Every year, millions of women leave their own families in Africa and Asia to look after other people's in the west. But many domestic workers find themselves abused, beaten, raped, even murdered. Foreign Reporter of the Year Dan McDougall travels from Manila through the Middle East to London to hear their stories
Out on the estuary, fishermen and day traders motor battered aluminium canoes through waves of steaming rubbish. Beyond are the skyscrapers of downtown Manila and the chaos of the streets - the calls of hawkers and warbling Pinoy radio music mingling with the snarling engines of Jeepney taxis stalled in traffic and the shrill whistles of traffic police, trying to rein in the uncontrollable energy of one of the world's most frenetic cities.
We are perched on the stilted home of Maritess Ruga, which looks out over the vastness of the Tondo slum - a floating city of rusted roofs. As the teenager is gutting a rotting pile of tilapia, blood runs down her wrists and elbows. Inside the two-room hovel, her three younger siblings and an elderly aunt are gathered around the small television set, silently engrossed in one of Manila's favourite soap opera's, Dahil sa Iyong Paglisan (Because You Left), a ham-fisted tele-novella based on the hardships endured by the Philippines' eight million or so foreign workers. On the wall above the crackling TV is an oversized photograph of the children's mother. Shrine-like, the photocopied image is surrounded by rosary beads, candles and plastic flowers. \"She works as a maid in Dubai, like all our mothers,\" says Maritess. At 15 she has had to take on the role of family matriarch. Her father is sleeping, as usual, on the mat he shares on the narrow balcony with two stray dogs.
Like most of the slum's eldest daughters, Maritess has been up since dawn preparing the home and will go to bed only after her day's chores are finished. It's been this way since she was nine. In Tondo, a local schoolteacher told me a few days later, the schools don't have parents' nights - the children are brought up by their older siblings. In most families, one or both parents are working abroad. \"This is the Philippines in 2009,\" the teacher tells me. \"Slum girls like Maritess face two tough choices for their future: to provide for their family they can go into prostitution, or they can go abroad, like their mothers.\"
Today, the slum mothers of Manila Metro are permanently elsewhere, maids and nannies to the world, with about one in seven Filipino workers abroad at any given time. It's a worldwide phenomenon. About 300m economic migrants from India, sub-Saharan Africa, South and Central America and southeast Asia are scattered across the globe, supporting a population back home that is closer to a billion. Were these international foreign workers to constitute a state, a migration nation if you like, it would rank as the world's third largest. They are an economic powerhouse. Migrants from the developing world sent home an estimated $300bn last year.
Consider the figure. It's nearly three times the world's foreign-aid budgets combined. These sums, or \"remittances\" as they are known, bring Morocco more money than tourism, Sri Lanka more money than tea and, in the Philippines, this foreign legion of workers is so essential to the government that the economy would collapse without them. More than half the world's migrants are women, many caring for children abroad while leaving their own at home.
More than any other country, though, the Philippines has become synonymous with migrant labour. In Greece, for example, the modern Greek word for a maid is a \"Filipineza\". The most recent figures show that there are 1.2m Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) registered in Saudi Arabia, closely followed by Japan, Hong Kong, the United Arab Emirates and Taiwan. And with workers in at least 170 other countries, OFWs are everywhere, including the high seas. About a quarter of the world's seafarers come from the Philippines. But behind the hard-earned dollars sent home, there are many tales of abject exploitation and sorrow, sexual abuse, violence and even murder.
A tattered billboard welcomes drivers on the dusty highway that winds its way towards the down-at-heel town of Alaminos, 170km north of Manila: \"May God Praise Our Seafarers and Overseas Foreign Workers\". Underneath the sign is the sponsor of the tribute, the town's largest shopping mall, which has sprung up largely on the back of OFW remittances. Just short of her 22nd birthday, Jennifer Perez would have passed the same sign as she left her village home in the northern Luzon province of the Philippines in the summer of 2006.
Like most migrant domestic workers heading for the Middle East, she packed a roll-on bag, stuffed with loose clothing, befitting Jordan, the Muslim country that would become her new home. Fatefully, she also packed her aunt's mobile phone to allow her to text her parents. Clutched in her left hand was the rosary her mother had given her before departure. She was proud of the carefully laminated documents in her luggage: certificates for 12 hours of on-the-job-training in elderly care, first aid, CPR and hospitality services, and the driver's licence she would never get to use.
A college graduate with a degree in physical education and dance, Jennifer had signed up to work for two years in the Jordanian city of Irbid, a dusty, nondescript settlement an hour north of Amman. A few days later, barely 24 hours after arriving in Jordan, Jennifer fell asleep in her small room in her employers' house. She was woken by her female employer (a dentist whose husband was a member of the prominent Obeidat tribe), who stormed into the room with the mobile phone that had been hidden in Jennifer's luggage, and threatened to confiscate it. Like most foreign domestics, Jennifer was banned from having contact with the outside world.
A fight broke out between the two women and, moments later, Jennifer fell four storeys from the kitchen veranda, landing squarely on her back. As the young woman lay in a coma in a Jordanian hospital, her employer claimed it was a suicide attempt. Jennifer's family say their daughter, like hundreds of Filipina workers in the Middle East over the past two decades, was simply thrown off the balcony. The woman was arrested and charged with assault as Jennifer, by now a quadriplegic, fought a losing battle to stay alive. Her employer was released after posting an undisclosed bail.
Speaking two years later from Alaminos, Jennifer's father, Herminiio, himself a former OFW in Saudi Arabia, claims his daughter's death - and those of hundreds of domestic workers abroad - is a tragedy of globalisation.
\"It is easier for these girls to go abroad than ever, with agents now paying their airfares and then taking half their salaries,\" Herminiio says. \"My daughter was a slave. She was treated like an animal, a nothing. Every day we read in the newspapers about families who have gone through similar hell: young girls raped, abused, beaten, murdered. A transaction seems to take place when a Filipina domestic helper goes abroad. When she steps over the threshold of her employers' home she gives up her human rights and her freedom. My message to these girls is the money is not important. Poverty is terrible, but it allows its own freedoms from violence and abuse.\"
What made his daughter's story harder to take was the fact that it took so long for her to die - nine months in total. \"We had to fight to get her home,\" says Herminiio. \"We were crippled with medical expenses and had to hold a television appeal to raise funds for her flight. She came home a quadriplegic and died of a broken heart, despite being surrounded by the people she loves and who loved her. Every time a domestic helper returns to the Philippines dead, why is she always ruled to have killed herself? Why are so many of our girls killing themselves, jumping out of windows, off roofs and balconies; are they all insane?\"
Migrants have been leaving the Philippines in search of work for decades. The key difference now, however, is where they migrate to. Mired in red tape and post-9/11 paranoia, the US is no longer an attainable promised land. That role has been taken on by the Middle East. The big Arab oil states have small populations but, until recently, grand development ambitions. Only through foreign labour can their lofty aims be achieved, which is why more than 14m migrants, many of them Filipino, are active in the Arabian peninsula alone.
The winter rain is whipping off the Mediterranean sea and pounding the stained glass windows of the 17th-century crypt in the heart of Old Beirut. Inside, the narrow pews are packed with browbeaten women: a league of nations in their Sunday best - maids from India, Sri Lanka, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Ethiopia and the Philippines. Below, in the catacombs, there is only silence. There, the women who have chosen not to be part of the morning congregation sit and contemplate their lives. In the darkness of the church, they seek sanctuary from their lives as slaves. In the past two years alone, more than 100 maids have died in Beirut in sinister circumstances, victims of abuse by cruel masters and mistresses. Countless more have been beaten, raped and even tortured. The walls of the basement are plastered with \"Missing\" posters of maids who have fled abusive owners, their whereabouts now unknown.
One unnamed Ethiopian maid, in a government hospital after \"falling\" from a 12th-floor balcony, says her Lebanese employer pushed her off. The police, as is normally the case, dispute her claim and are hoping to deport her as soon as possible. The 25-year-old's testimony, which has been made public, is chilling: \"Madam asked me to hang the clothes. Then she came and pushed me from behind.\" Too frightened to let her name be published, she said her employer had frequently threatened and abused her. \"Madam would tell me, 'I will spill hot oil on you.' She would take a knife and threaten to kill me. She would beat me with shoes, pull my hair to the floor.\"
Her testimony, along with thousands of others', has been gathered by Human Rights Watch (HRW). The group claims that, every week, one of an estimated 200,000 migrant domestic workers in Lebanon dies. Normally it is recorded as \"suicide\" or falling while trying to escape their employer. Another major cause of death is untreated illness - hospitals cost money and maids aren't seen as worth the expense. HRW claims that maids in Lebanon, as elsewhere in the Middle East, are increasingly vulnerable to beatings, rape and murder - and there are no laws to protect them from abusive employers.
