Eye on Britain
Posted by John Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).
Thursday, November 30, 2006
Censorship = Tolerance and Diversity?
Sometimes even obvious possibilities may not be mentioned
Satoshi Kanazawa, a virtually unknown professor of evolutionary psychology at the London School of Economics (LSE), has published in the pages of the British Journal of Health Psychology an article suggesting that ill-health and poverty in less-developed countries in Africa can be blamed on low IQs. Predictably, student activists have circulated an electronic petition across Europe calling on the well-known school to stand up for tolerance and diversity--by condemning Kanazawa.
Thankfully, these self-appointed do-gooders are off to a slow start. At the time I finished editing this column, the student petition, "LSE Lecturer: Research or Racism?" had only 151 signatures. Needless to say, I was not one of its signatories. It's not that I support Kanazawa (I don't even know who he is). Rather, I consider the petition's aim to be nothing more than a call for censorship. I'm not sure I like that.
I also bristle anytime student activists and other pimple-faced do-gooders decide what views or opinions I should be protected from. But more than anything else, the petition embodies the worst kind of political correctness and is, with no hyperbole intended, fundamentally dangerous to the very idea of academic freedom.
In my way of thinking, if you really aim to be diverse and tolerant--as an individual, institution, or society--then I think freedom of thought and liberty of opinion (no matter how objectionable) is fundamental. I am therefore perplexed by a petition that calls for institutional condemnation of a professor. How can censorship of a particular view--no matter how obtuse or misguided it may be--be equated to standing up for tolerance and diversity?
Now, let's be up-front about things here: Racist or racialist theories are repugnant. And Kanazawa may be shown to have, in the end, some questionable views. But I'm not ready to label him a racist or eugenicist yet since I haven't read his article (and I'm not about to blindly trust the British tabloids). His publishing record is certainly provocative and includes such choice works as "Why beautiful people are more intelligent", "You can judge a book by its cover", and "The myth of racial discrimination in pay in the US".
But the truth is I am not in the least bit interested in discussing Kanazawa or his article. What concerns me is the well-intentioned but wholly misguided reactions to his ideas. In other words, the problem is not Kanazawa but the LSE petition and the authoritarian liberals signing it. Their morally righteous and knee-jerk reaction to ideas deemed "dangerous" frankly terrifies me much more than Kanazawa himself
To be sure, this is the first that any of us studying journalism here have ever heard of Kanazawa. But I have little doubt that the Kanazawa story will get bigger in the coming weeks--especially as the petition spreads and if the LSE continues to admirably defend the professor's right to publish controversial research.
Of course, in the US, we've seen this all before: earlier this year, when John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt published their paper "The Israel Lobby"; in, 2005, when Larry Summers at Harvard raised questions about gender and academic achievement in mathematics; in 2004, when Samuel Huntington published Who Are We?, on America's national identity and Hispanic immigration; in 1994, when Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein co-wrote The Bell Curve. It's no different on the other side of the Atlantic. In March, Leeds University forced the early retirement of a professor accused of racism because he supported the ideas of Murray and Herrnstein (which have, by the way, almost nothing to do with race but everything to do with the erosion of social cohesion in the US). And incidents of political correctness abound in England and across the Euro-zone.
That's why with regards to Kanazawa, I am surprised that the LSE hasn't yet fired him. (The last time I saw this kind of back-bone in defense of free speech was when the Danish government refused to condemn the news daily Jyllands-Posten for publishing a dozen cartoons of the prophet Muhammad.)
What to do about Kanazawa? Laissez faire, laissez aller, laissez passer. Let him continue to put his ideas into circulation--by publishing articles, lecturing, giving provocative presentations--and watch just how quickly the marketplace of ideas at the LSE and elsewhere will churn with indignant responses to his outrageous claims. I have no doubt that his work will eventually serve as a catalyst for others to carry out their own research. Some of these researchers will overwhelm him with reams of new data. Others may eventually (si Deus vult) prove him flat-out wrong--and effectively reduce him to academic irrelevance.
But liberty of thought and mind is vital. And if there is one place in the world where crack-pot ideas can be discussed and hair-brained schemes explored without fear of retribution it should be in the halls of academe. It is precisely because the LSE is a diverse and tolerant [academic] institution that it should do nothing about Kanazawa and leave the professor to his fever swamps. Let the student petitioners gnash their teeth.
Source
Starbucks again in the sights of the success-haters
Starbucks was accused yesterday of "playing Russian roulette" with its brand as a row over prices for Ethiopian coffee farmers intensified. As an Oxford academic lambasted the American coffee shops chain, Jim Donald, Starbucks' chief executive, was preparing to visit Ethiopia tomorrow for talks with Meles Zenawi, its Prime Minister, The Times has learnt.
Douglas Holt, the L'Or‚al Professor of Marketing at Oxford University's Said Business School, accused Starbucks of hypocrisy and abuse of power and said that the company was in danger of damaging its name among its educated middle-class customers by opposing Addis Ababa's attempts to trademark Ethiopia's coffee varieties in the United States.
The international coffee chain had worked hard to cultivate a progressive image, selling fair trade and "ethical" products and promoting sustainable development among the poorest coffee-growers, he said. "In their rash attempt to shut down Ethiopia's applications, [Starbucks] have placed the Starbucks brand in significant peril. Starbucks customers will be shocked by the disconnect between their current perceptions of Starbucks' ethics and the company's actions against Ethiopia," he said. He claimed that Starbucks' stance was likely to hit profits much harder than any price rises brought about by trademarking.
Oxfam said last month that the Ethiopian growers selling to Starbucks earned between 75 cents and $1.60 a pound on beans that Starbucks sold at up to $26 (13.40 pounds sterling) a pound. The aid organisation issued a strongly worded statement accusing Starbucks of actively blocking Ethiopia's trademark bid.
Starbucks, in turn, denied this and issued a statement demanding that Oxfam stop its attack. Oxfam took out full-page advertisements on the issue in The New York Times and two Seattle-based newspapers. Starbucks said that trademarks were not the best way to help growers and suggested a regional certification alternative that it said was used in many countries to brand premium food and wine. It made no sense, the company said, for trademarks to be geographically based, as in the Ethiopian application for three regional names. Starbucks added that it consistently paid premium bean prices and that between 2002 and 2006 it had quadrupled its Ethiopian coffee purchases.
"We support the recognition of the source of our coffees and have a deep appreciation for the farmers that grow them," the company said. "We are committed to working collaboratively and continuing dialogue with key stakeholders to find a solution that benefits Ethiopian coffee farmers. We have had recent conversations with Oxfam about planning logistics for a stakeholder summit. "Our investment in social development projects and providing access to affordable loans . . . has been recognised for its leadership within the industry," it said.
Getachew Mengistie, the director-general of the Ethiopian Intellectual Property Office, said that Addis Ababa had studied the merits of both trademarks and certification and found that trademarks would strengthen the position of farmers, enabling them to get a reasonable return for their product.
Professor Holt said: "With a certification mark, Starbucks and other Western coffee marketers would still have full control over Ethiopian coffee brands." Trademarks would require licences for companies wanting to use the names - giving the coffee producers a commercial asset that they could control.
Starbucks declined to confirm or deny Mr Donald's visit. Oxfam said that it had invited supporters to fax Mr Donald in protest and that more than 70,000 people had done so. "Speciality coffees in other regions of the world can get up to 45 per cent of the retail price, compared with the 5 to 10 per cent Ethiopians are currently receiving," Oxfam said. "We're meeting with Starbucks again next week and are hoping there can be progress." Ethiopia's growers could earn $88 million more per year with trademarks, it said. Starbucks declined to respond directly to Professor Holt's comments.
Brian Smith, research fellow at Cranfield University and author of Guarding the Brand, questioned Professor Holt's assertions. He said that Western consumers had limited sympathy with subsistence farmers in Africa and although they might be prepared to pay 5p more for a fair trade latte, they might not walk an extra 50 yards to another coffee shop to avoid Starbucks and its policy on trademarks. "I don't see this doing Starbucks significant long-lasting harm . . . Starbucks will handle this in an intelligent manner, offering an alternative," he said.
Source
SLOUCHING IS GOOD FOR YOU
There are a few leaps in the reasoning below but it has given room for debate in an area not usually discussed scientifically
Your mother probably told you, as her mother told her: sit up straight. Whether at table, in class or at work we have always been told that sitting stiff-backed and upright is good for our bones, our posture, our digestion, our alertness and our general air of looking as if we are plugged into the world. Now research suggests that we would be far better off slouching and slumping. Today's advice is to let go and recline. Using a new form of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), a team of radiologists have found that sitting up straight puts unneccesary strain on the spine and could cause chronic back pain because of trapped nerves or slipped discs.
The ideal angle for office workers who sit for long periods is about 135 degrees. It might make working at a computer impractical but it will put less pressure on the spine than a hunched or upright position, the researchers say. The study at Woodend Hospital in Aberdeen involved 22 healthy volunteers who had no history of back pain or surgery. They adjusted their posture while being scanned by a movable MRI machine, assuming three sitting positions: a slouch, with the body hunched forward over a desk or video game console; an upright 90-degree sitting position; and a relaxed position where the patient reclined at 135 degrees but kept their feet on the floor. By measuring the spinal angles and the arrangement and height of spinal discs and movement across the positions, the radiologists found that the relaxed posture best preserved the spine's natural shape.
Waseem Amir Bashir, from Edinburgh, lead author of the study, said: "When pressure is put on the spine it becomes squashed and misaligned. A 135-degree body-thigh sitting posture was demonstrated to be the best biomechanical sitting position, as opposed to a 90-degree posture, which most people consider normal. "Sitting in a sound anatomic position is essential, since the strain put on the spine and its associated muscles and ligaments over time can lead to pain, deformity and chronic illness." Dr Bashir, who now works at the University of Alberta Hospital in Canada, presented the research yesterday at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) in Chicago. The study was the first of its kind because MRI scanning has previously required patients to lie flat.
Back pain is the cause of one in six days off work and about 80 per cent of Britons are expected to suffer from it at some point. Office workers and school children may stave off future back problems by correcting their sitting posture and finding a chair that allows them to recline, Dr Bashir said. He added: "We were not created to sit down for long hours, but somehow modern life requires the vast majority of the global population to work in a seated position, The best position for our backs is arguably lying down, but this is hardly practical."
However, Gordon Waddell, an orthopaedic surgeon at the Glasgow Nuffield Hospital, said that the link between biomechanics as shown in MRI scans and preventing back pain was still very theoretical. It was "human nature" to develop back pain, he said. "Like a headache or a cold, it seems we all get back pain and most of the evidence suggests that sitting position does not make a difference
Source
OBESITY NOW A CRIME IN BRITAIN
So far only in dogs but child obesity cannot be far behind
Obesity has become such an issue of political incorrectness that two brothers appeared in court yesterday charged with allowing a dog to get too fat. Rusty, a nine-year-old labrador, may only have been doing what labradors do, which is to eat everything in sight. But he ballooned to more than 11« stone (161lb, 73kg), the ideal weight for a large-boned 6ft (1.82m) woman, but not a retriever, which should be chasing sticks and newly shot game. Rusty had trouble standing up, and after no more than five paces he had to sit down again, breathless. He looked, magistrates at Ely, Cambridgeshire, were told yesterday, more like a seal than a dog.
In what is thought to be the first case of its kind, Rusty's owners, David Benton and his brother Derek, have been charged with animal cruelty for allowing him to become grossly overweight. According to the Kennel Club, the ideal weight for a dog of Rusty's age and breed is between 65lb and 80lb. When found by an RSPCA inspector, Rusty was more than twice the upper limit. Unlike most labradors, he was quite incapable of leaping into a van. The Benton brothers, of Fordham, Cambridgeshire, deny causing the dog unncessary suffering. They claim that they fed Rusty a normal diet of dried pet food with only the odd bone as a treat.
When Jason Finch of the RSPCA first saw Rusty in February, he found the dog virtually unable to move, the court was told. He issued a notice advising the owners to take the dog to a vet as soon as possible. When he returned in March, they had not done so. The owners declined to sign the dog over to the RSPCA, but agreed to let Mr Finch take Rusty to the charity's own vet. But the dog could not even walk to Mr Finch's van.
Stephen Climie, for the prosecution, said that Rusty had been found to be morbidly obese at 74.2kg, double the weight of a normal labrador; the brothers had been told repeatedly by vets over five years to put the dog on a diet, but had not done so. Rusty suffers from arthritis, a common complaint in labradors, but his condition had been made worse by his being grossly overweight, Mr Climie said. Alex Wylie, a vet from Bury St Edmunds who treated Rusty, said that the dog suffered from painful joints and breathing problems. "He did literally look like a walrus. There were times when he couldn't get up from his back legs at all. It was horrible to see."
When interviewed by the RSPCA, David Benton insisted that Rusty ate only one meal of dried food each evening and a snack in the morning. "He has been plump ever since he was a puppy. He is a poor old thing but he is not in pain. We have tried to give him many foods, but it does not make any difference," he said. Derek Benton told the charity that Rusty's weight gain was old age catching up with him.
The court was told that Rusty had not seen a vet for 17 months before the RSPCA took him away. The brothers claimed that they used to get him treated under a pet insurance plan, but could no longer get cover because of his age. Since living with an RSPCA dog carer, the court was told, Rusty had lost 3.5 stone [49lb].
Source
British Labour's health chaos: you couldn't make it up
They are trying to close an A&E [ER] department in Casualty. In Holby City more and more patients have to be transferred to specialist centres elsewhere. In No 10 they wish everyone could understand what the scriptwriters do: the NHS is changing.
Source
AN OPTIMISTIC GREENIE!
But about Britain only
The days of empire may be gone but global warming will make Britain the centre of the civilised world once again, according to James Lovelock, the creator of the Gaia theory, which views the world as a self-sustaining organic system. In a bleak prophecy he says that global warming will become so intense within a century that much of the world will become uninhabitable. The British Isles, however, is perfectly placed to become the most desirable location in the world in which to live and one of the few areas able to feed itself. It will be able to survive the devastating consequences of global heating, as he now terms it.
Professor Lovelock was one of the first scientists to give warning of the dangers of global warming, which he believes is here for 200,000 years. It will wreak so much havoc that the Earth wil be able to support only 500 million people, just one in six of today's population. Adaptation, Professor Lovelock said yesterday, is the only choice left as the world warms up and there is a rapid northwards shift of its population. Equatorial regions will become so hot that they can no longer sustain agriculture and will turn into deserts. Much of Europe will dry out so extensively that millions of people will be forced to make a new life closer to the Arctic.
The British Isles, small and surrounded by water, will remain cool enough to sustain a modern, technologically advanced nation, despite being 8C (14F) hotter on average. "The British Isles may be a very desirable bit of real estate because we are surrounded by the sea," he said. "The summer of 2003 will be typical of conditions by 2100." Displaced millions will settle in Britain and Ireland and will have to be accommodated in skyscrapers that will make cities resemble the Hong Kong of today - which by 2100 will be uninhabitable, he said.
Speaking to the media before a speech to the Institution of Chemical Engineers yesterday, Professor Lovelock said that agricultural land would be at a premium and rationing would have to be reintroduced. Among the countries forecast by Professor Lovelock to face agricultural collapse is China. A warming world will open up Siberia as a potential grainbelt but he doubts that Russia will welcome a billion Chinese immigrants. Island nations such as New Zealand may remain habitable but large land masses, including most of the USA and Asia, will become too hot to grow sufficient food, with the possible exception of some coastal regions.
His Gaia theory suggests that rather than temperatures continuing to rise indefinitely until emissions are controlled, the increase will be limited to 8C. He likens it to a human suffering a fever - but one from which it will take the planet 200,000 years to recover from. Despite his bleak prophecy he remains optimistic for the species if not for individuals: "We are not all doomed," he said. "An awful lot of people will die, but I don't see the species dying out."
Source
Sometimes even obvious possibilities may not be mentioned
Satoshi Kanazawa, a virtually unknown professor of evolutionary psychology at the London School of Economics (LSE), has published in the pages of the British Journal of Health Psychology an article suggesting that ill-health and poverty in less-developed countries in Africa can be blamed on low IQs. Predictably, student activists have circulated an electronic petition across Europe calling on the well-known school to stand up for tolerance and diversity--by condemning Kanazawa.
Thankfully, these self-appointed do-gooders are off to a slow start. At the time I finished editing this column, the student petition, "LSE Lecturer: Research or Racism?" had only 151 signatures. Needless to say, I was not one of its signatories. It's not that I support Kanazawa (I don't even know who he is). Rather, I consider the petition's aim to be nothing more than a call for censorship. I'm not sure I like that.
I also bristle anytime student activists and other pimple-faced do-gooders decide what views or opinions I should be protected from. But more than anything else, the petition embodies the worst kind of political correctness and is, with no hyperbole intended, fundamentally dangerous to the very idea of academic freedom.
In my way of thinking, if you really aim to be diverse and tolerant--as an individual, institution, or society--then I think freedom of thought and liberty of opinion (no matter how objectionable) is fundamental. I am therefore perplexed by a petition that calls for institutional condemnation of a professor. How can censorship of a particular view--no matter how obtuse or misguided it may be--be equated to standing up for tolerance and diversity?
Now, let's be up-front about things here: Racist or racialist theories are repugnant. And Kanazawa may be shown to have, in the end, some questionable views. But I'm not ready to label him a racist or eugenicist yet since I haven't read his article (and I'm not about to blindly trust the British tabloids). His publishing record is certainly provocative and includes such choice works as "Why beautiful people are more intelligent", "You can judge a book by its cover", and "The myth of racial discrimination in pay in the US".
But the truth is I am not in the least bit interested in discussing Kanazawa or his article. What concerns me is the well-intentioned but wholly misguided reactions to his ideas. In other words, the problem is not Kanazawa but the LSE petition and the authoritarian liberals signing it. Their morally righteous and knee-jerk reaction to ideas deemed "dangerous" frankly terrifies me much more than Kanazawa himself
To be sure, this is the first that any of us studying journalism here have ever heard of Kanazawa. But I have little doubt that the Kanazawa story will get bigger in the coming weeks--especially as the petition spreads and if the LSE continues to admirably defend the professor's right to publish controversial research.
Of course, in the US, we've seen this all before: earlier this year, when John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt published their paper "The Israel Lobby"; in, 2005, when Larry Summers at Harvard raised questions about gender and academic achievement in mathematics; in 2004, when Samuel Huntington published Who Are We?, on America's national identity and Hispanic immigration; in 1994, when Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein co-wrote The Bell Curve. It's no different on the other side of the Atlantic. In March, Leeds University forced the early retirement of a professor accused of racism because he supported the ideas of Murray and Herrnstein (which have, by the way, almost nothing to do with race but everything to do with the erosion of social cohesion in the US). And incidents of political correctness abound in England and across the Euro-zone.
That's why with regards to Kanazawa, I am surprised that the LSE hasn't yet fired him. (The last time I saw this kind of back-bone in defense of free speech was when the Danish government refused to condemn the news daily Jyllands-Posten for publishing a dozen cartoons of the prophet Muhammad.)
What to do about Kanazawa? Laissez faire, laissez aller, laissez passer. Let him continue to put his ideas into circulation--by publishing articles, lecturing, giving provocative presentations--and watch just how quickly the marketplace of ideas at the LSE and elsewhere will churn with indignant responses to his outrageous claims. I have no doubt that his work will eventually serve as a catalyst for others to carry out their own research. Some of these researchers will overwhelm him with reams of new data. Others may eventually (si Deus vult) prove him flat-out wrong--and effectively reduce him to academic irrelevance.
