The welfare standards of meat (or broiler) chickens is under threat of further degradation because the government is currently deciding how to bring new EU legislation on chicken welfare into law in England. Your help is urgently needed to persuade the government to make the right choice for chickens.

At current minimum industry standards, so many chickens are crowded into a shed each bird has less space than a sheet of A4 paper. It’s hard to walk or even flap their wings, and the birds often develop painful deformities. The new legislation could allow even more chickens into already overcrowded sheds.

Is this how you want the UK to treat its animals? If not, please join the Quash the Squash campaign in urging the Minister for Animal Welfare, Mr Jim Fitzpatrick, to reject this backwards step for chicken welfare.

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A Football Association spokesperson has said the FA expects all those involved in the riots at Upton Park to be ‘banned from football for life’. I have never been more pleased that we moved away from London in 2005. Our home was in Upton Park for five years of our time in the capital, and you could see the stadium and hear the crowds from our back garden. In all that time there was very little trouble, more noise than actual bodily harm, but every single game was accompanied by a huge police presence, the Tube was a rowdy intimidating nightmare on match days, and our entire locality was knee-deep in fast food, lager cans and other rubbish afterwards.

The cost of policing, and the clean-ups, must have been enormous. I’m no fan of football culture, if that’s an appropriate term to employ. I’ve nothing against the game itself, though it interests me not even a little. Every club has its miscreants but one in particular, Millwall, has huge numbers of fans who have been notorious for decades for their love of casual violence. Millwall doesn’t want them, Millwall never praises them, Millwall is shamed by them. They’ve made Millwall a by-word for hooliganism. It must be an ongoing work of endurance for those Millwall fans who simply love the game, support the club, and don’t endorse or get involved in the violence that breaks out from time to time.

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