Tuition fees: Nick Clegg should come clean about what really happened

The Lib Dem leader campaigned on a promise to abolish tuition fees but confidential papers show he had no such intention

• 
• • Rob Wilson
  • guardian.co.uk, Friday 21 September 2012 15.15 BST

Nick Clegg speaking at Oxford Brookes University before the 2010 general election. Photograph: Dan Chung for the Guardian

Nick Clegg has gone through some of the biggest highs and lows of any politician in recent years. During the 2010 general election campaign he was briefly as popular as wartime leader Winston Churchill and commentators talked about his "Obama-esque" poll ratings. For a short time Clegg and his inner circle thought seriously about the prospect of becoming prime minister in a Lib-Lab pact, having (they hoped) received a higher percentage of the general election vote than Labour.

It was a serious possibility, given that Labour was pushed into third place in a number of polls and the Liberal Democrats hoped to poll more than 100 seats. Of course it had evaporated by the end of the campaign and the Lib Dem leader was left with fewer seats, wounded pride and depression. He was devastated by the final result.

Next, the high of negotiating his party into government and himself as deputy prime minister, was rewarded with the low of a dramatic drop-off in the Lib Dem poll rating. Part of the reason was what was considered "the party's treachery" over tuition fees.

The Lib Dems had gone into the election promising to abolish tuition fees over two parliaments, while the two big parties had kicked the ball into the long grass through the Brown review, while privately recognising an increase in fees was highly likely. The party targeted university campuses with their campaign to abolish fees and its MPs and Clegg signed the NUS pledge not to vote for a rise in parliament. Clegg even made a direct appeal to students through a video, again making a promise to students about his party's intentions.

What students and potential voters did not know is that months before the general election David Laws, Chris Huhne, Danny Alexander and Clegg had met in secret as part of their preparations and decided that the abolition of tuition fees was not a priority for the party. This senior group had for some time been taking seriously the likelihood of a hung parliament and were meticulous in their preparations. In making their plans, the Lib Dems knew with certainty they would not be in government alone.

Thanks to confidential Liberal Democrat papers passed to me as part of my research for my book Five Days to Power, the evolution on the party's negotiating position is clear. By March 2010 the party had come to the clear position that the Lib Dems would not waste political capital pushing for the abolition of tuition fees. It was clear and unambiguous. This was a totemic party policy and it was to be ruthlessly sacrificed without any attempt to salvage it. The document said: "On tuition fees we should seek agreement on part-time students and leave the rest. We will have clear yellow water with the other [parties] on raising the tuition fee cap, so let us not cause ourselves more headaches."

With these words the full extent of the Lib Dem political calculation being made becomes clear. The party would gain its benefit from its public position vis-a-vis the other parties, but privately fighting for their key general election pledge was always a non-starter. Even more than two years later, I still find the level of cynicism involved quite shocking. The party's MPs and candidates were not told of the strategy.

So Clegg's apology this week is welcome. He is right, he should not have made the promises he did on tuition fees – they were unaffordable and he knew that. He is right his party had become irresponsible in opposition, making promises it knew it could never honour. The Lib Dems were well known for saying one thing is one area and the opposite in another and that culture had seeped into the party's DNA, hence its "treachery" on fees. But the Lib Dem leadership should not try to rewrite history. What the leadership did at the 2010 general election was pretty cynical and calculated. He knew he would not fight to abolish fees but said he would. This also requires an apology to the public and probably to the Liberal Democrat party as a whole, who were not aware of the leadership's position.

It is welcome that Clegg now realises his party needs to grow up and to turn its back on being a party of perpetual opposition and frivolous chancers. But he needs to do it with the full and open recognition of past mistakes, not a selective narrative that is historically inaccurate.

Justice and security bill is designed to stop disclosure of intelligence secrets

After recent embarrassments, the government wants to ensure no intelligence information emerges in civil court hearings again

• Richard Norton-Taylor and Ian Cobain
• guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 11 September 2012 14.38 BST

The government has tried to assuage opponents by keeping the relatively liberal Ken Clarke in charge of the bill. Photograph: Steve Parsons/PA

The justice and security bill is the direct result of evidence that emerged in court supporting allegations that MI5 and MI6 knew about the torture or inhuman and degrading treatment meted out by the CIA to terror suspects, including British citizens and residents, notably Binyam Mohamed.