Indrani Ekanayaka is a 27-year-old Sri Lankan who has lived for the past year in the basement of a Beirut shelter run by the Christian charity group Caritas, after fleeing an abusive employer. She says there are thousands of women like her still suffering in silence. \"I was paid for the first year and a half, but then I wasn't paid for the next eight years. When I asked for money, Madam would swear at me and break glasses against the wall. I was only given some bread and rice to eat. Fruit was forbidden. I was not allowed to speak to my parents. They thought I had died,\" she says, the tears welling up. \"I managed to escape. I got a copy of the key they used to lock my door at night and I crept out. I'm certain if they'd caught me they'd have killed me. I filed a police report, but they only told me I would be deported. Now, they have a new maid, a Filipina. They are abusing someone else. I came to Beirut from Lebanon because I had the chance to help build a home for my parents and sisters, but my life is a nightmare.\"
Indrani, who has four sisters at home and a family torn apart by the country's civil war, believes she has let her family down. \"My family expected great things of me, that I would have enough money for a house and a good life, but all I have had is torture and misery and I am left with nothing to show for it. I am penniless. I think I will go back next year and then I will probably have no option but to try another country. I know there is no work for me at home and that's why there are so many young Sri Lankan women all over the world, suffering like me, to send money home.\"
The majority of abused domestic workers in Beirut, however, are Filipina. One is Mila, 27. \"I left Manila for Beirut at 22,\" she says, \"because it was an easy choice to make. Stay and watch my family starve or leave and help to feed and clothe them. My parents were getting elderly and it was me and my sister's jobs to make sure they were secure. I approached an agent in Manila who told me a job in Beirut as a domestic maid, a cleaner, a cook and a babysitter rolled into one would make 10 times as much as I could make in Manila. I accepted on the spot and my parents spent their last few pesos for admission to the airport lounge from where I left. And then I suppose they went home to cry and wait for the money. I wasn't paid for a year and my sister was also struggling abroad, so they had to rely on loan sharks.\"
When Mila arrived in Beirut she was imprisoned in the basement of a home with only iron bars for a window. \"It was damp and it felt like a torture chamber. At times my madam, who told me she was my 'owner', made me do everything. I had to cut her toenails, scrub her feet, wash her clothes, cook and clean. I had to look after her nephews, light her cigarettes. My life was a living hell. Her partner would try and molest me and threatened to tell the mistress I was a prostitute if I didn't comply. I only managed to escape in the end because I got a letter out to a lawyer who turned up at the door and then the mistress simply threw me out on the street. I'm still fighting to get my salary from her. She owes me a year and a half's wages, about $5,000.\"
Nigerian Agnus Iyo Emeka, 27, is another maid at the Beirut refuge. She came to Lebanon to be a domestic worker, suffered beatings and torture at the hands of her employer and was sexually assaulted by her employer's husband. \"Many women who come to the centre talk about how they are treated as sex objects by the Arab men,\" she says. \"It starts off with simple groping, but in most cases ends up in full rape. I was assaulted by my owner's husband. I also had a friend who was raped; she lived in the same apartment block and the man of the house raped her every day for months, until she jumped from a third-floor window and broke her pelvis. So many young women have died in Beirut. I have personally known two who have died - I knew them from church. Praying one day and dead the next.\"
Another victim of abuse in the Beirut refuge is Ayalnesh Alameraw, a 26-year-old from Ethiopia. \"I came from Addis Ababa five years ago. An agent approached my parents and offered to take three of their daughters to 'Europe', but they only took me. My sisters were spared. I thought I was going to London. I had never heard of Beirut until I boarded the plane.\" Ayalnesh was taken to the agency offices and given her uniform, a pink domestic outfit, but no training. \"My first madam was the cruellest woman I have ever met,\" she says. \"I was beaten for staining clothes and fined six months' wages for 'damage'. I was beaten with shoes, belts and even a thin iron bar. I tried to escape five times and each time I was taken back to her by the police. They always caught me and ordered me to return or I would be put in prison. They never listened to any of my stories. They didn't waste a single drop of ink on me until I jumped from a fourth-floor window. Looking over a balcony and being so desperate to escape that you will risk your life is impossible to explain to someone who has never been imprisoned. You may think being imprisoned in a tiny apartment isn't really a prison, but in a city where you have no voice and no rights and nobody hears your screams or cries for help you are in a hell.\"
When Ayalnesh recovered from her fall she was sent to a detention centre to await deportation. \"My madam filed a complaint with the agency and accused me of stealing. I was inside the centre during the 2006 bombing campaign by the Israelis and we thought we would be buried alive in the rubble.\" The sick went untreated, and almost everyone, eventually, in the stifling summer heat, became ill. \"As the war continued we became a hindrance and six of us were taken to Caritas, who still look after me now. I can't go back to Addis. I have a family of seven brothers and sisters and my parents are simple cattle raisers. I have more chance of being a success abroad.\" Ayalnesh, like many foreign workers, believes her best chance of being treated fairly is now in London, a growing market for domestic workers.
A ragged flock of starlings flies across the roof of the Kalayaan drop-in centre in Holland Park, west London. It's a hard building to find. The narrow entrance blends into the concrete facade rendering it almost as invisible as the women the unit was created for. Only thin writing scratched on the buzzer identifies your location. In the adjacent courtyard, wealthy Londoners sit in the garden of a wine bar. Laughter fills the air. Above them, in a cramped office, domestic workers sit crouched over plates of noodles speaking to each other frantically in broken English.
\"The foreign girl next door to you in London never rests,\" says Gita, a maid from northern India. \"She works day and night and is never allowed to leave the apartment. She sleeps in the kitchen with the dog. She does the dirty work. She wipes the bottoms of the young and the old, she gives baths, she washes clothes. She barely eats. That is my story, this is my life even now.\" And according to Gita, this is the story all over London. \"It is happening next door to many of you,\" she says, \"but you just don't realise it. The girl escapes, but her owner finds her in the street and takes her back. I was held prisoner for two years and I wasn't paid a penny for my last year's work. This is the dream your country has to offer.\"
Around Gita, the other women softly clap their hands in timid solidarity. Few have the confidence to raise their own voices. Britain, and London in particular, is one of the fastest growing markets in the world for recruiting foreign domestic workers. Many of these workers are migrants, serving \"cash-rich, time-poor\" British families as cleaners, nannies and cooks. Behind closed doors many are exploited and abused. Kalayaan, a campaigning group for migrant domestics, recently conducted a survey which showed that 86% of migrant maids work more than 16 hours a day, 71% have been deprived of food, 32% have had their passports withheld by their employers and 23% have been physically abused. Many of the women who visit the Kalayaan shelter sleep in hallways or in converted cupboards in small London apartments.
Gita, who now works for a new family, also claims, like many of the domestic staff, to have been sexually abused. \"I worked for an Indian family in Hampstead. There were bars on the basement window where I slept. At first I only had a duvet cover to sleep on and then later a mattress on the floor. I was up at 5am to prepare roti for the madam and I worked until midnight each night. Sometimes I wasn't given any food and was pushed around by their eldest daughter. Although I shopped for the children's food, the wife never asked me to eat with them. I felt she would notice if I ate their food, so I borrowed money from a neighbour's maid to buy noodles and ate when I could.\"
The family told Gita they were sending her money home, but they never did. \"The husband would come home and make advances on me. After a few months he started raping me. This went on for five months. Many of the maids in the UK are sexually abused, but are too frightened to report it for fear of deportation. Eventually I broke down in tears in front of his wife, but she didn't believe me, and later she was so furious she came at me with a hot iron. I realised she was going to burn my face. I put my arm up when she charged at me and she burnt that instead. Later that night she threw me on the street at 3am and I turned to Kalayaan.\" Proving what happened to Gita is impossible, she says.The family left Britain earlier this year.
Another London-based worker, Divia, reveals how she was forced to sleep on the stone floor of her madam's kitchen in the West End. She was fed so little her eyesight started to fail and she began to show symptoms of severe malnutrition. Her diet was entirely based on leftovers from the family table. \"I was so thin I would faint with hunger. But I have heard stories worse than mine in Kalayaan. When I hear of young girls who work for Arabs in London swallowing acid it makes me depressed. I know that could have been me.
\"Sometimes I feel thankful that I had the strength not to try and take me own life. The women I met here are so filled with sadness, they are constantly on the verge of tears at the abuse they receive behind closed doors, but they have no voice and are too terrified of the authorities to trust them. They have seen other women deported for causing a fuss.\"
According to Kalayaan, stories like Divia's are not uncommon. In the past few weeks a domestic worker in Knightsbridge, who cannot be identified for legal reasons, attempted suicide after years of abuse by her employer. The woman, a Filipina, swallowed acid and is now permanently disabled. Scotland Yard is investigating the case.
