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• Record numbers want assisted death
• Lords will hear plea to overturn law

Record numbers of Britons who are suffering from terminal illnesses are queueing up for assisted suicide at the controversial Swiss clinic Dignitas, the Observer can reveal.

Almost 800 have taken the first step to taking their lives by becoming members of Dignitas, and 34 men and women, who feel their suffering has become unbearable, are ready to travel to Zurich and take a lethal drug overdose.

The tenfold increase in the number of Britons who have joined Dignitas since 2002 will raise questions about the law that bans assisted suicide in Britain.

On Tuesday, 46-year-old Debbie Purdy, who suffers from progressive multiple sclerosis, will go to the House of Lords, the UK’s highest court, asking it to determine whether her husband Omar Puente will be prosecuted if he helps her to travel abroad to die.

The 34 Britons given what Dignitas calls a “provisional green light” to die have provided documentary evidence of their condition and been interviewed by both a doctor and Ludwig Minelli, the founder of Dignitas, and satisfied them that they are mentally fit to make such a decision.

One of the 34 is due to undertake an accompanied suicide very soon. Four have already secured fixed dates for their deaths, but adjourned them. The remaining 29 have not yet arranged a specific date.

A further four British people failed to get Dignitas’s permission after the Swiss doctor who examines all applicants said they should not be helped, either because they did not have an incurable illness or were judged not of sound enough mind to reach such a decision.

Dignitas figures also show that 15 Britons took their lives there in 2003, 26 in 2006, eight in the first five months of 2008 and 23 in the past 12 months.

The disclosures will reopen the highly charged debate about euthanasia. This week, an influential group of peers, led by two former ministers in Tony Blair’s cabinet, will seek to end what they see as the outdated and inhumane situation in which relatives or friends risk up to 14 years in prison if they travel with a loved one undertaking assisted dying overseas.

The peers - led by Lord Falconer, a former lord chancellor, and Baroness Jay, a former leader of the House of Lords - will table an amendment to the Coroners and Justice Bill in an attempt to lift the threat of prosecution from people in England and Wales who want to support someone in their final moments.

The 1961 Suicide Act criminalises anyone who aids, abets, counsels or procures someone else’s suicide, and some relatives who have travelled have been questioned by police on their return. However, government law officers have already admitted that no one who goes abroad for that purpose is likely to face prosecution.

“It’s a tragic anomaly that people who are giving a last loving assistance to a loved one find themselves under threat of 14 years’ imprisonment if they do,” Jay said last night. “Having made the very difficult decision to travel abroad to somewhere like Switzerland, where assisted dying is legal, someone would want the sort of support they would expect here from a husband, wife or loved one. The law in this area is a fudge and parliamentarians are lagging behind public opinion on this.”

Prominent peers with legal or medical backgrounds are backing the move, including Lib Dem barrister Lord Lester, Baroness Greengross, the former head of Age Concern England, and Lord (Naren) Patel, chairman of the National Patient Safety Agency.

If they win - and they are increasingly confident - it would force the government to take a view. It used parliamentary procedure to prevent voting in March on an identical amendment in the Commons, which had been proposed by Patricia Hewitt, the health secretary until 2007.

Lesley Close, who travelled to Dignitas with her brother, John, in 2003 when he ended a life overshadowed by motor neurone disease, said: “More and more British people will be joining Dignitas and travelling to Switzerland to die because more people are aware of the compassionate and peaceful death you can achieve there.

“The interest in Dignitas among Britons underlines the case for reform of the law here. We need the same facility here [as Dignitas]. It’s a perfectly rational and humane decision to end your life if you are suffering intolerably at the end of a terminal illness.”

Sarah Wootton, chief executive of Dignity in Dying, which campaigns for a new right to assisted dying, said: “These figures show that the situation in this country is forcing people into difficult and dangerous decisions - to go abroad for an assisted death, or ask their doctor or a relative to help them die, or to attempt suicide themselves, some of which end up being botched.

“There is clearly a growing demand in this country for a well regulated, legal right for people with terminal illness, who are mentally competent, to end their life if they choose to.”

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Johnson warns of disaster for Labour on election night

Alan Johnson, the cabinet minister widely tipped as a successor to Gordon Brown, prepared Labour for disaster at the polls as he predicted it would suffer the worst local and European election results in its history.

In a candid admission last night, the health secretary said he expected all three mainstream parties to do “badly” in Thursday’s polls. But he believed that Labour would be hit hardest by the overwhelming tide of public anger over the MPs’ expenses scandal. Raising his profile as a future leadership contender, he told the Observer: “If you are asking me for an honest assessment about whether recent events will have an effect, they are bound to, because we are the brand leader, we are the party of government and it will have more of an effect on us than the other parties.”

Senior Tory sources predicted that Labour would suffer the humiliation of losing control of all county councils across the whole of England after Thursday. The Tory high command is confident of taking outright command of Lancashire and Staffordshire -two of the four councils that remain under Labour’s power, and of depriving them of overall authority in the other two, Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire.

With the BNP close to winning at least one seat in the European parliament and Labour at risk of being pushed into third place by Ukip, activists are questioning whether Brown can survive an electoral massacre on the scale being predicted.

A Sunday Telegraph poll last night also revealed more people intend to vote Lib Dem at the next general election than Labour. The ICM survey put Labour in third place for the first time since 1987 on just 22% - three points adrift of the Lib Dems and 18 behind the Conservatives.

