There are no surprises about the music chosen for Margaret Thatcher’s funeral, for clearly she and her family discussed her demise, which is all too rare due to our society’s still strong taboo about death and dying.

The former Prime Minister didn’t share this irresponsible approach to one of the most important decisions we must take, as she insisted she did not want her body to lie in state or money to be spent on a fly-past. Even if she had dismissed the idea of planning her end of life event, as a past Prime Minister she would have been leaned on to approve her funeral arrangements of which the songs and readings are hugely important elements.

Her staunch Methodism was well known and she often cited Christianity to justify her support for the market economy and capitalism. Her Methodist upbringing will thus be commemorated by Charles Wesley’s hymn Love Divine, All Loves Excelling and her patriotism by the music played at the start and end of the service by a British-only group of composers, and the last hymn, I Vow To Thee My Country.

Lady Thatcher wanted the service to be ‘framed’ by British music, hence the scores by Henry Purcell, Gustav Holst, John Ireland, Herbert Howells, Edward Elgar, Frank Bridge, Charles Stanford, Hubert Parry and Ralph Vaughan Williams. The pieces by Johannes Brahms, Gabriel Faure and Johann Sebastian Bach are excellent choices too.

The order of service features Wordsworth’s Intimations of Immortality and TS Eliot’s Little Gidding.

She also decided that she was to be cremated, which is a break with tradition, and one of which we approve. We would have approved even more had she (or her family) chosen a green funeral and a woodland burial.

While not Thatcherites, most of the My Last Song team are old enough to understand her place in history and admire her courage in standing up to bullies whether the undemocratic trades union bosses holding the country to ransom or the fascist Argentinean military dictator General Galteri invading the Falklands. And on balance we agree that her funeral should reflect her place as a major figure, unlike the political pygmies that followed her as Prime Minister.

My Last Song was created to encourage and support people to plan their own or their loved ones’ funerals so they have the end of life event that best reflect their lives and values.

We have many thousand visitors every month but don’t think these include the Thatchers. Even so, it’s encouraging to know that the family’s planning of Margaret Thatcher’s funeral validates the My Last Song message. For what’s good for former Prime Ministers should be good for the rest of us too.

There was a lot of good sense talked during yesterday’s Westminster Hall end of life care debate, on which the government is consulting at the moment, and in particular when discussing the Liverpool Care Pathway (LCP).

The LCP is designed to manage the withdrawal of unnecessary treatment given to dying patients to relieve suffering, and has been inaccurately reported in the Daily Mail (which seems to enjoy making it readers as anxious as possible) as a state sponsored way of killing the old.

Glyn Davies MP, who sponsored the debate, criticised such poorly informed criticism, without naming the Daily Mail, as shouting ‘Fire’ in a crowded theatre, and said that to abandon the LCP was like “tearing up the Highway Code because there were some bad drivers.”

Sir Tony Baldry MP also spoke sensibly when he said that the NHS wasn’t failing because people died, but failed when they didn’t die well. He stressed the need for improvements in the way medical professionals communicated with dying patients and their families.

Credit must also go to the Shadow Health Secretary Liz Kendall who didn’t oppose this welcome development to the management of end of life but pointed out the LCP was only as good as the teams that used it.

The debate ended with the Health Minister Norman Lamb stating the government’s aim to make all patients’ end of life care as pain free and dignified as possible, and that it was totally unacceptable that patients were put on the Pathway without any notification of the patient’s family.

A vital and as yet overlooked concomitant to the Liverpool Care Pathway is the benefits of the terminally ill and ailing elderly having their own personal death plan, rather as mum’s-to-be have birth plans. Death, after all, is as inevitable as birth.

Filling in a death plan means that the end of life has to be discussed, rather than ignored because it’s awkward, upsetting or embarrassing. And the discussion will inevitably include loved ones, medical professionals and, if appropriate, ministers of religion.