But liberty of thought and mind is vital. And if there is one place in the world where crack-pot ideas can be discussed and hair-brained schemes explored without fear of retribution it should be in the halls of academe. It is precisely because the LSE is a diverse and tolerant [academic] institution that it should do nothing about Kanazawa and leave the professor to his fever swamps. Let the student petitioners gnash their teeth.
Source
Starbucks again in the sights of the success-haters
Starbucks was accused yesterday of "playing Russian roulette" with its brand as a row over prices for Ethiopian coffee farmers intensified. As an Oxford academic lambasted the American coffee shops chain, Jim Donald, Starbucks' chief executive, was preparing to visit Ethiopia tomorrow for talks with Meles Zenawi, its Prime Minister, The Times has learnt.
Douglas Holt, the L'Or‚al Professor of Marketing at Oxford University's Said Business School, accused Starbucks of hypocrisy and abuse of power and said that the company was in danger of damaging its name among its educated middle-class customers by opposing Addis Ababa's attempts to trademark Ethiopia's coffee varieties in the United States.
The international coffee chain had worked hard to cultivate a progressive image, selling fair trade and "ethical" products and promoting sustainable development among the poorest coffee-growers, he said. "In their rash attempt to shut down Ethiopia's applications, [Starbucks] have placed the Starbucks brand in significant peril. Starbucks customers will be shocked by the disconnect between their current perceptions of Starbucks' ethics and the company's actions against Ethiopia," he said. He claimed that Starbucks' stance was likely to hit profits much harder than any price rises brought about by trademarking.
Oxfam said last month that the Ethiopian growers selling to Starbucks earned between 75 cents and $1.60 a pound on beans that Starbucks sold at up to $26 (13.40 pounds sterling) a pound. The aid organisation issued a strongly worded statement accusing Starbucks of actively blocking Ethiopia's trademark bid.
Starbucks, in turn, denied this and issued a statement demanding that Oxfam stop its attack. Oxfam took out full-page advertisements on the issue in The New York Times and two Seattle-based newspapers. Starbucks said that trademarks were not the best way to help growers and suggested a regional certification alternative that it said was used in many countries to brand premium food and wine. It made no sense, the company said, for trademarks to be geographically based, as in the Ethiopian application for three regional names. Starbucks added that it consistently paid premium bean prices and that between 2002 and 2006 it had quadrupled its Ethiopian coffee purchases.
"We support the recognition of the source of our coffees and have a deep appreciation for the farmers that grow them," the company said. "We are committed to working collaboratively and continuing dialogue with key stakeholders to find a solution that benefits Ethiopian coffee farmers. We have had recent conversations with Oxfam about planning logistics for a stakeholder summit. "Our investment in social development projects and providing access to affordable loans . . . has been recognised for its leadership within the industry," it said.
Getachew Mengistie, the director-general of the Ethiopian Intellectual Property Office, said that Addis Ababa had studied the merits of both trademarks and certification and found that trademarks would strengthen the position of farmers, enabling them to get a reasonable return for their product.
Professor Holt said: "With a certification mark, Starbucks and other Western coffee marketers would still have full control over Ethiopian coffee brands." Trademarks would require licences for companies wanting to use the names - giving the coffee producers a commercial asset that they could control.
Starbucks declined to confirm or deny Mr Donald's visit. Oxfam said that it had invited supporters to fax Mr Donald in protest and that more than 70,000 people had done so. "Speciality coffees in other regions of the world can get up to 45 per cent of the retail price, compared with the 5 to 10 per cent Ethiopians are currently receiving," Oxfam said. "We're meeting with Starbucks again next week and are hoping there can be progress." Ethiopia's growers could earn $88 million more per year with trademarks, it said. Starbucks declined to respond directly to Professor Holt's comments.
Brian Smith, research fellow at Cranfield University and author of Guarding the Brand, questioned Professor Holt's assertions. He said that Western consumers had limited sympathy with subsistence farmers in Africa and although they might be prepared to pay 5p more for a fair trade latte, they might not walk an extra 50 yards to another coffee shop to avoid Starbucks and its policy on trademarks. "I don't see this doing Starbucks significant long-lasting harm . . . Starbucks will handle this in an intelligent manner, offering an alternative," he said.
Source
SLOUCHING IS GOOD FOR YOU
There are a few leaps in the reasoning below but it has given room for debate in an area not usually discussed scientifically
Your mother probably told you, as her mother told her: sit up straight. Whether at table, in class or at work we have always been told that sitting stiff-backed and upright is good for our bones, our posture, our digestion, our alertness and our general air of looking as if we are plugged into the world. Now research suggests that we would be far better off slouching and slumping. Today's advice is to let go and recline. Using a new form of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), a team of radiologists have found that sitting up straight puts unneccesary strain on the spine and could cause chronic back pain because of trapped nerves or slipped discs.
The ideal angle for office workers who sit for long periods is about 135 degrees. It might make working at a computer impractical but it will put less pressure on the spine than a hunched or upright position, the researchers say. The study at Woodend Hospital in Aberdeen involved 22 healthy volunteers who had no history of back pain or surgery. They adjusted their posture while being scanned by a movable MRI machine, assuming three sitting positions: a slouch, with the body hunched forward over a desk or video game console; an upright 90-degree sitting position; and a relaxed position where the patient reclined at 135 degrees but kept their feet on the floor. By measuring the spinal angles and the arrangement and height of spinal discs and movement across the positions, the radiologists found that the relaxed posture best preserved the spine's natural shape.
Waseem Amir Bashir, from Edinburgh, lead author of the study, said: "When pressure is put on the spine it becomes squashed and misaligned. A 135-degree body-thigh sitting posture was demonstrated to be the best biomechanical sitting position, as opposed to a 90-degree posture, which most people consider normal. "Sitting in a sound anatomic position is essential, since the strain put on the spine and its associated muscles and ligaments over time can lead to pain, deformity and chronic illness." Dr Bashir, who now works at the University of Alberta Hospital in Canada, presented the research yesterday at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) in Chicago. The study was the first of its kind because MRI scanning has previously required patients to lie flat.
Back pain is the cause of one in six days off work and about 80 per cent of Britons are expected to suffer from it at some point. Office workers and school children may stave off future back problems by correcting their sitting posture and finding a chair that allows them to recline, Dr Bashir said. He added: "We were not created to sit down for long hours, but somehow modern life requires the vast majority of the global population to work in a seated position, The best position for our backs is arguably lying down, but this is hardly practical."
However, Gordon Waddell, an orthopaedic surgeon at the Glasgow Nuffield Hospital, said that the link between biomechanics as shown in MRI scans and preventing back pain was still very theoretical. It was "human nature" to develop back pain, he said. "Like a headache or a cold, it seems we all get back pain and most of the evidence suggests that sitting position does not make a difference
Source
OBESITY NOW A CRIME IN BRITAIN
So far only in dogs but child obesity cannot be far behind
Obesity has become such an issue of political incorrectness that two brothers appeared in court yesterday charged with allowing a dog to get too fat. Rusty, a nine-year-old labrador, may only have been doing what labradors do, which is to eat everything in sight. But he ballooned to more than 11« stone (161lb, 73kg), the ideal weight for a large-boned 6ft (1.82m) woman, but not a retriever, which should be chasing sticks and newly shot game. Rusty had trouble standing up, and after no more than five paces he had to sit down again, breathless. He looked, magistrates at Ely, Cambridgeshire, were told yesterday, more like a seal than a dog.
In what is thought to be the first case of its kind, Rusty's owners, David Benton and his brother Derek, have been charged with animal cruelty for allowing him to become grossly overweight. According to the Kennel Club, the ideal weight for a dog of Rusty's age and breed is between 65lb and 80lb. When found by an RSPCA inspector, Rusty was more than twice the upper limit. Unlike most labradors, he was quite incapable of leaping into a van. The Benton brothers, of Fordham, Cambridgeshire, deny causing the dog unncessary suffering. They claim that they fed Rusty a normal diet of dried pet food with only the odd bone as a treat.
When Jason Finch of the RSPCA first saw Rusty in February, he found the dog virtually unable to move, the court was told. He issued a notice advising the owners to take the dog to a vet as soon as possible. When he returned in March, they had not done so. The owners declined to sign the dog over to the RSPCA, but agreed to let Mr Finch take Rusty to the charity's own vet. But the dog could not even walk to Mr Finch's van.
Stephen Climie, for the prosecution, said that Rusty had been found to be morbidly obese at 74.2kg, double the weight of a normal labrador; the brothers had been told repeatedly by vets over five years to put the dog on a diet, but had not done so. Rusty suffers from arthritis, a common complaint in labradors, but his condition had been made worse by his being grossly overweight, Mr Climie said. Alex Wylie, a vet from Bury St Edmunds who treated Rusty, said that the dog suffered from painful joints and breathing problems. "He did literally look like a walrus. There were times when he couldn't get up from his back legs at all. It was horrible to see."
When interviewed by the RSPCA, David Benton insisted that Rusty ate only one meal of dried food each evening and a snack in the morning. "He has been plump ever since he was a puppy. He is a poor old thing but he is not in pain. We have tried to give him many foods, but it does not make any difference," he said. Derek Benton told the charity that Rusty's weight gain was old age catching up with him.
The court was told that Rusty had not seen a vet for 17 months before the RSPCA took him away. The brothers claimed that they used to get him treated under a pet insurance plan, but could no longer get cover because of his age. Since living with an RSPCA dog carer, the court was told, Rusty had lost 3.5 stone [49lb].
Source
British Labour's health chaos: you couldn't make it up
They are trying to close an A&E [ER] department in Casualty. In Holby City more and more patients have to be transferred to specialist centres elsewhere. In No 10 they wish everyone could understand what the scriptwriters do: the NHS is changing.
The voters certainly don’t get it. It used to be Labour’s boast that it was the party of the NHS. And it was true: every single poll showed Labour ahead of the Conservatives on the health service, always. Until this summer. In the past ten years Labour has achieved the extraordinary feat of turning a 49-point lead over the Tories on health into a four-point lead for the Tories (Ipsos MORI). That’s a stunning fall at a time when spending on the NHS under Labour has ballooned from £35 billion to £80 billion, and waiting lists have fallen from 18 to six months.
In part the decline reflects growing cynicism about the Government in general, in part it is a riposte to overblown promises about “saving the NHS”. Ten years after promising to “save” it, the health service has a £500 million debt and 60 hospitals are threatened with closure or downgrading.
What went wrong? First, not as much as it sounds. The debt isn’t a lot for a health service with a budget of £80 billion. Gordon Brown could flick that away with a stroke of his pen, or his big clunking fist.
Nor is it on the whole that the Conservative Party is trusted more with the NHS; Labour is just trusted less. Four in ten people say that they don’t know who would do the best job any more.
That’s the good news for the Government. The rest is bad. With hospital closures imminent and a ferocious Conservative assault on the territory, including a cheeky campaign to “stop Brown’s NHS cuts”, Labour is worried. Not quite worried sick, but it should be.
The drive to cut the debt has coincided with a big push towards “reconfiguration” of services — hospital closures to you and me. It is almost impossible now for ministers to disentangle in people’s minds the idea that the local health service is in debt with the fact that their hospital is under threat. The Government argues that the closure or downgrading of some hospitals was always implicit in its reforms, regardless of the current financial difficulties, as some treatment was brought “closer to the people” while greater specialisation saw fewer, more specialised hospitals. I don’t remember them championing hospital closures when they published their reform programme, the NHS Plan, six years ago. It was an implicit not an explicit part of it.
The area I live in is in debt and has a number of hospitals under threat. Throughout Surrey and Sussex, in East Anglia and other threatened areas, this is the big conversation. It dominates local media. What ministers may have hoped could be contained in a few mainly Conservative rural areas has spilled over into the national press, and they haven’t even started shutting any of the hospitals yet. We are in a pre-consultation planning period, when health authorities are drawing up plans for public consultation next year, and rumours abound as to what hideousness they may contain. The vacuum of information is filled by local GPs, who tell patients they cannot take on the extra work the Government says they are going to do when the hospital closes: no staff, and no space to expand the surgery.
What mastermind at the heart of government, I wonder, planned this? And planned it so perfectly that the next election is going to coincide with massive hospital cuts?
“It’s the right thing to do,” they repeat. Tony Blair is not for turning. Fewer, more specialised hospitals will be safer for patients who will end up overall with better services, not worse. And what is more, we won’t get to the maximum 18-week wait between GP referral and treatment by the end of 2008 unless we do it.
So between spring next year and the end of 2008 the Government is simultaneously going to jump through the hoops of closing hospitals, reorganise local services, open new treatment centres and make the biggest, deepest cut yet in waiting lists? Forget it.
There is a broader tension in government policy that nobody can resolve: just as it claims to be bringing care closer to the people, it is planning to take local A&E and maternity departments further away from them. Local health planners calculate how long an ambulance with a flashing blue light might take to reach the specialist hospital, not an ordinary driver distracted by a sick family member in the car. Ministers have realised that these are the issues that have to be addressed, tangibly, in the local reorganisation proposals, which is why they have been put back until next year.
Let’s assume that the Government is right and a lot of conditions — asthma, diabetes, heart disease, arthritis — as well as many minor operations could be better and more cheaply managed in local communities or at home than in big hospitals. Let’s allow too that superhospitals with knobs on have a better chance of saving the life of a seriously injured person, and that babies are marginally more safely delivered in larger specialist centres (which is why mothers at high risk will be transferred there anyway).
That still won’t answer the “local” problem. People do not feel safe without access to an A&E that they can reach within a reasonable time. They would prefer to have their babies in a local hospital, which means maintaining a full maternity unit — there were some terrible problems in Kidderminster when the maternity unit was downgraded to a midwife-led one. And when a baby is born, or someone is taken ill in the night, the family wants to be able to visit the next day, without making a two to three-hour round trip, plus the visit time.
These are human needs outside the medical charts, and the Government has failed to grasp them. I wonder if it’s too late to ask Casualty’s scriptwriters for help.
Source
AN OPTIMISTIC GREENIE!
But about Britain only
The days of empire may be gone but global warming will make Britain the centre of the civilised world once again, according to James Lovelock, the creator of the Gaia theory, which views the world as a self-sustaining organic system. In a bleak prophecy he says that global warming will become so intense within a century that much of the world will become uninhabitable. The British Isles, however, is perfectly placed to become the most desirable location in the world in which to live and one of the few areas able to feed itself. It will be able to survive the devastating consequences of global heating, as he now terms it.
Professor Lovelock was one of the first scientists to give warning of the dangers of global warming, which he believes is here for 200,000 years. It will wreak so much havoc that the Earth wil be able to support only 500 million people, just one in six of today's population. Adaptation, Professor Lovelock said yesterday, is the only choice left as the world warms up and there is a rapid northwards shift of its population. Equatorial regions will become so hot that they can no longer sustain agriculture and will turn into deserts. Much of Europe will dry out so extensively that millions of people will be forced to make a new life closer to the Arctic.
The British Isles, small and surrounded by water, will remain cool enough to sustain a modern, technologically advanced nation, despite being 8C (14F) hotter on average. "The British Isles may be a very desirable bit of real estate because we are surrounded by the sea," he said. "The summer of 2003 will be typical of conditions by 2100." Displaced millions will settle in Britain and Ireland and will have to be accommodated in skyscrapers that will make cities resemble the Hong Kong of today - which by 2100 will be uninhabitable, he said.
Speaking to the media before a speech to the Institution of Chemical Engineers yesterday, Professor Lovelock said that agricultural land would be at a premium and rationing would have to be reintroduced. Among the countries forecast by Professor Lovelock to face agricultural collapse is China. A warming world will open up Siberia as a potential grainbelt but he doubts that Russia will welcome a billion Chinese immigrants. Island nations such as New Zealand may remain habitable but large land masses, including most of the USA and Asia, will become too hot to grow sufficient food, with the possible exception of some coastal regions.
His Gaia theory suggests that rather than temperatures continuing to rise indefinitely until emissions are controlled, the increase will be limited to 8C. He likens it to a human suffering a fever - but one from which it will take the planet 200,000 years to recover from. Despite his bleak prophecy he remains optimistic for the species if not for individuals: "We are not all doomed," he said. "An awful lot of people will die, but I don't see the species dying out."
Source
Wednesday, November 29, 2006
Filth and shame in an NHS hospital
Twenty-four hours to save the NHS! I wonder how often that promise comes back to haunt Tony Blair 10 years later. Week after week reliable reports and the government’s own figures tell a disgraceful story of incompetence, debt, misery and filth in the National Health Service. That story is supported, week after week, by heart-rending personal accounts of horrors on the wards.
The broken new Labour promise that caught most public attention last week was the failure to abolish mixed-sex wards. Janet Street-Porter, the ferocious media personality, wrote about the misery of her sister when dying of cancer in a mixed-sex NHS ward. Plenty of other people have tried to draw attention to this disgrace and Baroness Knight, the Conservative peer, has been campaigning about it for years but — such is the spirit of the times — it takes a loud-mouth celebrity to get public attention.
Source
BRITISH GOVERNMENT DISCOURAGES MARRIAGE
The scandalous way that Labour has allowed State handouts to undermine marriage was exposed last night. A newlywed couple revealed how they were told by a Government welfare official: "You'd get more money if you split up." Janet and Mark Fensome were advised by their local Job Centre that if they wanted extra money in handouts, the best thing to do was to get divorced because under existing rules, couples who live apart get more. They had married three weeks earlier and were shocked to find out that the welfare official was right - but they refused to take the advice and complained to their MP.
The Job Centre's manager later apologised for the advice and said the official had acted wrongly. But aides to Work and Pensions Secretary John Hutton has confirmed that, technically, the official was right: if the Fensomes had split up they would get an extra 25 pounds a week - or 1,250 a year. The Tories claimed that this showed how Labour has downgraded marriage and encouraged family break-ups by making it profitable to become single parents. Shadow Work and Pensions Minister Andrew Selous, who by chance is the Fensomes' MP, said: "John Hutton says he wants to encourage families together but Job Centres are telling people to do the opposite."
Mrs Fensome, of Houghton Regis, near Dunstable, in Bedfordshire, said: "We went to sort out a problem with our benefits after we came back from our honeymoon in Blackpool. "The woman at the Job Centre said, "If only you were split up and you were both single, it would be much easier to deal with and you would get more money too." I couldn't believe it." Mother-of-four Mrs Fensome, 41, who is training to be a marriage guidance counsellor, married engineer Mark on September 9. She helps with the local Cubs and Scouts and gave up work to care for her two infirm parents. Mr Fensome has been with the same engineering firm for more than 20 years but has been off work on incapacity benefit since suffering a nervous breakdown. For most of his time off work, Mr Fensome, 44, did not claim a penny in benefits and lived off his savings. When The Mail on Sunday visited the family yesterday, one of Mrs Fensome's teenage sons was practising the clarinet and another was doing his maths homework.
After their honeymoon in Blackpool paid for by friends and family, the couple went to Dunstable Job Centre Plus to sort out their benefit entitlements as a married couple. "The Government says it believes in families and yet it is advising people to part to claim more benefits. It doesn't make sense,' said Mrs Fensome. They were so shocked by the advice, they went to Bedfordshire South West MP Mr Selous, who complained to the head of Bedfordshire Job Centres. "I told him it was completely out of order,' said Mr Selous. "He apologised and said the official should not have said it and it was not their policy to advise people to break up. I want an assurance that this is not happening in other Job Centres."
