A momentary glimpse of how government should be

Harriet Harman filled in for Gordon Brown at Prime Minister's Questions today, and in my view she played a blinder.

Although there was a touch of the Prescotts about some of her responses, one thing that struck me was the way in which she dealt with some of the questions put to her.

Although the banter with William Hague was funny, she commenting that the government would take no advice about food wastage from a man who thinks 18 pints of beer is a good diet, and Hague responding that none of his youthful beer consumption was wasted, one thing stood out.

And it was not Hague's slick line, standing in for Cameron, that the PM is past his sell-by date.

It was the way that Harriet spoke to and listened to the Cabinet sitting around her.

On the economy, she was prompted by the Chancellor, and her answer was stronger for it.

On Heathrow expansion, she got advice from Transport Secretary Ruth Kelly and then answered.

On the emotive issue of Zimbabwean refugees, she was on the front bench talking to Home Secretary Jacqui Smith to formulate her response.

Although there is no chance of Harriet becoming the next PM, I was impressed with her approach.

Government is collective, and should be co-operative.

It was a stark contrast with the macho posturing of Gordon Brown, and most other government ministers.

It was a small thing, but it made me want to back her more when, instead of pretending she was master of all trades, she turned to the people around her who knew more about each issue for help with her answers to MPs.

It felt more real, and for a small moment I was impressed by Harriet Harman.

Will Glasgow East be the end for Gordon?

Yea, yea, I don't have time to blog - so here is another entry - it's only been three weeks.

Fun things have been happening - I met that David Cameron for the first time - he is bulkier in real life - not fat or anything - just meatier. I had a lovely birthday picnic, went to Pride London and have interviewed Boris twice in a week - but not about his troubles unfortunately but about gay related things.

Interesting guy that David Cameron. I was slightly impressed that he rocked up to Glasgow yesterday to do a launch in a by-election he has no chance of winning.

Of course, things are looking very bad for the PM.

House prices are falling, the market for new home buyers has all but disappeared, the people are angry about fuel and rising bills and rising prices.

Even my mum said she would vote him out, if only she could (she lives in Northern Ireland).

That whole mollycoddled generation of English people who think it is normal to buy eight year old children hundreds of pounds worth of gifts twice a year are suddenly feeling the pinch, and Labour MPs in seats that are starting to look to the Tories are more nervous than Adam Rickitt at a selection meeting.

Big name pundits are saying that if Gordon loses the Glasgow East by-election, he is toast. Three disasters in a row - the party as you know lost Crewe and Nantwich, a supposedly safe seat.

They came fifth in the by-election to replace Boris (who the Speaker thinks is the Lord Mayor of London), beaten by them Greens and the lovely BNP.

So the smart talk is all about Labour losing in Glasgow East, and that the PM cannot even attract support in Scotland, and that he will have to go.

I do not buy it. A string of by-election defeats is damaging, but I do not think it is fatal. Perhaps I am naive to make comparisons with John Major, but he lost a string of by-elections during his time as PM and the public hated him too.

Then again, he did not get us involved in any wars and his whole party knew they were going to lose the 1997 election, and indeed Major won in 1992.

And perhaps the public's disaffection with Gordon is of a different order. More visceral.

But the idea that the Labour movement will remove the PM in mid parliament is madness as far as I can see.

It is not just MPs and the Westminster crowd who pick and choose leaders but the affiliated societies, MEPs, the unions and party members.

Are they all baying for his blood?

Also, its bloody difficult to remove a sitting Labour Prime Minister. You need a lot of those MPs to put their head above the parapet and it will cause infighting that the party can ill afford.

It seems to me that no matter how bad things get, Gordon is staying in Number 10 until the bitter end.

THT on why they support a ban on gay blood

Sexual health charities are one of the most complained about groups working within the gay community.

While they broadly command the support of the pink press, there is consistent criticism of their ad campaigns, priorities and stance on issues such as the ban on gay men donating blood.

Terrence Higgins Trust is the biggest fish in the HIV/AIDS pond, and consequently comes in for the most criticism.

Recent campaigns such as Drugfucked and PlayZone are accused of glamourising drug use and underground sex clubs.

