I cannot have been the only person who spent a few idle minutes yesterday scanning the list of BNP members helpfully available on various websites (and no, I’m not posting any links – find ‘em yourselves) wondering whether I would come across any names I knew.  Not that I expected to: indeed, nothing would surprise me more than finding that anyone connected with Shelter, let alone anyone I knew privately, had ever flirted with such beliefs.  But enough of the members’ names listed have vaguely respectable professions attached – town planner, vicar, doctor, former Green party candidate – that it does raise some doubts.
 
What I’m not sure about, of course, is what I would do if I did recognise any names.  Friends are easy – they would simply cease to be friends: I am entitled to make my own moral judgements about who I chose to spend time with in my private life and I would draw a line at that.  But what about people at work?  If police officers and prison officers are banned, and trade unions are seeking to expel BNP members, what about charity employees?
 
In one sense, this should be simple.  Charities are banned from any type of party political affiliation and should not therefore be discriminating against anyone on party political grounds.  It is a deliberate policy at Shelter that we work with all parties in areas where we have common goals.  It is part of our value set to oppose all types of discrimination and we fight hard on behalf of people who many regard as entirely beyond the pale.
 
But Shelter has a proud record on issues to do with race and immigration.  We were the moving spirits behind the successful legal challenge to Section 55 of the Immigration and Asylum Act, which tried to withdraw from some refugees any type of state support.  And we are the first charity in the country to have gained official recognition that we meet level two of the Equality Standard.  As I say, I am absolutely confident that no-one in Shelter supports what the BNP proposes on such issues.  But it would be very difficult for a charity like us if we found someone within our ranks someone who did.

To Cardiff to take part in a discussion at the annual meeting of FEANTSA (stay with me…), the European network of homelessness organisations.  Four of us, each representing one of the nations in the UK, had an hour to explain to representatives from 21 countries how devolved Government in the UK impacted on the chances of us ending homelessness.
 
But what struck me was the extent to which we all accepted that the areas which had been devolved to national governments were dwarfed in importance by those which lay outside the power of the Governments in Belfast, Edinburgh or Cardiff to decide.  Benefits policy, taxation, broader economic management - these were what mattered.  And, arguably, what is now playing out on a global economic scale has more of an impact on homelessness than most politicians would care to admit and housing campaigners like ourselves recognise every day.
 
That said, teasing out the vagaries of approach to homelessness in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland (the last particularly interesting in a nation where effective administration is still split between the power-sharing executive, Westminster and a national housing body) was a fascinating exercise.  In both Scotland and Wales, moves to extend the right to housing were being balanced with changes to the duties of the local authority. 
 
In some cases, this carried real danger.  In his welcome speech to the conference, Welsh First Minister Rhodri Morgan gave a broad hint that moves to extend homelessness legislation might be accompanied by changes to make greater use of the private rented sector to provide settled housing for people accepted as homeless, fine if that is accompanied by a wholesale reform of the sector, but really worrying if it means vulnerable homeless people being dumped in expensive, ill-run private houses with just six months security of tenure.
 
But, whatever the attitudes of national governments, it is the broader market which matters more.   The building industry, banking, the attitude of employers are all more critical to causing – and arguably solving - solving homelessness than Government.  In this context, the decision of Gordon Brown in Westminster to seek to acquire shareholdings in Scottish-based banks such as RBS and HBOS not only is perhaps of greater significance than any of the policies we were discussing but also raises some far trickier questions about the limits of the existing constitutional settlement between England and Scotland.
 

The bus stopped at 11 o’clock precisely for the two minutes silence.  And as the other passengers sat and remembered the dead of two World Wars (or, in a few cases, carried on chattering inanely), my mind turned to a funeral taking place 500 miles away.

The call had come through late one night last week.  S had been found slumped in a public toilet.  The post mortem report was not out yet, but it didn’t much matter.  Not an overdose, thank God.  More likely was that it was something to do with her liver, weakened by 25 years of abuse and ravaged by Hepatitis C.
 
Not that I’d seen her much for a while.  As a matter of fact, none of us had, not since her latest - her final - attempt at treatment.  She had planned, promised, to go straight from treatment to stay with a friend outside London but had never turned up, having been met at the door by someone she’d met in rehab and whisked away to who knows where.  The only contact anyone had had was when a stranger rang the first name on her mobile to report that he’d found her bag with all her essentials - passport, phone, keys, purse - discarded somewhere in Waterloo.  And then silence.
 
We’d become good mates some fifteen years when ago I’d been working in penal reform.  But the life of an addict is a peripatetic one and the friendship is difficult to sustain when people are constantly moving from rehab to stability to relapse to rehab.  Last time we met, she’d been living in Hertfordshire and holding down a good job.  When she didn’t make it to Manchester for one friend’s 50th or turn up to another’s 40th it was clear she was on the way down again.  But I always thought she’d make it back up.
 
So why should anyone care?  In many ways, her story was all too familiar.  Check the list: horrendous childhood, home made tattoos, prostitution - all present, all correct.  But in many more – and more important - ways, she was a woman to be respected and admired.  Not many people I know could have dragged themselves off the streets (and I mean the streets) and talked themselves into getting accepted for an English degree at London University, still less having her tutor plead with her at the end of the course to stay on to do a PhD, all the while working behind a bar and, I suspect, nursing a renewed heroin habit.  

Her death may have been pitiable but S did not warrant pity.  She was worth far more than that.

Further intriguing press coverage about the continuing debates within the National Trust about its attitude towards housing development.  On the one hand, the Trust has been setting itself up as a leading voice against development, even promising to buy up land to prevent it being used to build.  On the other, it appears that the organisation is now in trouble with its own supporters about its habit of funding its activities by using its own land for housing.
 
In the development on the Erddig estate near Wrexham, just 55 of the 223 homes will be affordable.  Nor is this a one-off.  In the Trust’s flagship Stamford Brook development in Cheshire, just 79 of the 700 homes will be affordable.  We would not tolerate such low levels of affordable housebuilding from a purely commercial developer.  Why should we tolerate them from a charity?
 
This is not a cheap shot alleging hypocrisy.  Given what I have had to do in Shelter over the past year or two, I am the last person to argue that charities can ignore the very real financial issues we face and criticise others for trying to find new ways of boosting income.  And, in any event, the National Trust does appear to be looking to work with developers to demonstrate ways in which the green movement can work with developers to improve the environmental sustainability of new homes.
 
My problem with this is the apparent lack of awareness on the part of the National Trust of the impact of its practices on those in housing need.  No-one can take issue with calls to ensure that environmental and recreational issues are taken into account in planning decisions.  However, demands that the proportion of building on brownfield sites be increased from 60% to 80% and warning that “our precious countryside is being gobbled up” show little appreciation of the desperate housing need experienced by many poorer rural dwellers.

What is worse is the fact that where the Trust is developing housing, the needs of people unable to afford the inflated prices charged in many rural settings are simply not being prioritised.