The high court, later backed by senior judges in the court of appeal, ruled that information the CIA had passed to MI5 and MI6 should be disclosed. Washington was furious. The British government, and in particular David Miliband, the foreign secretary at the time, was deeply embarrassed.

There was a danger of further incriminating evidence emerging in court as UK citizens and residents who were held at Guantánamo Bay demanded compensation. To avoid disclosing what MI5 and MI6 may have known about the secret transfer of the detainees to the US military prison on Cuba and about their treatment, the government offered them expensive out-of-court settlements.

Under pressure from the security and intelligence agencies – and the US – the coalition government decided to introduce a statute designed to prevent any intelligence information from being disclosed in civil court hearings ever again.

The government argues that the bill would allow more intelligence information to be heard in court than hitherto, even though it would be heard in secret. A judge would decide whether the information should be kept secret. The bill's critics say that the way it is drafted means it would be extremely difficult for a judge to challenge any minister's claim that information should be kept secret on grounds of national security. The fact that a hearing would be held in secret could itself be kept secret.

Critics say the bill represents a creeping move towards more and more secret courts, based on the model of the special immigration appeals commission, where any evidence can be withheld from a defendant and his or her lawyers. Evidence of British collusion in the abuse and rendition of terror suspects to places where they risked being tortured – including evidence of MI6's role in the rendition in 2004 of two Libyan dissidents into the hands of Muammar Gaddafi's secret police in Tripoli – might never have seen the light of day had the bill been in place.

The government has tried to assuage opponents by keeping the role of steering the bill through parliament in the hands of the relatively liberal former justice secretary Ken Clarke, rather than his successor, Chris Grayling. Liberal Democrat ministers have sought credit for excluding inquests from the bill, an element of the original draft that had provoked strong opposition from armed forces families and the British Legion.

But senior Liberal Democrats have not all been persuaded and will express their concern about the bill at their conference in Brighton this month. A motion says the bill's proposals for "closed material procedures", as they are called, form no part either of the Liberal Democrat or Conservative manifestos in 2010, or the coalition agreement.

Alzheimer's could be due to junk food

There is evidence that poor diet is one cause of Alzheimer's. If ever there was a case for the precautionary principle, this is it

• 
• • George Monbiot
  • guardian.co.uk, Monday 10 September 2012 20.30 BST

Because regulation is light, the industry can kill off the only effective system for telling us how much fat, sugar and salt food contains. Photograph: Brownstock Inc/Alamy

When you raise the subject of over-eating and obesity, you often see people at their worst. The comment threads discussing these issues reveal a legion of bullies who appear to delight in other people's problems.

When alcoholism and drug addiction are discussed, the tone tends to be sympathetic. When obesity is discussed, the conversation is dominated by mockery and blame, though the evidence suggests that it may be driven by similar forms of addiction.

I suspect that much of this mockery is a coded form of snobbery: the strong association between poor diets and poverty allows people to use this issue as a cipher for something else they want to say, which is less socially acceptable.

But this problem belongs to all of us. Even if you can detach yourself from the suffering caused by diseases arising from bad diets, you will carry the cost, as a growing proportion of the health budget will be used to address them. The cost – measured in both human suffering and money – could be far greater than we imagined. A large body of evidence now suggests that Alzheimer's is primarily a metabolic disease. Some scientists have gone so far as to rename it: they call it type 3 diabetes.

New Scientist carried this story on its cover on 1 September; since then I've been sitting in the library, trying to discover whether it stands up. I've now read dozens of papers on the subject, testing my cognitive powers to the limit as I've tried to get to grips with brain chemistry. Though the story is by no means complete, the evidence so far is compelling.

