The Conservatives keep sending me letters

...but then so do the LibDems.  They seem to have lumped together all their lists of anybody who contacted either of them at any point during the election (like Obama without the brain) and they desperately send out scattergun emails, though they do have different formats and different messages.  Know the person who wants you to think he's your friend, at least as well as your enemy.

This is a lie!

Andrew Lansley claims to be banning below-cost selling of alcoholic drinks.  This is simply not true.

The limit of duty plus VAT takes no account of the costs of manufacture, distribution, storage and selling and therefore allows alcohol to be sold at a price below cost.

Is this a rapid change?

That emblem of standard English, Radio 4, is worrying me (again). The word "estimate" is pronounced to rhyme with "mutt" not "mate" when it's a verb. "Contribute" and "distribute" are pronounced with the emphasis on the first syllable: I was always taught to stress the second, and I think I still do.

The actual change is not much of a worry. It was always a bit daft to say conTRIbute but contriBUtion, but then how much better is CONtribute and contriBUtion? The speed of the change is surprising, however. Either I haven't been listening properly, or this has happened in about five years.

Tuition fees? Who pays?

Opponents of the coalition government scream that tuition fees have been trebled, and "good" universities do little to disabuse them. A new generation is politicised - in an initially scattergun/scatterbrained direction - and Aaron Porter is kidnapped/kettled by the people he was elected to represent. Another day on the political front line.

First the good bits...

• the coalition government is piling more resources into further education
• the coalition government is including part-time students in the loans/grants scheme, where before they really did have to pay up-front
• given where they start from, the new loan repayment scheme is much "fairer" than what it follows (it doesn't change anything for those who are already facing a levy when they get to £15k pa)
• that's about it, though it isn't nothing

Now the bad bits...

• withdrawing most, or all, government funding from university teaching is a powerfully symbolic move which I would also label despicable
• expecting a large proportion of young people - from whatever background - to start their working lives with a sizeable loan hanging over them goes against every change we need to make in our thinking about money
• hey kid, it's OK to have a loan, it's OK that you never had to prove you could pay it back, and - you know what's best about this? - most of you won't have to!

I'm laughing all the way to hell.

Sex offenders get up the nose

The UK Supreme Court has decreed that sex offenders should have the right to seek to be removed from the sexual offenders' register, the right to demonstrate that they have changed. Parliament - all three main front benches - strutted its opposition to the idea. I have no doubt that the Sun's presses are melting with indignation as I write.

This is a difficult subject, but the establishment reaction to it is predictably ridiculous. The decision was that there should be a right to "seek" a change, not to expect one. The convicted offender would have to demonstrate a change.  The last figures I saw suggested that only a third of convicted sex offenders actually re-offend.  How is this different from an application for parole?

From observation of actual cases and from a lot of reading, my conclusion is that there is a spectrum here. A "paedophile" is someone who feels sexual attraction to inappropriately young people (how young is defined differently by various groups).  Not all "paedophiles" actually do anything about it, and not all of those that do repeat the offence.

Some "paedophiles" are extremely nasty and extremely dangerous.  Some are not so bad.  And some people on the sex offenders register were sixteen-year-old boys caught having sex with their fifteen-year-old girlfriends. I've given up on the tabloids, but it's Parliament's job to think carefully about things like this.

The ratchet effect in politics

As a citizen of the UK it is far too easy to...

1. lay into the Conservatives for their ideological obsession with privatisation
2. support the aims and some of the methods of the coalition because you are (still, just about) a LibDem
3. lay into public bodies because of your own experience
4. suspect private bodies for the same reason
5. lay into the Labour party for just carrying on Thatcher's work

... but (as I once delighted in reminding a Conservative MP twice my age) life isn't that simple.

One of the main strands of coalition thinking is to offer the opportunity to deliver public services to "any willing provider". As well as opening up the profit pot for the United Healths, Bupas, Capitas and Sercos of this world, much is made of the idea that people currently working in the public sector will set up cooperatives to do what they know so well, but do it better.

The health sector is perhaps the biggest and most symbolic example of this move, but there are also free schools (inspired by local groups of parents and teachers they say, but also an opportunity for faith groups to spread their influence, and in many cases managed by private companies - see the names above), and others.

Many arguments can be had here, but the thing that worries me tonight is - cruel cliche - the slippery slope. Once you open up a public service to competition (started a long time before the current government and promoted energetically by Labour), it is hard to imagine that change being reversed. When the market has its claws in, and European competition law is the regime, is there really more than one possible direction of travel?

What happens when the group of parents who started the free school breaks up - people move on, Toby Young's kids get their A-levels? What happens when one of the driving individuals who makes your health co-op sing leaves to look after a baby?

A new parent, with children of the right age, a new consultant may step up and everything may carry on beautifully. But if the recruit is not there the critical mass may be lost, and if the school or the service has worked well so far, somebody has to decide how to support and maintain it. A new set of parents has not come forward, a new co-operative is hardly likely to spring up in the same area and the same speciality, so who is left to do the job?

