pets for healing

APART from missing her family, Jaycee Lee Dugard, the Californian girl imprisoned by a religious zealot in his garden for 18 years, regarded the loss of her school days as her greatest impairment.

She is planning to spend the proceeds from a forthcoming book about her ordeal on an educational trust so she and her two teenage children can catch up on their schooling.

Last week, following the publication of the first new pictures of Dugard, 29, since she was snatched off a street in 1991, the young mother was said to be summoning the courage to put herself and her girls into mainstream education.

Dugard will need a personal tutor to prepare herself for college, a family friend said, but Angel, 15, and Starlit, 11, could take up places in a private school next year.

The three are considering changing their names from those given by Phillip and Nancy Garrido, who are in jail facing multiple kidnap and sexual assault charges, to something “less well known and more personal”, said the friend.

According to People magazine, the family are living near where they were held and learning “to be together again”.

“I'm so happy to be back,” Dugard was quoted as saying.

The magazine has declined to reveal how much it paid for the pictures of Dugard with her daughters, who were allegedly fathered by her kidnapper.

Last week an animal shelter confirmed that the girls had been reunited with most of the 12 pets that lived with them in their backyard encampment of ramshackle sheds and tents in Antioch, northern California.

“The five cats have been reclaimed and the three cockatoos, a pigeon and a pet mouse have gone to friends and family,” said the Martinez Animal Shelter. “We are still looking for homes for three dogs.”

The animals were a rare source of companionship and education for the trio — most of the books found scattered around the encampment were animal stories or pet manuals. Reuniting the girls with their pets is a significant step towards healing their psychological wounds, say experts.

Dugard's mother, Terry Probyn, 50, is writing a book about her experience of the “missing” years, during which she organised searches and poster campaigns to find her child.

The book, which will be published by a division of Random House next spring, will include a foreword by Dugard. But the publisher hopes that, after the legal system has dealt with the Garridos, she may write her own account of life at Walnut Avenue, the Garridos' home.

The publisher, Broadway, has agreed to place some royalties from Probyn's still untitled book into a fund to benefit all three captives.

Police believed that at the age of 11, Dugard was targeted by Garrido because his wife Nancy was infertile and he wanted “God's innocent vessel” to produce children.

In 1991, Dugard was walking towards a school bus stop when a car pulled up beside her and a woman bundled her into the back. The male driver accelerated away from her stepfather, Carl Probyn, who had tried to chase them on a bicycle.

Investigators say the girl was driven 170 miles to the Garridos' bungalow and initially locked in a chicken shed.

Garrido, 58, who was on probation for sexually assaulting a woman in 1976, was sent back to jail for three years in the 1990s but his wife kept Dugard prisoner, allegedly using her babies as hostages to prevent her from escaping. For many years Dugard told the children she was their sister.

Dugard is believed to have listened to advice from Elizabeth Smart, the 14-year-old Utah girl kidnapped from her bedroom in 2002 and found nine months later.

“Jaycee must enjoy the present, focus on the future, and put the past back into the trash where it belongs — and also go on holiday a lot,” said the fellow survivor.

Healing Nations. The practice, philosophy and language of healing and alternative medicine for ourselves, for our neighbourhoods and for our nations. The philosophy and language of healing and alternative medicine transferred into the social / political arena: transforming politics and communities and how our nations function. Healing Nations. The key to creating a society, to creating neighbourhoods, communities and nations, that will work for us all. HEALING, THE KEY TO THE 21ST CENTURY HEALING OURSELVES, HEALING NEIGHBOURHOODS, HEALING COMMUNITIES, HEALING POLITICS, HEALING NATIONS.

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Placebos work

If you thought the placebo effect was all in the mind, think again. Scientists have solved the mystery of why some people benefit from remedies that do not contain any active pain-relief ingredients.

Research suggests that placebos work, in part, by blocking pain signals in the spinal cord from arriving at the brain in the first place.

When patients expect a treatment to be effective the brain area responsible for pain control is activated, causing the release of natural endorphins.

The endorphins send a cascade of instructions down to the spinal cord to suppress incoming pain signals and patients feel better whether or not the treatment had any direct effect.

The sequence of events in the brain closely mirrors the way opioid drugs, such as morphine, work — adding weight to the view that the placebo effect is grounded in physiology.

The finding strengthens the argument that many established medical treatments derive part of their effectiveness from the patients' expectation that the drugs will make them better.

The latest studies on antidepressants suggest that at least 75 per cent of the benefit comes from the placebo effect. GPs also observe that patients report feeling better only days after being prescribed antidepressants, even though the direct effects take several weeks to kick in.

In the study, published today in the journal Science , the spinal cords of 15 healthy volunteers were scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The scan homed in on an area called the dorsal horn, which transmits pain signals coming up through the spinal cord into the pain-related areas in the brain.

During the scan, the volunteers received laser “pinpricks” to their hands. The volunteers were told that a pain-relief cream had been applied to one of their hands and a control cream to the other. But unknown to the volunteers, an identical control cream was administered to both hands.

When people believed that they had received the active cream, they reported feeling 25 per cent less pain and showed significantly reduced activity in the spinal cord pathway that processes pain.

Previously, it has been shown that placebo causes the release of natural opioids in areas of the brain involved in pain control, such as the rostral anterior cingulate cortex. However, it was not known whether the natural opioids acted on the spinal cord in the same way as artificial painkillers or whether they simply changed people's tolerance or interpretation of pain.

“We've shown that psychological factors can influence pain at the earliest stage of the central nervous system, in a similar way to drugs like morphine,” said Falk Eippert, of the University Medical Centre Hamburg-Eppendorf, who led the study.

Until now, the difficulty of obtaining MRI images of the spinal cord, because of its small size and its being surrounded by airways and pulsating arteries, prevented this question from being addressed. However, advances in image processing allowed the Hamburg team to obtain high resolution scans of the region.

The advance in imaging techniques is likely to have important applications for drug development.

Pharmaceutical companies are working to develop new anaesthetic drugs that target the pain pathways in the spinal cord. Being able to image this area of the body provides a direct way of testing whether the drugs are working as intended.

The findings will continue to fuel debate over the prescription of “sugar pill” cures. In a study in 2005, 48 per cent of Danish GPs admitted having prescribed a placebo at least ten times in a year. A variety of placebo cures, such as Obecalp pills for children , are also available on the internet.

