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I recently attended Unison's national delegate conference in Bournemouth as a delegate from a London local government branch. It was an eye opening experience with respect to the machinations of political groupings within the union.

In particular some of the ways in which the new Labour-linked bureaucracy maintained control over the supposedly lay lead organisation became clear.

Other highlights in a week of high-quality political programming are the classic film which depicts the events of the controversial 1925 American creationism v Darwinism courtroom debate, documentaries on the escalation of gang-related violence in Britain and an investigation into the despicable corporate practice of encouraging tobacco addiction in children in Africa.

Abstract: In March 1939, Republican soldiers who had been training as aviation pilots were stranded in the USSR along with the sailors of several vessels from the Spanish merchant navy. They were prevented from leaving and in 1941 were arrested and sent to Novosibirsk Transit Prison. Also detained were several civilians who had been working with children evacuated from the Civil War.

The sms’s came fast and furious. As furious as the fiery images we were subjected to by our television and our daily newspapers. The front pages are a festival of beastly pictures of the victims of the negrophobic blood letting which has gripped South Africa in the past weeks.

The industrial and mining towns on the Eastern outskirts of Johannesburg are unlovely places. They’re set on flat windswept plains amidst the dumps of sterile sand left over from old mines. In winter the wind bites, the sky is a very pale blue and it seems to be all coal braziers, starved dogs, faded strip malls, gun shops and rusting factories and mine headgear.