As the teaching union conference season gets under way, we ask what the everyday worries are in schools today

Phillip Smith, secondary school English teacher and assistant head, West Midlands

The downgrading of BTecs in league tables affects us massively. As an early academy – we converted in 2009 – with a large intake from socially deprived areas, we've had a lot of success offering pupils a personalised curriculum. To be told now that you can teach whatever you like, but only some things will count in the tables, leaves you in a catch-22 situation. There were some Mickey Mouse qualifications, but we tried to steer away from them and offer courses that were of real use to pupils. Now they're being pushed into doing academic subjects that probably aren't in their best interests. Couple that with considerable budget cuts, and it limits even further what we can offer pupils. You can make efficiency cuts to a degree, but when much of your budget is tied up in staffing, there's only a certain amount you can do before you have to look at that. That in turn affects the courses you can offer and class sizes. Gove says he wants teachers to offer a first-class education and be respected, but we're being asked to do that in a climate of reduced budgets and in which pay and conditions are getting worse. For a lot of staff, the messages simply don't add up.

Damian Knollys, headteacher, Midsomer Norton primary school, Somerset

Education has been a political plaything for too long; the continual tinkering makes schools very unsettling places to be for teachers. Current inspections are part of a system that seems designed to reduce everything to a label. In doing so they fail to reflect the complex nature of schools. Heads and teachers inevitably try to simplify what they're doing to meet the latest criteria that Ofsted imposes, compromising their beliefs on what education is about. And the climate of fear and judgment engendered by Ofsted is unhelpful. By Sir Michael Wilshaw's own admission, staff morale is not high on his agenda, but we know from experience with colleagues and pupils that you achieve progress through sustained challenge and support. We need to move towards such a model, not away from it.

Claire Smith, headteacher, St Werburgh's primary school, Bristol

There's an issue around primary places in Bristol; most schools are working with some quite challenging structural issues. My class sizes are relatively small, but that's changing as we are becoming increasingly popular in the area and the population is increasing, too. Last year, we had 143 applications for the 28 places in our reception class and about 80 families put us as their first choice. It means talking to the local authority about whether we can support this growth in any way without it having a detrimental effect on existing pupils. For heads, another issue at the moment is trying to put policy into practice. We are thinking carefully about what the benefits and implications would be if we used the new freedoms being offered to schools by the government.

Ian Horsewell, Midlands-based secondary school science teacher

Changes to courses or exams are a huge problem. They're not necessarily bad changes – plenty of teachers like the idea of moving from modules to a terminal exam, but they're being dumped on us at such short notice. Politicians don't seem to understand that putting a course together takes a long time. They want things to happen straight away. In science, we still don't know what to plan for next September's year 10 groups and that has an effect on pupils, too. It's incredibly frustrating to be told how to do your job by someone who's not a teacher.

Andrew Austin, father of four and co-chair, Louth Save Our Schools, Lincolnshire

The unions seems to be willing to strike for pay and conditions, but the biggest threat to those things is the privatisation of education. I think they need to be a little more vigorous about it. As academies start setting their own terms and conditions, we're going to see an awful lot of disparity between schools and areas. I really can't see that being good in the classroom. Many teachers decided to become public-sector workers because they had that ethos. To find themselves being almost forced into the private sector by default, at a time of austerity, is petrifying for a lot of them. For children already in their teens, there's going to be enough of the public-sector ethos left among teachers for the changes not to be too much of an issue, but I worry for the five- and six-year-olds who'll be heading into their GCSE years in a system that's been privatised for almost a decade.

Sir Michael Wilshaw, chief inspector of schools

We talk about problems and challenges, but actually I think these are exciting times in education at the moment. There's huge political will to make a difference. When I was a young teacher there wasn't that same drive from the centre. Teaching is now seen as a high-status job in a way it wasn't years ago. It's better paid than it was and promotion for good teachers, particularly in challenging areas, is good. I think there's a new sense of momentum now in young teachers I meet. They really want to make a difference.

The union voice

Mary Bousted, general secretary, Association of Teachers and Lecturers

Low morale is a really serious problem. We've had an absolute barrage of very, very destructive criticism from the coalition government – I call it shouting at the profession. Teachers are being held responsible for all the ills of society. Ofsted is now saying over-detailed lesson planning is focusing minds on activities rather than outcomes, but it's Ofsted that drove this mania for writing things down. It's part of this reign of terror on school leaders. They feel it so acutely, it gets passed down to teachers.

Christine Blower, general secretary, National Union of Teachers

Pensions, performance management, professional autonomy, pay cuts and Ofsted. Michael Gove talking about bad teachers sets entirely the wrong tone. It ought to be a case of helping and supporting teachers with their professional practice, not fishing for people you might set up competence procedures against. As Arne Duncan, the US education secretary, said: "You can't fire your way to the top."

Chris Keates, general secretary, NASUWT

The move towards the English baccalaureate means a narrowing of the curriculum, so children won't get broad, balanced learning. For some teachers in non-English baccalaureate subjects, it's already thrown the notion of job security out of the window. Normally at a time when people are losing their jobs, people turn to teaching. You get an absolute glut of people. But last year the numbers applying to train fell by 30%. Teachers are under siege from this government.

What you told us on Twitter

Co1port @ICTwitz

Headteacher incompetence & paranoia. Accountability agenda getting in way of teaching pupils

Rachel Gooch @PlaceFarm

Proposed free school causing uncertainty when planning for big strategic changes

Daniel J Ayres @DanielAyres

School dinners – avoiding overcooked broccoli

Andrew Bethell @Andrewbeth

Teacher retention. Finland lose 3% of staff after 3 yrs. We lose 25%

Philip Salisbury @llewelyn20

Behaviour. Definitely. No doubt at all

BrummieMummy @BrummieMummy

Politics getting in the way of education

Debbie Foster @Goody200Shoes

If funding agreed, the arrival of large free school in area where already surplus secondary places

Lonnie2512 @Lonnie2512

Parental engagement on SRE [sex and relationships education] in 98% Muslim school. We're failing to quell concerns

J Hobson @JohnAHobson

No clear vision from Gove as to what he expects schools to look like: obsessed with failing schools and failing kids. Why?

AB @Kiteflyer67

Sourcing quality staff

Lorenza Bacino @LorenzaBacino

How to stay open and prove we are an asset to the community as the smallest school in Barnet

Ian @teachingofsci

Decisions being made (eg exam specs) at short notice by non-teachers who don't understand impact on pupils/staff

Andromeda @andromedababe

Ill-informed, heavy-handed political interference

Dan Nicholls @InglishTeecher9

An influx of EAL [English as an additional language] kids, with little staff training and expectation to support their learning and get them a GCSE

kalinski1970 @kalinski1970

The government

Parma Kalsi @parmachanna

We are a primary school being forced into academy status. Ofsted: blatant tool of govt

nici scott @nicionthegreen

So many services that supported schools disappearing as a result of LA cuts

• Compiled by Alice Woolley

The discovery in Africa of a one million year old fireplace may enable us to identify when humans first began using fire

Cooking is a universal in human culture. The mixing and heating of raw ingredients to make dinner is a fundamental part of our lives, one of the most noticeable things that separates us from even our closest animal cousins.

The advantage of this method of preparing food is clear: it makes food tastier, easier to digest and makes the extraction of energy from raw ingredients quicker and more efficient. All useful things if you want to power an over-sized, energy-hungry brain without having to spend all your time foraging and chewing food.

Richard Wrangham, a professor of biological anthropology at Harvard University, has argued that the invention of cooking split the ancestors of humans from the evolutionary path that went on to include modern gorillas and chimpanzees. Cooking allowed our ancestors to develop bigger brains and, in his hypothesis, is the key reason modern humans emerged. The controlled use of fire, according to Wrangham, was a more important milestone in human evolution than the invention of agriculture or eating meat.

Critics of Wrangham's "cooking hypothesis" have pointed to a lack of archaeological evidence. If our ancestors were cooking regularly, where are the fossilised fireplaces?

In an article, published on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team of scientists led by Francesco Berna of the University of Boston has found strong evidence of such a fireplace. They have uncovered evidence of burned bones and ashes of plant material created in controlled fires that were lit at least 1m years ago in southern Africa.

Until now, the oldest evidence for fire has been dated to around 800,000 years ago, based on evidence for charred wood and burned bones located at the Gesher Benot Ya'akov site in Israel, though it has not been determined whether these fires were controlled or accidental.

Berna's team examined specimens of rocks inside the 140-metre-long Wonderwerk Cave in the northern Cape Province of South Africa. They found the burned material 30 metres inside the entrance to the cave, which makes it unlikely to be a result of natural causes.

"It's 30 metres inside the cave, there weren't any trees growing there, so it was unlikely there was any vegetation of wood or wood-like material that would have been there to burn on the spot – you can exclude local burning of material by natural causes," said Prof Paul Goldberg of the University of Boston, an author on the study.

"These ashes are really quite delicate, so they can't have been transported by wind or water, they would have never survived as intact pieces. It has to be something local, right there on the spot. I don't think it's been transported at all."

