Depends what the custom is where you live I think - I grew up in the northwest where 'luv' was just a part of everyday speech. I know too in Newcastle they say pet a lot, and mean absolutely nothing patronising by it.

JDOvengloves
Ironically given I spent most of my PhD saying I didn't want to be an academic (and laying the path for a policy-related career post-PhD) in the last year, something clicked and I realised how much I loved teaching university students. So I did a postdoc and start a lectureship in September (I genuinely am feeling very guilty about this, as my more theory-orientated 'must be academics' PhD friends have not got academic jobs on the whole, and it seems really unfair that I lucked out). But I think the 'impact agenda' helped me, as suddenly all the policy-relevant activity I'd been involved in, started to look more relevant to departments. In an ideal world, I'd love to keep a foot in both camps but I suspect compromise will come down the line somewhere.

I sympathise, I agonised about this too. For what it's worth, here's my thoughts, some of which I did myself:
Foreign office / civil service - there's currently a recruitment freeze, so if that's what you want then you might be better finishing the PhD in the hope that things are better a couple of years down the line. With the journalism / third sector routes how much experience have you got in those fields? Given how scarily competitive both are, you need to make sure you've actually got a chance.
Obviously if you loathe every bit of the PhD then quit, but I'd like to throw a few thoughts up in the air about making it work for you and your aims:
1) If you don't want to be an academic, then the traditional 'must give conference presentations & publish' mantra can be cast aside. Instead, you can try and get NGOs to publish your research reports. Different style of writing to a PhD chapter but definitely no more hassle than turning a chapter into an article. Get yourself onto mailing lists and rather than academic conferences, go to the NGO-organised events and network like mad. As a PhD student, you can become a semi-insider in a way that a jobseeker can't as easily.
2) Use your fieldwork time cleverly. Interview civil servants, NGO folk and why not a few journalists who write on your country.. It's legitimate research but you can also make yourself a known figure in the circles you'd like to end up in.
3) Are you ESRC funded? If so, do that funded three month internship programme in an organisation you'd like to work for.
While the PhD itself as a qualification might not make you more employable, if you do stuff like that you can enhance your cv while still getting the PhD stipend.

Obviously if you're well connected and already have a cv to die for, then these ideas might not be attractive, but given all the sectors you mention are shrinking at the moment, I just wonder whether quitting the PhD is actually a good idea, given you are funded. If the realistic alternative is an unattractive job or crazily trying to fit freelancing, part-time work & volunteering together to make enough to live on, you may as well finish it and build your cv at the same time.

I warn you though - if you do go down the track I've suggested, you may be met with incomprehension by fellow PhDers and academic staff, who don't get why you're not chasing the holy grail of an academic job. But that's liveable with if you don't actually hate the idea of spending another couple of years on the PhD.

Yuk that certainly makes it more complicated. I think I'd tackle the welfare person, unless they give off vibes of untrustworthiness, and just ask for help understanding the structures of the place and where you are meant to seek help and advice. Is your institution completely independent i.e. do they award the degree? If say you're part of the University of London, there may be some sources of support and advice at the federal level, even if there's nothing obvious in your own institution if you know what I mean? I also wonder whether you'd be able to get any advice from the National postgraduate committee http://www.npc.org.uk/ - particularly on where you stand with the AHRC. It might be worth a try.
I'd also document everything from now on. Make a formal note of supervision meetings and send it to your supervisors saying that if you haven't heard from them by such and such a date, you assume they accept it to be an accurate record of the meeting. Reading between the lines, my suspicion would be that your supervisors might be in trouble over this already as they're going to such lengths to try and deny responsibility. It might therefore genuinely be worth talking to your HoD, even though he was on the panel, stressing that you were very shocked at the time and didn't really take in everything that was said, as you'd been assured by supervisor 2 that it was fine, and could he/she clarify what the problems are and what your status actually is. Then raise the supervision issues. Or if not the HoD, perhaps the most sympathetic seeming person of the three. But only you know the people involved, so this might not feel possible.

I'd agree with Sneaks on how to phrase it. Is the dept you are applying to likely to be entered for the REF? If so, it might be helpful in your c.v. to make it clear what your REF entry would look like. If not, I'd still clearly separate work submitted from work in preparation (make it two separate categories), as it makes the submitted stuff stand out better.

Minerva I'd agree you need to complain. To the best of my knowledge, the AHRC refuses to intervene in disputes between the university and studentship holders so you might want to leave that for the moment. What I think you need to get hold of is the institutional code on research supervision - it's probably on-line somewhere (if you have a website for your research training programme that would be a good place to look). If you can't find it, ask the education officer in the student union - they'll know. You need to show exactly how far short your supervision is from the mandated level. (And if it is only 4 meetings a year that is truly shocking - the Russell Group uni I'm postdocing at insists on twelve structured interactions per year).
I would also suggest complaining not just to the HoD but also taking it up, with whoever is the dean for research or postgrad students in your faculty. that's whose head is on the block, if they fail to get enough AHRC funded students to completion, so it's in his or her very best interests to get things sorted for you. If you feel too upset to act forcefully on your own behalf, then enlist the help of any student union advice centre there is. But get going quickly - it sounds as though you have a good case, but if a complaint is made soon after the incident, then it's more effective in my opinion. Good luck.