Eric Pickles, the Conservative party chairman, said Johnson was “clearly doing his best to lower expectations”. But Labour did appear to have “given up” serious campaigning across large parts of the country. In last year’s council elections, Labour slumped to the lowest level of support of any governing party in history.

Johnson accepted that Labour would take yet more punishment on Thursday. But he urged people to resist registering protest votes with extremists such as the BNP. “My message to those people who would normally have voted for a mainstream parties is ‘don’t change your mind because of allowances’. Registering your vote at what has gone on for a protest would just lead to a far worse situation where we have people who are full of hate representing us by default in the European parliament.”

Last night Tory leader David Cameron was forced to defend his expenses claims after it was reported that he paid off a loan of £75,000 on his London home shortly after taking out a £350,000 tax-payer funded mortgage to pay for his constituency home in Oxfordshire. Cameron said his claims had been “perfectly reasonable”.

In a sign of his frustration at Labour’s failure to land blows on Cameron and Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg over the expenses scandal, Johnson said the two, whom he dubbed the “self-righteous brothers”, had been allowed to take the moral high ground without being challenged over their own financial arrangements. “I am amazed about what an easy ride Cameron and Clegg have had over this whole issue,” he said.

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The carmaker’s new owner has given assurances that production will continue in the UK - but concern grows about Luton’s 1,500 van workers

The threat of large-scale redundancies among Vauxhall’s 5,000 workers is looming as the company comes closer to being taken over. Union leaders are particularly anxious about the future of its Luton van plant, which employs 1,500 people.

The company’s short-term future was secured yesterday after the German government agreed a deal paving the way for Canadian car parts maker Magna International to take over most of GM Europe, which owns Vauxhall and its German sister company, Opel.

However, there are fears that some van production could be switched to Russia, given the reported involvement of the Russian vans company run by Oleg Deripaska, the oligarch who met the business secretary, Lord Mandelson, on a yacht in Corfu last summer. Deripaska and the Russian bank Sberbank are believed to be part of the Magna-led consortium set to take over Vauxhall and Opel.

Although there has yet to be a formal announcement of the takeover, the German government’s intervention - a €1.5bn (£1.3bn) bridging loan secured in the early hours of yesterday morning after marathon talks involving the chancellor, Angela Merkel - has saved Opel and Vauxhall from imminent collapse. It comes as its troubled owner, the car group General Motors, heads towards bankruptcy in the US.

GM’s chief executive, Fritz Henderson, has called a press conference in New York for tomorrow, when the company is expected to announce the biggest insolvency filing in US industrial history. Merkel told reporters that Barack Obama had phoned during the negotiations to help the loan go through.

Mandelson will now step up plans to save jobs both at Luton and the Astra plant in Ellesmere Port. Tony Woodley, the joint general secretary of the Unite union, said the two plants had suffered enough, after Luton lost car production and workers at Ellesmere Port went on to a four-day week.

“Bearing in mind that our workers have paid a heavy price already at these plants, we look to Lord Mandelson to do what he says he will do, to go in there and negotiate for Britain and British jobs,” he said. “It would be ludicrous if he lost more jobs, because both Luton and Ellesmere Port have already paid a heavy price.”

Mandelson said he wanted to meet Magna as soon as possible, having been previously assured by them that they would stand by production in the UK.

“I will be seeking a very early, further meeting with them to reinforce that commitment … and I’ll be concentrating on that as soon as these initial talks have been completed between them and General Motors USA.

“We are at the beginning of a process of due diligence, of examination by Magna and their partner, the Russian Savings Bank, of the finances of General Motors in Europe as a whole. Over the coming weeks, we will be talking to them about their detailed plans and how those will affect Vauxhall here in the UK.”

Mandelson said the new company would need help from a range of European governments. “We have accepted that we will play our fair share in that,” he said. “But just how much will depend on the needs and requests of the new owners, and what they’re prepared to put or keep in production and employment here in the UK.”

Magna wants to push Opel into Russia, raising doubts about the future of British van production. There are also fears that the leading role played by the German government could put Magna under pressure to save German jobs, leaving the British parts of the new Opel/Vauxhall company at a disadvantage.

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Washington sees missile tests as direct threat as spy satellites reveal preparations for new launches

America has warned it “will not accept” a nuclear-armed North Korea as new intelligence data showed that the secretive state was preparing a fresh missile launch, which could take place in two weeks’ time.

The fresh developments increased the tension yet further yesterday in a game of diplomatic brinkmanship that seems destined to put Washington and Pyongyang on a collision course.

The US defence secretary, Robert Gates, used the opportunity of a security conference in Singapore to force home America’s view that North Korea’s recent nuclear test and missile launches were seen as a direct threat. “We will not stand idly by as North Korea builds the capability to wreak destruction on any target in the region or on us… we will not accept North Korea as a nuclear state,” he said.

North Korea has test-fired six missiles since detonating a nuclear device on Monday, with the latest being a short-range missile launch on Friday. In a statement, North Korea denounced its critics as “hypocrites” and warned of “adopting self-defensive countermeasures” if action were taken against it at the UN.

According to the South Korean news agency Yonhap, spy satellites have captured images that show the country is busy preparing more tests. The images appear to show an intercontinental ballistic missile being moved by train from the capital to a launch pad at Musudan-ri in the north-east of the country. The missile is thought to be a Taepodong-2, which is in theory capable of hitting US soil. The missile could be launched within two weeks. Other images show vehicle activity at test sites and Chinese fishing boats fleeing the area.

