The Wardman Wire

Touching Base - David Keen

The BMA annual conference dealt with a string of ethical issues this morning. The chair of their ethic committee was given the chance to speak just before each vote was taken, and each vote happened to take the same line as he did, which was interesting. Here are the motions:

An extract from Gordon Browns Guardian interview today

…private and public worlds have both shown themselves to be irresponsible. “The public realm and the free market realm are subject to inherent weaknesses that have got to be underpinned by having shared values that lead to shared rules,” he says, in some version, many times. Values, values, values, rules, rules, rules.

What are our ’shared values’? Hmmmm

Hazel Blears has obviously been doing some thinking since last week. She clearly now wishes she’d done the thinking before her triple-whammy of the Observer article, the resignation and the brooch, but the horse - or possibly the chipmunk - has bolted.

“What a man is on his knees, that he is and nothing more.” (Robert Murray McCheyne)*

The Toothpaste Test: what comes out when the pressure is on? It’s easy to put on a facade when everything is fine, but there’s nothing like a tight squeeze for revealing what we’re really like:

- Gordon Brown has displayed a spectacular level of resilience (or desperation?). Both James Purnell and Caroline Flint may have thought they were delivering the ‘Geoffrey Howe moment’, but Brown has clung on. Most people would have ended up in the Priory after the sort of week he’s had. You have to admit his toughness, even if you’d rather he wasn’t there. I rather admire his dutiful refusal to give up and walk away.

With 5 days until the Euro elections, the ‘election communications’ are stacking up. There are 16 parties in the South-West, so far 9 have discovered my letterbox:

1. The British National Party, a leaflet composed by searching Google for ‘white family’, which declares “it’s not racist to oppose mass immigration and political correctness - it’s common sense!” Maybe, but it is racist to bar black people from your party. NEXT!

2. The Labour leaflet had glued itself shut, possibly to hide the endorsement and picture of Gordon Brown inside.

Is the idea of vocation (’calling’) still a viable one? Many of the classic vocations seem to be in decay: the vocation to entertain has mutated into celebrity culture, the vocation to justice has become the much-scorned legal profession, teachers are leaving in droves rather than prop up a system built not on education, but on league tables.