Gordon Brown has likened our troops, fighting in Afganistan, to the winners of Britain’s Olympic medals.

I don’t like to see a solitary person the recipient of so many complaints and so much discontent, as Gordon Brown has recently been, but even I must join in the crowd this time.

Far from putting down the achievements and the sheer effort that has gone into the winning of every one of those Olympic medals, the winning of a sporting event simply is not the same as setting yourself in front of bullets for your country.

I think the comparison must be recieved as a great insult by the armed forces.  Surely, running repeatedly around a track, can not be considered the same as putting ones self against an infamous terrorist cell?

Meanwhile, we have learnt that parents, for the first time, are to be allowed to act as agents for their offspring when it comes to applying to university.  Parents are being allowed to conduct all communications with the universities and even to sit in on their offsprings’ interviews.

For me, attending university was a learning curve. Not just learning about my specialist subject, but learning simply how to live independantly as an adult.  University taught me, and countless others, how to take control of ones own affairs and how to become the master of your own life and decisions.

For many students, university is the first time they are allowed to make their own decisions and even to pick their own bed-times.  But now, with parents already sending emergency food packages to their incarcerated children, parents are to be allowed to pull the reigns of their offspring back in.

If youth is the future of tomorrow, crippling it from independent thought does not bode well for humanity’s future.