Kalayaan spokeswoman Jenny Moss believes the situation is not improving. \"There is a saying here which is used by the Filipina workers: 'Kung walang hirap, walang ginhawa', which means 'Without suffering, there can be no ease,'\" she says. \"Many of these women enter their working relationships here in Britain quite simply expecting to be treated badly. At Kalayaan we register about 350 new domestic workers each year, the majority of whom have been exploited or abused in the UK. Domestic workers are dependent on one employer for their work, their immigration status and their accommodation, and this makes them extremely vulnerable. They often feel they have little choice but to accept their working conditions - no matter how abusive.\"
It is late in downtown Manila. A young prostitute, no older than 14, stands in a yellow mini-skirt in front of a paunchy Welshman who has, fingers clicking, called her out from a group of around 30 skinny girls. As he heaves himself off a tiny bar stool he flicks up her skirt at the front to inspect her and with a wave of his hand sends her back to the goldfish bowl they stand in. Outside on Burgos Street, one of the most notorious red-light strips in Asia, the dark skies finally open up, breaking the intolerable humidity. Within moments the hot rain runs down the heavily made-up faces of the lowly street girls, the youngest of all the prostitutes, pathetic and ghoulish in their thin clothes and tottering high heels. Sheltering under the awning of a snack bar, Cristiana puts her hands out for a cigarette and shivers.
\"The rain is bad for business,\" says the 15-year-old. As she speaks, she absentmindedly scrawls her number in the menu of the café she is taking shelter in. The menu she is holding is scribbled over with messages: \"Hi! Hello! My name is Maria.\" \"I'm Tina. Call for your heart's desire.\" Inside the café western men bounce tiny Filipina girls on their thighs like babies, the youngsters' infantile appearances exaggerated by their white ankle socks. The younger they look the more money they will make.
\"I want to go to Europe, to work abroad as a massage therapist or a nurse. I would be happier there,\" says Cristiana. \"I am working here to pay my way through my entrance exams to become a nurse. That is the dream we all share. To leave these islands for a better life.\"
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Climate change is greatest humanitarian challenge facing the world as heatwaves, floods and forest fires become more severe
Climate change is already responsible for 300,000 deaths a year and is affecting 300m people, according to the first comprehensive study of the human impact of global warming.
It projects that increasingly severewill be responsible for as many as 500,000 deaths a year by 2030, making it the greatest humanitarian challenge the world faces.
Economic losses due to climate change today amount to more than $125bn a year - . The report comes from former UN secretary general Kofi Annan's thinktank, the Global Humanitarian Forum. By 2030, the report says, climate change could cost $600bn a year.
Civil unrest may also increase because of weather-related events, the report says: \"Four billion people are vulnerable now and 500m are now at extreme risk. Weather-related disasters ... bring hunger, disease, poverty and lost livelihoods. They pose a threat to social and political stability\".
If emissions are not brought under control, within 25 years, the report states:
• 310m more people will suffer adverse health consequences related to temperature increases
• 20m more people will fall into poverty
• 75m extra people will be displaced by climate change.
Climate change is expected to have the most severe impact on water supplies . \"Shortages in future are likely to threaten food production, reduce sanitation, hinder economic development and damage ecosystems. It causes more violent swings between floods and droughts. Hundreds of millions of people are expected to become water stressed by climate change by the 2030. \".
The study says it is impossible to be certain who will be displaced by 2030, but that tens of millions of people \"will be driven from their homelands by weather disasters or gradual environmental degradation. The problem is most severe in Africa, Bangladesh, Egypt, coastal zones and forest areas. .\"
The study compares for the first time the number of people affected by climate change in rich and poor countries. Nearly 98% of the people seriously affected, 99% of all deaths from weather-related disasters and 90% of the total economic losses are now borne by developing countries. The populations most at risk it says, are in sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, south Asia and the small island states of the Pacific.
But of the 12 countries considered least at risk, including Britain, all but one are industrially developed. Together they have made nearly $72bn available to adapt themselves to climate change but have pledged only $400m to help poor countries. \"This is less than one state in Germany is spending on improving its flood defences,\" says the report.
The study comes as diplomats from 192 countries prepare to meet in Bonn next week for UN climate change talks aimed at reaching a . \"The world is at a crossroads. We can no longer afford to ignore the human impact of climate change. This is a call to the negotiators to come to the most ambitious agreement ever negotiated or to continue to accept mass starvartion, mass sickness and mass migration on an ever growing scale,\" said Kofi Annan, who launched the report today in London.
Annan blamed politians for the current impasse in the negotiations and widespread ignorance in many countries. \"Weak leadership, as evident today, is alarming. If leaders cannot assume responsibility they will fail humanity. Agreement is in the interests of every human being.\"
Barabra Stocking, head of Oxfam said: \"Adaptation efforts need to be scaled up dramatically.The world's poorest are the hardest hit, but they have done the least to cause it.
Nobel peace prizewinner Wangari Maathai, said: \"Climate change is life or death. It is the new global battlefield. It is being presented as if it is the problem of the developed world. But it's the developed world that has precipitated global warming.\"
Calculations for the report are based on data provided by the World Bank, the World Health organisation, the UN, the Potsdam Insitute For Climate Impact Research, and others, including leading insurance companies and Oxfam. However, the authors accept that the estimates are uncertain and could be higher or lower. The paper was reviewed by 10 of the world's leading experts incluing Rajendra Pachauri, head of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change, Jeffrey Sachs, of Columbia University and Margareta Wahlström, assistant UN secretary general for disaster risk reduction.
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• Record numbers want assisted death
• Lords will hear plea to overturn law
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.
On Tuesday, 46-year-old Debbie Purdy, who suffers from progressive multiple sclerosis, will go to the House of Lords, the UK's highest court, asking it to determine whether her husband Omar Puente will be prosecuted if he helps her to travel abroad to die.
The 34 Britons given what Dignitas calls a \"provisional green light\" to die have provided documentary evidence of their condition and been interviewed by both a doctor and Ludwig Minelli, the founder of Dignitas, and satisfied them that they are mentally fit to make such a decision.
One of the 34 is due to undertake an accompanied suicide very soon. Four have already secured fixed dates for their deaths, but adjourned them. The remaining 29 have not yet arranged a specific date.
A further four British people failed to get Dignitas's permission after the Swiss doctor who examines all applicants said they should not be helped, either because they did not have an incurable illness or were judged not of sound enough mind to reach such a decision.
Dignitas figures also show that 15 Britons took their lives there in 2003, 26 in 2006, eight in the first five months of 2008 and 23 in the past 12 months.
The disclosures will reopen the highly charged debate about euthanasia. This week, an influential group of peers, led by two former ministers in Tony Blair's cabinet, will seek to end what they see as the outdated and inhumane situation in which relatives or friends risk up to 14 years in prison if they travel with a loved one undertaking assisted dying overseas.
The peers - led by Lord Falconer, a former lord chancellor, and Baroness Jay, a former leader of the House of Lords - will table an amendment to the Coroners and Justice Bill in an attempt to lift the threat of prosecution from people in England and Wales who want to support someone in their final moments.
The 1961 Suicide Act criminalises anyone who aids, abets, counsels or procures someone else's suicide, and some relatives who have travelled have been questioned by police on their return. However, government law officers have already admitted that no one who goes abroad for that purpose is likely to face prosecution.
\"It's a tragic anomaly that people who are giving a last loving assistance to a loved one find themselves under threat of 14 years' imprisonment if they do,\" Jay said last night. \"Having made the very difficult decision to travel abroad to somewhere like Switzerland, where assisted dying is legal, someone would want the sort of support they would expect here from a husband, wife or loved one. The law in this area is a fudge and parliamentarians are lagging behind public opinion on this.\"
Prominent peers with legal or medical backgrounds are backing the move, including Lib Dem barrister Lord Lester, Baroness Greengross, the former head of Age Concern England, and Lord (Naren) Patel, chairman of the National Patient Safety Agency.
If they win - and they are increasingly confident - it would force the government to take a view. It used parliamentary procedure to prevent voting in March on an identical amendment in the Commons, which had been proposed by Patricia Hewitt, the health secretary until 2007.
Lesley Close, who travelled to Dignitas with her brother, John, in 2003 when he ended a life overshadowed by motor neurone disease, said: \"More and more British people will be joining Dignitas and travelling to Switzerland to die because more people are aware of the compassionate and peaceful death you can achieve there.
\"The interest in Dignitas among Britons underlines the case for reform of the law here. We need the same facility here [as Dignitas]. It's a perfectly rational and humane decision to end your life if you are suffering intolerably at the end of a terminal illness.\"
Sarah Wootton, chief executive of Dignity in Dying, which campaigns for a new right to assisted dying, said: \"These figures show that the situation in this country is forcing people into difficult and dangerous decisions - to go abroad for an assisted death, or ask their doctor or a relative to help them die, or to attempt suicide themselves, some of which end up being botched.
