The World in which I have to live today

Peter Hain has condemned another night of loyalist violence in Belfast. "This is taking Northern Ireland, or attempting to take it, back to a hideous dark past," he told BBC Breakfast. "These were serious attempts to kill police in some instances. This is really not loyalism but gangsterism masquerading in this community." Sinn Fein's Mitchel McLaughlin told Radio 4's Today programme there is "an absolute vacuum of leadership within unionism at the present time". Later today chief constable Sir Hugh Orde will brief the Northern Ireland secretary on the riots, which left at least 18 more officers injured overnight.

The involvement of troops in NI came after demonstrators found a way of rent-a-rioters in dispersed geographical locations so that the then RUC became worn out travelling from one riot to another. Billy Bliar will be in trouble if he has to find soldiers to beef up the PSNI. The police feel hard done by and morale will not run on zero if they sustain too many causalities. They are a police SERVICE not a police FORCE.

David Blunkett is planning a major shake-up of the welfare state. In an interview with the Independent, the work and pensions secretary says a green paper to be published next month will go much further than reform of incapacity benefit. "It is going to be a radical look. I want to go wider than incapacity benefit," he says. "The whole benefit system is a patchwork of past ameliorations and contradictions, with sticking plaster all over the place."

Cheap jibe here is what he will do about working mothers who cannot work as they find themselves harassed by putative fathers seeking access to the kid with two daddies.

Labour peer Lord Layard calls for a network of 250 treatment centres to offer psychological therapy to the public. In a lecture to be delivered at the Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health, he warns that unhappiness is Britain's "biggest social problem".

Sort of ‘drop-in’ centre for depressives? Can you imagine the scene in your local super-market? Very small queue at Customer Complaint and a loop around the store and out of the door of assorted nutters, weirdoes and people annoyed at not being invited to Jordan’s wedding – count me in for some of that. My draft has a red line under nutters – is it warning me that this is a new non-p.c. term?