Most importantly, an individual’s death plan will be a properly communicated record which doctors and others involved will, if appropriate, follow so that the patient’s death is as comfortable and comforting as possible. Even if some of the end of life wishes expressed in the death plan are unrealistic, at least the creation of the plan facilitates discussion between the patient, the patient’s family and the those providing the end of life medical care.

My Last Song has created a holistic death plan template which not only addresses medical issues but also other aspects which affect the quality of the end of life experience, such as who the patient wishes to be present, where they want to die, the music they want to hear, the aromas they want to smell, pictures they want to see and also practical matters so they don’t worry about, as an example, who will look after their pets.

We hope the government will suggest the adoption of personal end of life death plans and acknowledges that a good death is more than just good medical care.

Climate expert Professor Corinne Le Quere says in today’s Metro that we are now on track for a warming of up to 6C by the end of the century unless there is a ‘radical plan’ to cut emissions.

But mankind is too short sighted and too self centred to be radical about helping the environment. Air travel is the fastest growing source of greenhouse gases.  So you would expect our thought leaders and opinion formers to consider the consequences before boarding their flights.

Such people don’t inhabit the BBC, who quite unnecessarily flew numerous members of staff to and from the US to cover the presidential elections.  What messages does this give to viewers and listeners? A total indifference to the environmental consequences.

I emailed my views on this to the charming Shaun Ley, presenter of The World This Weekend, who joined his BBC colleagues in this four yearly short term migration. He argued that his trip was necessary to get a ‘sense of place’.  I’m sorry Shaun, but we got very little sense of place from the BBC and other UK media, but far too many versions of: “it’s only the swing states that matter; it’s too close to call (it wasn’t); women, blacks and Hispanics more likely to vote for Obama; not much enthusiasm for Obama, even less for Romney; employment growth will help Obama…”

The BBC’s US-based staff are just as able to give us this analysis without help from their UK colleagues who should have stayed put.

Jon Snow over at Channel 4 also took the opportunity to fly to the States to cover the election…yes the same Jon Snow who bangs on about his cycling helping to reduce pollution. He’ll have to cycle for several hundred years to counteract the damage his flight to and from the US caused.

The environment means nothing to the travel writers, telling us which undiscovered tourist paradises to discover once we’ve flown half way around the globe, and destroying their delicate biodiversity and sheltered cultures once we arrive.

One may hope in vain that the Guardian, that most progressive of our broadsheets, would think twice about the ethics of producing travel and holiday supplements, but why would it when advertising revenue is at stake?

Sports teams and their supporters are going to ever increasing foreign destinations, usually by plane, these fixtures driven by satellite tv revenue and vanity.  The NFL is now organising games between US sides at Wembley. UK fans of American football will be grateful, the NFL want to exploit a new market…and the hole in the ozone layer grows a bit larger as a consequence.

Our supermarkets’ wilful disregard for unnecessary food miles is best summed up by Tesco’s home delivery vans’ mouthwatering livery of  a bunch of asparagus, only in season in the UK between late April and mid June. For the rest of the year it’s flown in from Peru.

Ponder too the fashion industry. Every six months, fashion designs are promoted, new stock sold, more unnecessary garments end up in our wardrobes.  Fashionistas fly around the world from one ‘Fashion Week’ to another. Most items on show on the catwalks and then, if deemed to be fashionable, manufactured in vast numbers, are made of cotton, one of the most water intensive crops…and who cares that the world’s water is running out, or that to fly the garments from the sweat shops of Asia to the boutiques of the developed world only accelerates the damage to our environment?

We have no intention of modifying our stupid and selfish behaviour…we’ll all be buying our Christmas trees, not giving a thought about the water and nutrients it’s taken from the soil, the pollution caused by its journey from nurseries to our living rooms and the food that could have been grown instead of miniature pine trees.  We take pleasure in our Christmas traditions, and lots of money is to be made.

The food we eat at Christmas is likely to be intensively produced despite the terrible consequences of the intensive rearing of animals – breeding grounds for anti-biotic resistant superbugs and toxic waste.