South Korean and US forces in the region have been placed on the second-highest alert level. The last time the joint forces raised the “Watchcon” surveillance alert was after a 2006 North Korean test that proved the regime was a nuclear power. North Korea has said that it no longer considers itself bound by the armistice that ended the Korean war in 1953 and ushered in five decades of uneasy peace on the peninsula.

There is huge speculation about what North Korea seeks to gain by raising the tension levels. The impoverished country may be using its nuclear programme as a bargaining tool to obtain aid and ease sanctions. But there is also the possibility that recent developments are linked to the country’s murky internal politics. Its leader, Kim Jong-il, is believed to be in failing health and there is no clear line of succession.

Washington does not fear a direct attack by North Korea, but is concerned that the country will export its nuclear technology to other rogue states or terrorist networks. The country, crippled by sanctions and its own disastrous economy, has already acquired billions of dollars by secretly exporting missile technology to the Middle East and Pakistan. In his speech in Singapore, Gates warned that America would hold Pyongyang “fully accountable” for the proliferation of any nuclear material or technology. “The transfer of nuclear weapons or material by North Korea to states or non-state entities would be considered a grave threat to the US and our allies. And we would hold North Korea fully accountable,” Gates said.

However, co-ordinating an effective international diplomatic response to North Korea has not been easy. Russia and China have stymied efforts to isolate the country at the UN, preventing a united front to condemn the country’s nuclear ambitions.

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Tamil children as young as 11 were forced at gunpoint to fight for the Tigers in Sri Lanka’s civil war. Survivors talked of their ordeal to Gethin Chamberlain in Ambepusse

Darchiga Kuken was sheltering in a bunker in the Mullaitivu area when a group of about 20 Tamil Tiger soldiers arrived and demanded that she went with them.

“I was sick with chicken pox. My mother and father were screaming and crying, saying that I was sick and pleading with them not to take me,” she said. The men went away. And then at 5pm on 14 March they came back. They called me to come out and then they grabbed me and put me in a jeep. I started to cry. I was shouting: ‘Mother, father, help me.’ ”

The 16-year-old is now being held in what the government describes as a “rehabilitation centre”, a jungle camp built on a hillside outside the town of Ambepusse in the south of the country. Here children like her, who were forced to fight on the front line in the final stages of the war in Sri Lanka, gave the Observer compelling evidence of war crimes committed by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).

The camp currently houses 95 children, with another 200 on their way from internment camps around the town of Vavuniya in the north of the country.

Despite international concerns over the treatment of LTTE suspects, the children appeared to be well treated and were able to speak freely when the Observer visited the camp on Thursday. The most distressing sight was a young boy howling in pain on the floor of one of the huts; his friends said that he had recently arrived and still had a piece of shrapnel lodged in his skull from the recent fighting.

The accounts of these boys and girls who surrendered to the Sri Lankan army were shocking. They say they were dragged screaming from their families and sent into action with only a few days of basic training. The older members of the LTTE warned them to keep firing and advancing, or they would be shot by their own side from behind.

Those who did try to escape said they were fired on by their own side. Children who were recaptured had their hair shaved off to mark them as deserters and boys were beaten.

Darchiga said she was shot in the stomach by the army two days after arriving on the front line, having been forced to pick up a rifle and go forward to fight. She said LTTE cadres left her bleeding for four hours before she received any medical treatment.

According to her testimony, the Tigers had warned every family that those children who could carry a weapon were expected to join up, regardless of age. Some as young as 11 and 12 had been taken, she said. “They told families that one child was enough. If they had five children, they would take four and leave just one.”

She was taken to a training camp at Mullaivaikal, where nine days of basic military training were interrupted by frequent air attacks. On the morning of 24 March, she was sent to the front.

“I was scared and thought that I would die now and would never see my parents again. They had scared us and said we shouldn’t sleep because the army would come and cut our throats.”

She spent the first day hiding in a bunker, then she was shoved forwards because the senior Tiger cadres said they were running out of fighters. “They gave me a rifle. It was very heavy. They threatened us that we had to go forward and shoot; if we came back, they would shoot us themselves.

“I went a few hundred yards and hid behind a coconut tree. I saw the army coming and I was very scared and I was lying down trying to hide, but then they shot me in the stomach.

“I started screaming because of the pain, but the cadres told me to shut up because the army would hear me. They gave me a cloth to put on the wound. There was a lot of blood. It was four hours before they took me to the hospital at Matalan.”

On 13 April she escaped and ran back to her family. The Tigers were looking for deserters, she said. “If they caught them, they shaved their hair off and sent them back to the front line.” Boys also received a beating.

She finally managed to escape with a group of civilians, but only after the Tigers had fired on them. She was separated from her family, who were sent to the internment camps at Vavuniya, and taken to a court, which ordered her to be detained at Ambepusse for a year - the standard treatment for those who confess to LTTE membership, even if they had been coerced.

Ravindram Vajeevan, 17, said he arrived at Ambepusse on 9 April after escaping from the Tigers four days earlier. He had a large scar on his left arm where he had been shot by his former comrades as he ran away.

He had been taken from his family in Mullaitivu on 29 March, as fighting raged around the shrinking no-fire zone and LTTE numbers dwindled. A large group of men arrived at the house, he said, and dragged him from the bunker where he had been sheltering.

