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Hugging therapy, the dangers of texting, and how to knit your own room. It’s the week’s weird and wonderful video stories in Newsbeat’s Odd Box with Dominic Byrne.
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Colin Firth is expected to win the best actor Bafta on Sunday The Social Network and The King’s Speech have dominated this year’s London Film Critics’ Circle awards.
The former won four prizes, including film of the year, while the latter won three, among them a best actor award for Oscar hopeful Colin Firth.
Firth was among the celebrities at the annual awards, held for the first time at BFI Southbank.
The event comes three days before the Bafta Film awards, to be held at the Royal Opera House in London on Sunday.
Firth said that reports of cinema audiences spontaneously applauding The King’s Speech were “overwhelming”.
“To hear that people are actually standing up or clapping or expressing a personal response is probably as good as it gets,” he told the BBC.
“Films like this depend entirely on what people say about them. They don’t depend on the money because there wasn’t much, they don’t depend on a big studio machine or a big financial apparatus.”
Asked about reports that the Queen had seen and enjoyed the film, he said: “It means a very great deal to me if that is the case.”
It is the second year in a row that Firth has won the award. He won last year for his role in A Single Man.
The King’s Speech, about George VI’s battle with his stammer, was named British film of the year at the event, where its director Tom Hooper was also recognised.
The Social Network’s other awards went to its director David Fincher, its screenwriter Aaron Sorkin and cast member Andrew Garfield, named best British actor in a supporting role.
Sorkin, who collected the awards, said: “The critics were the first ones to come out for this movie and they told people to go see it and they did go see it. Getting an award from people who see everything is really something.”
Both The King’s Speech and The Social Network are expected to enjoy further success at the Baftas and at the Academy Awards on 27 February.
Sam Taylor-Wood (r) presented Kristen Scott Thomas with the award for “outstanding contribution to cinema” Mike Leigh’s Another Year, which had received four nominations, came away with a single prize after Lesley Manville won British actress of the year.
Manville paid tribute to the other actresses in the film, including Ruth Sheen who she was up against at the awards. “This year there have been some great parts for older women, so it’s a good move,” she said.
Elsewhere, Olivia Williams was named best British actress in a supporting role for Roman Polanski’s political thriller The Ghost.
Actress of the year went to Annette Bening for her role in The Kids are All Right, while Christian Bale won British actor of the year for The Fighter.
The young British performer of the year prize went to Scotland’s Conor McCarren for his performance in Peter Mullan’s gritty drama NEDs – short for Non-Educated Delinquents.
The award for breakthrough British film-maker went to Gareth Edwards for his feature debut Monsters, while French drama Of Gods and Men was crowned the year’s foremost foreign language film.
The evening climaxed with Kristin Scott Thomas being honoured for her outstanding contribution to cinema – presented to the actress by Sam Taylor-Wood, her director on Nowhere Boy.
The actress said: “It was very special because I know she wouldn’t have done that for many people and I’m really touched by what she said.”
The awards are voted for by more than 120 members of the circle including critics, broadcasters and writers.
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Police released an undated image of Matthias Schepp The father of two missing Swiss twin girls trawled websites on suicide, guns and poison before killing himself, police say.
Police also said that Matthias Schepp, who was last seen with the twins on a ferry to the island of Corsica, made the trip back to mainland France alone.
The uncle of six-year-old Alessia and Livia said the latest news was “very, very worrying”.
Schepp threw himself under a train in southern Italy on 3 February.
Police spokesman Jean-Christophe Sauterel said analysis of Schepp’s work computer had turned up the websites, which also included ferry schedules.
“These factors show that the father had carefully planned his journey,” Mr Sauterel said.
“The investigation is now focusing on trying to establish more precisely the movements of the father from Tuesday noon, when he arrived in Corsica with the girls, until Thursday noon, when he was in the region of Naples.”
Meanwhile, police official Alfredo Fabbrocini told Associated Press that Schepp was on his own when he sailed back to the port city of Toulon in mainland France from Corsica on 1 February.
