Well, when you put it like that

Labour endorses graduate tax

Labour is to endorse a graduate tax as its official policy after Ed Miliband overruled Alan Johnson, the shadow Chancellor, who has expressed grave doubts about the idea. In a speech yesterday, Mr Johnson prepared the ground for a personal retreat by saying that Labour disagreed with the Coalition Government's decision that graduates should pay all the cost of their university education under plans to allow tuition fees to rise to £9,000 a year from 2012. "This is the central issue now and it's why the Shadow Cabinet has agreed to look at whether a graduate tax can be a fairer and more sustainable alternative to the current mess as part of our policy review proposals," he said.

Mr Johnson, who introduced top-up fees as Higher Education Minister during the Blair government, is the first senior Labour figure to suggest the Opposition will come out in favour of a graduate tax since Mr Miliband became party leader in September. The issue has been discussed by the Shadow Cabinet and one member said: "We will go for a graduate tax."

Mr Miliband backed the move during Labour's leadership election but the party is divided over it. On the day after Mr Miliband was elected, Mr Johnson advised him in an article in The Independent on Sunday: "For goodness sake, don't pursue a graduate tax. We should be proud of our brave and correct decision to introduce tuition fees. Students don't pay them, graduates do, when they're earning more than £15,000 a year, at very low rates, stopped from their pay just like a graduate tax but with the money going where it belongs: to universities rather than the Treasury."

Vince Cable, the Business Secretary, considered a graduate tax but concluded that one would not bring in revenue for many years. Yesterday, Nick Clegg admitted he "should have been more careful" over his pre-election pledge to scrap tuition fees. He told ITV's Daybreak programme: "I guess the easiest thing for me would have been to say I've signed this pledge, I'm going to put my head in the sand, I'm not going to come up with a fair sustainable solution to universities and simply refuse to deal with it. I don't think that would have been the right thing."

Welfare reforms will expose families and children to the 'risk of destitution', say charities

Ian Duncan Smith, the work and pensions secretary, faced a backlash from poverty campaigners today over plans to impose severe welfare penalties on people who are out of work and refuse to take up jobs

Oxfam's director of UK poverty, Kate Wareing, said: "Removing benefits and leaving people with no income will result in extreme hardship for them and their families. This sanction, and the proposals to force people to do unpaid work are based on stigma. Most people receiving benefits do want to work, and punishing them as if they are criminals repaying a debt to society is not a fair way to treat someone entitled to support."

Sally Copley, head of UK policy at Save the Children, said: "It is hard to see how Britain's poorest children are going to be helped using sanctions creating a climate of fear. It is children who will suffer when a single mum is told to take a job, but there is not suitable childcare available. It is the children who will suffer when the safety net is withdrawn for three months, living in homes where mums and dads already struggle to put a hot meal on the table or buy a winter coat. Breaking the cycle of poverty is important. Simplifying the benefits system is long overdue. But paying for this by welfare cuts for the poorest families is in no-one's interest."

Douglas Alexander, the shadow work and pensions secretary, said: "We support the underlying principle of simplifying the benefits system and providing real incentives to work. My concern is that [chancellor] George Osborne's recent actions reveal he doesn't support these principles – he has already both complicated the system and undermined incentives to work through changes such as the reduction in working tax credit. Some of the key aspects of Iain Duncan Smith's original plan already seem to have been cut and that could mean some people facing bigger barriers to getting back to work. And our overriding concern is that there is a fatal flaw at the heart of these proposals: without work they won't work."

Richard Hawkes, chief executive of disability charity Scope, said the reform effort was "encouraging" but unrealistic about the reality of people's lives. Citing the regime of sanctions planned, Hawkes said: "What about those disabled people who do play by the government's rules? Who try repeatedly to get work but are not successful? The sanctions the government is going to introduce will effectively penalise them, pushing them further into poverty, further away from work and ultimately creating more dependency on the state. The government needs to be clear in its aim of supporting genuine people today as well as introducing robust plans for the future."