\"There is clearly a growing demand in this country for a well regulated, legal right for people with terminal illness, who are mentally competent, to end their life if they choose to.\"
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• Racism allegation hits South African production
• Scene unsuitable for child audiences, woman says
A theatre production designed to promote inter-racial harmony in South Africa has been hit by recriminations over an onstage kiss between a white and a black actor.
Carolyn Forword walked out of a production of The Pied Piper of Hamelin after being directed to kiss fellow cast member Unathi Dyantyi repeatedly on the lips.
Forword, 22, argues that the kissing was not suitable for the touring production's audiences of young children. Dyantyi counters that her description of the kiss as \"unhygienic\" was racially motivated, an allegation she vehemently denies.
The row engulfing The Pied Piper, which has three white actors and one black, has underlined how even the apparently liberal arts are not immune to South Africa's ongoing sensitivities around race.
Dyantyi, 28, said Forword pushed him away and shrank from kissing him during performances of the play. \"I felt like a piece of shit every time we had to do it because of the way she treated me,\" he said. \"She didn't want to kiss me. She said she found it unnecessary and the kiss was unhygienic.\"
\"I'm speechless. What's unhygienic about the kiss? And what's unnecessary about it? It is necessary for what the director is aiming to do. He's trying to convey a message that it's OK for different cultures to fall in love. We're a multicultural country and we're trying to convey that.\"
The Riverside Theatre Company, based in Cape Town, had hoped to take The Pied Piper to Forword's former school, but she apparently objected. Dyantyi added: \"I gathered she didn't want her parents to see their kid being kissed by a black dude.\"
\"She's been trained as an actress at drama school, yet she has a problem with kissing. This has never happened to me before. There is still racism in South African theatre today, but it's very subtle.\"
Forword withdrew after 12 performances of The Pied Piper, leaving another actor to take over the remaining 50 shows. She adamantly denies the accusations of racism, which first appeared in the Sowetan newspaper.
\"It is a play for eight-year-olds,\" she said. \"They wanted me to kiss the guy for 20 seconds, which is inappropriate for that audience. It wouldn't have gone down well at a Catholic school, for example. It would have been unhygienic because it was a travelling show. I pulled out because the director never gave my agent an idea of where we were staying. It had nothing to do with the kissing thing. But now I'm seen as a racist.\"
The play's director, Leslie Ehrhardt, supported Dyantyi's account. \"Without a doubt there was a racial element from the word go until the very end,\" he said. \"Carolyn underlined it with her general behaviour towards Unathi. She pushed him away and her face was screwed up, as if kissing him was the worst thing in the world.
\"She said to me in rehearsals that her doctor told her it was unhygienic to kiss on the stage. That took me by surprise. When we going to her old school, she said it would not go down well with her people, or words to that effect.\"
Ehrhardt, 42, added: \"It's a horrible situation. It undermines what people did here in the 60s, 70s and 80s in using theatre to challenge apartheid. Racism isn't significant in South African theatre and we shouldn't be talking about it.
\"South Africa is 15 years into its new democracy. This lady is 22 and she would have been brought up in a different way from me and others of my age and older. I was really shocked about what happened.\"
Forword has made a series of complaints against Ehrhardt over issues such as living conditions, transport and what she termed his \"inappropriate behaviour\".
Prominent members of the British National party are today revealed as Nazi-sympathisers and racists with abhorrent views on such diverse issues as teenage violence, David Beckham and even David Cameron's deceased son, Ivan.
The revelations undermine the party's attempts to paint itself in a more moderate light before the local and European elections and threaten to derail the electoral ambitions of its leader, Nick Griffin, who is standing as a prospective MEP.
At a time when BNP activists are claiming a surge in support in the polls, a reflection, they say, of mounting public outrage over MPs' expenses, the party has been keen to portray itself as a viable alternative to mainstream political parties.
The BNP website boasts that money is flooding into its campaign headquarters. Its administration consultant, Jim Dowson, claims the party's call centre alone received just under 12,000 calls in the first 15 minutes following the BNP's first national television broadcast. And in emails to supporters - or \"patriots\" as the BNP calls them - Griffin claims almost £400,000 has been stumped up by supporters to help fund the party's European election campaign.
It claims the apparent groundswell in support is down to the \"British public waking from the long, deep sleep\". Much of the BNP's recent success has been down to its ability to shake off the patina of far-right extremism that has alienated most voters since its inception. But this month the veneer slipped when it emerged that a Salford-based BNP candidate in the European elections had set his Facebook status to read \"Wogs go home\". Eddy O'Sullivan, 49, wrote: \"They are nice people - oh yeah - but can they not be nice people in the fucking Congo or... bongo land or whatever?\" O'Sullivan, who also joined an internet group called \"Fuck Islam\", denied that the comments were racist and insisted they were made in private conversations between individuals. \"I also may have had a drink at the time,\" he added.
Amid the furore, the BNP's leaders promised an investigation into O'Sullivan's comments. The party's officials also circulated urgent emails urging its members that \"particular care should be taken when making comments on chat forums and other sites such as Facebook. Do not make the mistake of thinking that comments posted on these sites are secret or hidden. Making inappropriate comments on these sites will be regarded as a very serious disciplinary offence. Please ensure that this message is passed quickly to all members in your area and that it is acted upon. We are entering a very critical time in our party's history and cannot afford careless and stupid talk that can undermine the hard work of our activists.\"
But the anti-fascist organisation Searchlight has spent months infiltrating the far right's network of websites and chatrooms and found that many BNP activists share O'Sullivan's views.
They include:
• Jeffrey Marshall, senior organiser for the BNP's London European election campaign. Following the death of David Cameron's disabled son Ivan, Marshall claimed in an internet forum discussion: \"We live in a country today which is unhealthily dominated by an excess of sentimentality towards the weak and unproductive. No good will come of it.\"
Later, in response to comments made by others on the site, Marshall is alleged to have written: \"There is not a great deal of point in keeping these people alive after all.\" He said the comments were private and some had been paraphrased and taken out of context. He admitted making the former comment, but said he could not recall making the latter one in an email to the forum, a copy of which is in the Observer's possession.
• Garry Aronsson, Griffin's running mate for the European parliament in the North West, posts an avatar on his personal web page featuring a Nazi SS death's head alongside the statement, \"Speak English Or Die!\" Aronsson proclaims on the site: \"Every time you change your way of life to make immigrants more comfortable you betray OUR future!\" He lists his hobbies as \"devising slow and terrible ways of paying back the Guardian-reading cunts who have betrayed the British people into poverty and slavery. I AM NOT JOKING.\"
• Barry Bennett, MEP candidate for the South West, posted several years ago under a pseudonym in a white supremacist forum the bizarre statement that \"David Beckham is not white, he's a black man.\" Bennett, who is half-Jewish according to the BNP's deputy leader, Simon Darby, continued: \"Beckham is an insult to Britishness, and I'm glad he's not here.\" He added: \"I know perfectly respectable half-Jews in the BNP... even Hitler had honorary Aryans who were of Jewish descent... so whatever's good enough for Hitler's good enough for me. God rest his soul.\"
• Russ Green, MEP candidate for the West Midlands, posted recently on Darby's web page: \"If we allowed Indians, Africans, etc to join [the BNP], we would become the 'British multi-National party' ... and I really do hope that never happens!\" Darby said he echoed Green's sentiments.
• Dave Strickson, a BNP organiser who helps run its eastern region European election campaign, carried on his personal \"Thurrock Patriots\" blog a recent report of the fatal stabbing of a teenager in east London beneath the words \"Another teen stabbed in Coon Town\". The site also carried a mock-up racist version of the US dollar entitled \"Obama Wog Dollar\". Darby said the BNP did not endorse these comments and described them as \"beyond the pale\".
When confronted in the past about the extreme views of some of its members, the BNP senior hierarchy has often tried to dismiss them as unrepresentative of the party's core membership. But it appears that they run right to the top of the party.
Lee Barnes, the BNP's senior legal officer and one of Griffin's closest allies, has posted a video on his personal blog of a black suspect being beaten by police officers in the US and describes it as \"brilliant\". Barnes adds: \"The beating of Rodney King still makes me laugh.\"
Barnes told the Observer his comments were \"nothing to do with colour\" but were merely a reflection of his belief that the police should have more powers to punish perpetrators of crime by \"giving them a good thrashing\".
