A mouse that can speak? A monkey with Down's Syndrome? Dogs with human hands or feet? British scientists want to know if such experiments are acceptable, or if they go too far in the name of medical research.

The Academy of Medical Sciences has launched a study to look at the use of animals containing human material in scientific research.

Using human material in animals is not new. Scientists have already created rhesus macaque monkeys that have a human form of the Huntingdon's gene so they can investigate how the disease develops; and mice with livers made from human cells are being used to study the effects of new drugs.

But scientists say the technology to put ever greater amounts of human genetic material into animals is spreading quickly around the world -- raising the possibility that some scientists in some places may want to push boundaries.

Religious groups are among those that are uneasy about the trend. One Catholic cardinal, Keith O'Brien of Edinburgh, has branded such work "Frankenstein science."

Martin Bobrow, a professor of medical genetics at Cambridge University is chairman of a 14-member group looking into the issue.

He says: "Do most of us care if we make a mouse whose blood cells or liver are human? Probably not. But if it can speak? If it can think? Or if it is conscious in a human way? Then we're in a completely different ballpark."

What do you say?

This week, hundreds of thousands of people will join the annual act of remembrance to commemorate those who have died in war, proudly wearing a poppy to honour the fallen.

However the simple flower emblem, which has been used since shortly after the end of World War One as it was the only thing to grow on the devastated battlefields of Belgium and northern France, has once again become an issue in itself.

Is the decision to not wear one an act of disrespect?

The Daily Mail newspaper is running a campaign, demanding that Premier League football teams have a poppy embroidered onto the shirts they wear this weekend. Twelve clubs initially said they would do so, but as the Mail turned its ire on those that didn't, all bar two -- Manchester United and Liverpool -- have now agreed to make the gesture.

The Mail said football teams wearing the poppy sent out a "powerful message of solidarity" to Britain's armed forces.

"All too often footballers - on and off the pitch - set a dreadful example to their young supporters," the paper said in its editorial. "It would be to their eternal shame if Manchester United and Liverpool snub the opportunity to demonstrate that their sport can be a force for good."

Footballers are by no means the first to be criticised for failing to wear a poppy. BBC, ITV and Sky News presenters and reporters all wear a poppy when they appear on our screens following complaints in the past, and even producers on "Strictly Come Dancing" have come in for criticism this year for suggesting contestants should not wear the emblem because of health and safety fears. They have since backed down.

A few years ago, Channel 4 news presenter Jon Snow described such insistence as "poppy fascism". He said he wore a poppy off air but would not wear one or any symbol -- such as an AIDS ribbon -- while broadcasting.

Guardian columnist Marina Hyde described the outrage of the Mail and other media commentators as "phoney poppy apoplexy".

"The point so often ignored is that the second world war, in particular, was fought to allow people the choice in this and many other matters," she wrote. "Victory meant freedom from fascism, which makes Jon Snow's choice of words for this annual hounding of any public figure pictured without one – "poppy fascism" – particularly significant."

The Royal British Legion which runs the Poppy Appeal itself says that wearing a poppy was a voluntary gesture. But with British troops fighting, and signficant numbers dying or being wounded in Afghanistan, many argue that it is more important than ever to show the soldiers have the support of the public -- and the best way is by wearing a poppy.

Fight them there or fight them here?

Former Foreign Office minister Kim Howells poses the question in the Guardian in a piece made grimly relevant by Wednesday's shooting dead of  five British soldiers by an Afghan policeman.

Howells says troops should be brought back from Afghanistan and that the billions of pounds saved should be used to beef up homeland security in Britain -- drawing the front line against al Qaeda around the UK rather than thousands of miles away in Helmand province.

He accepts that such an approach would result in "more intrusive surveillance in certain communities," a tacit acknowledgment that Britain's Muslims would be subject to greater scrutiny by police and intelligence services.

His "Fortress Britain" theory takes into account indications that a growing number of experts feel the war against the Al Qaeda's supporters the Taliban in Afghanistan is unwinnable.

It also makes the point that not all Al Qaeda training camps are in Afghanistan anyway.

