BRITAIN

BRITAIN
Sunday Mirror, London, Sept. 25: It is an occupational hazard for all prime ministers that after a few years in the job they become isolated from real life by a mixture of wishful thinking and rose-tinted spectacles. Tony Blair is no exception.
Just before the faithful assembled in Brighton for Labour's annual conference, he gave a pep talk to the Cabinet about where Labour is going. "Our vision is clear," he said. "A country more equal in its opportunities, more secure in its communities, more confident in its future."
This is Tony Blair's 12th conference as leader and those words could easily have come out of the first. The world may well be changing as the prime minister insists, but much of it remains resolutely the same.
Then there was "tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime" back in 1993. A fresher, more youthful Blair -- in those days Shadow Home Secretary -- but the same old Brighton.
War against yobs
We can expect a raft of legislation, he told the Cabinet, including the war against yobs well and truly waged. Again the gap between rhetoric and reality, like the gulf between rich and poor, remains stubbornly wide. You can't have much respect for a criminal justice system that manifestly fails to deliver either the criminals or the justice.
Tough on crime? Latest Scotland Yard figures show an average Metropolitan Police officer solves less than one crime a month.
And so to the NHS and social justice. Labour was elected, Blair told the Cabinet, because the British people share the party's values and aspiration for a dynamic and fair country.
But aspiration it remains. There is nothing fair about being denied vital drugs because you live in the wrong postcode. Nothing dynamic about being 40 times more likely to catch a superbug in Britain than anywhere else in Europe. Nothing fair about being pitched out of a job with reduced pensions by bosses raking in the cash with a golden parachute strapped to their backs.
It isn't all bad, of course. Labour's employment and economic record has been good. The minimum wage was an important piece of social legislation and certainly not the disaster the Tories said it would be. Hospitals and schools have been gradually improved from the terrible legacy left by the Conservative neglect of public services.
The believers who assemble in Brighton ... may never sacrifice those principles.
But they are still a hell of a long way from fulfilling them.
SOUTH AFRICA
The Star, Cape Town, Sept. 28: They say a picture paints a thousand words, but so too did one phrase from the Health Ministry this week.
The ministry lambasted Cosatu General Secretary Zwelinzima Vavi for criticising President Thabo Mbeki and Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang.
Vavi accused Mbeki and Tshabalala-Msimang of a lack of leadership on HIV and AIDS. The Health Ministry's response was to accuse Vavi of being a stooge of an "anti-retroviral drug lobby group" read the Treatment Action Campaign.
For a minister who consorts with pseudo-scientists who use poverty-stricken South Africans as guinea pigs, and who continues to give mixed messages to a citizenry ravaged by HIV and AIDS, the latest Health Ministry statement should be viewed as hypocrisy of a special type. But it also showed that perhaps AIDS activist Zackie Achmat's belief that TAC is a victim of a sustained state-led campaign to discredit it may well be correct.
State paranoia
TAC isn't alone. Ask any civil society organisation that dares to stand up and point out a few home truths what its like to be on the receiving end of state paranoia.
For the state to waste resources on perceived enemies and not on real threats, such as our crumbling public health system (which the minister recently saw with her own eyes when she visited Chris Hani-Baragwanath), speaks for itself.
The highest court in our land ruled in favour of TAC and did not dismiss it, as the government and its spin doctors are wont to do, as an anti-retroviral drug lobby group in the pocket of pharmaceutical companies or foreign backers.
This was an organisation intent on upholding our Bill of Rights, and which won in court.
Instead of using the language that it did to respond to Vavi, the government should have taken the opportunity to demonstrate to South Africans and the rest of the world that Vavi's allegations were devoid of truth. The response was emotional and did not show marks of great leadership. Civil society organisations such as Cosatu and TAC have a huge role to play in our democracy and cannot be wished away.