A spoonful of sugar

• The children's medicine Calpol contains a little paracetamol but is generally seen as a sugar cure

• Scientists have shown that placebo surgery can be as effective as real surgery for conditions ranging from heart disease to arthritic knees

• Thanks to its strong placebo effect, spiritual healing is available on the NHS to cancer patients

• Placebos aren't limited to medicine — giving people decaffeinated coffee, but telling them it has caffeine in it causes them to perk up and similarly alcohol placebos can cause intoxication

• Some studies of placebo cures for animals show pets getting better, but it might just be owners anxiety that is being cured

Healing Nations. The practice, philosophy and language of healing and alternative medicine for ourselves, for our neighbourhoods and for our nations. The philosophy and language of healing and alternative medicine transferred into the social / political arena: transforming politics and communities and how our nations function. Healing Nations. The key to creating a society, to creating neighbourhoods, communities and nations, that will work for us all. HEALING, THE KEY TO THE 21ST CENTURY HEALING OURSELVES, HEALING NEIGHBOURHOODS, HEALING COMMUNITIES, HEALING POLITICS, HEALING NATIONS.

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Just four slices of bread made from wheat enriched by selenium-fortified fertiliser could increase levels in the population to recommended levels.

One expert said he was so convinced by the evidence he wanted to see Government action to make the addition of selenium to farm fertilisers routine.

The mineral, mainly obtained from wheat and other cereals but also brazil nuts, occurs naturally in the soil but only at low levels in Britain.

As a result consumption levels of selenium in the UK are about half what they should be.

Selenium is important to the immune system - especially for combating viruses such as the ones that cause flu - and hormone production.

It also reduces the risk of heart disease and certain types of cancer, notably prostate. In old age, selenium is believed to help the brain remain sharp and active.

Research also suggests that raising selenium intake from low to ideal levels can increase life span and boost fertility.

Professor Steve McGrath, a soil scientist from the Rothamsted research institute in Harpenden, Hertfordshire, described a new study in which fertiliser was used to raise selenium levels in bread.

Just 20 grams of selenium per hectare of wheat produced bread containing 10 micrograms of the mineral in each slice.

"Eating three or four slices would provide half the intake you need," said Prof McGrath, speaking at the University of Surrey in Guildford.

"If you like bread, then one of your staple foods would bring your selenium intake up to normal levels.

"By increasing levels of selenium in this way we should have people with less heart disease, better immune systems, more longevity, hopefully better brain function in old age, and better thyroids.

"We'd all generally be healthier and better able to combat viruses."

Healing Nations. The practice, philosophy and language of healing and alternative medicine for ourselves, for our neighbourhoods and for our nations. The philosophy and language of healing and alternative medicine transferred into the social / political arena: transforming politics and communities and how our nations function. Healing Nations. The key to creating a society, to creating neighbourhoods, communities and nations, that will work for us all. HEALING, THE KEY TO THE 21ST CENTURY HEALING OURSELVES, HEALING NEIGHBOURHOODS, HEALING COMMUNITIES, HEALING POLITICS, HEALING NATIONS.

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She has come up with a number of food types that have been scientifically proven to have preventative properties against the disease that kills 10,000 a year in the UK.

And to make their digestion more palatable she and her researchers at the University of Surrey have written the world's first “evidence based” recipes and published them in The Prostate Care Cookbook.

The superfoods include cruciferous vegetables like broccoli, cauliflower and brussel sprouts, allium vegetables like onions, garlic and leaks.

Tomatoes are also said to have preventative qualities as do brazil nuts, pomegranates and soya bean. Even the kidney in steak and kidney pie could have a beneficial affect.

“Most people with prostate cancer want to do something for themselves and I think diet is something they can do,” she said at the British Science Festival.

“I just wanted to write a cookbook that was backed up by scientific knowledge.”

As well as recipes such as cauliflower curry, the cookbook also offers useful tips for enhancing the health giving properties of food.

One included leaving garlic and onion for 10 minutes after chopping before cooking so that beneficial chemical reactions can take place.

Another is using rapeseed oil in cooking and eating cruciferous vegetables raw.

Healing Nations. The practice, philosophy and language of healing and alternative medicine for ourselves, for our neighbourhoods and for our nations. The philosophy and language of healing and alternative medicine transferred into the social / political arena: transforming politics and communities and how our nations function. Healing Nations. The key to creating a society, to creating neighbourhoods, communities and nations, that will work for us all. HEALING, THE KEY TO THE 21ST CENTURY HEALING OURSELVES, HEALING NEIGHBOURHOODS, HEALING COMMUNITIES, HEALING POLITICS, HEALING NATIONS.

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Road traffic pollution: Young and middle-aged people were found to suffer most, increasing the risk of strokes or heart attack, while elderly people were the least affected.

A survey was conducted involving almost 28,000 people living in Scania, Sweden, and conducted by a team at the country's Lund University Hospital.

Theo Bodin, one of the researchers, writing in the journal Environmental Health, says: “Road traffic is the most important source of community noise.

“We found that exposure above 60 decibels was associated with high blood pressure among the relatively young and middle-aged, an important risk factor for cardiovascular disease.

“The effect of noise may become less important or harder to detect, relative to other risk factors, with increasing age.”

Healing Nations. The practice, philosophy and language of healing and alternative medicine for ourselves, for our neighbourhoods and for our nations. The philosophy and language of healing and alternative medicine transferred into the social / political arena: transforming politics and communities and how our nations function. Healing Nations. The key to creating a society, to creating neighbourhoods, communities and nations, that will work for us all. HEALING, THE KEY TO THE 21ST CENTURY HEALING OURSELVES, HEALING NEIGHBOURHOODS, HEALING COMMUNITIES, HEALING POLITICS, HEALING NATIONS.

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Nicotine, the addictive component in cigarettes, “tricks” the brain into creating links between smoking and a feeling of well being.

Events such a drinking alcohol, dining with friends or even driving home from work can act as cues that give people the urge to light up.

Dr John A Dani, professor of neuroscience at Houston's Baylor College of Medicine, said: “The brain sends a reward signal when we act in a way that contributes to our well-being.

“However, nicotine commandeers this subconscious learning process so we begin to behave as if smoking is a positive action.”

The finding, in the current issue of the journal Neuron , were based on tests involving the behaviour and recorded brain activity of mice when exposed to nicotine.

