Best Watches For Sale

The rain came down so hard that the man in a centre of a tiny room in a slum here couldn't be heard. It pounded on the tin roof. Outside, puddles became ponds, and groups of boys, their hair matted and their T-shirts glued to their ribs, dodged and splashed and fell, and it didn't matter.

Welcome to the new frontline in fighting TB in Nepal.

The rain turned to drizzle, and in a slum along the rising Manahara River, health educator Jeevraj Adhikari turned to the reason for his presence. He asked about 40 women and small children what they knew about tuberculosis – how it was transmitted, whether it was curable, and how it was treated. Answers came from all corners. These people knew TB.

"TB,'' he warned his audience, " is everywhere, inside your home, outside your home. If you have symptoms – fever, cough, spitting up blood – come right away to be tested.''

Nepal, famous for its beautiful trekking routes and for being home to eight of the world's 10 highest mountains, including Everest, is also well-known in the small circle of world TB experts for running one of the innovative programmes to fight the disease in modern times, in the developing world.

I have been travelling around the country for the past 10 days, with support from the World Health Organisation, not only to understand why Nepal has done so well in the past, but to look at how it's going to tackle new challenges. And what I found (besides a downpour in a slum that left me knee-deep in mud) was country health leaders willing to acknowledge difficulties in order to get better.

Perhaps this shouldn't come as a surprise. Nepal has become one of the highest performing countries in terms of multiple health indicators: mortality for children under the age of five has fallen; the number of mothers dying in childbirth has fallen; vaccination rates are at 90%; the number of malaria cases has plummeted from 27,000 cases a decade ago to just over 3,000 last year.

To top it off, the health ministry has taken major steps, along with donors, to start controlling health care for its people. That may sound strange. Don't countries usually control their own health programmes? Well, not always in the developing world, where donors often exert control. NGOs often run projects and don't tell the government.

Here, however, the government announced just last month that it would be working with donors in a new way – with three groups, DfID, the World Bank, and the GAVI Alliance – funneling money directly into a pooling arrangement for better maternal and child health. The hope is that the arrangement will reduce duplication and lead to better health outcomes. (And the government could even improve its performance: In the past year around 30 health ministry workers, including senior leaders, have attended workshops put on by the Ministerial Leadership Initiative for Global Health on how to better negotiate with donors).

In TB control, the government has cooperated closely with partners for several decades. But it wasn't until 1996 that things started to work well. That's when Nepal became one of the first countries in Asia to introduce the DOTS strategy, which calls for health workers to observe patients take their TB medicine every day for at least six months. It wasn't easy in a country as poor with so many remote villages, but strong central leadership at the time from the energetic Dr Dirgha Singh Bam and Dr Ian Smith, who later became WHO's first medical officer in Nepal – helped to build a national programme.

In the early 1990s, just 45% of TB patients were cured; today, that figure has doubled to 90%. Twenty years ago, a couple of hundred health facilities oversaw TB treatment; today, more than 4,000 sites, including tiny health posts in the mountains, administer the anti-TB drugs.

That's all positive, but health leaders remain concerned about new problems. There's HIV-TB co-infection; an estimated 40,000 people each year contract TB, which isn't much less than 15 years ago; and those with multiple-drug resistant (MDR) and extensively drug resistant (XDR) types of TB can't go to isolation wards because there are none.

So patients with MDR and XDR-TB walk into centres every day, and then go back into the community. Authorities wouldn't allow that to happen in London, or in many places around the world.

But Nepal doesn't have the funds or the facilities to isolate them. And so they advise patients on how not to infect others, especially in their homes or other close quarters, and to make sure they continue to receive treatment. In the next year, Nepal, using money from the Global Fund, will rent or build 10 hostels for MDR and XDR patients.

Most patients want to stay at home, but one said she should be put in isolation. Belu Badal, 30, who once worked as a nurse, has been taking TB drugs for five years. Now, she has XDR-TB, she said, wearing a mask and sitting behind the German-Nepal tuberculosis project with seven others, all of whom had MDR-TB.