The business sector warned that red tape could hamper efforts to create the new jobs required. Dr Adam Marshall, director of policy at the British Chambers of Commerce (BCC), said: "Business will support moves to make work pay – because UK plc cannot function efficiently and effectively with millions of people permanently outside the labour market," he said. "Yet there are challenges too that must be addressed. If private sector companies are to create the jobs needed to employ local people, the government must make it easier for small and medium-sized firms to take on staff – by stripping away burdensome employment regulation, and by ensuring that everyone has the basic skills needed to hold down a job. Businesses will take it from there, and train up the specialist workforce they need to deliver growth."

Cameron condemns students blah blah blah

David Cameron vowed today that he would not turn back on trebling tuition fees and condemned the students who tried to ransack Conservative headquarters yesterday, saying the full force of the law should be used to prosecute violent protesters.

In a round of interviews in Seoul, where he is attending the G20 summit, Cameron said: "We won't go back. Look, even if we wanted to, we shouldn't go back to the idea that university is free." He also urged the police to learn lessons from yesterday's riot, saying there were 30,000 police officers in London yet only a thin blue line of extremely brave police officers was available to "to hold back a bunch of people intent on violence and destruction".

He also insisted he had a mandate to push through the reforms to higher education, saying: "I think the will of the public was expressed at the time of the election when they rejected debt and deficit and putting off these difficult decisions under Labour, and they chose a new approach and we've got to be true to that and stick to that".

He said he was very glad the Metropolitan police commissioner, Sir Paul Stephenson, had called for an inquiry into the policing of the event, saying: "I think we need to learn the lessons rapidly." He said there had not been remotely enough police officers, adding that there may have been failures of intelligence. "I think the police themselves have said that the problem here was about the planning, was about the intelligence, was about the resourcing of that particular operation."

But he added: "I am quite convinced that the reductions in police spending that we're making can actually be done without losing the visibility and the activity of the police officers on our streets." He disclosed he had been on the phone from Seoul to Conservative HQ in Millbank to check staff were safe. He said: "I thought it was extremely serious. I could see a line – a thin blue line – of extremely brave police officers trying to hold back a bunch of people who were intent on violence and destruction."

He also denied that the violence represented a return to the kinds of riots seen in the 80s under Margaret Thatcher. Asked if he feared the British social fabric was under threat, he said: "There have been protests – both peaceful protests and sometimes protests that have turned quite nasty – under all governments so I don't see it like that. Look, people who assault police officers or who smash windows or who break property they are breaking the law and, yes, those people I hope that they will be prosecuted. They should be.” He added: "Lawbreaking is not acceptable and I hope that the full force of the law will be used."

Nick Clegg was 'led astray' by Tories over tuition fees, says Harriet Harman

Harman attacks Clegg over tuition fees u-turn as students protest over cuts and threaten to unseat Lib Dem MPs who break pledges on higher education funding

Nick Clegg was today accused of having been "led astray" by the Tories over the coalition's plans for increasing tuition fees as students and academics marched on Whitehall in protest. Harriet Harman, the deputy Labour leader, sought to play on Liberal Democrat unease about the rise in the cost of university education after Clegg and his party made the abolition of fees a key plank of their election manifesto.

Thousands of students and academics from across the country gathered in London for today's demonstration, billed as the largest show of opposition to its austerity cuts since it came to power. Fury at the Lib Dem U-turn has sparked warnings from the National Union of Students (NUS) that students will attempt to oust Liberal Democrat MPs who vote for a tuition fee hike by trying to force a by-election in the constituencies of MPs who renege on a pre-election pledge to oppose any hike, using proposed recall legislation.

Clegg, who was standing in for David Cameron at prime minister's questions today, faced a total of 12 questions related to higher education funding. Cameron was in China. Harman said she hoped Clegg would go out and tell the students protesting outside parliament how "fair" the government's plan was.