The tax and benefits attack on marriage under Labour started when Gordon Brown abolished the married couples' tax allowance. The Tories claim the new system for helping people with children is biased against couples because single-parent families get the same amount in tax rebates as a couple where one parent stays at home to bring up the children. There are other handouts where couples can claim more by breaking up. Divorced couples can claim two portions of housing benefit and council tax rebate. Single parents get a 22.20 housing benefit premium. The unemployed can also claim more in income support and job seekers' allowance. In both cases a couple who split up can claim an additional 25 pounds a week. A single person gets 57.45 a week in income support. A couple who are both claiming receive a total of 90.10, or 45.05 each. The difference for two people is 24.80 a week or 1,289.60 a year.
A total of 200 million pounds of income support was claimed fraudulently last year - 130million going to people claiming to be lone parents. The Department for Work and Pensions launched a campaign last month to crack down on people pretending to live alone to get more. Billboard posters show a woman standing in a circle with the slogan: "But pretending I live on my own doesn't make me a benefits thief." The Department of Work and Pensions said: "The rate of benefits paid to couples reflects the lower cost of shared living expenses. It costs more for a single person to run a household than a couple."
Source
SALT AND BLOOD PRESSURE: OVER-HYPED FINDINGS FROM A BRITISH DOCTOR
First read the following press report:
The humble cheese stick could be killing your children. Visiting cardiovascular medicine specialist Graham MacGregor, of St George's Hospital Medical School in London, has warned parents that diets high in salt were placing children at risk of heart attacks and strokes later in life. Autopsies on preschool accident victims revealed signs of diseased blood vessels, he said. Professor MacGregor's latest research, published this month in the journal Hypertension, showed a modest reduction in salt intake among children caused significant falls in blood pressure.
A review by Australia's National Heart Foundation found one processed cheese stick provided almost all the salt intake a toddler needed in a day. A pack of instant flavoured noodles contained almost three times a teenager's recommended daily salt needs.
"If you got all the nutritionists together in the world and said let's design a diet that's going to cause strokes and heart attacks later in life, that's exactly what these products seem to be designed to do," Professor MacGregor said. "It's mad how we allow ourselves to be feeding our children something that is going to cause heart attacks and strokes later in life. We know how to prevent strokes and heart attacks yet we seem to be doing our best to cause them."
Professor MacGregor said the battle to prevent heart attacks and strokes needed to begin in childhood. Feeding children salty food suppressed their taste receptors, getting them used to eating foods with high salt levels. "Most of these things are the concentration of sea water," Professor MacGregor said. "Do you really want your children to be eating solid seawater for lunch?"
Heart foundation national nutrition manager Barbara Eden said consumers should compare the sodium content of foods before purchasing. She said low salt foods must contain no more than 120mg of sodium per 100g of product.
Professor MacGregor called on food manufacturers to reduce salt levels in their products by a fifth. He said the salt concentration of most processed foods could be cut by 20 per cent tomorrow without anyone noticing. Prof MacGregor is in Sydney this week to address health professionals and food industry representatives on the need to reduce salt intake.
Source
If however you read the actual abstract of Macgregor's paper, it says only about one tenth of all the assertions above. It reports simply that children who have had their salt intake experimentally suppressed to varying degees show reduced blood pressure during the experiment. And that is no suprise. Studies with mice show the same.
What is NOT shown is ANY long-term effect of such salt reductions. That artificial salt restriction might also DO HARM in various ways is not considered -- which is just negligent, considering that people on salt-restricted diets die younger.
Note also that blood pressure response to salt varies between individuals. Genetic differences make some individuals more responsive to salt level than others. So any policy that treates everybody as the same is Leftist ideology, not medical science.
Note further that in healthy ADULTS, level of salt intake does NOT affect the level of salt in your blood. You just piss out any salt you do not need.
What utter crap the salt phobia is!
NORDHAUS ON STERN
Economist William Nordhaus has published a critique of Britain's Stern Report (PDF here) Here is his summary...
"How much and how fast should the globe reduce greenhouse-gas emissions? How should nations balance the costs of the reductions against the damages and dangers of climate change? The Stern Review answers these questions clearly and unambiguously: we need urgent, sharp, and immediate reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions."
I am reminded here of President Harry Truman's complaint that his economists would always say, on the one hand this and on the other hand that. He wanted a one-handed economist. The Stern Review is a Prime Minister's dream come true. It provides decisive and compelling answers instead of the dreaded conjectures, contingencies, and qualifications.
However, a closer look reveals that there is indeed another hand to these answers. The radical revision of the economics of climate change proposed by the Review does not arise from any new economics, science, or modeling. Rather, it depends decisively on the assumption of a near-zero social discount rate. The Review's unambiguous conclusions about the need for extreme immediate action will not survive the substitution of discounting assumptions that are consistent with today's market place. So the central questions about global-warming policy - how much, how fast, and how costly - remain open. The Review informs but does not answer these fundamental questions."
Nordhaus's paper is fairly technical but he does make an amusing aside imagining what would happen if Stern-like zero discount rate reasoning were applied to other areas of public policy....
"While this feature of low discounting might appear benign in climate change policy, we could imagine other areas where the implications could themselves be dangerous. Imagine the preventive war strategies that might be devised with low social discount rates. Countries might start wars today because of the possibility of nuclear proliferation a century ahead; or because of a potential adverse shift in the balance of power two centuries ahead; or because of speculative futuristic technologies three centuries ahead. It is not clear how long the globe could long survive the calculations and machinations of zero-discount-rate military powers. This is yet a final example of a surprising implication of a low discount rate."
(William D. Nordhaus is Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, USA)
Twenty-four hours to save the NHS! I wonder how often that promise comes back to haunt Tony Blair 10 years later. Week after week reliable reports and the government’s own figures tell a disgraceful story of incompetence, debt, misery and filth in the National Health Service. That story is supported, week after week, by heart-rending personal accounts of horrors on the wards.
The broken new Labour promise that caught most public attention last week was the failure to abolish mixed-sex wards. Janet Street-Porter, the ferocious media personality, wrote about the misery of her sister when dying of cancer in a mixed-sex NHS ward. Plenty of other people have tried to draw attention to this disgrace and Baroness Knight, the Conservative peer, has been campaigning about it for years but — such is the spirit of the times — it takes a loud-mouth celebrity to get public attention.
The same thing happened when Lord Winston made a fuss about the dreadful treatment that his elderly mother received in hospital. Only then did the government stop denying that there was anything wrong.
Street-Porter published extracts last week of the diary of Patricia Balsom, her dying sister. They were horrifying. Among the miseries she endured was lying neglected in a mixed ward, where she was woken more than once to see a naked male patient masturbating opposite her bed. Her shocking stories prompted a flood of others.
The late Eileen Fahey, for instance, dying of cancer, was put onto a mixed geriatric ward where confused people wandered about without supervision. One man with dementia regularly masturbated at the nurses’ station and tried to get into women patients’ beds; he was a threat to them all but staff took no notice, according to her daughter Maureen. Other patients have to give answers to intimate questions in the hearing of other patients. One deaf old man was repeatedly asked when he last had an erection, until tears ran down his cheeks.
A former midwife described eloquently on Radio 4 the indignities of being in a 24-bed mixed-sex ward, stripped of all dignity and intimidated. Bedlam was the word she used, and it applies even more accurately to the secure psychiatric mixed ward in London endured by Susan Craig last year, after a breakdown. She suffered regular sexual harassment, with mentally ill men groping her and exposing themselves. The nurses disbelieved her and told her husband she was “flaunting herself”.
If so (I don’t believe them), their job was to protect a patient from her own folly. Instead they chose, in modern cant, to blame the victim. Sexual harassment is only a small part of the problem. Many people, both men and women, feel their modesty is violated by such closeness to random members of the opposite sex, even when they are not threatened.
Patients lie naked, half washed and forgotten, their sick and ageing flesh exposed to everyone, while nurses rush elsewhere. It is commonplace to have to walk to filthy mixed lavatories with gowns wide open at the back. At a time of sickness and anxiety many people are profoundly embarrassed to be surrounded by a clutter of bed pans, colostomy bags, nakedness, cries of pain and sweat, blood and tears — their own and other people’s.
All this is much worse, for many, when they are surrounded by members of the opposite sex; shame and anxiety are not the best bedfellows of hope and healing. Much has been written about the rape of modesty and the death of shame. However, it is still true in this weary country that most men and women prefer to perform private bodily functions alone if possible, and among their own sex only, if not. That’s why we have separate public lavatories and separate changing rooms in shops and clubs and pubs. That’s why people put up towels on the beach. That’s why women give birth in female wards, not in mixed wards or not — I hope — so far.
Source
BRITISH GOVERNMENT DISCOURAGES MARRIAGE
The scandalous way that Labour has allowed State handouts to undermine marriage was exposed last night. A newlywed couple revealed how they were told by a Government welfare official: "You'd get more money if you split up." Janet and Mark Fensome were advised by their local Job Centre that if they wanted extra money in handouts, the best thing to do was to get divorced because under existing rules, couples who live apart get more. They had married three weeks earlier and were shocked to find out that the welfare official was right - but they refused to take the advice and complained to their MP.
The Job Centre's manager later apologised for the advice and said the official had acted wrongly. But aides to Work and Pensions Secretary John Hutton has confirmed that, technically, the official was right: if the Fensomes had split up they would get an extra 25 pounds a week - or 1,250 a year. The Tories claimed that this showed how Labour has downgraded marriage and encouraged family break-ups by making it profitable to become single parents. Shadow Work and Pensions Minister Andrew Selous, who by chance is the Fensomes' MP, said: "John Hutton says he wants to encourage families together but Job Centres are telling people to do the opposite."
Mrs Fensome, of Houghton Regis, near Dunstable, in Bedfordshire, said: "We went to sort out a problem with our benefits after we came back from our honeymoon in Blackpool. "The woman at the Job Centre said, "If only you were split up and you were both single, it would be much easier to deal with and you would get more money too." I couldn't believe it." Mother-of-four Mrs Fensome, 41, who is training to be a marriage guidance counsellor, married engineer Mark on September 9. She helps with the local Cubs and Scouts and gave up work to care for her two infirm parents. Mr Fensome has been with the same engineering firm for more than 20 years but has been off work on incapacity benefit since suffering a nervous breakdown. For most of his time off work, Mr Fensome, 44, did not claim a penny in benefits and lived off his savings. When The Mail on Sunday visited the family yesterday, one of Mrs Fensome's teenage sons was practising the clarinet and another was doing his maths homework.
After their honeymoon in Blackpool paid for by friends and family, the couple went to Dunstable Job Centre Plus to sort out their benefit entitlements as a married couple. "The Government says it believes in families and yet it is advising people to part to claim more benefits. It doesn't make sense,' said Mrs Fensome. They were so shocked by the advice, they went to Bedfordshire South West MP Mr Selous, who complained to the head of Bedfordshire Job Centres. "I told him it was completely out of order,' said Mr Selous. "He apologised and said the official should not have said it and it was not their policy to advise people to break up. I want an assurance that this is not happening in other Job Centres."
The tax and benefits attack on marriage under Labour started when Gordon Brown abolished the married couples' tax allowance. The Tories claim the new system for helping people with children is biased against couples because single-parent families get the same amount in tax rebates as a couple where one parent stays at home to bring up the children. There are other handouts where couples can claim more by breaking up. Divorced couples can claim two portions of housing benefit and council tax rebate. Single parents get a 22.20 housing benefit premium. The unemployed can also claim more in income support and job seekers' allowance. In both cases a couple who split up can claim an additional 25 pounds a week. A single person gets 57.45 a week in income support. A couple who are both claiming receive a total of 90.10, or 45.05 each. The difference for two people is 24.80 a week or 1,289.60 a year.
A total of 200 million pounds of income support was claimed fraudulently last year - 130million going to people claiming to be lone parents. The Department for Work and Pensions launched a campaign last month to crack down on people pretending to live alone to get more. Billboard posters show a woman standing in a circle with the slogan: "But pretending I live on my own doesn't make me a benefits thief." The Department of Work and Pensions said: "The rate of benefits paid to couples reflects the lower cost of shared living expenses. It costs more for a single person to run a household than a couple."
Source
SALT AND BLOOD PRESSURE: OVER-HYPED FINDINGS FROM A BRITISH DOCTOR
First read the following press report:
The humble cheese stick could be killing your children. Visiting cardiovascular medicine specialist Graham MacGregor, of St George's Hospital Medical School in London, has warned parents that diets high in salt were placing children at risk of heart attacks and strokes later in life. Autopsies on preschool accident victims revealed signs of diseased blood vessels, he said. Professor MacGregor's latest research, published this month in the journal Hypertension, showed a modest reduction in salt intake among children caused significant falls in blood pressure.
A review by Australia's National Heart Foundation found one processed cheese stick provided almost all the salt intake a toddler needed in a day. A pack of instant flavoured noodles contained almost three times a teenager's recommended daily salt needs.
"If you got all the nutritionists together in the world and said let's design a diet that's going to cause strokes and heart attacks later in life, that's exactly what these products seem to be designed to do," Professor MacGregor said. "It's mad how we allow ourselves to be feeding our children something that is going to cause heart attacks and strokes later in life. We know how to prevent strokes and heart attacks yet we seem to be doing our best to cause them."
Professor MacGregor said the battle to prevent heart attacks and strokes needed to begin in childhood. Feeding children salty food suppressed their taste receptors, getting them used to eating foods with high salt levels. "Most of these things are the concentration of sea water," Professor MacGregor said. "Do you really want your children to be eating solid seawater for lunch?"
Heart foundation national nutrition manager Barbara Eden said consumers should compare the sodium content of foods before purchasing. She said low salt foods must contain no more than 120mg of sodium per 100g of product.
Professor MacGregor called on food manufacturers to reduce salt levels in their products by a fifth. He said the salt concentration of most processed foods could be cut by 20 per cent tomorrow without anyone noticing. Prof MacGregor is in Sydney this week to address health professionals and food industry representatives on the need to reduce salt intake.
Source
If however you read the actual abstract of Macgregor's paper, it says only about one tenth of all the assertions above. It reports simply that children who have had their salt intake experimentally suppressed to varying degees show reduced blood pressure during the experiment. And that is no suprise. Studies with mice show the same.
What is NOT shown is ANY long-term effect of such salt reductions. That artificial salt restriction might also DO HARM in various ways is not considered -- which is just negligent, considering that people on salt-restricted diets die younger.
Note also that blood pressure response to salt varies between individuals. Genetic differences make some individuals more responsive to salt level than others. So any policy that treates everybody as the same is Leftist ideology, not medical science.
Note further that in healthy ADULTS, level of salt intake does NOT affect the level of salt in your blood. You just piss out any salt you do not need.
What utter crap the salt phobia is!
NORDHAUS ON STERN
Economist William Nordhaus has published a critique of Britain's Stern Report (PDF here) Here is his summary...
"How much and how fast should the globe reduce greenhouse-gas emissions? How should nations balance the costs of the reductions against the damages and dangers of climate change? The Stern Review answers these questions clearly and unambiguously: we need urgent, sharp, and immediate reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions."
I am reminded here of President Harry Truman's complaint that his economists would always say, on the one hand this and on the other hand that. He wanted a one-handed economist. The Stern Review is a Prime Minister's dream come true. It provides decisive and compelling answers instead of the dreaded conjectures, contingencies, and qualifications.
However, a closer look reveals that there is indeed another hand to these answers. The radical revision of the economics of climate change proposed by the Review does not arise from any new economics, science, or modeling. Rather, it depends decisively on the assumption of a near-zero social discount rate. The Review's unambiguous conclusions about the need for extreme immediate action will not survive the substitution of discounting assumptions that are consistent with today's market place. So the central questions about global-warming policy - how much, how fast, and how costly - remain open. The Review informs but does not answer these fundamental questions."
Nordhaus's paper is fairly technical but he does make an amusing aside imagining what would happen if Stern-like zero discount rate reasoning were applied to other areas of public policy....
"While this feature of low discounting might appear benign in climate change policy, we could imagine other areas where the implications could themselves be dangerous. Imagine the preventive war strategies that might be devised with low social discount rates. Countries might start wars today because of the possibility of nuclear proliferation a century ahead; or because of a potential adverse shift in the balance of power two centuries ahead; or because of speculative futuristic technologies three centuries ahead. It is not clear how long the globe could long survive the calculations and machinations of zero-discount-rate military powers. This is yet a final example of a surprising implication of a low discount rate."
(William D. Nordhaus is Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, USA)
Tuesday, November 28, 2006
Advertising is a free speech issue
The ban on junk food ads on British TV is far more 'mind-controlling' than anything a cynical adman could come up with.
I can’t have been the only person who, upon hearing that the Office for Communications planned to introduce a widespread ban on junk food advertising on British TV, thought to himself: ‘Who the hell do these poncy unelected suits think they are?’ And yet there has been little outcry over the ban. Ofcom announced this week that in March 2007 it will introduce a ‘total ban’ on ads for hamburgers, crisps, chocolate and other foodstuffs high in fat, salt or sugar during all children’s programming, on all children’s channels and during any other programmes that have a ‘particular appeal’ to 16-year-olds and under. The only complaint is that Ofcom hasn’t gone far enough. The failure to extend the ban to adults programmes that children also watch – like Coronation Street or, come to think of it, pretty much any show on TV – was a ‘betrayal’ of future generations, who now face the prospect of obesity, ill-health and early death, said health campaigners and commentators.
A far better response to Ofcom’s illiberal, patronising and bizarre ban would have been to tell Ofcom officials to get stuffed, and to disband themselves while they’re at it. I don’t hold a candle for big corporations; I don’t like the fact that they can afford to flog their wares in primetime TV slots or on big brash billboards on street corners, while cash-strapped outfits who make far better products – like spiked, for example – have to rely on word-of-mouth and something called ‘viral marketing’ (which I’ve never liked the sound of).
And yet I would far rather take my chances in the weird and loud chatroom that is the world of advertising than have public space sanitised on my behalf by an unrepresentative quango which, like mother, thinks it knows best. Advertising is a free speech issue, or at least it ought to be. Because behind today’s anti-ad campaigning there lurks a degrading view of the public as fickle and easily bought off, who must be protected from certain words and imagery by better men and women. And that is far more patronising – far more ‘mind-controlling’ – than anything a cynical suited and booted adman could come up with.
The first striking thing about Ofcom’s ban on junk food ads is that the justifications for it are – if you will forgive my post-watershed language – total bollocks. Forget facts or evidence; this ban is based on a creepy combination of scaremongering, snobbery and paternalism.
Ofcom documents and media coverage of the ban constantly refer to ‘junk food’, as if it were an always-existing factual and historical category. In fact, some experts argue that there is no such thing as junk food. According to Vincent Marks, emeritus professor of clinical biochemistry at the University of Surrey and co-editor of Panic Nation: Unpicking the Myths We’re Told About Food and Health: ‘Junk food is an oxymoron. Food is either good – that is, it is enjoyable to eat and will sustain life – or it is good food that has gone bad, meaning that it has deteriorated and gone off.’ For Marks, the ‘junk food’ tag is a moral judgement rather than a health-based one: ‘To label a food as “junk” is just another way of saying, “I disapprove of it”.’ (1)
There’s always a big side order of snobbery in denunciations of junk food – which might explain why Ofcom’s rules will mean that Domino’s Pizzas (an eaterie popular in working-class areas) will have to stop sponsoring The Simpsons, while Gordon Ramsay (whose Channel 4 show The F Word is popular among teens who like his swearing and general cockiness) will still be free to make fatty dishes like duck a la orange and salty pork steaks and chunky chips with their red potato skins still attached. It is hard not to sympathise with the boss of Domino’s Pizzas, who said he might try to get around the new rules by sticking a bowl of salad next to his pizzas because at least salad is seen as ‘good’ grub (2).