I think you should probably interpret it as 'it'd scrape through but we might need to revisit the chapter depending on how it reads when the whole thing is written'. Or at least that's what my supervisor would have meant by that comment. I found that she was very picky about style and grammar from the start but the major comments on content came when she'd read nearly the full draft and could really see where the holes in the argument are. I asked why she hadn't criticised the chapters individually earlier on content, and she said that she'd found that if you hammered earlier chapters, students got bogged down in trying to perfect them and got very discouraged, whereas if you got more or less a full draft and then started to improve it, then they seemed to stay on track better. THis was also a v experienced supervisor with no failed students (I also passed with minimal corrections) so it might bee the track your supervisor is following too.

Once you've collected all this stuff together though, at least you can recycle parts in other applications, so it's not wasted work regardless of the outcome.

http://ec.europa.eu/euraxess/index.cfm/jobs/index - this seems to be where many of the Marie Curie (EU funding) postdocs are advertised.

www.academics.de is good for Germany, http://chronicle.com/section/Jobs/61/ for US (but here often the appropriate professional organisation for your subject is often the best source).

jobs.ac.uk, THES and guardian websites should cover it for the UK (although I think Oxford and Cambridge don't always advertise beyond their own websites). Are you internationally mobile?

Juc,

Did you apply to everywhere in the country with block grant that's ok for your topic or just to your preferred options? If so, I'd definitely consider another go next year with a wider spread of applications. You are right though, your first degree result will not help. Is your MA from somewhere highly rated in your subject? If it is, then it might work out.

Odds on getting a permanent lectureship? Someone has calculated for my hopelessly oversubscribed soc sci subject (politics) that it's about 10% and a friend in genetics reckons it's about the same for them although that's cushioned by numerous postdocs in her subject. Mind you that's including everyone who graduates, and many won't want to go into academia, as a Politics PhD can be helpful in other careers if you've done something appropriate to public policy or NGO work. I'd imagine though that it's probably not much better in most humanities subjects although with variations according to topic area. E.g. I suspect modern history is better than medieval. If you want a lectuership I'm reliably told an accountancy PhD is the way to go. Apparently they have reall difficulty filling accountancy posts...

Juc I'm afraid to the best of my knowledge that's correct. There are career development loans but as they are only for courses lasting up to two years (or three with a year's work experience included), they don't really work for PhDs. To be really really honest with you, I really wouldn't recommend funding a humanities PhD through credit - it doesn't stack up as a sensible plan financially. I have a few suggestions that may work depending on your situation:
1) ask yourself whether a PhD is REALLY necessary to get you to whatever career you are seeking. If you are thinking of academia, be aware that the job market in the humanities means you are statistically unlikely to get an academic job, and that things are going to get worse not better in the next 5 years regardless of who wins on Thursday. If you are going to do this, whatever you do, go in with your eyes wide open, and don't assume you will beat the odds - plenty of excellent people don't.
2) If you need a PhD or can't imagine doing anything else then I assume you've not been successful in this year's funding battle. If you're eligible for AHRC funding, then study who has block grant funding for next year and apply everywhere that you can make a viable case that you could be supervised there. This might mean applying to places that you wouldn't choose to live in but I'd suggest trying to get past this if at all possible. Also keep an eye on the Tuesday guardian and jobs.ac.uk for any university scholarships or alternatively funded projects. It might also be worth considering the USA and Canada if you have a good academic record, or if you speak other languages and the project would be viable there, other European countries.
3) If you are AHRC eligible and have a first or very high 2:1 in your BA, it might be worth risking a career development loan for an MA but get advice from someone in the know in your subject as to what MAs might help your cause. They are very definitely not all equal. Also be aware that you'll have to start repaying as soon as you finish the MA.
4) If you're not AHRC eligible and/or your results / limited geographical mobility are such that you're unlikely to ever get funding, I'd suggest doing it part-time. It's just about financially manageable particularly if you live somewhere cheap. I have my doubts that London would be viable. Before commiting to this, ask your dept what other part-timers do to self-fund, and make sure you have a viable plan.
Sorry not to be really encouraging but I thought it was fairer to be honest.

If it's crucial for your field, are there other people in your department effected too? If so, it might be worth talking with the department person in charge of research students, to see if they can do anything. There might be someone in your dept using that method / technique, who isn't able / willing to teach it for the whole faculty but might for their own students. Otherwise I'd look up what the formal complaints procedure is at your university and start using it. I've noticed that if you complain formally a lot more notice is taken than if you just have an informal moan in an office. If then you have to escalate, you can prove that you've followed procedures but not have a satisfactory reply.

I assume you've done the obvious i.e. looked on the EU website's research funding pages?

If the colleague is serious about research and / or wants to leave the possibility of a career elsewhere open, then he/she should choose the best supervisor for the topic within geographical reach. If you can make a claim that the colleague in question is an international expert on your friend's topic and that the research resources at your home university are adequate, then it might be a choice that you can rationally defend to outsiders, but if neither of those things are true then it's going to look dubious to outsiders. I personally wouldn't want to give a colleague that much power over my career either but that's a personal perspective.