Prosecutors earlier this week said that the girls were last seen with their father on a ferry to Corsica – the first confirmation that they had boarded the boat.
Friday 28 January: Schepp picks up his daughters to spend the weekend with them in their home village, St Sulpice, where both he and his estranged wife have homesSunday 30 January at 1300 (1200 GMT): The girls are last seen with Schepp in St SulpiceSunday 30 January at 1804 (1704 GMT): Schepp crosses the border into FranceMonday 31 January: Schepp sends a despairing postcard to his wife from Marseille; he and the girls take an evening ferry to Propriano, CorsicaTuesday 1 February: Schepp disembarks in Propriano, with or without the girls; he later leaves Corsica for Naples in ItalyThursday 3 February: Schepp throws himself under a train at Cerignola, in the south Italian region of Puglia
The 43-year-old father had been looking after the girls for the weekend, but failed to return them home as planned.
He picked up the girls from his estranged wife’s house in the Swiss village of St Sulpice on 28 January, before travelling to France and Italy. He was found dead in Cerignola, in the region of Puglia.
An unconfirmed report from a cafe owner in Cerignola emerged in recent days suggesting that the girls were seen with their father shortly before he threw himself under a train.
But Mr Fabbrochini said police had viewed closed circuit video footage from the cafe “over and over,” but had not seen them.
He added that days of searching the Cerignola area with sniffer dogs had failed to turn up any trace of the girls.
The twins’ uncle, Valerio Lucidi, said Schepp’s “terrible premeditation” was “very, very worrying”, according to AFP news agency.
On Wednesday, the girls’ mother, Irina Lucidi, went on Italian TV to urge viewers who might know anything about the case to contact police.
“I appeal to whoever has seen them or knows something to contact the police,” she said on Rai 3’s primetime news bulletin.
Alessia was dressed in blue jeans, a striped T-shirt and a white jacket, while Livia wore a purple ski jacket with white and pink sneakers.
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There were large queues on Sunday when banks reopened after a week The Egyptian currency and stock markets are functioning in “a normal fashion,” the deputy governor of the Central Bank of Egypt has said.
Hisham Ramez told BBC World the bank had had to intervene earlier in the week after “some speculative moves”.
But he said since then there had been some “good news”, with foreign investors returning to take part in the first bond auction since the unrest.
Mr Ramez also said he was not concerned about the value of the Egyptian pound.
Some analysts have expressed concerns that the pound could fall sharply in value – by up to 25% in a month.
But Mr Ramez said: “We are not actually worried about the market as it is functioning in a normal way now.
“The supply and demand is there.”
Egypt’s banks were closed for a week before re-opening on Sunday.
There had been concerns about the possibility of a bank run, with investors taking flight and depositors withdrawing their money.
Large queues were reported outside banks, and the deputy central bank governor said it had been an exceptionally busy day. But he said they had been well-prepared.
“On Sunday there was lots of buying, this was expected and we were ready for it.”
“The average volume on the Egyptian interbank market is around $350m a day. At that day the volume was around $1.7bn,” Mr Ramez said.
He pointed out that the central bank’s main role was to ensure that there was sufficient liquidity in the markets and said they had done that.
Economic hardship
As the political unrest continues, the cost to the economy is causing concern.
Analysts at the French bank Credit Agricole recently estimated the cost to be $310m (£192m) a day.
Nationwide strikes are threatening to cause more economic hardship and the Norwegian oil company Statoil has said that it is no longer drilling in Egypt.
Meanwhile, the company running the Suez Canal – another vital source of foreign currency – has said that January’s takings were 1.6% lower than in December.
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The owners of a luxury cliff top home in Dawlish, Devon, are counting the cost after a landslip caused large parts of the garden to crash about 130ft into the sea.
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The three institutions already work closely together and award University of Wales degrees A new “super university” could be created under plans to merge at least three Welsh universities, BBC Wales has learned.
Talks are planned between the University of Wales Institute Cardiff (Uwic), Swansea Metropolitan University and Trinity Saint David in Carmarthen.