But anti-fascist groups said such comments portrayed the BNP in its true light. \"This is the face of the modern BNP,\" said a spokesman for Searchlight. \"The comments of Nick Griffin's candidates and officials are sickening beyond belief. They have tried to hide their agenda of racism and hate from the voters, and they have failed.\"
Separately, concerns exist about the historic links between the BNP and extremist groups. Gary Pudsey, a BNP organiser running the Yorkshire and Humber campaign, was once a regular at National Front meetings. A young Pudsey was also photographed with the late Max Waegg, a Nazi second world war pilot who wrote articles for the white supremacist magazine Spearhead
Martin Page is a BNP treasurer and his wife Kim is a senior fundraiser for the party. Both have been photographed alongside Benny Bullman, the lead singer of Whitelaw, the white supremacist band whose songs include Fetch the Noose, We're Coming for You and For White Pride.
And Dowson, the BNP's senior administrator, who appears on the party's website talking about the success of its call centre's fundraising activities, has also been dogged by allegations that he has enjoyed close relationships with hardline loyalist groups in the past. The 45-year-old has also been the public face of the LifeLeague, the militant anti-abortion group that has hijacked Britain's pro-life debate. He has regularly appeared on television to pronounce terminations a sin and has published the names of abortion clinic staff, placing many in fear for their personal safety.
That the BNP has become a magnet for extreme-right sympathisers is understandable given Griffin's own background. The Cambridge graduate was himself a member of the NF before going on to form the International Third Position, a neo-fascist organisation with links to the Italian far right.
But aware of the party's need to raise funds from middle England, Griffin has repeatedly attempted to portray his party as the \"reasonable\" face of patriotism in its bid to broaden its appeal. The approach has paid dividends, with the party having gained 55 seats on local councils, including a seat on the Greater London Authority. This June it is contesting every UK seat at the European elections and there have been predictions it could win overall control of Stoke City Council.
Darby, Griffin's deputy and the BNP's spokesman, accused Searchlight of \"distorting the BNP's message\" in a bid to derail its political ambitions. He accused the organisation of being \"merely a front for the Labour party, paid for by National Lottery funds\". Darby said: \"When you put it in the context of what's been happening at Westminster, a few scribblings on Facebook hardly seems something to get worried about.\"
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Scottish spinster's global fame wasn't enough to overcome 10 dynamic young men from Essex in the final of the TV talent show
In the end, Susan Boyle's dream of winning Britain's Got Talent remained just that. With bookies offering odds of 10-11 that she would clinch victory over the show's strongest-ever field, last night's climax was supposed to belong to the 48-year-old Scottish spinster who has become a global phenomenon. But when results of the final public vote were announced, Diversity, a youthful 10-member dance group from Essex, had pushed her into second place, in front of a TV audience of up to 20 million.
Standing a few paces away from them as the result was announced, Boyle was magnanimous in defeat: \"The best people won. They are really entertaining. Lads, I wish you all the best.\"
Diversity, which includes three sets of brothers, impressed the judges with a frenetic routine which included a cheeky reference to the panel's buzzers. Three members of the multi-ethnic group, which won the £100,000 prize and will perform at the Royal Variety Show, donned red caps to represent the buttons pressed to order acts off the stage.
Stumbling over his words after the win, choreographer Ashley Banjo, 20, said: \"I was saying 'guys, second!'. When you said our name - honestly, I'm going to wake up in a minute.\"
Earlier in the evening, and after weeks of relentless media coverage that has taken a more negative turn in recent days with suggestions that her mental health was at risk, Boyle had played it safe by returning to \"I Dreamed a Dream\", the song which has become an internet sensation. Oozing confidence and betraying none of the nerves that had reportedly seen her throw public tantrums in the days leading up to the final, Boyle nevertheless appeared more subdued than on previous appearances. Moments after her performance she asked presenters Anthony McPartlin and Declan Donnelly and the audience: \"I'm among friends, am I not?\"
\"You have had a weird several weeks and you have had every right to walk away from this,\" she was told by judge Simon Cowell. \"You have had the guts to come back here tonight and face your critics. Whatever happens you can walk away from this with your head held high.\"
Cowell, a man not known for self doubt, also responded to controversy surrounding the participation of young children in the contest. During Friday's semi-final 10-year-old Hollie Steel, a finalist last night, broke down during her performance.
After listening to Welsh-Iranian Shaheen Jafargholi, 12, Cowell admitted last night: \"This debate about whether we put kids on has really made me think this week because of what happened last night, and I have been in two minds about whether it's the right thing or the wrong thing. But after that performance it really made me realise that if you are talented, regardless of you age, and you can cope with it, we should not deny someone like you the opportunity.\"
This will be remembered as the year Britain's Got Talent went truly global, a success only partly due to the astonishing international popularity of Boyle: even before last night's show, more than 100 million people New York to New Zealand had logged in on YouTube to have their prejudices confounded by watching her near-perfect rendition of \"I Dreamed a Dream\". Boyle has attracted fans including Barack Obama and actress Demi Moore, and has appeared on a satellite interview with Oprah Winfrey.
But BGT, which has achieved the rare television accolade of being so popular that it is referred to by its initials alone, has become so powerful that it has spawned what is becoming known as the \"BGT effect\": a sprinkling of career gold dust on many of those who simply appear on the show, regardless of whether or not they walk off with the crown. Now in its third season, the programme's popularity is phenomenal. A record 15.4 million people tuned in to watch the semi-final last week, meaning more than 60% of the television audience were glued to the ITV1 show. In the depths of a recession, it has catalysed a multimillion-pound windfall in advertising revenue.
The broadcasters, however, are far from being the only ones to rake in the benefits of the programme's astonishing success. According to a rich list published last week, previous winners have gone on to bank millions: Operatic singer Paul Potts, the retail manager who won the competition in 2007, is now worth £5m. Dancer George Sampson might still be in the middle of his GCSEs but has invested his winnings so carefully he has yet to touch a penny of his £100,000 prize money.
Similar success looks certain for other competitors of this year's contest, even those who weren't in the top three: Jafargholi has been besieged by interview requests from US and British TV after his dazzling rendition of Michael Jackson's \"Who's Loving You?\".
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If the cabinet comes out from under its duvet now, there is still time to avoid annihilation and create a fairer electoral system too
What happens on Thursday night and Friday morning may decide the future of the Labour party for the next 10 or 15 years - or even for ever. Has it the will to live? Or is it dead already and beyond resuscitation? We shall know soon.
Assume a crushing defeat in next week's elections: everyone does. Downing Street will call it a frightening failure of democracy, since the Conservatives will do less well than expected, while small parties enjoy a protest flowering. Gordon Brown will rush for an eyecatching cabinet reshuffle: fallers may include Smith and Blears, maybe Darling too, and who knows what other big heads. It must be dramatic enough to dominate the day's headlines. Blunkett back to the Home Office is mooted (by himself, among others). Who knows if Brown will use John Reid or other retreads to amaze, as he did . Anything that makes enough splash to stop the one story that really matters: will the cabinet and leading MPs seize this last chance to sack their failed leader?
The window of opportunity is exceedingly small. Ministers would need to be doing what they are not doing - talking to each other. In their despairing inertia, action must be better than 11 months on this agonising deathbed. They look at each other, without speaking. They ask others - outsiders, Labour peripherals and even journalists - what they think their colleagues are thinking. Pre-Âelection day omerta is a dangerous time for rebellious talk, so nothing is said. But they need to talk if they want to save the party that, in all honesty, they probably don't much love right now. Knocked senseless by the expenses scandal, never knowing who will be next in the merciless searchlight, it's not an easy time for bravery. And they all know how deadly is Downing Street's briefing revenge: 's spirit lives on.
Don't imagine all are filled with altruism. You would not look to Jack Straw or Geoff Hoon for more than the low calculation of self-interest that has kept them in power so long. Yet paradoxically for that very reason they are voices that carry weight: people watch as they row their boats towards power. shares that boat - but recently he's become a trusted Brown confidant. Those about to be shuffled look too weak to act, but could get pre-emptive. Ed Balls was always Brown's best man. David Miliband is temporarily winged. Alan Johnson, heir in waiting, can't be an assassin. Brown will portray any coup as the revenge of the Blairites, so that makes Mandelson an unlikely prime mover. It looks hopeless, doesn't it?
But then there are others. John Denham, Hilary Benn, Ed Miliband, Douglas Alexander and Jim Murphy are clean skins, if not yet big beasts. If Harriet Harman were to use her power as the only elected representative of the party to galvanise her colleagues, the deed could be done. But will it?
The danger is that collective fright and an instinct to hide under the duvet will prevail. They will justify cowardice with solemn talk of stability and a hope that green shoots can revive Brown's reputation. They rightly point to his intellectual prowess. They talk of fearing voter revenge at a second unelected prime minister. They fear a new leader must hold an election soon. But they should ask themselves if they are weighing up the pros and cons of ousting Brown, or just disguising their own pusillanimity with excuses.