Modern humans are biologically adapted to cooked foods, according to Wrangham, because cooking means that food is partly digested before we eat it. Cooked food freed humans from needing to spend half the day chewing tough raw food in the way most other modern primates do – compared to apes, modern humans have much shorter digestive systems and our jaws are much weaker.

According to Wrangham's hypothesis, cooked foods allowed the evolution of our ancestor, Homo erectus, around 1.9m years ago, which had a brain 50% bigger than the preceding species of human, Homo habilis.

"It gave extra energy, used for evolutionary success; reduced feeding time, freeing men to hunt; lowered weaning time, creating bigger families; allowed brain size to increase; gave us our shortfaced, flat-bellied anatomy; enabled the sexual division of labour," said Wrangham. "It was so important that it likely drove the evolution of our genus Homo. Basically, if the cooking hypothesis is right it turned us from advanced ape to early human."

In their paper, Berna's team do not speculate on exactly how the fire inside the Wonderwerk Cave might have been started, nor what the fire was used for or how often.

Goldberg said that the circumstantial evidence, however, points to a role for human ancestors. Near the burned material in the Wonderwerk Cave, for example, the researchers also found pot lids made from flakes of ironstone, a rock that exists in layers above the limestone cave.

"This had to have been brought into the cave, there's no way for it to get in there any other way than humans," said Goldberg. "When you put this together, the weight of the evidence is that how this is going to get into the cave is somebody brought it in. I can't imagine antelope making fires – I'm trying to be facetious – or bringing in these blocks of bedrock that occur above the site. You can't find another explanation – it doesn't mean that's the one – but it seems pretty reasonable."

Berna and Goldberg used a technique borrowed from geologists – called soil micromorphology – to study paper-thin sections of their burned specimens. "We collect an intact block of material, something the size of a milk container where everything is preserved in its original shape," said Goldberg. "We can pick out a block of this stuff … dry it, soak it in polyester or epoxy resin and turn it into a rock, essentially. Once we do that, we can slice it just like geologists do, mount it on a slide and then look at it under the microscope."

Previous excavations of other sites in South Africa, such as at Swartkrans near Johannesburg, have burned material dated to 1.5m years ago, but the techniques used to study this and other old sites do not provide conclusive evidence that the burning occurred in controlled fires. Goldberg said that using soil micromorphology to test samples from these areas could help answer the long-standing questions of how long ago the ancestors of humans were using fire in a controlled way.

Goldberg added that the evidence from Wonderwerk Cave goes some way to supporting Wrangham's cooking hypothesis. "To tell you the truth, I've heard Richard give several lectures on this topic but I've said [previously] there's no archaeological evidence, so I dismissed it myself," he said. "And here we are and we found this evidence. One of the reasons, perhaps, that ashes evidence of fire doesn't show up [in other places] is that people aren't using the right techniques and approaches."

Labour leader kicks off local election campaign by accusing David Cameron of putting Tory donors above middle Britain

David Cameron has abandoned "any pretence" that he governs for the whole of the country after placing the interests of Conservative party donors above middle Britain, Ed Miliband has declared.

Speaking at the launch of his party's campaign for the local elections, which will be a crucial test of whether his poll lead is translating into votes, Miliband said that Labour was now Britain's only one-nation party.

"The Tories have abandoned any pretence they can govern for the whole country," Miliband said in Birmingham. "They have abandoned middle Britain. They prefer to listen to those who have given millions of pounds to the Conservative party. Labour would govern for the whole country, not just for the wealthy few."

Miliband chose Britain's second largest city for the launch of Labour's local election campaign because the party has high hopes of a symbolic capturing of Birmingham city council, which is currently run by a joint Conservative and Liberal Democrat administration. A win in Birmingham, where the Conservatives have failed to win a parliamentary seat since 1992, would show that Labour has consolidated its position in the crucial electoral battleground of the West Midlands.

Labour faces the greatest pressure of the three main UK parties on election night on 3 May, because the party performed badly when the last set of seats were contested in 2008 at the height of Gordon Brown's unpopularity. Brown was polling around 24% at the time, while the Tories were on 43%. In a YouGov/Sunday Times poll at the weekend Labour was on 42% and the Tories were on 33%.

The Tories say that Labour's recovery in the polls means Miliband should gain 700 seats from those being contested across Britain on 3 May. There are 2,407 seats up for grabs in England – a third of the 36 English metropolitan district councils and a third of the 16 unitary authorities. The 74 shire district councils are voting in differing proportions. There are 1,222 seats in Scotland and 1,224 in Wales in all the major authorities apart from Anglesey.

Labour dismisses the Tory claim as an exaggeration and says it will be happy if it gains 300 to 350 seats. The main challenges for Labour on 3 May will be:

• The mayoral contest in London, where Ken Livingstone hopes to return to City Hall four years after being unseated by Boris Johnson. Labour fears that Johnson's strong "brand" and Livingstone's tarnished reputation, which sees him polling behind Labour nationally, makes it a difficult contest in what should be natural territory for the party.

• Glasgow city council, once Labour's Scottish heartland, which could fall to the SNP. This would be a body blow to Labour and would indicate a pattern suggested by the loss of the Bradford West byelection last week – that Labour is failing to appeal to what should be core voters.

Miliband placed law and order at the heart of his campaign launch as he called for a greater use of restorative justice. He wants this to become the "default response" for first-time offenders rather than just pilot schemes in different parts of the country.

The Labour leader said: "We need to encourage police to nip problems in the bud. Instead of just giving people a caution, knowing they will commit further offences, those who do the wrong thing should be forced to make it up to the victim. Make good on the damage they have caused, help rebuild the community project, clean up the graffiti, fix a wrecked garden.

"Of course, it won't be appropriate in all circumstances and should only happen if the victim wants it to happen. When offenders have to confront the consequences of their crimes and meet their victims, they can come to understand what they have done and the damage they have caused. This has made some less likely to commit further offences: it puts them back onto the right path."

Miliband also pledged that Labour councils across England will act as the "last line of defence" against the controversial NHS act, as he promised to overturn its "free market, free-for-all principles". He said Labour councils would use the public health and wellbeing boards that are being created under the reforms to resist the most damaging aspects of the Health and Social Care Act, which was formally granted royal assent by the Queen following a bruising parliamentary battle.

The Labour leader said his party would abide by the law, but made clear the party would do everything within the law to undermine the reforms, which will hand around 60% of the NHS's £100bn budget to GP-led commissioning groups. "I think that Labour councils are now the last line of defence against this bill and they have got to use the public health and wellbeing boards as a way of trying to prevent the worst aspects of this bill. Of course, comply with legislation, because the legislation has passed. But I think there is an opportunity for Labour councils to stand up for the right principles, not the wrong principles, in our NHS."

Labour believes the boards represent a chance to challenge the implementation of the bill at a local level. They will include local councillors, elected mayors and members of the clinical commissioning groups.

Liz Kendall, Labour's shadow social care minister, outlined tactics in a recent article for the Health Service Journal. She argued that the boards can pledge to work in a collaborative way to mitigate the impact of the act by, for example, agreeing to work against the introduction of a postcode lottery. The powers of boards are, however, limited. They do not have a formal say over clinical commissioning groups and do not have the power to sign off their decisions.

Miliband pledged that a Labour government would repeal the act. "We will repeal the free market, free-for-all principles in this bill. That is an absolute commitment. It is incredibly damaging to the whole ethos of our NHS. Frankly, doctors and nurses and people right across this country know that."

• 'Every sport needs its champions' says veteran trainer
• Star colt is 'growing up and maturing' for season ahead

Frankel can help to broaden the appeal of horse racing when he returns to action next month, according to Sir Henry Cecil, trainer of the exciting and unbeaten colt. Cecil spoke on Monday of his hope that the horse will be even better this year than last, when he was a devastating winner of the 2,000 Guineas, and said he would let the horse tell him if and when the time comes to step him up to a mile and a quarter.

Despite his obvious reluctance to compare Frankel with the sport's all-time greats, the trainer is keenly aware of the excitement surrounding his stable star. "Every sport needs its champions, right?" Cecil said. "Not just for the racing public but for other people who aren't interested in racing and get to learn about it from word of mouth and from the television.

"Watching Andy Murray has made me more interested in tennis and [Rory] McIlroy in golf, even though I can't play it. I enjoy watching the best and everyone likes to see stars.

"Frankel is in the public eye and it would be wonderful if he could continue to win races because it's important for the sport. When he comes to the races and even when he walks into the parade ring, people are lining up to see him.

"People want to see something good. They want to see Andy Murray winning Wimbledon or Kauto Star, if Paul [Nicholls] decides to carry on with him, racing again. People take an interest in Frankel. They want him to do well."

Hitting full stride, Cecil was unable to stop himself from gently reminding his critics that decisions over Frankel's future remained his to make.

"They say, 'Why didn't Henry Cecil run him in the Derby?' when I know if he'd run at that stage of his career, he'd have fallen flat on his face in the home straight," he said. "They ask why didn't I run him at six furlongs. My response is that, if you trained him, you wouldn't be asking such a stupid question."