In looking to the future, intensive production must be the way we feed the rapidly growing world population.  Well that’s what the few multinationals who stand to gain from intensive agriculture would have us believe, although it’s a myth.

Does it matter that we’re destroying the planet by our selfish desire to travel more, to wear the latest fashions, to eat what we want to eat when we want to eat it, no matter how it’s produced, to uphold Christmas traditions, to go on exotic holidays…? Yes, of course it does. But we are more concerned about our pleasures and vanities, so it’s to hell in a handcart.

And remember, while you’re separating your waste into various recyclable bins and bags, those who tell us what to do are flying around the world, buying the latest fashions and devouring as much food and drink as possible.

I can’t see the adoption of any radical solutions, can you?

Barack Obama has, in his first term, been a good President dealing well if not brilliantly with the US economy and foreign affairs.

It’s been difficult to know what his Republican opponent Mitt Romney really stands for, though his economic policy is woefully unconvincing and contradictory. His foreign policy seems two generations out of date, and his defence spending pledges are unaffordable and irrelevant.

He hasn’t been able to articulate what, if anything, the Republican Party has to offer apart from not liking President Obama.

We also take seriously what the Economist magazine says:  ”Mr Romney has an economic plan that works only if you don’t believe most of what he says…not a convincing pitch for a chief executive.” We don’t think he has the right policies to guide the US out of the economic mess of the past four years.

Obama’s policies of prudent government spending and encouraging small business to take on workers is gradually pulling the US into better times. He is less in the pocket of big business and the banks that have got the US, and the rest of the western economies, into the dire financial mess from which we are slowly emerging.

My Last Song believes that America shouldn’t go in Romney’s direction of travel: taking away women’s rights to have an abortion, reducing the tax paid by the rich (and therefore making the poor pay more or reduce their benefits), ignoring the case for equal marriage, giving big business more power and privileges, being indifferent to the needs of the disadvantaged and seemingly guided by the rules of the Mormon Christian sect.

As President Obama’s instinctive sympathy and desire to help the people whose lives have been devastated by storm Sandy shows, he’s a man of the people, and we hope that the people of the US will give him another four years as President.

Islamic fundamentalists must feel their religion is very fragile if they have to kill people because it’s criticised or mocked.

Allah, via the Archangel Gabriel, told Mohammad to write in the Qur’an his rules on how Middle Eastern society 1,600 years ago should behave.

As the one God he thought people should be unquestioning of his wisdom and so deemed it right that his followers should punish those who disobey, criticise or mock his work. These days we would say Allah is a totalitarian control freak demonstrating self-doubt.

Mohammad didn’t help matters by not putting much thought into his succession…disputes between his offspring and son-in-law caused the division between Sunni’s and Shi’ites which has resulted in butchery between the two ever since.

It’s in the nature of religions to encourage fanaticism. A religion that demonstrates self doubt won’t get very far.

Those who wrote the Bible as the word of the Christian God saw the weakness of saying in effect, this is the word of God but if you want to ignore it, fine. Jews believe they are commanded to read and understand every phrase in the Torah.

Most of us find it difficult to be fanatical about something we can’t fully support, and this is what fundamentalists fear. The violent Muslim fundamentalists who killed the US ambassador to Libya and demonstrate in the streets are showing just how feeble Islam is, just as zealots of other religions demonstrate their fear that their faith might be misplaced by killing or persecuting ‘heretics’ who have the temerity to disagree with some dogmatic detail.

If extremists from any religion believed their faith had the strength to withstand critics, comics and those of other religions, they would not resort to violence and murder to defend it.

The vast majority of people who share a faith take the positive from it and ignore the dangerous. Indeed Islam went through a golden period from about 750 to the 16th century of tolerance, artistic excellence and scholarly endeavour.

But being fanatical is a dangerous consequence of a religious belief as it is sanctioned by the people who started the religions.

