The Labour government were, just four months ago, caught changing transcripts to say what they wanted them to say, rather than what was actually said. In that last case, Tony Blair’s words magically changed on two occasions: First he unadmitted a mistake, then he suddenly didn’t want to say his MPs supported him, so used some more magical speech Tipp-Ex.

This time, he seems to have passed a bottle of the enchanted correction fluid to his Foreign Secretary. More4 News have discovered that part of a Channel 4 News interview with Margaret Beckett has disappeared from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office transcipt. The offending piece, spoken and yet apparently not heard:

JON SNOW: Foreign Secretary, are you happy to discover that bombs and rockets and missiles are being sent through Prestwick Airport from the United States to Israel?

MARGARET BECKETT: No I’m not happy about it, not least because it appears that insofar as there are procedures for handling that kind of hazardous cargo – irrespective of what they are – it does appear that they were not followed. I’ve already let the United States know that this is an issue that appears to be seriously at fault, that we will be making a formal protest if it appears that that is what has happened. We’re still looking into the facts but I have already notified the United States that we are not happy about it.

Is it now official government policy to delete from the archives anything which, in retrospect, is a bit politcally awkward?

For the best part of the last academic year, some friends and I have had a running joke that the best excuse ever is, “I’m sorry, I can’t do that, I’ve shit myself” (due credit to Charlie Brooker). It really works in any given situation. However, I’ve found a new pretender to the crown.

You may remember that one of the most esteemed weekly news journals of our time – the News of the World – found that Mr Mark Oaten MP, a dedicated husband and father, had been having a relationship with a rent boy. Oopsie. But, according to this, he had a great excuse:

In an article for the Sunday Times, Mr Oaten said his fall from grace was prompted by a mid-life crisis brought on by his rapid hair loss.

“I slept with a rent boy because my hair fell out”. It could be taken straight from the cover of Chat or Pick Me Up. I should know, I unashamedly read these magazines when they’re lying about the hospital…

But the real question here: With a killer excuse like that, why did he have to resign? I can’t imagine. But he obviously never consulted Prentiss McCabe. He should have said he was a fellow urban fox-spotter.

The Observer reports today that a leaked report shows that the NHS is ‘failing our children’ through a lack of Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAHMS). And how.

One quarter of the country does not have crisis teams for Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services. That is beyond belief. If the report was that we didn’t have ambulances to pick up children in 25% of the country, nobody would accept it, because we know children would die. Newsflash: The lack of crisis teams means children are dying.

Imagine for a second that, god forbid, your child is standing on your roof and threatening to jump and kill himself. Who do you call? In 25% of the country, there’s no-one to help. Imagine your teenager suddenly has horrific hallucinations of millions of spiders coming to kill him. In 25% of the country, there’s no-one to help. Both of these children might kill themselves, because in 25% of the country, there’s no-one to help – and all because we’re pulling funding from such services to serve the less common but more palatable diseases like cancer.

We’re awful at providing mental health services in general, because we don’t like to talk about them. We like to imagine that the ‘crazy’ people are locked up, and brand every criminal going as having some mental health problem – usually schizophrenia – because we can’t accept that some people are just evil. Poor mental health and criminality become inextricably linked, and who wants to spend money helping criminals?

This is an utterly ludicrous situation. 9 million people in this country – one in six – has a mental health disorder right now. More than 1 in 3 of us will have a mental health disorder at some point – more than will experience cancer. Yet we’re cutting the amount spent on mental health services. Where’s the logic?

The situation is worse for children, because as repulsive as society finds the idea of an adult with mental illness, the idea of a child with it is far worse. When was the last time some do-good charity collecter asked you for money for children with cancer? And when the last time they asked you for money for children with serious mental health problems requiring treatment? The latter is 56 times more common. Yet in some parts of the country, there are no Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services at all.

We need to get over ourselves and face these issues, otherwise our own children will continue to suffer. And there’s a pretty huge chance it will be yours next.

You may remember from last week that a new terror alerts system is to be introduced in response to the London bombing of 7th July. Clearly, it’s important that the public know the terror level at all times, because if we’d known that it was lowered from ‘severe’ to ‘substantial’ just before the attacks then we would’ve been more vigilant. Apparently. No, I don’t understand either.

