Here is just a selection of the stories from Friday’s Independent, in the order in which they appear:

• Heathrow expansion plan could demolish village.
• Benefits to rise less than inflation under Labour.
• Fast-track teacher training to get ex-troops into classrooms.
• Half the people living in the UK in 2020 will endure cancer at some point in their lives.
• Cuts may cause councils to collapse.
• Government’s own lawyers condemn legal aid changes.
• Labour defends tax-free donation that dodged £1.5m in tax.
• Britain admits torture of thousands of Kenyans, but offers them pathetic compensation.
• Archbishop of Canterbury resisting Governmnt’s attempts tp legalise gay marriage.
• Turkish people show the way to protest, planting flowers and undertaking yoga sit-ins, while we criminalise 21 climate change activists that can be bothered to take direct peaceful action in a power station.
• Many degrees simply increase debt, not job prospects.
• Magnetic levitation trains, first tested in the UK in the 1960s, are proving a massive success in Japan.
• Car making is alive and well in the UK, but it is nearly all foreign owned.
• Satirist Tom Sharpe dies. Comic genius who vented his fury at racists, thoughtless modernisers, greedy capitalsists and smug poloticians.
• Homelessness at a five-year high.
• UK rail firms charge highest fares in Europe.
• Worries over spiralling violence between muslim extremists and the EDL.
• Labour will stick to the current Government’s spending plans.
• Just 1% of Norwegians attend a church and 72% declare themselves atheists. The Norwegian government has recently passed a constitutional amendment severing all ties with the Church of Norway. Way to go!
• A humble garage in Crouch End, East London, was sold for £80,000 to be converted (at an additional cost of £183,000) into a 10mx5m two storey home that sold for £495,000.

The UK is becoming a truly depressing place to live. It simply does not have to be this way.

There are beacons of light all around the world for us to learn from, but apathy and misplaced, self-centred, short-term thinking seems to be the British way these Con-Dem days.

There is much work for us to do.

Andy C.