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.

The BBC is coming in for flak about its religious coverage, much of it centring on its incoming head of religious broadcasting.

The publicly funded broadcaster has appointed Aaqil Ahmed from Channel 4,  a move that has dismayed a Church of England member who is proposing to discuss the matter at the church’s General Synod, the church’s parliament.

Nigel Holmes, a former BBC employee and lay member of the synod, has tabled a private members’ motion for the upcoming meeting in July.

In a document to go with the motion, which has to attract 100 signatures to be discussed, he accused Ahmed of heading up a Channel 4 religious department that was sensationalist and biased against Christianity.

“Many of the Channel 4 programmes concerned with Christianity, in contrast to those featuring other faiths, seem to be of a sensationalist or unduly critical nature,” he wrote.

“From this point of view it is worrying that the Channel 4 religion and multicultural commissioning editor, Aaqil Ahmed, who is a Muslim is soon to be responsible for all the religious output from the BBC.”

He also said BBC coverage of religious affairs had been falling over the years, and the BBC 3 output covered religion “from the angle of the freak show”.

“We have lost so much and there is now hardly any religion on television in peak time and no programmes with a moral dimension aimed at young people either on radio or television,” he wrote.

The motion calls on the BBC and its regulator to explain why religious and ethical issues had become so ”marginalised”.

In a separate criticism, a former Radio 2 religious presenter said the corporation only focused on gay clergy stories about the Anglican church, and paedophile stories in connection with the Catholic church, the Daily Mail newspaper reported.

Don Maclean, 66, who hosted “Good Morning Sunday” for 16 years before being replaced by Aled Jones, said programming chiefs were keen to take a ‘negative angle at every opportunity’ in a way they do not with other faiths like Islam, the paper added.

“They seem to take the negative angle every time,” he was quoted as saying. ”They don’t do that if they’re doing programmes on Islam.  Programmes on Islam are always supportive.”

The BBC said in a statement that Ahmed was appointed because he was “the best qualified candidate”.

It said its commitment to religious and ethics broadcasting was “unequivocal”.

“As the majority faith of the UK, Christians are and will remain a central audience for the BBC’s religious and ethics television and other output. We regularly exceed our formal commitments to religious programming on both BBC One and BBC Two,” it added.

“On radio our commitment to quality Christian programming is as strong as it’s ever been with over 450 hours of content broadcast each year.”

Parliament’s election of a new Speaker is supposed to solve a lot of the woes it has brought upon itself by the expenses scandal. But it won’t, newspaper editorials predict.

The House of Commons needs to appoint somebody who can restore the integrity of the chamber and public trust after many MPs were found to be claiming for lavish and sometimes inappropriate expenses.

Instead Westminster in its search for a replacement for Michael Martin has resorted to old fashioned “unparalleled cynicism” and “horse trading”, the papers say.

The media’s favoured choice, former Conservative minister Ann Widdecombe, looks set to be overlooked to preserve vested interests, they believe.

The Conservatives are resisting the early front-runner John Bercow, despite him being a Tory, because of his switch from right-wing to left of centre, media reports said.

Labour only backed Bercow early on because their “sole purpose in electing him is to discomfit his fellow Tories who loathe the sight of him”, wrote Melanie Phillips in the Daily Mail.

The Daily Telegraph said in its editorial: “There has been an atmosphere of horse-trading. Candidates have found themselves attracting support from unlikely quarters because one faction wants to spite another.”

Parties don’t seem able to leave it there either. Some MPs are complaining of skulduggery and campaigning by party whips.

The Telegraph added: “One has to ask: have MPs learned nothing from the expenses scandal, which has exposed a vein of unattractive cunning in scores of them?”

Phillips questions how so many of the candidates are still making the running for the job despite their expense claims having been exposed in the Daily Telegraph.

Beckett claimed for almost 11,000 pounds in gardening and plants, while Bercow twice charged taxpayers for the cost of hiring an accountant to complete his tax return, she said.

One of the few to be squeaky-clean is Widdecombe.

“If anyone can save parliament from itself, surely she can,” Phillips wrote.

Widdecombe was also the choice of The Times, though it added “there is no single ideal candidate”.

Because her tenure would be short - she is standing down at the next general election due to be held before mid-2010 - she would “sort out immediate problems quickly”, it said.

She is also an accomplished public figure, and her tenure would pave the way for parliament to choose “a new Speaker from a new era…rather than the current roster of has-beens, also-rans and almost-buts”.

Phillips adds: “This is Ann Widdecombe’s moment. Whether parliament actually wants to be saved is another matter.”

The online release of MPs’ expense claims has only served to further dent their already battered reputation.