Labour faces annihilation. The party is £11.5m in debt, with no donors - putting it in a firmer grip of a few union barons who themselves represent a smaller fragment of the people than ever. In many hollowed-out local parties, mandated union branches pick the councillors and parliamentary candidates. As the parliamentary democratic deficit is uncovered, Labour sees its own moral corrosion. begs Brown disgracefully for a peerage: count them out of rebellion. The corruption of party power and patronage was left untouched by Blair. Now the lid is off the whole system, it reeks as never before. If entry through these corrupt doors is the only way a progressive person can hope to enter politics, Labour deserves to die. That's why proportional representation, keeping the constituency link - but with open top-up lists - would force a blast of oxygen into the fetid system.
No surprise that both Labour and Tory party machine men this week hurry to propose any minor reforms they can think of - except the big one. Chameleon Cameron capers about in yet another fashionable parody: first he was the pink hoodie-hugger, then green tree-hugger, now yellow democracy-reviver. But there is only one sincerity test for pretending reformers: will they support proportional representation that might break apart their own old power bases?
Brown, Blunkett, Hain, Prescott and Straw all fail, no surprise, along with the entire Tory party. How they all praise \"strong government\" - God help us - founded on wooing 200,000 non-Âpolitical floaters in a handful of marginals. How can any credible reformer refuse people a referendum to choose their own voting system?
But more Labour people are seeing the light: Roy Hattersley is a surprise new convert. Progress and Compass come Âtogether on this from each wing of the party. Alan Johnson was always a vocal PR reformer. Ah, Alan Johnson. Here is Labour's one and only piece of good luck and good timing. How Âunexpected at a time like this to find a likable new leader around whom they can coalesce. He has the charm to Âchallenge Cameron without mentioning their back stories. He has the political instinct to shape Labour into something resembling a respectably progressive party. Perfect? Probably not. Can he win? Maybe impossible, but at least Labour saves itself from destruction, while a PR referendum would change everything in future. So will the cabinet take the chance? An October election might be better, and there is Ânothing left to lose as Cameron dances on, Âunchallenged by Brown.
What will it take? They don't need to wait for Thursday's poll results. I have no idea if a coup will happen, but if they let this moment slip, history will record this as the spineless cabinet that threw away Labour's last chance. So let them dare to pick up the phone: the members of this cabinet in their lonely silos may find that it's good to talk.
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Limiting its corrosive power throughout our democracy can start with state funding for parties
The last few weeks have been deeply uncomfortable for anyone who believes that politics is not a means for enriching yourself but a vehicle for us to change our society. All politicians are under scrutiny and will have to answer to their constituents. For two weeks we have looked inwards. But now, as the whole country starts to recover from the shock of moats and mystery mortgages, it is time every member of parliament starts to contribute to the debate of what comes next.
Everyone agrees we need to reform MPs' expenses. A growing number agree we need to open up democracy. But the long overdue process of introducing transparency to the expenses system should only be the start of opening up politics.
The prime minister has already set out a radical reform of the MPs' expenses system to end the gentlemen's club where members make up the rules for themselves. Some of my colleagues in cabinet have begun to set out their own ideas of how we can reform the democratic process.
Better scrutiny of parliament is key and we shouldn't forget about electing the Lords or dodge the debate about electoral reform. And the public must be involved in reshaping their democracy, perhaps through a citizen's convention that would debate and deliberate on urgent constitutional reform before the general election. Constitutional experts and politicians should be involved, but on an equal basis as other citizens.
Yet a debate on constitutional reform alone would ignore the elephant in the room - money. Without recognition that in our society and in our politics money buys power and dictates influence, any talk of \"power to the people\" will be meaningless.
Earlier this week in the Guardian, David Cameron set out the Conservatives' response to the political crisis. Despite his flighty rhetoric, most of what he said was either traditional Tory ideas dressed up in new language or tinkering at the margins of reform. I suspect Cameron's real goal is not to rebuild trust in politics but to use the current anti-political sentiment to rehabilitate a platform based on hostility to the role of government.
His position is both too ideologically narrow and not ambitious enough for the economic and political challenges we face. Text updates on legislation are fine, but is this really a fundamental redistribution of power?
The Tory leader says he wants to rebalance the power people have over their lives. This is something I have long argued for. Yet the Tory conception of power fixates on where the state has too much power and individuals and communities too little. This is often the case - and it is why public service reform is vital so that individuals have power over their own lives.
But Cameron's Thatcherite \"smaller state equals greater power\" analysis is incredibly partial and shallow. It ignores the way power is distributed and exercised - and the way one person's power can constrain another's. While an overweening state can disempower, so too can failing markets or unjustified inequalities.
The Tory vision completely ignores the role of money - both an excess of and a lack of - in creating inequalities of power in both society and politics. Given that the current political crisis is all about money, it is striking that Cameron's contribution to this debate completely ignores the corrosive nature of money in our democracy.
Money means power. It affects the extent to which you have control over your own life and whether others - either people or institutions - have control over you. For example, many people who are losing their jobs now are doing so because of the power exercised irresponsibly and unaccountably by the banking sector. I believe this is the crucial challenge we face if we want to truly open up politics.
Politics is the means by which we seek a fair distribution of power, wealth and opportunity in society. Whenever politics comes into contact with big money the effect is too often negative: we see it in the expenses scandal, in questions about the motives behind large donations to political parties, in elections where the size of your war chest counts more than the value of your ideas.
Money has allowed parties to focus on narrower and narrower segments of passive voters. It makes no strategic sense for our campaign machines to seek to engage the citizenship at large when their sole purpose is winning the support of targeted swing voters.
Whereas David Cameron wants a system in which \"the powerful simply left the powerless to get on with the rest of their lives\", Labour wants to increase the power of the powerless. Key to that is a body politic open to all and a political system that incentivises parties engaging with the many, not the few.
If we are serious about opening up politics to different sorts of people, we must avoid creating a system where only the wealthy can afford to be parliamentarians. Or, worse still, moving further towards a system where big money purchases political power and influence.
This needs radical action. A first step is to open up our political selection and widen the gene pool of politics. We need politics to be attractive and available to people from more varied backgrounds and careers, and we also need to open it up to late entrants - American politics benefits from being able to recruit the likes of Tim Geithner or Robert Gates to the cabinet.
Beyond this, we need to further open up political debate. One way to do that is to legitimise the House of Lords. They should be elected and given the task of amending legislation. To maintain the primacy of the Commons, the Government could overturn Lords amendments on a two-thirds majority, as broadly also happens in Congress.
And we need to take big money out of politics. We can debate what a cap on annual donations from any individual should be, but I would suggest it should be in the hundreds of pounds - certainly not the £50,000 that David Cameron wants, which would still mean parties chasing donations from wealthy individuals.
We could also provide 100% tax relief on the smallest donations, quickly tapering out to encourage parties to seek small donations from the many rather than larger ones from the few. That way, pound for pound, parties would have more incentive to chase large numbers of small donors, rather than simply chasing donations at the level of whatever the cap was. Parties would once again require hundreds of thousands of supporters rather than hundreds of thousand-pound donors.
However, there may still be a gap in allowing political parties to promote a vibrant democracy that engages society. The same fear that led parliamentarians to evade difficult questions about their own incomes should not cause us to avoid tackling this question. We need more democracy, not less. And democracy needs money from a democratic source or it will become dominated by those who have money themselves.
Amid the current anger at politicians and politics we must bite the bullet of state funding for political parties - alongside cutting the overall amount the taxpayer spends on politics. This funding must not be money for newspaper advertisements, billboard posters or spin doctors. By offering state funding to parties in return for them engaging the entire public through local activism and policy-making we would incentivise them to return to their roots as vehicles for bringing citizens together to change their communities - not separating them into narrow segments of valued voters.
We should ensure that, deprived of big donations, the only way parties can sustain themselves financially is through broad-based support. By offering state funding to those parties in return for them engaging the entire public through local activism and policy-making you would incentivise them to return to their roots as vehicles for local people to come together to change their communities - not just targeting a narrow segment of the voters.
We should reduce the total amount that parties can spend on general election campaigns so that it's the content of the campaign not the colour of the money that makes the difference. And we should cap annual spending in the years between elections too. If these annual caps applied to individual constituencies, parties would not be able to simply pile resources into marginal areas while neglecting so-called \"safe seats\".
Such a system would pose questions for all political parties, including how in Labour we maintain our historic and vital link with the trade union movement. Under the system I suggest Labour would have an incentive to properly engage with the hundreds of thousands of individual trade unionists who are linked to our party.
The block grants that trade unions contribute towards my party represent a collective donation on behalf of millions of working people, but that contribution has to be more directly made. Under the proposals but forward by Hayden Phillips but blocked by David Cameron, Labour would lose our large union donations, but the link would continue through the affiliation system - this seems the obvious way to keep big money out of politics while keeping the party rooted in the lives of working people.
The Conservatives too would have to fundamentally reassess how they raise and spend resources, not least in their key seat strategy - organised by Lord Ashcroft and funded in part by his company, Bearwood Corporate Services.