However, despite Frankel's apparent invincibility last season, Cecil said he remained conscious that the horse was always "only one bad step away" from the end of his career.

"The way Frankel is settling better, there's every reason to think he could be even better as a four-year-old," he said. "He's growing up. He's maturing. But you never know what's around the corner.

"Lester [Piggott] worked Simply Great before the [1982] Derby and said, 'This will be my easiest ever winner of the race.' The next day he tripped, hit his front leg with his back leg and cracked his knee. These things happen."

Cecil was in London to promote Sandown's two-day mixed Flat and jump meeting at the end of the month, the Bet365 Ultimate Celebration.

Alongside him was Nicholls, whom he had previously met only once, and then briefly, but with whom he appeared to find a great deal of common ground.

While Cecil questioned whether there are enough "very, very good horses" among his 150-horse team to challenge for a championship this year, Nicholls was wondering whether he can hold on to the champion's title he first won in 2006 and has held ever since.

"We're £10,000 behind Nicky Henderson but that's not much," he said. "Nicky's a good mate and you could certainly argue that he really deserves to win it this season but I'm not going to be waving the white flag. We've got plenty of horses left to run at meetings like Aintree and Sandown where there is still decent prize money to be won."

A team of female jockeys will for the first time take part in this year's Shergar Cup at Ascot on 11 August. Hayley Turner, a fixture in the British team at the event in recent years, will be joined by the Canadian pair of Emma-Jayne Wilson and Chantal Sutherland, who took part in Saturday's Dubai World Cup."

Knight says her five years in job was a time of 'extraordinary difficulty', and she has 'one more job in me'

Angela Knight, the voice of banking during five of the most tumultuous years in the industry's history, is to step down this summer.

Knight, who is 61, said she had "one more job in me" as she announced her departure from the British Bankers' Association. She described her time there as one of "extraordinary difficulty" that came "during a crisis of a magnitude that few if any have seen before or expected".

A former Conservative MP and economic secretary to Ken Clarke, she joined the BBA on 1 April 2007 and was soon pitched into battle on behalf of the businesses blamed for the worst recession since the Great Depression.

Her first trial by fire came on Friday, 14 September 2007, the day the queues formed outside Northern Rock in the first run on a British bank since the 19th century, when Knight took on 19 back-to-back television and radio interviews from a studio at London's Millbank Tower.

As the credit crunch and the collapse of Lehman Brothers followed, Knight become an early morning fixture of Radio 4's Today Programme. During her tenure at the BBA, she has given over 800 broadcast interviews, made over 1,000 speeches, and travelled over 14,000km to and from Brussels alone.

"It's been a lot of ground covered in both distance and issues," she said on Monday. At a time when "banker bashing" became a national sport, Knight's challenge was to defend the industry while avoiding becoming as unpopular as those she represented. She played a key role in shaping the legislation introduced to reform British banks and prevent a similar financial collapse.

On Monday, she paid tribute to her team at the BBA, describing the organisation as "strong and forward looking", and to the commuters who became her sounding board during her morning train ride from Ascot to Waterloo. "I'm kept in order by those who I travel on the train with in the morning. There's plenty of time for people to give me a view."

Knight drew personal criticism for taking on the retail banks' fight against rulings that they should compensate customers for over £5bn of mis-sold payment protection insurance. The BBA backed away from seeking a judicial review after Lloyds Banking Group and Barclays withdrew their support.

"We had to take it on behalf of the banks and that is very hard for a trade association on a very unpopular issue," said Knight. "It became very personalised. But you can't just walk away."

A chemistry graduate who started her career working for Air Products, an American industrial gas company, she set up on her own, forming Knight & Cook, a metallurgical processor, before entering local politics in Sheffield as a Tory councillor. She entered parliament in 1992 before serving as economic secretary to the Treasury between 1995 and 1997.

She lost her seat in the 1997 general election that swept Tony Blair to power, and joined the Association of Private Client Investment Manager and Stockbrokers, where she was instrumental in breaking up a 2000 merger plan between the London and Frankfurt stock exchanges. At the time, she described herself as "a woman with two kids doing a job".

BBA chairman Marcus Agius praised her "extraordinary leadership and energy" and said she had been instrumental in making the BBA "the key voice in the debate on the future of the banking sector".

Ex-NoW and Met schmoozer found plenty to say for a man who's been arrested and could face charges

Fleet Street has sent some pretty rackety witnesses to Lord Justice Leveson's phone hacking inquiry, dozy enough to shame the Street of Shame. But Neil "Wolfman"Wallis, who turned up for a second helping on Monday, wasn't one of them. Cheerful and doggedly unabashed, worldly and articulate, he's smart and knows it.

After three hours of cross-examination in the high court in the Strand it was still obvious, except perhaps to the witness, that the Metropolitan police were being wildly inappropriate when they employed Andy Coulson's former deputy at the News of the World as a £1,000 a day PR adviser, especially one who turned out to be still flogging police stories to his old papers.

But it was more obvious than ever why the Met must have thought it was a good idea. By the end of the session the great schmoozer was generously advising Judge Leveson on how to write his report on better media regulation. Good advice it was too, just what Leveson needs. But no, it would be inappropriate.

But Wolfman, bearded, compact and famous for employing reporters shorter than himself, also chuckled a lot for a man in a tight corner, who's been arrested and could face charges. Had he been pleased when his friend (protege?) John Stevens became the new Met commissioner in succession to his friend, Paul Condon? "It was the opposite of a perfect storm – a perfect sunburst." Wallis would later ghost-write The Chief, Stevens's NoW column.

And what about ex-anti-terrorism chief Andy Hayman, whose sideline was terrorising his expenses. Was he hard to buy a drink for? asked Robert Jay, QC for the inquiry. "I didn't have to arm-twist him." Did Wallis recall ever buying champagne for Hayman or for high-flier John ("an immensely impressive bloke, very clever") Yates, both of whom have since resigned. Wallis: "I don't like champagne." Jay: "I'm not quite sure that was an answer to my question … you might not have drink it." Wallis: "Not to my knowledge … I prefer a dry white wine."

Like most tabloid witnesses here he couldn't hide his disdain for Nick Davies's expose of Scotland Yard complicity in the phone hacking culture. They make jokes about "wonderful newspapers that most people don't read" (you said that last time, protested Jay), but Wallis was more gracious than most. Explaining that journalists are only as good as their contacts, he said that even Nick Davies didn't get his hacking leaks "from someone he met last week".

As so often in court 73 the trouble yesterday was one of bifurcation, whereby well-documented tabloid excesses, some Wallis-related, are barely visible. The Neil Wallis visible to voters watching the televised hearings was "Joe Citizen" (his own description), concerned about catching paedophiles, assorted crooks, and drug-addicted mothers trying to sell their teenage daughter's virginity. No doubt about it, he cares about the Met and works for papers which – "like most people" – are "pro-police, pro-army and pro-law and order".

Pro-law phone hacking? Good tabloid operators don't do irony, it's unsettling, and Wallis is clearly a very good tabloid man. Telling Leveson the sort of advice he gives his Met chums is about "the life and death of a story", how "if you get to the weekend and it isn't in the Sunday papers it's over". Good simple advice for which all sorts of organisations would pay £1,000 a day.

The only time the Wolfman showed his fangs came when he admitted being "a bit raw" about the breach of his own daughter's privacy over her work experience at the Met. He'd been shopped by two senior coppers who'd pulled exactly the same strings for their own kids. Privacy? The irony problem again.

Wallis was scornful of Jay's laboured efforts to establish that the drinks, dinners and shared football matches were designed to give the NoW a "special place," an inside track at the Met, a two-way trade in information. It was clear he didn't like Ian Blair, a disaster as Met commissioner who was cerebral, tabloid-hating and politically correct (ie, a bit Labour) as distinct from Lord Stevens, who was "a proper non-political copper" (ie Tory). Would a brave and brilliant officer like him be bought for drinks, he asked.

Good question, and it fitted his strategy of playing down his own importance, his journalist's instinct for "a hoofing great story" for which he would not hesitate to dump on anyone. Two phrases which kept recurring were "that's human nature" and "it's the way of the world". Even civil servants get lunched and leaky. Too leaky, he was asked. "Sadly … not leaky enough."

Right at the end, Wallis made a serious pitch for a more open society like America's, one in which we all get told more (his remedy for most things, preferably via an NoW exclusive). There was far less intrusion on privacy than 20 years ago. The McCanns? Awful, he felt for them, but blamed the Portuguese police, clearly not mates of Wolfman. Lord Leveson wondered if Wallis-style openness would mean sharing inside track information with all media. What, sharing his great ideas with the rivals? Wolfman was horrified.

• Woods father figure believes Tiger is nearly back to best
• O'Meara hints at prospect of battle with Rory McIlroy

No one in professional golf knows Tiger Woods better than Mark O'Meara and after two days spent together practising at Augusta National for this week's Masters no one is more bullish on the former world No1's chances of winning a major championship for the first time in almost four years.