Forty-two days after the Daily Telegraph began to investigate MPs’ expenses the Houses of Parliament finally got round to publishing official details of them. Or rather it didn’t, as lots of key information was blacked out.

Britain’s newspapers spelt out their condemnation - in black and white - of this supposed exercise in freedom of information.

The Sun labelled MPs “Blankers”, the Daily Mirror led with the headline: “Blackwash”, while the Daily Mail posed the question: “Just how stupid do they think we are?”

Commons officials insisted that the information that had been blacked out was done to protect MPs’ security, but the consensus of Britain’s media was that the political classes had shot themselves in the foot.

“Yesterday’s exercise in obfuscation suggested the House of Commons has learnt nothing,” opined the Daily Telegraph’s editorial, with the paper promising to publish an uncensored version of every MP’s expense claim on Saturday.

“The Portcullis House edition of the dossier does not so much slam the door behind a bolted stallion as painstakingly construct a new stable in order to house a dead nag,” wrote the Guardian.

The farce was meat and drink to cartoonists. The Guardian’s Steve Bell captioned his cartoon with the statement: “Justice must not only not be done, it must not be seen to not be done.”

Even advertisers got in on the fun with a Volkswagen advert having most of its words crossed out.

Lest your mood has been overly blackened, remember that at least we have learnt a new word from this very British political scandal. Hands up who knew what the word “redacted” - to make ready for publication; edit or revise - meant 42 days ago?

The question is now how are MPs going to redact their reputations?

Discussions between the British premier and monarch to reverse religious discriminatory laws going back 300 years have sparked consternation in a conservative newspaper while attracting little response from the Roman Catholic church.

Proposed changes of the 1701 Act of Settlement would allow a future king or queen to marry a Roman Catholic, but would still preclude a royal of that faith becoming monarch.

It would also give female heirs an equal claim to the throne.

Nevertheless, Steve Doughty writing an analysis piece in the Daily Mail suggested it was an attack on Britain’s constitution, heralding the end of the monarchy as we know it and the Church of England.

“The trouble with pulling down pillars of the constitution is that you never know what may fall with them,” he wrote.

“Tinkering with either the 18th century law or the principle of primogeniture would put a question mark over the future of the monarchy, at a time when its popularity has been rocky.”

He said repealing the Act may lead to calls for a return of the Catholic Stuart dynasty.

The Stuarts were chased off the throne in 1688, paving the way for the arrival in 1714 of the Hanoverian dynasty with George I, the monarch from whom the present Queen is descended, he wrote.

“The remnants of the Stuart dynasty now living in southern Germany might feel they had a better claim to the throne,” he said.

Doughty also suggested the Church of England’s status could be under threat, as it is “knotted deeply together with that of parliament and the monarchy in centuries of constitutional law and practice”.

“The church crowns the monarch and the monarch is supreme governor of the church. Neither role could continue were the church to be disestablished.”

His colleague Harry Phibbs writing on the newspaper’s Web site, suggested it was all a smokescreen by Prime Minister Gordon Brown to distract the electorate from the current economic chaos in the country.

Branding it as “New Labour meddling”, he went on to say that “the whole change would be a great legislative indulgence”.

“Legislation would need to be passed in every Commonwealth country giving ample scope for republican elements to try and make mischief,” he wrote.

“This would be an enormous distraction.”

The law was drawn up at a time of widespread hostility towards Roman Catholics, cemented by decades of mutual suspicion.

In the meantime, an individual in the line of succession to the throne can have a civil partnership with a Catholic and can marry a Muslim or atheist, the Liberal Democrats point out.

It is time for reform, Brown said.

Yet the Roman Catholic Church, while supporting such a move, thinks there are more important issues facing the country.

A spokesman for the Archbishop of Westminster Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor said: “It is anachronistic and discriminatory and he is sure it will be repealed at some point.

“However, it is not something that the church is actively lobbying for. It is not top of our priorities.”

“Brave” was how most of the British press responded to Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s speech to both houses of Congress in Washington.

Brown was the first European leader to be invited to Washington by the new U.S. administration and was only the fifth British prime minister to speak to a joint session of Congress.

The front pages of the broadsheets were dominated with the speech and leader writers agonised on whether the so-called special relationship between the two countries is still intact.

With an eye on the upcoming G20 meeting of leading nations in London on April 2, Brown called for the U.S. and their European allies to work together through the global economic crisis.

He was praised for his warning against protectionism and his “passionate” plea on tackling poverty in Africa.

It was a speech where Brown “rose to the occasion”, Peter Hyman, former speechwriter to ex-British Prime Minister Tony Blair, wrote in the The Guardian.