This is an uncomfortable but urgent debate. If the last fortnight has taught us anything, it is that we cannot let another chance to reform politics be wasted. The lesson of the expenses scandal is that if you allow another closed, even occasionally corrupt, system to continue unreformed, you will eventually end up with a catastrophe for politics.
Democratic reform matters. If the people have power they will use it to make the changes in society we need; and, because those changes would be more legitimate, it would make it harder for vested interests to resist them.
If we are bold enough to take on this issue then the test for Cameron won't be whether he expels a handful of MPs, it would be whether he is willing to create a politics where the few with money no longer wield power over the many without.
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In 1946 Observer editor David Astor lent George Orwell a remote Scottish farmhouse in which to write his new book, Nineteen Eighty-Four. It became one of the most significant novels of the 20th century. Here, Robert McCrum tells the compelling story of Orwell's torturous stay on the island where the author, close to death and beset by creative demons, was engaged in a feverish race to finish the book
\"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.\"
Sixty years after the publication of Orwell's masterpiece, Nineteen Eighty-Four, that crystal first line sounds as natural and compelling as ever. But when you see the original manuscript, you find something else: not so much the ringing clarity, more the obsessive rewriting, in different inks, that betrays the extraordinary turmoil behind its composition.
Probably the definitive novel of the 20th century, a story that remains eternally fresh and contemporary, and whose terms such as \"Big Brother\", \"doublethink\" and \"newspeak\" have become part of everyday currency, Nineteen Eighty-Four has been translated into more than 65 languages and sold millions of copies worldwide, giving George Orwell a unique place in world literature.
\"Orwellian\" is now a universal shorthand for anything repressive or totalitarian, and the story of Winston Smith, an everyman for his times, continues to resonate for readers whose fears for the future are very different from those of an English writer in the mid-1940s.
The circumstances surrounding the writing of Nineteen Eighty-Four make a haunting narrative that helps to explain the bleakness of Orwell's dystopia. Here was an English writer, desperately sick, grappling alone with the demons of his imagination in a bleak Scottish outpost in the desolate aftermath of the second world war. The idea for Nineteen Eighty-Four, alternatively, \"The Last Man in Europe\", had been incubating in Orwell's mind since the Spanish civil war. His novel, which owes something to Yevgeny Zamyatin's dystopian fiction We, probably began to acquire a definitive shape during 1943-44, around the time he and his wife, Eileen adopted their only son, Richard. Orwell himself claimed that he was partly inspired by the meeting of the Allied leaders at the Tehran Conference of 1944. Isaac Deutscher, an Observer colleague, reported that Orwell was \"convinced that Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt consciously plotted to divide the world\" at Tehran.
Orwell had worked for David Astor's Observer since 1942, first as a book reviewer and later as a correspondent. The editor professed great admiration for Orwell's \"absolute straightforwardness, his honesty and his decency\", and would be his patron throughout the 1940s. The closeness of their friendship is crucial to the story of Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Orwell's creative life had already benefited from his association with the Observer in the writing of Animal Farm. As the war drew to a close, the fruitful interaction of fiction and Sunday journalism would contribute to the much darker and more complex novel he had in mind after that celebrated \"fairy tale\". It's clear from his Observer book reviews, for example, that he was fascinated by the relationship between morality and language.
There were other influences at work. Soon after Richard was adopted, Orwell's flat was wrecked by a doodlebug. The atmosphere of random terror in the everyday life of wartime London became integral to the mood of the novel-in-progress. Worse was to follow. In March 1945, while on assignment for the Observer in Europe, Orwell received the news that his wife, Eileen, had died under anaesthesia during a routine operation.
Suddenly he was a widower and a single parent, eking out a threadbare life in his Islington lodgings, and working incessantly to dam the flood of remorse and grief at his wife's premature death. In 1945, for instanc e, he wrote almost 110,000 words for various publications, including 15 book reviews for the Observer.
Now Astor stepped in. His family owned an estate on the remote Scottish island of Jura, next to Islay. There was a house, Barnhill, seven miles outside Ardlussa at the remote northern tip of this rocky finger of heather in the Inner Hebrides. Initially, Astor offered it to Orwell for a holiday. Speaking to the Observer last week, Richard Blair says he believes, from family legend, that Astor was taken aback by the enthusiasm of Orwell's response.
In May 1946 Orwell, still picking up the shattered pieces of his life, took the train for the long and arduous journey to Jura. He told his friend Arthur Koestler that it was \"almost like stocking up ship for an arctic voyage\".
It was a risky move; Orwell was not in good health. The winter of 1946-47 was one of the coldest of the century. Postwar Britain was bleaker even than wartime, and he had always suffered from a bad chest. At least, cut off from the irritations of literary London, he was free to grapple unencumbered with the new novel. \"Smothered under journalism,\" as he put it, he told one friend, \"I have become more and more like a sucked orange.\"
Ironically, part of Orwell's difficulties derived from the success of Animal Farm. After years of neglect and indifference the world was waking up to his genius. \"Everyone keeps coming at me,\" he complained to Koestler, \"wanting me to lecture, to write commissioned booklets, to join this and that, etc - you don't know how I pine to be free of it all and have time to think again.\"
On Jura he would be liberated from these distractions but the promise of creative freedom on an island in the Hebrides came with its own price. Years before, in the essay \"Why I Write\", he had described the struggle to complete a book: \"Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist or [sic] understand. For all one knows that demon is the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's personality.\" Then that famous Orwellian coda. \"Good prose is like a window pane.\"
From the spring of 1947 to his death in 1950 Orwell would re-enact every aspect of this struggle in the most painful way imaginable. Privately, perhaps, he relished the overlap between theory and practice. He had always thrived on self-inflicted adversity.
At first, after \"a quite unendurable winter\", he revelled in the isolation and wild beauty of Jura. \"I am struggling with this book,\" he wrote to his agent, \"which I may finish by the end of the year - at any rate I shall have broken the back by then so long as I keep well and keep off journalistic work until the autumn.\"
Barnhill, overlooking the sea at the top of a potholed track, was not large, with four small bedrooms above a spacious kitchen. Life was simple, even primitive. There was no electricity. Orwell used Calor gas to cook and to heat water. Storm lanterns burned paraffin. In the evenings he also burned peat. He was still chain-smoking black shag tobacco in roll-up cigarettes: the fug in the house was cosy but not healthy. A battery radio was the only connection with the outside world.
Orwell, a gentle, unworldly sort of man, arrived with just a camp bed, a table, a couple of chairs and a few pots and pans. It was a spartan existence but supplied the conditions under which he liked to work. He is remembered here as a spectre in the mist, a gaunt figure in oilskins.
The locals knew him by his real name of Eric Blair, a tall, cadaverous, sad-looking man worrying about how he would cope on his own. The solution, when he was joined by baby Richard and his nanny, was to recruit his highly competent sister, Avril. Richard Blair remembers that his father \"could not have done it without Avril. She was an excellent cook, and very practical. None of the accounts of my father's time on Jura recognise how essential she was.\"
Once his new regime was settled, Orwell could finally make a start on the book. At the end of May 1947 he told his publisher, Fred Warburg: \"I think I must have written nearly a third of the rough draft. I have not got as far as I had hoped to do by this time because I really have been in most wretched health this year ever since about January (my chest as usual) and can't quite shake it off.\"
Mindful of his publisher's impatience for the new novel, Orwell added: \"Of course the rough draft is always a ghastly mess bearing little relation to the finished result, but all the same it is the main part of the job.\" Still, he pressed on, and at the end of July was predicting a completed \"rough draft\" by October. After that, he said, he would need another six months to polish up the text for publication. But then, disaster.
Part of the pleasure of life on Jura was that he and his young son could enjoy the outdoor life together, go fishing, explore the island, and potter about in boats. In August, during a spell of lovely summer weather, Orwell, Avril, Richard and some friends, returning from a hike up the coast in a small motor boat, were nearly drowned in the infamous Corryvreckan whirlpool.
Richard Blair remembers being \"bloody cold\" in the freezing water, and Orwell, whose constant coughing worried his friends, did his lungs no favours. Within two months he was seriously ill. Typically, his account to David Astor of this narrow escape was laconic, even nonchalant.
The long struggle with \"The Last Man in Europe\" continued. In late October 1947, oppressed with \"wretched health\", Orwell recognised that his novel was still \"a most dreadful mess and about two-thirds of it will have to be retyped entirely\".
He was working at a feverish pace. Visitors to Barnhill recall the sound of his typewriter pounding away upstairs in his bedroom. Then, in November, tended by the faithful Avril, he collapsed with \"inflammation of the lungs\" and told Koestler that he was \"very ill in bed\". Just before Christmas, in a letter to an Observer colleague, he broke the news he had always dreaded. Finally he had been diagnosed with TB.
