800 waiting to commit suicide, Labour hits the skids and the future of Comparative Studies was never so bright

Yes. I know. Reminds me of Comparative Studies at uni. Especially that analysis of the Sun newspaper we did which deconstructed the pictures on page 3 and that small news item on the right. You know the one. The story which invariably went along the lines of "Dirty habit shock as bishop caught with cassock down!".

So it is that the Observer presents us with two entirely unrelated stories this morning that nevertheless feed off each other in an entirely unhappy manner. First, Alan Johnson vigorously massaging expectations as Labour hits the skids:

Alan Johnson, the cabinet minister widely tipped as a successor to Gordon Brown, prepared Labour for disaster at the polls as he predicted it would suffer the worst local and European election results in its history.

In a candid admission last night, the health secretary said he expected all three mainstream parties to do "badly" in Thursday's polls. But he believed that Labour would be hit hardest by the overwhelming tide of public anger over the MPs' expenses scandal. Raising his profile as a future leadership contender, he told the Observer: "If you are asking me for an honest assessment about whether recent events will have an effect, they are bound to, because we are the brand leader, we are the party of government and it will have more of an effect on us than the other parties."

More here.

Meanwhile, the waiting-list of those with terminal illnesses who are looking for an alternative to waiting it out just gets longer and longer. If Alan Johnson is the page 3 girl, this report is the bishop:

Record numbers of Britons who are suffering from terminal illnesses are queueing up for assisted suicide at the controversial Swiss clinic Dignitas, the Observer can reveal.

Almost 800 have taken the first step to taking their lives by becoming members of Dignitas, and 34 men and women, who feel their suffering has become unbearable, are ready to travel to Zurich and take a lethal drug overdose.

The tenfold increase in the number of Britons who have joined Dignitas since 2002 will raise questions about the law that bans assisted suicide in Britain.

More here.

Make of it what you will. Being a member of any political party must be a miserable place to be at the moment but being a member of the Labour Party is masochism of the highest order.

Dave asked us to fuck New Labour last night.

Maybe its critics are right. Maybe the banking crisis and the hidebound traditions which have led to the scandal of MPs' expenses are two sides of the same coin. I am certainly aware of glass ceilings in the company I work for beyond which not only do certain types of people never progress but also certain behaviours never appear. Open and honest communication is reserved for the ordinary workers. Meanwhile, top management play games with everyone's futures and get us into the kind of mess we now find ourselves all suffering from.

David Cameron may win the next general election but he will fail Britain as a nation, because he truly proposes nothing new. If New Labour has looked after its own over the past decade, it's clear the Tories have no intention of playing - in any way - a different game. The only things that will ever change are the constituencies of voters in question, the captive audiences that leaders psychologically stroke, the sponsors, the hangers-on, the lobbyists, the guilty or embarrassing parties who must be hidden, the spin doctors and the marketing analysts. But the structures of communication, integration and dialogue will continue to maintain the same hierarchies.

That is why Cameron will never be capable of changing anything.

He is part of the problem, not the solution.

As Dave (Semple) might've said, if he wasn't so explicit and given to Anglo-Saxon epithets: "A plague on all your houses!"