Healing Nations. The practice, philosophy and language of healing and alternative medicine for ourselves, for our neighbourhoods and for our nations. The philosophy and language of healing and alternative medicine transferred into the social / political arena: transforming politics and communities and how our nations function. Healing Nations. The key to creating a society, to creating neighbourhoods, communities and nations, that will work for us all. HEALING, THE KEY TO THE 21ST CENTURY HEALING OURSELVES, HEALING NEIGHBOURHOODS, HEALING COMMUNITIES, HEALING POLITICS, HEALING NATIONS.

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Spiritual healing in NHS

If you see Angie Buxton-King at work on the cancer wards at University College Hospital in Central London, she looks like any other medic: alert, down to earth, overworked. But her talents are different - she is a spiritual healer, one of a handful on the NHS payroll. But she hopes that, with new research and regulation of healing, there may soon be more like her.

Cancer patients at UCH are offered a range of complementary treatments as well as chemotherapy and radiotherapy. These are provided by a four-strong team led by Buxton-King: two healers (Angie and her husband Graham), a counsellor and a massage therapist.

Their services are in great demand, which is hardly surprising: statistics suggest that about 90 per cent of cancer patients avail themselves of some form of complementary medicine.

In a small room behind the team's office, a CD of relaxing music is playing. The patient lies on a couch while Buxton-King runs her hands over him or her to “channel the healing energy”. Many patients report feeling heat emanating from the hands, and a feeling of profound relaxation and peace. Each session lasts for 15 minutes.

So how did this all start? In the late 1990s Buxton-King's son, Sam, was fighting leukaemia. “He wasn't expected to live longer than three months,” she says, “so we looked at alternative ways of helping him, and during the three more years that he lived, it became obvious that his quality of life was improved by healing.”

Buxton-King wanted to help other NHS cancer patients, and first offered her services to Great Ormond Street hospital. They were sceptical, so she went to UCH, where she asked Dr Stephen Rowley, the clinical director of haematology, for a chance to prove the need for her services and was taken on for a trial month, one day a week.

“At the end of that time they were very interested,” says Buxton-King. “The whole ward benefited - staff as well as patients.”

She was taken on for two days a week, and eventually made manager of the complementary team. Four other healers also work at UCH, paid for by a charity that Angie and Graham set up.

Now the team is fully accepted as integral to the treatment on the cancer wards. Dr Maria Michelagnoli, a paediatric and adolescent consultant oncologist, says: “I was a sceptic at first, but you can't question the results. I'd be devastated if we lost these professionals now.”

Dr Rowley says: “I see experienced doctors call for the healer to help to support a child having a cannula put into a vein. Patients benefit in many ways.”

Other experts concur. Derryn Borley, the head of support services at Macmillan Cancer Support, says: “There is evidence that it improves patients' moods and can help with physical symptoms. It also helps people to go through chemotherapy.”

Spiritual healing may be hands-on, hands-off or conducted from a distance. Practitioners say that they are channelling energy from a higher source. It is distinct from faith healing, requiring no shared religion between healer and patient.

Some scientists believe that, if it works, it is the result of a “healing intention” in the healer's mind. This might also help to explain why praying for the sick can help them to recover, as some research has suggested it does. A study in Israel, for instance, published in 2001, looked at two groups of people with blood infections, one prayed for, the other not. It indicated that the prayed-for patients had shorter stays in hospital, stayed feverish for less time, and were more likely to survive.

Professor Edzard Ernst, of Exeter University, studied 110 patients with chronic pain, half of whom were treated by professional spiritual healers, the other half by actors pretending to be healers. “The results were staggering,” he wrote. “Several patients practically abandoned their wheelchairs. But there were no differences between the groups - if anything, the control patients fared slightly better. This suggests that spiritual healing is a strong placebo but not much more.”

Naturally, full-time healers dispute this. “I wanted to see if it was true so for a while I just practised on animals. I still saw positive results,” says Buxton-King.

Patients also believe that something “real” is happening. Dr Anil Wijetunge, an NHS tutor, became sick with bone marrow cancer in 2005 and received spiritual healing at UCH. “Something was going on with the energy,” he says. “The healers knew which part of me was suffering the most.”

To raise funds for more NHS healers, Buxton-King set up the Sam Buxton Sunflower Healing Trust, which held “Sunflower Jam” concerts in 2006 and 2007. The next concert is due to feature a re-formed Deep Purple.

Could the NHS provide more support? Baroness Finlay, a professor of palliative medicine at Cardiff University School of Medicine, says: “It's not enough to say that spiritual healing makes patients feel better. Having a haircut might as well, but that doesn't mean the NHS should pay for it. We need evidence that it works.”

Anecdotal evidence from former patients is in favour, but some healers accept that further proof will be required - which is partly why Buxton-King is carrying out a trial this year on reiki, a form of spiritual healing used in Japan, which will be funded by UCH.

Another hotly debated area is regulation. A government working group chaired by Professor Mike Pittilo recently recommended statutory regulation for Chinese medicine and acupuncture, and last month Professor Pittilo wrote in The Times : “There is honest recognition that the evidence base for many [complementary] therapies is thin but, given the public demand for treatment, this should be addressed alongside the introduction of statutory regulation, rather than as a prerequisite.”

Regulating spiritual healers would be quite a challenge. There are 15,000 at work in the UK, and several governing bodies. But, says Buxton-King, “it's the only way it's going to go forward”.

Healing Nations. The practice, philosophy and language of healing and alternative medicine for ourselves, for our neighbourhoods and for our nations. The philosophy and language of healing and alternative medicine transferred into the social / political arena: transforming politics and communities and how our nations function. Healing Nations. The key to creating a society, to creating neighbourhoods, communities and nations, that will work for us all. HEALING, THE KEY TO THE 21ST CENTURY HEALING OURSELVES, HEALING NEIGHBOURHOODS, HEALING COMMUNITIES, HEALING POLITICS, HEALING NATIONS.

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Nice idea, Dave. Cut ministers' salaries, dump a third of their chauffeur-driven chariots and bump up the price of subsidised Westminster tuck to a level that might ring a bell with the humble voter. Isn't that just what we want to hear when we're still reeling from the pong of all the nasty stuff that steamed into our nostrils during the MPs expenses scandal?