“They hit me and my mother was crying and I was crying, but they said I had to go to fight. My neighbours tried to stop them, but they said they would shoot. Then they fired in the air,” he said.

He was taken to a camp with about 70 other young boys and taught how to make a bunker, how to handle a rifle, how to escape from an ambush and how to stage an attack. They were told that if they did not fight they would be shot from behind, he said. On the fifth day, he escaped.

“In the beginning, the LTTE were fighting for the Tamils, but in the end they were just fighting for themselves,” he said.

Thambirasa Jagadiswary, 20, and her brother Thambirasa Thisanandan, 17, were reunited at Ambepusse after the the Tigers took them from their family. Jagadiswary was taken in June 2008 and drafted into a mortar unit before being captured; her brother was dragooned in February this year. He had spent 15 days with the rebels before escaping and surrendering.

Afterwards he was taken to Vavuniya with his parents. “They told us there that those who were in the LTTE should register, so I did,” he said. “Then they told me they would separate us from our parents.”

“I was talking with my friends when they brought him in,” his sister said. “All of a sudden I saw my brother and I started crying and shouting and hugging him.” Their mother remains in the internment camp at Menik Farm.

These teenagers’ revelations come days after the UN human rights council rejected a call for an investigation into allegations of war crimes by both sides during the 26-year conflict and accepted an alternative Sri Lankan government resolution describing the conflict as a “domestic matter that doesn’t warrant outside interference”. The Sri Lankan military has also been accused of committing war crimes by firing on civilians.

Among the traumatised and unwilling child soldiers of the Tamil Tigers, there is just a desire for normality to return.

“I was one year with the LTTE and I must be one year here,” said Jagadiswary. “Now I would just like to find my mother and get on with my life.”

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Scottish spinster’s global fame wasn’t enough to overcome 10 dynamic young men from Essex in the final of the TV talent show

In the end, Susan Boyle’s dream of winning Britain’s Got Talent remained just that. With bookies offering odds of 10-11 that she would clinch victory over the show’s strongest-ever field, last night’s climax was supposed to belong to the 48-year-old Scottish spinster who has become a global phenomenon. But when results of the final public vote were announced, Diversity, a youthful 10-member dance group from Essex, had pushed her into second place, in front of a TV audience of up to 20 million.

Standing a few paces away from them as the result was announced, Boyle was magnanimous in defeat: “The best people won. They are really entertaining. Lads, I wish you all the best.”

Diversity, which includes three sets of brothers, impressed the judges with a frenetic routine which included a cheeky reference to the panel’s buzzers. Three members of the multi-ethnic group, which won the £100,000 prize and will perform at the Royal Variety Show, donned red caps to represent the buttons pressed to order acts off the stage.

Stumbling over his words after the win, choreographer Ashley Banjo, 20, said: “I was saying ‘guys, second!’. When you said our name – honestly, I’m going to wake up in a minute.”

Earlier in the evening, and after weeks of relentless media coverage that has taken a more negative turn in recent days with suggestions that her mental health was at risk, Boyle had played it safe by returning to “I Dreamed a Dream”, the song which has become an internet sensation. Oozing confidence and betraying none of the nerves that had reportedly seen her throw public tantrums in the days leading up to the final, Boyle nevertheless appeared more subdued than on previous appearances. Moments after her performance she asked presenters Anthony McPartlin and Declan Donnelly and the audience: “I’m among friends, am I not?”

“You have had a weird several weeks and you have had every right to walk away from this,” she was told by judge Simon Cowell. “You have had the guts to come back here tonight and face your critics. Whatever happens you can walk away from this with your head held high.”

Cowell, a man not known for self doubt, also responded to controversy surrounding the participation of young children in the contest. During Friday’s semi-final 10-year-old Hollie Steel, a finalist last night, broke down during her performance.

After listening to Welsh-Iranian Shaheen Jafargholi, 12, Cowell admitted last night: “This debate about whether we put kids on has really made me think this week because of what happened last night, and I have been in two minds about whether it’s the right thing or the wrong thing. But after that performance it really made me realise that if you are talented, regardless of you age, and you can cope with it, we should not deny someone like you the opportunity.”

This will be remembered as the year Britain’s Got Talent went truly global, a success only partly due to the astonishing international popularity of Boyle: even before last night’s show, more than 100 million people New York to New Zealand had logged in on YouTube to have their prejudices confounded by watching her near-perfect rendition of “I Dreamed a Dream”. Boyle has attracted fans including Barack Obama and actress Demi Moore, and has appeared on a satellite interview with Oprah Winfrey.

But BGT, which has achieved the rare television accolade of being so popular that it is referred to by its initials alone, has become so powerful that it has spawned what is becoming known as the “BGT effect”: a sprinkling of career gold dust on many of those who simply appear on the show, regardless of whether or not they walk off with the crown. Now in its third season, the programme’s popularity is phenomenal. A record 15.4 million people tuned in to watch the semi-final last week, meaning more than 60% of the television audience were glued to the ITV1 show. In the depths of a recession, it has catalysed a multimillion-pound windfall in advertising revenue.

The broadcasters, however, are far from being the only ones to rake in the benefits of the programme’s astonishing success. According to a rich list published last week, previous winners have gone on to bank millions: Operatic singer Paul Potts, the retail manager who won the competition in 2007, is now worth £5m. Dancer George Sampson might still be in the middle of his GCSEs but has invested his winnings so carefully he has yet to touch a penny of his £100,000 prize money.