Cameron in China

 

Ambulance and fire services could be turned into John Lewis-style mutuals, says Francis Maude

The Government has already unveiled plans to turn Government agencies into John Lewis-style mutual organisations where the staff have a stake in how they are run. Francis Maude, the Cabinet Office minister, said the plans could be expanded to the fire and ambulance services.

Maude told The Daily Telegraph that he would probably stop short of trying to mutualise “the armed forces or the police”. He added: “Outside that, would you exclude all uniformed services? No, not necessarily. Ambulance services could easily be - I know there is one that is interested in doing it. We have to assume that this is applicable across the public sector unless there is a very pressing reason why the model won’t work.”

Staff would be given their annual budget and allowed to run the service themselves. Turning fire and ambulance services into mutual bodies would allow staff to hold their management to account and give them a better say in running the organisation. A similar scheme was already run by Central Surrey Healthcare, a not-for-profit organisation that provides community nursing to the people in central Surrey.

Maude said there would be “a genuine co-ownership, genuine mutual model. There is no profit share, there is no ‘tradeable’ share, although they all own a share”. The benefits were felt among staff, who felt they had a stake in the workplaces. He said: “They are paid on exactly the same basis as they were before. Their financial motivation is exactly the same and yet their mindset has been utterly transformed. They would say they are working harder but we are much happier, more fulfilled; the ability to make a difference, to see what needs to be done and make things happen.”

Lord Young, a former Trade minister under Margaret Thatcher, is already looking at how to turn public bodies which charge fees - such as the Driving and Vehicle Licensing Agency or Companies House - into mutual organisations. Staff would then be allocated shares allow them to share in the agency's success. The shares would then be sold or handed back when they leave. Lord Young is expected to provide more details about his plans later this month.

The tools of welfare reform are being sharpened in the Tories’ divide-and-rule box

Iain Duncan Smith’s welfare reforms suggest that unemployment is the fault of lazy people. The argument does not consider structural conditions nor recognise that many people are not working because there simply are no jobs for them; instead it implies that people are not working because they are lazy. It also maintains a narrow definition of work. For example, single parents looking after children perform socially valuable work but this is not recognised as such.

There is also some confusion over the actual nature of welfare. Welfare was intended to help people who needed it. It was not created as something for which people should have to work. Its advocates want to force people to work and demand that those who refuse to take any kind of work, no matter how meaningless or degrading, will lose benefits. This assumes that poor people should lose the right to choose.

It is not clear that this will foster the sense of individual responsibility that its advocates champion either. People on welfare share the problem of unemployment, but many, especially those who will be turfed from ISA on to JSA, are also victimised by violence, abuse, mental illness, disability and emotional problems. Such people may feel defeated and crushed, and achieving some success in meaningful activity might well help them.

Yet it is difficult to see how forcing people to do soul-destroying jobs through this scheme will help their self-esteem or produce a sense of social responsibility. People resent being forced to do meaningless jobs that will not help them but are merely intended to create the impression that they are not “getting something for nothing.” It would be more useful to create real jobs that would allow people to earn a decent living and feel a sense of pride. Similarly, structural explanations that explain why jobs are scarce are more useful than fanciful stories about the laziness of poor people.

I find that many of those who support these plans misunderstand the situation. What they see as the causes of poverty – apathy, lethargy, lack of hope – are more often its effects. This reform offers emotional appeal and easy answers to complex problems. Affluent people usually see the system as one of unlimited opportunities and believe poverty is due to failure to take advantage of those opportunities. Having profited from the system, they believe in it and express a self-congratulatory view: “we worked hard and deserve our success”; the failure of others to achieve similar success must be the fault of those individuals themselves.

The explanation always shifts the cause of unemployment away from structural factors to the moral character of the claimant. This is the most useful tool in the Tory’s divide and rule box. By diverting working class ire towards the “undeserving” poor, highlighting the depravity of the benefit claimant who squanders his or her pittance on a consoling six-pack of beer, the rich and big corporations can enjoy their vast wealth undisturbed.

