If more people drove like a woman fewer children would be dying in road accidents

After four years trying to get “joined-up government”, there’s still a long way to go, if the new child road safety initiative is anything to go by. Laudable in itself, it fails to link up with the wider issues of quality of life and health.

This latest initiative offers local councils £10m for child pedestrian training projects. Most will go to deprived areas with high numbers of ethnic minorities where new research shows that child death rates are appreciably higher. The new initiative includes pamphlets in relevant languages but mainly focuses on training schemes to integrate road safety lessons into “personal social and health education”.

Full article: http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/may/09/comment.roscoward

Lord Stevenson says hairdressers shouldn’t be made people’s peers as they might not feel ‘comfortable’ in the House of Lords. Ros Coward took celebrity snipper Nicky Clarke along to test out the theory

Another New Labour attempt at populism has gone awry. Criticised for the predictably safe, middle-class list of people’s peers, Lord Stevenson compounded the crime by saying that they could not select people, like hairdressers, who would be uncomfortable in the Lords. Roy Hattersley, suitably appalled, responded in Monday’s Guardian. The people’s peers ought to be real people like hairdressers, he said, and gallantly offered to acclimatise a couple.

Full article: http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/may/04/lords.politicalnews