"XDR-TB patients,'' she said, "should not be allowed to freely move outside. They should be in hospitals so that I and others cannot contaminate others.''

drive from www.guardian.co.uk

Confusion surrounded the fate of Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani yesterday, the Iranian woman sentenced to death by stoning for adultery, who now faces execution by hanging for the alleged murder of her husband, according to some reports.

The government says no final decision has been taken in a case that has generated outrage around the world, as the adultery and murder issues are still before the courts. A final judgement would be announced only when that process is completed, Ramin Mehmanparast, the foreign ministry spokesman, told reporters in Tehran.

But he indicated that the focus was shifting to a charge of murder, and seemed to suggest that Ms Ashtiani's guilt was not in doubt. "Right now, what we are pursuing is the topic of murder, and her participation in murder is confirmed," he said.

Earlier, two local news agencies had produced conflicting versions of events, with one saying she had been sentenced to death by hanging for the murder of her husband. Another, however, reported that the original stoning sentence had been confirmed, and that Ms Ashtiani had been given a 10-year prison sentence for being an accomplice to the murder.

The developments came after statements by senior Iranian officials indicating that the stoning sentence had been suspended, most recently by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who said during his visit to the United Nations General Assembly last week that news of the sentence had been "made up". His remarks were seen as a sign that the authorities, embarrassed by the outcry over stoning, were now trying to present Ms Ashtiani as a cold-blooded murderess who would get the punishment she deserved.

The President drew a comparison between the global publicity given to her case, and the scant protest over Teresa Lewis, the first woman executed by the US state of Virginia in nearly a century, who was put to death by lethal injection on 23 September for the murder of her husband and stepson.

Ms Ashtiani, 43, a mother of two, has been on death row in Tabriz since 2006 after being sentenced to stoning for adultery. Since it became public last year, her treatment has become yet another bone of contention between Iran and its Western critics.

So heated did the exchanges become that one state-run Iranian paper accused Carla Bruni of being "a prostitute", after the wife of French President Nicolas Sarkozy spoke out in support of Ms Ashtiani.

Human rights groups say the treatment of Ms Ashtiani highlights the shortcomings of Iran's judicial system. They claim her original confession of adultery was coerced. A sentence now of death by hanging for the murder of her husband would be another travesty of justice, according to Amnesty International.

Ms Ashtiani was arrested in 2005 for that murder, but she was convicted on a lesser charge of participation in murder and sentenced to the maximum term of 10 years in prison. In 2009, according to her lawyer Javid Houtan Kiyan, the conviction was changed to "complicity" in murder, and the sentence reduced to five years.

By next year, she would have served it in full, Amnesty says. For the courts now to sentence her to death for murder would breach the international ban on "double jeopardy", of a person being tried and convicted twice for the same offence.

drive from www.independent.co.uk

Sales of new homes in the US remained on the floor last month, the second lowest level in almost 40 years, sending a signal to Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernake that historically low interest rates had failed to bolster confidence in the housing market.

With thousands of unsold or repossessed homes across the US and near 10% unemployment, analysts warned that any plans by the Fed to flood the economy with cheap money in another round of quantitative easing would fail to bolster confidence among homebuyers.

In Europe, Spanish officials approved a new austerity budget to be put before parliament, including a tax rise for the rich and 8% spending cuts.

The measures include an increase in the top rate of income tax, adding 1% to the 43% for people earning more than €120,000 (£102,000) and 2% for those above €175,000. Madrid is also pushing through paycuts of 5% for government employees and departmental spending cuts of 16%. Unemployment in Spain, which has been one of the worst hit countries in the eurozone, stands at 20%, twice the EU average.

Home sales in the US stayed at 288,000 a year in August, the same level as July and the second lowest since records began in 1963. Average prices fell to a level not seen since December 2003, according to figures from the Commerce Department.

"There is no upside momentum in housing, period," said Eric Green, chief market economist at TD Securities in New York who correctly forecast the level of sales. "Unemployment is so high, consumer confidence is so low, household wealth is eroded and the psychology remains negative."

