I was away from a radio, TV or computer when Sergeant announced he was quitting the show. I was probably 6 hours behind the rest of the nation by the time I heard. I was startled and a little surprised. As a person, Sergeant has undoubtedly been endearing and entertaining (while dividing the nation) but he was never a good dancer and for those fans who take the dancing seriously, it was difficult watching better dancers being eliminated at the expense of Sergeant, who survived this far purely on the public vote. What was amusing at first, as with Kate Garraway last year, later was just irritating.

What angered me was Sergeant’s comment at today’s press conference: “it’s [become] very difficult to carry off the joke”, which suggested he had never taken the contest seriously. It’s difficult because while SCD is light entertainment, it still remains a contest. That is why the judges are there - their job is to judge the dancing itself and to make constructive criticism. And clearly the aim is that the better dancers will survive the longest and the poor ones will be knocked out quickly. I like that the public has half the vote because it’s right in many ways that people can vote for the celebrities they support. As with other celebrity reality shows, though, the public vote is less often about talent and more often about fanbase. Certainly with SCD this series, the public vote has often not been about the dancing at all.

Where does this leave the show? If the BBC wants SCD to survive, changes need to be made (not least the fakery of the Sunday results show which appears to be live but everyone knows is recorded on the Saturday night). If SCD is to be about the dancing, then the BBC needs to choose contestants who will take it seriously and really strive to improve. It must stop picking people just because they are well-known, have large fanbases and will pull in an audience. On the other hand, if SCD is about entertainment then get rid of the judges, or at least force them to make no criticism at all, and let the public decide on the outcome of the popularity contest. It cannot work both ways. And we all know what a joke the Eurovision Song Contest has become when left purely to a public vote. SCD needs to be about the dancing again.

Watching Sergeant tonight on It Takes Two, he seemed once again to be manipulating his situation. Pro dancer James Jordan got it right when he said Sergeant had been selfish by quitting. It’s wrong to brazenly beg for the public vote for 9 weeks then decide to leave not by public decision. Far from leaving with dignity after some quite harsh comments from the judges, he has taken the coward’s route while managing to remain the centre of attention. It’s also very unfair on his pro partner Kristina Rihanoff, who dances so fabulously, choreographs so beautifully and worked so hard to keep them both in the competition. And he has let down everyone who kept voting for him - those who found him genuinely entertaining, those who did just to annoy the judges, those who wanted to stick up for the underdog. All those people spent money and donated to charity while doing so and probably feel as cross as I do, if not for the same reasons.

I hope next season that the production team will pick contestants more carefully and spare us from the inevitable rows that spring up when a bad dancer outstays their time. Maybe then, SCD will actually be genuinely about entertainment again.

And the sequins. Don’t forget the sequins.

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Like the rest of the nation, I feel angry, appalled and disgusted that this poor child was let down so many times.

It’s hard to comprehend that a society sophisticated enough to put people into space, create the internet and develop pioneering medical treatments unthinkable even 5 years ago failed to spot such terrible abuse.

I don’t have children and the nearest I get to maternal is hugging my cat, but I struggle to comprehend how adults can deliberately hurt such a small, young, vulnerable being. How someone can slice off a baby’s fingertips with a stanley knife and snap their spine over a knee, for amusement.

Like others, I had an opinion on Brandgate, but that seems so insignificant now and I wonder where the complainants are now? Where are the sackings and resignations? Where is that someone with the bottle to take put their hand up and take some responsibility?

Baby P won’t be the last child we fail - you can’t stop someone hellbent on doing wrong things - but we need to stop saying “lessons will be learned”. Saying isn’t enough. We need a complete overhaul, not a review, of how we care for the vulnerable.

Don’t let Baby P have died in vain.

