is. They're mostly very elderly (in their 80s and even 90s) and at that unlovely point in life where people become too frail to stand. They're huddled in wheelchairs, or clutching walking-frames, or leaning on carers and chairs.

They're not too sure what a 'floating' support service is, either. The cynics among them have a few ideas - they think the council imagines a system where residents telepathically trip some alarm when dropping dead from heart attack, thus alerting a random officer somewhere in the borough to stop by later on with a shovel.

Bill Campbell, Barnet council's unnaturally oily senior press creature, refused point-blank to say what a floating service was when I told him that I didn't quite grasp the concept - Campbell said he couldn't say what a floating service was until the cabinet voted for or against the concept at its 8 June meeting. I said that someone must know what a floating service was, if only to be in a position to put the concept of it before the cabinet. Campbell said again that he couldn't say what the concept would be. I thought probably somebody could. This went on for longer than was strictly fascinating. Suffice to say a floating service is not one the council wants to brag about. Let's return on 8 June.

Back to the protest: long-time (eight years) sheltered housing resident Mary Dorrie, 87, glares across the small lawn at the front of the town hall, where grinning councillors sweep past the wheelchairs and walking-frames, and up the town hall stairs to their meeting. Some avoid the whole scene by driving past it. They pull up at the front door in cabs and fancy cars. The crowd boos each time one arrives.

'You just can't answer for this lot,' says Dorrie furiously, watching councillors disembark from late-model cars and shake hands with various high-vis-dressed coppers as they enter the hall. 'They're just going in that door and they're just smiling, with all old people sitting out here, freezing. I'd love to get inside there.'

A few thoughts on the expenses scandal:

It's not so much that MPs have been feathering their first and second nests that is the outrage.

It's the poverty and misery that MPs cheerfully inflicted on society's most vulnerable citizens while they - MPs - were ransacking the allowances account, and, presumably, enjoying untold pleasant evenings out and in. Tis the lousy knowledge that even as oversold tarts like Hazel Blears were carefully explaining to us that salary control, frugality (particularly in the public sector), anti-union laws and the dreadful terms and conditions of the private sector were crucial to civilised society, they were beautifying moats and latrines, and reappointing flowerbeds, and paying off mortgages at such a canter that they missed the glorious moment when they finished.

The real tragedy is that none of it is any surprise - certainly not to those who have learned firsthand that modern government - much like old government, perhaps - looks actively to punish anyone without useful political or financial clout, and happily reward itself on the proceeds.

Trust in government - and indeed anyone in a position to cut the average guy a break - disappeared long before the sticky paws of Blears and Morley, et al, crept into the till. The trade union grassroots could give you hundreds, and probably thousands, local examples of skewed and screwed political decisions that have made life worse for just about everybody, apart from a handful of private sector contractors.

You may think here of small, but monumental (to locals, anyway) examples like the thousands of pounds cut from the budget of the Hammersmith community law centre, and the 100% funding cut to Hammersmith immigrant support group Horn of Africa (see law centre link above). As we speak, there are the plans to dismantle the sheltered housing scheme in north London (locals plan another protest in Hendon this week). It's all part of the same ideological wreckage that encourages some c-list bandit to profess that he didn't know he'd paid his mortgage. The list really does go on.

It includes the national disgrace that is the dire treatment of low paid careworkers around the country - people who have learned the very hard way that privatisation of care services means a fast route to subsistence living for anyone in a hands-on caregiving role.

Working on some things at the moment, so back sometime next week.

More photos from the Tamil demonstration in London, which continues.

Updated Saturday 18 April

Tuesday 14 April, 6pm:
 
Down at parliament square, a small marquee has been pitched - probably less than 300m from the place where our mighty prime minister and his various hangers-on bitch about the consequences of hiring Derek Draper and other vital matters of state, etc.

A young man called Prarameswaran Subramaniyam sits at the back of the marquee, wrapped in a pile of blankets. Subramaniyam is 28 and a Tamil. He's in the eighth day of a hunger strike that he hopes will draw world attention to the plight of Tamil civilians being slaughtered by the Sri Lankan government in northern Sri Lanka - the latest awful chapter in the famously horrific 60-year-old conflict between Sri Lanka's Sinhalese majority and Tamil minority (although it's older than that: Tamils at this protest are quick to point out that their persecution predates Sri Lanka's 1948 independence from Britain by many years).

Anyway  - the publicity returns of Subramaniyam's hunger strike remained disappointing at the time of writing. The protestors have yet to be offered a substantive UK government statement on the conflict, and - apart from a handful of reports last week when Tamil protestors occupied Westminster bridge at rush hour and started chucking themselves into the Thames - mainstream journalism has managed to ignore the fact of this loud eight-day-old protest almost entirely. Alas for UK Tamils, mainstream journalism has been at full stretch on important topics such as measuring the gap between Susan Boyle's looks and talent, and probing Dolly and Damian McBride.  
 
The point I want to make, though, is that avoiding this protest actually takes quite a lot of effort if you're in the Westminster area. It's been difficult to physically circumvent for days, and even weeks (UK Tamils first took their protest about Sri Lankan government attacks on Tamils in northern Sri Lanka to the streets in February. They began their occupation of parliament square last week). The fact that the UK government, the mainstream media and even the Met (to an extent) have been able, largely, to avoid the whole event is a kind of salute to the mainstream's collective ability to turn a blind eye to the woes of dark-skinned citizens, even when they're screaming their heads off right in the middle of us.

Outside the tent which houses Subramaniyam, hundreds of Tamil protestors chant and wave signs. They're also being kettled by the police (not sure that news of the Met's new go-slow on kettling has reached the cops at Westminster) into a too-small area on the right flank of parliament square - men and women, elderly men and women, teenagers, babies, and lots of little kids.

The action shows absolutely no signs of losing momentum - I pass hundreds of British Tamil protestors in parliament square on my way home from work every evening, and see more and more flags and signs tied to the parliament square railings every morning on my way in. Brian Haw's small camp has almost disappeared behind them.

I find it interesting in this paranoid day and age that so many people can scream a grievance at parliament for so long and get such a muted media and political response. The protestors can't believe it either - 'for what we've done, I don't think the response is what people expected,' says student protestor and organiser Janani Paramsothy. The original Tamil protests weren't even legal - as most people know, protesting in parliament square in the SOCPA era is a form filling nightmare that tends to end badly if you don't get it right - and yet, these guys carry on.

Perhaps they picked the wrong week to make their point - and not just because parliament's on holiday. Parliament may lie just a few hundred metres from here, but alas - all anybody associated with it wants to talk about is the voltage in Mad Nad's' ladyshave. Perhaps the problem is purely technical - maybe none of our political notables can bring themselves to look out the car window during the ride to work these days. Maybe they just spend the whole trip on the floor in the crash position. Perhaps they back the Tamil Tigers. Perhaps they're selling arms to the Sri Lankan government. Who can really say? 

Anyway - Subramaniyam. He has started taking water today, but looks weak, bleary-eyed and a lot younger than 28. He has the rancid breath that people develop on a fast. He tells me that he plans to stay on the hunger strike 'until I get answers to all of our demands.'