The three are currently part of the University of Wales alliance.
In December the Welsh education minister, Leighton Andrews, challenged universities to “adapt or die”.
The three institutions already work closely together and students receive University of Wales degrees.
Trinity Saint David itself was formed recently by the merger of Trinity University College, Carmarthen, and the University of Wales, Lampeter, Ceredigion.
BBC Wales education correspondent Ciaran Jenkins understands there would be an opportunity for the two remaining members of the alliance, Glyndwr University and the University of Wales, Newport, to join any new university at a later date.
It is thought the merged university would be a single entity under the direction of the University of Wales with just one vice-chancellor in charge.
Details of the merger will be discussed at a meeting of the University of Wales Council on Friday.
Were the three universities to come together it would become the third largest in Wales after Cardiff and Glamorgan.
“Uwic can confirm that it is currently in preliminary discussions with regard to options relating to reconfiguration ”
Uwic
A new institution comprising all five University of Wales alliance members would be the largest in Wales in terms of student numbers.
Late last year Mr Andrews said universities would only be permitted to charge increased tuition fees from September 2012, upon which their survival would depend, if they could demonstrate they intended to collaborate more closely.
The Higher Education Funding Council for Wales subsequently published plans to halve the number of universities by 2013.
Uwic said it was committed to playing a full role in the assembly government’s drive to strengthen higher education in Wales through effective re-configuration and collaboration.
“With this in mind, Uwic can confirm that it is currently in preliminary discussions with regard to options relating to reconfiguration and that these conversations are ongoing and there is no further news to report at this stage,” a spokesperson said.
“Whatever the outcome of these discussions, Uwic will continue to develop its role in Cardiff, providing quality professional/vocational education, applied research, business and industry advisory services and knowledge exchange activities that impact on across Wales, the UK and internationally.”
Dr Peter Noyes, vice-chancellor of the University of Wales, Newport, said the university was looking at all options available to it.
“The positive developments involving our partners in the University of Wales alliance will feature prominently in (our) options appraisal”
Dr Peter Noyes, University of Wales, Newport
“This will look at what is best for the region in terms of the provision of higher education, widening access, supporting a buoyant economy and delivering social justice,” he said.
“Once we have all the relevant information we will be in a position to make the right decision on our future.”
He added: “The positive developments involving our partners in the University of Wales alliance will feature prominently in this options appraisal. Our position will be based solely on the needs of the region and delivering our mission, rather than the institutional status of the University.”
The University of Wales said it was exploring how it could help develop the higher education sector in Wales to meet the assembly government’s aspirations.
A spokesman said it wanted to “to ensure that Wales continues to be competitive on the global stage and builds on its strengths in research, teaching, knowledge transfer and innovation.”
A senior staff member at the University of Wales Alliance commented: “A number of initiatives have been started by alliance members which promise to be very successful.
“Any further strengthening of this relationship with the University of Wales is a natural development which will benefit everyone in Wales.”
Neither Swansea Metropolitan University nor Glyndwr University would comment.
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The fossil is about 3.2 million years old New fossil evidence seems to confirm that a key ancestor of ours could walk upright consistently – one of the major advances in human evolution.
The evidence comes in the form of a 3.2 million-year-old bone that was found at Hadar, Ethiopia.
Its shape indicates the diminutive, human-like species Australopithecus afarensis had arches in its feet.
Arched feet, the discovery team tells the journal Science, are critical for walking the way modern humans do.
“[The bone] gives a glimpse of foot anatomy and function,” explained William Kimbel, director of the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University, US.
“It is the fourth metatarsal bone, which resides on the outside of the middle part of your foot, and which helps support the well-developed arches of the foot that we see in the soles of modern human feet.
“The bone that was recovered from the Hadar site has all the hallmarks of the form and function of the modern human foot,” he told the BBC.
Palaeo-scientists knew A. afarensis spent some of its time standing tall; that much has been clear since 1974 when they first examined a skeleton of the species, famously dubbed “Lucy”, also found near the village of Hadar in the Ethiopian rift valley.
