To dull his anguish about his son's illness, Liam's fabulous waster of a father, Frank (a bravura turn by David Threlfall), starts asking youths at The Jockey to supply him with drugs He is livid when one can't come up with the goods. The local pub, The Jockey, immediately launches a charity appeal and a "Liam Day" to raise money to send him to Disneyland. The final straw came when he announced to the assembled audience - while he was playing one of the three kings in the nativity play - that "Jesus is a made-up person, and the Bible is all pretend stories to make people be good."Terrified that social services will realise there are no adults looking after them and split up the children, Liam's resourceful older sister Debbie paints his face yellow, shaves off his hair and pretends to the visiting social worker that he has cancer. If you don't believe me, here is a selection of vignettes from the forthcoming first episode of the third series. Social services are coming round to the Gallaghers' chaotic, parent-free house on the tough-as-old-boots Chatsworth Estate in Manchester to check up on five-year-old Liam He has been acting up at school. Paul Abbott is currently writing a new series entitled No Offence.

It's not a phrase you would usually associate with the writer. He has made his name by testing the limits of good taste with Shameless, his Channel 4 series about that family of walking invitations to an Asbo, the Gallaghers. It's the single most important lesson for democratic societies in a time of resurgent religiosity Once you accept that, all else is possible. Then you can take your values to work and do the best you can.. So I think people should carry their faith and values into politics, but there needs to be enough humility to know that you are not in possession of the absolute truth As Saint Paul said, you see through a glass darkly That means that you might be wrong.

On the other hand, when you're making compromises, you can't live with them unless you think they're principled consequences. So no religious person can leave his or her religion at the door But you also have to respect other people's faith. That leads to demonisation and polarisation in politics, and it's inconsistent with a democratic society, the essence of which is compromise. Salvatore: Mr President, you are a spiritual man, even a prayerful man.

How do you feel about the push for religiosity in law, in the courts, in the schools? Are you concerned about that trend? Clinton: Yes, to the extent that people believe their religious convictions give them the possession of the absolute truth, which they can then turn into a political agenda and, therefore, believe their opponents are somehow almost less than human because they don't share that truth. So you can say for historical reasons, the odds are not great of our prevailing [in Iraq]. Whether it will succeed or not depends upon whether those two things happen before Americans feel tired of American young people dying over there. Since the end of World War II, the only major foreign power that succeeded in putting down an insurgency was the British putting down the Malay insurgency, but the British stayed 15 years. The second thing is the level of our success in training the security and military forces of Iraq.

There were terrible problems in the beginning, but they have really increased their professionalism and capacity. If they get to the point where they can defend themselves against their own insurgency, then they've got more than half the battle won When that point is reached, they'll want us to go. They won't want us to hang around and tell them how to run their country Having said that, it could go wrong. If a substantial percentage of Sunnis feel that they can participate in this government, that, in effect, they have sort of a federal system where they have a limited amount of self-government, as far as various regions, that they have a coherent national policy, that the oil money be distributed fairly, that will be very important. One is, if the constitutional process can be successfully concluded so that the Sunni minority that dominated the country under Saddam, and now can't dominate anymore, is not itself dominated by an alliance between the Shi'ites and the Kurds.