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Given the current debate regarding plans to allow product placement on TV, coupled with the ongoing discussion around issues concerning the commercialisation of childhood, we’ve organised a high profile debate in Parliament on this hot topic. The event will take place from 6pm-7.30pm on Wednesday 24 February, confirmed speakers include: Sue Palmer, author, Toxic Childhood; John McVay, PACT; Neal Lawson, Compass; David Carins MP and chaired by Zoe Gannon, Compass.

Four years after we launched our campaign to end the commercialisation of childhood the government is on the verge of making a decision that will move us further away from our goal. We need you to send a message to Ben Bradshaw asking him to keep the ban on TV product placement.

In a letter published in today's Guardian representatives of organisations working in the children and parenting fields, teachers and members of the wider children's workforce, health professionals, campaigners, academics, politicians and individuals have urged Culture Secretary, Ben Bradshaw to reverse the decision to allow product placement on television. The letter reads:

Media misrepresentations of the scale and nature of childhood crime is leading to the demonization of an entire generation of young people.

The description of the terrible death of baby P in Haringey might leave you with the assumption that failures in services designed to protect vulnerable children were unique to this part of London with its acute social problems. This is not the case.

The crimes inflicted on P have rightly horrified the nation and will surely never be forgotten by the individuals involved in his short life. As with any child death, it is essential that lessons are learned quickly and effectively from the state's failure to protect this child.

Barack Obama has become a beacon of hope for many and his ideals of change have already reached our shoresI have never seen anything like it.  I had the honour of presenting prizes at a secondary school in Streatham last week, a school whose most famous ex-pupil is supermodel and Streatham native, Naomi Campbell. For all her alleged faults, Campbell is an icon, but in the course of the evening the school principal mentioned a very different model - the US president-elect, Barack Obama.

There has long been a moral case for tackling child poverty: it makes children's lives more brutal and it makes them shorter. Because of its impact on people, on communities and on the services which support them, we have also known there is a corrosive economic, not just a social, cost of deprivation.

Sometimes a march feels like it is ahead of its times. The End Child Poverty march on 4th October, which 10,000 people are estimated to have attended, may be such a march.

"I am not a statistic, I never wanted to have a life on benefits, I used to work and I really enjoyed it. When I worked I was a real grafter I loved being financially independent. Now when I work it's for cash-in-hand and it's at times when things are really tight. Living in fear of being caught is a terrible way to live but what is scarier is giving up benefits altogether and having no safety net."