Paradoxically if there’s one antidote that dilutes fanaticism within the fanatic, it’s humour. So it would be a good thing for those moderates of all religions who abhor killing in the name of their faith to encourage people to laugh about it.

I laugh about religion as the alternative is to cry.

Long live the resistance! Today three more of the so-called Islamist Force to Protect Britain are no more.

It was the now usual pattern. At one of the bases where the Islamists are training those of our young men disloyal enough to take their place when they return to the Middle East next year, one of our resistance fighters enrolled only to take the first opportunity to slay the occupiers.

In fact, the ‘loyalty’ of most of these trainees is questionable…many either belong to the British Intrepid Terrorists (BRITS) resistance movement or are sympathetic to us.

While we BRITS are still divided between Catholics and Protestants, fundamentalists and atheists, moderates and extremists, England versus the other nations, we’re united by our belief that we should run Britain the way it has been run for centuries and our hatred of an army that has slaughtered so many innocent British people.

We didn’t invite the Islamists here to shore up the corrupt Blair regime, but they invaded nevertheless, telling us and the world it was for our own good because Blair was ‘moderate’ whereas we BRITS and our supporters – most of the population – wanted free elections, a free press, an independent judiciary, equality between men and women, decent education for girls, tolerance for people of all backgrounds and religions… and to drink alcohol as we have done for centuries.

Yes, some of our beers ended up on the streets of the Middle East but that is hardly an excuse for an army of muslim zealots to tear up our barley and destroy our breweries.  How would they like it if we sent our troops to ruin their poppy crop?

Faced with such occupiers, hostile to and ignorant of our traditions and values, the British people (apart from those who gain from assisting the Islamists and the Blairite administration it’s shoring up) have made their lives hell.

The Islamists policy was to defeat the BRITS (believing we were an unpopular group of extremists) and then convert the rest of the British people to be ‘moderates’, to support Blair and his cronies, to keep our boys and girls apart as they grow up, to persecute gays and minorities, to abstain from alcohol and give groups of local elders powers to decide civil disputes. They should have known the British would never be told how to live by people who have no idea of our history and values.

And despite their use of the most advanced weapons and the terrible toll of lives of our freedom fighters, our bravery and determination to remain British has given us victory.

The Islamist Force to Protect Britain were doomed from the start, and our resistance has forced them to announce they are going back to their countries – Saudia Arabia, Pakistan, Afghanistan and those other feeble states who have sent their young men on such a thankless task.

Their politicians’ face saving tactic in the months before they go is to train some of our people to be police or security officers to enforce Blair’s corrupt laws after they pull out.

Their stupidity knows no bounds…this training gives our brave resistance fighters the weapons with which to kill their trainers, and the easiest of opportunities to do so. No wonder the people of these Islamist countries want their young men to leave as soon as possible.

The BRITS have won! We fought them in the back streets of London, the Yorkshire moors, the Scottish Highlands, the valleys of South Wales. Now they are holed up in their compounds, going on meaningless patrols of moribund villages, and even here we BRITS kill or maim them.

Long live the free people of Britain! And if those Islamists have any sense, they won’t interfere again in countries they know little about and have little interest in.

My Last Song has decided not to publish the pictures of Prince Harry cavorting naked in a room in a Las Vegas hotel.

This is not because we think he deserves privacy. Indeed we support The Sun’s arguments for publishing the photos…they inform a discussion about the Prince, his behaviour, his character, his friends and his security taking place across the country and beyond.

Nor are we, as a website, cowed by the Leveson inquiry. Unlike the Sun, other UK newspapers seem frightened to publish these photographs in case the judge decides that the level of media regulation he’ll undoubtedly recommend is heightened a notch or two.

We haven’t been influenced by St James’s Palace or those close to the Prince who have asked the media quite reasonably to respect the privacy of a young man doing nothing more than having a good time with friends.

The deciding issue for My Last Song was a business reason. We have created a Lifebox, a secure online storage area for people’s memories to be available for future generations to access and understand better the life and times of the departed loved one.

