If ever proof was needed that The Government Is Not Our Friend, then the treatment of the survivors and the families of the victims of the July 7 bombings is surely it.

Today being the first anniversary of the bombings it’s worth looking back on the treatment of the people who simply had the misfortune to board the wrong tube trains or bus last summer. Those fortunate enough to emerge alive, many with terrible injuries, both physical and psychological, were met with official incompetence, ignorance, suggestions of culpability in future attacks and, on one memorable occasion, outright hostility.

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So apparently learning mathematics in school is about to become ‘cool’ under new measures announced by Education Secretary Alan Johnson this week. Britain’s kids are about to throw down their blades and Breezers and find out that numbers ain’t butters.

In a speech peppered with - ha, ha, ha, hang on a second, ha, ha - *hilarious* maths-based gags (’today’s complex world just doesn’t add up without essential maths skills’ and ‘the formula for success is pretty simple’ were just two to bring down the house), Johnson said that, to get the kids down with maths, instead of all that algebra and quadratic equations crap, from now on they’ll learn how to add, subtract and the rest by solving problems ‘based around things which appeal to pupils, such as fashion, football, or the Olympics’.

‘Pupils could be asked to consider how many flats will have to be built in the Olympic village to cater for all the athletes taking part in the Games in 2012′ or ‘asked to design a dress and then estimate how many yards of material will be necessary to produce it for, say, 100 girls’, said The Independent. Which, yet again, shows that trying to guess just what pushes the buttons of the youth of today without actually talking to them is to invite peals of scornful laughter. What else will those who know best come up with? ‘Multiply the number of Phil Collins’ hit singles by the albums in Fleetwood Mac’s back catalogue’? ‘If 25 people attend the church disco and pay a pound to enter, how much profit will there be after buying the barley water and rich tea biscuits’?

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This year’s unofficial ‘Won’t Somebody Please Think Of The Children’ week was a huge success. First up, on Sunday, the News of the World and the Home Office agreed that Britain is better off with its ‘child sex beasts’ out of sight and out of mind, instead of in plain sight where we can see what they’re up to. Under orders from Britain’s biggest selling newspaper, the Home Secretary ordered 60 of said beasts to be moved from 11 hostels adjacent to schools. Fortunately for the safety of our children, the child abuser is a naturally stupid creature and is unable to drive a car.

Next up was Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor, leader of Britain’s four million Roman Catholics, calling for the 24-week upper limit on abortions to be lowered. It was brave of the Cardinal to thrust himself into the news while Paedomania is sweeping the nation once more. You have to say he timed his run to perfection in a week where child abusers are being moved on to who knows where, him being something of an expert at moving paedophiles on himself. In 1985, while Bishop of Arundel and Brighton, he transferred a known paedophile, Father Michael Hill, to a parish despite advice that Hill would continue to assault children. This Hill did, including altar boys and a child with learning difficulties. He was jailed in 1997 after pleading guilty to nine charges of indecent assault.

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(First published in this week’s The Friday Thing.)

The massed angry ranks of Little England found themselves a new cause and a new figurehead this week. Still riding the wave of popular acclaim that her News of the World campaign to name and shame paedophiles brought her (claim to fame: the famous attack on a paediatrician from confused nonce-hunters), and having pretty much picked clean the bones of Heather Mills McCartney, The Sun’s editor Rebekah Wade kicked off a new venture naming and shaming judges giving ‘child sex beasts’, crack addicts, muggers and other scum ’soft sentences’.

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His supporters say he’s ready. Not long now and he’ll take us all the way to glory, sweeping all before him. Those with cooler heads are sceptical. Does he really have what it takes, is he fit, can he - against the odds - fulfil the nation’s expectations, hopes and dreams? Yes, the big question on everybody’s lips is ‘Can Gordon Brown really become Prime Minister?’

This week former Tory MP turned pundit Matthew Parris joined the bandwagon set rolling by even more right-wing politicians (Tony Blair’s close New Labour colleagues reportedly running a Stop Brown campaign). ‘He is not a persuader, he is not a salesman, he is not a visionary. He is not a diplomat, he is not a deal-maker, he is not a peacekeeper and he does not soothe… Gordon Brown is not a thinker,’ was Parris’ don’t-beat-about-the-bush-speak-as-I-find verdict.

Left-wing pundits, politicians and voters should be pondering the same question. Particularly when opinion polls show that voters want to vote for David Cameron with Blair as PM but *really* want to vote for Cameron with Brown as PM. Or alternatively, in a week where the Chancellor of the Exchequer and odds-on next *Labour* Prime Minister stood before millionaire business leaders and told them low paid public sector workers could stick their hopes for better wages up their arses, they could be asking ‘What’s the point of Gordon Brown?’ Or the Labour Party (party of the working classes, as was) for that matter.

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‘You couldn’t make it up’ is, of course, the hackneyed, clichéd catchphrase of hateful human skidmark, Richard Littlejohn. This though, like so many things the evolutionary drag factor pontificates on, is wrong.

The walls between our reality and fiction have been growing thin for quite a few years now. Under the auspices of New Labour and the cynicism of the PR industry those walls have finally been breached and everyday reality is now polluted by fiction. You can indeed make it up and largely get away with it.

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To judge by the reaction of some sections of the media and other members of the professionally offended this week, you’d think Cherie Blair had been cluster-bombing children and undermining human rights like her husband. If only the Prime Minister’s actions over the years had been scrutinised and judged with the level of vitriol that his wife’s have, he’d have been chased from Downing Street years ago.