The area around Hadar continues to reveal remarkable information about human evolution But the absence of important foot bones in all of the specimens uncovered to date has made it difficult for researchers to understand precisely how much time Lucy and her kin spent on their feet, as opposed to moving through the branches of trees.
Human feet are very different from those of other primates. They have two arches, longitudinal and transverse.
These arches comprise the mid-foot bones, and are supported by muscles in the soles of the feet.
This construction enables the feet to perform two critical functions in walking. One is to act as a rigid lever that can propel the body forwards; the other is to act as a shock absorber as the feet touch the ground at the end of a stride.
In our modern ape cousins, the feet are more flexible, and sport highly mobile large toes that are important for gripping branches as the animals traverse the tree tops.
Professor Kimbel and colleagues tell Science journal that the feet of A. afarensis’ say a lot about the way it lived.
The position of the fourth metatarsal in a human foot It would have been able to move across the landscape much more easily and much more quickly, potentially opening up broader and more abundant supplies of food, they say.
“Lucy’s spine has the double curve that our own spine does,” Professor Kimbel said.
“Her hips functioned much as human hips do in providing balance to the body with each step, which in a biped of course means that you’re actually standing on only one leg at a time during striding.
“The knees likewise in Lucy’s species are drawn underneath the body such that the thighbone, or femur, angles inwards to the knees from the hip-joints – as in humans.
“And now we can say that the foot, too, joins these other anatomical regions in pointing towards a fundamentally human-like form of locomotion in this ancient human ancestor.”
A. afarensis is thought to have existed between about 2.9 million and 3.7 million years ago, and the Hadar area has yielded hundreds of fossil specimens from the species.
Commenting on the latest research, Professor Chris Stringer, a palaeoanthropologist at London’s Natural History Museum, said scientists were gradually filling in the detail of this creature’s position in the human origins story.
An artist’s impression of what Lucy might have looked like “Bipedalism in Lucy is established, but there has been an issue about how much like our own that bipedalism was,” he told BBC News.
“Was it a more waddling gait or something more developed?
“And certainly there’s evidence in the upper body that the Australopithecines still seemed to have climbing adaptations – so, the hand bones are still quite strongly curved and their arms suggest they’re still spending time in the trees.
“If you are on the ground all the time, you need to find shelter at night and you are in a position to move out into open countryside, which has implications for new resources – scavenging and meat-eating, for example.
“If the Australopithecines were on that road, they were only at the very, very beginning of it.”
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There are plans to protect poorer students from the controversial tuition fee increases Universities in England are being told that if they want to charge higher fees they must make greater efforts to attract students from poorer backgrounds.
Having raised the maximum fee level to £9,000 per year, the government wants to ensure that higher fees will not exclude poorer students from university.
Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, who angered students by breaking his pledge to vote against raising tuition fees, argues that universities must do more to promote social mobility.
“There is a social crisis in this country – a crisis of opportunity. Universities, the gateway to the professions, are too often acting to inadvertently narrow opportunities, rather than widen them,” said Mr Clegg.
But the National Union of Students’ president, Aaron Porter, issued an angry response to Mr Clegg, accusing him of “lying” to students over fees, and saying he was “living in a fantasy-land” if he thought he could become a “champion for students”.
Universities wanting to charge more than £6,000 will be expected to show that they are making progress in areas such as outreach work, attracting poorer students and increasing the proportion of state school pupils.
These are likely to be individual benchmarks, worked out between universities and the Office for Fair Access.
These access agreements will be reviewed each year, rather than every five years at present.
Universities will be looking carefully to see what sanctions could be applied if benchmarks are missed – and at what will happen if no agreement can be reached.
“Laying down crude targets will do nothing to aid social mobility”
Paul Wellings 1994 Group
Full details will be set out by Business Secretary Vince Cable in a letter to the director of the Office for Fair Access on Thursday.
