He said: “Critics say that you are encouraging drug addiction but the reality is that these people are addicts and they are going to do it anyway… If you are going to get people off heroin, then in the initial stages we have to have proper heroin prescribing services.”

It is curious how Dr Carter’s argument is the precise diametric opposite one to that advanced for such facilities by the director of one such facility in Bern catering for some 210 addicts.

After a ten year experiment which led Swiss voters to approve them, Dr Christopher Buerki argued for such facilities by saying of the addicts who attend his:

‘Their average age is 40 now, and they have an average of 13 years of heroin addiction before they enter this programme. Basically we are aiming at a group of people where everything else has failed… These are patients with a chronic, relapsing disease that might go with them for the rest of their lives.’

The case for such facilities cannot be both that they provide the best initial environment for weaning addicts from their addiction, and that they provide a safe haven for those for whom the addiction is so great that they will never be able to rid themselves of it.

Faced with a choice as to what to believe about what function such facilities would actually provide addicts in relation to their habit, I think one must be inclined to accept the argument from experience advanced  by the Swiss doctor, rather than the a priori purely conjectural considerations proffered by his British counterpart.

For the NHS merely to control addiction by supplying addicts with their drugs is to abandon medicine in favour of its becoming a drug-pusher and perpetuating the problem.

Drug addiction is a tragic problem that afflicts the lives of all too many vulnerable people. However, it cannot surely be right for the authorities to become part of it by effectively throwing in the towel and abandoning therapeutic endeavour.

Terminating addiction is ultimately a matter of will and resolution on the addict’s part, but the appropriate beginning steps will never be taken if addicts are enabled to continue their habit indefinitely.

For an interesting take on the whole subject of overcoming addiction, read the article by Dr Stanton Peele of Morristown, New Jersey.

‘Mass unemployment, crime, drug abuse amongst young people, poor education, poverty for some and insecurity for many, are the signs of a social fabric ripped apart at the seams. Our task is to renew and rebuild our nation as a strong and active society sustaining stable community and family life.’

Clue: It wasn’t David Cameron and the remark is over thirteen years old.

Answer: Yes, You’ve guessed it.

The statement was made by Tony Blair (remember him?) in May 1994. He made it as Shadow Home Secretary in a widely reported speech that heralded the beginning of his successful contest with Gordon Brown for leadership of the Labour Party.

The more things change, eh?

For all you disillusioned ex-Labour voters who thought 1997 was the start of a bright new dawn, may I offer you the consolation of listening to one of my favourite songs, ‘I really wanted you’ by Steve Tilston whose timely lyrics run:

well, strike me dead if you wish

for not wanting you for long

season turns,  so do I

why go into promises for my songs

cold winds bend in the morning

and the back-road bears the pain

i came with the gift of a new day

see, I leave with a gift of rain

and see two leaves falling

see they kiss then drift away

and it’s true, i really wanted you

and it’s true, i really wanted you

just yesterday…

I can see your eyes were made for their crying

like a star was made to shine

my face was meant to bear knowledge

empty promises for lines

and see two leaves falling

see they kiss, then drift away

and it’s true, i really wanted you

and it’s true, I really wanted you

just yesterday…

so let us strike out

touch the new day

let our bruises meet the air

like land the rain has forsaken

we will need the greatest care

and see two leaves falling

see they kiss, then drift away

and it’s true, I really wanted you

and it’s true, I really wanted you

just yesterday…

strike me dead if you wish

for not wanting you for long

season turns, so do I

why go into promises for my songs

The condoning of homosexual activity might be thought, for example, to be necessarily being demanded of  a registrar called upon to conduct gay civil partnership ceremonies, or  a counsellor called on to provide a gay couple with sex therapy, as opposed to relationship counselling.

As things currently stand, the weight of judicial opinion seems to have come down firmly against religious believers who harbour such scruples. Currently, they are being required to discharge such professional duties or quit their posts.

Surely, there must be some more accommodating posture that the judiciary could assume in the face of current legislation?

Former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Carey, wishes to have the conundrum resolved by providing that in future only judges sympathetic to religion serve on employment tribunals dealing with such tricky cases.

