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It seems according to Sunday's Independent that his Priory clinics have been treating 800 British troops who served in Iraq and are suffering from psychiatric illnesses.

Now, don't get me wrong, I think our treatment of British "vets" is scandalous compared with the value some other nations put on looking after those who have put their lives on the line for their country and I am sure that many more probably deserve Priory type standards of assistance. But if this was Haliburton and America we'd be screaming blue murder about contracts for favoured insiders.

Of course the alternative, properly funding public sector mental health services, is just unthinkable these days, isn't it. And a far cry from W H R Rivers at Craiglockhart.

I don't blog about work much, but this is exciting news you all ought to share! Last year, here at Oxford Brookes University we got terribly excited about being only the 17th UK Higher Education Institution to have appointed a female Chief Executive , in the form of Vice-Chancellor Janet Beer, who's now had her feet under the desk for nine months or so.

Shami Chakrabarti, new Chancellor of Oxford Brookes University

Originally uploaded at Flickr by martinstabe

In the interim we've been looking for a chair designate of the Board of Governors (I am one of the two elected staff governors), and have selected Joanna Simons, the chief executive of Oxfordshire Councty Council, and of course, another woman.

Today, we are very pleased to have announced that our new Chancellor, a position currently held by Jon Snow, is to be another woman very much in the ascendancy and particularly in the news in the past couple of weeks leading up to last night's vote to abolish Habeas Corpus for people the Home Secretary doesn't like the look of, Shami Chakrabarti, the Director of Liberty (whose "new members pack" I received yesterday by chance!).

We were doing quite well actually with gender balance amongst the top echelon of staff here, but I thought it was important to mark that the top three offices are now all held by women right at the top of their respective careers.

The same chart as in the previous post but now with GDP and Average Earnings since 1968. - both at current prices, and both courtesy of the Economic History Network.

There was a way more important by-election today in Oxford for a seat on Oxford City Council vacated by our own Richard Huzzey who is going off to the "Land of the Free" and the alma mater of the simian one.

Congratulations therefore, to Councillor Mark Mills. I see he will be twenty tomorrow, Friday 13th. So happy birthday as well! Do we have any younger principal authority councillors at the moment?

Particularly pleasing was to see Labour, who put in a whole load of work to try to gain the one seat that would have handed them a Town Hall majority beaten into third, and most especially, the Tories' turncoat left unceremoniously back in fourth again in Oxford city! Well done all round everyone!

Except for the miserable bugger porter wanting to sort the students' mail in New College this morning - I've never been spoken to so rudely by a servant of either university, from Chancellors down to porters, as I got from him this morning!

UPDATE:  My glee is somewhat tempered this morning by the news that the City Council had got the votes wrong on the original notice on their web page and in fact the Tories came second and the Greens fourth.  Oh well, you have a Labour run council and that's what you can excpect...:-)

The 27.6% of you trying to access this site with Internet Explorer 7 (at least - I'm not sure about the other 35.2% using IE6) may have been experiencing problems access my site recently. It appears that when I added a module to make the list of blogs down the left hand side collapsable so as not to take up so much space IE7 didn't like some of its Javascript.

Only one of you contacted me to say there was a problem but since I could reproduce the error 100% of the time when I did look at the site using Internet Exploder 7 on M$ Windoze I presume you will all have been suffering in silence, or at the very least, indifference.

So I've disabled the collapsable side bars for the moment at least and will check whether there's an update to the relevant modules to cope with IE's failings.

However, since most of you come this way from Lib Dem sites, I recommend you upgrade to a more co-operatively developed browser, such as Firefox, which would be more fitting for supporters the party of anti-monopoly and free trade.