The myths swallowed by George Osborne

George Osborne fails to understand that the value of lost output in Britain is vastly greater than the cost of public debt, writes George Irvin in the Guardian

MPs on the Treasury select committee have criticised George Osborne for "misleading the public" by suggesting that Britain was close to bankruptcy. Britain's budget deficit is at present equivalent to 12.7% of GDP. The national debt has been rising, as has the cost of debt service, currently running at about just over £42bn per annum or about 3% of GDP. According to George Osborne, unless drastic austerity measures are imposed as per the government spending review, the international financial markets will lose confidence in Britain. But the chancellor's argument in favour of drastic budgetary retrenchment is a mixture of fact and myth. Below are some typical myths.

Myth 1: Debt repayment is a cost to the country
About 80% of public borrowing is from the domestic market, what economists call the "non-bank public". To those who buy them – either directly or through things like pension funds – British bonds are an asset on which holders receive a payment totalling £34bn per annum. The remaining 20% is either held by government departments or is owed to foreigners. Most public borrowing appears as a liability on the government side of the ledger, but as an asset on the ledger of domestic bondholders.

Myth 2: The taxpayer pays
We are told repeatedly that the cost of servicing public debt is paid by current and future taxpayers. But anyone who believes that has grasped the wrong end of the stick. The reason the government has had to borrow ever larger amounts since 2008 is that, in a recession, tax receipts fall while transfer payments (such as jobseekers' allowance) rise. So it is the lack of tax receipts that leads to the borrowing, not excessive borrowing that leads to more taxes. As the economy recovers, tax receipts rise and borrowing falls.

A somewhat more sophisticated argument used mainly by "financial economists" (the sort who advise Osborne) is that when government debt-financed spending rises, the public cuts its consumption by an equal amount in the expectation that future taxes will rise. This is what economists call the "Ricardian equivalence" hypothesis, first proposed by David Ricardo in the early 19th century and popularised by Robert Barro and other members of the "rational expectations" school of economics which enjoyed brief credibility in the 1970s. Bluntly, there is little empirical support for this hypothesis. (See Elmendorf, DW; Mankiw, NG (1998). "Government Debt, NBER Working Paper 6470".)

The same is true of the oxymoron "expansionary fiscal contraction"; the IMF's World Economic Outlook (October 2010) could find only two episodes out of 15 of advanced economies expanding as deficits were cut.

Long-term jobless 'could face compulsory manual labour'

Long-term benefit claimants could be forced to do compulsory manual labour under proposals being put forward by the government, it has emerged. Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith is set to outline plans for four-week placements doing jobs like gardening and litter clearing. "The message will go across - play ball or it is going to be difficult," said Mr Duncan Smith. Details will be unveiled in the Welfare Reform White Paper expected shortly.

Boom boom!

Under the plan, claimants thought to need 'experience of the habits and routines of working life' could be put on the month long, 30-hour a week placements. Anyone refusing to take part or failing to turn up on time to work could have their £65 Jobseekers' Allowance stopped for at least three months. The Work Activity scheme is said to be designed to flush out claimants who have opted for a life on benefits or are doing undeclared jobs on the side. Reports suggest it will target people believed to be sabotaging efforts to get them back into work.

The Welfare Reform White Paper, set to be unveiled in the coming week, will set out Mr Duncan Smith's plans for a universal credit to replace the range of benefits currently claimed by the jobless. Under the scheme, job advisers would be given powers to require tens of thousands of claimants to take part in community work for charities or local councils. A Department for Work and Pensions spokesman said: "We will shortly be bringing forward further proposals on how to break the cycle of dependency blighting many of our communities and make sure work always pays."

Mr Duncan Smith said his plans were designed to reduce welfare dependency and make work pay. He said: "One thing we can do is pull people in to do one or two weeks' manual work - turn up at 9am and leave at 5pm, to give people a sense of work, but also when we think they're doing other work. The message will go across; play ball or it's going to be difficult."

