The greatest motor behind the anti-abortion campaign has always come from the Catholic and fundamentalist Protestant churches and within all churches… - Polly Toynbee

The underlying reason for remorseless social disadvantage remains a silent subject in Blair politics.

The punishment block is aptly named Bleak House, and known just as Bleak. Several of the solitary cells inside this separate compound, hidden behind the coal sheds, were opened for me to inspect the inmates, a procedure that made me feel extremely uncomfortable. ...
Inside one cell a big, red haired girl sat on her bed, the only furniture, and the officer said she was there for her own protection. She can hardly have been twenty, but her arms, legs and face were covered in old scars. New stitches stood out on the pale flesh from a long cut across her arm. She cut herself often. She was also agoraphobic and didn't want to leave the cell.
"I'm glad you've come to talk to me," she said warmly as I sat down beside her. She sounded like a young child.
"No one's been to talk to me all day. I don't want to be free but I'd like to be in mental hospital, where I was before. But they sent me out, so I stole a social security cheque and went straight to the police, and then I got put here." Her mother had been in the same mental hospital. Her father and two uncles had killed themselves, and she had slashed herself countless times. Her father had assaulted her when she was six and when she was sixteen. She, too, though visited by a doctor every day, as are all Bleak inmates, said she was receiving no psychiatric treatment, and no drugs.

Sometimes it seems as if a tidal wave of the worst Western culture is creeping across the globe like a giant strawberry milkshake. How it oozes over the planet, sweet, sickly, homogenous, full of 'E' numbers, stabilisers and monosodium glutamate, tasting the same from Samoa to Siberia to Somalia. A traveller across the desert wastes of the Sahara arrives at last at Timbuktu, where the first denizen he meets is wearing a Texaco baseball cap. Pilgrims to the Himalayas in search of the ultimate wilderness in the furthest kingdom find Everest strewn with rubbish, tins, plastic bags, Coca-Cola bottles and all the remnants of the modern global picnicker. Explorers of the Arctic complain that empty plastic bottles of washing-up liquid are embedded in the ice. Global culture and its detritus wash up everywhere, nothing sacred, nothing wild, nothing authentic, original or primitive any more. These modern travellers' tales tell of cultural vandalism, Western Goths contaminating ancient civilisations and traditions untouched for centuries. If the West were to set out on a mission of global imperialism deliberately planned we would surely choose better cultural ambassadors. It is not pages from Shakespeare or scores of Mozart that litter steppe and savannah but some marketing man's logo from last year's useless, meretricious product, or a snatch of that maddening theme tune from Titanic. Was ever an empire so monstrously self-assured and ambitious? Western cultural imperialism reaches right into the hearts and souls, the sexual behaviour, the spirit, religion, politics and the nationhood of the entire world. It happens haphazardly with no master plan or empire-building blueprint, but with a vague and casual insouciance that drives its detractors to despair. So when we consider the globalisation of culture most of us bring to the subject a jumble of deep-seated alarms - moral, intellectual, political, spiritual, artistic and nationalistic, melting into a great pot of 'globalisation panic'. It causes deep pessimism about the cultural future of a world turning homogeneously horrible.