Maybe, that might be a short-term answer to the conundrum, short of the unlikely prospect that one or other of the two parties giving rise to it undergoes something tantamoun to inner moral revolution.

Eventually, however, a more stable solution must be found. Surely, in a society as plural as ours has lately become, legal space must be created to allow both parties to be able to live and work in mutual toleration and respect, despite their manifestly incompatible creeds and life-styles.

Clearly, part of the problem that we as a society currently face is that we are in a transitional period in which devout believers may have taken up employment without fully knowing what changes in the law might subsequently call upon them to do in a professional capacity in the name of equality.

Perhaps, the immediate way forward is for judges involved in hearing such cases to appreciate better and make due allowances for this historically unprecedented situation.

After all, given how long it was in the making, not even the most gung-ho secular judge could reasonably expect for Rome to be un-built in a day.

Without overmuch hope for any bright new dawn come a new tenancy at Number 10, sufficient clear water still separates the two main parties to give voters with any healthy mistrust of overblown government reason to cast their vote one way rather than another.

One such issue dividing them concerns the fate of the centralised electronic data-base of NHS patient records. The present government seems intent on pressing ahead with it, whereas  the Conservatives rightly oppose it.

The stealth-like manner of its introduction these last few months, without patients being offered any real and genuine opt-out, speaks volumes about the present government. Even the Germans not noted for their libertarian leanings, have abandoned a similar national project out of concerns about patient confidentiality.

That the present government is still pressing ahead with it, despite all the well-advertised similar concerns raised here by doctors, patients’ associations, computer-security experts and civil liberties groups, reveals how little New Labour values the rights of the individual as opposed to the convenience of state bureaucracy.

What has triggered these reflections has been recent press reports that NHS patient records are currently being shipped for processing to India, despite previous assurances this would not happen.

Mind you anyone who still takes any promises made by this government seriously is in sufficient need of urgent medical attention as perhaps to warrant their medical records being freely available to all and sundry.

I can’t wait for polling day, therefore, not because of anything particularly good to which I am looking forward, but because of something positively bad the end of which I anticipate finally seeing.

As was reported earlier this year:

‘Nearly one in five young people from the poorest homes now go to university… [but] a comparison with 15 years ago… reveals the overall gap [between them and the best- off young people who go to university]  has widened… to 38 oper cent.’

With an impending election, New Labour is desperate to put as good a spin on its track-record as possible. But with impending massive spending cuts all round, and a shortage of jobs, the demand for university places has never been higher.

Since, in any straight competition based purely on A-level grades, university applicants from higher income backgrounds would be bound to win a disproportionately large share of university places, in order for New Labour to conceal what an utter disaster its educational track-record has been, something was needed to discredit A levels as the principal metric on which Universities should rely in judging applicant eligibility.

Enter conveniently stage left, Steve Smith, Vice Chancellor of Exeter University and president of Universities UK. He has reportedly just announced that ‘research from Bristol University [has] justified offering places to candidates from poor schools whose A-level results are up to three grades lower than those who are better educated.’

Smith was quoted as having said:

‘The evidence is going my way. The research is absolutely clear now.’

According to press reports, the Bristol research on which Smith relied had found that ‘among 4,000 recent Bristol graduates… students who had attended poor schools far outperformed those with the same grades who had been better educated.’

Seemingly quite fortuitously, just announced research findings at University College Dublin would appear to support Smith’s contention. It was reported in the Times today that researchers from there had found that:

‘Teenagers from poor families who are accepted into university with lower grades are just as likely to graduate with good degrees as their fellow students.’

The account of the Irish research findings is ambiguous and might genuinely confirm Smith’s claim, were it true. But it will not, if it is guilty of the same verbal sleight of hand as Smith employed (or, at least, acquiesced in) when claiming that the Bristol research findings had shown that A level grades are not a fair and reliable index of academic potential, and therefore need discounting by the quality of the school at which they were obtained.

The reason Smith’s claim is a verbal sleight of hand is that the statistics on which he based it fail to take into consideration university drop-out rates before graduation. These are vastly higher among those university students who have entered from less advantaged social backgrounds, and, by extension, have  attended less highly performing schools.