About 35 million people suffer from Alzheimer's disease worldwide; current projections, based on the rate at which the population ages, suggest that this will rise to 100 million by 2050. But if, as many scientists now believe, it is caused largely by the brain's impaired response to insulin, the numbers could rise much further. In the United States, the percentage of the population with type 2 diabetes, which is strongly linked to obesity, has almost trebled in 30 years. If Alzheimer's, or "type 3 diabetes", goes the same way, the potential for human suffering is incalculable.

Insulin is the hormone that prompts the liver, muscles and fat to absorb sugar from the blood. Type 2 diabetes is caused by excessive blood glucose, resulting either from a deficiency of insulin produced by the pancreas, or resistance to its signals by the organs that would usually take up the glucose.

The association between Alzheimer's and type 2 diabetes is long-established: type 2 sufferers are two to three times more likely to be struck by this form of dementia than the general population. There are also associations between Alzheimer's and obesity and Alzheimer's and metabolic syndrome (a complex of diet-related pathologies).

Researchers first proposed that Alzheimer's was another form of diabetes in 2005. The authors of the original paper investigated the brains of 54 corpses, 28 of which belonged to people who had died of the disease. They found that the levels of both insulin and insulin-like growth factors in the brains of Alzheimer's patients were much lower than those in the brains of people who had died of other causes. Levels were lowest in the parts of the brain most affected by the disease.

Their work led them to conclude that insulin and insulin-like growth factor are produced not only in the pancreas but also in the brain. Insulin in the brain has a host of functions: as well as glucose metabolism, it helps to regulate the transmission of signals from one nerve cell to another, and affects their growth, plasticity and survival.

Experiments conducted since then seem to support the link between diet and dementia, and researchers have begun to propose potential mechanisms. In common with all brain chemistry, these tend to be fantastically complex, involving, among other impacts, inflammation, stress caused by oxidation, the accumulation of one kind of brain protein and the transformation of another. I would need the next six pages of this paper even to begin to explain them, and would doubtless get it wrong (if you're interested, please follow the links on my website).

Plenty of research still needs to be done. But, if the current indications are correct, Alzheimer's disease could be another catastrophic impact of the junk food industry, and the worst discovered so far. Our governments, as they are in the face of all our major crises, seem to be incapable of responding.

In this country, as in many others, the government's answer to the multiple disasters caused by the consumption of too much sugar and fat is to call on both companies and consumers to regulate themselves. Before he was replaced by someone even worse, the former health secretary, Andrew Lansley, handed much of the responsibility for improving the nation's diet to food and drink companies – a strategy that would work only if they volunteered to abandon much of their business.

A scarcely regulated food industry can engineer its products – loading them with fat, salt, sugar and high-fructose corn syrup – to bypass the neurological signals that would otherwise prompt people to stop eating. It can bombard both adults and children with advertising. It can (as we discovered yesterday) use the freedom granted to academy schools to sell the chocolate, sweets and fizzy drinks now banned from sale in maintained schools. It can kill off the only effective system (the traffic-light label) for informing people how much fat, sugar and salt their food contains. Then it can turn to the government and blame consumers for eating the products it sells. This is class war, a war against the poor fought by the executive class in government and industry.

We cannot yet state unequivocally that poor diet is a leading cause of Alzheimer's disease, though we can say that the evidence is strong and growing. But if ever there was a case for the precautionary principle, here it is. It's not as if we lose anything by eating less rubbish. Averting a possible epidemic of this devastating disease means taking on the bullies – both those who mock people for their pathology and those who spread the pathology by peddling a lethal diet.

Having 10 ex-lovers is the ideal number

By Cristina Odone

8:44PM BST 06 Sep 2012

It’s a crucial scene in Four Weddings and a Funeral, and for my money ranks with Meg Ryan faking an orgasm in When Harry Met Sally. Hugh Grant’s character, looking like the uncomfortable, repressed Englishman he is, fidgets and squirms at a table in a café as the upfront American he’s fallen for, played by Andie MacDowell, merrily lists her previous lovers.