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Dacre is, of course, bristling at Justice Eady’s ruling in the Max Mosely case earlier this year. The problem is that his “moral” stance on Mosley’s activities, which let’s not forget were consensually agreed by adults and hurt no one, is out of step with modern society. When the Mosley story broke, most ordinary people said “so what?”. They were not outraged or appalled. No children or animals were involved. Arguably, the only person hurt was Mrs Mosley, who was unaware of her husband’s proclivities. And she would not have known had the News of the World not published.

Unlike red-top editors, I don’t share the view that it is ok for the press to invade privacy. Dacre has regularly attacked Justice Eady’s ruling, claiming that it is bringing a privacy law in by the back door. Well, yes it is. Sort of. The tabloids were warned for years to get their house in order and failed to. Coupled with a fairly ineffective Press Complaints Commission that has little power over newspapers’ transgressions, it was only a matter of time before privacy issues were brought to the courts.

The public mood has shifted and while the public still has an appetite for celebrity-led gossip in the press at the same time it has made it clear that the tabloids regularly overstep the mark. What Dacre describes as “perverted, depraved,  the very abrogation of civilised behaviour” was considered by Eady to be “unconventional” and the public see as commonplace - viz. the hundreds of thousands of pairs of fluffy handcuffs Ann Summers sells every year.

No one apart from F1 fans had heard of Max Mosley before his privacy was invaded. Tabloid editors have regularly confused the public interest with the interest of the public. Dacre’s speech continues that error.

The fact is, a privacy law will not, in my opinion, prevent journalists and newspapers carrying out serious investigative journalism where there is a genuine public interest. It will not stop bona fide investigations into corrupt company directors, backhanders being passed to government ministers, and trafficking rings or drug smugglers. And Dacre is, in any case, twisting Eady’s words - Eady had gone on record as saying that a privacy law should be drawn up by parliament.

Listening to the ensuing debate on Radio 4’s Today programme this morning, I was most amused at Sun managing editor Graham Dudman’s stuttering attempts to support Dacre. He contradicted himself several times on the press’ right to invade privacy and managed to claim that parliament should determine case law (er, that’s for the courts to decide, Mr Dudman) and was forced to agree with John Humphrys when he pointed out that there was no reason why papers could not challenge any privacy rulings in court.

Dacre would like to turn the clock back to the 1950s, a time when women stayed at home to bring up their 2.4 children, the working class tugged their forelocks and divorce was socially damning. He would do well to remember that the world has changed massively in the last 60 years and the public has no desire to live in the past. The Mail looks increasingly irrelevant among newspapers and if a full-blown privacy law ever does become a reality, it and the other red-tops will have only themselves to blame.

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It’s not as if I hate politics. On the contrary, I’m enormously interested in politics. Just not the party sort.

I know I should pay attention as the outcome of the US election will affect us here in the UK, and indeed everywhere else on the planet. But the reason for my lack of interest is that regardless of who wins, the president will still get in. And whichever one it is, I don’t expect US policy towards the rest of the world to really change. America will still continue to be boss of us all and do what the hell it likes, regardless of how it will affect other nations and peoples. So - no change. Although I’d love to be proved wrong. So, I’ve spent the last 10 months not reading the coverage in the press and I won’t be staying up to watch the results tonight. In the morning, I expect to shrug my shoulders and say “so what?”.

My attitude is probably shocking to many. But I feel little different about elections here. Whoever you vote for, the government still gets in. I think part of my disillusionment is to do with two-party electoral systems, which inevitably polarise voters and if neither party really represents you, then you have a limited choice - vote for the party you hate least, vote for the party that is closest to your own beliefs and ignore the bits you feel uncomfortable about, vote tactically (possibly for a smaller party) to keep out the party you hate most or not vote at all.

Since I returned to the UK, the latter has been my preferred option. I loathe New Labour (and wasn’t mad keen on the old lot either) but hate the Tories even more (I have vivid memories of Thatcher in power). And the other parties are not really in the running.

