Football is traditionally a working class sport with a significant proportion of supporters being of a low income background. This is particularly the case where Blackburn Rovers FC are a relatively small club, where the majority of its fan base is in Blackburn itself. The town arguably has more social deprivation than many in the UK, and as such, the population is likely to be more vulnerable to be taken advantage of by fee charging claims management companies, debt advice companies etc. Blackburn Rovers FC is the most important organisation to the town of Blackburn in the 21st century, and there is therefore a moral duty for it to reflect the needs of the community around it. The football club would gain significant respect if it were to display charities such as the Citizens Advice Bureau and Step Change or an ethical private company such as Payplan on its shirts. This would be a statement that the club acknowledges the level of financial difficulty a large proportion of the town and its fan base faces. It would also encourage other football clubs to do the same where fans are feeling increasingly distanced from their football clubs with television deals coming into hundreds of millions of pounds and accusations of tax evasion now commonplace.

It is an outdated tax that now has no other function than to support the department that administrates it. The equivalent income to treasury could be added to the price of petrol at the next budget at zero financial cost.

Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories cause harm and poverty to Palestinians, and are an obstacle to peace in the region. Israeli settlements are illegal under international humanitarian law. This is important because the Palestinians are currently under violent attack and need resources to rebuild their lives, home and future. They cannot do this if their produce are stolen from them and sold to the Americas and Europe. According to a study conducted by Dr. Majid Sbeih from Al-Quds University for the Democracy and Workers’ Rights Center in Palestine, 82% of Palestinian workers have the desire and willingness to leave their jobs in the settlements, provided that a suitable alternative is available. However, suitable alternatives will not be found as long as the Palestinian economy is under occupation. We are calling on companies to withdraw investment in and end trade operations with Israeli settlement businesses.

At a time of austerity, when almost a million people per year in the UK depend on food banks and when the average wage is stagnating, it's completely inappropriate for MP's to be getting a pay rise. We are not 'all in this together'. http://www.trusselltrust.org/stats To be fair to them, most MP's have already criticised the pay rise. Let's make sure they put their money where their mouth is.

There is no scientific basis that the culling of badgers will help combat the spread of Bovine TB. If anything, it will make the problem worse and the trial culls have been proved both ineffective and inhumane. It is a political tool with which the government perseveres, to appease the farming industry despite overwhelming expert, scientific advice. It seeks to remove an iconic, protected and much loved wild mammal from our landscapes and encourages illegal baiting and cruelty towards this and other wild animals.

Next time it may be an issue you feel strongly about that is reported less than fairly. You may not agree with my politics but everyone on 38 degrees seems to agree that we should always get the best information. On the 15th of July there will be 1000's protesting outside the BBC. See if they report it, because they did not report the 10,000 outside the Israeli embassy last Friday.

At the moment the US, UK, Germany, Russia and China are negotiating with Iran over their nuclear program. This is a great shift from the mindset that bought us the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We need to show that ordinary people support diplomacy to help make sure that politicians understand that diplomacy and avoiding military conflict isn't just the right thing to do - it's what the majority of us support as well.

Pre eclampsia is a disease affecting only pregnant women - it affects 1in 10 women and 1 in 100 can become seriously ill. Despite 22 years of work at Action on Pre-eclampsia (APEC), data show that 7 women (and 1,000 babies) die each year in the UK due to pre-eclampsia. Whilst in rare cases this cannot be prevented, the overwhelming majority of these deaths are unnecessary, resulting from sub-standard care. This must not continue. Over the last decade, deaths from pre-eclampsia associated with sub-standard care have almost doubled despite APEC’s development of clinical guidelines for midwives and doctors on the screening and detection of pre-eclampsia in pregnancy (PRECOG – 2005). During the period of the last Confidential Enquiry into Maternal Deaths (2006-2008), 22 women died from pre-eclampsia. In 91% of cases (20 women) this was associated with substandard care. This means that those deaths were avoidable. Women in the UK are continuing to die from pre-eclampsia due to a failure to recognise and treat the condition according to officially approved guidelines from NICE. You can help to prevent these deaths. Please lend your voice to our new campaign to have deaths from pre-eclampsia due to sub-standard care officially declared a ‘never event’ in the NHS. This means that any future deaths will automatically be considered a serious failure and trigger a review of the systems and procedures that allowed it to happen. On the 22nd July 2014 we will be holding an event at the House of Lords to launch this campaign. Well known family doctor and medical journalist Dr Carol Cooper, President of the Guild of Health Writers, was part of the team who developed the PRECOG guidelines to ensure prompt screening and detection of pre-eclampsia in pregnancy almost ten years ago. She says: “It’s shocking and unacceptable that women continue to die from pre-eclampsia. Best practice could prevent many of these tragedies, yet those who care for pregnant women clearly haven’t all taken the message on board. I join the call for maternal deaths from pre-eclampsia to be never events.” If you agree that pregnant mothers should NEVER die due to inadequate care, then please sign our petition and say NO to unavoidable deaths in pregnancy.