David Cameron thinks so. But as the newly demoted Alan Duncan has pointed out — unwisely but pertinently — there are limits. He didn't quite say, pay peanuts and you get monkeys, but he is not the first to understand that if you cut the funding of our political leaders to the bone, it will be difficult to attract able — and potentially high-earning — people into politics unless they are independently wealthy.

Peter Davies is not wealthy. He is a retired religious studies teacher, but as the Mayor of Doncaster, an English Democrat elected in June at the height of the MPs expenses debacle, he is already putting Cameron's ideas to the test. Davies slashed his own salary from £73,000 to £30,000, disposed of the mayor's chauffeur-driven Toyota Prius and plans to cut the number of the town's councillors from 63 to 21.

“People are suspicious of anyone in local government,” he says. “I thought, let's go back to the days when public service was important and people gave of themselves to the town, show the people of Doncaster that I'm here to serve them and not in it for any self-gain. Here's a different agenda, one that appears to coincide with what the man on the Clapham omnibus is thinking.”

Davies prides himself on saying what he thinks. He supports “harsh punishment for young thugs” and promises to run a no-frills value-for-money bureaucracy that will maintain essential services and eradicate what he regards as politically correct dead wood. Yet his tactics are raising questions, not least one that is applicable to Westminster at a time when it suddenly feels bound to cut the cost of its workforce. Has Davies, who has never previously held a publicly elected office, got the experience and nous to take on a big political job?

Prior to his administration Doncaster had been led by a socialist council for 35 years. Did the voters realise how right wing he is? “I don't think I am right wing. Labour voters will tell you they're in favour of capital punishment, they're fed up of Eastern European immigration. People can just wander into the country willy-nilly. Right, left and even centre have gone.” So where do you stand? “I don't know. I stand where the ordinary citizen stands who feels neglected by the three main political parties.” Do you support capital punishment? “Yeah, I do.” To what extent? Hanging? “I'm not bothered what the means is.”

It's the “don't know” words that are strange in a political context, and Davies uses them a lot. He wants to tackle antisocial behaviour but doesn't know how this will work, he wants to remove PC jobs but doesn't know where they are in his council, he doesn't know how much money he has saved because he hasn't yet added it up, and replies by working through the individual items. This may be honest, guileless and entirely lacking in spin — but do we want to be led by people who can't anticipate, who admit they don't have answers? Doesn't good leadership depend on a sense of confidence and certainty that provides security for those operating below?

We are in the mayor's office, a plain room in an ugly 1960s tower block once used by the National Coal Board. The grey walls are scuffed and there is no computer on Davies' desk — he doesn't use them, and neither does he accept calls on his mobile phone. It is hard to guage how his populist messages are going down in Doncaster — and whether Cameron might learn a lesson from him. Speak to people in the streets and it seems that they have yet to form an clear opinion, though he says his office has received 2,000 e-mails of support. There is a campaign against him on the internet, and there are others who dissect the moments when he has been unguarded and unprepared but the mayor doesn't read their rumblings.

If the majority have yet to make up their minds about him it is perhaps because while he is well-intentioned and has a remarkable lack of ego for a politician, he doesn't come across as a man who listens. Did he expect to be elected? “No.” Was he ready for it? “Yes.”

That is hard to believe. What did he mean when he wrote in his manifesto that he would scrap politically correct non-jobs “and encourage the former employees to seek meaningful employment”.

“It was a throwaway remark, wasn't it?” Can there be such a thing in politics? “My manifestos are truthful but there's an element of humour in there. I get quizzed on every nuance but my manifesto is going to be kept far more than any political party's has been kept in the past.”

Davies is 66, the son of a socialist butcher from a mining background, and a Conservative mother from a farming family. His childhood on a farm outside Doncaster was idyllic, and for the first ten years of his adult life he voted Labour.

In 1973 he attended a Mayday socialist rally, realised he didn't fit in, and joined the Conservative party three weeks later. Twenty years after that, when John Major signed the Maastrict treaty, Davies joined UKIP, but left when it split in 2000. He joined the English Democrats five years later, and supports its call for a separate English parliament.

“It's a very popular message, I tell you. Dead easy. You would reduce the number in Westminster, throw that lot out altogether, probably only need 50 of them to do things like defence and law and order.

“National politics should listen to what people want. What we've got is a patronising and condescending approach from the three main parties, they know best, there's no debate, completely out of touch with the public. We're full of professional politicians, people who have no experience in life of anything outside that cocoon of the House of Commons.”

True, Davies has lived outside that cocoon. He has spent 30 years entertaining children in classrooms, he maintains — “A teacher has got to be a ham actor” — and now he lives in a small detached house with his second wife and two cats, drives himself to work in a Nissan Almeira Twister, and uses his leisure time reading Thomas Hardy, watching cricket and betting to support his part-ownership of three horses. There are those who think he is admirable, others who would describe him as an amateur who is on a steep learning curve.

“If you tell people things as they are, and you're honest, then you're halfway there,” he maintains. “There's a difference between mistakes in policies or things that I don't do, and words and nuances.” Which will come as news to Westminster.

Britain now has one of the worst teenage drop-out rate of any developed country.

Only Turkey, Israel and Brazil have more 15 to 19-year-olds not in education, employment or training according to the report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

The UK also has among the highest numbers who fail to complete their higher education — with vocational courses having particularly low graduation rates.

The figures, from a wide-ranging study of the international education landscape before the recession hit, indicate that the situation for teenagers in the UK is now even more severe. Andreas Schleicher, of the OECD education directorate, said that young people are less well equipped to weather the storms of the economic crisis. “Those with better qualifications have better life prospects," he said. “At the other end [among those with fewer qualifications] there is rapid deterioration.

“It will get more difficult. Young people who become unemployed, stay unemployed. If you get out of the labour market it's going to be hard to return if you don't have qualifications.”

The UK has more than double the average number of teenagers not in some kind of work, training or education in the OECD.

It jumped from sixth to fourth worst between 2006 and 2007 with 14.5 per cent of 15 to 19-year-olds not in school, work, or training compared with 10.9 per cent in 2006 and 9.3 per cent the year before.

“Younger cohorts are typically more sensitive to changes in supply and demand for skills as they try to get a foothold in the labour market,” the report's authors said.

Jim Knight, the Employment Minister, admitted that there was still more to do to help young people.

"This report highlights the improvements made to the quality of the education young people receive. But in the current recession we are doing everything we can to ensure young people can still make the most of their talents and skills.