August's durable goods report, suggested the recovery in the manufacturing sector has faded significantly. This was shown by the slowdown in the three-month on three-month growth rate of core orders from 26.2% in May to -4.1%."

The only bright spot was a report that showed orders for capital equipment rebounded in August, signalling business investment is holding up better than some economists projected.

Michael Woolfolk, an analyst at Bank of New York Mellon said the wild swings in US data meant it was difficult to draw conclusions from one month's figures.

"The devil continues to be in the detail of this report, as large swings in commercial aircraft and defence orders cause the headline to consistently miss consensus expectations. While the headline number was a modest disappointment, everything else proved positive."

Stock markets focused on the capital investment figures, which were positive for the third month in the last four, and better than expected figures from across the eurozone.

The FTSE 100 finished up 51 points at 5598, while the German Dax and French CAC bourses were up almost 2%. The Dow rose 1.75% at 10,848.

Markets also welcomed the budget cuts and investments in job creation by the Spanish government. Earlier, the news that German business confidence unexpectedly rose in September, as measured by the Ifo Institute, was diluted by the fact that most businesses in Europe's biggest economy expect tougher conditions in the months ahead as the global economic recovery slows down.

There was also encouraging data from France, which said it would beat its growth target of 1.5% this year after revising second quarter data upwards. Officials also said public debt would stop growing from 2012 onwards.

Traders were concerned at the apparent intervention in the currency markets by the Bank of Japan to stem the export-sapping appreciation of the yen. Japan has suffered from the falling value of the dollar and sterling, which has made its exports more expensive.

drive from www.guardian.co.uk

Derek and Jean Robinson were a kindly couple who lived in a neat house in Heslington, York. He was a doctor and she worked for Christian Aid. It was the early 1970s; I was a student at the university, and my father, who knew them, had urged me to make contact. I spent a pleasant hour in their kitchen, chatting over coffee, and then took my leave, promising, as one does, to see them again soon. I never did. The next I heard, more than 30 years later, was that they had been murdered by a man with a psychopathic personality disorder who told police he wanted to become Britain's most prolific serial killer.

Daniel Gonzalez was sent to Broadmoor for the murders in 2006. He attacked six people in 48 hours, killing four of them. He is thought to have broken into the Robinson's house early in the morning – they had moved to Highgate, north London by this time – and stabbed both of them to death in the hallway. It was a pointless, motiveless, random killing. Could anyone make sense of it? Could Gonzalez?

In Gwen Adshead's view, killers like Gonzalez must be helped to try. As a consultant forensic psychotherapist – a rare breed in medicine – she spends her working life in the company of men at Broadmoor whom others would dismiss with a single word – evil. Her aim is to make them safer – safe enough, ultimately, to be released from Britain's highest security institution for mentally disordered offenders – and to achieve that they must understand the full import of the crime they have committed.

"My job is to help a man become more articulate about what he has done, about his illness and about why that might be important for his future. Even if a cure is not possible, recovery of some identity is possible. My work involves talking to them and getting them to become more self-reflective. Violence is more likely to occur when people are not thinking straight."

Admission to Broadmoor is granted only to members of an exclusive club: the violent insane. The Yorkshire Ripper, Peter Sutcliffe, is here, convicted in 1981 of murdering 13 prostitutes; Kenneth Erskine, the Stockwell strangler who murdered seven elderly people in 1986; and London nail bomber David Copeland who targeted blacks, Bangladeshis and gays, killing three people and injuring 129, of whom four lost limbs. But what does "insane" mean? How different are they from the rest of us?

Adshead, who is 50, is wearing a dark jersey top, a long olive skirt with a string of pearls at her neck and around one wrist. She could pass for an art college lecturer or a rural GP but for one detail – the leather pouch on a belt around her waist carrying a jangling bunch of keys.

Her tiny office is strewn with papers – she has to move some to make space for my mug of tea – and the filing cabinet next door contains folders marked "Evil and moral reasoning", "Toxic attachments", "Hope and hate". She was brought up in New Zealand – her parents were both academics – and she is writing a book on the nature of evil to be published by Jessica Kingsley next year.