Funnily enough, when I lived in the Netherlands, I used my vote. I wasn’t allowed to vote in the national elections, as a foreign resident, but I was permitted to vote in the European elections and did, because I’m pro-European, and I was also able to vote in the local elections - in the Netherlands having the local vote is seen as important because it has a direct influence what happens in your local area and giving foreign residents the right to vote encourages inclusion and a sense of community. It helps that the Netherlands has a multi-party, proportional representation system, which means there is also a stronger likelihood of finding a candidate to vote for who represents something close to your beliefs. And the PR system means that your voice will be heard to some degree.

Coming home meant returning to the same old, same old and I just don’t care. So shoot me.

I’m sure I’m not alone…

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I’ve enjoyed Ross since his screen debut on The Last Resort on C4 in the mid-80s. I listen to his Saturday show pretty much every week and tune in most weeks to the Friday TV show. I’m all in favour of edgy comedy too, comedians should push boundaries, but there was nothing edgy about invading an elderly man’s privacy (and his granddaughter’s), nor being abusive when he couldn’t answer back. It simply was not funny. Prank calls are fine when all parties are consenting and in on the joke. This was not one of those occasions.

I felt extremely upset for Georgina Baillie, who was the other innocent party in this. One may question the wisdom of having sex with Brand, who is not exactly known for discretion, but that did not give him the right to brag about this particular conquest to her grandfather. Both English common law and the European Convention enshrine the right to privacy and recent court decisions are now enforcing this more strictly than in the past. Certainly within our families we should expect a right to privacy where our sex lives are concerned. Baillie’s privacy was breached not once but twice. First by Brand calling up Andrew Sachs then by the BBC for broadcasting it.

There are really three issues at the crux of Brandgate. Firstly, there is the right to privacy (and let’s not forget that Sachs had his privacy invaded too). Secondly, the BBC is a publicly funded institution and is therefore publicly accountable. I think this particularly applies when highly paid talent such as Ross and Brand are involved in such gross lapses of judgment. I’m not going to join the braying mob because action has already been taken and, besides, Brand’s sensible decision to resign will appease the mob somewhat. No doubt he took advice suggesting it was better to go before he was pushed. More importantly, the show was prerecorded. Those who took the decision to go ahead and broadcast it unedited will undoubtedly pay for their errors. There are already question marks hanging over the future of the licence fee.

At £135 a year, I find the BBC very good value for money, offering around eight TV channels and nearly a dozen national radio stations, plus all the regional output. It does an extraordinarily good job within the constraints it is bound by and iut is the envy of the world as a public service broadcaster. Yet those who are calling for the abolition of the licence fee are the same people who happily fork out £30 a month for satellite services, many of whose programmes are of far poorer quality. It would be a tragedy if Brandgate were to smash wide open the possibility of the BBC having to change its funding model.

Thirdly, there are grounds for criminal prosecution on possible charges of harassment. While Sachs has stated he will not make a complaint to the police, there is still the matter of the Ofcom investigation and the police could, of course, press charges anyway if they felt the grounds for a successful prosecution were strong enough.

John Harris in the Guardian today makes some very pertinent points about how and why the BBC has found itself in this mess. It’s not just the BBC though. There has been a coarsening across the board in all broadcast output, a sea change that reflects the rapid changes that have taken place in society over the last few decades. The volume of complaints received echoes that over the Goody/Shetty furore in Celebrity Big Brother last year. We should see this is as sign that the public is very aware when lines are crossed and will not hesitate to speak up. I do not believe that TV has dumbed down that much but I do think programme makers need to understand that common decency has to be a linchpin of broadcast output.

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Several years ago, I was offered a basic bank account. I wasn’t on benefits and already had several bank accounts. My problem was that I had just returned to the UK after over a decade abroad. And while I was living it up in Amsterdam, the world had changed. On 11 September, terrorists attacked the World Trade Center and one of the consequences was that global banking regulations were massively tightened everywhere. It transpired that Al Qaeda’s networks were moving money around the globe using thousands of small-scale ordinary current accounts and shifting only small sums of money so as not to attract attention.