"We are investing £1 billion in the Future Jobs Fund which will create 100,000 jobs specifically for young people, giving them the vital first steps on the ladder."

The report also found that graduation rates in the UK have stalled. Britain has had a graduation rate of 39 per cent since 2004 — but the OECD average has now caught up, suggesting that Britain has reached its limit in terms of participation rates in higher education.

Mr Schleicher suggested that more private investment in tertiary education was needed if the UK is to increase its participation rate. This finding reinforces calls for an increase in tuition fees, expected in the Government's review of university funding to begin before the end of the year.

But the report's authors warn that increasing the number attending university will be detrimental for those without skills.

“If too many individuals with higher levels of education are entering the labour market young individuals with lower levels of education will find it increasingly difficult to find skilled jobs, increasing the advantage of older cohorts,” the report said.

The UK has increased its spending on education and is now at the OECD average of 6.1 per cent of GDP on schools and universities.

But Mr Schleicher warned against spending cuts during the recession, which he said was the time to invest in the education sector in order to drive economic recovery.

As our alternative, Healing Nations makes this very simple point:

Do not ask: 'what sort of teenage drop-outs does our country have?'

Ask instead: 'what sort of country are to have such drop-outs?'

So long as e continue to ignore the real need to recreate communities and neighbourhoods, we will not solve or heal our social and political problems.

Healing Nations. The practice, philosophy and language of healing and alternative medicine for ourselves, for our neighbourhoods and for our nations. The philosophy and language of healing and alternative medicine transferred into the social / political arena: transforming politics and communities and how our nations function. Healing Nations. The key to creating a society, to creating neighbourhoods, communities and nations, that will work for us all. HEALING, THE KEY TO THE 21ST CENTURY HEALING OURSELVES, HEALING NEIGHBOURHOODS, HEALING COMMUNITIES, HEALING POLITICS, HEALING NATIONS.

John Kampfner writes in the Times:

Why is it that so many people are willing to give up their freedoms in return for an easy life? The question goes to the heart of the political and economic crisis that is afflicting countries around the world, whether they are considered authoritarian or democratic.

This is what I call the pact . In each country it varies; citizens hand over different liberties in accordance with their own customs and priorities. In some it is press freedom; in some it is the right to vote out their government; in some it is an impartial judiciary; in others it is the ability to get on with their lives without being spied upon. The model for this new world order is Singapore, the state in which I was born, and which has long intrigued me. I am constantly struck by the number of well-educated people there who defend a system that requires an almost complete abrogation of freedom of expression in return for a good material life.

The pact belongs not just to states in transition such as Russia and China. It belongs also closer to home. Citizens in all systems have colluded, but in the West we colluded most. We had the choice to demand more of our governments, to rebalance the relationship between State and individual, but for as long as the consumerist going was good we chose not to exercise it. What mattered, particularly for the middle class, were “private freedoms” — the right to own property, to run businesses according to contract law, the right to travel unimpeded and the right to determine one's own personal life.

The unspoken trade-off was this: the State would resist the urge to intervene in the private realm as long as the citizen did not “cause trouble” in the public realm. Public freedoms became disposable.

During the past two decades of globalised glut, the pre-eminent freedom was financial — the right to earn money and to consume it unimpeded. Political leaders such as Gordon Brown even extol shopping as a patriotic duty. This, combined with the internet and other technological advances, created a cultural homogeneity not seen before. The super-rich, the quite rich and the aspiring rich, whether in Shanghai, São Paulo or South Kensington, inhabited a uniform world of the same designers, the same communications tools and the same holiday destinations. A cultural conformism was born, a herd mentality that provided an easy environment for those in power to operate in.

My travels took me to a beach party for the wealthy in Moscow (where they imported the sand from the Maldives), to a round-table discussion at a golf club in Shenzhen, to behemoths of excess in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, to maudlin conversations with sacked newspaper editors in Italy, which by any standards of political and constitutional theory is close to being a failed state. They took me to anti-corruption local politicians in Mumbai and to American liberals.

Nowhere, however, has left me as depressed as Britain. From ID cards and CCTV, to a national DNA database, to long periods of detention without charge, to restrictions on protest, to the most stifling libel laws of any equivalent nation, the UK Government has rewritten the relationship between State and the individual. In doing so, it has met little popular resistance.

For a decade, Britons enjoyed increasing prosperity, indulging in their favourite hobby of borrowing and spending money. The people that really mattered, the top 1 per cent, were pampered as never before. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown resisted all attempts to tax or regulate them. When I once wrote about Singapore that the State was “providing a modicum of a good life, and a quiet life, the ultimate anaesthetic for the brain”, I could have easily been referring to my own country. The tragedy is that Britain had an extraordinary opportunity to combine an emphasis on social justice with civil liberties. By the end of the new Labour era, not only are these liberties in jeopardy, but representative democracy has rarely been weaker.

Yet much of the rage directed at politicians is synthetic. It is hard to make the case that the people were duped. Blair and Brown had been fairly frank about their priorities. The role of government was to create the environment for wealth creation, and to use all the forces at the disposal of the State to stop those who threatened that good.

What does all this say about us and about our choice of freedoms? In the end, how important is public freedom? In Britain pockets of civil society remain strong. But how much change has it really brought about? How many fall into the category of troublemakers? What percentage of the population consists of NGOs, defence lawyers, dissenters or investigative journalists? How many people take part in marches? Participatory democracy has all but disappeared. And even where it has occasionally broken through into the mass consciousness, such as the huge anti-war march in London in 2003 on the eve of the Iraq conflict, it made no difference.

Will a new generation of world leaders produce something different and more inspiring, a post-crash version of freedom that inspires and addresses the many iniquities around the world? I fear the answer is a resounding “no”, although I hope I am proven wrong. People's priorities reflect the socio-economic conditions of their time. So although it may have been the bankers and hedge fund managers who caused the immediate mess, the bigger culprits were we, the people, particularly in the West, for allowing democracy to mutate into something it should never have become — a vehicle to deliver consumption.

In Britain, as elsewhere around the world, a critical mass of people vested in their leaders almost unlimited powers to determine questions of liberty. In return they were bought off by a temporary blanket of security and what turned out to be an illusory prosperity.