O'Meara, who acted as father figure to Woods during the latter's first few years on the PGA Tour, played practice rounds with his old friend on Sunday and Monday here and left with the distinct impression the chase for Jack Nicklaus's record of 18 major wins was about to be rejoined. "Everything I saw out there on the course was extremely good," the 1998 Masters champion said. "I expect him to play really well out there – I'd be shocked if he didn't. He's driving the ball well. He's powerful again. He's got a little pep to his step again."

O'Meara cited his friend's victory at the Bay Hill Invitational two weekends ago as a important moment as Woods seeks to restore the kind of domination he enjoyed at his peak. The pair spoke shortly after Woods won, beating the field by five shots for his first PGA Tour win in more than two and a half years.

"It's like riding a bike," O'Meara said. "When you have won the tournaments he has won and have had the career he has had, it's always going to be in there. He just needed to dig deep and find it. Nerves are a big part of the game, and even he gets nervous. Yet he was certainly in control on that Sunday at Bay Hill."

Woods has won four Green Jackets, although his last victory came in 2005. He has played here twice since returning from the scandal that knocked his career off the rails, finishing fourth on both occasions. In the circumstances, these stand as remarkable performances given the state of his game at the time and the tumult that surrounded his private life.

O'Meara believes that a familiarity with the Augusta National course and a deeper appreciation than almost any other player of what it takes to win here helped Woods excel against all the odds.

"There are going to be a lot of guys this week who will be in contention – certainly a lot of guys who have had good experiences here before," he said. "I think those guys have got a little bit of an advantage. Having said that, this is not going to be a pushover by any means because there are a lot of guys playing well, particularly young players."

O'Meara did not single out any youngster in particular, though there was no doubt he was talking about Rory McIlroy in particular. The Northern Irishman played a practice round here last week and will arrive at the course on Tuesday to finalise his preparations for Thursday's opening round.

He and Woods are scheduled to give press conferences on Tuesday, when the only topic of conversation will be the prospect of the 2012 Masters coming down to contest between the two most recognisable, and currently, best golfers in the world.

A BBC documentary reveals the discrimination and abuse preventing women in football from doing their jobs

It was just over a year ago when, for a few days at least, English football came to a juddering halt. It was Richard Keys' and Andy Gray's fault – their off-air comments about the lineswoman Sian Massey leading the rest of the world to a nasty discovery about our game: Football is rife with sexism. Who knew? Well, every woman in the industry for a start.

And so begins a new BBC documentary, fronted by Gabby Logan, titled "Sexism in Football?" It need not have bothered with the question mark. The film follows Logan as she speaks to some of the most influential women in the game – from West Ham's vice chair, Karren Brady, and the FA's first female board member, Heather Rabbatts, to Uefa's first female board member, Karen Espelund. Many of Logan's interviewees, even those who have spent more than two decades in the industry, say they still face sexist comments and discrimination.

While football has spent millions of pounds on campaigns to stamp out racism and homophobia from the game, sexism continues to be tolerated – whether that means thousands of fans chanting "slut" at a TV reporter during a live televised game, female employees being barred from meetings and press briefings or the nation being up in arms at the appointment of a woman to do a "man's job".

Such was the experience of Jacqui Oatley, who made headlines after it was announced she would become the first woman to commentate on Match of the Day, in 2007. Despite years of experience in radio commentary Oatley's suitability for the job was questioned – even within the Guardian's sports section.

In the week that news of her appointment was leaked to the press Oatley was the subject of nationwide debate and gruesome tabloid tactics, her family home doorstepped by journalists in the build-up to the game. As fellow MOTD commentator Jonathan Pearce says, "It was unfair coverage, the sort of coverage that wouldn't be given to a male commentator coming to Match of the Day for the first time."

"They thought there was a shelf with a load of blonde dolly birds on it," says Oatley with a smile, "and they plucked me off and plonked me into the commentary box – I think some people genuinely thought that."

Oatley's sense of humour typifies the response of many women in the game. In a lovely exchange between Brady and Logan, the former managing director of Birmingham City remembers being at a match with her grandmother when the crowd were shouting abuse. "They were shouting 'Karren Brady's a whore,'" says Brady. "I said, 'They're saying I'm twenty-FOUR, nan.'" "Sounds like my nan," says Logan with a wry smile. "At one match she couldn't understand why the crowd wanted me to show them my teeth."

The film brilliantly captures a typical woman in football – "WiF" – moment when Jackie Bass, regional clubs partnerships manager for the Football League, pulls into Barnet's car park to a torrent of abuse. "She can't fucking park!" a group of players shout. "Welcome to my world," says Bass, deadpan.

I have shared many such moments with Bass and other women in the game – out and about at football matches, doing our jobs. Usually we laugh, because the majority of comments – from being mistaken for the club tea lady or a WAG – are too silly to get upset about.

Where it is hard to laugh, and Bass testifies to this in the film, is when the prejudice actively prevents a person from doing her job. It makes for disturbing viewing as she reels off a list of episodes that have affected her career and her confidence – being banned from press briefings or the tunnel simply because she is a woman.

As a former press officer for both QPR and Watford, Bass campaigned for the Football League rules to be changed and Barnsley were forced to remove a sign from their tunnel which read: "No women beyond this point". Manchester City's chief communications officer, Vicky Kloss, was infamously barred from the tunnel at Notts County for being a woman days after the Keys and Gray incident.

The documentary covers much ground, but in resorting to using an actress to tell one particular story reveals just how sensitive this material remains. As Bass says, "If you heard some of the stories that could have been told, I think it would shock a lot of people."

Through the WiF network, founded in 2007, we have heard many disturbing tales which include sexual and physical harassment. The same type of incidents seem to resurface over and again. Women who have been grabbed by the neck, stalked, harassed on their phones or been told that they have to sleep with the man in question if they wish to continue going about their everyday jobs. The perpetrators are often high-profile – star players, top managers, well-known TV pundits – all safe in the knowledge that their behaviour will never be reported. "Who wants to be the whistleblower?" asks Bass. There have been women who have attempted it but most have gone quietly, paid to keep silent or threatened with having their names and reputations dragged through the newspapers.

Logan's film takes us on a touching personal journey – from TV stalwart, 18 years in the game, hardened to being asked by Premier League managers how many footballers she had slept with, to deciding that a change must be made. "I decided this should not just be a programme that reflected a problem but it should try and encourage a change," she says. "And suddenly I felt a great sense of relief."

Change is most powerful when it occurs at the very top so news of a tweet from Fifa head Sepp Blatter is most encouraging. On Friday Blatter wrote: "Football is for men and women. Vital to have a female voice on the Committee". Fifa, of course, do not have a female voice on their committee. It seems his was a timely note to self to get a woman in. Don't go getting too excited though – it's just the one, mind.

"Sexism in football?" BBC1, Wednesday 4 April, 10.45pm

Senior MPs concerned at government proposals to extend powers of security services to monitor public communications

Senior Liberal Democrat MPs are threatening to rebel over the coalition government's plans to extend the powers of the security services to monitor the public's email, telephone calls and social media communications.

Some were in talks with Nick Clegg's office on Monday as they sought "clarification" over whether the legislation, expected to be presented in the Queen's Speech in May, would enable the government's interception agency, GCHQ, to access the content of communications without a warrant.

The concerns emerged as the data protection watchdog pressed for new safeguards to protect individuals' privacy from the proposals. Internet companies have told the Guardian that the government's plans to monitor email and social media use by the British public could be used by autocratic regimes to justify state surveillance.

Whitehall sources confirmed that the legislation may well enable GCHQ to access some information "on demand" and in "real time" and it remained unclear whether a warrant would be necessary.

Downing Street insisted only data – times, dates, numbers and addresses – not content would be accessible as it sought to quell fears about the proposals.

But some Lib Dems and civil liberties groups were adamant the plan would indeed give the security services access to the content and details of people's communications.

Julian Huppert, the Lib Dem MP for Cambridge who sits on the Commons home affairs select committee, said: "No expert I've ever spoken to can see how this could possibly be done without great expense and without allowing access to the actual message that was sent – which is not legal without a warrant from the home secretary. I haven't seen the details of these proposals – not for want of asking – but it's clear to me that what we want is more safeguards, not more powers for the state to keep data."

Another senior Lib Dem MP said the proposals would have to give access to content and would ride a "coach and horses" through the party's principles.

"These proposals are entirely contrary to the core beliefs of the Liberal Democrats and the position we adopted in opposition. This could put considerable stress on the coalition not least because Lib Dem activists would almost certainly expect the party in parliament to resist," the MP said.

Mark Hunter, the Liberal Democrat MP for Cheadle and a deputy chief whip, said the plans could prove to be difficult with the party and its MPs.

"If we are to continue to punch above our weight in government, as we have so far, then this is one issue that we will have argue out [in the party]. This was not in the coalition agreement. This is a potentially tricky one to deal with," he said.

Clegg defended the plans, insisting he was "totally opposed" to the idea of governments reading people's emails at will.