The upshot was something called “Know Your Customer“, which required banks to verify the identity of all new and existing account-holders to satisfy the regulators that accounts were genuine and not being used for fraudulent purposes. All well and good. The problem was, and remains, that such due diligence hampers non-terrorists too and makes it very difficult for ordinary people to open a current account.

In 1998, after seven years abroad and certain that I’d never live in the UK again (note: never say never), I closed my last UK bank account. I didn’t need it any more, right? Wrong. Six years after that fateful act, with a relationship over and a voluntary redundancy, I packed my belongings and moved back to Britain. I moved in with my new partner and set about opening a UK bank account. This was the point that I entered an Orwellian nightmare. I couldn’t prove my identity.

To open a bank account, you have to produce a huge amount of paperwork that proves that you are who you claim to be. What exactly varies from bank to bank, but it generally consists of two items of photographic ID and five or six items of proof of address. My passport, British, was obviously good enough as an item of photo ID. My driving licence, with photo, had just been returned to the DVLA though. My Dutch ID card and residence permit, a credit-card sized piece of plastic with my pic and a number, was not good enough, even though it was a solid bit of ID from an EU member state.

Proof of address was even harder to verify. I had no utility bills in my name. How could I when I’d been away? I was not on the electoral roll. I had no tenancy agreement either, or any other bits of official paper that verified that I was a bona fide person living at a bona fide address. The only bank account most banks were willing to offer me was the basic variety. This despite the fact that I could prove I had four bank accounts in the Netherlands, complete with credit and debit cards, and half a house and was very solvent. One bank was willing to offer me an offshore account on the grounds that I was based in Amsterdam, except that I wasn’t any more and as a Brit on home territory I wanted access to the standard banking facilities I’d enjoyed here before my sojourn away.

I tell this anecdote because it illustrates how easy it is to fall into some bureaucratic black hole when you don’t fit the tight Know Your Customer profile drawn up by the Financial Services Authority. I did eventually get to be allowed to open a current account (another long story), but right now those basic bank accounts look very attractive.

The basic account is, as its name suggests, very limited. You can pay money in, or out using a direct debit, and you can get cash from an ATM. And that’s about it. People who have basic accounts are unlikely to have any savings or other financial assets. They are the people whose money is safest while the world’s banking systems teeter on the brink of collapse. After all, if you’ve got very little, you’ve got very little to lose.

Everyone else, on the other hand, is anxiously waiting to learn if they will remain solvent or not. The banking edifice is like a house of cards. A couple of aces have already fluttered to the floor, the rest of the pack is tottering. The big question is what will happen to taxpayer-funded services? More than 60 councils invested millions in Icelandic banks, prompting fears of a collapse in local services, while Gordon Brown is insisting that education and health budgets will not be cut as a result of pumping billions (£500bn to be precise) into shoring up the UK banks.

What we are experiencing is the result of conjuring money out of thin air. The last time the world went through a similar experience was in 1929 - the Wall St Crash. My grandfather lost everything then and he had a lot to lose. His siblings had to wire him the fares to bring his family back here by boat as he was left destitute.  This time round, it’s both depressing and infuriating that the lessons of 80 years ago appear not to have been learned and the City fat cats will still get their bonuses, despite having brought the world to its knees. Who, if anyone, will be called to account? There’s a weird poetry in the banks demanding proof of ID under the Know Your Customer regulations, but we cannot insist that the banks prove themselves to us…

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No doubt Nick will be keeping the world posted as to what happens next, now that he’s consulting the NUJ. His sacking raises many questions about the freedom of journalists to write where, how, as and when they choose. Within the blogosphere, several high profile bloggers have lost their jobs, Petite Anglaise being one famous example. But these are people who were staffers blogging about their jobs anonymously. And who unwittingly transgressed unwritten company codes about the boundaries between work and private life.

