In the 23-29 November issue of Community Care, Mental Health Tsar, Louis Appleby, accused critics of the Mental Health Bill of 'scaremongering' over proposals for compulsory treatment in the community.

He said: 'It's frightening to patients and it shouldn't happen.'

Now in the way his own report on killings by mental health patients is being promoted he is allowing the general public to be frightened in a crude attempt to push through a sloppily drafted mental health bill, which relies on good intent to prevent people being sectioned inappropriately.

I wonder if Litvinenko's post mortem will reveal that the 3 unidentified objects which X-rays revealed in his gut will turn out to be more significant than reported so far.

Under the proposed terms of the bill any person can be detained if (any) two registered medical practitioners judge that person to be suffering from a mental disorder of a nature or degree which makes it appropriate for them to receive treatment and that the treatment is judged necessary for the person’s own health and safety or that of others. Risk of detention is increased because mental disorder is now broadly defined to mean ‘any disorder or disability of the mind'.

It seems to me that powers of detention which rely on opinion based on such a broad definition could easily be used inappropriately, for example if it's felt that other routes have been exhausted. I don't know whether the vastly increased scope of the powers is deliberate or just another example of the sloppy drafting which seems to have proliferated under this government.

With the bill as it stands and with one in four people experiencing some kind of mental health problem every year, I believe that one day any one of us could be affected, if not directly, then indirectly if somebody we know, perhaps somebody close to us, is inappropriately detained.

I reckon the thing Jack Straw really doesn't like about the full veil is that he's used to being the one in control and the veil shifts the balance. If he's really concerned about 'the implications of separateness' perhaps he should consider discarding his uniform of power, the suit and tie. I don't know what he wears to his constituency surgeries, but perhaps he should consider jeans and a t-shirt if he wants to make sure he doesn't separate himself from his constituents.

Charles Clarke's comment about Gordon Brown having psychological issues does nothing to reduce the stigma attached to mental health issues. I wonder if he's liable to prosecution under the Disability Discrimination Act for suggesting that people with psychological issues (all of us and, surely, all politicians?!) are unsuitable for important jobs.

This was a story about a local authority telling a disabled person that they should seek money from charities to pay for the service they should be providing (a special chair). However, added to the problem that charities which do not receive statutory money are now being asked to provide services which should be provided by the state, is the fact that (owing to current financial crises) the statutory sector is now chasing more money which used to be available to charities e.g. Big Lottery money.

A contributor to the Today programme today claimed that Tony Blair had no great philosophy driving his term in office (or words to that effect). Maybe it's just that he knew it was dangerous enough to get rid of socialism without saying that he was trying to replace it with a completely different political philosophy: mutualism.

Waitrose say they're going to sell misshapen fruit at a discount. At Waitrose prices does that mean you'll be able to get ugly fruit at the price of normal fruit? On the plus side, let's hope it leads to more food selected for taste rather than looks.

Whilst living in a water supply area with a hose pipe ban, MP, Geoffrey Robinson, has justified watering his extensive gardens with water from a private borehole by saying that he drilled the hole so he wouldn't make demands on the public water supply. Surely, part of the water supply problem is that underground water levels are low. People who can afford boreholes to extract water for their hose pipes are making underground water levels even lower. Ultimately, then, they are removing water from public supply by using it in ways that are banned for everybody else.

So, Bill Gates says he's going in 2008. Does that make him a lame duck leader?

Taking steroids to enhance physical performance is wrong but taking Omega 3’s to enhance intellectual performance is OK. What’s the difference?

I agree with David Cameron's attack on lyrics which promote violence - let's hope he goes on to attack lyrics which encourage greed and consumerism ....so that would be hip hop again.

What I like about Peter Crouch is that he's beginning to expose the modern day myth that to be good you need style.

So, British senior scientists have written a letter recommending against the NHS funding those complementary treatments which aren't backed by scientific evidence. At one time I would have said, great. But, maybe some complementary treatments work by bringing into play the body's own self-healing mechanisms (the placebo effect).

If so, It seems to me that an essential part of this process is faith in the treatment. Scientific method relies heavily on double blind trials and these don't allow the effects of faith in the treatment to come into play let alone be measured.

Reluctantly, I have to say I think science needs to devise methodologies which measure what complementary treatments might be doing not what conventional treatments would do.

I have to fight against that part of me which hates to see people making loads of dosh out of conning others into believing in things that don't work in the way they say that they do. But, maybe in this case, a false belief in the way a thing works may be essential to it working at all. Maybe this is a natural progression from what Kathy Sykes said at the end of her BBC2 series on complementary treatments i.e. we may be missing a trick by failing to harness the placebo effect.

I've never taken my children out of school for holidays during term time, but here's the deal: I won't ask to take my children out of school for holdays in term time if schools don't set homework over holiday time. And that includes, so-called, project work and it definitely includes setting internal tests and exams for the first week back. Can anyone point me in the direction of any evidence to suggest that children suffer if they don't work during holidays?

Individual windmills may be quite attractive, but spread across the countryside are they really environmentally friendly?

wind farms
in many a view
are beautiful ...
but out of place
like rows of nudes
across the face
of Constables

As somebody who campaigned on Third World issues in the seventies and eighties, it staggers me that people still promote the idea of trickle down.

It’s poverty, not wealth, that acts like water. Wealth behaves more like an elusive vapour: it rises, bubbling up through the downward torrent of poverty.