Fiona MacDonald

Worst of 2008

Our cavalier attitude to civil liberties has been a constant source of surprise and concern in 2008. There have been many examples over the past 12 months of local councils using heavy-handed means to deal with minor inconveniences such as having to prove whether a family live within a particular school catchment area (Poole Borough Council used legislation designed to track criminals and terrorists to one family under surveillance) or to stop lone adults from walking through a park on the off chance that they could just possibly be paedophiles (Telford and Wrekin Council). Only a few days ago, the police held a photographer for 45 minutes and examined her camera under section 44 of the Terrorism Act because she was taking photographs and recording video footage of a wedding party outside a Ramada hotel in London's docklands. It is possible that police suspicions were aroused by the simple fact that she was near to London City Airport. It has taken a ruling by the European Court of Human Rights to tell Britain that the DNA profiles of innocent individuals should be removed from the National DNA database. Jack Straw is planning to 'rebalance' the Human Rights Act. Civil rights campaigners fear that clauses in the Immigration and Citizenship Bill will allow police to demand identification documents from anyone who has ever entered the country – even if that was you returning home from a couple of weeks in the sun. It's believed it could be a means of introducing compulsory identity cards through the back door. And so it goes on. Terrorism and crime are serious problems but if in dealing with them we allow our society to be disfigured and we lose the freedoms and privacy that we have always enjoyed, we will be allowing the state to throw the baby out with the bath water.

Best of 2008

I  searched through my memories of the year from Aberdeenshire to Zimbabwe via impending financial Armageddon, and could find nothing to give any cause for optimism. Just as I thought I might have to give up, it came to me. A glimmer of a candle in the dark: Terry Wogan is giving up commentating on the Eurovision Song Contest. I have nothing in particular against Wogan but the way I figure it is this: once he has gone there is a possibility that the BBC may, eventually, pull the plug on this dreadful annual farce. After all, the few people I know who admit to watching it add quickly that it is Wogan's commentary that makes it bearable. Bizarrely, it seems there are one or two TV executives who still think there is the remotest possibility that the UK can win. Why else would Andrew Lloyd Webber have been commissioned  to write next year's entry? But the UK will never win again. The voting is all political and cultural – everyone else votes for their neighbours but we don't share a border with any other country and no one else likes us anyway. Lloyd Webber can write his lordly socks off but it will do no good. Without Wogan it is my ardent hope that in future viewing figures will completely collapse and the BBC will finally decide enough is enough and put us out of our misery.

Book of 2008

Bill Bryson's Shakespeare was my holiday reading this summer. A vivid account of the bard's life and times, it is both highly entertaining – in the way that Bryson always is – and informative. When I started to read Eric Sykes's autobiography If I Don't Write It, Nobody Else Will, I didn't really expect that I would stick with it until the end, but it is a strangely compulsive book – poignant on the subject of his childhood, gossipy and funny.

Fiona MacDonald is director of the Young UK and Ireland Programme

Barbara Millar [click here]