Clay Harris

Every time I read about an alleged “war on Christmas”, I think of my mother, who’s been fighting on one front in that battle for a long time.

Even now, she’s making sure that she sends no card with a nativity scene or any other religious subject, and that any postage stamp she uses only bears a secular image. “Season’s greetings” as a message? Yes, please, that’s what she prefers.

Clay Harris

Each season, Charlton Athletic designates one home match “Red, White and Black Day” to recognise and celebrate the diversity of its community. While we long-suffering Addicks wish Charlton were as successful as a football team as it is as a social outreach agency, it’s an important and clear statement.

I wonder if it could also inspire a solution to the controversy and increasing ambiguity surrounding another annual tradition – the wearing of poppies for Remembrance Day.

Ellen Barnes

Dinner party conversations tend to be comfortingly familiar. For years, the 'ludicrous' rise in the value of the family home was discussed in terms of mock horror. Now that one's a definite dead duck, the new topic could well be the even more ludicrous need for perfectly well meaning people to undergo a Vetting and Barring Scheme check.

'Have you been done?' 'Who did they ask about you?' 'How long did you have to wait for the all clear?' 'Who's taking the kids to rugby meanwhile?'

With ten round the table, the conversation could see them through starters, main course and half way through pudding.

If we had any sense, we'd rise up en masse and tell the Department of Children Schools and Families to stick its Vetting and Barring Scheme and concentrate its resources on known offenders, children on the 'at risk register', training and supporting social workers - and leave the rest of us alone.

The government cites over and over the Baby Peter and the Soham murders as a grave warning and to justify a database they expect will contain details of one quarter of the adult population.

Across the Pond

The war for healthcare reform continues to rage here in the United States. I know it must be bewildering for some of you (why in the world would anyone fight against universal health coverage?), but believe, me it’s bewildering for us Americans too; and in the long hot summer recess, cable news adds fuel to the fire.

Londinium

When it comes to health spending, Shadow Chancellor George Osborne says only that "we will work hard to protect it".

That’s the new Conservative position, according to The Guardian, which published an interview with Mr Osborne today.

A word of caution – the interview does not tell us exactly what Mr Osborne said about the NHS, quoting only those seven words, which were presumably part of a longer sentence.

But if the impression the Guardian gives is correct, it looks like a major change of policy.

Up until now, the Conservatives have insisted they would “ring-fence” health, so that the NHS was spared from any cuts an incoming Tory government would have to make to public spending.

While other departments might see their budgets reduced, the Department of Health would be immune.

This commitment helped Mr Cameron counter Labour’s traditional charge that the Conservatives could not be trusted to run our hospitals.

And it actually allowed the Tories to claim they cared more about the NHS than Labour – because Gordon Brown has refused to make a similar commitment about his Government’s spending plans if Labour does win the next election.

But there is a huge difference between a firm pledge not to make cuts and a promise to “work hard”.