'Progress with unity' is the motto of the London borough of Ealing. The often progressive politics and culture of the suburbs should not be written off by urban intelligentsia.

I can't remember exactly who said it but it's bound to be some American clever clogs or other who quipped that the problem with being British is you're only allowed to find out about current affairs 30 years after they take place. Recent examples of the political past being illuminated for today's news junkies contrast in their respect for the UK's venerable 30-year rule which is applied to civil service documents. Sometimes it feels the past has been pored over with almost indecent haste. At others we have been reminded of anachronisms of a bygone age that feel out of kilter with today's less deferential politics.

It may not quite have been on the scale of the mystery glamorous couple who inveigled their way into Obama's White House for a state dinner held for the Indian PM but I found myself last night at Gordon Brown's 10 Downing Street for an Eid reception. The first Muslim to ever attend Cabinet, Sadiq Khan introduced a troupe of Syrian singers who'd come by way of Birmingham before introducing ‘Scotland's most charismatic and popular politician' Mohammad Sarwar who spoke briefly. Shahid Malik also addressed the assorted throng before Brown then took to the floor and listed areas on which Britain had benefited from Muslim influence from financial services to lobbying over increased third world debt.

Watching the Conservative party conference on television during the week I’ve been struck by the sea of overwhelmingly white faces fulfilling the function of clapping seals. At Labour last week the audience too was largely white but at the Tory love fest in Manchester even more so. The one exception is their big gun Baroness Sayeeda Warsi who seems to taken on the role of the Tories’ prize Asian, who addressed delegates on Monday from centre stage. The baroness is best known for her role in teddy bear-gate a couple of years ago when an English language teacher in Sudan was saved from a lashing due to her diplomacy skills.

Am still shocked about Michael Jackson¹s passing. Went to bed after seeing Kirsty Wark interrupted in the middle of a Newsnight story on expenses (BBC executives this time) to receive news in her ear-piece that he'd been rushed to hospital. Awoke to hear he¹d snuffed it. People have compared it to Elvis dying or John Lennon¹s death.

I found myself in a BBC television studio last week where I was asked to complete the sentence ‘the big issue of the next general election will be...’ My answer (having been told to make it a soundbite) was three little words ‘the economy stupid’. They were asking about the next general election, whenever it may be. Voting for our European representatives had not yet begun. Had they asked what the issue of the European election was, I'd have answered that the thing about the 2009 European election was the fact that it had nothing to do with Europe.

The revolution, it seems, will not just be televised but also blogged, twittered and Facebooked. At least that was the message last week from a panel of eminent online campaigner-types who I happened to be chairing in discussion with an audience of largely off-line social activist types at an event run by the voter-registration pressure group Operation Black Vote. The title of exactly what we were discussing kept changing. I was initially tempted in by the promising-sounding ‘Representation 2.0: Engaging the Obama Generation’. The bit after the colon later changed to ‘Using New Technology to Make Waves’ and finally on the night ‘How to Develop Your Social Networks and Mobilise Communities for Action’.

When I last happened to be in the family way I was a resident of Manchester M14, an area with a high incidence of teen pregnancy, to the extent that every time I went for an anti-natal appointment I was asked to confirm that I was over 16 although I was actually double of that number. M14 is however not that unusual. Figures out this week demonstrate that the UK can still top the charts for something in these economically tough times. The domain where Britain stubbornly can still lay claim to be the fairest of them all is teenage pregnancy – a dubious distinction. The reasons are multiple, as should the solutions be.

Mrs Thatcher came up with some interesting lines in her time, surely worthy of any 99p ‘Dictionary of Quotations’. There was the inequality-advocating “let our children grow tall, some taller than others”, defiant “the lady’s not for turning”, the more homespun “we are a grandmother” and in later life “the mummy returns”. Daughter Carol however will now just be remembered for the word “golliwog”.

In a week set to be dominated by the Obama inauguration, spare a thought for a long-awaited election in a different part of the globe. This election may not have received the same wall-to-wall coverage but it still offers hope in its results that came in during the final days of 2008. As a bespectacled sari-clad 60something, Sheikh Hasina Wajid may not have the same powerful imagery attached to her as the youthful iconic Obama but her sweeping victory in Bangladesh’s first elections for seven years may turn out to be just as significant. For starters an election held in peaceful conditions with no real contestation of the final outcome surprised many. The record turnout has parallels with November’s voting in the US.

“Sex’n’drugs’n’roll,” sang cheeky chappie Ian Dury three decades ago. It’s that third element of youth culture’s unholy trinity that’s seen most as defining generational consciousness and change. But has pop music (a synonym for rock’n’roll) ceased to have its once assumed insurrectionary impact?