Howells is Gordon Brown's intelligence and security watchdog and his theory goes counter to the prevailing wisdom in Washington and London, both of which are preparing to send more troops to Afghanistan.

Do you agree with him?

Prince Charles is in Canada, the Queen is expected to go there next year and William is preparing to go to New Zealand and Australia -- but are there signs that the locals are revolting?

Polls published in advance of Charles' visit show support for Canada's constitutional monarchy is weak, even if the public's frosty opinion of the Prince of Wales himself has begun to warm just a bit.

Sixty percent of Canadians felt the constitutional monarchy was outdated, although 80 percent said it was an important part of Canadian history.

Polls in New Zealand show people generally in favour of the monarchy even if it seems to have little relevance to their lives but when William heads off afterwards to Australia he will find a much more developed republican movement.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is an avowed republican whose announcement of William's trip made it crystal clear that the young royal was coming because because he asked to, not because he was invited. Foreign Minister Stephen Smith says a split from the monarchy is inevitable in the next decade.

William, travelling without girlfriend Kate Middleton, can expect to bask in the lingering "Diana factor," but this enduring phenomenon may actually work against the older couple in Canada.

Do you believe such royal visits have any point?

Fury, resentment and a general feeling of being hard done-by is reported to be the prevailing mood amongst MPs as they reconvene after the Summer break to find brown envelopes of an unwelcome sort waiting for them.

These are the already infamous "Legg letters," the latest symbol along with duck houses, moats and mole-catchers of the expenses scandal which did so much damage to all parties earlier this year.

Written as a result of the inquiry headed by former civil servant Sir Thomas Legg, they assess the expenses claimed by each MP between 2004 and 2008 and, where anomalies have been found, they either demand repayment or clarification.

Gordon Brown is to pay back 12,415 pounds, Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg 910 pounds and SNP leader Alex Salmond 700 pounds. David Cameron has been asked to provide more details about his mortgage repayments.

But three things have particularly annoyed backbenchers.

The first is that Legg has imposed  retrospective limits on various categories of expenses that the MPs themselves obviously cannot have known about at the time. He has said the maximum allowable for cleaning for example is 2,000 pounds and that for gardening 1,000 pounds, according to newspaper reports.

The second is the perception at Westminster that those MPs who made the really big claims, the ones on mortgage payments, are getting away with it. Saying "sorry" seems to be enough, as in the case of former Home Secretary Jacqui Smith.

And the third is that some MPs feel they have been unfairly singled out for reprisal by party leaders eager to be seen to be taking action.

Do you think they have a point? Is it time to stop harassing MPs and get on with government?

– Mark Hannam is a guest columnist, the views expressed are his own. He formerly worked at the Bank of England. He currently chairs Fair Finance, a microfinance company. The views expressed are his own. –

George Osborne’s proposals to reform the UK’s system of financial regulation make for good short-term politics but bad long-term policy. He should think again.

Blaming the tripartite structure of financial regulation for the banking crisis makes sense politically, because it suggests that the Prime Minister, who designed the structure, was responsible for the crisis.
Good politics does not always make for sound policy however. There are three reasons to think that Mr Osborne’s proposals are ill conceived. First, unless the opinions polls change dramatically in the next few months, the FSA will start to haemorrhage high quality staff and will not be able to replace them.

Second, if the Conservatives implement these plans they will throw the financial regulatory system into chaos for two or more years while the re-organization takes place. This will create risks in an already fragile financial system and generate costs for an already depleted public purse. Regulatory reform on this scale is neither quick nor cheap.

Third, if these reforms are fully implemented the UK will find itself with a system of banking supervision run by a management team that in practice knows nothing about banking and nothing about supervision.
When I worked at the Bank of England in the mid-1990s there were two career options for ambitious employees. To be successful at the Bank required a couple of degrees in economics leading to a job in the Research Division, preferably on monetary policy.

For those who preferred not to remain at the Bank, a successful stint in the Markets Division was the route to maximize one’s options, by later departing to the “real world” of the financial markets. This is the path I took.