Similar success looks certain for other competitors of this year’s contest, even those who weren’t in the top three: Jafargholi has been besieged by interview requests from US and British TV after his dazzling rendition of Michael Jackson’s “Who’s Loving You?”.

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Twenty years ago, a democratic revolution led by Lech Walesa’s trade-union movement signalled the end of the country’s communist regime. But as plans for this week’s anniversary festivities are marred by rows, nostalgia is in short supply

The stage is being prepared outside the famous Gdansk shipyards. The temporary terraces are nearly ready in the centre of Krakow and Kylie Minogue is on her way. Poland is getting ready to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the events that set the nation and much of eastern and central Europe on the road to freedom.

But Piotr Karwowoski, a recently retired trade union official and factory worker, will not be celebrating. When he travels the 100 miles across the green, flat plains to Warsaw from his home town of Swidnik next week, he will instead be heading to a three-day administrative meeting of his union’s industrial wing.

Karwowoski played a key role in the years of struggle, strikes and demonstrations that finally culminated in “semi-free” elections on 4 June 1989. But the 65-year-old, despite his impeccable revolutionary credentials, is not in the mood for nostalgia.

“Twenty years ago I was euphoric at the prospect of change, especially after all we had done,” Karwowoski told the Observer last week. “But the Poland that resulted was different than I expected. I don’t really want to celebrate.”

Two decades after the triumphant defeat of the communist regime that took its orders from Moscow, there is no doubting the Polish transformation that is visible in the streets. Pictures from Warsaw even in the final years of communist rule look like images from another age, not another generation. The rows of inefficient, clunky local cars that once clogged the capital’s Constitution Square have been replaced by Fiats, Toyotas and BMWs.

Under a flat, grey, rainy sky last week, the trams and the 1950s Stalinist architecture hinted at what once had been. But the Green Coffee cafe with its ciabatta sandwiches, fresh orange juice and black T-shirted waitresses symbolise the present and the future. One poster for a rival coffee chain features pretty girls saying, “chocolate, man, coffee … some things are better rich”.

“What is the difference between Warsaw and England? The side of the road on which we drive?” asked veteran film-maker Marek Drazewski. “There are the same films, the same McDonald’s. Warsaw is a standard European capital and when I go to the US now I feel at home. The biggest difference is that I am allowed to smoke.”

Satellite television and the internet are bringing change to far-flung rural areas, too, as is the new confidence and openness of those hundreds of thousands of Poles who travelled from small rural towns to work in the UK and Ireland and who are now returning home.

Yet all across Poland last week, people voiced the same disenchantment with the public festivities. Major newspapers are planning huge coverage and special supplements. Political personalities such as the former Czech president and playwright Václav Havel are being flown in. There is the free concert starring Kylie Minogue and numerous worthy conferences will take place. No one can doubt the desire of the authorities to whip up a storm of enthusiasm. But very few Poles are so far joining in. One poll found that only 41% of the 38 million population actually knew what the celebrations were for.

No one regrets the passing of the communists, of course. “Even on the left many, many welcomed the end of the regime with joy and happiness,” said Ryszard Kalisz, a former interior minister and senior leader of the leftwing SLD party. Many are intensely proud of the role that Poland played in pioneering resistance to the Moscow-backed regimes, and are resentful that the fall of the Berlin wall has become the symbolic event signifying the swift collapse of communism.

But when it comes to the present, many Poles believe that Poland lacks “moral and political order” and that the poor “have been betrayed”, as Karwowoski, the retired union official, puts it.

Many more are put off by what they say is the poor quality of their leaders. “The political class is exceptionally mediocre,” said Jaroslaw Kurski, deputy editor of the Gazeta Wyborcza newspaper, which published its first issue just four days after the 4 June 1989 elections that saw the Solidarity union sweep into effective power. Maciej Stryjecki, a former ministerial private secretary and leftwing activist, agreed: “I have observed many governments close up. Each new one is worse than the last. Competent, honest, experienced people are very, very rare.”

The disenchantment is especially strong among younger Poles. For Robert Kulik, a 28-year-old legal adviser in the southern town of Lublin who recently returned from a year in the UK, “solidarity is a not just a slogan or the name of an organisation. It can only be something that exists between people. There isn’t any real solidarity in Poland any more”.

Certainly the Solidarity that won so much admiration in the west is no more. From being founded as a trade union, Solidarity became a mass movement in the 1980s before becoming a political party in the 1990s. Now it has returned to being a union, with a membership a fraction of that of two decades ago. The modern Solidarity is a close ally of the controversial hard-right Law and Justice party whose leaders, twin brothers Lech and Jaroslaw Kaczynski, have repeatedly shocked local and international audiences with their nationalist, borderline xenophobic rhetoric and alliances with extreme-right groups.

Cezary Kowanda, an analyst at Polityka magazine, says that the alliance of Solidarity with the hard right is natural. “Trade unionism in Poland and Solidarity has always been very closely linked to the church and to a conservative set of social values,” he told the Observer. “The real anniversary for a lot of Poles is not the 4 June elections of 1989 but 2 June 1979 when Pope John Paul II made his first pilgrimage to his homeland.”