"I have always been interested in how other people's minds work. I was an internalist – on the spectrum I was towards the introspective end. If you are interested in how the mind goes awry and how organisations should respond, then you are going to gravitate to a place like Broadmoor," she says.

It was her appearance on Desert Island Discs earlier in the summer that brought Adshead – and Broadmoor – some unexpectedly positive and welcome attention.

She described the patients – "our people" is a favourite phrase – as not mad or bad but sad. She quoted Shakespeare's phrase from King Lear – "ruined pieces of nature" – and explained that her job had become harder when she had her two sons, who are now school age.

"Their arrival changed my view. I imagined these men as the beautiful babies they must have been – or as round-headed eight-year-olds. All that promise... how sad it is," she says.

The impression was of a humane, empathetic doctor with liberal instincts trying to do her best for people who are more often regarded as depraved monsters, fit only to be locked away for life.

Some of them, unavoidably, will be. But for the rest, if they can be made safer in themselves, then those around them will be safer – and they may be able to move on.

"Our people have been really dangerous and there is a risk they will be again and the Government is entitled to take steps to protect the safety of the public. Slaughter-ing your family is, we can agree, an undesirable thing.

In ordinary psychiatry there is a lot of debate about paternalism. Psychiatrists have the power to detain people against their will and there is debate about when that power should be used. The issues are much starker here – there is no grey area over whether they have done something horrible or mad. Ordinary psychiatry is much woollier than that."

She likens what she does to providing palliative care for cancer – not trying to cure, but trying to ease the symptoms so that the patient is more comfortable, more serene and more secure.

"They may be mentally ill or they may not be, but have very disorganised ways of thinking. They may not have lost touch with reality but they may have talked themselves into an alternative reality. Like the Royal Marsden [the hospital in London which provides specialist cancer care], we deliver highly specialised long-term care to very disabled people at Broadmoor."

She never got a chance to help Gonzalez. Once he arrived at Broadmoor he set about attacking his seventh victim – himself. He attempted suicide by opening the veins in his wrists with his teeth – one psychiatrist said he had never seen anyone bite himself with such ferocity. He was placed on heavy doses of anti-psychotic and tranquillising drugs and he put on four stone in weight in a year – a side effect of the drugs. But he never lost his desire for self-destruction. In 2007, three years after his admission, he finally succeeded in ending his life, slashing his wrists with the plastic edge of a CD case.

drive from www.independent.co.uk

British forces in southern Afghanistan handed responsibility for security in Sangin to US forces, the Ministry of Defence said today.

The British Government first announced the transfer of authority in July.

Control of the area was handed from 40 Commando Royal Marines to the US Marine Corps shortly after 6.30am.

Defence Secretary, Dr Liam Fox, said: "British forces have served in Sangin over the last four years and should be very proud of the achievements they have made in one of the most challenging areas of Afghanistan."

He added: "The level of sacrifice has been high and we should never forget the many brave troops who have lost their lives in the pursuit of success in an international mission rooted firmly in our own national security in the UK."

UK forces have been in Sangin since 2006.

British troops will redeploy to central Helmand, where they will continue to lead the fight against the insurgency and assist in building a stable and secure Afghanistan, he said.

The number of British losses since the conflict in Afghanistan began in 2001 now stands at 337.

Ministry of Defence spokesman Major General Gordon Messenger, a former commander of the UK Helmand task force, insisted the handover was not an admission of defeat.

"It certainly won't look like that on the ground," he told the BBC Radio 4's Today programme.

"The British soldiers that are there are handing over to the American Marines. In terms of the physical security presence and every other aspect of the campaign in Sangin, it's going to be more of a continuum than a watershed."

He added: "We are seeing real and positive progress in areas that only a year or so ago were in a very different state."

drive from www.independent.co.uk

It is little more than a mile from Everton Brow to the shiny new conference hall on the Liverpool dockside where the Liberal Democrats are holding their annual conference. But the two places are a world apart. Those Liberal Democrats who are preening themselves that this is the party's first conference in government for 65 years might do well to make the short journey. If they did, they would discover the consequences of their decision to renege on their manifesto pledge not to back public-spending cuts as hard or as fast as Conservative ministers have decreed.