For the aimless and the loafers there was Banking Supervision. Occasionally a bank would collapse and a junior official would be fired to appease the critics. For the most part it was a pleasant way to earn a decent salary with a pension at sixty.

Since then, banking supervision has been taken over by the FSA, where it has been gradually re-engineered into a serious job. Markets activities have been outsourced to the Debt Management Office or scaled back. The brightest and the best now come to the Bank solely to work on monetary policy, where they report to people who know nothing else.

Of the nine current governors and executive directors only one has any recent experience of real banking. Most joined the Bank straight from studying economics at university and have never worked anywhere else. The exceptions, like the present Governor, joined the Bank after teaching economics at university.

If the Bank had taken an open-minded approach to monetary policy it would have recruited people from the financial markets who knew about the price of money and its effect on other asset prices. It would have spent some time talking with markets participants rather than talking at them. Instead it hires and promotes ingénues.

The idea that the “Threadneedle Street School of Economics” is an appropriate place to embed the teams of people charged with supervising the UK’s major financial institutions is therefore risible.
Young Mr Osborne probably does not remember Joyce Grenfell’s celebrated monologue, in her role as a nursery school teacher. He would do well to heed her advice: “George, don’t do that!”

Biography: Mark Hannam worked at the Bank of England from 1993-96, then at Citibank and Barclays from 1996-2005. He now chairs Fair Finance, a London-based microfinance firm, and is a part-time writer and his articles can be found at www.markhannam.com

– Paul Taylor is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own –

They’re at it again. No sooner has the financial system begun to stabilise than Big Finance is reverting to its old ways — aggressive hiring, remuneration on steroids, wriggling out of regulation or threatening to decamp to evade tougher supervision.

These are is not the rantings of some crypto-Marxist City-basher, but the considered view of one of Europe’s most thoughtful financial regulators.

In testimony to the House of Commons on Tuesday, FSA chief Lord Adair Turner voiced concern that the industry was failing to learn the lessons from the “biggest financial crisis in the history of market capitalism”. Regulatory exhaustion and the first green shoots of recovery could prompt “some drawing back from the degree of radicalism that we require”, he said, raising the prospect of another such crisis in 10 or 15 years’ time.

Turner cited investment banks’ aggressive hiring of traders among his concerns. Others would add the return of bumper bonuses, the casting off of restraints on top executives’ pay, and threats by banks and hedge funds to desert the City if the EU or the UK enact onerous new rules.

There are plenty of examples. Last week, 10 of the biggest U.S. banks repaid $68 billion in U.S. taxpayers’ bailout funds in a race to extract themselves from government restrictions on pay for senior executives.

Citi, prevented from repaying its $25 billion in TARP funds, is reported to be planning to raise employees’ base salaries by as much as 50 percent this year to offset smaller bonuses.

In Brussels, there is talk that Internal Market Commissioner Charlie McCreevy, the pope of “light touch regulation”, is busy watering down his officials’ proposals to regulate the vast and opaque trade in over-the-counter derivatives.

Where banks and financial market players feel they are not getting their way, some are threatening to vote with their feet.

Hedge fund managers warned the UK Treasury at a recent meeting that some funds could desert London for Switzerland to avoid EU regulation. And even the big banks are dropping veiled hints that they could move elsewhere.

A senior continental European regulator says he sees growing signs that the financial services industry is playing for time in the belief that it will be back to “business as usual” soon provided it can see off the drive for rapid and sweeping regulation.

Regulators are not necessarily helping themselves. Debates over the degree of future intervention, and turf battles between different regulatory bodies, are sapping momentum in the United States, Britain and the EU.

There is legitimate concern that hasty, ill-drafted reforms will merely create a new set of problems in the future. But regulators have a limited opportunity to impose meaningful changes. They must not allow themselves to be blown off course.

– Paul Taylor is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own –

“All political careers end in failure,” the late British Conservative Enoch Powell famously said. And perhaps all political cycles end in scandal.

The outcry in Britain over politicians’ expenses that has claimed ministerial scalps and threatens the survival in office of Prime Minister Gordon Brown reflects more than just anger over taxpayer-funded duck houses.