EPSRC is a branch of Research Council UK, the largest public funding agency in your country. It supplies hundreds of millions of pounds in funding every year. See www.epsrc.ac.uk. The pretense is that this money is given to Research Organizations with adequate procedures to tackle scientific fraud. This is not so. In fact, fraud in publicly funded research has promoted the careers of incompetent people at British Universities. I know most of you won't know much chemistry, but there is Wikipaedia to check up simple scientific facts: what would you think, after checking that aluminum sulphate is Al2(SO4)3 and phenol an acid, I told you that two academics at two of the top five Universities in the UK wrote a research paper where they gave phenol as an alkali and aluminum sulphate as AlSO4? (Pst! Now that you are at the Wikipaedia site you could make a donation... ;-) ) And remember, corruption only spreads...It is therefore in your interest that public funding is not abused. Also, by claiming that organisations funded by EPSRC have procedures to deal efficiently with fraud lends legitimacy to such institutions when dealing with people they have damaged. For example, I want to confront EPSRC with a range of allegations which includes those made in this link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2umhkGxHbasY241U3huLUZQTzA/edit?usp=sharing in an example case which still affects me.

Clara was a Masters student in the UK when her friend back home was arrested. They’d both spoken out against the abuse of young girls in their West African community. His arrest meant Clara couldn’t return home. She claimed asylum, lost her right to work, and had to live on asylum support – a payment given to asylum seekers to meet their essential living needs, which has been set at the same rate by the government since 2011. Clara found herself living on just £5.23 a day. “It was very, very difficult," she says. "I was used to working. The first time I received [asylum support], I went into a pharmacy and bought the stuff I'd normally buy. When I looked at my hand I was left with three pounds. I had not bought food, I had to make calls, and I had to pay for transport". After four years without a single increase, asylum support is now as low as 50% of the equivalent level of income support – forcing people like Clara, who’ve fled persecution and war, into lives of poverty and misery. Everyone has the legal right to seek asylum. But in the UK, waiting for an asylum decision can take months. The freeze on the asylum support rate leaves asylum seekers unable to meet their essential living needs. 43% of those we asked had missed meals; 88% couldn't buy clothes; and 43% couldn't afford even basic toiletries. The High Court ruled the freeze unlawful back in April 2014, but the Home Office subsequently decided to leave the rates at their current level. They maintained that just £2.51 per week is enough for asylum seekers to buy all essential clothes and footwear, that £3.00 will pay for all their weekly travel, and that money to maintain interpersonal relationships and a level of participation in social, cultural and religious life simply isn’t needed. We don't think this is fair - and neither do a cross-party group of MPs, who've put forward an Early Day Motion (EDM 99) calling on the government to increase asylum support rates to 70% of the equivalent level of income support. The more MPs who sign this EDM, the more attention we can bring to this injustice. Will you ask your MP to sign it today? Please take action by contacting your MP today. Ask them to call on the Home Secretary to raise asylum support to 70% of the equivalent level of income support – the rate it was set at prior to restrictions introduced in 2008 and the freeze introduced in 2011. You can also sign our petition, which we are keeping open until asylum support rates are increased to a fair level. It's time to end this injustice restrictions and bring back dignity to the asylum support system. Take action now.

The clause which bars other food retailers leaves a toxic legacy by limiting the options: IKEA has now been granted permission for a full-size store and loading bay. IKEA aims to demolish the building and the eco-park which Sainsbury’s gave to the local community. The site is on the main commuter bus route to North Greenwich station. Locals will have to join the traffic mayhem or jostle for space on public transport through IKEA traffic to shop for food. If there is an emergency how will services reach the site on a peninsula surrounded by water on three sides with IKEA at its neck? Instead of 'village living in the city' this is an urban nightmare. Sainsbury's says it is committed to helping communities and sustainability: Lifting the clause will mean that a more suitable retailer than IKEA can move into the neighbourhood creating diverse shopping opportunities for locals without overburdening transport networks and ruining the environment.

This is a massacre and not a war: 2 weeks ago, Mira Bar Hillell wrote in The Independant: "the death toll in Gaza is nearing 100, one in four being children. Hundreds more have serious injuries in a place where hospitals have also been bombed and medical essentials are running out." The death toll is now over 1000 with more than 6000 seriously injured. Israel is ignoring pressure from the UN and international community and showing no let up in these merciless attacks. Jon Snow on Channel 4 news underlines why so many of the victims are children:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mR1LGoNg5p4 To sit back and allow this bombardment to continue robs us all of our humanity: whatever history has occurred with the war in Israel, these children had nothing to do with it. It needs to stop now.