"The point is we are not doing any of that and I wouldn't allow us to do any of that. I am totally opposed to it as a Liberal Democrat and someone who believes in people's privacy and civil liberties.

"All we are doing is updating the rules which currently apply to mobile telephone calls to allow the police and security services to go after terrorists and serious criminals and updating that to apply to technology like Skype which is increasingly being used by people who want to make those calls and send those emails."

An aide to the deputy prime minister said he and his party remained committed to a policy passed at the Lib Dems' spring conference which said they would ensure that "there shall be no interception of telephone calls, SMS messages, social media, internet or any other communications without named, specific and time-limited warrants".

Even if the proposals do get through the Commons, they can expect a rough ride through the second chamber, according to the Lib Dem peer Lord Oakeshott. "I am sure that peers of all parties and none will be scrutinising this bill at least as carefully as the security services want to scrutinise the ordinary citizen. We grew battle-hardened in the Blair years to accusations that we are soft on terrorism," he said.

Attempts by the last Labour government to create a giant central database containing web and telephone use were dropped after huge opposition, including from the Conservatives and Lib Dems.

Instead, internet service providers have had to keep details of users' web access, email and internet phone calls for 12 months under an EU directive from 2009. Although the content is not kept, the sender, recipient, time of communication and geographical location does have to be recorded.

The proposed new law – which could be announced in the Queen's Speech in May – would reportedly allow GCHQ to access that data in real time, on demand, rather than retrospectively. Government sources say this would not, however, be stored on a single database.

Security minister James Brokenshire said the emphasis was on solving crime rather than "real-time snooping on everybody's emails".

No internet businesses were willing to mount a public criticism of the coalition's controversial plans on Monday, but many privately raised fears over the power of authorities to see who is contacting whom online in real time.

Christopher Graham, the information commissioner, wants assurances about plans that will mean internet companies are instructed to install hardware tracking telephone and website traffic.

A spokesman for the Information Commissioner's Office said: "We will continue to seek assurances, including the implementation of the results of a thorough Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA).

"Ultimately, the decision as to whether to proceed with the project is one which has to be taken by Parliament."Isabella Sankey, Liberty's director of policy, said: "Whoever is in government, the grand snooping ambitions of security agencies don't change. Proposals to stockpile our web, phone and texting records were shelved by Labour. Now we see plans to recycle this chilling proposal leaking into the press."

Nick Pickles, director of the Big Brother Watch campaign group, said: "No amount of scaremongering can hide the fact that this policy is being condemned by MPs in all political parties. The government has offered no justification for what is unprecedented intrusion into our lives, nor explained why promises made about civil liberties are being casually junked."

Suspect in custody shooting at a private Christian college in California with 'multiple victims' and at least five deaths

At least five people have been killed and several injured after a shooting at a religious college in Oakland, California, on Monday morning.

Police said a suspect had been detained in the attack.

The shooting occurred at Oikos University, a Korean religious college offering studies in theology, music, nursing and Asian medicine.

At a brief press conference, Oakland police spokeswoman Joanne Watson said that a gunman had entered the college shortly after 10.30am local time and fired multiple shots. She was unable to confirm numbers of fatalities or of those injured.

Law enforcement sources close to the investigation told the Associated Press that at least five people have died. Officials from a nearby hospital said they were treating four people from the shooting, according to AP.

Watson said: "We are interviewing the witnesses right now to try to determine if this person is known to them," she said.

Footage broadcast by the local ABC affiliate showed wounded people have been brought out of the building, and more gurneys were being brought in. Officers surrounded the building.

The suspect was described as a Korean man in his 40s with a heavy build and wearing khaki clothing.

"One of the people who was inside the building, she was saying there is a crazy guy inside," witness Brian Snow told KGO-TV. "She did say someone got shot in the chest right next to her before she got taken off in an ambulance."

Offices of a local newspaper, the Oakland Tribune, were locked down during the incident. After the lockdown was lifted, the paper updated a report on its website to quote Jong Kim, a pastor who founded the school about 10 years ago, as saying the gunman had was a former student.

According to the Tribune, Kim said the suspect had been studying nursing but but was no longer enrolled. Kim remained in his office during the incident, and said he heard about 30 gunshots. "I stayed in my office," he said, imitating the sound of rapid shots.

Several local media reports said that the suspect was detained nearby in the Alameda district. The area was cordoned off with yellow police tape.

Oakland police did not immediately return calls.

Professionals and policymakers give their thoughts on the act's implications and on campaigning for the future of the service

John Ashton: 'I'd like to see a royal commission on public health'

Having lived through seven reorganisations in the 20 years I have been a director of public health, and having been unable to make much progress in public health in Cumbria for the past 18 months due to the distractions caused by yet more structural change, the last thing I want to see is yet another reorganisation. Personally, I now need to recharge my batteries, and dedicate myself to making a difference in Cumbria, by delivering what we can within the law as it now stands.

Any change to the bill now needs to come from evolution, tidying up, and shaping. I would like the opposition to set up a shadow royal commission on public health. We desperately need a legal framework for public health that is fit for the 21st century.

This should not be a party political thing – rather, a royal commission could come up with a proposal for a new public health act, which would be of the enabling kind. It would encourage experimentation, and allow progressive local authorities to develop their own powers; others could then follow what emerged as best practice. Having said that, I am sympathetic to the notion of having health professionals stand for parliament [see Clive Peedell, below].

Andrew Lansley was billed as knowing more about the NHS than anyone else, whereas clearly he knew very little. It is right and proper to have people in parliament who know what they are talking about.

Dr Clive Peedell: 'We need a party to defend the NHS'

Despite the pre-election promises of "no top-down reorganisation" and the overwhelming opposition to the reforms from right across the NHS stakeholder spectrum, the coalition eventually forced through the legislation. Experts in health policy and public, commercial and constitutional law have published evidence in leading peer-reviewed medical journals explaining how this legislation (despite late amendments) will lead to the abolition of the NHS in England. It facilitates the transition from a single taxpayer-funded system to a mixed funding system, with increasing privatisation of the provision and commissioning of healthcare in England.

For this reason, a group of doctors has decided to form a single issue political party to defend the NHS and its founding principles. We hope to stand at least 50 NHS professionals as candidates at the next general election, believing that there is a rising public appetite to vote for independents. We were delighted to see that Lord Ashcroft's recent poll published on Conservative Home put us in third place on 18%, before we have even formed as a party. We would have the added advantage of not being subjected to party whips and would vote in the interests of the public good, not our political and corporate masters. We plan to tactically select seats to take on coaliton MPs who betrayed the NHS.

We are already overwhelmed by the amount of support we are getting from the public and healthcare professionals. If we can keep up the momentum, we strongly believe we can win seats, and the more seats we win, the more influential we can become in making parliament more accountable to the people.

David Owen: 'We were lied to at the general election'

For nine months this NHS bill has dominated my timetable and now there is nothing more that I can do. It will be reversed only if the coalition breaks up, say in 2013, or loses the general election in 2015. I will of course help if Labour needs advice to develop specific amendments to return the NHS in England to an internal market and remove all aspects of an external market. Some of these aspects were developed under Labour in government. Any such action needs to be specific and detailed but not involve total repeal and yet another costly reorganisation from which the NHS has suffered enough. For example, keep the National Commissioning Board and Monitor but strip them of powers to commercialise and marketise healthcare.

Legislation would need to be passed very quickly on coming into power – for example if Labour comes into power prior to a 2015 general election under the Fixed Term Parliament Act. What is needed soon, therefore, is a Save Our NHS Plan for specific emergency action. No generalities. No waffle. But an injunction for "Action this Day". Only such a forensic approach will carry conviction within the NHS, whose staff are punch-drunk and suspicious of any political promises having been lied to at the last general election.

Director of public health (anonymous): 'We need a NHS restoration bill'

The campaign starts now for an NHS restoration bill recreating a socially owned NHS led by health professionals accountable to the people. The current act removes socially accountable organisations from any special place in the NHS and prohibits GPs from preventing privatisation of provision. Once healthcare is defined as a commodity the state buys, not a service it provides, EU competition laws apply more strictly, creating procurement bureaucracies. In the Netherlands competition authorities raided GP premises to stop them favouring local hospitals.

Clinical commissioning should be retained but without the oversight of these market regulators. Further reorganisation is unnecessary but the regulatory framework should be swept away. Our NHS should be run by parliament, the professions and the people, not by market economists, procurement bureaucrats and commercial lawyers.

An NHS restoration bill should not just go back to 2006 but must correct some of the defects in the NHS – extending democracy, establishing a universal occupational health service, and empowering local communities to address health issues.

The campaign against the current act must transform itself naturally into a campaign for a restoration bill – public awareness was late coming, was still building and must not ebb. In clinical commissioning groups and health and wellbeing boards problems created by the act can be exposed, resisted and, where possible, ameliorated.

The Health and Social Care Act 2012 must not remain. The campaign to save the NHS did not end at royal assent.

