Authority

Woman's Hour had a piece on the impending abolition of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority. The HFEA should not be abolished. Rather, its members should be elected by universal suffrage.

Candidates would have to be sufficiently independent to qualify in principle for the remuneration panels of their local authorities. Each of us would vote for one, with the top two elected. The electoral areas would be Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, and each of the nine English regions. The Chairman would be appointed by the relevant Secretary of State, with the approval of the relevant Select Committee. And the term of office would be four years. Expert advice would still be taken. But it would be as it should be: on tap, not on top.

Predictably, Jane Garvey made no attempt to pull up interviewees who described IVF as having become "a routine procedure" (nothing else with its failure rate would be funded by the NHS) and who claimed that Britain was "a world leader in stem cell research", meaning the embryonic stem cell "research" that has never achieved anything but exists purely in order to offend the Catholic Church, not the adult and cord blood stem cell research that really does deliver the goods but which refusal to fund has driven from Newcastle to France.

But then, the first item this morning was on some forthcoming television programme about how boys can only be taught "literacy" by being taken out to climb trees or to stage mock-battles. But boys did better when teaching and examination were rigorously academic. And girls may have soared ahead in terms of raw results since that ceased to be the case, but they are almost immeasurably less well-educated than they used to be. The betrayal of both sexes is total.