Nick is a freelance journalist - self-employment should mean it’s entirely up to him to blog about what he likes, when he likes. Newspapers have embraced blogging, some more than others, but pretty much all of them recognise the important medium it has become. Most papers have blogs written by their staff. Very few seem to have any kind of policy on what their staff may blog about (judging purely on all the chatter doing the rounds on the net in the past few days), or even whether such policies apply to freelances under contract.

What’s puzzling in Nick’s case is why he was fired. He didn’t attack The Scotsman. He was only commenting on something the paper had already reported. The Scotsman is not doing itself any favours right now. It’s not taking calls about Nick’s firing from the NUJ or the media who want to hear the paper’s side of the story. And it’s made itself look rather petty. Which it has been.

What happens to Nick next may well determine how the landscape lies for other freelance journalists who blog, even those of us living from pitch to pitch rather than on a contract or two. It would be awful to think that a freelance fashion writer, say, was refused further commissions for blogging that a company’s latest range was poor, because the mag she writes for takes advertising from that company. Where does it end? Will it mean all freelances will have to sign some kind of disclaimer determining what they may blog about?

I suspect very many of us will be watching developments very closely.

I hope Nick is reinstated. And I hope we will all continue to enjoy the freedom to blog as we choose without fear of losing work as a result.

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Leaving London was one of my better ideas. I’ve already posted on some of the reasons I got fed up with the capital. My first year living there was an adventure. Every weekend, there were markets to explore, galleries and museums to pop into, parks to laze in, shops to investigate. I went to the cinema an average three times a week and ate out just as frequently. And I got a kick out of doing my own version of The Knowledge, learning the streets and shortcuts on foot, the bus routes and Tube lines.

And then slowly it began to pall. I truly began to hate the dirt and overcrowding. I resented the amount of my precious time it took to get anywhere. All journeys, whether one mile or ten miles, seemed to take 90 minutes. A bereavement made me question what I was doing in London, apart from grieving, and I left.

A weekend away to see a West End show with friends reminded me anew of why London is not even a great place to visit a lot of the time. Standing with a friend on Charing Cross Road at 1.45 am on a Saturday night looking for cabs in the chill night air quickly became a drag as, unusually, no taxis for hire drove past. We tried a few other spots and even rang some cab companies to no avail. We did eventually manage to hail a cab after 90 minutes and our cabbie also found another cab for me a mile further on as I actually needed to be going in a different direction (we were staying in separate hotels and the plan was to go to my friend’s hotel first then get the doorman there to rustle one up for me). By the time my head was on the pillow, it was 4am yet my hotel was only a mile or so from Charing Cross Road. I was struck by the ridiculousness of taking almost two and a half hours to travel such a short distance.

In the morning, the gutters outside my hotel were full of kebab wrappers blowing gently along like urban tumbleweed. Everywhere I looked there was litter - bottles and cans and empty cigarette packets and polystyrene burger boxes. No doubt visitors are unimpressed by the level of general grime that runs through London like a seam of coal. The capital has less than four years to embark on a clean-up and sustain it if it wants visitors to see a city to be proud of when the Olympics kicks off in 2012. Compare London to Paris, where the streets are washed down every day and litter is a rare sight even at the busiest tourist attractions.

Catching my train home yesterday morning, I was depressed also at the shabbiness of Euston Station, where pigeons were merrily pecking away deep inside the seated catering area, secure in the knowledge that no one would be chasing them away anytime soon.The most depressing thing about rundown London is that no one actually seems to care. Civic pride has gone the same way as the steam train and the quill pen. Londoners are so used now to the dirt that they take it for granted. To be fair, that attitude is prevalent in most of our major cities and towns. Only in the smallest places where a sense of community still genuinely exists is litter invisible. Even the city where I live, so small you can walk from one end to the other in little over an hour, has huge problems with litter, pigeons and chewing gum, although fortunately not discarded syringes.