There were various rolls in the hay (she was a country girl). One paramour had a hairy back. Another was a “shock”. There was a “disappointing” one and another, “who broke my heart”. Number 22 kept falling asleep (“that was my first year in England”). Number 27 was a mistake (“he kept screaming”); 28 was Spencer; 29, his father; 32 was lovely… and then there is the man she is about to marry.

That’s 33 lovers. “Not as many as Madonna,” she points out. But a great deal more than anyone should admit to – at least to a prospective partner. This is not my prudish hunch, but the very scientific finding of SeekingArrangement.com. The dating website asked 1,000 clients to name the perfect number of ex-lovers anyone should have, and the answer, from both males and females, was 10. Any more, claim the respondents to the survey, would be promiscuous; any less would betray an inexperienced fumbler, or a repressed loner.

So 10 it is, and I can see why. Nine lovers will have ironed out a person’s little idiosyncrasies, like popping in his mouth guard (“so I don’t forget”) before the first fumble. By number 10, she will have learned not to offer a running commentary during rumpy-pumpy. After 10 lovers, paranoia about one’s naked body disappears, and chatting to the opposite sex no longer unnerves. With any luck, out of 10 lovers, at least one will be great and inspire confidence in oneself – and thus in relationships.

By the tenth “friend”, even the most overprotective parents won’t pose questions like “are your intentions honourable?”. By then, too, nosy friends will have stopped studying each new candidate for sinister perversions or bunny-boiling tendencies. Ten previous lovers suggests a person is neither a commitment-phobe nor a desperado ready to hitch up with the first person who’ll have them. 

If 10 has been deemed a good rule of thumb when it comes to admitting to past lovers, I should point out that some of us would rather die than discuss (let alone list) our exes with our present partner. It was a lesson that girls learnt at finishing school, like getting out of a sports car without showing too much leg. Bad girls did, and talked about it; good girls did, and kept mum. These charm schools did not wish to promote goody-goody Victorian morality, they just wanted to maximise students’ chances of bagging an eligible bachelor: numerous exes would intimidate, but secrets would titillate the chinless wonder with a country pile but without a clue.

Mary Killen, The Spectator’s agony aunt and queen of etiquette, thoroughly approves of such discretion. “Who wants their friends or strangers imagining them having 10, or any number, of couplings? Mystery is always best. Once graphic details, or even numbers, have been spelt out, they can never be forgotten.”

True, but in today’s confessional culture, reticence is worse than a hairy back. Health and safety are as much a part of sexual etiquette as they are of employment regulations. With the rise of internet dating, sexually transmitted diseases such as chlamydia and chilling reports of jealous rows ending in murder, a secret past is a turn-off.

Suddenly, making inquiries about a suitor’s romantic history is part of every courtship, as awkward but unavoidable as the moment when the bill arrives, and you don’t know whether to reach for your purse: are you going Dutch or do you risk offending him by intimating that he can’t afford to keep you in style?

“How many have you had?” is no longer a lubricious question but a legitimate one. Some men, of course, don’t need this excuse to divulge how many notches they’ve chalked up on their bedposts. Casanova, the notorious 18th-century ladies’ man, boasted more than 200 conquests. Mozart’s Don Juan turned his long catalogue of seductions into a delightful aria. And Warren Beatty’s biography claims that the Hollywood heart-throb managed to bed 12,775 women. More recently, we’ve had the 69-year-old Tony Blackburn admitting to 500 women, while Bill Roache – Coronation Street’s Ken Barlow – claims to have had over a thousand.

In comparison, Nick Clegg, who famously confessed to having slept with “no more than 30” women, sounds positively virginal – if not a little “vulgar”, as Matt Warren, editor of The Lady, puts it. “Going public with the number of lovers you’ve had is unforgivable.”

Especially, I’d venture, if you’re a politician. I can no more dissociate Clegg from his 30 lovers than Gladstone from his prostitutes, or Berlusconi from his glamour models. Knowing about the Deputy PM’s bunga-bunga past dents his dignity. Frisky Nick is a lot less authoritative than devoted (if henpecked) father-figure Nick.