The UK has 5m people on out-of-work benefits and one of the highest rates of workless households in Europe, with 1.9m children living in homes where no-one has a job.

Leaked document shows how one London council will cut spending by targeting children, the old and the lonely

Streetlights will be switched off at night. Roads will be swept less often. Home repairs for council tenants will be refused. Libraries and children's centres will close. Potholes will no longer be fixed. Fees for swimming and sports will increase. And luncheon clubs for pensioners, playgroups for children, youth clubs and breakfast clubs will all be cancelled.

The devastating reality of the cuts being planned by councils across the country has been laid bare in a secret document, seen by the Observer on condition the council is not revealed, which details every single service likely to disappear in one inner London local authority. Every council will have a similar document: a map of misery for the next four years.

The London council report has been drawn up by officials in response to the government's comprehensive spending review, which laid out heavy cuts for local authorities. It illustrates just how much local communities are likely to be disrupted. It lists the potential risks of the cutbacks, including "deterioration of estates leading to antisocial behaviour" and "reduction in overall standards of cleanliness for litter, detritus and fly-tipping".

Anna Turley, deputy director of the New Local Government Network think-tank, warned that the spending review was going to be "devastating" for local government. "We are starting to see how this will affect people's lives," she said.

The London report provides a strong illustration of what is to come. A cabinet member at the London council said: "The invisible services – the support in the home behind closed doors that is enormously expensive – will have to remain. Those are the people with the highest needs. So we have no choice but to cut the more visible, popular services that will bring protests – the luncheon clubs, the play services, the youth groups, the breakfast clubs. And those lunches are important because they are really good at reducing isolation."

Cheeeese!!

Martin Rowson, the Guardian

Ken Clarke to close six jails as he insists inmate numbers will fall

Around 5,000 prison cells will be lost and 10,000 jobs across the Prison Service will be axed under a government plan to shut six jails in England and Wales. The Ministry of Justice is reportedly preparing a list for establishments for closure as part of an overhaul of sentencing policy designed to reduce the number of offenders behind bars.

A consultation green paper outlining the reduction, a reversal of the Labour government's plan to increase prison accommodation from the current 88,000 places to 96,000, is due to be published next month.

The proposal comes after George Osborne's demand for a 23% cut in the ministry's budget by 2014/15 in the spending review. Justice secretary Ken Clarke hopes he can reduce the prison population by 3,000 by 2014, rather than the previous government's forecast that an extra 8,000 places would be needed. He reportedly intends to achieve this by reforming sentencing, transferring mentally ill offenders to NHS units, and repatriating more foreign national offenders.

Jails that may be vulnerable to closure include Shepton Mallet in Somerset, Shrewsbury, North Sea Camp in Lincolnshire and Dartmoor in Devon; larger inner-city prisons such as Wandsworth and Pentonville in London are thought to be still viewed as important.

Colin Moses, chairman of the Prison Officers' Association, called for a policy of smaller jails instead of closures. "We do not believe at this time that there should be any prison closures until we have had a root and branch review of the prison estate," he said. "We believe smaller prisons deliver the things Ken Clarke is talking about, such as good offender behaviour programmes."

There are doubts over whether there are sufficient NHS facilities available to take offenders, and whether large numbers of foreign national prisoners can be returned; last year only 41 of almost 8,000 convicted were returned.

Meanwhile, the chief inspector of prisons, Nick Hardwick, told the Times that he believed that inmates were being treated very badly. "You look at the conditions some people are in and what's happening to them and the lack of care they are getting and you think, 'This is just a disgrace'," he said. Not enough focus was put on trying to stop offenders returning to crime, with many inmates sitting around playing cards even in workshops, he said.

The justice ministry said last night: "We expect that by the end of the spending review period the number of prisoners will be around 3,000 lower than it is today, equivalent to 2008 levels. "We are looking at the sentencing frameworks for adult and young offenders, as well as the full range of penalties available in the criminal justice system. Long-term decisions on prison capacity programmes will be taken in the light of these policy developments."

