There are some big stories around today – the opening of the Labour Party Conference and the US still trying to find a good excuse to attack Iraq are two good examples. But all of the tabloids ignore all of that and present us with news that would have been pointless even when it was current (in the mid 1980s). Anyone would think the editors are being told what to print by the Labour Party spin doctors in order to minimise the amount of coverage that the Perty Conference is getting.

This was the story about Edwina Currie and John Major. Ten years on, I still don’t want to think about that.

And at that point, Wasted Inches finishes. I can’t remember why I stopped it. I know I’d started another blog which became the main place where I wrote. But it never really covered the tabloids in the way that Wasted Inches did. These days, of course, we have many excellent blogs which spend their time pointing out the nonsense that the tabloids print. I hope they keep going as long as the tabloids do.

Ever since Home Secretary David Blunkett announced last week that cannabis will be reclassified from class B to class C, the Daily Mail has been running a campaign to make him reconsider. Every day they have been running headlines on how terrible life is in areas of Lambeth where “drugs usage is rife”. They completely ignore the fact that most of the crime surrounding drugs is caused purely because they are illegal. Today’s headline is really scraping the bottom of the barrel. They have a photo of three or four people enjoying a joint in a sunny park. An innocuous enough site you might think – but not to the Daily Mail as only yards away children play innocently unaware of the fiends in their midst. It’s all total nonsense, of course.

And here’s something that doesn’t change. Both politicians and the tabloids still have a knee-jerk reaction to drugs which make it impossible to have an intelligent conversation on the subject. In the ten years since I wrote this entry, cannabis has been reclassified back to class B and the government have sacked a scientific adviser on drugs because he insisted on giving them scientific evidence on drugs.