At a moment where celeb stories have preoccupied the tabloids – including Kerry Katona slurring her words on This Morning and Simon Cowell laying into Peter Kay's comedy character Geraldine keeping his own creation from number one – the furore over Rossgate/Brandgate has topped the lot. Many a handwringing editorial and indepth studio discussion has pondered questions including where the boundaries of taste and decency lie, the mismatch of this stunt with the Reithian ethos of the BBC as a public service institution, risk-taking in broadcasting and the pay that our biggest stars can command. Surely behind the ‘off the their heads’ lynch mob mentality directed at the two broadcasters, there are a wider set of issues around youth culture.

When I was doing my growing up in suburban west London, Manchester neighbourhoods like Whalley Range and Rusholme - eulogised by Morrissey of the Smiths - sounded exotic. Yet Manchester was a city in decline, sparring with its north-west neighbour Liverpool as proud former industrial city of glory most ravaged by Thatcherism.

Arriving via the old-fashioned medium of snail-mail, rather than pinging my into-box, I got an invite the other day for Saturday night - always rather flattering at my age. It felt like it came from another era ...

Surbiton’s premier seat of learning and place of my day-job, Kingston University doesn’t normally hit the headlines. However the recent furore when two psychology staff were covertly taped urging students to rate the institution highly an on-line survey has put us on the map. Crucially, the whole sorry tale is much more than a case of lazy lecturers caught red-handed fiddling the figures. It speaks volumes about the marketisation of education, staff-student relations and a sector that many argue is at an all-time low in terms of morale, pay and conditions.

 In the US, political strategists uncovered the significance of the soccer moms - a category of the electorate who chat about current affairs while ferrying around their kids to football and cheer them on from the sidelines. As someone with a recently turned four year-old I'm on the threshold of becoming the UK equivalent, a school-gate mum. The little lad hasn't started his full-time compulsory education yet but already I am being sucked into the exciting world of bonding with fellow parents in my locality with a common cause in public service delivery.

My parents left what was known as East Pakistan in the early sixties and although I was born in the UK a decade on, my siblings and I were raised to think of Bangladesh as our homeland. For me Bangladesh, until the age of 17 when I made my first trip there, was always a bit of an imaginary territory that was based on fabled descriptions from my folks.

Back then it was unforeseeable that almost twenty years later I'd be travelling as part of a Foreign Office delegation selected to reflect British Bangladeshi achievement. Yet it was in this capacity I found myself the other week as part of a five-strong team in with a four day programme travelling the country to visit institutions including the British High Commission, the British Council, education from primary school to universities, and television and radio studios. These made for a radically different set of sites to visit to the usual round of aunties and uncles on previous family trips and made me appreciate Bangladesh more.

Attending Unite Against Fascism's (UAF) national conference the first Saturday of March turned out to be an interesting experience. With serious Labour party hacks away in Birmingham for spring conference the 400 or so attendees were assorted other folk. There seemed to be a genuine mix of ages and ethnic groups present but the local situation in London loomed large.

The main message impressed upon us time and time again was the threat, so graphically posed on the cover of the last edition of Progress magazine, of possibly one - and maybe as many as three - BNP Assembly representatives being elected this May in the capital. They only missed out by a whisker last time round and with the implosion of UKIP we may not be so lucky this year.

The last time I went to Glastonbury was, funnily enough, 1997: year zero for New Labour. I remember scurrying over to catch Billy Bragg’s appearance, wondering what his act might consist of seeing that his raison d’etre had just evaporated with Labour in power and the old Red Wedge (80s rock against Thatcher project) mission now accomplished.

In the event he did the usual songs and urged us all to buy those ‘Support the doCKers’ t-shirts of the time that looked like a rip-off of the Calvin Klein logo of the time. They sold out on the spot from the festival stall. Two further general election wins later Bragg continues to agitate; his current hobbyhorse is Englishness.

Late last year, while European correspondents were preoccupied with the kerfuffle that was the signing of the EU treaty I found myself as the sole UK attendee at a seminar on ‘EU citizenship’ as part of the Commission’s Youth in Action programme. Admittedly European cooperation has kept the postwar peace but today’s Euroyouth only know about 1945 from history books. The EU’s white paper on youth was the foundation of discussions by 26 bright young things from Turkey, Malta, Spain our host nation Finland and me. We grappled with defining European values and uncovered various similarities and differences in our home situations. A Finnish government representative told us how a democracy unit had been installed as turnouts threaten to dip below 50 per cent at general election level. Conversely 90 per cent of young voters vote in Turkey. “You have everything here. There is nothing to fight for,”; a (literally) Young Turk said accusingly to the Fins referring to their generous welfare state. “We vote because we are angry”;. This includes anger at repeated rejection for EU membership necessitating paperwork and visa applications to participate in European gigs.