The 4 June festivities were initially planned for Gdansk, birthplace of Solidarity and scene of the showdowns at the famous docks where workers led by electrician Lech Walesa defied the communist regime. But in the Baltic port city the mood is one of anger rather than nostalgia. The docks are being shut on the orders of the European Union, which Poland officially joined in 2004, and the government feared rioting would mar the anniversary. So while opposition groups including Solidarity and the Law and Justice party celebrate there, the main official festivities, led by the centre-right ruling party of Civic Platform, have been moved to Krakow. A third set of events will take place in the capital.

Even the presence of Walesa at the forefront of celebrations is controversial. The former president has been forced to repeatedly deny accusations from right-wingers that he was a communist spy. This month he threatened to boycott all celebrations for the anniversary of the events that eventually saw him made president in 1990.

In Swidnik, where the first serious demonstrations against the communist regime in Poland broke out in July 1980 before spreading to Gdansk a month later, they are not celebrating anything at all. The town is a long way from Warsaw and its traffic jams, expensive restaurants and “yuppie” flats. The grim tenement blocks and shopping centres of the town of 40,000 do not share the new European buzz of nearby Lublin where students from three universities and young Poles back from the UK or Ireland form their own cafe society.

Swidnik is poor, religious, conservative and has one of the highest unemployment rates in Poland. Its mayor is Waldemar Jackson, from the Law and Justice party.

“[The party] supports traditional values like the family … and is a victim of the dominant political correctness which says that people have no right to value Christianity, the church, to not like homosexuality,” Jackson said.

“In western European countries you wouldn’t understand that, because Islam is much more popular there than Christianity. There are more mosques built in Germany than churches. But Christianity underlies European values.”

Law and Justice won power in 2005, ruling for two years in coalition with extreme-right parties before being defeated two years later by the Civic Platform, who mix neo-liberal economics with moderate conservatism to appeal to Poland’s newly wealthy and newly Europeanised classes. Law and Justice’s Lech Kasczynski remains president and retains his popularity in the countryside. Civic Platform is popular among the young, in the big cities, among the elite.

According to Professor Lena Kolarska-Bobinska, a sociologist, “there are many Polands”. Jackson, the Swidnik mayor, jokes that where you find two Poles you will find four opinions. Sitting in a Lublin cafe, Kulik too talks of how historically, once there is no common enemy, Poles fight among themselves. Amid the anniversary rows and the rivalries between countryside and city, the sense of division can be overdone. Drazewski, who documented the early protests in Gdansk, says that Poland is now “stable and rich”. Though the wealth is unequally shared and relative - GDP per capita is around a third of that in the UK - Poles are considerably wealthier than 20 years ago. The Civic Platform government is strong and relatively secure and few contest the basics of the political system.

“No one argues about election results,” said leftwing leader Kalisz. Poland is even resisting the global economic crisis relatively well, recording a steady 6% year-on-year growth rate until last year.

In fact, the importance of rows, often stirred up artificially, over values, identity or the historical record may owe much to the broad ideological consensus. “There is no real left and the entire political spectrum and debate is situated on the right,” said Kowanda. The predominant mood is pragmatic and, after the epoch-changing dramas of the late 1980s, most Poles are happy to live in relatively low-key times. Last week 94% of people asked by pollsters to describe the biggest change the events of 1989 had brought spoke of “the range of goods in the shops”. Even in a Swidnik soup kitchen, people are more into apathy than radicalism. “I’m not interested in politics or history or celebrating anything particularly,” said Wladyslaw, an unemployed council technician aged 57. “I’m just interested in getting a job.”

In the gleaming new offices of the Gazeta Wyborcza, journalists were last week proudly reviewing the commemorative reprint of its first issue. The Gazeta has long been independent of the union. Times have changed, said deputy editor-in-chief Kurski.

“We are becoming a middle-class society, with bourgeois values and bourgeois tastes. We like going on holiday to sunny places, we are careful because of the crisis, but we like shopping anyway,” he said.

“We are turning into a normal modern European state with all the advantages and disadvantages that that entails. And if that is boring, well, all the better.”

The fall of Polish communism

A Polish Pope
On 16 October 1978, the Polish cardinal Karol Wojtyla is elevated to the papacy.The Catholic church had become important in the resistance to communist rule and Pope John Paul II’s homecoming tour galvanised the population; 500,000 heard him speak in Warsaw in June 1979. A quarter of the population attended his outdoor masses.

His visit was the beginning of the end for the communist regime.

The Gdansk Strikes
In Gdansk, at the then “Lenin Shipyards”, the sacking of outspoken workers, including electrician Lech Walesa, resulted in a strike led by Walesa which began on 14 August 1980. The Gdansk Agreement is eventually signed, giving the legal right to organised trade unions and more freedom for the Catholic church. On 17 September, Solidarnosc (Solidarity), the first independent labour union in the Soviet Bloc, is born.

Martial law
On 13 December 1981, General Wojciech Jaruzelski declares martial law: 5,000 Solidarity members, including Lech Walesa, are arrested in the night. Hundreds of strikes taking place throughout the country are put down by riot police. In October 1982, Solidarity was declared an illegal organisation and duly banned.

The Coming of Gorbachev
On 5 October 1983, Lech Walesa is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize but prevented from leaving the country to accept it. In 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev assumes control of the Soviet Union. Three years later, as dissent grows in Soviet satellite countries, he will tell a Communist party conference: “The imposition of a social system, a way of life or policies from outside by any means, let alone military force, are dangerous trappings of the past.”