Freedom for Sale by John Kampfner is published today by Simon & Schuster

Simon Heffer writes: Since McKinsey and Co, the consultancy company, is not a registered charity, I presume it cost the taxpayer a substantial amount for the firm to conduct an efficiency review into the National Health Service. Having commissioned the report, the Department of Health took one look at its main finding – that 10 per cent of NHS staff should go in order to achieve efficiency savings – and rejected it. If you seek an example of how superbly the Government spends money, this is a magnificent one.

Any fool knows that the NHS is overmanned: perhaps not with doctors and nurses, but certainly with bureaucrats and support staff. Even the fools who run the Department of Health must have realised that if they asked McKinsey to do this job, it would find there were too many people on the payroll. To order this review and then to reject it immediately is completely obtuse.

Having read some of the findings of the report, even I would not agree with all of them. I doubt it is sensible, with our ageing population, to pursue a goal of fewer doctors and nurses. But it has long been apparent that the NHS is an organisation that exists as much for the benefit of many of those who work in it, as for those it purports to treat. It is also apparent that, despite numerous reforms since it began in 1948, it is shaped by an immediate post-war ideology that has about as much relevance today as Bile Beans and Craven "A"s. No private-sector health concern would begin to think of running itself as the NHS does: it would be bankrupt within weeks. But then no private-sector health concern has as its mission in life the provision of jobs for Mr Brown's client state.

Labour rejected McKinsey's plans because it deemed them politically unworkable. It is not prepared to have a mature conversation with the British people about how their right to a health service free at point of use would not be affected by a desire to secure better value, in an economy that is cruising towards bankruptcy. Sadly, the Tory party doesn't want to have this conversation, either. Feeling morally blackmailed by a climate in which public spending, irrespective of the value obtained from it, is a good thing, it too has dismissed McKinsey, though with the caveat of saying (quite rightly) that there are bureaucratic jobs that can be lost.

Given the expense of the NHS – more than £100 billion a year, or about a seventh of total public spending – cowardice about how to reform it is not an option. It is derelict of anyone who seriously wishes to govern this country to say that we can go on in the same bloated, welfarist way that we have pursued since 1948. For a failure to get costs under control will, sooner rather than later, ensure that those same vulnerable people the NHS is supposed to help are at risk of having very little decent care at all.

The bold move for a government to take would be to contract out the management of the NHS. Hospitals, then possibly even whole health authorities, should be franchised out to the private sector, to break the culture of jobbery and self-serving trade unionism that has handicapped the development of the NHS. The service would still be free at point of use: but it would be delivered more efficiently. As McKinsey found, some hospitals are abominably wasteful. The rescue of the whole NHS should start with them.

Of course, all our politicians can carry on claiming that value doesn't matter, and believing that there is a bottomless pit of money to run our health-care service. In the suffering this will inflict on patients in the long term, it reveals an utter unfitness to govern.

Daily Telegraph

NHS nurses aree criticised today for their cruel treatment of more than a dozen elderly patients. A report published by the Patients Association, a health watchdog, records 16 incidents of people left lying in their own faeces and urine, having call bells taken away from them and being left without food or drink. One former nurse told of the substandard care she received as a patient, describing her experience as “scary”. The Patients Association said one hospital had threatened it with legal action if it chose to publish the material, but added that there was a “striking similarity between many of the cases — nearly all of them centre on concerns over basic nursing and domiciliary care.” It urged the Government and the Care Quality Commission, the health regulator, to conduct an “urgent review of the standards of basic care” in hospital, and called for tougher inspections and regulations. Jayne Knowles Smith, 49, a nurse with 30 years' experience, said she witnessed “nursing from another angle as a patient” of the Gloucester Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. “I'm not sure if it's the training that's lacking, the basic skills or just understaffing,” she said. She criticised the way fluids were taken from her and then monitored in the treatment of her heart disease. Other examples of poor care included that of the late Professor Leslie Vaughan, 81, a leading vetinary surgeon who was fitted with a leaking urinary catheter while being treated for stomach cancer. The hospital involved, run by West Hertfordshire Hospitals NHS Trust, said it had responded to a complaint and had expressed its “sincere condolences”. Adrian Goddard, following the death of his 82-year-old mother, Pamela, claimed she was “often found in her own faeces and urine” at the Royal Surrey County Hospital, before she suffered an “agonising death from a bedsore”. Surrey and Sussex Health NHS Trust said it was carrying out an investigation after receiving a complaint about Mrs Goddard's treatment. In a foreword to the report, compiled from a database of complaints received by the association, Claire Rayner, the organisation's president, said she was “sickened” by the incidents, and called for the nurses responsible to be struck off. “For far too long now, the Patients Association has been receiving calls on our helpline from people wanting to talk about the dreadful, neglectful, demeaning, painful and sometimes downright cruel treatment their elderly relatives had experienced at the hands of NHS nurses,” she said. The former nurse and television agony aunt, added: “I am sickened by what has happened to some parts of my profession of which I was so proud. “These bad, cruel nurses may be — probably are — a tiny proportion of the nursing work force, but even if they are only 1 or 2 per cent of the whole they should be identified and struck off the register.” Katherine Murphy, the charity's director, added that the stories were often about the most vulnerable elderly and terminally ill patients. “These accounts reveal patients being denied basic dignity in their care — often left in soiled bed clothes, being given inadequate food and drink, having repeated falls, suffering from late diagnosis, cancelled operations, bungled referrals and misplaced notes. “There are also worrying instances of cruel and callous attitudes from staff towards vulnerable and sometimes terminally ill patients.” The Government's chief nursing officer, Christine Beasley, said that all patients deserve the highest quality of care from the NHS but added that the report did not reflect the majority of people's experiences. “The poor care received in these cases is simply unacceptable. “Where care falls below expected standards, this can be distressing for the patients concerned and their families and we expect trusts to take immediate action to investigate and ensure this does not happen again.” “The NHS treats millions of people every day and the vast majority of patients experience good quality, safeand effective care - the Care Quality Commission's recent patient experience survey shows that 93 per cent of patients rate their overall care as good or excellent.” Peter Carter, chief executive of the Royal College of Nursing (RCN), added: “We will not condone nurses who behave in ways that are contrary to the principles and ethics of the profession. “However, we believe that the vast majority of nurses are decent, highly skilled individuals.”