Universities UK said that all universities shared a commitment to broadening access, but there had to be a flexible and autonomous approach for individual universities.
The measures on access also include further details of a National Scholarship Programme for poorer students – which in the first year will provide £50m of support – rising to £150m after three years.
When it is fully running it will assist 48,000 students per year – with funding worth at least £3,000 in the form of bursaries, fee waivers or discounts on accommodation.
Universities will be watching to see how much power will be given to the access regulator.
There are also different views on how widening participation in higher education should be measured.
The 1994 Group, representing research-intensive universities, suggests that it should mean more than a simple headcount of numbers of poorer students being given places.
“Laying down crude targets will do nothing to aid social mobility,” said Paul Wellings, chairman of the 1994 Group and vice chancellor of Lancaster University.
They suggest that “diversity” in intake can take many forms and that measuring the success of poorer students who have been through a university might be as valid as counting those given places.
Different types of university also face different challenges.
Among the prestigious Russell Group universities there might be too few state school pupils – and among 1994 Group there might be too few students recruited from poorer areas.
While for new universities the challenge might be to improve retention rates among students.
The toughening of such access regulations are part of a wider change in university funding.
While the access agreements will apply pressure to keep down fees – universities argue that they need to raise fees because the government has cut funding.
Oxford University says it needs to charge fees of at least £8,000 to replace university budget cuts.
There have also been warnings from the Million+ group, representing new universities, that access agreements should not be used to restrict their chance of raising funds from higher fees.
As well as wanting to protect access for poorer students, the government will also be concerned about the cost of student finance if too many universities charge fees approaching the maximum level.
The UCU lecturers’ union says that since almost every university will need to charge fees of more than £6,000 to cover budget cuts, access agreements could “deprive institutions of funds”.
There are also tuition fee changes ahead for other parts of the UK.
In Northern Ireland, a report commissioned by the Department of Employment and Learning (DEL) has recommended that fees should rise to a maximum of £5,750.
In Wales, students are protected from increases in tuition fees, with the Welsh Assembly Government subsidising the cost of higher fees.
In Scotland, students do not pay tuition fees.
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Every school in the UK needs fixed rules about how teachers use Facebook, a teaching union says.
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The chips could be smaller, transistor for transistor, than current designs Engineers have developed a computer chip made of tiny “nanowires” whose computing functions can be changed by applying small electric currents.
These “programmable logic tiles” may represent the building blocks of a new generation of ever-smaller computers.
Instead of etching chips down from chunks of material, the nanoprocessors can be built up from minuscule parts.
The work, reported in Nature, may outpace the shrinking of chips made with current manufacturing techniques.
The group led by Charles Lieber of Harvard University has spent the last few years developing the nanowires – each made of a core of the element germanium and sheathed in a silicon shell, thousands of times thinner than a human hair.
The latest report is a demonstration that the wires can be made reliably enough to enter the world of computing.
Small circuits made of nanowires have been assembled before, but the latest work is unique in the sheer complexity of the resulting circuit, along with the fact that the tiles can be “cascaded” to yield far more complex circuits.
The group’s prototype design is based on a mesh of the nanowires.
The prototype contains nearly 500 of them in a 1mm-square area, criss-crossed with normal metal wires.
“These nanoprocessor circuits are building-blocks that can control and enable an entirely new class of… consumer electronics”
Shamik Das Mitre
Together with a whisker-thin stack of semiconductor materials laid on top, this mesh acts as a collection of transistors.
Passing an electric current through the normal wires can change the so-called “threshold voltages” of each transistor; the whole ensemble is in this way completely programmable.
The team demonstrated the changeable nature of their chip by re-programming it to do a number of mathematical and logical functions.
“This work represents a quantum jump forward in the complexity and function of circuits built from the bottom up, and thus demonstrates that this bottom-up paradigm – which is distinct from the way commercial circuits are built today – can yield nanoprocessors and other integrated systems of the future,” said Professor Lieber.
However, the team concedes its prototype needs to be scaled up greatly to begin to approach the power of current semiconductor chips, but should hold advantages in the longer term.