“Yesterday, Brown didn’t just give us substance but a little style too.”

It had “passion”, Kafka and even a reference to a Puritan founder of New England, the paper said.

“The speech was delivered with passion and was full of good lines; even a bit of poetry,” Hyman added.

“To this audience, religious rhetoric, like manna from heaven, is scooped up with open arms. And Brown didn’t hold back, Biblical soundbites flowed.”

The broadsheet Daily Telegraph said: “Gordon Brown … found eloquent and moving words to describe this country’s unique relationship with the United States and capture the common purpose of the wars we have fought together.

“More important, he found brave words when he tackled head-on the protectionist instincts that are so powerful in the United States and which could hamper the world’s economic recovery.”

The Daily Mail’s leader described it as a “serious and sombre speech for serious and sombre times”.

“Mr Brown merits praise for refusing to pull his punches (unlike his predecessor, whose idea of the special relationship was to fawn on American presidents).

“…If the special relationship is to mean anything, it must be based on honesty and not platitudes.”

But The Guardian leader was critical, saying the speech was limited and full of flattery.

“A brave speechmaker challenges his audience and a cautious one flatters them. Gordon Brown spoke to Congress yesterday with all the daring of a lover clutching a bunch of slightly wilted flowers.

“He said very little that was new, and nothing that was shocking.

“…Perhaps respect encouraged him to be too cautious, when a more critical friend would have been blunter.

“He passage on protectionism pulled its punches. He did not blame America for the crash, as he so often does at home.”

The tabloid Sun newspaper questioned the extent of the special relationship, pointing out that while Brown received 19 standing ovations, Congress was depleted.

“While Congress was packed, it was not with politicians,” the paper’s political editor George Pascoe-Watson wrote in an opinion piece.

“There were many ’staffers’ and interns taking up seats. Gone are the days when a British PM was such a star draw that Tony Blair was cheered as he walked through US hotel lobbies.

“Mr Brown left America last night with a vastly different Special Relationship.

“A new President has taken over - and it is hard to claim he and the PM have an obvious chemistry.

“President Obama paid lip service to the bonds between America and Britain. Things are definitely not what they used to be.”

But the International Herald Tribune said the chamber “was nearly full”, adding the interns “who are sometimes summoned to fill empty seats on such occasions were relatively few in number”.

While the visit dominated the British press, papers in the U.S. were less obsessed. They did look at the special relationship, suggesting it had cooled.

“The address came a day after President Obama assured Mr. Brown that the “special relationship” between the countries was as strong as ever, despite what some people have described as coolness in the handling of the prime minister’s visit,” the New York Times wrote.

The Internatational Herald Tribune referred to the same coolness, harking back to the close bond between former leaders George W. Bush and Blair.

“Commentators on both sides of the Atlantic have catalogued a number of signs that the reception accorded to Brown in Washington was not quite as warm as the ones British prime ministers enjoyed during the Bush years: No invitation to Camp David, no full-scale news conference, no state dinner - and while there was a meeting between the men’s wives, none was held between the two couples.”

But as the Daily Mail pointed out, Brown was still pleased to have beaten French President Nicolas Sarkozy to Barack Obama’s door.

Brown could not hide “his satisfaction” at becoming the first European leader invited by Barack Obama, it reported the French financial daily La Tribune as quoting a Washington source as saying.

After a week of media frenzy, the BBC hopes it has taken action to end the crisis caused by the crude prank call made by Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand on the latter’s Radio 2 show.

Brand has quit and Jonathan Ross has been suspended after the presenters left lewd comments on the answerphone of 78-year-old “Fawlty Towers” actor Andrew Sachs. The head of Radio 2 Lesley Douglas has also resigned.

The outcome it would appear has left no one happy. Most commentators feel the BBC took far too long to act on an issue that had clearly angered the public with more than 30,000 people making a complaint.

Many newspapers feel Douglas was unjustly sacrificed, taking the rap for mistakes made by production staff she had little or nothing to do with. The Daily Mirror said she was a “big loss to weak BBC”.

What it means for the BBC is unclear. Its governing body, the BBC Trust, says lessons must be learned and editorial guidelines tightened without jeopardising creativity and “edgy” programmes.

Those like the Daily Mail, a regular critic of the broadcaster, want the corporation to go further, citing other “highly offensive” jokes, including one about the Queen, that have appeared on the BBC since the row erupted.

Others worry that fear of causing offence will make the BBC safe and irrelevant.

Did the BBC get it right? Should Ross have been sacked as an example that the BBC has lost the plot on what is acceptable or has the whole affair just been ridiculously hyped by the media?