As our alternative, Healing Nations says that so many of the problems that occur in the British National Health Service have nothing to do with resources but having everything to do with the size of the organisation. The National Health Service is the third largest employer in the world. Local accountability is vital. Neighbourhoods need to have real input into how their hospitals are run. National guidelines can operate, but local communities need to ensure that those guidelines are followed. We should also be looking to involving patients' families far more. If doctors and nurses are freed to concentrate on medical and cleanliness issues, and families and volunteers are employed to concentrate on care issues, we could transform not only the service we are able to give our patients but also the atmosphere and moral of our hospitals. Healing Nations. The practice, philosophy and language of healing and alternative medicine for ourselves, for our neighbourhoods and for our nations. The philosophy and language of healing and alternative medicine transferred into the social / political arena: transforming politics and communities and how our nations function. Healing Nations. The key to creating a society, to creating neighbourhoods, communities and nations, that will work for us all. HEALING, THE KEY TO THE 21ST CENTURY HEALING OURSELVES, HEALING NEIGHBOURHOODS, HEALING COMMUNITIES, HEALING POLITICS, HEALING NATIONS.

There was a time when characters in children's books enjoyed wonderful adventures after which they all lived happily ever after. By contrast, a former children's laureate warns, reality weighs heavily on today's young readers. Anne Fine says that cosy tales in which children's characters looked forward to future adventures has been replaced by gritty stories that offer no hope for their protagonists. Contemporary literature is dauntingly bleak, with depressing endings that do little to inspire. “In the Fifties, when a strong child was dealing with difficult circumstances, there was always a rescue at the end of the book and it was always a middle-class rescue,” she says. “The child would win a scholarship to Roedean or something, and go on to do very well. That was felt to be unrealistic and so there was a move away from that. Books for children became much more concerned with realism, or what we see as realism. “But where is the hope? How do we offer them hope within that? It may be that realism has gone too far in literature for children. I am not sure that we are opening doors for children who read these books, or helping them to develop their aspirations.” The bestselling writer makes her comments at Compelling Novels, Vulnerable Children, an event organised by the umbrella group Children in Scotland for the Edinburgh Book Festival. She says she does not want to see a return to the standards of Enid Blyton, but she is worried about the effect that gloomy books can have on children. “I can't see how we roll back from this without returning to the sort of fiction that is no longer credible — books with a Blyton-ish view of things.” Her concerns are not shared by Anthony Browne, the current Children's Laureate, who believes that a lot of children's literature remains upbeat. “There are both types of endings, happier and unhappier. I prefer open endings. I don't think we are living in an age of depressing, dark endings. If you look at Jacqueline Wilson, she does deal in gritty realism, but her books don't lack aspiration.” He recently changed the ending to his forthcoming book — Me and You, a retelling of Goldilocks and the Three Bears in which Goldilocks comes from an impoverished background — so that the ending was less miserable. “My original version had Goldilocks being chased out of the bears' house and her ending up on bleak, dark streets. I decided to give it a more ambiguous ending, so now she is running toward something that may or may not be her mother.” Fine was accompanied on the panel at the book festival talk by Melvin Burgess, whose children's books have dealt with child abuse in a care home and teenage heroin abuse. Burgess argued that young people had a right to know about the seamier side of life. “I think well-informed young people are better able to deal with things they may come across,” he said. “I have had letters talking about the humanity of my books, even when the situations the characters are in are very dark and difficult. Just the fact that they are still making jokes and falling in love. Perhaps the light of hope comes from the reader and not the story.”