The Lifebox has easy to populate sections including ‘Family’, ’Friends’, ‘Lifestory’, ‘Obituary’ and, yes, ‘Secrets’.

The Lifebox can only be opened by those given an access key, and once opened nothing within the Lifebox can be altered.

Each section has the facility to store photographs and other digital information.

We want our visitors to understand the benefit to them and their loved ones of populating their Lifebox with the memories, even secrets, that they only want close family and friends to see. These may include photographs, videos, letters, emails that would be very embarrassing if made available to a wider public.

And that dear reader is why you won’t see photos of Prince Harry on My Last Song.

Three more British servicemen have been killed by rogue Afghanistan policemen they were ‘training’ as part of our strategy  to make the Afghan forces and police loyal to the Government and professional in the way they carry out their duties. We are told this justifies our intervention in Afghanistan in 2001.

I hope the politicians who involved the UK in Afghanistan, those that continued with this flawed foreign policy and the senior military men, either active or recently retired, who announce to the media that our strategy is paying off, sleep well at night.

I’m not sure how they can as they have sacrificed over 400 brave young lives in an excise they knew was doomed. History alone should have taught them to stay out of Afghanistan, though if they had analysed the situation in the country in 2000 the only sensible decision would have been to leave the country to sort out its own divisions and problems. The argument that by confronting the Taliban in Helmand province the streets of our cities would be made safe from Islamic terrorists is palpable nonsense.

Let’s hope that the abject defeat suffered in Iraq, the unsuccessful campaign against the Taliban (a collective noun for warlords, Islamists, bandits and nationalists) in Afghanistan and the failed and dangerous state that Libya now is – all reports show a descent into anarchy and lawless revenge killings – will stop any thought of intervention in Syria.

The situation there is desperate…it is beyond comprehension how Syrians can kill and torture fellow Syrians, how President Assad can turn his troops on his own people, how doctors turn in patients to the authorities if they have been injured while demonstrating.

But as the Russians and Chinese have argued, to use force in Syria in an attempt to bring peace will make the situation worse. Russia in particular knows first hand how the various factions are being supported by Saudi Arabia and Iran, whose enmity makes every dispute in the Middle East a war by proxy. Israel is, of course, happy to see a hostile neighbour at war with itself and will do nothing to help resolve the situation.

Add to that the febrile atmosphere of sectarian hatred: Christian against Muslim, Shia against Sunni, and the previously persecuted Alawis who now control the army and security forces determined to hang on to power at any cost. The President’s family is from the Alawite community and was from a poor background until his father rose in the military and took power in a coup in 1970.

You have only to read about the Hama massacre to know what Assad has inherited from his father and other family members.

Syria is now gripped by a civil war and the international community is unable to impose a peaceful outcome.  We will look on hopeless, horrified, depressed and desperate to alleviate the suffering. But we will also be helpless…we cannot help and to try will only make matters worse.

I’ve had enough of The Spectator. I know it’s difficult to bring out a weekly magazine with relevant and high quality articles, but there ought to be a higher bar than the silly ranting of Stephen Pollard, whose observation of the audience booing of Dvorak’s Rusalka at the ROH has the strapline: ‘The British no longer know how to behave in public’.

A cruel, or stupid, sub-editor highlighted the crassness of Pollard’s piece by selecting this statement as the stand out: ‘Now that going out is as easy as staying in and watching TV on the sofa, we behave when we’re out as if we are watching TV on the sofa’. Clearly Pollard hasn’t tried to reach or park in theatreland in the past ten years, but why let facts get in the way of a space filler.

Rod Liddle fills his space with a daft piece that argues the falling support of right wing racist parties will result in a rise in racial violence because bigots and fascist thugs need an outlet for their anger.

Lucy Bannerman writes just about the only worthwhile piece, reporting on Zambia’s achievement of changing goverment peacefully after last year’s election – fairly rare in Africa – and the appointment of a white man as vice President – understandably an exception in post-colonial, post-apartheid Africa.