The manufacturing methods used in making current chips are projected to reach a limit of size, a threshold, below which the relentless shrinking of the chips seen in recent years would not be possible.
The nanowires can in principle be made to occupy an area just one-eighth of what many think that limit is.
The manufacturing approach leads to transistors that are more energy-efficient However, Professor Lieber and his team do not expect their approach to replace current chips, because their devices operate at significantly slower speeds.
So while current designs will keep the lead in number-crunching power, nanowire chips could win out in terms of size and efficiency.
The nanowires suffer less leakage of electrical current than current transistors, so chips should be as much as 10 times more efficient.
“Because of their very small size and very low power requirements, these new nanoprocessor circuits are building-blocks that can control and enable an entirely new class of much smaller, lighter-weight electronic sensors and consumer electronics,” said study co-author Shamik Das, of the Mitre technology firm.
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Mehdi Karroubi leads the National Trust Party Iranian opposition leader Mehdi Karroubi has been put under house arrest, his official website says.
Security officials at the premises say the measures will last until next week, it adds. No one is being allowed to enter the house except his wife.
Mr Karroubi and Mir-Hossein Mousavi, another opposition leader, had called for a rally on Monday to support the popular uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia.
The authorities refused permission, calling it a political move.
Although Iran’s establishment supports the Egyptian popular protests, a spokesman for Iran’s judiciary said on Wednesday that Iranians should show their solidarity by taking part in official rallies this Friday to commemorate the anniversary of Iran’s revolution.
Choosing another day to hold a rally means that the opposition leaders “wish to be in a separate front and will create divisions”, he told a news conference in Tehran.
Mr Karroubi, a 72-year-old cleric and former parliament speaker, ran against President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad during the disputed 2009 election which returned the hardline leader to power.
He currently leads the National Trust Party, and is seen as a political survivor who sought a soft and gradualist strategy of reforms.
His son, Hossein Karroubi, has told the BBC’s Mohsen Asgari in Tehran that even the opposition leader’s children and family members – with the exception of his wife – are not being allowed to see him.
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Some places lock their toilets to avoid vandalism One council is shutting all but one of its public toilets, so where in the High Street can you go to the loo these days?
People often employ one of two strategies to look surreptitious when using toilets in commercial premises, having entered with no intention of buying anything.
In pubs, the non-patron toilet user may pretend to look around the pub for a few seconds, as if for a friend that is due to be met, before heading to the toilets.
In a fast-food restaurant, a quick scan of the menu before heading to the loos at least suggests you might be about to buy some chicken nuggets when you’ve finished with the conveniences.
These situations arise because the public toilet is in long-term decline. Manchester City Council has responded to the need for cuts by shutting 18 of its 19 remaining toilets. If you can make it to Mount St, where the town hall extension is, you’ll be able to go. If you can’t, you’ll just have to hold it in.
Since the boom years of the late Victorian era, when public conveniences sprang up everywhere, there has been a change. In recent decades public toilets have become run down, unloved, targeted by vandals and increasingly prone to closure by councils looking for cuts.
“Over the last 10 years or so we’ve lost about 40%,” says Clara Greed, professor of inclusive urban planning at the University of the West of England, and an expert on public toilets.
“If someone walked into the toilet, didn’t buy a drink and walked out we wouldn’t go chasing after them”
Wetherspoons
“Toilets aren’t compulsory. They are always one of the soft options to cut, it has been endless decline. There is very little understanding of the value of toilets. Areas that have got public toilets attract more shoppers. People can stay.”
Women, disabled people and elderly people feel the most angst over the toilet drought. And many people are shy about cheekily using toilets in shops, restaurants, bars and pubs.
So which High Street names are happy for you to use their toilets?
John Lewis, for one. All of their 28 department stores have toilets, with 112 at the biggest branch in Oxford St. They are for customers and non-customers alike. There’s an obvious positive as you trawl through the shop on the way to the loos, says a spokesman, with the “reason being to try and drive footfall and turn people into customers”.