Ofcom and its backers claim their tough action is necessary to stop the new generation of Brits from fast becoming the most ‘unhealthy in history’ (3). What, more unhealthy than those kids who lived through (or didn’t live through, more to the point) Black Death, smallpox, wars and food shortages? This is clearly codswallop. In 1900, there were 140 deaths per 1,000 births; that had fallen to 5.7 by 1999 and it continues to fall. Of those born in the early 1900s, 63 per cent died before they reached 60; today only 11 per cent die before 60. A boy born in 1901 could expect to live to 46, and a girl to 50; today a boy is likely to live to 76 and a girl to 81. British children can expect to live more comfortably, and for longer, than any generation in history.
And Ofcom relies on very shaky evidence for its basic premise that banning junk food ads will change children’s eating habits. One of its pieces of evidence is an email from a self-selected group of parents called NetMums, who claim that ‘TV ads for junk food do work – they make children demand junk food which inevitably means more consumption of junk food.’ (4) More serious studies have found little evidence of a clear link between ads and eating habits. As one news report said this week, there is a ‘relative paucity of evidence that TV advertising has much effect on children’s food choices’ (5). An academic study found that ‘just two per cent of all children’s food choices were influenced by TV advertising’ (6).
Ofcom’s ban is based on fear dressed up as facts: children are not as unhealthy as the hysterical headlines claim, and there’s little evidence that the blunt instrument of TV censorship will make them switch from a Happy Meal to broccoli with a side of semi-skimmed milk. What really seems to be motivating Ofcom and its supporters is a patronising view of parents. Mums and dads are seen as powerless to resist ‘pester power’ demands for sweets and snacks. In banning ads during children’s programmes, Ofcom sends a powerful message that parents cannot be trusted to do right by their kids. It is effectively setting itself up as a surrogate parent, making decisions on behalf of mums and dads who are apparently too weak-minded or thick to make the right decision themselves.
We’ve gone from ‘Watch with mother’ to ‘Watch with the strange men and women from a jumped-up quango called Ofcom because they’re more caring than your mother’.
Ofcom likes to present itself as a ‘media literacy’ outfit whose aim is to ensure balance and quality in the communications media in Britain. That is a case of false advertising if ever I heard one. Someone call the trading standards authority. In truth, Ofcom is a petty and censorious organisation seeking to control public debate and public space and protect people from what it views as their own worst instincts. It is at the forefront of new forms of censorship that cloak themselves in ethical lingo and use nice words like ‘diversity’ and ‘respect’ as a cover for clamping down on free speech.
So Ofcom banned a beer advert for giving ‘undue emphasis to the alcohol strength of the product’. Er, why else do people buy beer, if it isn’t for a bit of ‘alcohol strength’? It banned a radio ad that made a pun on the word ‘faggot’ (which can mean a meat product or a homosexual), decreeing that the ad was ‘capable of causing serious offence’. And usually it bans things in response to handfuls of complaints. That beer ad was banned after Ofcom received one complaint, the radio ad after it received three complaints. Recently Ofcom demanded that Hanna-Barbera remove all cigarette-smoking from its entire back catalogue of Tom and Jerry cartoons after it received a single complaint (7).
Ofcom represents the tyranny of the minority. What about the 60 million of us who aren’t offended by strong booze or the word ‘faggot’ or cartoon cats puffing on a cartoon fag? Why should the public realm – that marketplace of ads, goods, debate and argument – be designed to the tastes of tiny handfuls of people who are weirdly oversensitive? Outraged of Oldham was once restricted to writing cranky green-ink letters to the local paper. Now, thanks to Ofcom and its mission to ensure that no one is ever offended, he’s dictating what images and words the rest of us can see and hear.
No, the world of advertising is not a level playing field. Yes, big corporations can speak more loudly and to more people than you or I can. But we should still defend advertising from today’s gracious and caring censors. You can’t make things more equal or free by running to powerful bodies like Ofcom and pleading with them to punish the nasty corporation and its adman who offended your sensibilities on the train to work. I would rather be Richard Branson’s potential target than Ofcom’s bitch; a free citizen or consumer able to make up my own mind about what I want to buy from companies that are at least upfront, rather than the charge of a powerful quango whose board members I don’t know from Adam.
From Ofcom’s attack on junk food ads to those campaign groups who demand bans on ads for 4x4s, cheap flights, cigarettes and booze: the argument seems to be that people are gullible and thus must be watched over by caring men and women in positions of power. Funnily enough, that is the same justification used by censors throughout history, from Torquemada to Tony Blair: all of their bans are about giving a sedative to society, sanitising public discussion, and protecting people from an alleged harm. Thanks, but no thanks.
For Karl Marx, the ‘chatter’ of consumerist society was one of the more positive aspects of capitalism. The capitalist ‘searches for means to spur [people] on to consumption, to give his wares new charms, to inspire [people] with new needs by constant chatter etc. It is precisely this side of the relation of capital and labour which is an essential civilising moment…’ (8) So what if ads are sometimes irritating and get into our heads? Forever knowing the tune to ‘Opal Fruits, made to make your mouth water’ is a small price to pay for openness in public space and chatter.
Source
Extremist views? Bring them on, we're ready
By Mick Hume
Back when I was a revolting revolutionary student, Labour students who ran university unions operated under the delusion that shutting up their opponents was the same as defeating them. Thus they demanded “No platform” for everybody from “fascists” (which included Tory ministers) to Zionists or the Moonies. Twenty-five years later those student politicians are running the country. And to judge by the Government’s new guidelines about Islamic radicalism on campus, they have learnt nothing.
Source
Diversity is divisive
A new manifesto looks set to kickstart a debate about how multiculturalism fosters tribalism and political victimhood.
The manifesto of the New Generation Network (NGN), published this week, has thrown out an impressive challenge to improve the national conversation about racism. Amongst other things, the manifesto calls for a proper debate about multiculturalism, an end to ‘communal politics’, and it criticises self-appointed ethnic ‘community leaders’ for hijacking certain issues (read the manifesto in full here). Perhaps inevitably, much of the debate it has provoked so far is focused on the comments about self-appointed leaders. However, these issues can only be fully understood in the context of official anti-racism measures that have been built up over the past two decades.
As NGN states, we have come a long way since the first Race Relations Act was created in 1976. Back then, racist attacks were more common and prejudice more evident in the immigration service, police, employment, housing and education. Thirty years on, racism is clearly in decline, thanks to the efforts of many progressive activists and the gradual cultural integration of ethnic groups in society.
Yet in many ways, our society is much more anxious about race than before. Early findings from the 2005 Home Office Citizenship survey show that nearly half of all people (48 per cent) questioned believed that racism had got worse in the past five years. This was a rise from 43 per cent in 2001. White people were more likely to say this than ethnic minorities, suggesting that perception does not reflect the reality experienced by most people.
Why has this strange paradox emerged? While people from ethnic minority backgrounds are today less likely to confront old-fashioned racism, they are much more likely to confront multicultural policies and practises that racialise them. The principle of equality – that all people should be treated the same regardless of their skin colour or ethnic background – has now been replaced with the principle of diversity, where all cultural identities must be given public recognition. While this sounds nice and inclusive in principle, the overall effect is that people are being treated differently, which fuels a sense of exclusion.
The ‘race relations industry’ has expanded massively on the back of government policies, legislation and funding. Most public services – housing, healthcare, arts and cultural provision, voluntary support, public broadcasting, and policing – have strategies to accommodate the supposedly different needs of ethnic users. Many organisations now have targets to ensure they are employing enough ethnic minorities.
The effect of such measures, however, is not to get rid of racial categories, but to reinforce their grip on our consciousness. For example, there has been much debate about the lack of ethnic minorities in the media and arts sectors. The reasons are complex, and can be explained by different aspirations, socioeconomic factors and cultural expectations (many of which also affect the white working class).
But the dominance of racial thinking leads to the simplistic explanation that the ‘white male establishment’ is full of bigots. This leads to positive discrimination schemes that put ethnicity before talent, and results in the hired hand being sent to work in this or that department as the unofficial spokesperson for their ‘community’. No wonder these individuals then think there is racism in the sector where they work, when they are so obviously treated as ‘the token ethnic’. Diversity policies often appear as the flipside of old racial thinking, making us see people’s ethnicity first and their (often diverse) talents and interests second.
The most pernicious effect of this new racial thinking is how it fosters tribalism between ethnic and religious groups. They end up competing for resources on the basis that they are more excluded and vulnerable than others. Some Muslim lobby groups have argued that Christian groups already have public funding for their schools and services, so they should, too. In response, there are now Hindu and Sikh organisations demanding their own concessions lest they feel left out. The demand to wear the headscarf one day spurs the demand to wear the crucifix the next. There is a perverse incentive to assert one’s victimisation by others, rather than build alliances. In this climate, no wonder everyone thinks that racism and discrimination is rife.
To challenge the dominance of identity politics, we need to champion an alternative universalist approach. This wouldn’t mean bland similarity, with everybody talking and looking the same. Instead, it would help us challenge the imposition of formal, ethnic categories and allow us to develop richer differences based on character and interests.
A major step towards the universalist approach would be to dismantle the countless diversity policies that encourage people to see everything through the prism of racial difference. We should get rid of ‘tick box’ measures that do nothing to address underlying inequality in areas like employment. And we should interrogate the claims of victimisation made by some organisations to get their slice of pie. If the NGN will help to expose some of the damage being done in the name of diversity, I welcome it.
Source
Business to save British schools?
Business executives should be drafted into schools to help to raise standards, the new chief inspector of England's schools said yesterday as figures revealed that more than half of secondary schools were under-performing. Christine Gilbert, the head of the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted), blamed poor leadership and management in schools for persistent poor standards. "We should certainly look at drawing in heads from business and industry," she said. "If you have teaching experience, it may get you to first base quicker, but I do think that schools could benefit from the leadership expertise of people from outside, particularly those who have taken early retirement in their 50s. They could come in as consultants or heads."
Ms Gilbert's comments came after the publication of Ofsted's annual report, which showed that 51 per cent of England's secondary schools were failing to provide a good education for their pupils. With one in eight secondaries and one in 12 schools overall judged inadequate, she said that the proportion of failing schools in England was too high. "The report card for English education has been increasingly encouraging over the past ten years, but it is still not good enough," she said. Of the 6,129 schools inspected last year, twice the proportion of secondaries (13 per cent) were judged inadequate, compared with primaries (7 per cent).
The key to raising standards was good school leadership and early intervention with primary school children, Ms Gilbert, a former history teacher, said. She acknowledged that academies were one possible response to raising standards, but said that only three of the nine inspected were judged effective. There were 46 academies operating and the Government hoped to have 200 by 2010.
Progress had been made, but inexperienced staff and problems recruiting and retaining teachers remained a significant problem. Secondaries without sixth forms suffered the greatest difficulties in raising the achievement among pupils, with more than half (52 per cent) failing to make good progress. At the same time, poor behaviour was disrupting one third of classes in secondaries, the inspectors said.
Those schools that had focused on the underlying causes of poor discipline, such as poor reading and writing skills and emotional problems, found that behaviour often improved.
More than half (58 per cent) of primaries were judged good or outstanding, but inspectors expressed serious concerns about primary teachers' "weak subject knowledge" in science, history, geography, music, art and design and technology.
Ms Gilbert's idea of appointing head teachers from outside the sector drew a mixed reaction. Liz Sidwell, chief executive of the Haberdashers' Aske's federation of schools in South London, said: "As long as the chief executive of a school has people on the management team who understand the curriculum and standards, it could work. The business skills you need to run a school are not the skills that teachers necessarily have."
John Dunford, of the Association of School and College Leaders, agreed that outsiders may make good heads, but added: "You could not recruit straight from business. School leadership is very different from business leadership and business leaders would be the first to spot that." Dr Dunford was very critial of the inspectors' report overall and accused them of setting schools up for failure. "Reports such as these will cause a crisis of confidence among the leaders of the profession unless we start to accentuate the positive aspects of schools' performance," he said. "Of the schools cited as `inadequate', many have good value-added scores for very weak intakes."
Source
British welfare madness: "The welfare state cost 79 billion pounds last year, more than is spent on the entire education system, twice as much as on law and order and almost as much as on the NHS. It totals nearly 3,000 pounds a household a year.There are 51 different benefits, with 39 per cent of households claiming one or more. Although the Chancellor often boasts about his record on unemployment, there are 5.4 million people of working age who are out of work and living on benefits. Many of those are registered disabled; Britain has more long-term sick than any European country besides Poland. The benefits system has become so generous that being "on welfare" is no longer a mark of even relative poverty. Households with incomes of up to 66,350 pounds - which puts them in the richest fifth - can be entitled to welfare.
The ban on junk food ads on British TV is far more 'mind-controlling' than anything a cynical adman could come up with.
I can’t have been the only person who, upon hearing that the Office for Communications planned to introduce a widespread ban on junk food advertising on British TV, thought to himself: ‘Who the hell do these poncy unelected suits think they are?’ And yet there has been little outcry over the ban. Ofcom announced this week that in March 2007 it will introduce a ‘total ban’ on ads for hamburgers, crisps, chocolate and other foodstuffs high in fat, salt or sugar during all children’s programming, on all children’s channels and during any other programmes that have a ‘particular appeal’ to 16-year-olds and under. The only complaint is that Ofcom hasn’t gone far enough. The failure to extend the ban to adults programmes that children also watch – like Coronation Street or, come to think of it, pretty much any show on TV – was a ‘betrayal’ of future generations, who now face the prospect of obesity, ill-health and early death, said health campaigners and commentators.
A far better response to Ofcom’s illiberal, patronising and bizarre ban would have been to tell Ofcom officials to get stuffed, and to disband themselves while they’re at it. I don’t hold a candle for big corporations; I don’t like the fact that they can afford to flog their wares in primetime TV slots or on big brash billboards on street corners, while cash-strapped outfits who make far better products – like spiked, for example – have to rely on word-of-mouth and something called ‘viral marketing’ (which I’ve never liked the sound of).
And yet I would far rather take my chances in the weird and loud chatroom that is the world of advertising than have public space sanitised on my behalf by an unrepresentative quango which, like mother, thinks it knows best. Advertising is a free speech issue, or at least it ought to be. Because behind today’s anti-ad campaigning there lurks a degrading view of the public as fickle and easily bought off, who must be protected from certain words and imagery by better men and women. And that is far more patronising – far more ‘mind-controlling’ – than anything a cynical suited and booted adman could come up with.
The first striking thing about Ofcom’s ban on junk food ads is that the justifications for it are – if you will forgive my post-watershed language – total bollocks. Forget facts or evidence; this ban is based on a creepy combination of scaremongering, snobbery and paternalism.
Ofcom documents and media coverage of the ban constantly refer to ‘junk food’, as if it were an always-existing factual and historical category. In fact, some experts argue that there is no such thing as junk food. According to Vincent Marks, emeritus professor of clinical biochemistry at the University of Surrey and co-editor of Panic Nation: Unpicking the Myths We’re Told About Food and Health: ‘Junk food is an oxymoron. Food is either good – that is, it is enjoyable to eat and will sustain life – or it is good food that has gone bad, meaning that it has deteriorated and gone off.’ For Marks, the ‘junk food’ tag is a moral judgement rather than a health-based one: ‘To label a food as “junk” is just another way of saying, “I disapprove of it”.’ (1)
There’s always a big side order of snobbery in denunciations of junk food – which might explain why Ofcom’s rules will mean that Domino’s Pizzas (an eaterie popular in working-class areas) will have to stop sponsoring The Simpsons, while Gordon Ramsay (whose Channel 4 show The F Word is popular among teens who like his swearing and general cockiness) will still be free to make fatty dishes like duck a la orange and salty pork steaks and chunky chips with their red potato skins still attached. It is hard not to sympathise with the boss of Domino’s Pizzas, who said he might try to get around the new rules by sticking a bowl of salad next to his pizzas because at least salad is seen as ‘good’ grub (2).
Ofcom and its backers claim their tough action is necessary to stop the new generation of Brits from fast becoming the most ‘unhealthy in history’ (3). What, more unhealthy than those kids who lived through (or didn’t live through, more to the point) Black Death, smallpox, wars and food shortages? This is clearly codswallop. In 1900, there were 140 deaths per 1,000 births; that had fallen to 5.7 by 1999 and it continues to fall. Of those born in the early 1900s, 63 per cent died before they reached 60; today only 11 per cent die before 60. A boy born in 1901 could expect to live to 46, and a girl to 50; today a boy is likely to live to 76 and a girl to 81. British children can expect to live more comfortably, and for longer, than any generation in history.
And Ofcom relies on very shaky evidence for its basic premise that banning junk food ads will change children’s eating habits. One of its pieces of evidence is an email from a self-selected group of parents called NetMums, who claim that ‘TV ads for junk food do work – they make children demand junk food which inevitably means more consumption of junk food.’ (4) More serious studies have found little evidence of a clear link between ads and eating habits. As one news report said this week, there is a ‘relative paucity of evidence that TV advertising has much effect on children’s food choices’ (5). An academic study found that ‘just two per cent of all children’s food choices were influenced by TV advertising’ (6).
Ofcom’s ban is based on fear dressed up as facts: children are not as unhealthy as the hysterical headlines claim, and there’s little evidence that the blunt instrument of TV censorship will make them switch from a Happy Meal to broccoli with a side of semi-skimmed milk. What really seems to be motivating Ofcom and its supporters is a patronising view of parents. Mums and dads are seen as powerless to resist ‘pester power’ demands for sweets and snacks. In banning ads during children’s programmes, Ofcom sends a powerful message that parents cannot be trusted to do right by their kids. It is effectively setting itself up as a surrogate parent, making decisions on behalf of mums and dads who are apparently too weak-minded or thick to make the right decision themselves.
We’ve gone from ‘Watch with mother’ to ‘Watch with the strange men and women from a jumped-up quango called Ofcom because they’re more caring than your mother’.
Ofcom likes to present itself as a ‘media literacy’ outfit whose aim is to ensure balance and quality in the communications media in Britain. That is a case of false advertising if ever I heard one. Someone call the trading standards authority. In truth, Ofcom is a petty and censorious organisation seeking to control public debate and public space and protect people from what it views as their own worst instincts. It is at the forefront of new forms of censorship that cloak themselves in ethical lingo and use nice words like ‘diversity’ and ‘respect’ as a cover for clamping down on free speech.
So Ofcom banned a beer advert for giving ‘undue emphasis to the alcohol strength of the product’. Er, why else do people buy beer, if it isn’t for a bit of ‘alcohol strength’? It banned a radio ad that made a pun on the word ‘faggot’ (which can mean a meat product or a homosexual), decreeing that the ad was ‘capable of causing serious offence’. And usually it bans things in response to handfuls of complaints. That beer ad was banned after Ofcom received one complaint, the radio ad after it received three complaints. Recently Ofcom demanded that Hanna-Barbera remove all cigarette-smoking from its entire back catalogue of Tom and Jerry cartoons after it received a single complaint (7).
Ofcom represents the tyranny of the minority. What about the 60 million of us who aren’t offended by strong booze or the word ‘faggot’ or cartoon cats puffing on a cartoon fag? Why should the public realm – that marketplace of ads, goods, debate and argument – be designed to the tastes of tiny handfuls of people who are weirdly oversensitive? Outraged of Oldham was once restricted to writing cranky green-ink letters to the local paper. Now, thanks to Ofcom and its mission to ensure that no one is ever offended, he’s dictating what images and words the rest of us can see and hear.