Solidarity triumphs
In 1988, a new wave of strikes sweeps the country after food costs are increased by 40%. The government announces it is ready to negotiate with SolidarityThe union is again legalised on 17 April 1989, and allowed to field candidates in the June election. It wins all democratically available seats and forms a government under prime minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki. In December 1990 Lech Walesa is elected president of Poland.

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Cancer experts yesterday issued a health warning as the country continues to enjoy several days of strong sunshine.

Temperatures could today reach their highest so far this year and Britain can expect to bask in the heat until Wednesday, say forecasters.

But doctors have warned that the spell of hot weather - which is likely to return throughout much of the summer, according to meteorologists - could ultimately trigger a rise in numbers of skin cancer cases unless care is taken by sunbathers.

“Most melanoma skin cancers are caused by over-exposure to ultraviolet rays given off by the sun,” said Sara Hiom, Cancer Research UK’s director of health information. “However, if people are careful not to redden or burn, especially if they have fair, freckly or moley skin, then most cases of malignant melanoma could be prevented.”

The cancer research group has warned sunbathers to enjoy the sun safely by spending time in the shade in the middle of the day, covering up with appropriate cool clothing and sunglasses and applying plenty of sun cream of at least factor 15.

Yesterday, the Met Office said it expected temperatures would reach at least 23C (73F) throughout most of Britain.

“There is just a chance that it could top 26 degrees, which we experienced on Friday, and so make Sunday the hottest day of the year so far,” added forecaster Andy Hobson.

Hobson said the good weather that has gripped Britain has been caused by a region of high pressure that has settled over the country, which was preventing changeable, cloudy weather from moving in from the Atlantic.

“The high temperatures and sunshine should last until Wednesday, when clouds will begin to build up over Britain,” Hobson added.

Yesterday bookies were offering 6-1 that today would be the hottest day of the year while Ladbrokes have cut their odds from 4-1 to 3-1 that the mercury would rise above 100F (37.7C) in 2009 and from 7-1 to 5-1 that the UK record of 101.3F (38.5C) would be beaten this year. The Met Office says that it is now odds on that Britain will experience “a barbecue summer”, according to its long-range forecasts.

Chief meteorologist at the Met Office Ewen McCallum said: “After two disappointingly wet summers, the signs are much more promising this year.

“We can expect times when temperatures will be above 30C, something we hardly saw at all last year.”

Burning issue

If you do get burnt, you should:

• Take anti-inflammatory medications such as ibuprofen (Nurofen), naproxen (Aleve) or aspirin, which will reduce inflammation and pain.

• Apply cool compresses and moisturisers.

• Avoid hot showers. Instead, take a lukewarm bath.

• Avoid any additional sun exposure.

• Not peel off blisters or dead skin.

• Not apply butter or oil.

• See your doctor if you have extensive burns or blistering.

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Amid fears of resurgent sectarian tensions this summer, following the murder of a Catholic youth worker last week, one of the most dangerous factions of the Ulster Defence Association has revealed it is about to decommission its arms.

The UDA’s rebel South East Antrim Brigade confirmed this weekend that it is preparing to hand over guns, ammunition and explosives before the British government’s decommissioning deadline in August. In an exclusive interview with the Observer, the leader of the UDA brigade said the weaponry will be surrendered to Canadian General John de Chastelain and his team of international arms decommissioning experts.

While the UDA’s South East Antrim Brigade refuses to recognise the authority of the mainstream UDA leadership based in Belfast, the faction said loyalist disarmament was inevitable and desired by the entire Northern Irish community. The area controlled by the faction has been home to some of the most hardline and notorious loyalist terrorists of the Troubles. They included John “Grugg” Gregg, the UDA gunman who shot and wounded Gerry Adams during anassassination attempt on the Sinn Féin leadership in 1984. Gregg was shot dead in 2003 during an internal UDA feud by members of Johnny “Mad Dog” Adair’s C-Company faction.

South East Antrim stretches from the northern suburbs of Belfast up to Larne and across to Ballymena and Antrim town. Although the “Brigade” area does not include Coleraine, the town where Catholic youth worker Kevin McDaid was murdered last Sunday night, the UDA leader condemned the killing, as well as the attempted murder of Damien Fleming, who remains on a life support.

McDaid was set upon by a gang of up to 15 loyalists after the climax of the Scottish Premier League football season. “No one should lose their life because of a football match. There should be full co-operation with the police investigation into this murder,” the UDA man said.

On disarmament, he said: “Everybody wants to do this, everybody is now on board. Something has to be done by August, so it’s better we take the initiative and do it before then. It’s right, not only inevitable, to do it now.” He added that handing over the illegal arsenal to General de Chastelain’s commission was part of the “going-away exercise” aimed at ending loyalist paramilitarism.

“The last report by the Independent Monitoring Commission noted that the South East Antrim Brigade was moving in the right direction. That ends with the arms given up and the group becoming an old ex-comrades’ association and nothing more. You have to remember that in this brigade area a lot of our former members are now in their 60s and 70s. They want all the trappings of paramilitarism gone, including the guns. No one needs them.

“The pace of change in this area will not be dictated by what other loyalist groups do or don’t do, although we think the other UDA brigades and the UVF and Red Hand Commando are probably moving in the same direction. The weapons, like the conflict, are a thing of the past.”

The recent upsurge in dissident republican terrorism and the murders in March of two British soldiers and the first PSNI officer would not deflect his brigade from decommissioning, he said.