A big organisation, probably, which can easily reallocate resources to take on a new responsibility. The NHS, the Department for Education... why not? Because once these services are out in the free market world it is perhaps even illegal to bring them back in. Again, the names above, these organisations will suffer no such restrictions.

I put it no more strongly than to ask: is this really what we want?

What's wrong with the idea of UFOs?

Nothing.  It could be a jumbo jet, a cricket ball or an alien space craft.  If it abducts you, cricks your neck or hits you in the face you might have some evidence, but otherwise it's just something in the sky that you CAN'T IDENTIFY.

Mubarak and British banks

Apparently the Bank of England cannot freeze Mubarak's many millions in London banks without an external request (from the EU, UN or a new Egyptian government).  So Mr Cameron should have a quick word with the appropriate EU commissioner to suggest this move.  In fact, the request should have been made several times already.

Fish heal heart damage!

This looks like an interesting field of study, but some of the media coverage behind the image of a plucky (almost cuddly) little fish has rested on some strange pseudo-science.

To study the mechanisms by which zebra fish can rebuild damaged heart muscle may well be valuable. (Newts have the same capacity, but are perhaps a little less sexy.) We may not want to address the question of how the damage is initially inflicted.

Most of the descriptions of the project seem to have been quite reasonable. In fact, most of them were just regurgitations of the same press release. However, at least one BBC report suggested this was a capability we humans had lost over the millennia (now what would the selective advantage of that be?) since - as we all know - we were all fish once. They don't seem to have realised that not all fish can do this so, unless most species in the world have also lost it in development, it wasn't a very sensible addition to the story.

By the way, experiments with rats (even less sexy) in 2008 showed that injecting a drug cocktail into a damaged heart could stimulate some regrowth. But this is a new campaign, and I wish it well while feeling some sympathy for the zebra fish who will be laying down their lives for us.

When prices rise...

The price of wheat and other basic food commodities is rising again. Does that mean everybody in the world pays more for their daily bread? No, it means that there isn't enough to go round, so those who can afford it pay the higher price and those who can't afford it go without.

Humour me for a moment

Greek civilisation preceded West European expansion by many years and it is often accorded a further kind of precedence. The Greeks made so many early steps in maths, philosophy and literature, it is argued. We just end up recycling their ideas in so many fields. They were therefore "better", and modern civilisation is degenerate by comparison.

Imagine for a moment that these things happened in a different order, with Britain, France, Germany etc developing the resources to support a rich country by 100BCE and Greece following on 1500 years later. Might Shakespeare and his contemporaries have developed all the basic themes of poetry and drama, and Roger Bacon of philosophy? Might Euripides have written a version of Hamlet? Might the French have had a word for it?

As counterfactuals go, this one is so hard to set up that it falls almost immediately. Just hold on to it for long enough to wonder whether the "superiority" of a culture relates to anything more than its coming first.

I'm glad you bought that up

We’ve all heard somebody on the news talking about the priminister at the generelection. It’s because they’re in a hurry, so words get run together. We all do it in normal conversation – things like I’ll be back, bacon neggs.

There are some long words that lose whole syllables as a matter of course. People say vetinarian instead of veterinarian, respitory instead of respiratory. Homogenous is just about accepted as a synonym for homogeneous, and it’s not exactly surprising that a reporter faced with the phrase quantitative easing comes out with quantitive.

Going the other way, coverage of the Cleveland child abuse scandal in 1987 featured the word dilatation, which I took to be an incorrect form of dilation. My paper dictionary has it as the preferred word, which seems daft, considering the normal way we play with Latin words in English, but dilation is definitely the commoner.

Does any of this matter? Most of the time, not much, though it would be depressing if people were to become incapable of using the full words, in writing particularly (or particuly as you sometimes hear).

A closely related observation is the increasing disappearance of the letter r in words such as brought. For some time, this was the only example I noticed (and Sebastian Faulks wrote about it a few years ago in the Observer), but the movement appears to be accelerating. I’ve heard boardcasting and infastructure, perlifically for prolifically, and many more.

Again, this is rather lazy, and it could become confusing when people move from simply reading the word without the r to wondering why the letter is there on the page at all. In the case of bought/brought, however, there is a difference of meaning. These are two different words which can often be used correctly in the same context to mean different things. I heard someone respond to the observation that she had bought some items with a rather acerbic “Yes, I bought them and brought them.”.

A window on the world

I was listening to some Bartok on Youtube (Cantata Profana) when a panel came up to say Mubarak was about to speak. Click and over to alJazeera English, some thrilling crowd noises then Mubarak’s disappointing TV address. That crowd can bellow!

The alJazeera commentators are saying that the protests will grow tomorrow. What’s the betting that things will start getting hotter tonight?