No, the world of advertising is not a level playing field. Yes, big corporations can speak more loudly and to more people than you or I can. But we should still defend advertising from today’s gracious and caring censors. You can’t make things more equal or free by running to powerful bodies like Ofcom and pleading with them to punish the nasty corporation and its adman who offended your sensibilities on the train to work. I would rather be Richard Branson’s potential target than Ofcom’s bitch; a free citizen or consumer able to make up my own mind about what I want to buy from companies that are at least upfront, rather than the charge of a powerful quango whose board members I don’t know from Adam.
From Ofcom’s attack on junk food ads to those campaign groups who demand bans on ads for 4x4s, cheap flights, cigarettes and booze: the argument seems to be that people are gullible and thus must be watched over by caring men and women in positions of power. Funnily enough, that is the same justification used by censors throughout history, from Torquemada to Tony Blair: all of their bans are about giving a sedative to society, sanitising public discussion, and protecting people from an alleged harm. Thanks, but no thanks.
For Karl Marx, the ‘chatter’ of consumerist society was one of the more positive aspects of capitalism. The capitalist ‘searches for means to spur [people] on to consumption, to give his wares new charms, to inspire [people] with new needs by constant chatter etc. It is precisely this side of the relation of capital and labour which is an essential civilising moment…’ (8) So what if ads are sometimes irritating and get into our heads? Forever knowing the tune to ‘Opal Fruits, made to make your mouth water’ is a small price to pay for openness in public space and chatter.
Source
Extremist views? Bring them on, we're ready
By Mick Hume
Back when I was a revolting revolutionary student, Labour students who ran university unions operated under the delusion that shutting up their opponents was the same as defeating them. Thus they demanded “No platform” for everybody from “fascists” (which included Tory ministers) to Zionists or the Moonies. Twenty-five years later those student politicians are running the country. And to judge by the Government’s new guidelines about Islamic radicalism on campus, they have learnt nothing.
The guidelines issued by Bill Rammell, the Higher Education Minister, tell universities how to combat “violent extremism in the name of Islam” by spotting extremists, banning outside speakers or informing the police. Just about everything, in fact, except the one thing that’s needed: some good arguments to explode the conspiracy theories of Islamic radicals.
Despite insisting that the Government supports freedom of expression, the guidelines’ definition of “unacceptable extremism” lumps “incitement of social[?], racial or religious hatred” in with terrorist acts, as if words and bombs were more or less equally dangerous.
There should be room for intellectual “extremism” of all sorts at university, the one place where young people ought to be free to experiment with ideas as well as everything else. Yet these days our ivory towers look more like fortresses of intolerance. Lecturers are wary of raising edgy questions that might offend some students, while freedom-phobic student union leaders seek to outlaw whatever-phobic words or images.
If debate is suppressed and the crazed ideas and conspiracies of Islamic radicals are never openly challenged, they can only fester and spread. Any attempt to silence them increases their credibility. And guidelines that leave the impression that the Government is afraid of a few bearded students are even better publicity for these groups.
Somebody needs to throw some intellectual grenades into university life, with arguments to incite hatred of illiberalism, whether it is offered “in the name of” Islam or of combating Islamophobia. Instead the only argument the guidelines propose concerns the radicals’ “distorted interpretation of Islamic texts”. Students can look forward to more sermons about the real meaning of being a Muslim from those noted Islamic scholars in new Labour.
Back in my day I recall one Labour union official with a megaphone, ordering Manchester University students to ignore Moonie leaflets. “These people want to brainwash you! DON’T LISTEN TO A WORD THEY SAY!” So in the name of free-thinking, you tell students what not to think about. Today, who needs a megaphone when you have the Minister for Higher Education?
Source
Diversity is divisive
A new manifesto looks set to kickstart a debate about how multiculturalism fosters tribalism and political victimhood.
The manifesto of the New Generation Network (NGN), published this week, has thrown out an impressive challenge to improve the national conversation about racism. Amongst other things, the manifesto calls for a proper debate about multiculturalism, an end to ‘communal politics’, and it criticises self-appointed ethnic ‘community leaders’ for hijacking certain issues (read the manifesto in full here). Perhaps inevitably, much of the debate it has provoked so far is focused on the comments about self-appointed leaders. However, these issues can only be fully understood in the context of official anti-racism measures that have been built up over the past two decades.
As NGN states, we have come a long way since the first Race Relations Act was created in 1976. Back then, racist attacks were more common and prejudice more evident in the immigration service, police, employment, housing and education. Thirty years on, racism is clearly in decline, thanks to the efforts of many progressive activists and the gradual cultural integration of ethnic groups in society.
Yet in many ways, our society is much more anxious about race than before. Early findings from the 2005 Home Office Citizenship survey show that nearly half of all people (48 per cent) questioned believed that racism had got worse in the past five years. This was a rise from 43 per cent in 2001. White people were more likely to say this than ethnic minorities, suggesting that perception does not reflect the reality experienced by most people.
Why has this strange paradox emerged? While people from ethnic minority backgrounds are today less likely to confront old-fashioned racism, they are much more likely to confront multicultural policies and practises that racialise them. The principle of equality – that all people should be treated the same regardless of their skin colour or ethnic background – has now been replaced with the principle of diversity, where all cultural identities must be given public recognition. While this sounds nice and inclusive in principle, the overall effect is that people are being treated differently, which fuels a sense of exclusion.
The ‘race relations industry’ has expanded massively on the back of government policies, legislation and funding. Most public services – housing, healthcare, arts and cultural provision, voluntary support, public broadcasting, and policing – have strategies to accommodate the supposedly different needs of ethnic users. Many organisations now have targets to ensure they are employing enough ethnic minorities.
The effect of such measures, however, is not to get rid of racial categories, but to reinforce their grip on our consciousness. For example, there has been much debate about the lack of ethnic minorities in the media and arts sectors. The reasons are complex, and can be explained by different aspirations, socioeconomic factors and cultural expectations (many of which also affect the white working class).
But the dominance of racial thinking leads to the simplistic explanation that the ‘white male establishment’ is full of bigots. This leads to positive discrimination schemes that put ethnicity before talent, and results in the hired hand being sent to work in this or that department as the unofficial spokesperson for their ‘community’. No wonder these individuals then think there is racism in the sector where they work, when they are so obviously treated as ‘the token ethnic’. Diversity policies often appear as the flipside of old racial thinking, making us see people’s ethnicity first and their (often diverse) talents and interests second.
The most pernicious effect of this new racial thinking is how it fosters tribalism between ethnic and religious groups. They end up competing for resources on the basis that they are more excluded and vulnerable than others. Some Muslim lobby groups have argued that Christian groups already have public funding for their schools and services, so they should, too. In response, there are now Hindu and Sikh organisations demanding their own concessions lest they feel left out. The demand to wear the headscarf one day spurs the demand to wear the crucifix the next. There is a perverse incentive to assert one’s victimisation by others, rather than build alliances. In this climate, no wonder everyone thinks that racism and discrimination is rife.
To challenge the dominance of identity politics, we need to champion an alternative universalist approach. This wouldn’t mean bland similarity, with everybody talking and looking the same. Instead, it would help us challenge the imposition of formal, ethnic categories and allow us to develop richer differences based on character and interests.
A major step towards the universalist approach would be to dismantle the countless diversity policies that encourage people to see everything through the prism of racial difference. We should get rid of ‘tick box’ measures that do nothing to address underlying inequality in areas like employment. And we should interrogate the claims of victimisation made by some organisations to get their slice of pie. If the NGN will help to expose some of the damage being done in the name of diversity, I welcome it.
Source
Business to save British schools?
Business executives should be drafted into schools to help to raise standards, the new chief inspector of England's schools said yesterday as figures revealed that more than half of secondary schools were under-performing. Christine Gilbert, the head of the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted), blamed poor leadership and management in schools for persistent poor standards. "We should certainly look at drawing in heads from business and industry," she said. "If you have teaching experience, it may get you to first base quicker, but I do think that schools could benefit from the leadership expertise of people from outside, particularly those who have taken early retirement in their 50s. They could come in as consultants or heads."
Ms Gilbert's comments came after the publication of Ofsted's annual report, which showed that 51 per cent of England's secondary schools were failing to provide a good education for their pupils. With one in eight secondaries and one in 12 schools overall judged inadequate, she said that the proportion of failing schools in England was too high. "The report card for English education has been increasingly encouraging over the past ten years, but it is still not good enough," she said. Of the 6,129 schools inspected last year, twice the proportion of secondaries (13 per cent) were judged inadequate, compared with primaries (7 per cent).
The key to raising standards was good school leadership and early intervention with primary school children, Ms Gilbert, a former history teacher, said. She acknowledged that academies were one possible response to raising standards, but said that only three of the nine inspected were judged effective. There were 46 academies operating and the Government hoped to have 200 by 2010.
Progress had been made, but inexperienced staff and problems recruiting and retaining teachers remained a significant problem. Secondaries without sixth forms suffered the greatest difficulties in raising the achievement among pupils, with more than half (52 per cent) failing to make good progress. At the same time, poor behaviour was disrupting one third of classes in secondaries, the inspectors said.
Those schools that had focused on the underlying causes of poor discipline, such as poor reading and writing skills and emotional problems, found that behaviour often improved.
More than half (58 per cent) of primaries were judged good or outstanding, but inspectors expressed serious concerns about primary teachers' "weak subject knowledge" in science, history, geography, music, art and design and technology.
Ms Gilbert's idea of appointing head teachers from outside the sector drew a mixed reaction. Liz Sidwell, chief executive of the Haberdashers' Aske's federation of schools in South London, said: "As long as the chief executive of a school has people on the management team who understand the curriculum and standards, it could work. The business skills you need to run a school are not the skills that teachers necessarily have."
John Dunford, of the Association of School and College Leaders, agreed that outsiders may make good heads, but added: "You could not recruit straight from business. School leadership is very different from business leadership and business leaders would be the first to spot that." Dr Dunford was very critial of the inspectors' report overall and accused them of setting schools up for failure. "Reports such as these will cause a crisis of confidence among the leaders of the profession unless we start to accentuate the positive aspects of schools' performance," he said. "Of the schools cited as `inadequate', many have good value-added scores for very weak intakes."
Source
British welfare madness: "The welfare state cost 79 billion pounds last year, more than is spent on the entire education system, twice as much as on law and order and almost as much as on the NHS. It totals nearly 3,000 pounds a household a year.There are 51 different benefits, with 39 per cent of households claiming one or more. Although the Chancellor often boasts about his record on unemployment, there are 5.4 million people of working age who are out of work and living on benefits. Many of those are registered disabled; Britain has more long-term sick than any European country besides Poland. The benefits system has become so generous that being "on welfare" is no longer a mark of even relative poverty. Households with incomes of up to 66,350 pounds - which puts them in the richest fifth - can be entitled to welfare.
Monday, November 27, 2006
Liberty belle becomes a pin-up for extremism
Shami Chakrabarti is to Britain’s intelligentsia what Posh Spice was to teenage girls. Well, if success and celebrity are synonymous. Always available to perform on the Today programme or in the columns of serious newspapers, the director of Liberty has made herself the closest thing this country possesses to an intellectual pin-up girl. But in making her instant opinions so universally available she has done little for the cause she claims to promote.
The core challenge to democracy since September 11, 2001, has been to achieve proportionality between the competing priorities of individual liberty and public protection. Ms Chakrabarti has come down relentlessly on the quasi-anarchist side of the debate. Her defence of individual rights against collective needs takes the demos out of democracy and leaves her organisation marooned on the extra-parliamentary left of politics.
In her enthusiasm to see the good in every terrorist suspect and a heart of unalloyed evil in each successive Home Secretary, the lady from Liberty has revealed extraordinary naivety about Labour’s favourite tactic. Acquired from Bill Clinton, the trick known as triangulation seeks to popularise government policy by contrasting it with the views of unpopular minorities. Ms Chakrabarti never rejects the invitation to play the extremist.
Source
BRITAIN: NEW TAX IS SET TO HAMMER HOLIDAYS
MILLIONS of families were facing a new wave of taxes on their holidays last night. Chancellor Gordon Brown will announce his latest cash raid in the run-up to Christmas. Middle Britain will be hammered by a series of stealth taxes which will be disguised as green measures. Holiday and business flights along with family cars are set to be the target of the new squeeze. Mr Brown, who has devised more than 80 ways of increasing tax since taking over at the Treasury, will say the higher levies are vital to save the planet from global warming.
Last night critics warned that the green agenda will be merely an excuse to wring yet more cash out of Britain's hard-working families, with questionable benefits for the environment. James Frayne, of the TaxPayers' Alliance pressure group, said: "This confirms what we have suspected: Politicians are going to start raising taxes massively in the name of the environment. "It's a convenient excuse. All they are interested in is extra revenue. These tax rises will penalise millions of ordinary middle class families."
Mr Brown is expected to unveil plans in his Pre-Budget Report on December 6 for an increase in air passenger duty, which is paid by every traveller leaving a UK airport. Tax on bigger family cars is also expected to rise in a bid to outflank David Cameron, who has put the environment at the heart of his Tory policy agenda.
Shadow Chancellor George Osborne said last night: "I want to see a shift to green taxes but they have to pay for tax reductions elsewhere. "My motto is pay as you burn, not pay as you earn. My fear about Gordon Brown is that he will use this as an excuse for a stealthy increase in the tax burden for families." Radical action to stave off disaster for the Earth was demanded by the recent Stern review, which was commissioned by the Treasury.
Mr Brown was said yesterday to have been persuaded that higher air passenger duty, which was frozen in the spring Budget, could have a part to play in tackling the damage done by aviation. There are currently four rates: 5 or 10 pounds for European destinations, and 20 or 40 for long-haul flights. An indication of Government thinking on the issue was revealed in a leaked memo from Environment Secretary David Miliband. He said air travel was "lightly taxed". Slapping 5 on air passenger duty would bring in 400 million a year, he said, adding that there was also a case for levying VAT on flights.
James Fremantle, of the Air Transport Users Council, said: "We do not shut our eyes to environmental concerns, and passengers have those concerns too. "But we are not convinced that raising air passenger duty would be the way to go. We are not convinced that higher taxes would stop people flying.''
Mr Brown is also poised to pile more pressure on the owners of family cars, believing that raising indirect taxation could help to persuade motorists to switch to less polluting vehicles. Since March, vehicle excise duty has included a top band of 210 pounds a year for new cars which emit the most carbon dioxide. Vehicles likely to be targeted include Land Rover Freelanders and Discoveries, and also Jeeps. But any new tax would also hit Mondeo Man, long seen as a political barometer, by affecting 2.5-litre models as well as owners of Vauxhall Astra 2L Twin Tops and Vauxhall Vectra 2.8Ls.
But critics say the 20 pound increase has not done enough to dissuade people from buying the most polluting models. Mr Miliband called for tough measures to combat car use and ownership, with a substantial increase in road tax to force people to switch to smaller vehicles.
Edmund King of the RAC Foundation stressed the Government must ensure that any duty rises are announced several years in advance of taking effect. "We have no problem with higher tax for the more polluting vehicles, it's about giving people time to adapt," he said. Liberal Democrat Chris Huhne said official figures this week showed that green taxes on fuel, vehicles, energy and landfill fell last year to 2.9 per cent of national income, the lowest since 1989. He added: "Reports about raising vehicle excise duty and air passenger duty would ring rather less hollow if Gordon Brown did not have such an embarrassing record on environmental taxes."
Mr Brown's Pre-Budget report is also expected to support an international market in carbon trading in which companies can buy and sell emission quotas to keep the overall level within a set limit. The Treasury last night described as "speculation" reports that Mr Brown was poised to raise taxes on air travel and large cars.
Source
"DUMBED DOWN" BRITISH HIGH SCHOOLS
Odd that such exams were not too hard for British kids in the past!
An exam modelled on the old O-level is too difficult to be offered in state schools, a report has revealed. Watchdogs concluded that International GCSEs in key subjects are "more demanding" than the standard exam, effectively ruling out their introduction in state secondaries. Hundreds of private schools have already adopted IGCSEs in some subjects, mainly maths and science, because they consider them to be better preparation for A-levels.
Now a report from the Government's exams watchdog has confirmed that popular IGCSE syllabuses contain tougher questions and challenge pupils on topics that GCSE pupils only encounter at AS-level. But it means that, without substantial changes, they cannot be added to the list of qualifications approved for use in state schools since they are not directly comparable to GCSEs. The exams may need to be dumbed down if they are to fit strict official criteria laid down for teenagers' studies.
Opposition politicians warned of a widening gulf between the state and independent sectors as fee-paying schools increasingly turn to tougher qualifications. Ministers admitted yesterday there were "significant obstacles" to the introduction of IGCSEs in secondary schools. But they agreed to launch a public consultation on whether they should "explore further" with exam boards "how to overcome these obstacles".
IGCSEs were developed primarily for schools overseas but are attracting increasing interest from British private schools dissatisfied with the standard GCSE. They are similar to the old O-level - scrapped in 1987 - as pupils are tested in a series of final exams at the end of a two-year course. There is a coursework option but most schools do not use it. Teachers also consider questions to be more "traditional" and open-ended.
The report from the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority exposes the apparently low demands placed on GCSE candidates in crucial subjects compared with counterparts abroad who are following IGCSE syllabuses. It reveals that English GCSEs have too many "formulaic questions" while pupils taking double science GCSE are even awarded marks for giving the wrong answers. They can be given credit if an answer is written in "appropriately scientic" language - even if "the science is incorrect".
But there were sharp variations across the two exam boards offering IGCSEs. IGCSEs set by Cambridge International Examinations (CIE) is taken in 200 independent schools, in at least one subject, while Edexcel's are used in 170. But only CIE's papers were found to be more demanding than standard GCSEs. And out of four subjects studied, CIE papers in just two - maths and science - were judged to be tougher. The report said: "The content of the CIE IGCSE coordinated syllabus is broad and deep compared with the other syllabuses reviewed. A number of the areas included are currently part of AS syllabuses. "CIE IGCSE was judged to be more demanding for the higher tier candidates and very demanding for foundation tier candidates." In contrast, standard GCSEs were "less demanding than they should be" for brighter candidates
Meanwhile a CIE maths paper was "by a long way" more difficult than others reviewed by a panel of assessors. Candidates were only allowed scientific calculators and no formula sheets. There were also "extensive structured questions" which "require organisation and a systematic approach from candidates". The report concluded there were "major differences" between GCSEs and IGCSEs across all four subjects studied - maths, science, English and French. "In almost every case, these differences meant that the IGCSE examinations did not meet the GCSE subject criteria in significant ways" it said.
Nick Gibb, Tory schools spokesman, said: "If the Government and the QCA refuse to allow state schools the same options as independent schools, an even greater divide between the two sectors will emerge as schools in the private sector increasingly adopt what the QCA has termed the 'demanding' IGCSE exam."
Source
MESSAGE TO THE LEFT: THE ARABS NEED TO WANT PEACE TOO
Since its birth 58 years ago, Israel has always been prepared to compromise for peace. From Begin's agreement with Sadat in 1979 to the Arafat-Barak talks at Camp David in 2000, Israeli leaders have been prepared to challenge their own people in pursuit of peace. Last summer Israel withdrew from Gaza, angry settlers and all. Yet the terror from the Gaza Strip has continued - more than 1,000 rockets have been fired into southern Israel in the past year. Since 2000, nine fatalities have been caused by Qassam missiles.