They might meet Danny Vaughan, a 29-year-old who is doing community work under a scheme called Future Jobs. He is a tall, taciturn young man who, until he joined the project, had been on the dole for six months after getting laid off from a labouring job. "I tried to get another but there's just no work out there," he tells me.

He is standing in the foyer of the West Everton Community Centre – known to everyone locally as "The Wecc", pronounced with a guttural Scouse click on the final consonant. He is talking to Ann Roach, who is the chair of the centre and also the supervisor of the Future Jobs scheme. "Danny is so keen he comes in at 7.30 though he's not supposed to start till 9am," she says.

His job is to help old people locally with their cleaning, decorating and other odd jobs. "Danny is the new Yosser Hughes," Ann says referring to the character from The Boys from the Blackstuff, the TV drama from the 1980s, who became famous for his catchphrase, "Gizza job". "I'll do any job. I'll go down the sewer and sort the hard shite from the soft shite if you want," says Mr Vaughan eloquently, "so long as it gives me a job."

The task he has been given is more mundane but far more useful. "Yesterday, we got a call from an 80-year-old lady whose house was full of wasps," he says. "I went in and killed 50 then we got someone in from the council to take the nest away. There are lots of old folk in the community who need help, who are stuck in their house and never go out, and where no one normally ever knocks on the door."

But the Future Jobs scheme is to be axed in the Coalition cuts. It is by no means all. Liverpool City Council has been told its Area-Based Grant budget – the money local councils get from central government – is being cut by £9.28m for the current financial year. And that is before the Coalition cuts proper start next year.

Already being axed are funds for a project to help unemployed people in the most deprived areas of the city set up their own businesses. A project to speed the rehousing of people made homeless by mortgage repossessions will go. Free sports and recreational facilities for young people have already gone. Free fruit and vegetables for primary school children have been reduced. A keep-fit programme to help the elderly stay active has been cut, which will almost certainly send some of them into residential care earlier than need be the case.

Quit Smoking and Cut Down on Booze projects have been cut. So have handyman services available to help the old and frail cope. Grants available for families with children with Special Educational Needs have been cut. So has a scheme to provide free smoke alarms for the old and vulnerable.

The scale of the cuts has prompted several Liberal Democrat councillors in the Merseyside region to defect from the party. One, in Liverpool itself, is Ian Jobling. "I was a Lib Dem representative on the Merseyside Police Authority," he tells me. "Just two weeks into the Coalition, we received an instruction to cut £4m from the current in-year budget. I was shocked. This was in breach of the Lib Dem manifesto which had said no cuts before 2011-12 because earlier cuts would harm the recovery and cost jobs. Indeed, we'd said we'd put 3,000 extra police on the beat with the money we saved from scrapping ID cards. And now here we were faced with having to cut 70 officers on Merseyside."

As the weeks passed, the extent of his party's turnaround on cuts became evident. Liverpool lost £350m for 26 new schools when Michael Gove slashed the Building Schools For The Future programme. "Then the Area-Based Grant was given an immediate £10m cut which will hit schemes to help older people and plans for new street lights in crime hotspots," Mr Jobling says. "People voted for us on our manifesto and then we got into bed with the Tories and junked it. I mulled on it for a few months. Labour had taken control of the council in May and had begun to do rather a good job so last month I decided to join them."

It was not him who defected, he feels, but the Liberal Democrats from their pledges.

Back at the Wecc, two men in their late 20s have arrived, wearing hard hats and fluorescent yellow jackets. They are the proof that the doomed Future Jobs scheme really works. Dean Powell and Darren Jones were given placements with a local construction firm, Conlon, by the scheme. They did so well that they have now both been employed by the company.

"I'd been on the dole for years," says Mr Powell. "I'm a single parent. I wanted to get a job to show my seven-year-old that life on the dole is no good and that you need a job. I came down here to the Ways to Work project and they helped me with my reading and writing twice a week. Then Future Jobs got me on to Conlon's."

drive from www.independent.co.uk

The fate of the Commonwealth Games in India is hanging in the balance after leading nations expressed concern over the state of facilities.