Bryan Ferry presents the Olympia exhibition

Labour goes with the Coalition over benefit reforms

If you were expecting a fight from Labour over welfare reforms, forget it.

Douglas Alexander, the new shadow work and pensions secretary, today moved to clarify Labour's stance on welfare by saying he will back phased reform of housing benefit and stressing the party's support for stricter incapacity benefit tests. He also said he was broadly supportive of plans for a universal credit, the centrepiece of Iain Duncan Smith's welfare white paper, due to be unveiled next week, but set a series of tests for his support. The universal credit will unify most benefits and tax credits into a single payment.

   
In his first interview since taking on what is likely to be a central political battleground, Alexander told the Guardian his preference was a Danish model of the state guaranteeing work, and then obliging people to take the job or lose benefit. "This is a form of conditional welfare. Real guarantees of work, but real sanctions if the offer is not taken up."

Duncan Smith, he said, had by contrast been obliged by the Treasury to follow an American punitive model of simply cutting benefit, regardless of whether work was available. In return for his £2bn universal credit scheme, Duncan Smith had agreed to £18bn of welfare cuts, many of which will reduce disincentives to work. Alexander and Duncan Smith are due to clash on welfare in a Commons debate on Tuesday.

Labour has been criticised, including by its former party general secretary Peter Watt, for appearing to be siding with the feckless poor against the hard-working squeezed middle, so appearing less credible on how to tackle the deficit. But Alexander listed a series of welfare reforms he was willing to accept, including changing access to disability living allowance, driving out fraud, temporary changes to the upgrading of some benefits, and testing the availability for work of incapacity benefit claimants.

Berlusconi government to ban street prostitution

According to  Barbara Saltamartini, the party’s  equal opportunities spokeswoman, Silvio Berlusconi’s government "has reached a further milestone"! The Italian prime minister yesterday chaired a meeting that … wait for it … approved a bill outlawing prostitution.

Mara Carfagna (above), the former topless model who is Berlusconi's equal opportunities minister, told the website Clandestinoweb a package of security measures will now go to parliament that included a ban on prostitution in all public places. "The aim is to cut off the oxygen to criminal organisations that profit from the bodies of women who are often very young and, in the overwhelming majority of cases, foreign," she said.

It emerged last week that three associates of the prime minister were formally under investigation on suspicion of profiting from prostitution. They include his TV network's best-known newscaster, a talent scout who supplies many of its showgirls, and a former dancer who was Berlusconi's dental hygienist until he plucked her from obscurity to be a regional MP for his Freedom People movement. I’m not making this shit up!

Among those who have been questioned is an 18 year-old Moroccan girl who said that she had visited the prime minister's home outside Milan. She has acknowledged receiving €7,000 from Berlusconi, but denies any sexual involvement with him. A 27 year-old ex-prostitute who has also given a statement to prosecutors, said however that she had twice provided sexual services for the prime minister at €5,000 a time. Opposition critics noted the new measures would not apply to call girls, but only to streetwalkers.

"If it weren't so terribly serious, you'd die laughing", said Senator Donatella Poretti of the Italian Radicals.

Rowan Williams enters the fray

Dr Rowan Williams says that government spending cuts threaten to remove vital services, particularly in rural areas, while church and voluntary groups are already at full stretch.

His comments, which followed private talks with the Prime Minister, reinforced his warning that the Big Society agenda must not be simply “an alibi” for public spending cuts. Dr Williams met Mr Cameron for talks with other faith leaders in Westminster earlier this week, although Lambeth Palace declined to give further details of the subjects discussed. Shortly after the election, Dr Williams said he could only give “two and a half cheers” for the Big Society because he was concerned that the plan to give voluntary and charitable organisations a greater role running public services meant the government was “washing its hands” of its responsibilities.