Some media have reported the panic these missiles have caused but they downplay the impact because of the small scale of fatalities compared with those on the Palestinian side. My husband, a British soldier, is currently serving a tour of duty in Iraq. His unit has come under mortar fire nearly every night for the past six months. Not many service personnel have been killed by these missiles but every soldier fears that the next one might have his or her name on it. Do you think that a child, a parent or a grandmother in one of the towns bordering Gaza thinks there have been "only" nine fatalities? Can you imagine what that does to a civilian population?
We need to think carefully about the consequences of questioning the defensive reactions of a nation-state that is constantly bombarded by an enemy calling for its destruction, especially after it has withdrawn from Lebanon and Gaza. Would we as British citizens accept a single rocket on a British town, let alone hundreds?
The commentators' objection is that the response is "disproportionate". But how does a nation-state defend itself against a terrorist organisation or organisations that are part of, and deliberately hide behind, ordinary citizens? Of course the Israeli military and all military forces must act ethically. But if the number of civilian casualties continues to be the main issue, there is no incentive for the terrorists to stop using the civilian population as a shield.
We live in dangerous times when, in parts of the left especially, you can't be a friend to Islam or to Muslims unless you are anti-Israel. That is exactly what al-Qaida wants us to think. Events in Rochdale at the last election represent a microcosm of what we are sleepwalking into globally. The Islamists and the left argued that, because I supported Israel and its right to exist, all my work for my Muslim constituents was a lie. They suggested I was an opportunistic, neocon Zionist, aiming to dupe them.
Israel's willingness to compromise for peace has never been enough, because Israel alone cannot gain peace. The Palestinians and others in the region also have to want peace. Israel needs a serious interlocutor so that peace can stand a chance. So my question to the left is this: why not concentrate your attention there, rather than on the one player in the region who has always been serious about peace?
More here
Shami Chakrabarti is to Britain’s intelligentsia what Posh Spice was to teenage girls. Well, if success and celebrity are synonymous. Always available to perform on the Today programme or in the columns of serious newspapers, the director of Liberty has made herself the closest thing this country possesses to an intellectual pin-up girl. But in making her instant opinions so universally available she has done little for the cause she claims to promote.
The core challenge to democracy since September 11, 2001, has been to achieve proportionality between the competing priorities of individual liberty and public protection. Ms Chakrabarti has come down relentlessly on the quasi-anarchist side of the debate. Her defence of individual rights against collective needs takes the demos out of democracy and leaves her organisation marooned on the extra-parliamentary left of politics.
In her enthusiasm to see the good in every terrorist suspect and a heart of unalloyed evil in each successive Home Secretary, the lady from Liberty has revealed extraordinary naivety about Labour’s favourite tactic. Acquired from Bill Clinton, the trick known as triangulation seeks to popularise government policy by contrasting it with the views of unpopular minorities. Ms Chakrabarti never rejects the invitation to play the extremist.
Almost single-handedly she has shifted the civil liberties lobby so far beyond the parameters of mainstream opinion that ministers pray she will oppose them. Their logic is simple: if Liberty objects, Middle Britain will automatically conclude that a policy is pure common sense.
Ms Chakrabarti easily achieved her ambition to reassert Liberty’s prominence after its name change from the National Council for Civil Liberties. But since then, through reams of anti-terror law and attempts to control asylum and antisocial behaviour, she has forgotten what the “civil” in that historic title meant. Liberty’s guiding principle should be John Stuart Mill’s advice that “The liberty of the individual must be thus far limited; he must not make himself a nuisance to other people.” By championing the errant individual to the detriment of the majority she ignores it completely.
Few mistakes better illustrate this debilitating flaw than Liberty’s backing for Graeme Chessum, the Nottinghamshire man banned from his local pubs for behaving aggressively towards staff at one of them. The Pubwatch scheme under which he is excluded is a fine example of community action against antisocial conduct. As such it achieves the utilitarian ideal of the greatest good of the greatest number. By threatening to challenge it under human rights legislation Liberty extends beyond absurdity its director’s faith that high profile is preferable to high principle.
Source
BRITAIN: NEW TAX IS SET TO HAMMER HOLIDAYS
MILLIONS of families were facing a new wave of taxes on their holidays last night. Chancellor Gordon Brown will announce his latest cash raid in the run-up to Christmas. Middle Britain will be hammered by a series of stealth taxes which will be disguised as green measures. Holiday and business flights along with family cars are set to be the target of the new squeeze. Mr Brown, who has devised more than 80 ways of increasing tax since taking over at the Treasury, will say the higher levies are vital to save the planet from global warming.
Last night critics warned that the green agenda will be merely an excuse to wring yet more cash out of Britain's hard-working families, with questionable benefits for the environment. James Frayne, of the TaxPayers' Alliance pressure group, said: "This confirms what we have suspected: Politicians are going to start raising taxes massively in the name of the environment. "It's a convenient excuse. All they are interested in is extra revenue. These tax rises will penalise millions of ordinary middle class families."
Mr Brown is expected to unveil plans in his Pre-Budget Report on December 6 for an increase in air passenger duty, which is paid by every traveller leaving a UK airport. Tax on bigger family cars is also expected to rise in a bid to outflank David Cameron, who has put the environment at the heart of his Tory policy agenda.
Shadow Chancellor George Osborne said last night: "I want to see a shift to green taxes but they have to pay for tax reductions elsewhere. "My motto is pay as you burn, not pay as you earn. My fear about Gordon Brown is that he will use this as an excuse for a stealthy increase in the tax burden for families." Radical action to stave off disaster for the Earth was demanded by the recent Stern review, which was commissioned by the Treasury.
Mr Brown was said yesterday to have been persuaded that higher air passenger duty, which was frozen in the spring Budget, could have a part to play in tackling the damage done by aviation. There are currently four rates: 5 or 10 pounds for European destinations, and 20 or 40 for long-haul flights. An indication of Government thinking on the issue was revealed in a leaked memo from Environment Secretary David Miliband. He said air travel was "lightly taxed". Slapping 5 on air passenger duty would bring in 400 million a year, he said, adding that there was also a case for levying VAT on flights.
James Fremantle, of the Air Transport Users Council, said: "We do not shut our eyes to environmental concerns, and passengers have those concerns too. "But we are not convinced that raising air passenger duty would be the way to go. We are not convinced that higher taxes would stop people flying.''
Mr Brown is also poised to pile more pressure on the owners of family cars, believing that raising indirect taxation could help to persuade motorists to switch to less polluting vehicles. Since March, vehicle excise duty has included a top band of 210 pounds a year for new cars which emit the most carbon dioxide. Vehicles likely to be targeted include Land Rover Freelanders and Discoveries, and also Jeeps. But any new tax would also hit Mondeo Man, long seen as a political barometer, by affecting 2.5-litre models as well as owners of Vauxhall Astra 2L Twin Tops and Vauxhall Vectra 2.8Ls.
But critics say the 20 pound increase has not done enough to dissuade people from buying the most polluting models. Mr Miliband called for tough measures to combat car use and ownership, with a substantial increase in road tax to force people to switch to smaller vehicles.
Edmund King of the RAC Foundation stressed the Government must ensure that any duty rises are announced several years in advance of taking effect. "We have no problem with higher tax for the more polluting vehicles, it's about giving people time to adapt," he said. Liberal Democrat Chris Huhne said official figures this week showed that green taxes on fuel, vehicles, energy and landfill fell last year to 2.9 per cent of national income, the lowest since 1989. He added: "Reports about raising vehicle excise duty and air passenger duty would ring rather less hollow if Gordon Brown did not have such an embarrassing record on environmental taxes."
Mr Brown's Pre-Budget report is also expected to support an international market in carbon trading in which companies can buy and sell emission quotas to keep the overall level within a set limit. The Treasury last night described as "speculation" reports that Mr Brown was poised to raise taxes on air travel and large cars.
Source
"DUMBED DOWN" BRITISH HIGH SCHOOLS
Odd that such exams were not too hard for British kids in the past!
An exam modelled on the old O-level is too difficult to be offered in state schools, a report has revealed. Watchdogs concluded that International GCSEs in key subjects are "more demanding" than the standard exam, effectively ruling out their introduction in state secondaries. Hundreds of private schools have already adopted IGCSEs in some subjects, mainly maths and science, because they consider them to be better preparation for A-levels.
Now a report from the Government's exams watchdog has confirmed that popular IGCSE syllabuses contain tougher questions and challenge pupils on topics that GCSE pupils only encounter at AS-level. But it means that, without substantial changes, they cannot be added to the list of qualifications approved for use in state schools since they are not directly comparable to GCSEs. The exams may need to be dumbed down if they are to fit strict official criteria laid down for teenagers' studies.
Opposition politicians warned of a widening gulf between the state and independent sectors as fee-paying schools increasingly turn to tougher qualifications. Ministers admitted yesterday there were "significant obstacles" to the introduction of IGCSEs in secondary schools. But they agreed to launch a public consultation on whether they should "explore further" with exam boards "how to overcome these obstacles".
IGCSEs were developed primarily for schools overseas but are attracting increasing interest from British private schools dissatisfied with the standard GCSE. They are similar to the old O-level - scrapped in 1987 - as pupils are tested in a series of final exams at the end of a two-year course. There is a coursework option but most schools do not use it. Teachers also consider questions to be more "traditional" and open-ended.
The report from the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority exposes the apparently low demands placed on GCSE candidates in crucial subjects compared with counterparts abroad who are following IGCSE syllabuses. It reveals that English GCSEs have too many "formulaic questions" while pupils taking double science GCSE are even awarded marks for giving the wrong answers. They can be given credit if an answer is written in "appropriately scientic" language - even if "the science is incorrect".
But there were sharp variations across the two exam boards offering IGCSEs. IGCSEs set by Cambridge International Examinations (CIE) is taken in 200 independent schools, in at least one subject, while Edexcel's are used in 170. But only CIE's papers were found to be more demanding than standard GCSEs. And out of four subjects studied, CIE papers in just two - maths and science - were judged to be tougher. The report said: "The content of the CIE IGCSE coordinated syllabus is broad and deep compared with the other syllabuses reviewed. A number of the areas included are currently part of AS syllabuses. "CIE IGCSE was judged to be more demanding for the higher tier candidates and very demanding for foundation tier candidates." In contrast, standard GCSEs were "less demanding than they should be" for brighter candidates
Meanwhile a CIE maths paper was "by a long way" more difficult than others reviewed by a panel of assessors. Candidates were only allowed scientific calculators and no formula sheets. There were also "extensive structured questions" which "require organisation and a systematic approach from candidates". The report concluded there were "major differences" between GCSEs and IGCSEs across all four subjects studied - maths, science, English and French. "In almost every case, these differences meant that the IGCSE examinations did not meet the GCSE subject criteria in significant ways" it said.
Nick Gibb, Tory schools spokesman, said: "If the Government and the QCA refuse to allow state schools the same options as independent schools, an even greater divide between the two sectors will emerge as schools in the private sector increasingly adopt what the QCA has termed the 'demanding' IGCSE exam."
Source
MESSAGE TO THE LEFT: THE ARABS NEED TO WANT PEACE TOO
Since its birth 58 years ago, Israel has always been prepared to compromise for peace. From Begin's agreement with Sadat in 1979 to the Arafat-Barak talks at Camp David in 2000, Israeli leaders have been prepared to challenge their own people in pursuit of peace. Last summer Israel withdrew from Gaza, angry settlers and all. Yet the terror from the Gaza Strip has continued - more than 1,000 rockets have been fired into southern Israel in the past year. Since 2000, nine fatalities have been caused by Qassam missiles.
Some media have reported the panic these missiles have caused but they downplay the impact because of the small scale of fatalities compared with those on the Palestinian side. My husband, a British soldier, is currently serving a tour of duty in Iraq. His unit has come under mortar fire nearly every night for the past six months. Not many service personnel have been killed by these missiles but every soldier fears that the next one might have his or her name on it. Do you think that a child, a parent or a grandmother in one of the towns bordering Gaza thinks there have been "only" nine fatalities? Can you imagine what that does to a civilian population?
We need to think carefully about the consequences of questioning the defensive reactions of a nation-state that is constantly bombarded by an enemy calling for its destruction, especially after it has withdrawn from Lebanon and Gaza. Would we as British citizens accept a single rocket on a British town, let alone hundreds?
The commentators' objection is that the response is "disproportionate". But how does a nation-state defend itself against a terrorist organisation or organisations that are part of, and deliberately hide behind, ordinary citizens? Of course the Israeli military and all military forces must act ethically. But if the number of civilian casualties continues to be the main issue, there is no incentive for the terrorists to stop using the civilian population as a shield.
We live in dangerous times when, in parts of the left especially, you can't be a friend to Islam or to Muslims unless you are anti-Israel. That is exactly what al-Qaida wants us to think. Events in Rochdale at the last election represent a microcosm of what we are sleepwalking into globally. The Islamists and the left argued that, because I supported Israel and its right to exist, all my work for my Muslim constituents was a lie. They suggested I was an opportunistic, neocon Zionist, aiming to dupe them.
Israel's willingness to compromise for peace has never been enough, because Israel alone cannot gain peace. The Palestinians and others in the region also have to want peace. Israel needs a serious interlocutor so that peace can stand a chance. So my question to the left is this: why not concentrate your attention there, rather than on the one player in the region who has always been serious about peace?
More here
Sunday, November 26, 2006
NHS PLAYING FAST AND LOOSE WITH DEFINITIONS AGAIN
Their favourite way of meeting their "targets"
The government has been accused of failing to meet a promise to scrap mixed-sex wards in NHS hospitals. The Department of Health said its targets had been achieved, and 99% of trusts are providing single sex accommodation. But patients groups said they were getting an increasing number of calls from people who think they have been in mixed-sex wards.
There appears to be confusion about the definition of the term. Katherine Murphy, from the Patients Association, said there had been 25-30 calls in the last month to the charity's helpline, mostly from elderly patients, who had been nursed on mixed-sex wards.
Andrew Lansley said it was not acceptable to claim that partitioned single-sex bays on mixed-sex wards were doing the job. "If you can be seen by patients of another sex, and they are coming and going past your bed in order to go to the toilet facilities you may not think you have the privacy you want."
The government pledged to scrap mixed-sex wards when it came to power in 1997. Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt said most trusts offered single-sex wards, but said more could be done.
More here
Britain: School helper who refused to remove her veil is sacked
A teaching assistant who refused to remove her Muslim veil in the classroom has been sacked. Aishah Azmi’s dismissal from a Church of England primary school in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, followed a lengthy period of suspension over her insistence on wearing the niqab in lessons led by a male teacher. She had already failed to persuade an employment tribunal that she was a victim of religious discrimination and harassment by Kirklees local education authority.
Source
Prestigious British private schools exported
In what is believed to be the first venture of its kind, Brighton College, a leading independent school, is planning to export British public school education to Russia. Boarding schools in England have attracted interest from growing numbers of wealthy Russians in the past decade who are keen to give their children a high-quality education in a secure, friendly environment. Brighton College is seeking to build on these links by building its own public school, 50 miles south of Moscow.
Several elite schools, such as Dulwich College, Harrow and Shrewsbury, have set up in the Far East to feed a growing appetite for British public school education, but none has so far attempted such an undertaking on Russian soil. Four hundred boys and girls will be offered Mandarin, polo and cricket, and taught a European-style curriculum, in English, in the grounds of a school near Borovsk, south of Moscow. Estimated to cost 18 million pounds, it could open as early as 2009. The school is the brainchild of Mikhail Orloff, a Russian businessman and the grandson of King Farouk, and it hopes to blend the best of English education with Russia's culture and history. It would operate mostly as a weekly boarding school.
Richard Cairns, the headmaster of Brighton College, said that Russian parents were attracted to the school because they would no longer have to send their children abroad for a top-class education. "Parents have been sending their children to Europe, but they don't like it because when they come over, they stay," he said. "They believe that Russia is losing her children. But this way, they hope to keep the same value system and the children."
The cleverest pupils would be able to spend their last couple of years studying A levels at Brighton College, which also has partnerships with schools in China and Australia. Mr Orloff approached the college after it became the first private school in England to make Mandarin compulsory for all new pupils. Brighton College is developing a three-year plan with Lord Skidelsky, an economist of Russian origin and chairman of its board of governors, to raise the money. Richard Niblett, the director of music, is overseeing the project. He has been living in Moscow since September to undertake feasibility studies and raise to funds for the school. "The concept is to draw on the best of both education systems - the logic of science and maths, which the Russians excel at, and the house-style system and arts of British public schools," he said. "Teaching in Russia is quite dogmatic, whereas we tend to help them think outside the box more."
There would certainly seem to be a market for it. According to the Independent Schools Council, which includes 1,288 of the Britain's 2,500 private schools, 343 Russian students were attending its schools in 2005-6. These parents were paying more than 5.5 million pounds for one year's school fees. Brighton College charges about 16,000 a year for weekly boarders, but their Russian affiliate would charge just 10,350 a year.
While Russia already has a handful of good Western-style private day schools, such as the Anglo-American School, the English International School and the British International School, they are not linked to any leading independent schools in Britain. The advantage of its model, Brighton College argues, is not only that it will follow a tried and tested method of schooling, which has worked well for centuries in Britain, but will also take children out of the pollution of Moscow during the week
Source
British Airways buckles under pressure: "British Airways is to lift its ban on workers openly wearing small crosses after an unprecedented backlash from MPs, bishops and customers. BA made the decision after 100 MPs and 14 bishops joined a campaign of support for Nadia Eweida, a check-in worker who lost an employment appeal to wear a tiny cross. It comes after condemnation by the Archbishop of Canterbury and a threat from the Church of England to sell its 9 million pound stake in the airline. Despite winning a legal battle against its employee, the company said it would review its uniform policy to find a way to allow symbols of faith to be worn openly.... Miss Eweida, who has begun a second appeal, issued a statement saying that she hoped that it would help her to win her case. "If they are going to review the policy and allow Christians their place in the workforce, it is a big relief." The ban on Miss Eweida caused outrage because members of other faiths, such as Muslims and Sikhs, are allowed to wear religious symbols..... Ann Widdecombe, the former Conservative Home Office minister, said: "I cannot believe that a major company couldn't have worked out weeks ago that the way out of this was a review instead of taking everything to the wire and losing custom and goodwill en route."
Their favourite way of meeting their "targets"
The government has been accused of failing to meet a promise to scrap mixed-sex wards in NHS hospitals. The Department of Health said its targets had been achieved, and 99% of trusts are providing single sex accommodation. But patients groups said they were getting an increasing number of calls from people who think they have been in mixed-sex wards.
There appears to be confusion about the definition of the term. Katherine Murphy, from the Patients Association, said there had been 25-30 calls in the last month to the charity's helpline, mostly from elderly patients, who had been nursed on mixed-sex wards.
Andrew Lansley said it was not acceptable to claim that partitioned single-sex bays on mixed-sex wards were doing the job. "If you can be seen by patients of another sex, and they are coming and going past your bed in order to go to the toilet facilities you may not think you have the privacy you want."
The government pledged to scrap mixed-sex wards when it came to power in 1997. Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt said most trusts offered single-sex wards, but said more could be done.
More here
Britain: School helper who refused to remove her veil is sacked
A teaching assistant who refused to remove her Muslim veil in the classroom has been sacked. Aishah Azmi’s dismissal from a Church of England primary school in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, followed a lengthy period of suspension over her insistence on wearing the niqab in lessons led by a male teacher. She had already failed to persuade an employment tribunal that she was a victim of religious discrimination and harassment by Kirklees local education authority.
Mrs Azmi, 24, said that it was her Islamic duty to wear the black veil, which covered her face except for a narrow slit at the eyes, in the presence of adult males who were not her blood relatives.