“We can’t allow the republican dissidents to dictate our political agenda any more. They don’t want us to decommission; rather they want to portray us as a threat to the nationalist community and they can then paint themselves as their defenders. We are not falling into that trap.”

He would not give an inventory of how many weapons the UDA in South East Antrim still controls. However he said De Chastelain would be given enough proof to convince the public that their arms were put beyond use. “The whole community will be put at ease by what is going to happen with the arms and our wholly peaceful intent,” he said.

He added that some outstanding issues, such as a welfare programme for “ex-combatants”, would have to be worked out with the British government in the run-up to the arms handover: “There could be up to 2,000 ex-UDA members living in this area, many of whom need jobs, have health problems related to time in jail or other issues connected to the conflict, who all have to be looked after.”

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The easing of travel and customs restrictions has led to family reunions and a mini-consumer boom

At a basic apartment in a creaky old building in central Havana, the Ramírez family is enjoying a feast. The women are chatting in the living room, catchy dance music is blaring out of an old cassette recorder and there are fried bananas and plenty of cheap local rum on the table.

It is a typical Cuban scene, with one crucial difference. The main attraction is a wide-open suitcase in the middle of the room. It belongs to Esteban, just in from Miami. Inside, bags of M&Ms mingle with some stripy Victoria’s Secret G-strings and bras. There are also tubes of Crest toothpaste, Colgate toothbrushes and orange bottles of Tide detergent. “Capitalism à la carte,” says Esteban excitedly, putting his right arm around his daughter’s shoulders.

Change, albeit piecemeal and small-scale, is taking place in Cuba, following the first tentative signs of a thaw in relations with the United States. Cuban-Americans used to be able to visit only once every three years. Last month the Obama administration decided to end that restriction and relatives may now travel as often as they wish. And where they were once restricted in the amount of money they provide, they can now bring meaningful economic assistance to often impoverished relatives.

The controversial economic embargo of the island (described by the Cuban government as a “blockade”) that was imposed in 1962 is, of course, still in place. Nevertheless, in minor but significant ways, things are looking up.

“No Cuban can get any of these things with their libreta,” says Esteban, referring to the green-grey ration book every adult Cuban citizen holds, designed to guarantee a monthly meagre range of products from state-owned shops.

Esteban left Cuba in 1980, leaving two daughters behind. He reached America, he says, “the only way I could, almost swimming”. This is his first visit in four years. “I can now come and see their smiling faces whenever I want… For me, as for many other ordinary Cubans, this is very significant,” he says. In his white trainers and khaki trousers, he looks like any average American.

“The revolution might have been a necessary deed 50 years ago,” he adds, “but Cuba desperately needs a change, a radical one.” His daughter Margarita, 22, seems to agree, shyly nodding her head.

Cuban-Americans are flocking home. “For me this is a real, concrete change,” said Estefania, hugging her mother at arrivals after two years away. “I am studying and working in Miami, and now, with the cash I am earning there, not only can I travel as often as I can to visit my family, but I can also give them more money and bring more supplies. This is real change for many Cubans.”

In another sign of green shoots in the US-Cuban relationship, American photographer Melani Lust recently joined forces with Cuban photographer Brayan Allonzo for an exhibition in Havana of classic, pre-embargo, American-marque cars, under the sponsorship of the Cuban government. “The Cuban government was exceptional to me,” said Lust. “I have never encountered a more friendly and welcoming people. I can only wish that I would be treated like this in the US.”

But some old attitudes die hard. Lust said that the office of Thomas Shannon, the US assistant secretary of state for Latin America, tried to warn her off staging the exhibition the day before its opening. And, in early May, Cuban troubadour Silvio Rodríguez was denied a visa to enter the US to sing alongside Bruce Springsteen, the Dave Matthews Band and Joan Baez in a concert in New York in honour of Pete Seeger’s 90th birthday. “The ones that do not want the United States and Cuba to be together, to sing to each other, to talk to each other, to understand each other, were the ones who did not let me arrive,” Rodríguez said in a letter to Seeger, an old friend.

The protests against the embargo have not stopped. This month dozens of youngsters gathered on Havana’s stunning seafront, waving the red, black and white flags of the revolutionary “26 July” movement, founded by Fidel Castro in 1953. The protest was directed at the grey block of the United States Interests Section, the US equivalent to a diplomatic mission in Cuba. Other youngsters, schoolchildren dressed in khaki trousers or skirts with tags bearing the signature of Che Guevara, used white chalk to write the slogan of the day on the pavement: “Down with the blockade.”

“We are here for Cuba to demand once again that the United States government lift the cruel blockade against us,” says Yosmani, 17. Until recently a big billboard on this spot pictured an old cartoon revolutionary holding an AK47 shouting at Uncle Sam: “Señores Imperialists, we have absolutely no fear of you!” One group chants: “Bush and Obama sleep in the same bed and eat from the same plate.”

As far as many members of the country’s National Assembly of People’s Power are concerned, Obama still has a lot to prove, National Assembly president Ricardo Alarcón told the Observer. “I am not waiting for any ‘real’ gesture from the US. What President Obama has done has nothing to do with Cuba. What he has done was purely an electoral promise made in Miami.

“So there is nothing Cuba has to do … We have waited for a long time; we have no problem with waiting some more. We are waiting for the full lifting of the blockade.”

But as far as the Ramírez family is concerned, the signs of the new times - contained in that Samsonite case - provide tangible evidence of a brighter future.

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