Speaking at a Church of England conference on faith in the countryside, Dr Williams suggested that his fears were proving well-founded. “Conversations earlier this week in Westminster suggested that a number of people driving the Big Society have not really thought through what the implication might be - certainly for the rural setting,” he said. Rural communities, in particular, face a “huge problem” with high rates of depression and suicide among farm workers, which will only worsen if funding for mental health services is withdrawn, he said. One in four mental health jobs in areas including Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire are said to be at risk.

Dr Williams said churches did not need to be told to get involved in helping their local communities, but required more government commitment and resources to expand their work. Voluntary groups are already taking up the burden of supporting rural residents who find themselves isolated, while “the Church can provide extremely significant support and help”.

“It is absolutely true that a certain amount of what gets talked about as Big Society shaped stuff is precisely what has been gong on already,” he said. “What it needs is not so much exhortation as capacity building. The challenge therefore is how do we get government – local and national – to build capacity in the countryside for groups like the churches to go on serving as they are already serving?”

Nigel Farage re-elected as leader of UKIP

Nigel Farage has been re-elected as leader of the UK Independence Party. Mr Farage, who led UKIP from 2006 to 2009, took just over 60% of votes in a ballot of party members. He beat fellow MEP David Campbell-Bannerman, economist Tim Congdon and former boxer Winston McKenzie. He will take over from Lord Pearson of Rannoch, who stood down after only nine months in the job.

The leader of the party in the European Parliament, Mr Farage was injured in a light aircraft crash on 6 May - the day of the general election. He then failed in his attempt to get elected to Westminster in the seat of the Commons Speaker John Bercow. All 18,000 members of UKIP had a vote in the postal ballot.

The party has long campaigned for the UK to pull out of the European Union, but failed to make its hoped-for breakthrough in May's election. However, its share of the vote did increase by nearly 1% as it polled more than 919,000 votes.

Vatican warns of ‘wayward’ religious sect Opus Angelorum

The Vatican has warned Catholic bishops around the world to monitor carefully a secretive traditionalist sect which prays to angels to combat demons, whereas anyone with half an ounce of sense knows you pray to God for that sort of thing – doh!

Opus Angelorum, which means "the work of angels" in Latin, was founded by an Austrian housewife who died in 1978. She claimed to have identified the angels and demons who were battling for the control of human beings. The Church said some members of the sect were carrying out "activities that disturb the ecclesiastical community".

The BBC's David Willey in Rome says Opus Angelorum first attracted the attention of the Vatican 30 years ago, after the death of its founder, a woman from the Austrian Tyrol called Gabriele Bitterlich. She claimed to have been in contact with an archangel and to have written down the names of hundreds of angels and demons. The sect - which operates mainly in German-speaking Europe, Brazil and India - claims that women who have had abortions are possessed by the devil.

The activities of Bitterlich's followers, including dozens of Catholic priests and nuns, eventually attracted the attention of the Vatican which ordered an investigation. According to a letter sent by the head of the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, in 1992 members of Opus Angelorum agreed to follow the doctrine of the Church in return for official recognition.

"In particular, [its] members were not to make use of the 'names' of angels derived from the alleged private revelations attributed to Mrs Gabriele Bitterlich and they were not to teach, spread or make use of the theories originating from these alleged revelations," Cardinal William Levada said. “Furthermore, they were reminded of the duty to follow strictly all liturgical laws, in particular those relating to the Holy Eucharist."

However, several members of the sect, including some priests, "have not accepted the norms given by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and seek to restore what, according to them, would be the 'authentic Opus Angelorum'", the letter warned. "The Congregation has learned that very discreet propaganda in favour of this wayward movement, which is outside of any ecclesiastical control, is taking place, aimed at presenting it as if it were in full communion with the Catholic Church."

'Yes I have a young girlfriend. It seems perfectly natural to me'

No, not Berlusconi, surprisingly

Bryan Ferry and some woman with a mattress on her back