Anyway, the new system does away with ‘Negligible’, because, durr, we’re always facing the biggest threat we’ve ever faced – otherwise we wouldn’t vote for policies which restrict our everyday lives (like ID cards or House Arrest). They’ve also combined ‘Severe Defined’ and ‘Severe General’ into ‘Severe’, because we can never be sure whether we’ve received intelligence about an attack anyway until after the attack takes place. And no-one really knows whether the intelligence is ‘patchy’ or ‘clear and authoritative’ anyway.

So how will the new system work? Well, I reckon the levels of threat will be determined much like this:

• Low: Oh my god, there’s a terrorist with a big nuclear bomb sat with a detonator in the centre of London. Best not panic the public, let’s keep the alert level down.
• Moderate: Hmm, some planes seem to be heading off course and towards some tall public buildings. Probably not worth calming the public completely, they might not accept draconian control measures, but let’s reassure them a bit.
• Substantial: The Daily Mail, that most reliable intelligence source, says someone who once passed Prince Charles’s butler’s cousin twice removed on Oxford Street made a comment that the Monarchy should be abolished! Clearly a terrorist plotting to kill the Queen!
• Severe: Someone seen calmly walking into a tube station wearing a light denim jacket. Shoot!
• Critical: Save our good Christian souls, a Muslim family has moved into a quaint village in Middle England! We don’t want those people here! Deport them!

So there you go! In fact, the official definitions are worse:

• Low: “An attack is unlikely”
  Which presumably means it’s not likely, but it is possible. See also ‘moderate’.
• Moderate: “An attack is possible but not likely”
  Which presumably means an attack is, erm, unlikely. See also ‘low’.
• Substantial: “Strong possibility of an attack”
  Presumably meaning an attack is quite likely. See also ‘severe’.
• Severe: “An attack is highly likely”
  Or, there is a strong possibility of an attack. See also ‘substantial’.
• Critical: “An attack is expected imminently”
  But we’re not going to tell you where or when. Bwwaaaahaahaaa!

I feel safer already!

The Right Honourable John Leslie Prescott is to have his wrists slapped for staying at Philip Anschutz’s ranch and failing to declare an interest (until bullied into it, of course). My question: Who’s going to do the slapping? Given Mr Prescott’s history of, err, hands-on politics (and no, not hands on that!), who is going to stand there and give him a good slapping?

Those unfamiliar with Westminster disciplinary proceedings may be somewhat lost, assuming ‘slapped wrists’ is merely a figure of speech. They would be wrong. The system works thusly:

• Horrendous, intolerable offences, like taking a two-week part time job whilst not in cabinet without consulting the correct committee are punishable with immediate sacking.
• Major offences like disagreeing with the Prime Minister is treated to a humiliating ‘You’ve let me down, you’ve let the Party down, and most of all, you’ve let yourself down’ speech until eventually you feel forced out of the clique and out of the cabinet.
• If you’re a little bit naughty and abuse your power by sleeping with your secretary, you go over the PM’s knee and have a couple of departments taken off you, but keep your job, salary, and perks.
• If you do something minor, like accepting gifts and holidays from someone before then giving them governmental support (let’s just call it being generally corrupt), then you get a quick slap on the wrist.
• If you do something barely worth mentioning, like, y’know, lying to Parliament or starting an illegal war, then that’s just brushed under the carpet.

See, it all makes perfect sense. All we need now is someone good at ducking!

A health select committee report out today says that the current system of NHS charges should be revamped. They’re talking about phone costs, eye tests, prescriptions, dental care, and – crucially – car park charges.

The current proposal is that people who have to attend hospital daily for treatment should get free parking. Not wanting to sound selfish here, I have to ask: What about me?

I’m a medical student. I go to the hospital every day, pay over £1,000 per year for the privelege, and often spent late nights there effectively working for the hospital for free. And yet I have to pay over £2 per day for car parking charges. Over the course of the last few months, that’s £343.20*.

Now, it might be argued that, hey, I’m young and fit, I can park away from the hospital car park. Well, no, not really, because not only does that drive local residents absolutely mad, and it’s potentially dangerous to go walking round these very quiet, poorly lit areas at 10pm.