Unions and energy watchdogs lashed out at Gordon Brown’s aid package aimed at helping householders cope with soaring energy bills, saying it was ”too little, too late”. Even  pensioners’ charities gave a frosty response.

But newspaper editorials on the whole were supportive, describing it as “bold politics. More importantly, it was good policy”, as The Times said.

From The Guardian to the Financial Times, the editorials praised the “eminently sensible” measures which concentrated on big companies helping householders to lag their lofts and cavity walls.

It may not have delivered on the pre-hype, but the editorials blame the government for bumping up the publicity in a desperate attempt to boost its poor showing in the opinion polls.

But the government resisted the temptation to impose a windfall tax on big power companies — a target on so-called excess profits.

Instead, the utility companies have been persuaded to invest 910 million pounds in helping householders pay the cost of insulating their homes.

The editorials said the government was right to resist pressure from Labour MPs and unions to impose a tax.

“In recent months, the government has often changed its tax plans under pressure,” the FT observed. “Not this time. It has been right to resist a windfall levy so far. It should continue to do so.”

The Guardian said: “Despite the chorus of carping, there was much to welcome in the devilish detail of the plans.

“Each of the biggest power firms has been forced to contribute an extra 50 million pounds to energy-saving funds.”

It added: “Much in energy policy is prosaic. A battered government in need of a political fix will not get much joy from publicising and planning the lagging of lofts. That does not stop it being a sensible thing to do. Minutiae it may be, but it matters.”

The Daily Mail believed a windfall tax would have distorted the market and driven big business abroad.

The FT suggested it would have eroded confidence over the fiscal structure’s stability and would have raised the prospect of further levies.

There were fears the companies would pass the cost on to customers, but the leader writers hoped regulator Ofgem would deal with any industry malpractice.

The Times looked at how they could be rewarded for their social contribution, and suggested tradable carbon permits could serve this purpose, as could allowing them to keep the proceeds of any efficiencies they achieved.

The Daily Mail, in a rare show of support for Brown, supported his ”wise” decision not to give large-scale handouts to people to help with fuel bills.

“Isn’t it better to offer every family the chance to cut their bills permanently, by fitting better insulation, than to hand over a one-off voucher for 100 pounds, as was suggested?” it asked.

The energy efficiency measure would pay for itself within three years, though the Guardian pointed out that many would suffer during this time  and would continue to do so afterwards.

“Asking someone who is already cold to shiver their way through another three winters before the lagging arrives is not an acceptable policy,” it said.

“And even after the insulation arrives, the millions of hard-up households who have neither lofts to lag nor wall cavities to fill will still feel short-changed.”

It also said the country now faced a shortage of loft laggers.

The government gained “brownie” points for its green credentials. The country’s housing stock is among the least fuel-efficient in Europe, the FT pointed out, and reducing waste is critical to cutting emission of greenhouse gases.

The Times backed the view: “It sends a vital signal that efficiency must be at the heart of any sound energy policy, not the fringe.”

The British press, like their American cousins, doesn’t seem to able to get enough of Sarah Palin.

The self-described hunting, shooting and hockey “mom” is the “biggest hot-button political story in the English-speaking world”, says Martin Kettle in The Guardian on Friday.

Newspapers have devoted pages to the previously little-known governor of Alaska and  now Republican vice-presidential candidate.

But while she was described as the next Margaret Thatcher by the American media in the Daily Telegraph, the British media have concentrated on drawing parallels with psychiatrist Dr Melfi from “The Sopranos” TV show or the late Princess Diana.

“She joins those women, such as Diana, Princess of Wales and Carla Bruni, who were picked to fill a gap at the side of a prominent man and promptly upstaged him,” writes Bronwen Maddox in The Times.

Her colleague Andrew Billen draws on Palin’s joke for inspiration: what is the difference between a hockey mom and a pitbull — lipstick.

“It has been applied liberally to Mrs Palin’s pleasing face, less hockey mom than Dr Melfi from The Sopranos or the Specsavers model, a sexy lady who knows it but won’t show it. Her hair was down but her neckline was up.”

But all the papers agree she was a superstar. Suzanne Goldenberg in The Guardian writes that Palin had “provided excitement and glamour to a campaign that formerly had trouble electrifying the Republican base”.

She can connect with people in white working-class small towns and conservative areas, as well as younger voters and working mothers, Goldenberg adds.

“Hers was the sort of speech that George Bush, at his best, could do with great effect,” Kettle says.

Peter McKay in the Daily Mail goes one further and says she shouldn’t just set her cap at becoming vice-president.

“The story now isn’t about Sarah Palin’s suitability as vice-president. It’s the certainty that, if McCain, 72, wins, he’ll serve only one term. And his party will be grooming her as America’s first woman President.”