Sir Andrew Foster, chairman of the England team, said it remained "very concerned" over the state of facilities, while the Scotland team delayed its departure for Delhi. Foster said the team still required assurances from organisers over the athletes' village and the games arenas. He added that a final decision would have to be made over the next few days. "All options remain open," he said.

The ultimate option would be pulling out of the tournament entirely but Foster said Team England was "not there yet". He also said he expected more English athletes may still choose to pull out of the games unilaterally. The first 22 members of the England team will fly to Delhi tomorrow as planned.

India's prime minister, Manmohan Singh, prepared for a round of crisis talks and the Welsh team set organisers a deadline to prove the venues and athletes' village were fit for use.

Foster earlier said the future of the event remained "on a knife edge", 11 days before the opening ceremony.

Teams that have sent advance parties raised serious concerns about the state of the accommodation, which has been described as "not fit for human habitation". A number of big-name athletes have pulled out amid security and health concerns.The Commonwealth Games Federation's president, Mike Fennell, will arrive in Delhi tomorrow and has requested a meeting with Singh.

The federation's chief executive, Mike Hooper, said the problems with the games' preparations had prompted Fennell to rush to Delhi far earlier than planned. His emergency trip "emphasises that this is an important issue and we obviously need to engage at the highest level to get it fixed", he said.The Commonwealth Games Council for Wales chair, Anne Ellis, said this morning's collapse of a false ceiling in the weightlifting venue – following yesterday's collapse of a footbridge outside the main stadium – had added "a different dimension" to the crisis. The number of injured was reported today to have risen to 27. It remains unlikely that any team will take the decision to pull out unilaterally.

"The decision will be made, but it won't be made in isolation. We have delegations from Scotland, England, Wales, Northern Ireland, New Zealand and Australia out there and the decision will be made jointly," Ellis told Sky News.

"I just hope it isn't going to come to that – I hope the organising committee and the Commonwealth Games Federation will pull out all the stops to ensure it can go ahead."

The Scottish team, one of the most strident in its criticisms of the village, today delayed the departure of the first group of 41 athletes due to travel tomorrow. Scotland has 192 athletes due to participate in Delhi.

"Scotland is hugely committed to the Commonwealth Games. Our team on the ground will continue to monitor the situation. However, we will not compromise on areas of athlete health, safety and security," said Michael Cavanagh, the chairman of Commonwealth Games Scotland.

drive from www.guardian.co.uk

Vince Cable sought to reassure the Liberal Democrats  today that the party had not changed in the four months of coalition with the Tories and used the last speech of the Liverpool conference to plough ahead with a planned critique of capitalism.

Facing down the hostile reaction to the parts of the speech revealed in briefings, the business secretary went further – adding to his unflattering appraisal of unbridled capitalism a new idea of higher taxes on land value – something embraced by only a handful of those standing for Labour leader, and likely to upset Tories in the coalition.

Lamenting that his pre-election pledge of a tax on mansions didn't make it into the coalition agreement, Cable said: "The biggest test of our party's contribution to the coalition is whether we can ensure fairness more widely.

"It will be said that, in a world of internationally mobile capital and people, it is counterproductive to tax personal income and corporate profit to uncompetitive levels. That is right. But a progressive alternative is to shift the tax base to property and land which cannot run away and represent, in Britain, an extreme concentration of wealth."

Plans for land tax appear to be tentative and most likely to be in the Lib Dems' next manifesto ahead of the 2015 election rather than acted on now.

His major announcement was to tell the conference he would bring forward legislation in the autumn to sell off a portion of Royal Mail to inject private capital into the service.

The plan to turn Royal Mail into a partial John Lewis-style workers' partnership had appeared in their manifesto and was one they could take ownership of, Cable said. He said: "I want to announce today that employees in Royal Mail will benefit from the largest employee shares scheme of any privatisation for 25 years. The Lib Dems were the first and only party to call for an employee stake and we are now implementing it in government."