Headfield Junior School argued that its pupils, many of whom are learning to speak English, found it difficult to understand what Mrs Azmi was saying when her mouth was hidden.
In a statement issued yesterday, the LEA said that the school governing body’s staff dismissals committee had recently held a hearing to discuss Mrs Azmi’s case.
“As a result of the hearing, the committee decided to terminate the employment of the employee concerned,” it said.
Shahid Malik, the Labour MP for Dewsbury, said that the Azmi case had not been about religion but about seeking the best possible education for children at the school.
More than 90 per cent of Headfield’s pupils are Muslim, many of them learning English as a second language.
Earlier this year, Ofsted criticised “exceptionally low” standards of achievement by pupils and said that many of the school’s difficulties were caused by “speech and communication problems”.
Mr Malik said: “I’m obviously disappointed that a compromise could not be reached. While I defend her right to wear the veil in society, it’s very clear that her wearing the veil in the classroom inhibits her ability to support children.”
When she was observed during lessons, the tribunal heard that, “it was readily apparent that the children were seeking visual clues from her which they could not obtain because they could not see her facial expressions”.
Mrs Azmi did not wear the veil when she was interviewed for the Headfield post, nor at her first training day, but problems arose soon after she started work on a one-year fixed contract last September. Although the school’s other female Muslim teachers wore a headscarf, Mrs Azmi insisted on wearing the niqab.
Mrs Azmi taught at the school for only a few weeks before being told that she must be unveiled during lessons. Soon after she went on long-term sick leave due to stress. She was suspended on full pay in February and took her case against the school to an employment tribunal which sat for four days in July.
Kirklees LEA renewed Mrs Azmi’s one-year contract after it expired on August 31, even though she was under suspension at the time.
When the tribunal issued its findings last month, it rejected her claims of discrimination and harassment but awarded her £1,000 for “injury to feelings” caused by the way her case was handled.
Mrs Azmi, whose appearance before the tribunal was a test case brought under new religious discrimination regulations, vowed to continue her fight for the right to wear the niqab.
She attacked the Government for treating ethnic minorities “as outcasts” and said that she was “fearful for the consequences for Muslim women in this country”.
Mrs Azmi’s lawyer, Nick Whittingham, of the Kirklees Law Centre, said that he had not yet received a decision in writing following this week’s disciplinary hearing.
Source
Prestigious British private schools exported
In what is believed to be the first venture of its kind, Brighton College, a leading independent school, is planning to export British public school education to Russia. Boarding schools in England have attracted interest from growing numbers of wealthy Russians in the past decade who are keen to give their children a high-quality education in a secure, friendly environment. Brighton College is seeking to build on these links by building its own public school, 50 miles south of Moscow.
Several elite schools, such as Dulwich College, Harrow and Shrewsbury, have set up in the Far East to feed a growing appetite for British public school education, but none has so far attempted such an undertaking on Russian soil. Four hundred boys and girls will be offered Mandarin, polo and cricket, and taught a European-style curriculum, in English, in the grounds of a school near Borovsk, south of Moscow. Estimated to cost 18 million pounds, it could open as early as 2009. The school is the brainchild of Mikhail Orloff, a Russian businessman and the grandson of King Farouk, and it hopes to blend the best of English education with Russia's culture and history. It would operate mostly as a weekly boarding school.
Richard Cairns, the headmaster of Brighton College, said that Russian parents were attracted to the school because they would no longer have to send their children abroad for a top-class education. "Parents have been sending their children to Europe, but they don't like it because when they come over, they stay," he said. "They believe that Russia is losing her children. But this way, they hope to keep the same value system and the children."
The cleverest pupils would be able to spend their last couple of years studying A levels at Brighton College, which also has partnerships with schools in China and Australia. Mr Orloff approached the college after it became the first private school in England to make Mandarin compulsory for all new pupils. Brighton College is developing a three-year plan with Lord Skidelsky, an economist of Russian origin and chairman of its board of governors, to raise the money. Richard Niblett, the director of music, is overseeing the project. He has been living in Moscow since September to undertake feasibility studies and raise to funds for the school. "The concept is to draw on the best of both education systems - the logic of science and maths, which the Russians excel at, and the house-style system and arts of British public schools," he said. "Teaching in Russia is quite dogmatic, whereas we tend to help them think outside the box more."
There would certainly seem to be a market for it. According to the Independent Schools Council, which includes 1,288 of the Britain's 2,500 private schools, 343 Russian students were attending its schools in 2005-6. These parents were paying more than 5.5 million pounds for one year's school fees. Brighton College charges about 16,000 a year for weekly boarders, but their Russian affiliate would charge just 10,350 a year.
While Russia already has a handful of good Western-style private day schools, such as the Anglo-American School, the English International School and the British International School, they are not linked to any leading independent schools in Britain. The advantage of its model, Brighton College argues, is not only that it will follow a tried and tested method of schooling, which has worked well for centuries in Britain, but will also take children out of the pollution of Moscow during the week
Source
British Airways buckles under pressure: "British Airways is to lift its ban on workers openly wearing small crosses after an unprecedented backlash from MPs, bishops and customers. BA made the decision after 100 MPs and 14 bishops joined a campaign of support for Nadia Eweida, a check-in worker who lost an employment appeal to wear a tiny cross. It comes after condemnation by the Archbishop of Canterbury and a threat from the Church of England to sell its 9 million pound stake in the airline. Despite winning a legal battle against its employee, the company said it would review its uniform policy to find a way to allow symbols of faith to be worn openly.... Miss Eweida, who has begun a second appeal, issued a statement saying that she hoped that it would help her to win her case. "If they are going to review the policy and allow Christians their place in the workforce, it is a big relief." The ban on Miss Eweida caused outrage because members of other faiths, such as Muslims and Sikhs, are allowed to wear religious symbols..... Ann Widdecombe, the former Conservative Home Office minister, said: "I cannot believe that a major company couldn't have worked out weeks ago that the way out of this was a review instead of taking everything to the wire and losing custom and goodwill en route."
Saturday, November 25, 2006
Young British Criminals are now "Trainees"
We read:
Basic physics supports solar activity as cause of global warming
Comments from a successful long-range weather forecaster:
Science, not argument about conspiracy, must be central to the debate about climate change (Letters, November 13), nevertheless Al Gore's stake in green business (Generation Investment Management) and David Miliband's closeness to the nuclear industry merit attention. Dr Wolff's claim that the climate-sceptical position "is in contradiction to everything we expect from basic physics" is bizarre, since physics is the basis of Weather Action's world-leading solar weather technique of long-range forecasting. The SWT relies on predictable effects of solar particles, not on CO2 or meteorology models - and I can assure your correspondent Richard Nunn that the SWT will be published when matters of intellectual property are sorted out
Dr Wolff admits "CO2 has indeed increased in response to temperature change in the past ..." This is a general pattern in slow changes over the last 250,000 years (Caillon et al, Science, March 2003). Furthermore proxy measurements covering thousands of years (eg Neff et al, Nature 2001) show that, in timescales of 22 years, the magnetic sun-spot cycle and world temperatures move together, whereas CO2, while following temperature in slow general terms, also moves the other way for quite long periods. This contradicts the theory that CO2 drives temperature and climate.
Current CO2 levels, or rate of CO2 rise, are not unprecedented. CO2 levels have been three times current levels (Bob Carter, Marine Geophysical Lab, Queensland). CO2 rapid rise "spikes" doubtless happened before, given the power of nature compared with man's puny activity (not even 1% of total greenhouse effect), but ice-core data smoothes them out.
The global warmers' claim that current extra CO2 causes warming which gets dangerously magnified through the greenhouse effect of extra water vapour in the atmosphere, consequent to the temperature rise, also fails. The sea absorbs extra CO2. Furthermore, increased transpiration-cooling by enhanced growth of plants, which is caused by extra CO2, cancels out the extra greenhouse warming of that same CO2. Increased greenhouse heating due to doubling CO2 is 3.7 watts per sq metre. This is negated by about the same amount of enhanced transpiration-cooling of plants, all of which grow faster in extra CO2. Therefore there is no CO2 driven net heat flow and surface temperature rise. Temperature and climate change in our epoch is therefore driven by other factors, especially solar particle and magnetic effects.
So can action against climate change make a difference? Even if temperature trends can be changed - and controlling the sun is a tall order even for a Bush/ Blair legacy - there is no evidence of connected change in weather extremes or useful outcomes. Let's save the planet from real chemical pollutants, but CO2 is not one of them. Wouldn't it be better to work to predict climate than make vain attempts to change it?
Source
BRITISH AIRWAYS IN TROUBLE
Its stupid policy of allowing non-Christian religious attire only was asking for trouble
Ms Eweida, a former member of BA's check-in staff who has lost her appeal to wear a tiny cross outside her uniform, has become a Christian cause celebre. She has the support of nearly 100 MPs. More worryingly for BA, churches are railing against the airline. There is talk of a Christian boycott of the airline worldwide. Only for the worldly is it still the world's favourite airline.
British Airways is at fault. For it is mishandling for a religious issue, betraying both its multicultural principles and a huge potential market. For, Ms Eweida not only has a strong argument of freedom of religious expression on her side, but also hundreds of millions of potential passengers. The 2001 census showed that 71.1 per cent of Britons identify themselves as Christians. According to Aquarius, a marketing consultancy focused on religious affairs, there are 2.1 billion people who call themselves Christian, by comparison with 1.1 billion who describe themselves as secular, non-religious, agnostic or atheist. The devout represent a powerful market: The Passion of the Christ has grossed $613 million at box offices worldwide.
British Airways has previously struggled with icons. When it came to removing the flag from the tailfin, it underestimated patriotism. Now, it has misunderstood the nature of modern faith. There are a growing number of Christians who feel threatened by secularism. Spiritually, the world is more polarised and politicised. Christians, particularly evangelicals, are adopting the activist habits of other religious communities.
By sticking to its guidelines on uniforms, BA is insensitively, perhaps unintentionally, appearing to use its professional code to make a secular case. People of faith expect not just tolerance, but respect. BA needs to show it.
Source
FAILING BRITISH SCHOOLS
One in eight secondary schools was judged "inadequate" in the past year, while more than a third were no better than satisfactory, Government inspectors said today. Chief Inspector of Schools Christine Gilbert condemned the high failure rate and said it was "unacceptable" that the gap between the best and worst state schools was so wide. She demanded urgent action to raise standards, warning: ""The report card for English education has been increasingly encouraging over the past 10 years, but it is still not good enough."
In her first annual report since becoming Chief Inspector, Ms Gilbert said a good education can "liberate and empower" children. "The story is not always positive, however," she added. "That is why I am so concerned at the gap between the best provision and that which makes an inadequate contribution to improving the life chances of children and young people. "Too many schools are inadequate - about one in 12 of those inspected, and in secondary schools this proportion rises to just over one in eight."
Ms Gilbert said many secondary schools, which are often far larger than primaries, faced a "substantial" range of issues which held them back. "However, more needs to be done, and swiftly, to reduce the number of secondary schools found to be inadequate," she said. Ofsted's annual report was based on evidence from inspections of 6,000 state schools during the 2005-06 academic year. The watchdog found:
11 per cent of all state schools were outstanding, about half were good, 34 per cent satisfactory and 8 per cent inadequate; 13 per cent of secondary schools were inadequate, and 7% of primaries; School attendance was not good enough in one in 10 schools, with particular problems in London and the North of England. In nearly one in three secondary schools, behaviour is "no better than satisfactory overall, and in these schools there are also instances of disruptive or distracting behaviour from some pupils".
The findings follow the first year of a new inspection system, in which Ofsted conducted "shorter and sharper" inspections, giving schools only a few days' notice before visiting. The new criteria for schools were also tougher than before, which explained in part why so many schools were judged to be poor. Ms Gilbert said: "The new inspection arrangements have raised the bar, but without putting it out of reach. "The performance of schools, and the public's expectations of them, have both risen, and it is right that inspection should reflect that."
Schools Minister Jim Knight said it would not be fair to make comparisons with previous years. "Direct comparisons between school judgments in this year's report and previous ones would be misleading," he said. "This report reflects the first year of the toughest inspection regime we have yet introduced. "Schools that may have been judged as good in previous years might only be judged as satisfactory now. "However, we make no apology for raising the bar - expectations are higher than ever and judgments need to be tougher than ever. "No school should be inadequate and there should be no hiding places for under-performance or coasting. "That is why the Education and Inspections Act is introducing tough new powers to turn around schools, closing or replacing them if they do not make adequate progress within 12 months."
Shadow education secretary David Willetts said: "It is still not good enough that four out of 10 schools are regarded by Ofsted as merely satisfactory or downright inadequate. "There is one success story - special schools. "But the Government is putting more effort into closing good special schools than closing inadequate secondary schools. "We need a moratorium on special school closures. "The wide gap between the best and worst-performing schools is also very worrying. "The best way to bridge this gap is by concentrating on discipline, improving behaviour and more streaming and setting in all schools."
Source
CASH-STRAPPED NHS CANNOT AFFORD NEEDED DRUGS
Plenty of money to pay an army of "administrators", though
The cost of making the breast cancer drug Herceptin available on the NHS will mean that health trusts have to deny patients other treatments, according to doctors writing in the British Medical Journal. Herceptin works for up to 25 per cent of breast cancer patients with a particular defective gene. But the cost of treating 75 patients with the 20,000 pound-a- year drug is equivalent to providing cancer treatment for more than 350 patients - while still requiring 500,000 pounds in extra funding.
In July the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) recommended Herceptin for those with HER2- positive breast cancer. But three cancer specialists have now challenged the wisdom of the decision. Writing in the BMJ, the doctors, from Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital NHS Trust, calculated that in drug costs alone they would have to find 1.9 million pounds to treat 75 patients with Herceptin. Supplementary costs pushed the figure to 2.3 million, according to Ann Barrett, Tom Roques and Matthew Small.
The team, working with Richard Smith, a health economist from the University of East Anglia, said that they could fund Herceptin if they dropped post-surgery cancer treatments for 355 other patients - 16 of whom were likely to be cured. Or they could stop palliative chemotherapy for 208 patients. Either way they would also need to find 500,000 pounds. The doctors write: "These untreated patients will be people we know. We will be the ones to tell them they are not getting a treatment that has been proved to be effective, which costs relatively little, because it is not the `treatment of the moment'."
Source
We read:
"Teenage muggers and burglars sentenced to jail by the courts will instead attend local schools and live alongside orphans in open children's homes. The hardened criminals would normally be locked in detention centres with specialist classrooms. But it has emerged an overcrowding crisis in the juvenile prison system is forcing the Government to dramatically relax the law. It will allow the criminals to mix with society's most vulnerable youngsters in the relaxed regime of a mainstream children's home for the first time. And some will even be allowed to attend local schools.
The Government has also ruled they should no longer be considered young offenders. Instead, in yet another example of political correctness, the Home Office's new Offender Management Bill refers to the tearaways as 'trainees'.
Source
Basic physics supports solar activity as cause of global warming
Comments from a successful long-range weather forecaster:
Science, not argument about conspiracy, must be central to the debate about climate change (Letters, November 13), nevertheless Al Gore's stake in green business (Generation Investment Management) and David Miliband's closeness to the nuclear industry merit attention. Dr Wolff's claim that the climate-sceptical position "is in contradiction to everything we expect from basic physics" is bizarre, since physics is the basis of Weather Action's world-leading solar weather technique of long-range forecasting. The SWT relies on predictable effects of solar particles, not on CO2 or meteorology models - and I can assure your correspondent Richard Nunn that the SWT will be published when matters of intellectual property are sorted out
Dr Wolff admits "CO2 has indeed increased in response to temperature change in the past ..." This is a general pattern in slow changes over the last 250,000 years (Caillon et al, Science, March 2003). Furthermore proxy measurements covering thousands of years (eg Neff et al, Nature 2001) show that, in timescales of 22 years, the magnetic sun-spot cycle and world temperatures move together, whereas CO2, while following temperature in slow general terms, also moves the other way for quite long periods. This contradicts the theory that CO2 drives temperature and climate.
Current CO2 levels, or rate of CO2 rise, are not unprecedented. CO2 levels have been three times current levels (Bob Carter, Marine Geophysical Lab, Queensland). CO2 rapid rise "spikes" doubtless happened before, given the power of nature compared with man's puny activity (not even 1% of total greenhouse effect), but ice-core data smoothes them out.
The global warmers' claim that current extra CO2 causes warming which gets dangerously magnified through the greenhouse effect of extra water vapour in the atmosphere, consequent to the temperature rise, also fails. The sea absorbs extra CO2. Furthermore, increased transpiration-cooling by enhanced growth of plants, which is caused by extra CO2, cancels out the extra greenhouse warming of that same CO2. Increased greenhouse heating due to doubling CO2 is 3.7 watts per sq metre. This is negated by about the same amount of enhanced transpiration-cooling of plants, all of which grow faster in extra CO2. Therefore there is no CO2 driven net heat flow and surface temperature rise. Temperature and climate change in our epoch is therefore driven by other factors, especially solar particle and magnetic effects.
So can action against climate change make a difference? Even if temperature trends can be changed - and controlling the sun is a tall order even for a Bush/ Blair legacy - there is no evidence of connected change in weather extremes or useful outcomes. Let's save the planet from real chemical pollutants, but CO2 is not one of them. Wouldn't it be better to work to predict climate than make vain attempts to change it?
Source
BRITISH AIRWAYS IN TROUBLE
Its stupid policy of allowing non-Christian religious attire only was asking for trouble
Ms Eweida, a former member of BA's check-in staff who has lost her appeal to wear a tiny cross outside her uniform, has become a Christian cause celebre. She has the support of nearly 100 MPs. More worryingly for BA, churches are railing against the airline. There is talk of a Christian boycott of the airline worldwide. Only for the worldly is it still the world's favourite airline.
British Airways is at fault. For it is mishandling for a religious issue, betraying both its multicultural principles and a huge potential market. For, Ms Eweida not only has a strong argument of freedom of religious expression on her side, but also hundreds of millions of potential passengers. The 2001 census showed that 71.1 per cent of Britons identify themselves as Christians. According to Aquarius, a marketing consultancy focused on religious affairs, there are 2.1 billion people who call themselves Christian, by comparison with 1.1 billion who describe themselves as secular, non-religious, agnostic or atheist. The devout represent a powerful market: The Passion of the Christ has grossed $613 million at box offices worldwide.
British Airways has previously struggled with icons. When it came to removing the flag from the tailfin, it underestimated patriotism. Now, it has misunderstood the nature of modern faith. There are a growing number of Christians who feel threatened by secularism. Spiritually, the world is more polarised and politicised. Christians, particularly evangelicals, are adopting the activist habits of other religious communities.
By sticking to its guidelines on uniforms, BA is insensitively, perhaps unintentionally, appearing to use its professional code to make a secular case. People of faith expect not just tolerance, but respect. BA needs to show it.
Source
FAILING BRITISH SCHOOLS
One in eight secondary schools was judged "inadequate" in the past year, while more than a third were no better than satisfactory, Government inspectors said today. Chief Inspector of Schools Christine Gilbert condemned the high failure rate and said it was "unacceptable" that the gap between the best and worst state schools was so wide. She demanded urgent action to raise standards, warning: ""The report card for English education has been increasingly encouraging over the past 10 years, but it is still not good enough."
In her first annual report since becoming Chief Inspector, Ms Gilbert said a good education can "liberate and empower" children. "The story is not always positive, however," she added. "That is why I am so concerned at the gap between the best provision and that which makes an inadequate contribution to improving the life chances of children and young people. "Too many schools are inadequate - about one in 12 of those inspected, and in secondary schools this proportion rises to just over one in eight."
