Missing

According to one website, 200,000 people are reported missing in Britain every year. Another says 250,000. Clearly so many that nobody knows for sure. I heard at a recent lecture that one percent of these - 2000 to 2500 are still missing after a year. A daily paper would have to publish five or six hundred names and photos every day to keep up. Yet for the past two weeks the headlines have been dominated by just two missing persons, with heart-wringing interviews and endless detail about searches. I am not saying that friends, relatives and police should not be concerned for every case, but the prominence given to a few of them suggests a desire to distract from issues that concern everybody. For example this morning, Ed Milliband's great speech was pushed down the agenda, and the remarkable election result in Georgia got hardly a mention. Still, I was glad to see that the (Conservative) Chairman of the parliamentary Select Committee on Education has called on Guvnor Gove to stop rushing into half-baked new policies.