And all that despite her grating voice. “You could kill a bear at 200 yards with Sarah Palin’s voice,” Maddox cruelly says in The Times.

“I heard it first on the radio and winced; an octave higher than Hillary Clinton’s. It made a screech out of ‘I’m going to Washington to serve the people of this country’.”

Palin as President would be bad news for The Daily Telegraph’s Charles Clover though. He writes in his Earthlog that she “could yet be a disaster for international relations” and that “environmentalists detest her”, quoting her pro-drillers stance and hunting habit.

She is not popular with Philip Stephens in the Financial Times either. Her speech was “not as good as the gush suggested”, he writes.

British newspapers were not fooled either by the “potent mixture of the homely and the daring”.

“Her teeth had not only been whitened, but sharpened, the better to sink into Barack Obama,” Billen in the Times writes.

Maddox describes Palin’s overall effect as “bullying”.

“You would not want to be on the Parent Teacher Association with her,” she observes.

“Her sarcasm was plain nasty. Mrs Palin portrays herself as the innocent outsider but she is a very worldly queen of her domain.”

The Guardian’s Kettle writes: “Palin can certainly attack. But will either male or female voters want a long-term relationship with a political dominatrix from the Arctic?”

Kettle warns against pumping up Palin’s profile too much.

He says the media had initially underestimated her, but the danger after her barnstorming speech on Wednesday is that it will now overestimate her.

“This isn’t a movie. This isn’t Geena Davis in Commander in Chief. It isn’t Jane Horrocks in The Amazing Mrs Pritchard.”

“Palin is one important factor among several in this election, and the real challenge, especially here in the eye of the storm, is get her into some perspective.”

For full coverage of the U.S. election click here

The media is still confused about the motives behind the Chancellor’s observation that “(the times we’re facing) are arguably the worst they’ve been in 60 years”.

What about the 27 percent inflation and 12 percent unemployment rates the country endured during the 1970s and 1980s, they ask?

The country has not been forced to go to the IMF, cap in hand, as it did in 1976, nor is it 1992 and another Black Wednesday, leader writers point out in Monday’s newspapers.

The problem seemed to be compounded when Alistair Darling was then forced to explain in a series of TV interviews that he was talking about severity of current economic conditions — the global credit crunch and rising commodities prices — rather than predicting a great depression.

“The pity is that the public doesn’t know what to believe or who to trust,” the Daily Mail says.

Darling also frets in the Guardian article on the weekend about the state of the Labour Party, saying the cabinet was partly to blame for its recent electoral woes and poor showing in the opinion polls because it has ”patently” failed to explain the party’s central mission to the country.

Was Darling then being honest or foolish, newspaper editorials ask.

One thing it seems certain about is that his comments were “astonishing” and in danger of “over exaggeration”, the Mail adds.

“Instead of talking our economy up — as Chancellors traditionally do in time of trouble — he talked it down, undermining confidence even further,” the Daily Mail says in an editorial on Monday.

The Financial Times believes Darling has his priorities the wrong way around.

“On the economy, his prognosis is too bleak. On Labour, his prognosis is nowhere near bleak enough.

“The government will only make matters worse politically and economically if it overreacts to the downturn.”

It adds: “His precise meaning has been in dispute but it would certainly be nonsense to suggest the UK faces the worst downturn in six decades.”

The Daily Telegraph believes it “shatters the myth that Labour’s stewardship has created economic stability”.

Anatole Kaletsky, writing in the The Times, says Darling has got his figures wrong: “On closer inspection, the Chancellor’s reputation for frankness makes his political blunder worse, since it reveals a flaw more serious than deviousness: basic ignorance of economic facts and figures.

“This is a failing that the minister responsible for national finances can never live down.”

He adds: “There is no way of messaging the facts and figures to make his statement even half-right. Despite all the headlines about a credit crunch, financial conditions are also relatively benign.

“What on earth, then, was Mr Darling talking about?”

The Daily Mail said his comments “seem over the top”.

“As to why, we can only guess. Trying to distance himself from Gordon Brown perhaps?”

Kaletsky adds: “Suppose, then, that the Treasury decides to spin his comments not as a description of what has already happened but as a prediction that Britain will suffer its worst economic crisis since 1948 in the year or two ahead.

“If this was what Mr Darling meant, will anybody believe any economic forecast he presents in his next Budget if this is less than catastrophic?

“And if Mr Darling does present a catastrophic forecast in a pre-election Budget, what will this do to Gordon Brown’s chances of survival?

“These questions can yield only one answer: the next Budget will be presented by a new Chancellor.”