James Delingpole, who a few weeks ago contributed what was virtually a press release praising the children’s book The Hunger Games, this week attempts a critique of Quantitative Easing, equating it with Soviet style planned economic policy.  He fails, not least because he admits that he isn’t an expert in this area. Is there, readers probably wonder, any area on which Mr Delingpole is an expert?

In the Arts section, it goes without saying the reviewer, Andrew Lambirth, is taken in by Cy Twombly’s scribbles.  This sentence confirms the reviewer is a fool. “Looked at in one way, it’s only a bit of scribble. Differently angled, it’s a rough chimney shape in blue crayon with five dabs of pink oil paint and three further touches of pink.” So it doesn’t matter which way you hang it up were you daft enough to buy it.

But why I won’t read another copy of The Spectator is the insert, The Spectator Guide to Independent Schools.

The publisher  of, and contributors to, The Spectator are too myopic to realise that private education, available only to privileged children, divides and perverts our society. Unimportant to them that the guide is full of fluff such as the importance of going to open days to see if a private school is worth the money, which schools specialise in sport, why one writer enjoyed his private school days as an army cadet, and the most absurdly self indulgent and banal piece by James Delingpole (yes, him again) justifying why he sent his son, whom he calls ‘Boy’, to Papplewick, a school in, where else, Ascot.

‘Boy’ was boardered there because it had a snake club, and when taking his son round on the open day, the inane Delingpole senior was hit on the chin by a rearing and understandably annoyed snake. ‘From that moment on,’ he says, ‘ I knew this was the school for Boy.’

‘Boy’ apparently asked his parents during the tour: ‘Might I really be able to come here?’ Anywhere rather than staying in the company of his pompous father would be a considerable relief to ‘Boy’, one suspects.

The adverts from these wretchedly unrepresentative educational establishments in the guide may subsidise The Spectator, but it now has one fewer reader.

This morning, Dr Margaret Evison, the mother of a soldier killed in Afghanistan in 2009, was interviewed on The Today programme in the aftermath of the death of the six British soldiers. This brings the number of British service personnel killed in Afghanistan to 404.

Dr Evison said that when she visited the country two years ago her thinking about the cause for which her son died changed. The social pressures as well as “the revenge culture” and the physical size and layout of Afghanistan made her doubt if the war was winnable.

No war waged by foreign forces in Afghanistan is winnable. Experts in the Foreign Office will have stated this to Tony Blair and Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, pointing out not just the lessons of history but that the current situation with the country divided into competing ethnic groups, tribes, warlords, bandits, Islamic extremists, run by an unpopular, ineffective and feeble central government, and with Pakistan, Iran and other neighbours intent on destabilising it would result in heavy casualties inflicted by a fanatical, invisible and, in some areas, popular force called the Taliban.

They would have told the politicians that the Taliban, the religious extremists and warlords would fight any moves to impose external values and culture with deadly effect. They would have dismissed the notion that an external force could defeat the Taliban, build a coalition to govern democratically or change a culture so embedded and so utterly different to ours.

Blair and Straw had commited to helping the US to invade Afghanistan and ignored the advice. Eleven years later and 400 plus brave, loyal and never to be forgotten deaths later (as well as thousands of innocent Afghans whose deaths have made the country’s hatred of the west far more intense) we are pulling out with our tails between our legs.

Let’s hope that our abject military and political failure in Afghanistan and the abysmal achievements of overthrowing Sadam and Gadhafi (Iraq and Libya now destined for years of bloody division, settling of scores and slaughter of innocents while Iran, Saudi and Israel fight proxy battles) prevent the west from considering any further military interventions in either Iran and Syria.

There are few certainties in politics or international affairs but the following is one of them: “The aims and objectives of external intervention in totalitarian Islamic countries will never be achieved, and instead intervention will make the situation more unstable and dangerous.”