He added: "The Post Office [network of branches] is not for sale. There will be no programme of closures as there were under Labour."

A briefing note put out by Cable's department said: "The extent of private sector investment and the speed at which we begin to divest shares will depend on market conditions, getting best value for the taxpayer and securing a sustainable future for Royal Mail. If Royal Mail is going to modernise, it will need to bring its workers along with it. A successful Royal Mail will have better engagement and stronger participation from its workers."

Cable's aides tried to address the question of whether safeguards would be introduced to stop employees selling shares to businesses. Critical safeguards would be put in place – possibly involving a trust – but they would only be worked out after legislation, the aides said.

While delegates in the hall applauded Cable's plans to sugar the pill of partial privatisation for the Royal Mail, unions said it was patronising.

Billy Hayes, the general secretary of the Communication Workers Union, said: "Any offer of shares to employees is deeply patronising for people who have invested their working lives to a public service. The public currently owns 100% of the Royal Mail but the government wants to sell 9% to the very people who got this country into financial crisis."

Cable delivered his speech in the face of a barrage of negative reaction from many sides – including some in his own party – to aspects of the speech that had been pre-briefed. He raised a laugh by addressing delegates as "comrades" in a reference to some critics labelling him a Marxist.

He pleased the auditorium when he got to the section criticising the "murky" world of high finance and setting out how he believes "capitalism kills competition".

He acknowledged to activists he had caused controversy in his four months as business secretary and had "managed to infuriate bank bosses, acquire a fatwa from the revolutionary guards of the trade union movement, frighten the Daily Telegraph … and upset very rich people. I must be doing something right."

He went on: "On banks, I make no apology for attacking spivs and gamblers who did more harm to the British economy than Bob Crow [the general secretary of the RMT union] could achieve in his wildest Trotskyite fantasies, while paying themselves outrageous bonuses underwritten by the taxpayer."

The key section of the speech remained unchanged from the version released on Tuesday: "We need successful business. But let me be quite clear. The government's agenda is not one of laissez-faire. Markets are often irrational or rigged. So I am shining a harsh light into the murky world of corporate behaviour.

drive from www.guardian.co.uk

The family owners behind the Butlins and Haven holiday parks are happy campers, after pocketing nearly £60m in dividends as cost-conscious Britons continued to holiday at home rather than abroad.

The "staycation" trend saw profits at Bourne Leisure, majority-owned by the Cook, Harris and Allen families, jump to £87.9m in 2009 from £54.8m, with sales up 6.3% to £791.6m – and the company forecast further growth this year.

Not only did more people decide to take their main holiday in the UK – despite the unpredictable weather – but the company also benefited from growth in short and weekend breaks. In its efforts to make the most of the trend, Bourne has continued to invest in its resorts, turning the cheap and cheerful Butlins image of Redcoats and regimented routines into something more modern.

At Bognor Regis in West Sussex, Butlins' Shoreline hotel boasts art deco design and rooms with widescreen TVs and DVD players. Its latest project was the Ocean hotel at the same resort, opened last year in an attempt to attract the spa-break crowd.

The company paid £40.3m in dividends to its shareholders for the year, up from £27m in 2008, while the directors shared a total of £4m in salary between them. According to accounts filed at Companies House, it has paid out another £19.7m in dividends since the year end, as business continues to boom.

Bourne can trace its roots back to 1964 when a private company founded by Peter Harris – still the company's chairman – bought its first caravan park. Over the years it bought more caravan sites as well as Thorpe Park holiday camp, but it entered the big league in 2000 when it bought Rank's holiday division, including the Butlins and Warner brands, with the support of Candover and Legal & General Ventures.

In 2004 the founding families took full control of the business after buying back the 28% stake held by the two private equity firms.

Bourne's Haven division said recently that weekend breaks had risen by 15% this summer, and it is offering 50% off short breaks in September in an attempt to keep the trend going. Its experience tallies with official figures for the travel industry, which showed that visits abroad fell at a record pace in 2009. The Office for National Statistics said the 15% drop from the year before to 58.6m was the biggest since records began in the 1970s.