A few days later, writing to Astor from Hairmyres hospital, East Kilbride, Lanarkshire, he admitted: \"I still feel deadly sick,\" and conceded that, when illness struck after the Corryvreckan whirlpool incident, \"like a fool I decided not to go to a doctor - I wanted to get on with the book I was writing.\" In 1947 there was no cure for TB - doctors prescribed fresh air and a regular diet - but there was a new, experimental drug on the market, streptomycin. Astor arranged for a shipment to Hairmyres from the US.
Richard Blair believes that his father was given excessive doses of the new wonder drug. The side effects were horrific (throat ulcers, blisters in the mouth, hair loss, peeling skin and the disintegration of toe and fingernails) but in March 1948, after a three-month course, the TB symptoms had disappeared. \"It's all over now, and evidently the drug has done its stuff,\" Orwell told his publisher. \"It's rather like sinking the ship to get rid of the rats, but worth it if it works.\"
As he prepared to leave hospital Orwell received the letter from his publisher which, in hindsight, would be another nail in his coffin. \"It really is rather important,\" wrote Warburg to his star author, \"from the point of view of your literary career to get it [the new novel] by the end of the year and indeed earlier if possible.\"
Just when he should have been convalescing Orwell was back at Barnhill, deep into the revision of his manuscript, promising Warburg to deliver it in \"early December\", and coping with \"filthy weather\" on autumnal Jura. Early in October he confided to Astor: \"I have got so used to writing in bed that I think I prefer it, though of course it's awkward to type there. I am just struggling with the last stages of this bloody book [which is] about the possible state of affairs if the atomic war isn't conclusive.\"
This is one of Orwell's exceedingly rare references to the theme of his book. He believed, as many writers do, that it was bad luck to discuss work-in-progress. Later, to Anthony Powell, he described it as \"a Utopia written in the form of a novel\". The typing of the fair copy of \"The Last Man in Europe\" became another dimension of Orwell's battle with his book. The more he revised his \"unbelievably bad\" manuscript the more it became a document only he could read and interpret. It was, he told his agent, \"extremely long, even 125,000 words\". With characteristic candour, he noted: \"I am not pleased with the book but I am not absolutely dissatisfied... I think it is a good idea but the execution would have been better if I had not written it under the influence of TB.\"
And he was still undecided about the title: \"I am inclined to call it NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR or THE LAST MAN IN EUROPE,\" he wrote, \"but I might just possibly think of something else in the next week or two.\" By the end of October Orwell believed he was done. Now he just needed a stenographer to help make sense of it all.
It was a desperate race against time. Orwell's health was deteriorating, the \"unbelievably bad\" manuscript needed retyping, and the December deadline was looming. Warburg promised to help, and so did Orwell's agent. At cross-purposes over possible typists, they somehow contrived to make a bad situation infinitely worse. Orwell, feeling beyond help, followed his ex-public schoolboy's instincts: he would go it alone.
By mid-November, too weak to walk, he retired to bed to tackle \"the grisly job\" of typing the book on his \"decrepit typewriter\" by himself. Sustained by endless roll-ups, pots of coffee, strong tea and the warmth of his paraffin heater, with gales buffeting Barnhill, night and day, he struggled on. By 30 November 1948 it was virtually done.
Now Orwell, the old campaigner, protested to his agent that \"it really wasn't worth all this fuss. It's merely that, as it tires me to sit upright for any length of time, I can't type very neatly and can't do many pages a day.\" Besides, he added, it was \"wonderful\" what mistakes a professional typist could make, and \"in this book there is the difficulty that it contains a lot of neologisms\".
The typescript of George Orwell's latest novel reached London in mid December, as promised. Warburg recognised its qualities at once (\"amongst the most terrifying books I have ever read\") and so did his colleagues. An in-house memo noted \"if we can't sell 15 to 20 thousand copies we ought to be shot\".
By now Orwell had left Jura and checked into a TB sanitorium high in the Cotswolds. \"I ought to have done this two months ago,\" he told Astor, \"but I wanted to get that bloody book finished.\" Once again Astor stepped in to monitor his friend's treatment but Orwell's specialist was privately pessimistic.
As word of Nineteen Eighty-Four began to circulate, Astor's journalistic instincts kicked in and he began to plan an Observer Profile, a significant accolade but an idea that Orwell contemplated \"with a certain alarm\". As spring came he was \"having haemoptyses\" (spitting blood) and \"feeling ghastly most of the time\" but was able to involve himself in the pre-publication rituals of the novel, registering \"quite good notices\" with satisfaction. He joked to Astor that it wouldn't surprise him \"if you had to change that profile into an obituary\".
Nineteen Eighty-Four was published on 8 June 1949 (five days later in the US) and was almost universally recognised as a masterpiece, even by Winston Churchill, who told his doctor that he had read it twice. Orwell's health continued to decline. In October 1949, in his room at University College hospital, he married Sonia Brownell, with David Astor as best man. It was a fleeting moment of happiness; he lingered into the new year of 1950. In the small hours of 21 January he suffered a massive haemorrhage in hospital and died alone.
The news was broadcast on the BBC the next morning. Avril Blair and her nephew, still up on Jura, heard the report on the little battery radio in Barnhill. Richard Blair does not recall whether the day was bright or cold but remembers the shock of the news: his father was dead, aged 46.
David Astor arranged for Orwell's burial in the churchyard at Sutton Courtenay, Oxfordshire. He lies there now, as Eric Blair, between HH Asquith and a local family of Gypsies.
Orwell's title remains a mystery. Some say he was alluding to the centenary of the Fabian Society, founded in 1884. Others suggest a nod to Jack London's novel The Iron Heel (in which a political movement comes to power in 1984), or perhaps to one of his favourite writer GK Chesterton's story, \"The Napoleon of Notting Hill\", which is set in 1984.
In his edition of the Collected Works (20 volumes), Peter Davison notes that Orwell's American publisher claimed that the title derived from reversing the date, 1948, though there's no documentary evidence for this. Davison also argues that the date 1984 is linked to the year of Richard Blair's birth, 1944, and notes that in the manuscript of the novel, the narrative occurs, successively, in 1980, 1982 and finally, 1984. There's no mystery about the decision to abandon \"The Last Man in Europe\". Orwell himself was always unsure of it. It was his publisher, Fred Warburg who suggested that Nineteen Eighty-Four was a more commercial title.
The effect of Nineteen Eighty-Four on our cultural and linguistic landscape has not been limited to either the film adaptation starring John Hurt and Richard Burton, with its Nazi-esque rallies and chilling soundtrack, nor the earlier one with Michael Redgrave and Edmond O'Brien.
It is likely, however, that many people watching the Big Brother series on television (in the UK, let alone in Angola, Oman or Sweden, or any of the other countries whose TV networks broadcast programmes in the same format) have no idea where the title comes from or that Big Brother himself, whose role in the reality show is mostly to keep the peace between scrapping, swearing contestants like a wise uncle, is not so benign in his original incarnation.
Apart from pop-culture renditions of some of the novel's themes, aspects of its language have been leapt upon by libertarians to describe the curtailment of freedom in the real world by politicians and officials - alarmingly, nowhere and never more often than in contemporary Britain.
Orwellian
George owes his own adjective to this book alone and his idea that wellbeing is crushed by restrictive, authoritarian and untruthful government.
Big Brother (is watching you)
A term in common usage for a scarily omniscient ruler long before the worldwide smash-hit reality-TV show was even a twinkle in its producers' eyes. The irony of societal hounding of Big Brother contestants would not have been lost on George Orwell.
Room 101
Some hotels have refused to call a guest bedroom number 101 - rather like those tower blocks that don't have a 13th floor - thanks to the ingenious Orwellian concept of a room that contains whatever its occupant finds most impossible to endure. Like Big Brother, this has spawned a modern TV show: in this case, celebrities are invited to name the people or objects they hate most in the world.
Thought Police
An accusation often levelled at the current government by those who like it least is that they are trying to tell us what we can and cannot think is right and wrong. People who believe that there are correct ways to think find themselves named after Orwell's enforcement brigade.
Thoughtcrime
See \"Thought Police\" above. The act or fact of transgressing enforced wisdom.
Newspeak
For Orwell, freedom of expression was not just about freedom of thought but also linguistic freedom. This term, denoting the narrow and diminishing official vocabulary, has been used ever since to denote jargon currently in vogue with those in power.
Doublethink
Hypocrisy, but with a twist. Rather than choosing to disregard a contradiction in your opinion, if you are doublethinking, you are deliberately forgetting that the contradiction is there. This subtlety is mostly overlooked by people using the accusation of \"doublethink\" when trying to accuse an adversary of being hypocritical - but it is a very popular word with people who like a good debate along with their pints in the pub. Oliver Marre
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