THT command considerable amounts from the NHS and other statutory bodies.

Their most recent report states:

"In 2006-07, we received income from 108 statutory bodies, funding both regional and national work. Of our total statutory income for the year of £8,031,000, £568,000 (7%) came from new contracts.

"Voluntary income rose in 2006-07 by £433,000 (12%) to £4,155,000, with a key increase of £139,000 (8%) coming from individual givers, through regular and one off gifts. Additional funding of £330,000 was also received from the Department of Health."

So THT has the support of government and donors, even if there is disquiet about their strategies to reduce HIV infections in the UK.

The charity works with all people, not just gay men.

Approximately 2,700 men who have sex with men were diagnosed in 2006, the highest number since the epidemic began. 82% of these men probably acquired HIV in the UK.

PinkNews.co.uk sat down with Lisa Power, head of policy at THT.

A gay activist since the 1970s, she has been with the charity for more than a decade.

In a frank interview, she revealed that THT is committed to becoming a mass membership organisation, defended their controversial campaigns and explained why she does not think the gay blood ban is discrimination.

PinkNews.co.uk: The first thing that we need to clear up is that a lot of our readers are under the impression that THT just deals with gay men.

Lisa Power: It would be reassuring to know in a way, since we seem to get a lot of complaints from gay men that we don't deal with them enough, that we are giving too much time to somebody else.

We deal with HIV and sexual health, and HIV will always be central to our work, so a lot of our work is with gay men and a lot our work will remain with gay men.

But we also work, in terms of HIV, we have three target groups.

One is gay men, one is African migrants and the other is people with HIV, anybody who has got HIV.

In terms of sexual health it's again gay men, because gay men have particular issues around sexual health, ethnic minorities, because there are a number of black men who have raised levels of problems with sexual health, and it's young people.

We have incredible rates of things like chlamydia in this country and in fact we have the worst sexual health in western Europe, which is a bit of a disgrace really, and a bit turn up from the 80s when we had some of the best.

PinkNews.co.uk received a lot of emails about a new website for gay men about sex and drugs, it talks about the effects of recreational drugs. How do you counter the argument that you are encouraging drug use.

We have been told that we had been encouraging all sorts of things right from the beginning, we started out with people like Mary Whitehouse saying we were encouraging sex.

The point is that you have to start of from where people are, and not from where you want them to be, and the fact is that a lot of gay men are using recreational drugs.

We'd rather they took them safely, and if they must take them we'd also rather that they thought about the kind of sex they want to have and to try and make that as safe as possible.

Our main aim is to reduce the transmission of HIV and poor sexual health, and gay men as a group have particularity bad sexual health.

We know that is linked with large amounts of recreational drugs taken and if we don't do something about it we are seriously not doing out duty.

We know that it doesn't work to tell people not to do it, we aren't Nancy Reagan we are not going to go 'just say no,' we have to talk to people in the language that they use and in the manner they will be most willing to hear what we have to say.

If that means T-shirts that say drugfucked and special materials for that group and using the language that people who use recreation drugs use, then that's what we will do.

Large amounts of immigrants, people who don't speak English very well, are not getting, served the way English speakers are.

We would agree with that, and it's one of the things that we have really started to highlight, we have just done the annual gay men's sex survey again with Sigma and through the CHAPS programme.

There is some really clear evidence this year that we need to do more targeting of certain groups of gay men.

A key group of gay men who are themselves migrants, it's not just African migrants, it's also gay men who have come here from Latin America, from Eastern Europe and a whole range of other places.

They are not as clued up around sexual health as people who have been subjected to all the materials for the last few years, sometimes it's a language issue, sometimes it's cultural issues, sometimes it's about getting to people in the right place, and we are very well aware of that and it's some of our key aims for future work.

We always work on the evidence base, and the evidence is clearly there, and we would agree that people have been saying that do you that we need to do more work.

An argument often put forward is that the approach that you are taking in your campaigns isn't working you need to start scaring people.

Read the rest of this interview here.

Interview: Richard Barnes, Deputy Mayor of London

Deputy mayors have been in the news a lot recently.