In all, Bourne spent £79m on new investment last year, including completing the Ocean hotel, improving entertainment complexes and swimming pools at its caravan parks and improving guest accommodation at Warner hotels. It also increased staff numbers last year by 4% to 10,697.

The company said: "Guest loyalty and repeat business underpins the long-term growth of the business. [We] anticipate that 2010 will show further growth in sales and profits from continuing operations."

The leisure tycoon Trevor Hemmings, one-time owner of Pontin's, whose business interests include the Blackpool Tower and a controlling stake in the Championship football club Preston North End, is a non-executive director of Bourne.

Its interest charge was also £9m lower at £30.3m after it refinanced its debts, which fell from £629m to £678m during the year.

drive from www.guardian.co.uk

As the Liberal Democrat minister started to write a speech for his party's annual conference starting today, he made a list of what is happening in his department and groaned: "It's all bad news."

The Liberal Democrats' heady excitement at their unexpected taste of power is being replaced by the hard graft and decisions of the spending review, and a sober recognition that they have come to office at a very difficult time.

The speechwriter's block which afflicted the minister sums up the problem facing Nick Clegg as he prepares for the Liverpool conference before leaving it early to represent Britain at the global poverty summit in New York.

Until Tuesday, he will be a hands-on Liberal Democrat leader rather than the Deputy Prime Minister. He will make three appearances and will do a lot of flesh-pressing as he appeals to his party to keep a cool head about its falling opinion-poll ratings.

Although the jitters are palpable, the conference may not be the bloodbath hoped for by much of the media. Crunch time will probably come at next year's conference. But genuine worries in the party about the Coalition Government's policies on education, health, welfare, university fees, housing and Trident may well surface this time.

The Deputy Prime Minister is convinced he has a good story to tell. He is sure that he and his ministers enjoy real influence on the Government's policies, saying many are "impeccably liberal" – a phrase we will hear a lot. But he has some convincing to do in his own party.

"We need a change of gear," one Liberal Democrat minister told me. He confessed that he and his fellow ministers had been on a fast learning-curve since May and had been in danger of being overwhelmed by the workload. "We now have to go on a mission to explain the gains; otherwise, all the party and public will see is the cuts," he said.

Indeed, the Whitehall grapevine suggests that a machine designed for majority government needs some fine-tuning. Some government announcements apparently came as a shock to the Liberal Democrats because they were buried in a pile of paperwork their overstretched ministers had not got round to reading.

An impressive study by the Institute for Government think tank this week proposed a beefing up of the Deputy Prime Minister's Office. One senior Whitehall official said: "When Nick Clegg stands in for David Cameron, the Number 10 machine takes over but he doesn't have enough back-up on a day-to-day basis."

When I interviewed Mr Clegg yesterday, I asked him whether he felt swamped. "No, I feel very well supported," he replied. "It was my decision alone to keep my operation pretty slim. I want to avoid baronial empires that pull things apart. My judgement is that it is best if I don't try to create some person-for-person rival operation."

His revealing answer stems from his desire, shared by Mr Cameron, for the Coalition to be a real partnership, not two parties trying to tick their own shopping lists. It explains Mr Clegg's reluctance to trumpet behind-the-scenes victories in stopping the Tories doing what they might have done if alone in power, although his reticence frustrates some Liberal Democrats.

Mr Clegg has not lost the bouncy optimism that made him such an attractive proposition in the leaders' televised debates. Yet some senior Liberal Democrats predict the party's ratings will slip into single figures once the detail of the cuts emerges.

Some describe a "nightmare scenario" in which the Liberal Democrats suffer the political pain of the cuts while the Tories enjoy the gains if and when the country senses light at the end of the tunnel. That has happened to the junior partner in coalitions on the Continent.

We don't yet know whether the British coalition is a one-off or the start of a long-term trend caused by the decline of Labour and the Tories, whose combined share of the vote has dropped from 97 per cent in 1951 to 65 per cent, its lowest since 1918.

drive from www.independent.co.uk