*In fact it isn’t, because I don’t park there. Understandably.

It’s all over the news, yet almost everyone I talk to claims they have no idea what’s going on this week in the Middle East. Now, my personal knowledge of Middle Eastern politics is abominable, but I’ve made it my mission to explain the current problem in the simplest possible terms. Yes, I’ve ignored hundreds of years of history here, and probably insulted everyone involved in the conflict by doing so, but I’m presenting this at the simplest possible level, the very basics, the ‘dumbed down’ version – that is, the level I understand it. So here goes.

Hezbollah is a political and military group in Lebanon, which was formed in the 1980s to drive Israeli troops out of Lebanon. By 2000, they achieved this objective, and so won lots of support from the Lebanese people. So much support, in fact, that they won lots of votes in Lebanese elections, and now have a sizable presence in the Lebanese parliament, and even a representative in the cabinet. Now, crucially, whilst they have a big political influence in Lebanon, Hezbollah is not the Lebanese government. Hezbollah is a separate political and military organisation.

On Wednesday, Hezbollah – this military group – attacked an Israeli town, and in so-doing managed to kill several Israeli soldiers, and capture two. Why they did this isn’t clear, but it may have been an attempt to capture some soldiers with which to bribe Israel into releasing some prisoners which Hezbollah beleives are being wrongly held.

Obviously, Israel didn’t take to kindly to this, with the Prime Minister calling it an ‘act of war’. But, of course, the action wasn’t launched by the Lebanese government, but by Hezbollah – a group that just happens to be in Lebanon, and has a lot of popular support there. Despite this, Israeli troops responded by dropping bombs on Lebanon, and returning into Lebanon for the first time since they withdrew in 2000. That pissed off Hezbollah somewhat, this being the group which had forced the Israelis out of Lebanon in the first place.

On Thursday, Israel continued to pummel Lebanon with bombs, killing at least 35 Lebanese civilians, and essentially said that Lebanon and Hezbollah could forget the idea of keeping the border between the countries at the location they’d agreed when the troops withdrew. George Bush said that Israel was well within its right to beat the poop out of Lebanon given that they’d been suddenly attacked, but the EU were less happy, saying that Israel was being too harsh with their response, given the small scale of the first attack and its unofficial nature.

Also on Thursday, a big bomb was dropped on Israel’s third biggest city. Hezbollah said it wasn’t them, but (probably understandably) Israel didn’t believe them. So on Friday, Israel went and bombed the Hezbollah headquarters, which made the Hezbollah leader pledge ‘open war’ against Israel. By this time, the UN Security Council is starting to get a bit worried, and says that it’s unfair that Israel is killing a whole load of Lebanese civilians, and basically asked it to stop. They didn’t.

As Israel’s attacks on Lebanon grew, so Hezbollah’s responses grew. On Saturday, the Lebanese Prime Minister called for help, because his country was being turned into a ‘disaster zone’. Of course, the Lebanese Prime Minister has no control over Hezbollah, as they’re a separate group, so he can’t stop the attacks that Israel sees as Lebanon committing.

So now, the attacks are getting bigger and bigger. The worry now is that Israel might start being aggressive towards the countries that contribute funds to Hezbollah – namely Syria and Iran. Of course, if Israel attacks, they will be forced to respond, and then the whole region will be at war.

Obviously, war would be bad in and of itself, but it’s got the rest of the world worrying because much of the world’s oil comes from the Middle East, and getting that oil isn’t going to be too easy if there’s a war on. Which means oil prices will rocket, and that will destabilise all of our economies.

But how can we stop this? Hezbollah aren’t going to back down, even though their initial attack did appear to be somewhat provocative. But Israel’s at fault too, for a clearly disproportionate response. A very rough and ready analogy would be if the Lib Dems in the UK were to capture American soldiers to barter for the release of prisoners from Guantanamo Bay, and America responded by bombing Leeds. There are no good guys in all of this – they’re all at fault.

Israel quite understandably won’t talk to Hezbollah, as it’s seen as a small radical group, and the Lebanese government who Israel will talk to have no control over Hezbollah. But it’s probably unreasonable to ask Israel not to respond to Hezbollah’s attacks, and Hezbollah will continue to respond to Israel’s attacks, tit-for-tat.