If all the least academically able students have dropped out before any annual cohort of them are eligible to graduate, and if the least academically able ones tend to come from the least well-performing schools, it will follow that those who attended such schools and did  graduate could  do so with a better degree class than those of their peers who entered university with slightly higher A levels gained at better performing schools.

Contrary to what Smith claims, that statistical fact would not go any way to show that a university applicant with somewhat lower A levels grades than a second with higher grades gained at a better performing school would be likely to out-perform that second applicant at university, and hence merited preference were there only one university place between them.

The drop-out rate of university undergraduates in England and Wales is staggeringly high, and disproportionately so among those who come from the less well-performing schools.

Statistics disclosed by the Higher Education Statistics Agency in 2008 reveal that, whereas 14 per cent of students who began degrees in 2005/6 dropped out before graduating, the proportion of those dropping out who had been admitted to the least prestigious universities was vastly higher than that:

‘Half of students at Bolton University failed to complete degree course… [M]ore than four in 10 students failed to finish their degrees …[a]t Anglia Ruskin, London Metropolitan, London Southbank, Middlesex and Thames Valley.’

Those high drop out rates reportedly occurred despite: ‘universities recruiting students from poor backgrounds receiv[ing] more money and the Government pay[ing] special retention grants for extra tutoring and pastoral care.’

In order for Smith and Bristol to prove that, in terms of indicating academic potential, A level grades need discounting by the quality of school at which they were gained, what needs to be shown is that those who begin university with lower grades obtained from less well performing school are likely to outperform at university those starting out there with slightly better A level grades obtained from better performing schools.

No statistical data yet supplied or anywhere cited by anyone go anywhere near to showing that to be the case.

Until some such statistice are supplied, then voters are justifiably entitled to see in pronouncements like Smith’s only pre-electoral spin, and,  in the case of the just announced Irish research, fortuitous coincidence  or else, more worryingly, deliberate news management by vested interests.

Alternatively, it could just be special pleading by Smith. This is because universities receive more money per student for admitting applicants from poor backgrounds,  and they are not penalised if these students then drop out, ‘providing they continue to recruit even more youngsters to replace them.’

That will be a pity, for, in the last several decades, Britain has been steadily depriving children of safe open spaces in which to play, with profound adverse social consequences.

Consider the following statistics:

• Children in England today have half as much free time as they had 30 years ago
• 50 per cent of them have been stopped from climbing trees; 20 per cent banned from playing conkers; and 17 per cent forbidden to play games of tag.
• Whereas over 70 per cent of adults played near their homes daily when children, today only a fifth of children do.
• Since the 1980s the number of adventure playgrounds in London has halved.
• Whereas in 1987 the average 9 year old was free to wander ten minutes from their homes; by 1997, they could so for only three minutes and, by 2007, their free to roam zone had contracted to not much beyond their front gate.

Meanwhile, during the same period, the opportunity accorded children for physical exercise while at school or travelling to and from it contracted:

• Whereas, in 1994, nearly half of schoolchildren in England spent 2 or more hours a week in school engaged in sports, by 1999, only a third did.
• During the 1990s, the proportion of children walking to school fell from 62 per cent to 56 per cent, and the numbers cycling to school halved. Meanwhile, the number of children being driven to school rose from 26 per cent to 36 per cent.

These social trends are exerting a toll on children’s health.

• Whereas, between 1974 and 1984, the proportion of overweight and obese children was constant, it increased rapidly during the following decade.
• Whereas in 1984, 5 per of boys in England were overweight, by 1994, 9 per cent were. There was a comparable increase  among girls.

While changes in diet contributed to these unhealthy trends, undoubtedly the increase in obesity in young children was not unconnected with the diminishing physical spaces available to for them to let off steam and play.

Not only has the country stored up a costly health problem in increased rates of adult heart disease, and other illnesses associated with overweight, it has also deprived children of opportunities for fun. Playing freely in open spaces certainly adds to the fun of childhood.

Reading about the just launched campaign of Play England reminded me of the great Cat Stevens’ song, ‘Where do the Children Play?’

Well worth a listen by our political masters and mistresses.