There’s a bit more ambivalence at most High Street names. But McDonald’s sounds promising.
“Strictly speaking, the toilet facilities are for McDonald’s customers only,” a spokeswoman says. “However, the restaurant manager is unlikely to take exception to potential customers using the toilet unless it’s felt that the use of the facilities by non-customers is hindering paying customers at any given time.”
McDonald’s have always been seen as a major public toilet provider, particularly in the US, notes Prof Greed.
KFC are less than outraged by the prospect of toilet users not subsequently buying a Zinger Tower.
“The toilets are there for the paying customers, but clearly this is going to happen sometimes,” says the spokeswoman. “It’s at the store’s discretion, but it’s always best practice to ask the manager.”
Burger King is on a franchise system, so toilet policy will vary from outlet to outlet.
And in the pub world there’s also inconsistency. Punch Taverns, with 7,000 pubs, doesn’t have a set policy. Enterprise Inns says its landlords have the ultimate decision, although the group is sympathetic to non-customers.
JD Wetherspoon says its pubs do not have signs to discourage non-customers from using the loos.
Some people are shy about covertly using pub and restaurant loos “We are fairly open-minded,” says a spokesman. “If someone walked into the toilet, didn’t buy a drink and walked out we wouldn’t go chasing after them.”
But, of course, many people would be too shy to march into a pub or fast food restaurant they weren’t planning to patronise and use the conveniences. And there are many places that lock their toilets as a precaution against vandals. Disabled people have a national key scheme from Radar that gives them access to 8,700 locked disabled toilets.
But the main problem is that pubs and fast food restaurants are not everywhere.
Further reading
The Independent’s leading article says closing public toilets is a sad reflection of our society. “The provision of clean and convenient public loos, for a modest charge or preferably free, is the hallmark of a civilised society and one that treats people, including visitors, with dignity.” The paper goes on to say: “The Victorians knew this; some time in the last few years, the guardians of our towns and cities managed to forget.”
The Guardian’s Simon Jenkins says the move is predictable in the era of spending cuts.
“Though overall resources available to councils are nowhere down by more than 9%, Doncaster is cutting half its libraries. Manchester is closing all its public toilets bar one, Wakefield is slashing its staff by a tenth. Most councils are taking a savage axe to many of the 200,000 extra staff (out of three million in total) taken on since 2000, and butchering grants to the voluntary sector.”
The last word goes to Richard Chisnell, chairman of the Loo of the Year Awards. He says in This is Lincolnshire: “Toilets are what it’s all about. We’re in danger, with all the cutbacks and doom and gloom, of losing our basic front-line services such as toilets.
“However bad the cutbacks, people aren’t going to stop needing the toilet.”
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Some prisoners could gain the right to vote for the first time. But would inmates actually fill in their ballot papers?
They are a section of the electorate few politicians are likely to canvass – but if moves to enfranchise them succeed, many residents of the UK’s jails would gain a say in picking the nation’s MPs.
The proposal was put forward after the European Court of Human Rights ruled that banning a convicted killer from the polls had breached his right to participate in the democratic process.
To comply with the ruling it has been suggested that only those serving less than a year in UK prisons will gain the vote, and Justice Secretary Ken Clarke has insisted the move would be conceding to inmates “a right that they probably wouldn’t bother to exercise”. But is he correct?
Here, two ex-convicts with very different views of the plans describe what they think prisoners would do with their new-found democratic power.
The move to introduce votes for prisoners is hardly one that is likely to win much popular support and the reaction from politicians has ranged from grudging acceptance to outright hostility. Both the cabinet and shadow cabinet have been told to abstain when the bill comes before parliament and the prime minister’s spokeswoman has said the government wants to do “as little as possible” to comply with the court ruling.
But up until now, the UK’s resistance to granting prisoners the vote sets it apart from countries such as Denmark, Sweden and Switzerland who have no such restrictions.
Some 13 European countries, however, have rules for disqualifying some prisoners depending on the crime committed or the length of the sentence.