Great ape guide to a Great Reform Act We need to rediscover personal familiarity in our political life, says the creator of Yes, Minister. But how? The answer lies in the history of human evolution In 1962 I became editor of Tonight , a nightly topical programme on BBC television. My first crisis was Don Haworth's decision to apply for a producer post in Manchester. It was a crisis because Don was our best film director. He did not want to leave, but he needed the extra money. I tried to get his salary increased, but he was already at the upper limit of his grade, so I failed. On the same day, I had a visit from Administration. They had a crisis, too: they had underspent on their office furnishing budget. Would I like new carpets, curtains and chairs? The amount available was more than it would have taken to keep Don in London, and, since our furnishings were fine, I asked if Don could have the money instead. As anyone who has worked in a government bureaucracy could have foretold, it was completely out of the question. Administration would never transfer a penny to Personnel, and even if they would, Personnel was handcuffed by the BBC's grade structure and remuneration policy. I mention this incident because it was the point at which I realised the folly, waste and destructive nature of bureaucracy. The higher up decisions are made, the worse they are likely to be. The higher up money is spent, the more likely it is to be wasted. Bureaucratic empire-building is not a distortion of the natural order, but a response to a basic human need. People in large organisations will always strive to enlarge their staff, increase their budgets and widen their areas of authority and jurisdiction. It is a cancerous growth. Over the past 200 years, central government has sucked authority, decision-making and independence out of local communities. It has drained money out of the pockets of citizens, and has created a vast proliferation of tribunals, inspectorates, regulatory authorities, quangos and councils. In addition, central government has taken on an army of consultants, advisory committees, czars, action groups and task forces, and printed millions of questionnaires, guidance notes, instructions, licences, tick boxes and leaflets that, between them, have created the bureaucratic nightmare of 21st-century Britain. What is remarkable about this change is that no one set out to make it happen. No plan, no plot, no conspiracy. But the effect is, as more and more observers have been pointing out, that the people of Britain are not represented in Parliament, but governed by a self-serving, almost unaccountable political class. It may be that the parliamentary expenses scandal will provide the impetus for change. But what change? If we are to reform our inefficient and unrepresentative political system, we must rediscover and reinstate the personal knowledge, the common interest, the trust and the day-to-day, face-to-face familiarity that holds groups together and enables them to function as political units. And over the past 50 years or so, it has become apparent that we carry the answer within us. The study of evolution, in particular of the social evolution of the great apes, has revealed that we have a natural group size — or to be more exact, a number of natural group sizes — which have taken us down from the trees and up to the Moon. Any system that is to work must follow our evolutionary nature. For millions of years, we evolved as primates in groups of 50 or so, which is still the size of a normal group of our nearest relatives, the gorillas and chimpanzees. Although we split from them about six million years ago, this group size persisted. It is found everywhere: small businesses, departments of larger ones, common rooms, military squadrons. It is a size people are happy with. You know everyone, you know what they do and how well they do it; you notice when they are not there. Any system of representative government must re-create these evolutionary groups. It is not a big deal. All that is required is a street representative for each group of 20 to 30 households, available to hear queries, complaints or suggestions, and calling occasionally to give information or warnings. Through their street representative they are locked into the community. This platform of existence, many millions of years old, continues today with the gorillas and chimpanzees. But some time after our ancestors, the hominims, split from them, a profound change took place. That change was the emergence of the tribe. It did not mean losing the primate group; that is still within us all. It meant the coming together of a number of groups, so that instead of rival groups of 50 to 60 individuals roaming the area, the landscape was dominated by co-operative groups of 500 to 600, who formed a single social unit.This number of around 600 is firmly in our nature. It is as large a group as we can belong to, where we can all know each other. When the hunting tribes turned to agriculture 10,000 years ago, it became the farming village. As industry developed, it became the mill or pit village. Right into the 19th and 20th centuries, tribe membership was lifelong: cities grew up, but around and within them, the tribe where you were born and raised, where you lived, worked and died, formed the limits of the human world that supported your existence and defined your identity. Look around the developed world and you find tribes everywhere. Not birth-to-death tribes, but working communities of a few hundred people (often within large organisations) who spend most of the week in contact with each other. Armies come in all shapes and sizes, but the building blocks are battalions and regiments of 500 to 600. That most decimal of people, the Romans, had a tent of 10, and 100 men under a centurion, but each unit was the cohort of 600. Practical businessmen will tell you that 400 to 750 is the largest number that a single boss can run. Private schools that are free to choose their own numbers usually stop at 600, even if it is profitable to accept more. Actors will tell you that a full house of 600 is the most satisfying to play to; something is lost when the audience gets bigger than 1,000 (indeed, a few hundred is the largest number that can reasonably be addressed by the unaided human voice in the open air). So a tribe of 600 members is the largest possible natural unit of the human community. And yet, outside rural areas, this ancient grouping has no administrative recognition. There is no problem about putting this right, since outside large towns and cities, the basic structure is retained in parish councils. So the first necessary reform is to create city villages, areas of some two or three hundred households, electing their own village councils (the street representatives). Any reform that leaves money and power in the same hands will be ineffectual tinkering. The city village councils must have a budget, and they must have the authority to make some decisions — on their playschools or parking restrictions — that affect the community. Some experts believe there is one other unit which has its genetic base in human evolutionary history. They put this last unit, the supertribe, at 6,000. This would comprise ten tribes, ten being the largest practicable number for the ancient- human hunting band or the modern committee. The leaders of the tribes form the supertribe's leadership. The supertribe, the market town of a few thousand, is a number we have been happy with over the centuries. It can be self-sufficient in a way that a village of a few hundred cannot. Our cities are full of these potential market towns; 6,000 is the sort of number that can support a shopping parade, a school and all the services for everyday living. It is not that long — a few hundred years — since towns that size ran themselves with minimum help or interference from above. They still could. Six thousand may sound a small number, but a government budget of £600 billion means that such a group contributes and consumes £100 million a year. At the moment, each citizen deals separately with an absurd range of government institutions, whereas almost all of these transactions could be carried out at the offices of his city township. Creating suburban townships would not simply involve removing work from the bloated centralised agencies. It would mean turning the whole system on end and running Britain from the bottom up. Of course, there will be services the city townships will need higher authorities to provideand there will have to be equalisation payments from rich areas to poor areas. And the State will need armed services, a foreign service, a Treasury. But once the huge mass of work dealing with individuals has been handed back to the townships, the size, cost and complexity of the higher levels of government would be drastically reduced. Central taxation would be slashed and replaced by local taxation, raised and spent by the townships. Local people have a strong incentive to economise — it reduces their tax payments. All this may sound like abstract theorising. In fact, it is the rediscovery of something we have known and possessed for a long time, but have unintentionally lost. The restoration of city villages and townships means getting government back in line with our evolutionary nature — humanising it. It's time to rediscover lost truths. The time for a new Great Reform Act has come. — A New Great Reform Act by Antony Jay will be published by the Centre for Policy Studies on 17 July.

Hundreds of secondary schools across Britain are wondering if they are still on a government hit list. Last year they failed to reach the government's minimum target of 30 per cent of pupils gaining five or more GCSEs, including English and maths. However, as an example one head teacher has still not heard from the government as to whether they have now been take off the hit list. The head teacher says: “We have moved from a failing school to being above the national average. But we have not heard from anybody what this means. Nobody has confirmed whether or not we will remain in the National Challenge... If the National Challenge brings me a string of advisers, I don't want anything to do with it. If they give me cash to hire more English and maths teachers so I can reduce class sizes, then I'll have it. Ben Slade, principal of Manor Community College in Cambridge, is also unsure of his school's current status. “There has been no communication with schools apart from a folder with cartoons on the front and a letter from Ed Balls saying we have got to come together to make schools better. Nowhere in any of this information is there anything to say that if you do well you will be taken off (the hit list). We have been offered no extra money, nothing has come to us and they don't even know how much money is available, everyone is poking around in the dark waiting for the next announcement from the Government.”

1. As our alternative, Healing Nations says there must be services to which we can relate, to which we can feel we have ownership. Part of our problem is that we just feel like numbers. In terms of our health, these proposals could have us feeling like mere pieces of meat, mere presenters of symptoms.Healing Nations. The practice, philosophy and language of healing and alternative medicine for ourselves, for our neighbourhoods and for our nations. The philosophy and language of healing and alternative medicine transferred into the social / political arena: transforming politics and communities and how our nations function. Healing Nations. The key to creating a society, to creating neighbourhoods, communities and nations, that will work for us all. HEALING, THE KEY TO THE 21ST CENTURY HEALING OURSELVES, HEALING NEIGHBOURHOODS, HEALING COMMUNITIES, HEALING POLITICS, HEALING NATIONS.

2. As our alternative, Healing Nations says to give us a sense of ownership it should not be central government that is forever deciding how our services should be structured. This should be decided at a local level. British politics needs to change. Politicians need to change. The entire political system needs to change. Healing Nations. The practice, philosophy and language of healing and alternative medicine for ourselves, for our neighbourhoods and for our nations. The philosophy and language of healing and alternative medicine transferred into the social / political arena: transforming politics and communities and how our nations function. Healing Nations. The key to creating a society, to creating neighbourhoods, communities and nations, that will work for us all. HEALING, THE KEY TO THE 21ST CENTURY . HEALING OURSELVES, HEALING NEIGHBOURHOODS, HEALING COMMUNITIES, HEALING POLITICS, HEALING NATIONS.