• This piece is written by a director of public health who, due to restrictions created by the act, does not wish to be named until after the close of poll in the current local government elections

Dr Alex Scott-Samuel: 'This is the health resistance'

The Health and Social Care Act is now law – and the health resistance is up and running. A website is being set up to log accounts of inadequate and poor quality care and charging for NHS services. I have produced a leaflet – The Courage to Refuse – for use in sympathetic GPs' waiting rooms and other NHS settings — which encourages patients to request GP referrals only to publicly provided services. Ideas are also needed re civil disobedience, nonviolent direct action and other legal means of challenging the government's healthcare market. Uncut, Occupy and other resistance groups need rapidly to co-ordinate NHS-related activities.

A privatisation indicators set and baseline data are also required to begin monitoring the impacts of the destruction of our NHS. Hopefully the alliance of medical royal colleges, professional associations, trade unions and political parties whose intervention was largely too late to save the NHS will support this.

Lucy Reynolds: 'The defects of this McNHS reform will emerge'

Those acquainted with the Health and Social Care Act know that it isn't written to improve service delivery, but to provide profit streams for investors, insurers and hospital chains. The responsibility of NHS staff is to protect patients' interests, because Healthwatch England lacks teeth. They can do that by escalating patient concerns through the system, and by keeping publishable records to document soaring costs and deterioration of care within the new system.

The leaked transition risk register gave odds of four to one that "dismantling the current management structures and controls [causes] more failures". It notes that mitigating actions are needed but lacking.

As the defects of this McNHS reform manifest, we should consider the Scottish mutual model developed since 2004, when statistics showed that market-based arrangements cost more. They removed the Westminster-mandated purchaser/provider split and set up 14 regional health boards to administer a collaborative, affordable integrated health system. It was subsequently found that the Scottish mutual NHS has outperformed the partially-marketised English NHS on the index indicator of health service quality, infant mortality and on key efficiency measures including waiting lists and patient satisfaction.

Cheerleaders for "liberating the NHS" insist that the current reforms should proceed. The risk register confirms that the sooner we follow the more efficient path of our northern neighbours, the better for our health and wealth.

Clare Gerada: 'GPs remain committed'

What has to happen now is to focus on stabilising the NHS and addressing the serious problems facing us all – namely reducing budgets, increasing demand and increasing complexity of care. The Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) has always argued that it is time for a national debate as to what the NHS should provide, how it should be provided and how we deal with the big issues such as improving end-of-life care, supporting the increasing numbers of frail elderly living alone and reducing the health burdens created by alcohol, obesity and smoking.

General practitioners have always been at the heart of the NHS, and its most trusted representatives. After all, when someone talks about "my doctor" they almost invariably mean their GP.

As the chair of the RCGP, I know that our members have never weakened or faltered in their commitment to the NHS. It is important that as their professional body we continue to have a voice in the future of the health service, particularly when difficult choices have to be made.

Bernice Boss: 'Others should be inspired by our campaign'

This heartbreaking act fragments the health service I've spent my life working in. I support calls for its repeal, and will be upping the political (and if necessary legal) pressure on both outgoing (PCT) and incoming (CCG and CSS) health bosses, to listen to the public wishes, and keep our health services public. Last month in the high court, 76-year-old Michael Lloyd and his lawyers, stopped Gloucestershire PCT transferring nine hospitals and 3,000 nurses and health workers out of the NHS. Large demonstrations and public meetings organised by Stroud Against the Cuts and other anti-cuts groups raised awareness and funds for the challenge. The PCT found it could not lawfully simply hand over NHS services to a "social enterprise" or "community interest company" – essentially an unaccountable, expensive, bureaucratic and vulnerable private company. The consent order also established that, contrary to the developing mythology, commissioners can choose not to outsource, and should consider the perfectly legal option of giving services to another NHS trust without need for a full competitive tender. We hope others will be heartened and inspired by our community campaign.

When authoritarian rulers embrace reform they almost always do so in the hope of retaining power rather than transferring it

When authoritarian rulers embrace reform they almost always do so in the hope of retaining power rather than transferring it. At most, they are ready to share it only so long as they can keep ultimate control behind the scenes. Real change comes, if it does, when events later slip out of the grasp of those trying to manipulate them. That was the story in South Africa, in post-Franco Spain, and in Russia and eastern Europe, for example. It seems to be the story, too, in Egypt since the fall of Mubarak, and it is the story in Burma today.

Aung Sang Suu Kyi's clean sweep in a raft of byelections at the weekend could come to be seen as the first step toward a full democratisation of Burma. Or it could turn out to be part of yet another attempt by the Burmese elite to co-opt and use the opposition. This is not necessarily to decry the sincerity of President Thein Sein. He seems to be an intelligent man who has understood that Burma under the generals has failed to deal effectively with its problems of ethnic division, unbalanced development and corruption. In addition, the country has drifted into an overdependence on Chinese aid and investment that offends patriotic Burmese. The government faces a discontented and disillusioned population angry at the lack of freedom and the extent of poverty in a country rich in natural resources.

Most Burmese have withdrawn from the sham that political life had become, and a pseudo-democratic makeover 18 months ago made things, if anything, worse. Freeing Aung San Suu Kyi and bringing her back into politics was an attempt to repair this situation. If Thein Sein wants to go further, with Suu Kyi's help, so that by the time Burma goes into a general election in 2015 it will be a real contest, he will have to disturb vested interests that have grown ever more entrenched since the original military takeover a half-century ago.

Out of the Burmese officer corps was born a new class that dominates not only the armed forces but the government, the civil and diplomatic services, and much of economic life. It includes many who have blood on their hands and many who have systematically raided public funds and expropriated national resources. These people want both to retain their privileges and to avoid retribution. Naturally, they want Thein Sein to secure their privileges rather than to reduce them.

The question before Thein Sein and Suu Kyi is thus whether there can be, in Burma, a negotiated revolution of the kind that in, for example, South Africa or Poland brought fundamental change without serious violence. Western countries should thus send a signal of approval by ending minor sanctions but keeping in place the major ones, notably on the use of the US dollar, until very much more progress has been conclusively demonstrated.

Blackdown Hills: A winding path took us through woodland to steps leading to a forgotten walled garden, derelict and overgrown, but still suggestive of the estate's former character

The river Otter flows mainly through rural Devon, past Honiton and Ottery, then across tidal mudflats and salt marshes to reach the sea close to Budleigh Salterton. But its source is just a little way into Somerset, in the Blackdown Hills, which are shared between the two counties, and where the Otterhead estate, once spacious pleasure grounds around a Victorian mansion, is now an intriguing wilderness. Its paths and drives invite the walker to explore 94 hectares of woodland owned by Wessex Water and leased to the Otterhead Estate Trust, which operates it as a nature reserve and place of recreation and education.

The great house was demolished in 1952 but, soon after we left the road and took a winding path from beside the lodge through woodland and past rhododendrons, we found steps leading to a forgotten walled garden, derelict and overgrown, but still suggestive of the estate's former character. And a little farther on, downhill, our way along the drive that used to lead to the house curved on to a bridge, some of its masonry hinting at a more dignified past, and across the stream spilling down over mossy stone from the level of a wide lake to the level below.

There were two swans and two pairs of mallards on the lake, but otherwise the place was deserted until a man with a fishing rod arrived on a bicycle. He pointed to the site of the old house. There used to be seven lakes, features of the grandly designed ornamental landscape, as the Otter went by stages down the slopes, but now there are only two. We explored the grassy terrace where there were a few pieces of stone, the remains of a wall, and some steps which might once have led to a tennis court or croquet lawn. Round a bend in the drive, we were surprised to find the surviving coach house and stable block, put to modern use as a forest school.

Your editorial (Economics lessons from Bradford West, 2 April) should be a wake-up call for Labour's frontbench to get its act together on regional policy. Following the coalition's destruction of the regional development agencies (RDAs) there is little if any strategic intervention in regional economies. The odd sweetie thrown here and there (Glaxo, Nissan) will do little to stop the accelerating decline of the north's economy. The new high-speed line will not reach Manchester or Leeds until 2033 at the earliest, and in the meantime we have a rail network that is creaking, with life-expired trains.

The missing element in your editorial is the need for a strategic – and accountable – "guiding hand" which can direct regional development. The former RDAs suffered from a lack of democratic accountability, but a new approach to the regions should have elected regional assemblies at their core. The north needs the sort of powers that London, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have if we are not to become even more of a backwater. I doubt we will get that from the coalition, for whom "region" seems to have become a dirty word. But as we approach the 120th anniversary of the founding of the Independent Labour party in Bradford, Labour should reassess its approach to the English regions, and develop a radical policy for devolution.
Prof Paul Salveson
General secretary, The Hannah Mitchell Foundation

• Larry Elliott's analysis (2 April) is spot-on: Britain's foremost carpetbagger's win in Bradford West is down to poverty in the most centralised country in the western world. Only a Whitehall-knows-best system could say that the Cornish cannot have a regional assembly when Luxembourg has layers of local government.

