Melanie McDonagh

Michael Gove has said that ‘nothing is off the table’ when it comes to dealing with the revelations in today’s Telegraph that a chief examiner of the Welsh examination board, WJEC, steered teachers attending his board’s fee-paying advice session so flagrantly in the direction of what was likely to feature in the next examination, it amounted, as the man said, to ‘cheating’. The irony of the thing is that those teachers who did not pay £230 a session for his assistance are likely to do much better by their pupils: the obliging examiner was telling the teachers about the cycle of examination questions — in other words, which bit of the syllabus was not going to feature in the questions.

It's tempting to respond to the BMA's extraordinary proposal to ban smoking in cars with a Thin End of the Wedge argument. Ban smoking even on the part of an unaccompanied adult, sitting in a car by the side of the road? How long before they're banning it in the home, eh? But hold it right there. The proposal isn't just scary for where it might lead. It's scary all by itself. The notion that a grown up can be barred from self-harm by smoking a fag by himself, in his own car, his own space, on the basis that it might kill him sooner rather than later, should be unthinkable in a free society.

Last November, Margaret Forrester, a mental health worker for the Central North West London Mental Health Trust in Camden was suspended for giving a colleague a charity booklet called “Forsaken – Women From Taunton Talk About Abortion” to a colleague -  they’d been discussing the information they offered to patients. It had the stories of five women who had experienced what the author describes as ‘post-abortion syndrome’, including depression, relationship issues, suicidal feelings and fertility problems. So, the downside of abortion, then. To begin with – no problem. Her colleague didn’t seem offended. But a few days later her manager told her she was being sent home on ‘special leave with full pay’.

A friend of mine has just come back from a few days of Civil Service in-house training. He managed in no time to get the hang of the exercise, namely, the mastery of another language. Not a foreign language, which might have been handy, but not English either. ‘I learnt,’ he said proudly, ‘about “brain-friendly learning”, “career pathing”, “energy management” and — my absolute favourite — “impact residue”, which is what you leave behind when you have met someone: what the uninitiated would call a lasting impression. I was encouraged to “flex my styles” and identify “meta-objectives”. In short, I am a new man.’ In other words, he’s learned management-speak.

The good news is that most people in Britain think that people in their local area mix pretty well  regardless of differences in race, religion and the rest of it. According to the latest Citizenship Survey from the Department for Communities and Local Government for April-September last year, about 85 percent of people think that their neighbourhood is cohesive, community-speak for the absence of overt ethnic and religious tension. But when it comes to attitudes to immigration a slightly different view emerges. About 78 percent of Brits would like to see immigration reduced; well over half, or 54 percent, want to see it reduced a lot. That's roughly the same level for the four years that this exercise in Cohesion Research has been underway.