So, too, does the extension of the Race Relations Act to the police, 30 years after a Labour government first shamefully exempted them. So does the imposition of standards on Britain’s increasingly hellish children’s and old people’s care homes. Equally, it is racist to assume that terrorism is something fomented only in Beirut or West Belfast.There will be, moreover, a healthy range of measures that are distinctively left/ liberal. There is no justification for using such legislation as an agent of brutal regimes such as that of Iraq. Reform of the CSA, and of a still zealously non-interventionist probation service, is overdue.Nor is it necessarily illiberal and dangerous to extend, as a new Bill will, the definition of terrorism to Britons who put poison in supermarket food or murder in the cause of animal rights.

It will break the old unwritten rule that nothing too radical or controversial can be done in the second half of a parliament. He has turned a truly awful Bill into merely a bad one.What makes this the greater shame is that the legislative programme that the Queen will foreshadow tomorrow is by any standards impressive for an administration in mid-term, much of it emanating from Mr Straw’s own department. What he has not done, however, is to deal with some of the central complaints about the Bill, not least that there will be no public right even to the factual background to important decisions – such as the safety implications of the privatisation of air traffic control, to take a topical, if random, example. Jack Straw has carried out his promise to listen to the critics of the Freedom of Information Bill.He has removed some of its most overtly Kafka-esque clauses.

No doubt some bright official somewhere in Mr Prescott’s department has objectively analysed all this and has, for all I know, come up with the persuasive answer that that while both options have a downside, the strongest safety argument is in favour of privatisation.But how should we tell? Here we come to the failings in another of the Bills that the Queen will announce tomorrow and which, incidentally, shares with the clauses on Air Traffic Control the possibility of a sizeable Labour rebellion. Moreover, ministers insist that the final regulatory responsibility for safety would remain, in the new order, in the public sector. The computer technology needed to cope with the awesome growth of passenger air traffic requires massive investment, almost certainly beyond the resources of the public purse. The fewer aircraft he can delay by sending them flying round in circles before they safely land, the better he’s doing his work. It’s precisely that conflict, and the fear that it may be resolved in favour of punctuality rather than safety, that has already prompted a surprisingly large number of Labour MPs to announce their strong opposition to Mr Prescott’s plan to privatise the National Air Traffic Control Service – one of the few measures that risk possible defeat in the next parliamentary session.It’s understandable that many MPs, not all of them unreconstructed Old Labour ones, believe rather strongly that the profit motive and the fiendishly complex business of modern air traffic control could be an unstable cocktail.And yet there is a strong case to be made that privatisation will lead to greater rather than less safety. The ace controller is required to avoid near-misses or worse But he is also paid to bring his aircraft down on time. The far-from-risk- averse Cusack is aghast that Thornton thinks there is room to add to the queue without threatening a mid-air collision “There’s a hole,” Thornton insists “There isn’t a hole,” Cusack replies.

Like stubborn children, the two men repeat these lines until Thornton triumphantly sees the jets, almost nose to tail, into the JFK approach without mishap.
The point of the incident is precisely the inherent internal conflict of the job. At one point the controller (played by Billy Bob Thornton), sits down at a blinking terminal next to the one operated by John Cusack and starts to talk an additional aircraft into an already crowded queue of passenger jets heading from the North Atlantic into New York. FOR JOHN Prescott’s sake, I hope that not too many Labour MPs have yet seen Pushing Tin, the Mike Newell film about sexual jealousy, male rivalry and personal redemption that is improbably set in the Long Island air traffic control headquarters. Meanwhile, if anyone else comes across gaffes made by Melvyn Bragg, let’s have them, so that I can feature them in future columns!Dr Wordsmith will be back tomorrow, so keep those queries rolling in – of a Bragg-free nature if possible, please!. After all, if Melvyn did say that on TV, it can only have been a recording, and you think he might have had the grace to re-record it.However, this is not a let’s-bash-Melvyn corner, for goodness sake, so let’s move on. Even the most fastidious speaker will commit solecisms if it helps to pinpoint the meaning.On the other hand, I do think that someone fronting a major series on the English language for Radio 4 would take more care, and I really feel that perhaps they should have got someone who cared a bit more for the niceties of correct English than our Melvyn seems to Me, for example.

ARE the skies…”Dr Wordsmith writes: This is a really pedantic point. It is well known that spoken English contains many rough edges, many mistakes, many false starts The main purpose is to get the meaning across. And your question?Dear Dr Wordsmith, Well, I wondered if you had any comment on the gross grammatical error contained therein He uses a singular subject with a plural verb “One of the things I love… I just happened to be watching one of those TV programmes that look at bits of the British countryside through celebrities’ eyes, and we were watching Melvyn Bragg striding out over some Cumbrian fell or other when I distinctly heard him say: “One of the things I love about these walks up here are the skies – there’s so much of them…”Dr Wordsmith writes: I see.