Clegg’s full disclosure did prompt many a dinner-party game among Westminster-watchers: which MP has had the most lovers? (Readers’ answers welcome.) Some argue that a “colourful” past is a plus in parliamentarians, showing that they have a wide variety of experience.

Indeed, the liaisons of such MPs as Alan Clark, Jonathan Aitken and Mike Hancock (who fell for an alleged Russian spy) – to name just a few – are well documented. Flesh-peddling is part of the job, after all; and a scattergun approach to frolicking is, perhaps, understandable, given that Westminster allows all the emotional intimacy of a Moonie marriage ceremony. Others counter that politicians who have over-extended themselves on the sexual front in the past become more vulnerable to humiliation (or blackmail) should a bitter and twisted ex decide to wreak revenge.

For even among phlegmatic Anglo-Saxons, jealousy of the ex should not be underestimated. This cuts both ways. I know couples who are so insistent about keeping their sexual past a no-go area that their current partner suspects a former lover in every friend and at every party. All encounters have the potential for sulks, inquisitions and rows.

On the other hand, admission of a particular number of exes can lead to questions about dates, names and – yikes – rankings. For these obsessives, there is no right number of ex-lovers: 10 is as intolerable as 1,000, and as offensive as “mind your own business”.

Perhaps it is best to accept Matt Warren’s advice, which is that “there should be no upper or lower limit to the number of lovers one can admit to; that would be too prescriptive. The essential thing is the state of your current relationship. And if your partner does ask, bear in mind how the information you share will affect them.”

In other words, lie.

You can't dance to atheism

Any doctrine that actually works to hold society together is indistinguishable from a religion. It needs its rituals and its myths

'In America the myth of a particular sort of extreme individualism is inseparable from the myths of a particular sort of America whose history has been invented in almost every detail.' Photograph: Ethan Miller/Getty Images

I finished the series of articles I wrote on Robert Bellah's Religion in Human Evolutionwith a definition – a religion is a philosophy that makes you dance. It pleased me because the book itself can be read as a history of how philosophy grew from dance. But is it any use?

The great difficulty of definitions like mine is that they leave the content of religions entirely to one side. We are still enough of the heirs of Christendom to feel that religions must involve doctrines, heresies, and a commitment to supernatural realism. The trouble is that a definition with doctrines, heresies, and supernaturalism fits many varieties of atheism just as well. You will object that atheism bans, by definition, any belief in the supernatural. Yet almost all sophisticated religions ban at an intellectual level all kinds of belief which sustain them in practice. Buddhists worship; Muslims have idols. "Theological incorrectness" is found wherever you look for it.

And atheism can be just as theologically incorrect: today's paper told me that: "our bodies are built and controlled by far fewer genes than scientists had expected". The metaphors of "building" and "controlling" have here taken a concrete form that makes them palpably untrue. Genes don't do either thing. It seems to me that a belief in tiny invisible all-controlling entities is precisely a belief in the supernatural, yet that is the form in which entirely naturalistic genetics is widely understood in our culture. Religion can't really be about doctrine and heresy either, because these concepts don't make sense in pre-literate cultures. You can even ask whether the concept of "supernaturalism" makes any sense in most of the world without a developed idea of scientific naturalism, and scientific laws, that would stand for its opposite.

The serious weakness of my definition is that philosophy itself is a very late development and not one that has really caught on. As Bertrand Russell observed, many people would rather die than think, and most do. So maybe it would be better to say that religion is a myth that you can dance to. This is useful because it suggests that atheism is not a religion as you can't dance to it. There's no shortage of atheist myths – in the sense of historically incorrect statements which are believed for their moral value and because it's thought that society will fall apart if they're abandoned. The comments here are full of them. But they are no longer danceable.

There aren't any overwhelming and inspiring collective atheist rituals. I don't mean that these can't exist. Olof Palme's funeral procession was one unforgettable example. But they don't exist today. Possibly, the London demonstration against Pope Benedict would qualify but in terms of numbers it was wholly insignificant compared with the crowds that he drew, or that flock to church every Sunday.