Parliamentarians have become scapegoats for a deeper malaise combining the twilight of the Labour Party’s long reign, the worst economic slump since the Great Depression and the shaming of the City of London’s financial titans.

This is not to belittle abuses of the public purse by individual lawmakers. But they do not fully explain the nervous breakdown that has gripped Britain in the last month.

Seen from abroad, many Britons seem to feel their country has been politically, financially and morally devalued. It is easier to vent frustration at MPs having their moats or tennis courts cleaned at public expense than to accept that Britain has been on a binge for a decade and faces a long, costly hangover.

Bits are falling off Gordon Brown’s fag-end government in the same way that befell John Major’s hapless last Conservative cabinet in the 1990s and James Callaghan’s washed-up minority Labour administration in the 1970s.

Parties that stay long enough in power get lazy, sleazy and accident-prone. Remember the political funding scandals that tainted the sunset years of Francois Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac in France, and of Helmut Kohl in Germany. Or the “back to basics” sex scandals and bonfire of mad cows that did for Major.

What makes the current mood in Britain particularly toxic is the cocktail of political brown-out and economic distress.

In the last 18 months, house prices have tumbled in a country where home-ownership is central to wealth. The pound has lost a quarter of its value against the euro, as Britons discover when they go abroad. Banks have been nationalised or propped up by the state. Unemployment has surged. Government debt has gone through the roof and taxes are rising.

Britons who own homes, shares and/or private pension savings are worth less and face an enormous bill for the clean-up. Many home-buyers who joined the party late have “negative equity” — they owe more in mortgage than their house is now worth. Consumers are groaning under unsustainable debts.

There is also a dawning awareness that after 25 years of deregulation and fast fortunes, Britain is going to have to do something other than financial capitalism to earn an honest living in the coming years.

Financial Times economic commentator Martin Wolf put it starkly when he wrote that the UK had “a strong comparative advantage in the world’s most irresponsible industry” and needed to diversify away from finance. The bill for rescuing banks will be comparable to the fiscal costs of a big war, he said.

Such introspection does not come easily to a proud old nation fond of lecturing foreigners, especially continental Europeans, on how to run their economies.

The French, Germans and Italians can be forgiven a smirk of “schadenfreude” (pleasure at others’ misfortune) after years of being hectored — not least by Gordon Brown — about economic reform, deregulating financial services and labour markets, privatising pensions and modernising the welfare state. But they should not feel too smug, since most are facing an even deeper recession than Britain this year.

Now that politicians have replaced bankers as public hate figures, it is safer for British party leaders to outbid each other with proposals for reforming parliament than to tell the public the ugly truth. Whoever wins the next election, most Britons will earn less, pay more tax, retire later on a smaller pension and enjoy less public spending on schools, hospitals and transport.

The bankers will cost Britons far more than the politicians. It will make the cost of removing dry rot and changing chandeliers in MPs’ second homes look like small change.
(editing by David Evans)

- Richard Whitaker is a lecturer in European politics at the University of Leicester, UK. The opinions expressed are his own. -

Europe rarely features highly in European election campaigns in Britain. In the 2004 campaign the word Euro more often than not referred to a football tournament rather than the single currency. And for at least two reasons, we shouldn’t expect European integration to be much discussed.

First, parties have little incentive to campaign on Europe because it features a long way down the list of issues British voters consider important, well behind Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s leadership, expenses, the economy, immigration and crime. Second, to the extent that parties are internally divided on the question of how far Europe should go, they are less likely to push the issue up the agenda.

In the current campaign we might have expected what little talk there was about Europe to cover the Lisbon Treaty on which the Conservatives, in contrast to the two other main parties, have called for a referendum, and the question of whether Britain should remain a member of the EU amid calls from Eurosceptic parties on the right and left, for us to withdraw from the organisation.

While Lisbon and EU membership have been mentioned, the reality is that discussion of Europe seems to have featured even less than the low level we might have predicted. Such is the domination of the campaign by the issue of MPs’ allowances that most of the main parties’ European Election Broadcasts – a place where they have the opportunity to talk specifically about European issues - made little or no mention of Europe.