On Friday Ray Lewis resigned as Deputy Mayor of London amid a welter of allegations about his previous incarnation as a Church of England priest.

While his departure was a blow to Boris Johnson, he has quite a few other deputies.

However, only one of them is the statutory Deputy Mayor, the one mentioned in the legislation that created the post of Mayor of London.

That man is Richard Barnes, who has been out and proud, and fighting, for so long that sometimes it seems he was the original gay Tory.

A Hillingdon borough councillor since 1982 and former council leader, he has served on the London Assembly since its creation in 2000.

After eight years of Ken, he is finally in power and, before last week's Pride parade, he sat down with PinkNews.co.uk to talk about Boris, HIV prevention, and why the terrorist attacks exactly three years ago today showed our city at its most resilient.

PinkNews.co.uk: Congratulations on your appointment. I understand that you are the statutory Mayor, can you explain what that entails?

A statutory Mayor is a legal requirement and should be there if anything untoward happened to the Mayor.

Does that mean you are a heart beat away from being Mayor?

I'm just a little bit further but yeah.

How does that work in terms of influencing the Mayor, do you meet regularly, do you have conversations?

We will meet regularly but obviously during the course of the campaign Boris and I did establish a close rapport and we worked very closely together.

When we were talking about Boris Johnson in November and even in January and February there was this idea that his candidacy was a Tory bit of fun …

I don't believe that.

Well what I was going to say is his majority is sizeable, a considerable vote, did that surprise you having been on the campaign trail with him, or were you expecting it on election night?

Before he was selected I just had that gut feeling that he was that symbol of change that everybody in London wanted and given the way his magnetic celebrity status on the campaign trail people just flocked to him.

I've been out with (former Mayor) Ken and you see people on opposite sides of the street say "oh there's Ken Livingstone."

With Boris they had to get near him, they had to get their photograph taken with him.

They want to be close to him which is that difference between premier division and a full star if you like.

You have been and assembly member since the beginning. What sort of changes did you want to see over those eight years, what changes do you want to see now and what do you think Boris will bring forward?

I would rather look forward than look backward.

But you must have seen an organisation that you thought could be better run?

I thought the organisation has improved since we came into office, that it was dysfunctional, the decision making was channelled through a very small coterie of people.

The professional offices were not allowed to make decisions of their own, they were all referred upwards.

What I believe is that you should trust the offices and professionals that you've put there, that you should allow them to get on and make decisions, clearly ask for checks and balances.

They just got a budget which has been examined and approved. I don't expect them to come back on a monthly basis and say "can I spend part of my budget?"

Boris had a bit of a rough ride from the gay community….

Read the rest of this interview.

The Democratic race explained in under nine minutes

This video is awesome!

David Davis - what the hell is he up to?

The DUP are the undertakers of governments, as Shirley Williams said on Question Time. Very true, a typical blast of common sense from the tenacious peer.

However, yesterday's vote on 42 and the shenanigans around how Gordon won the vote seems like months ago after today's bombshell.

David Davis insists he is resigning from the Shadow Cabinet on a matter of principle. I don't buy it.

Why resign and fight a lone battle against a piece of legislation? Why piss off the leader and abandon the party, steal headlines from them and make the fight against 42 when the Lords are more than likely to kick it out, plus the government bill is unworkable?

And why now? I think this has got a lot more to do with the leadership of the party and not any issues of liberty.

Fighting his case in his own constituency - it is barmy.

And where will the Tories come into all this? Is he official candidate?

Cameron said he was going to campaign for Davis? How will that work?

Its all very confusing, but I think at the end of the day the loser will be Davis. He is out of the Shadow Cabinet - will he ever get back in?

Nice to see one of the Robinsons has some sense

The Iris issue rumbles on - she was on the radio this morning claiming that she only said that gay people could be cured, not they should be.

Her hubby, the First Minister of Northern Ireland, today assured the Assembly that not only does he take his responsibilites seriously with regard to discrimination but he and the missus are fighters against it.

Anyway there are still issues, not least round this idea that people can be "converted" by nutty psychiarists.

It hurts gay people. It gives the impression that they are somehow mentally ill, that they need help.

We don't. Leave us alone.