Against this point the committed atheist replies exactly as a liberal protestant would have done 20 years ago: bums on pews don't matter; he or she is in the business of truth, not numbers, and the truth must in the course of time prevail. I don't believe this. I don't believe it in either case. Individualism without some myth of the collective is quite powerless. This is clearly illustrated by the Tea Party in America where the myth of a particular sort of extreme individualism is inseparable from the myths of a particular sort of America whose history has been invented in almost every detail.

If I'm right, then liberal, individualistic atheism is impossible as an organising principle of society because any doctrine that actually works to hold society together is indistinguishable from a religion. It needs its rituals and it needs its myths. A philosophy will grow around it in due course. Now perhaps you can have, at least on a small scale, a society committed to the principles of rational and tolerant disagreement and the sovereignty of reason. But what you end up with then isn't some rational Athens of the mind. It's Glastonbury.

Family Matters Should Be Argued Only By Married People, Not Spinsters says Judge

A petition to Chief Justice of India asks him to remove Justice Bhaktavatsala of Karnataka High Court for his retrograde views against women against the tenets of the Constitution

From the petition:

On August 31, he went out of his way to counsel a young woman whose stated reason for not living with her husband was that he used to beat her. Justice Bhaktavatsala said, “Women suffer in all marriages. You are married with two children, and know what it means to suffer as a woman. Yesterday, there was a techie couple who reconciled for the sake of their child. Your husband is doing good business, he will take care of you. Why are you still talking about his beatings? I know you have undergone pain. But that is nothing in front of what you undergo as a woman. I have not undergone such pain. But madam (Justice BS Indrakala) has.”

The court asked the woman if her parents were present, at which her father walked up to the bench. The judge remarked, “Ask your father if he has never beaten your mother!” When the woman said her husband would beat her in the open, in front of everyone, Justice Bhaktavatsala remarked that it was she who was bringing it out in the open. The court was told that the husband would beat her in the middle of the night and had thrown her out of the house.

When the woman’s advocate produced photographs showing her swollen face, the court said, “You have to adjust. Are you just behind money? There is nothing in your case to argue on merits. You have to give him a divorce or go with him. Have you read about actor Darshan. He spent 30 days in jail after beating his wife. But they are living together now. What is on your mind and what is on your agenda?”
...
This is just not an isolated case in another case reported , a young advocate had not imagined she would be receiving a lesson on married life when she took up a case on behalf of an estranged wife. She was summarily told by Justice K Bhaktavatsala that she was unfit to argue a matrimonial case as she was unmarried. While the lady advocate was citing the allegations against the husband, Justice Bhaktavatsala stopped her midway and asked, “Are you married?” When she replied in the negative, the judge said, “You are unfit to argue this case. You do not know real life. Why are you arguing like this? He is your (client’s) partner,not a stranger. Family matters should be argued only by married people, not spinsters. You should only watch. Bachelors and spinsters watching family court proceedings will start thinking if there is any need to marry at all. Marriage is not like a public transport system. You better get married and you will get very good experince to argue such cases.”

Some cruelest foods

Menaka Gandhi in Mathrubhumi

In the last 5 years meat eating has risen to the highest levels it has ever been. The reason for this is that India is, thanks to TV, turning non-vegetarian. Soon we will lose the magic and mystery of India, the soul and the gurus who have kept it alive, and become just another struggling, boring nation full of viciousness. According to the Mahabharata, the Kalyug started on the day that man discovered he could eat his fellow creatures. From there it was a short step to wars, slavery and wickedness to all humans.

All animals that are grown for meat are raised, trucked and killed with extreme cruelty. But man has taken unkindness to an art form. Let me give you a list of the cruelest foods. I am sure I can give you at least 100, but let me start with ten.