So how can it be stopped when the parties involved won’t even speak to each other? Beats me.

For more on the on-going crisis, see the BBC’s special site.

Walter Pincus, a veteran Washington Post reporter, argues that US networks should fight back against what he terms ‘the PR presidency’ by refusing to cover statements and events staged purely as PR boosters. I say: Please ignore him.

If we were to ignore every PR-motivated statement, we would miss real gems. We would’ve missed the sight this week of Blair desperately trying to convince us he’s a “green” PM by giving a statement whilst stood aboard a launch by a windfarm: Possibly the most ludicrous PR stunt this PM has undertaken in a few years, which served only to make him appear “green” in an unintended sense. Well, that’s not quite true. It also served to lift the spirits of a nation through a profound sense of schadenfreude.

It probably also served as a reasonable metaphor for the “rocky times” this government is currently undergoing, what with members of the governing party and close friends of the PM being arrested. Though that, too, is really quite fun to watch: After everything he’d done wrong, the net is finally closing in on him. It’s a little like the fifth season of 24, but without the cliffhangers every hour. Or, y’know, MacBeth if you go for the more traditional approach.

The tragedy for Blair is that he’s now lost control of the “stable and orderly transition” he always wanted. He’s stayed past his welcome, and there’s now no way to resign with dignity. He’s off, and not at a time of his own choosing. And power won’t be handed straight next door, there will be a challenge. Blair’s government can no longer end; it will be ended, leaving Blair humiliated, just as he’s being humiliated into playing Cameron catch-up now.

Blair’s started out as a PR government, and it’s ending as a PR government. Just different PR’s. Humiliating and undignified.

Just a few minutes ago, a story I’ve been working with Guido Fawkes on was published on his site – using, perhaps, stronger terms than I would dare.

The story was first posted here as a foot note to another post, here. For those who can’t remember, here’s a quick reminder.

Back in 2004, I sent an email to my MP, David Borrow, asking him to sign an Early Day Motion in the House of Commons, stating “That this House deplores recent announcements by leading universities that they are to close, or freeze recruitment to, some departments because of funding problems”. I have long since lost the text of my original email, but happened to come across the originial reply just recently. In it, Mr Borrow said:

I am currently the Parliamentary Private Secretary to Higher Education Minister, Kim Howells MP. When I was appointed I took the decision that as I was a member of the government, albeit at a very junior level, I would not sign EDM’s.

I’m not sure that that’s the best response to the request at the best of times, but – apparently at odds to this statement – he went on to sign hundreds of EDMs whilst PPS to Kim Howells, on subjects as diverse as the televising of cricket, National Tree Week, and Sales of Bananas in the Palace of Westminster. That is to say that he would not sign an EDM which aimed to halt the decline of technological and scientific advancement in the United Kingdom, yet would sign an EDM about bananas in Parliament.

You can see Guido’s comments on the story, and comments left on his website, here.

On a personal note, working with a blogging giant like Guy (featured in today’s MediaGuardian, as it happens) on this has been quite an exciting experience, and a fantastic way to celebrate the growth of my own blog to over 900 posts and 200,000 words. Thanks to your continued visiting, and thanks to new visitors too, the site is going from strength-to-strength, with hits for the first half of 2006 up 105% over those for the same period last year. There have already been over 1,000,000 hits this year, a point only surpassed in November last year. As a blog that does not try to make a profit, hits mean very little – but having so many of them is certainly a personal boost. So thank you to all my readers for your continuing support.

Tomorrow, David Cameron is to make a speech defending the hoodie (hoody? What is the singular?) wearing ‘yoofs’ of today. I guess I’m probably one of them, given that I own two hoodies, though with both of mine being emblazed with university insignias, I’m not sure they’re quite the ones Mr Cameron is complaining about.

But really, this post is an appeal. Please can Mr Cameron follow the lead of Archbishop John Sentamu, and give the speech whilst wearing a hoodie? Tomorrow’s my first weekday off in some considerable time, I have exams coming up, and I need a good laugh. Please, Dave, just for me?