I’m not sure what the answer is but those who run our cities should probably look to Europe for inspiration. Boris Johnson, whom I have never considered a credible alternative to Ken Livingston to run the capital, undoubtedly has a lot on his plate since taking over City Hall. If he truly wants to restore a sense of greatness to London, perhaps getting the boroughs to work together to clean up the city should be the first step.

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Head of online editorial, Sarah Hartley, was our guide along with her colleague Helen Read - between them, they introduced the 15 or so of us to design chief Peter Devine, chief sub Paul Coates and assistant news editor Paul Gallagher, who each explained their role and showed us some practical stuff. The bloggers were a mixed bunch, with about half having a media background of some sort - the tour was a great opportunity to get up to speed on the latest newsroom developments - and half not, so for them it was probably a bit of an eye opener. I’ve not worked in a newsroom of any sort for the best part of two decades so it was interesting to see how things have changed.

MEN has become completely multimedia and the newsroom reflects that. The paper now has a TV channel called Channel M, which broadcasts from Manchester’s Urbis centre but also boasts a full-blown TV camera lurking among the desks for those urgent on-the-spot interviews with key staff journalists. Under Sarah Hartley’s guidance, MEN has incorporated plenty of Web 2.0 tools - the website boasts a healthy dedicated blog section, video and audio clips plus reader comments on top stories and other user-generated content such as photographs. Paul Gallagher stressed that Manchester’s bloggers often were useful sources for breaking news stories and it was clear that a strong two-way relationship was already developing between the newspaper and the city’s citizen journalists. Stories may, depending on the level of exclusivity, go in the print edition first or straight to web or TV.

Helen Read also showed us the cuttings library, a vital resource for any paper. The MEN is 140 years old so a majority of the older clippings have been transferred to microfilm (new ones of course being available digitally on the paper’s intranet) and complete back issues in storage off the premises. We saw a selection of front pages from across the decades. Those of us old enough to remember had a giggle at a 1980s budget cartoon of former Tory Chancellor Geoffrey Howe, above a headline that read “Tough times lie ahead”. No change there, then, with the newsroom’s TV screens blaring the latest BBC updates on the current global financial crisis.

Following the tour, we took over a meeting room and deputy editor Maria McGeoghan kicked off an informal discussion about the role of Web 2.0 in today’s press. MEN seems to have taken on board some of the harsh lessons learned by some national newspapers - The Guardian’s Comment is Free section is renowned for its bear-pit inhabited by lay commenters so MEN keeps a carefully moderated check on user comments at the foot of stories, while the Daily Mail’s recent experience of being Google-bombed by someone whose comments correcting a factual inaccuracy on a technology story were repeatedly blocked highlights the dangers of a newspaper refusing to engage in a dialogue with its readership. We had a lively debate about the pros and cons of moderating comments or not on blogs and the experience of a blogger who had been trolled for some time before blocking their harasser.

Sarah Hartley also gave us a preview of the MEN’s plans for covering the Labour Party conference in Manchester this weekend. MEN will not only be live-blogging the proceedings, but also be live-tweeting them on a dedicated Twitter channel, having learned from others’ experiences of live-casting that clogging up the Twittersphere on a personal feed can quickly annoy your followers if they are not interested in the topic (for the record, MEN has already experimented with a Twitter feed for its green news coverage). Ground-breaking stuff for politicos who want minute-by-minute coverage.

Afterwards, we retired to a nearby pub to network among ourselves and continue the discussions. This was not the first Manchester bloggers meet-up, but it was the first I’ve actually managed to attend. It’s great to be able to chat face-to-face with the people behind the blogs you follow, but MEN’s decision to throw its doors open and take that engagement a step further was a brave and exciting one - a great example of “old” media actively embracing the new and looking at ways to keep moving forward together in cyberspace. Congratulations and thanks are in order.

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As with all good blog meets, this one will head to the pub once we’ve had the tour and I’m looking forward to meeting some of Manchester’s finest bloggers, many of whom I know by blog only so far. I’ll be blogging here again on Thursday about the M.E.N. and the pubfestblog meeting. Stay tuned!

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