Perhaps the paucity of talk about European integration would matter little if there was nothing at stake. But, like it or not, the European Parliament’s (EP) legislative powers have greatly increased over recent years such that it is now heavily involved in the regulation of the EU’s single market.

The balance of power in the EP matters between those favouring greater control of markets and those preferring deregulation. The outcome of the EP elections will also have an effect on the choice of European Commission President, who will have to be approved by the Parliament before taking office.

The polls suggest that the big parties are likely to suffer on June 4th with minor parties doing much better than they would in general elections. Small parties doing well at EP elections is nothing new. UKIP came third last time around winning 12 seats and 16 percent of the vote.

Governing parties normally do badly at European elections but if Labour were to drop below 22 percent they would beat their own record for the lowest score by a governing party in a European election in Britain. Many of the smaller parties take an anti-EU stance, especially those likely to win seats in the election (UKIP and possibly the BNP).

So if we look simply at the results this time around, the expected victory for the Conservatives and the votes for small parties may send a largely Eurosceptic message from the UK to Brussels.

This is fine, if that’s how the electorate feels, and we have plenty of polling evidence that the British electorate is comparatively Eurosceptic. But crucially, for many voters the decision will have been made not on issues of European integration and EU membership, but on the question of MPs’ expenses.

Jonathan Morduch is Professor of Public Policy and Economics at the Wagner School of Public Service of New York University and managing director of the Financial Access Initiative. He is the co-author, with Daryl Collins, Stuart Rutherford and Orlanda Ruthven of Portfolios of the Poor: How the World’s Poor Live on $2 a Day (Princeton University Press, 2009).

In New York City, $2 is what you spend for a ticket on the subway or to buy a coffee. But for billions of people around the world, $2 or less is the average amount of money you have to put food on the table every day, pay medical bills, keep children in school, and seize business opportunities. It seems impossible.

Foreign aid experts, policy makers, and even celebrities have a lot to say about the population living on $1 or $2 a day. The group we don’t often hear from is the poor themselves. As a result, most of us have little clue about how the poor manage to live on so little—so we fall back on our guesses and assumptions, and that then informs the way we think about foreign aid.

A few years ago, my colleagues Daryl Collins, Stuart Rutherford and Orlanda Ruthven set out to learn how poor families in Bangladesh, India and South Africa really manage to live on so little. Research teams spent a year getting to know families and recording their challenges, ambitions, strategies, failures, and successes.

Our new book, Portfolios of the Poor: How the World’s Poor Live on $2 a Day, comes to conclusions that turn common assumptions upside down. Far from living hand-to-mouth, all of the families interviewed were borrowing, saving, and leading active financial lives because of their poverty, not in spite of it. One of the central conclusions is that when you live on so little and face a life of uncertainty, thinking about the future is an imperative, not a luxury. You can’t afford not to save.

Some of the families have access to formal bank accounts, but most make due with imperfect financial tools of their own creation that help them deal with irregular, unpredictable incomes. Some of the most interesting strategies involve ways to save. To overcome temptation, the families create tools with built-in self-discipline features, like rule-bound savings clubs involving a few friends that shift money into a “hands-off” account; deposit collectors who come around the village daily to collect a penny or two each day; and friends delegated to be “money guards” who act like beefed-up piggy banks by restricting access to cash.

“Portfolios of the Poor” highlights that the often-hidden challenge of living on $1 or $2 a day is that these figures are just averages—some days the families earned more and some days much less. Coping with the unpredictability of income is a fundamental challenge—and it’s missed in the articulation of the United Nations’ much-discussed “Millennium Development Goals”. A better picture of poverty is captured by what we call the “triple whammy” of poverty: (1) low incomes, (2) irregular and unpredictable incomes, and (3) a lack of financial tools. Better financial tools would allow poor families to squeeze the most out of what they have.

“Portfolios of the Poor” includes concrete ideas for moving forward. Getting there, though, requires us to first step back and listen.