Denmark, Sweden and Switzerland: no form of electoral ban for imprisoned offendersItaly, Malta and Poland: ban for those deemed to have committed serious crimesGermany: prisoners encouraged to vote, apart from those whose crimes undermine “democratic order”Greece: permanent voting ban for anyone sentenced to lifeRussia, Armenia, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Luxembourg and Romania: outright ban for all inmatesQ&A: UK prisoners’ right to vote
Perhaps the most useful comparison, however, is offered by the Republic of Ireland, which gave inmates of its jails the right to participate in elections for the first time in 2006.
With a general election looming in the Republic, just 191 out of a prison population of 4,500 are currently on the electoral register, according to the Irish Prison Service – barely 4% of all those currently behind bars.
Given that those guilty of crimes have, by definition, transgressed the norms of society, it would not be altogether surprising if they were less inclined than the rest of the population to take part in a civic duty such as voting.
Moreover, they are disproportionately likely to come from the sort of chaotic backgrounds that generally preclude political engagement. A 2010 report by the centre-right think tank Policy Exchange suggested that as many as 35% of England and Wales’s prison population were regular drug users.
For these reasons, former prison governor and warder Roger Outram is doubtful that more than a handful of British inmates would actually bother to participate.
“They’re going to be more concerned with who their wife is spending time with on the outside or where they’ll get their next fix,” he says.
“I can honestly say that in 32 years in the Prison Service I never had a conversation with an inmate about elections.”
Of course, this argument presupposes that convicts who were apolitical would remain so.
Lord Ramsbotham, a former chief inspector of prisons in England and Wales and an advocate of the government’s reform, anticipates that many prisoners would be attracted to casting a vote.
“I imagine if this comes in a lot of them will vote for the first time because it’s a novelty – anything that’s new or a break from the routine they’ll try,” he says.
“In the long-term, though, they should be educated about what the party manifestoes actually mean for their life chances when they come out. At the end of the day, the job of prison is to protect the public and reduce the risk of reoffending, and all members of the public should be asking questions of their MPs if that isn’t happening.”
Members of the public may disagree on whether giving the vote to prisoners is a good idea. But any reforms should cast light on the question of whether voting makes good citizens, or being good citizens makes voters.
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1. pandatank
It’s interesting that the severely mentally ill still have the right to a vote, but prisoners don’t. If the prison population is of such a size that a “block vote” would affect the results of elections, there’s something seriously wrong with both our justice and our political systems that seek to imprison such a large % of the population. Hardly democratic is it?
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New President Dilma Rousseff has vowed to get Brazil’s spending boom under control Brazil’s government has said it will implement 50bn reais ($30bn; £19bn) of spending cuts in order to curb inflation and help prevent the economy from overheating.
Finance Minister Guido Mantega said all stimulus packages introduced since the onset of the global financial crisis would be removed.
Social spending and infrastructure projects will not be affected, he said.
Last month, the central bank raised interest rates to cool inflation.
It raised rates from 10.75% to 11.25% – the first increase under President Dilma Rousseff and central bank head Alexandre Tombini, both of whom took office last month.
Inflation was 5.91% last year and is forecast to remain above 5% in 2011.
Brazil’s economy, Latin America’s largest, grew more than 7% in 2010 and is expected to grow between 4.5% and 5% this year.
“It’s good news to come out of the Rouseff administration,” said Kathryn Rooney at Bulltick Capital Markets.
“This is also positive news for future ratings upgrades.” She added that the central bank was now less likely to raise interest rates as many times as it might otherwise have.
However, some analysts felt the new administration should have gone further.
“This is sort of a missed chance because if the government wanted to trigger some positive impact on inflationary expectations, then they should have announced something closer to 70bn reais [of cuts],” said Nick Chamie at RBC Markets.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
The government has narrowly avoided a fourth Lords defeat on the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill, as peers rejected a Labour amendment aiming to retain the current system of public inquiries for changes to constituency boundaries by 266 votes to 262.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
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