First-past-the-post elections monopolise what local power is left and suppress diversity – unlike Scotland, which now uses the single transferable vote in its local elections. Add to this a lack of effective regional government – even in Greater London, with only 25 assembly members – plus the need for the rest of England to have at least a dozen regional assemblies, and no wonder the south-east has become economically overheated and is running out of water.
David Nowell
New Barnet, Hertfordshire

• A visitor to depressed northern areas – Bradford, Merseyside, Teesside, Humberside, Tyneside – will find plenty of infrastructure. It is not clear why yet more motorways, industrial estates and retail parks should trigger the growth which those that are already there, in all their tatty ugliness, have failed to.

Larry Elliott is right – top-down planning, bread and circuses in the form of HS2 etc is not the answer. I think I had an inkling why regeneration doesn't happen nearly 40 years ago, when coal was discovered at Selby. I had recently returned from Zambia's copper belt. There, a whole community of contractors and service providers was sustained by the local mines. Here, the National Coal Board handed out the contracts to national companies: all the locals got was pitheads, pollution and some jobs down the pit. Now the pitheads are museums, we are clearing up the pollution and the jobs are gone. We need more devolved debate and decision-making to end the London stitch-up.
Tony Ridge
York

• The next few months are likely to be the most interesting of times in English politics. Established politicians and commentators are still struggling to explain and come to terms with George Galloway's and Respect's stunning win in Bradford West (Muslims must step outside this anti-war comfort zone, 2 April). Local elections for councils and the Greater London authority in May, and likely mayoral and police chief elections outside London a few months later, will see a range of political forces to the left of Labour seeking to gain the ear of working people. Those winning the most impressive votes and successes could go on to gain seats at the next general election – even holding the balance of power. A rainbow coalition of the left could develop, offering an alternative of jobs, housing and peace to the mantra of austerity, redundancy and closures.
Nick Long
Election agent, People Before Profit

• The result in Bradford West was a clear reminder to the Labour frontbench that there are political consequences of taking the north for granted. The people of the north deserve (and demand) more than a Labour party preoccupied by voters in London and the south-east.

Too much of what Labour did deliver for the north (tax credits, public sector jobs, investment in health and education) is being dismantled far too easily and quickly by the coalition government. The inequality and poor economic performance that these advances masked have quickly returned to the fore.

While the much smaller populations of Wales and Scotland have governments acting as something of a bulwark against the disastrous economic policies of Westminster, the 16 million people of the north are left largely defenceless.

Labour needs to set out a clear vision for the north to ensure that improvements to people's lives in the future are sustainable and can't be so readily destroyed by incoming Conservative governments. A democratically elected parliament for the north, or each of the three regions of the north, would act as a bulwark against cuts and high unemployment while also allowing the region to shape its own future, building sustainable economic advances.
Graham Whitham
Manchester 

• Your editorial (Economics lessons from Bradford West, 2 April) correctly pinpointed the need for "smart state intervention" to economically rebalance the economy and so rejuvenate the UK's declining regions. Such an approach will need concrete policies and sources of funding to generate the vast number of jobs across a broad range of skills so desperately needed in the towns and cities where the majority live. The Green New Deal group has campaigned since before the credit crunch for a massive country-wide investment programme to make all buildings energy-tight and where feasible powered by renewables such as solar PV. In the economically vulnerable region of the West Midlands, Birmingham is already putting in place a £100m programme to do just that in 15,000 homes in the city.

However, to fund such a programme across the nation a "smart state" should make use of historically low interest rates to set the e-printing presses running for yet more quantitative easing – but this time to be invested directly in such job-generating schemes. UK pension funds could also be enlisted were the government to issue 50-year index-linked bonds that the sector seeks and use the funds to employ people in all the declining regions. This would of course need to go far beyond saving energy to encompass for example maximising recycling and reuse and minimising waste, building low-income homes on brownfield sites and regenerating regional transport infrastructure to benefit local economic activity, rather than shaving tens of minutes off intercity journeys. Only such a "look to the local" emphasis will result in the labour-intensive economic rejuvenation so desperately needed by the Bradford Wests of this country.
Colin Hines
Convenor, Green New Deal Group

I enjoyed the article by Oliver James (Family under the microscope: Can faith save people from a life of alcoholism or depression?, Family, 31 March) but why did he assume that Guardian readers would be "a largely agnostic or atheist bunch"? Is there evidence that people of "leftwing" persuasion are less likely to be religious or that religious people are less likely to be leftwing? I think not. My wife and I are active Christians and have read the Guardian for more years than we care to remember. Most of our Christian friends are, like ourselves, politically left of centre, as we might expect among people who are followers of Jesus Christ. Many of them also read this paper. Please do not so glibly discount us.
John Bryant
Professor emeritus, University of Exeter

• In assuming that Guardian readers are "a largely agnostic or atheist bunch", Oliver James is guilty of sloppy thinking. He also risks alienating readers like myself who are, in fact, believers and feel at home with the Guardian (and I know many such people). One could, without being sloppy, assume Guardian readers are largely a left-of-centre bunch. It might surprise him to learn that if the British electorate were to vote for leftwing parties in the same proportion as do Catholic voters, there would never be a rightwing government at Westminster. He also seems to think secularism is incompatible with religious belief, whereas it should suffice to look at France and Italy, to name but two countries, to see that it is perfectly possible to believe both in God and in secularism.
Janet Pitt
Luxembourg

With the knowledge of the Department for Education and almost certainly its connivance, there is now a concerted attempt to get around the ban on the establishment of new grammar schools in place since 1998 – and to expand selective education. Two grammar schools in Kent are proposing to establish "satellite schools" on new sites (Report, 30 March). If successful, no doubt attempts will be made to replicate this move in other parts of the country, leading to a lowering of educational standards for the majority of children, many from poorer families. Who knows, some entrepreneurial grammar schools might even establish satellites in previously non-selective local authorities. Labour and Lib Dem MPs, as well as those Conservative MPs genuinely interested in promoting social mobility, need to raise the matter. The expansion of selective education in England by indirect means is too important an issue not to be debated in parliament.
Professor Colin Richards
Spark Bridge, Cumbria

Thank you for Robert Hanks's article (Tyranny of a dog's turds, 24 March) – something close to my shoe if not my heart. I live in a beautiful area, which is a mecca for dog walkers. I love dogs, and were it not for my two catty companions I'd probably have one, so I can sympathise with the embarrassment and inconvenience of walking along with a plastic bag of warm poo. I appreciate my neighbours who do take the effort to collect and dispose of their doggy poo, but I am fast turning into a grumpy old woman about the ones who don't bother. I have grandchildren. Little kids don't stick to the path, so the flick stick doesn't always do the business.

But I do have a solution, and one that a friend has taken up with enthusiasm. Why not wear a mini backpack (or bum bag depending on the size of your pooch) with a tight-shutting plastic box inside to put the bags in, then dispose of the poo at home in your bin? My friend says it works brilliantly and showed off her new grey canvas bum bag with great pride as she passed by yesterday. I contend that if the less convinced dog walkers would only think of the waste as human poo being dropped around the neighbourhood, they'd be a lot more careful to pick up, and the Mirey Brook at the bottom of the valley would be a lot cleaner, as would my carpets.
Mary Horsley
Nailsworth, Gloucestershire

• Robert Hanks did not mention an odd habit of many dog walkers. I often walk on the Peak District moors and am astonished at the number of knotted plastic bags with dog mess that are thrown down by the side of the path or hung from a fence or bush. What good does it do to leave these offerings for weeks or months to rot down? Taking the dog off the path into the surrounding vegetation and leaving the result there would be better than that. Existing insects and processes will get rid of it. Take the bags away or bin them, certainly, but please don't leave the present array of unpleasant offerings.
David Gregory
Sheffield

Lee Hall's article on his new production of Close the Coalhouse Door (Still a rich seam, G2, 27 March) took me off down memory lane. In the late 1960s I was living in Peterlee, County Durham, and was a member of Peterlee Players, the town's amateur theatre group. We all went to see the original production of the piece in Newcastle and were entranced by it.

Around August 1969 the London production had just closed, but as far as we knew the play hadn't yet been "released" for amateur production. With tongue rather in cheek, I wrote to the agent Margaret Ramsay explaining that we were a group living in a "town built for miners", that 1969 marked the centenary of the Durham Miners' Association (DMA), and that we'd love to do Coalhouse Door. We almost begged for a licence.

To our absolute delight we received permission to go ahead. Rehearsals started and we had a call from a professional theatre designer asking if he could help. He gave us a superb set. I contacted the headquarters of the DMA, and they mounted a display of mining history in the foyer and decorated the auditorium with some of the magnificent banners belonging to the union lodges in each colliery. And so at the beginning of October the curtain went up on the first amateur production of the play, which played to packed houses for a week.

Alex Glasgow and Sid Chaplin came to the first night, and Alan Plater apologised for not being able to make it. I still treasure Sid's comment after the show: "If Alan had been here I'm sure he would have been proud that the people from whom the play came in the first place had taken it back and done it credit."