So what had she done to have us, yet again, clutching our scented hankies to our faces and reaching for the smelling salts? She signed a copy of the Hutton Report which was later auctioned in a Labour Party fundraiser. Tasteless to be sure but at least some good came of the suicide of government scientist, Dr David Kelly: Labour Party coffers were swelled by a princely 400 quid.

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Before he answered a higher calling, Tony Blair was a lawyer. Given his much publicised infatuation with cash (cheap holidays at Sir Cliff’s Barbados hideaway, nuzzling with billionaires like Italian national joke, Silvio Berlusconi, parading endless celebrities through Number 10) and considering just how much lawyers can earn, you have to think that he must have been bloody rubbish at it or he’d be still in the trade.

When he says things like he wants to ‘de-rail the gravy train of legal aid’, it conjures the mental image of Deke Thornton in The Wild Bunch hunting down his old friends after they left him for dead. Reading that the Prime Minister was ‘called to the Bar at Lincoln’s Inn in 1976′ makes you wonder if he was actually only summoned to the pub to get a round in.

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Which of these statements is true?:

a) In 2002, the German Vegetarian Society voted cannibal, Armin Meiwes (’It was passable, but a little tough,’ he said of eating his victim’s penis), its honorary chairman.

b) In September of last year, ultra-orthodox Catholic cult, Opus Dei, invited godlike atheist Richard Dawkins (’Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence,’ he once said) to join its number.

c) In 2003, Libya (’Over the past three decades, Libya’s human rights record has been appalling. It has included the abduction, forced disappearance or assassination of political opponents; torture… and long-term detention without charge or trial or after grossly unfair trials,’ said Human Rights Watch) was elected as chairman of the United Nations Human Rights Commission, the body set up to investigate human rights abuses across the world.

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So, football fans, have you started writing your World Cup checklist yet? Days off booked? Check. Crosses of St George affixed to the motor? Check. Wallchart pinned up? Check. Cases of Stella laid up? Get down to Sainsbury’s quick, they’ve got an offer on. There’s something missing. What is it? Oh yes. The excuse for when we crash out in the second round at the hands (or is it feet?) of the Ascension Islands.

So, it is with much relief that we say: Thank you, Wayne Rooney.

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At dawn on March 13 this year – a Sunday – immigration officials raided the home of Verah Kachepa, a Malawian asylum seeker who had lived here for five years. They took Verah and her four children Natasha, 20, Alex, 17, Anthony, 16, and Upili, 10, to the Yarl’s Wood detention centre.

Natasha said she was forced to dress in front of two officials, one male, one female. ‘It’s nothing I haven’t seen before,’ said the man, according to Natasha. The family was released ten days later. (The Children’s Commissioner for England said in 2005 that conditions at Yarl’s Wood violated the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.)

Verah’s former husband left - leaving a scene of domestic violence and debt – and is now living with the niece of Malawi’s former dictator, Hastings Banda. The family had applied for asylum on the grounds that the still-influential Banda family might harm them were they to return to Malawi. The Home Office refused the application and they were finally flown to Malawi on August 25.

Verah had raised four children on her own for five years. Natasha’s fiancee, Tom Sanderson, who she’d been with for four years, was injured fighting with the British Army in Iraq. Alex had been offered a job as a nightclub DJ. The family had deep roots in their community. On the day they left, 200 people gathered in support outside the family’s home in Weymouth. ‘They’ve drawn together the town,’ said one resident. Yet they were treated like common criminals and then deported.

On Tuesday, Home Secretary Charles Clarke announced that 1,023 foreign prisoners had been released when they should have been considered for deportation.

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The morality of high politics is beyond the ken of mortal man. How else to explain why Jack Straw could shake hands with Robert Mugabe at the UN (’it was quite dark,’ whined Straw afterwards) and then mock peace protesters (’I could have done better‘) while showing off in front of Condoleezza Rice during her recent visit to Blackburn?

And then we have the curious story of the Government wading in on the side of Saudi Arabian officials who, it is alleged, tortured a group of British men wrongfully held after a spate of bombings in Saudi Arabia in 2001. A forensic pathologist, after examining one of the men, Ron Jones, confirmed Jones’ account of events. He had been beaten, deprived of sleep, told his wife and son were also in custody and being tortured, and given a ‘Rohypnol-style’ drug. He now suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder and is recovering from a nervous breakdown.

The men were released after more bombings in the Saudi capital were blamed on al-Qaida. They are now seeking compensation in the British courts from the officials they say tortured them (Saudi Arabia, as a state, is immune from claims of compensation for torture). The Saudi Government, with the help of UK government lawyer, Christopher Greenwood QC, are applying to the House of Lords to overturn the appeal court ruling allowing the men to claim redress from their alleged torturers.

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(I’m totally stoked to have been asked to write for the mighty The Friday Thing. Here is my inaugural missive.)

So it turns out that people reporting their neighbours to the water companies for breaking recently imposed hosepipe bans was prophesised in the Old Testament. Isaiah, 19:2, no less:

“I will stir up Egyptian against Egyptian— brother will fight against brother, neighbour against neighbour, city against city, kingdom against kingdom”

Egypt being symbolic of the cracked and parched plains of South East England, obviously.

According to the Guardian, since last Monday, 353 pillars of the community have reported their neighbours for crimes against water. Southern Water has had 1,500 reports since their hosepipe embargo was introduced last summer.

Whether this informing on ones’ neighbours is purely driven by some twisted sense of patriotic responsibility towards the nation’s water supplies isn’t clear, but it’s surely reasonable to suggest that some of these grassings will have been inspired by long-nursed neighbourhood grudges.

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