1. A Japanese dish , Ikizukuri means 'prepared alive'. It is the preparation of fresh raw meat, usually of fish, cut into thin slices made from live seafood and served as sashimi. The victims are fish, octopus, shrimp, and lobster. You choose the animal. The chef uses his skills to partially gut and cut the animals up and serve it. He must cut the fish without killing it. With its heart exposed and beating, gills still working, trying to gasp for air and painfully conscious while its body is being cut up. Often the chef will take the pieces he cut from the fish and 'reassemble' them like some nightmarish jigsaw puzzle. The Chinese have Yin Yang Fish, which involves dipping the living fish into oil and frying it alive, but again just enough that it is still living right up until you plunge your fork into it and put it wriggling into your mouth.
2. Ortolan is a tiny songbird native to most European countries and west Asia. It is about six inches long and weighs just four ounces. The French capture these birds alive, blind them using a pair of pincers and then squeeze them into tiny cages where they cannot move. The bird is fed millets, grapes and figs till it reaches 4 times its size. Then it is drowned in a liquor called Armagnac, roasted whole and eaten, bones and all, while the diner drapes his head with a linen napkin to preserve the aroma of the brandy – and probably to hide from God.
3. 'Foie Gras' means 'fatty liver,' and it comes from ducks or geese. Adult ducks and geese are taken to a dark room and put in fowl coffins. A long metal pipe is shoved down the bird's oesophagus and a machine pumps pounds of fat greased corn mix directly into their digestive systems, which then gets deposited in their livers. This goes on till their livers reach six times their normal size. The birds writhe in pain for three weeks but they are stuck in boxes where they cannot even spread their wings. Then their throats are cut and the cancerous liver taken out and sold as a delicacy for rich people.
4. This is a dish invented by people who are known for their culinary cruelty – the Japanese. The victims are baby Dojo loaches (Mudfishes). The recipe calls for boiling water. When the water is heating up, a block of soyabean tofu is placed in the vessel. The baby loaches are added and they try to escape being boiled alive by plunging straight into the still cold tofu. The tofu starts cooking and the little fish are cooked alive inside it. The final product resembles Swiss cheese, the holes created by panicked baby loaches trying to escape boiling water.
5. A product of that other compassionate civilization, the Chinese who brought it to Tibet – or vice versa - Feng Gan Ji means 'wind dried chicken.' The chicken is not killed. Its stomach is sliced open and its intestines are cut out and replaced with spices and herbs as stuffing. The stomach is sewn up again in the still living bird and it is then strung upside down to die and dry in the wind.
6. Another dish known in China as Huo Jia Lu meaning 'Live Donkey'. The animal has its legs tied and its body held down, while the cook cuts its body and serves it immediately to the diners who quietly eat it among the ear splitting cries of the animal. The flesh is actually eaten raw without cooking. The diner uses a special fork and spoon to scoop out some of the flesh from the donkey. The meat is dipped into the fresh red blood before it is eaten. A variation of this dish is called Jiao Lu Rou ('Water Donkey Meat'), where the donkey's skin is pulled off and boiling water poured on its raw flesh until it is cooked.
7. Nagaland has its dog variation. A dog is tied to a tree and kept hungry for a week. It is then given a bucket of rice, lentils and vegetables to eat. It stuffs itself. It is then turned upside down and its stomach split open while alive and the food scooped out and eaten.
8. Nothing like eating your own relatives. A monkey is forcibly pulled to the dining table, tightly bound with hoops over its hands and legs. One of the diners uses a hammer to create a hole in the live monkey's head. Its cracked skull opens from its head and the diners use a stick to extract the brain. The monkey usually screams terribly before dying. Diners use their spoons to scrape through the bloody monkey's brain. Others dip the raw brain into a herb soup in order to add to the aroma while eating.
9. We in the Northeast have another amazing way to eat the most intelligent and emotional animal on the planet – the pig. A sharp iron rod is poked through the pig's anus and pushed in till it comes out through the mouth , tearing up all the organs on the way. The still living pig is then roasted over a fire.
10. Another popular Far Eastern dish - a newly born rodent and a selection of vegetables are brought to the table. The diner uses a special skewer to stab the live rodent. The rodent, who cannot bear the pain of being pierced, squeals as it is impaled on the skewer. The diner dips the still-live rodent into the boiling oil and then eats it.

Next week I will tell you 10 more. Put yourself in the animal's place.

I cannot imagine the people who enjoy this – and then believe that praying to the gods will result in something good for themselves.