We had a memorable week, and I still occasionally get out my old script and read it again – and enjoy it. Best wishes to Lee Hall for his production. We live in deepest Cheshire now but are determined to get up "home" to see it.
John Alan Simpson
Cheadle Hulme, Cheshire

• London is home to a significant proportion of England's huge variety of cultural institutions, so it's perhaps not surprising that a substantial amount of the Arts Council's first tranche of proposed investment in refurbishment of arts buildings should be allocated to the capital (Noises off as arts bodies hear good and bad news, 30 March). However, more than half of the £114m will go to 18 organisations across seven other English regions – like Square Chapel in Halifax, York Museums Trust, and Theatre Royal in Plymouth. And there is more to come for smaller organisations, with a small-scale capital fund to be launched later this year. Plus 75% of our Grants for The Arts investment this financial year has been outside London.

The Lottery funding we use for such projects cannot be applied to the running costs of organisations in our national portfolio, but our grant-in-aid investment there is equally geographically diverse – 446 of our 696 portfolio organisations are based across eight English regions other than London. An almost 30% reduction in our budget from government for the arts meant reducing funding to the majority – including Max Stafford-Clark's Out of Joint, who will still receive a little over £1.8m from us over four years.

Sadly, there were other organisations we had to take the difficult decision to no longer fund at all. But the Arts Council has never funded all the art that takes place in this country and, given an equivalent cut in local authority funding, it was sadly inevitable that some organisations would not be able to manage.

The Arts Council is using its increasing income from the lottery in new ways to help support decreasing levels of money from government. We're looking at the long term, helping arts and cultural organisations all over England, and of all shapes and sizes, become more sustainable, have fit-for-purpose buildings, and generate other sources of income, so they can continue to deliver great work that audiences flock to see.
Alan Davey
Chief executive, Arts Council England

"Actually, a kitchen supper is a perfectly good idea. It's an informal meal eaten in the kitchen, as opposed to three or four elaborate courses in the dining room …" (Simon Hoggart's week, 31 March). "When [Francis] Maude … said that Mr Cameron's dinners … were just 'kitchen suppers', he made everything worse. In that phrase, he was disclosing an assumption – we have a nice dining room but we'll be all relaxed with our pals and won't use it – which is perplexingly, excludingly foreign to his audience" (Charles Moore, Daily Telegraph, 30 March). The Torygraph more in touch with common feeling than the Guardian? A sorry state of affairs indeed.
Ed Freeman
London

• No, the Royal Mail has not just issued "a new stamp bearing Alan Turing's likeness" as stated in Pass notes (28 March). The stamp to commemorate his 100th birthday as part of the Great Britons series features the bombe decryption device. The equivalent of "please send photo of tractor"? It would be interesting to find out how many acknowledged homosexuals have appeared on a stamp.
Richard Humphry
Stockport

• I am having a bit of trouble in receiving emails at the moment. I wonder if GCHQ would be able to forward copies to me (Security services to get more powers to monitor emails and social media, 2 April).
Jill Hughes
Horsmonden, Kent

• If the number of forenames is an indicator of social class (Letters, 29 March), Otto von Habsburg (Obituary, 5 July 2011) must have been in a class of his own. His initials were FJORMAKMHSXFRLGPI. Good job he never played cricket.
Robert Adams
Cardiff

• Janis Goodman (Letters, 31 March) need have no worries about antibiotics becoming resistant to bacteria. She should worry that bacteria are becoming resistant to antibiotics.
Dennis Hawkins
Leominster, Herefordshire

• Last year our first water lily flower opened on 8 June. This year the first flower opened on our pond on 30 March.
Julie Baker
Gloucester

Ed Miliband should know it's not only in areas feeling the worst cuts that voters are seeing the damage around them

The political establishment needs shock treatment from time to time: a whiff of revolution from riot or electoral rebellion gives Westminster a defibrillator jump. Neither riots nor George Galloway's return are welcome news, but rebellions are reminders that people will burst out if pushed too far. And many are being pushed too far, here and right across Europe. Expect the unpredictable.

YouGov reports its highest "none of the above" score, with 17% choosing small parties; 68% think British politics is corrupt. The Westminster wars of "your fault", "you did it", "you're worst" sound like wasps in a bottle to those who say "they're all the same". One in nine who voted Tory last time would opt for Ukip now. SNP success in Scotland is part rebellion against Labour hegemony. A collapsing Lib Dem vote may turn to Labour – or skitter off to the Greens or doctor candidates. Elections for mayors and police commissioners are an open invitation to anti-establishment backlash, as in Doncaster or Hartlepool: the new has a brief veneer of authenticity. The tightening tourniquet of austerity round a stagnant economy must have political consequences.

Ed Miliband's bid to break out opened Labour's local election campaign today in Selly Oak with a speech my colleague Nicholas Watt (not given to hyperbole) reported as "a bravura performance". Read it to see Miliband potting every ball, though a blindfolded player could hardly miss: Osborne's catastrophic budget, NHS dismemberment starting at full tilt, zero growth, a million young jobless – and a £3bn tax cut for millionaires. On crime, he was refreshing, calling for restorative justice – a well-researched evidence-based policy for criminals to pay something back, devoid of New Labour's tendency to cheap and nasty eye-catchers.

A steady 10-point lead suggests Labour would win most seats now, despite gerrymandering of borders and bad new rules for election registers knocking off poorer Labour voters. No wonder the Daily Telegraph reports Tory backbench gnashing of teeth, calling for Osborne's removal from strategy: Norman Tebbit castigates Cameron's "government by chums". Good grief, Labour snatched council seats in Tory Southfields and Sevenoaks last week. Tories can see that vital 7.5% lead to form a majority next time is a horse galloping away from them over the Chipping Sodbury horizon. It stretches credulity to imagine them doing any better than their puny 36% last time, when Cameron was at his most charming, the nasty party least toxic, Gordon Brown in Downing Street and every European government executed by voters. Ahead lies only very much worse – 88% of cuts still to come. Cameron's -26 approval rating makes him less popular than Brown was before the 2010 election.

So if they are not going to win outright and escape coalition, what do they do about the Lib Dems? Tories always were the stupid party: had they backed the AV referendum, in a pact they could have named each other second choice in elections to secure a centre-right coalition. As it is, the Lib Dems must either merge so the Tories stand aside in some seats, or fight and lose most. Lib Dem failure to denounce email snooping today marked their demise: civil liberties was their last USP.

But as Labour surveys the wreckage of Bradford West, ripples of alarm pulse through "safe" seats: Tory unpopularity may not always mean Labour votes. However, Labour has been spring-cleaning it roots, its website is alive with campaigns it hosts, not all of its choosing, such as the Robin Hood tax. What matters most is the big message so foghorn loud and heard so often that everyone knows what Labour is for and why. That is what authenticity sounds like.

It's not quite there yet, with Labour still straddled between being a tarnished government and an insurgent opposition. But since the budget, blame for the past is receding; Tory finger-pointing is losing its poke. Labour's cautious tendency tugs back towards the centre-ground "where elections are won", but Bradford West shows over-caution has great dangers too. What's it to be: a fiscal straitjacket or a business-building, demand-stimulating, jobs-and-growth Keynesian answer to hyper-austerity? Some blend of the two is cooking. Labour is now only a tantalising 4four points behind the government on trust to run the economy – though that post-budget fillip may dip again: lost reputation for economic credibility is hardest to regain. Today Miliband's message was: "Labour is changing." How much change? Time now to draw a line under much that went before. Get ahead fast with a fair party funding offer this week.

Post office privatisation is a chance to say Labour was wrong to think of it, wrong because imprudent outsourcing wastes more money. As the NHS fragments to the private sector and the work programme threatens to collapse under the weight of companies struggling to profit from the unemployed, under-scrutinised taxpayer billions are wasted with A4E, KPMG and the rest. Hurry forward with policies in the making on house building, rent controls and universal good childcare, with costs accounted for. Labour shadow cabinet members each have their messages – usually in threes: "Anger, credibility and hope," said one.

This is a week for white-hot anger: on Thursday, the new financial year, a most devastating cut takes £74 a week in working tax credit from low-paid working families on £17,000 a year. Watch them flock to Trussell Trust food banks, new ones opening every week. Many won't know what's about to hit them. Lib Dems boast of their minor £126 a year gained by taking the low paid out of income tax, yet say not a word about this shocker. These are the "hard-working couples playing by the rules" that politicians keep praising, striving but failing to find longer working hours. With Liam Byrne off to bid for mayor of Birmingham, it's time to bring back Douglas Alexander to the work and pensions job he held, wasted in the wilderness as shadow foreign secretary. Labour needs to get brave on welfare: the cuts are only popular because few know the savagery done in their name under cover of a handful of "scrounger" anecdotes. Most would be shocked to know two thirds of disabled children soon lose large sums in disability living allowance.

If Bradford has a message, it's that Labour needs to get angrier: stricken towns devastated by unemployment and hopelessness need Labour and Labour needs them. But not just in those places. Enough voters everywhere see the damage done around them – yes, even voting Labour in Sevenoaks.

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