Ms Gilbert said many secondary schools, which are often far larger than primaries, faced a "substantial" range of issues which held them back. "However, more needs to be done, and swiftly, to reduce the number of secondary schools found to be inadequate," she said. Ofsted's annual report was based on evidence from inspections of 6,000 state schools during the 2005-06 academic year. The watchdog found:
11 per cent of all state schools were outstanding, about half were good, 34 per cent satisfactory and 8 per cent inadequate; 13 per cent of secondary schools were inadequate, and 7% of primaries; School attendance was not good enough in one in 10 schools, with particular problems in London and the North of England. In nearly one in three secondary schools, behaviour is "no better than satisfactory overall, and in these schools there are also instances of disruptive or distracting behaviour from some pupils".
The findings follow the first year of a new inspection system, in which Ofsted conducted "shorter and sharper" inspections, giving schools only a few days' notice before visiting. The new criteria for schools were also tougher than before, which explained in part why so many schools were judged to be poor. Ms Gilbert said: "The new inspection arrangements have raised the bar, but without putting it out of reach. "The performance of schools, and the public's expectations of them, have both risen, and it is right that inspection should reflect that."
Schools Minister Jim Knight said it would not be fair to make comparisons with previous years. "Direct comparisons between school judgments in this year's report and previous ones would be misleading," he said. "This report reflects the first year of the toughest inspection regime we have yet introduced. "Schools that may have been judged as good in previous years might only be judged as satisfactory now. "However, we make no apology for raising the bar - expectations are higher than ever and judgments need to be tougher than ever. "No school should be inadequate and there should be no hiding places for under-performance or coasting. "That is why the Education and Inspections Act is introducing tough new powers to turn around schools, closing or replacing them if they do not make adequate progress within 12 months."
Shadow education secretary David Willetts said: "It is still not good enough that four out of 10 schools are regarded by Ofsted as merely satisfactory or downright inadequate. "There is one success story - special schools. "But the Government is putting more effort into closing good special schools than closing inadequate secondary schools. "We need a moratorium on special school closures. "The wide gap between the best and worst-performing schools is also very worrying. "The best way to bridge this gap is by concentrating on discipline, improving behaviour and more streaming and setting in all schools."
Source
CASH-STRAPPED NHS CANNOT AFFORD NEEDED DRUGS
Plenty of money to pay an army of "administrators", though
The cost of making the breast cancer drug Herceptin available on the NHS will mean that health trusts have to deny patients other treatments, according to doctors writing in the British Medical Journal. Herceptin works for up to 25 per cent of breast cancer patients with a particular defective gene. But the cost of treating 75 patients with the 20,000 pound-a- year drug is equivalent to providing cancer treatment for more than 350 patients - while still requiring 500,000 pounds in extra funding.
In July the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) recommended Herceptin for those with HER2- positive breast cancer. But three cancer specialists have now challenged the wisdom of the decision. Writing in the BMJ, the doctors, from Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital NHS Trust, calculated that in drug costs alone they would have to find 1.9 million pounds to treat 75 patients with Herceptin. Supplementary costs pushed the figure to 2.3 million, according to Ann Barrett, Tom Roques and Matthew Small.
The team, working with Richard Smith, a health economist from the University of East Anglia, said that they could fund Herceptin if they dropped post-surgery cancer treatments for 355 other patients - 16 of whom were likely to be cured. Or they could stop palliative chemotherapy for 208 patients. Either way they would also need to find 500,000 pounds. The doctors write: "These untreated patients will be people we know. We will be the ones to tell them they are not getting a treatment that has been proved to be effective, which costs relatively little, because it is not the `treatment of the moment'."
Source
Friday, November 24, 2006
In Defense of Spiderman
By Glenn Sacks
The mayor of London compares him to Osama bin Laden. He's been dubbed a "menace" holding a city for "ransom," as well as a lunatic and an extremist. What has 36 year-old David Chick done to arouse such anger? He loves his little daughter, from whom he's been forcibly separated, and he had the courage to do something about it.
The now world famous Englishman recently ended his traffic stopping, six day, one man protest atop a 150 foot high crane near the Tower Bridge in London. Dressed as Spiderman because he is his two year-old daughter's favorite comic book character, Chick says his daughter's mother has not allowed him to see his girl for eight months and has tried to alienate her from him. Interviewed by English newspapers, the ex-girlfriend admits blocking the standard yet paltry twice a month visitation which English courts have granted Chick. To date, she has declined to offer a reason publicly.
Chick is one of hundreds of thousands of English fathers who have been cut off from their children after divorce or separation. Their voices have crystallized into a widely popular campaign by the activist group Fathers 4 Justice. This campaign seeks to reform the family law system to allow divorced and unwed fathers to play a meaningful role in their children's lives.
The English Lord Chancellor's Department admits that mothers win custody in about four-fifths of all cases in English and Welsh courts, and English courts are notorious for their failure to enforce fathers' visitation rights. According to Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips, "some senior judges recently acknowledged that with so many contact [visitation] orders being flouted by mothers, the law is being brought into disrepute."
When one judge recently did transfer care of a child from the child's alienating mother to the father, it was such an event that it merited inclusion in Phillips' column. In reality, these types of transfers should be more common, and would no doubt have a salutary effect on the behavior of parents who try to prevent their children from seeing their exes.
Chick's plight will sound familiar to many American fathers. According to the Children's Rights Council, a Washington-based advocacy group, more than five million American children each year have their access to their noncustodial parents interfered with or blocked by custodial parents. And while politicians and the media hammer away at absent fathers on both sides of the Atlantic, they too often fail to examine the critical role that family courts and vengeful exes play in creating the problem.
To the minimal extent that defenders of the current system have been forced to justify mothers' actions, they claim--as the mayor of London now does--that these men often should not have access to their children.
This is no doubt true on occasion, but is inaccurate in most cases of access and visitation denial. Those opposing fathers' rights claim they are defending women and children from abusive fathers. However, according to the US Department of Health and Human Services, the vast majority of child abuse, parental murder of children, child neglect, and child endangerment are committed by mothers, not fathers. In addition, decades of research, including that carried out by the National Institute of Mental Health, show that women are just as likely to be violent towards their spouses as men are.
According to Carol Plummer, Chick's sister, "David would never harm his daughter or Jo [the ex-girlfriend]. He doesn't want custody of his daughter, he just wants to see her. But Jo is making him suffer by depriving him of seeing his daughter, who is his life."
Though one can sense a smear campaign against Chick on the horizon, two weeks of digging for dirt on him have turned up little. He was convicted of cannabis possession three years ago and of public indecency (for consensual sexual activity) while a teenager. According to Chick's brother Steven Reed, in the cannabis conviction David took the rap for his ex-girlfriend.
Chick says: "[My daughter] is the most precious thing in my world. I was there for the scans when she was still in the womb, I was there for her birth. I fed her, bathed her, got up in the night with her, cuddled her when she cried. "Now I'm just another statistic--another dad who has no part in his daughter's life. For me, it is a living bereavement."
Today fathers in England, America and most of the Western world stand upon a foundation of sand, knowing that our loved ones can be ripped away from us and there is often little we can do about it. We invest our lives in the children we love and tell them that we will always be there for them. But in the back of our minds we can't help but think of a question which Spiderman no doubt considered before he began his ascent up that crane hanging over Tower Bridge: will we be allowed to?
Source
Britain: The ‘school meals revolution’: a dog’s dinner
Scare stories about kids eating 'shit' have created a crisis in school dinners. What a shock!
‘It is about one decent man’s heroic battle against an uncaring, bureaucratic system; about the exploitation of dinner ladies and everybody else who has to struggle away on the front line in a country which no longer values leadership, principles and standards; about the corruption of childhood; and the loss of virtue.’ So said a columnist in the Daily Telegraph after celebrity chef Jamie Oliver launched his Channel 4 TV campaign – nay, crusade – to rescue British school meals from multinationals, and children from their own bad eating habits and feckless parents. What has been the upshot of Oliver’s ‘heroic battle’? Increased bureaucratic monitoring of parents; fewer children eating school meals; even greater exploitation of dinner ladies; and local authorities struggling to pay for all this new found ‘virtue’.
New rules on meals, including restrictions on vending machines, came into force in September. This week, the BBC reported on the results of a survey conducted in 59 local authorities to find out how they had fared. In 35 of them, fewer children were eating school meals – that is, they are no longer having a hot dinner during the day. Of these, 71 per cent felt that Oliver’s campaign was one of the reasons. As it happens, Oliver is far from being solely responsible. But he has been the most high-profile promoter of an obsession with freshly prepared food, locally-sourced, at the expense of ‘junk’ containing salt, sugar and fat. If he’s happy to accept the plaudits, he should also take a few brickbats.
The fresh-food obsession has been cut-and-pasted into a school meals service that doesn’t do that kind of thing, and which has been in steady decline. With staff not accustomed to actually doing much cooking, instead just heating pre-packed food, the jump to food preparation has been mainly at their expense. Across the country, dinner ladies have been working late and starting early to get everything done – usually without extra pay. This is hardly a surprise. In the original series, Jamie’s School Dinners, his sidekick and long-suffering school cook Nora Sands seemed to have her life taken over by the demands of making and promoting Jamie’s food.
In May this year, spiked‘s Brendan O’Neill interviewed Cathy Stewart, a dinner lady in Hackney in London and a union rep, for the New Statesman. ‘Overnight, we were expected to start seasoning meat and peeling hundreds of carrots - but that takes time and we’re not being paid for it’, said Stewart. ‘They want dinner ladies to become professional chefs. But they won’t give us the resources we need. We have outdated equipment and we don’t have enough staff.’ (2) Stewart was balloting members about industrial action.
When the food is finally ready, many children are turning their noses up at it. It’s not just that the food is unfamiliar – it’s also not actually allowed to taste of anything. In post-Jamie’s School Dinners Britain, salt is treated like nerve poison rather than an essential element of flavour, and is banned from canteen tables. When given a choice, kids have tended to choose the ‘junk’ and vote with their feet against the new options. School caterers in Denbighshire in North Wales found that 40 per cent fewer children ate meals on ‘healthy’ food days (3).
If the kids don’t like the food, they will struggle to find alternative sustenance like crisps and chocolate bars in school. The ban on ‘tuck’, along with the extra costs of ingredients, has been a double whammy for school food budgets. As the follow-up Channel 4 programme, Jamie’s Return to School Dinners, showed at Kidbrooke School, this didn’t stop children from eating sweets and savoury snacks. It simply meant that they bought them on the way to school instead – enriching local shopkeepers and depriving the school of important revenue; a sum that ran well into five figures in Kidbrooke’s case.
In other schools, it is reported that children have set up their own ‘black markets’ in junk food, selling sweets to each other behind the bike sheds or in the toilets, as if they were dealing in deadly substances. This might show that children are as wily as ever when it comes to breaking the rules; it also suggests they are developing a pretty screwed-up attitude to the joys of food in general (see The junk food smugglers).
If the sums are getting uncomfortable at Kidbrooke, they’re downright serious in Denbighshire. A report has warned councillors in the county that the school meals service is ‘no longer financially viable’ after servings were down by 100,000. The service lost £81,000 in the last year – a major blow for a relatively small local authority. Part of the problem was the decision to go for locally-sourced meat – a nice subsidy to farmers which looks like a luxury now that sales are down.
What started out as a crusade has become mired not only in the hubris of Oliver’s fantasy of a ‘school meals revolution’ (replacing chips with ciabatta does not qualify as a revolution) but also in the dumping of every other modern food prejudice into the mix. For one thing, we’ve been forced to listen to Oliver’s tirades against parents and packed lunches (see Jamie Oliver: what a ‘tosser’ and Are packed lunches the ‘biggest evil’? by Rob Lyons). This tirade became a chorus of indignation from all right-thinking newspaper hacks when two mothers started supplying takeaway food to kids at a Rotherham school. The fact that the children were struggling to be fed in the ludicrously short lunchbreak, and didn’t much like the food when they did manage to get it, was simply ignored. Parents getting involved with schools is usually regarded as a wholesome example of community spirit - except when it’s off-message like this.
We also now have the prospect of ‘fat charts’ in schools, where children will be weighed by school staff to see if they are the ‘right weight’ for their age, height and gender (4). Such a measure will effectively institutionalise that age-old trend of bullying the fat kid of the class, where children who fall short of state-imposed waist measurements will be made to feel like outcasts not only by their peers but also by the school system itself. And these fat charts are also yet another example of the undermining of parents’ authority: the clear message is that mums and dads can’t be trusted to keep their children in shape, so the authorities will have to do it.
A significant chunk of the extra millions spent on school meals has actually gone to create the School Food Trust, a quango designed to promote healthy eating (5). Did we really need another body to tell us that kids are getting too fat, or remind us of the ‘Seven Deadly Sins: food facts that every parent should know’? And vilifying the catering giants like Sodexho might provide a thrill for those who hate big corporations, but having handed a swathe of school meals over to them, it might have been easier to take a more constructive approach to working with them.
Jamie Oliver, and the government ministers and journalists who fell at his feet, told us that schools are feeding our children ‘shit’, and today’s children will be the first generation to die before their parents. None of this was based in fact, but unsurprisingly such kneejerk scaremongering has had a negative rather than a positive impact. After Jamie has ridden off on his scooter into the sunset, the school meals service may actually settle down and recover - but only if staff and parents work very hard to fix it while quietly dropping or subverting many of his more nonsensical ideas, and while kicking against that new layer of school-meals bureaucracy that is at least as obsessed with lecturing mums, dads and their children as it is with replacing butter with olive oil.
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Godless Dawkins challenges British schools
RICHARD DAWKINS, the Oxford University professor and campaigning atheist, is planning to take his fight against God into the classroom by flooding schools with anti-religious literature. He is setting up a charity that will subsidise books, pamphlets and DVDs attacking the "educational scandal" of theories such as creationism while promoting rational and scientific thought. The foundation will also attempt to divert donations from the hands of "missionaries" and church-based charities.
His plans are sparking criticism from academics, religious leaders and fellow scientists. The Church of England described them as "disturbing", while others complained that Dawkins's foundation bore the "whiff of a campaigning organisation" rather than a charity.
John Hall, dean of Westminster and the Church of England's chief education officer, said: "I would be very disturbed if this project was going to be widely supported because it's not based on reasoned argument."
Dawkins, Oxford's professor of the public understanding of science, is the author of various bestsellers extolling evolution, such as The Selfish Gene. His latest book, The God Delusion, is a sustained polemic against religious faith. He established his foundation in both Britain and America earlier this year and is now applying for charitable status. It was founded in response to what he calls the "organised ignorance" that is promoting creationism, the belief that the Old Testament account of the origins of man is true. Another challenge comes in the form of "intelligent design", the suggestion that life is the result of a guiding force rather than pure evolutionary natural selection.
"The enlightenment is under threat," Dawkins said. "So is reason. So is truth. We have to devote a significant proportion of our time and resources to defending it from deliberate attack from organised ignorance. We even have to go out on the attack ourselves, for the sake of reason and sanity."
Creationism is less widespread in Britain than in the US, but there is a growing movement lobbying to have it introduced as part of the national curriculum. The Emmanuel Schools Foundation, sponsored by Sir Peter Vardy, the Christian car dealer, has been criticised for featuring creationist theories in lessons in the three comprehensives it runs. A spokesman for the foundation denied the claims. However, Steve Layfield, head of science at Emmanuel College in Gateshead, is a director of Truth in Science, a Christian group campaigning to have "intelligent design" in science lessons. Truth in Science has sent DVDs and educational materials to thousands of secondary schools to encourage them to debate intelligent design. Andy McIntosh, director at the organisation and professor of thermodynamics at Leeds University, said: "We are not flat-earthers. We're just trying to encourage good scientific discussion."
Dawkins, however, describes the theory as a "bronze-age myth" and plans to send his own material to schools to counter the "subversion of science". He also plans to campaign against children being labelled with the religion of their parents. "It is immoral to brand children with religion," he said. "This is a Catholic child. That is a Muslim child. I want everyone to flinch when they hear such a phrase, just as they would if they heard that is a Marxist child."
But Hall said: "The European convention on human rights is clear that parents have the right to bring up children within the faith they hold."
Dawkins is also critical of donating money to religion-based charities, warning that pledges for disaster victims should not end up in the hands of "missionaries". His foundation will maintain a database of charities free of "church contamination".
Christian Aid, however, believes Dawkins is "tarring a lot of excellent charities with the same brush". Dominic Nutt, a spokesman, said: "Many charities give aid only on the basis of need."
Dawkins's approach has also offended fellow scientists. Steven Rose, emeritus professor of biology at the Open University, said: "I worry that Richard's view about belief is too simplistic, and so hostile that as a committed secularist myself I am uneasy about it. We need to recognise that our own science also depends on certain assumptions about the way the world is - assumptions that he and I of course share."
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MONCKTON DEBUNKS MONBIOT
The original moonbat is a scientific ignoramus
It's a shame that George Monbiot didn't check his facts with me before using his column to describe my two recent Sunday Telegraph articles on climate change as "nonsense from start to finish" (This is a dazzling debunking of climate change science. It is also wildly wrong, November 14). He implies that a classically trained peer ought not to express scientific opinions. It's still a free country, George. And at least I got the science right.
George says my physics is "bafflingly bad" and contains "downright misrepresentation and pseudo-scientific gibberish". Yet he himself nonsensically refers to "lambda" as a "constant" in the Stefan-Boltzmann radiative-transfer equation. Lambda is not a constant, and it's not a term in the equation.
He wrongly states that the equation only describes "black bodies" that absorb all radiant energy reaching them. No qualified physicist would make such a schoolboy howler. Of course the equation isn't limited to black bodies. Its emissivity variable runs from zero for white bodies to 1 for black bodies. The Earth/troposphere system is a rather badly-behaved grey body with emissivity about 0.6.
He lifted these errors verbatim from a blog run by two authors of a now-discredited UN graph that tried to abolish the medieval warm period. I'd exposed the graph in my articles. Check your sources, George.
He says I was wrong to reinstate the medieval warm period cited by the UN in 1990 but abolished by it in 2001. A growing body of scientific papers, some of which I cited, shows that the warm period was real, global and up to 3C warmer than now. Check them out, George.
He says I shouldn't have said the Viking presence in the middle ages shows Greenland was warmer than now. The Viking farmsteads in Greenland are now under permafrost, and you can't farm permafrost.
He says I was wrong to say James Hansen told Congress in 1988 that world temperature would rise 0.3C by 2000. Hansen projected 0.25 and 0.45C, averaging 0.35C. Outturn was 0.05C. I fairly said 0.3C and 0.1C. He says my source was a work of fiction by Michael Crichton. It wasn't: it was Hansen's graph.
He says I overlooked the difference between the immediate and delayed temperature response to changing conditions. In fact I expressly addressed it, citing evidence on both sides of the theory that the delayed air-temperature response arises from warming of the oceans.
He says I said the warming effects of carbon dioxide had been "made up". I didn't. I said all were agreed that there was more CO2 around and that we could expect some warming. But there is no consensus on how much.
He says I claimed to know better than the UN's scientists. I'm arrogant, George, but not that arrogant: I said the contrarians were probably a lot closer to the truth than the UN.
Too many facts wrong. Too much argument ad hominem instead of ad rem. Too much ignorance of the elementary physics of radiative transfer and equilibrium temperature. Still, gie the puir numpty a cigar - at least he spelled my name right.
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Gore gored
Below are some excerpts from Viscount Monckton's detailed reply to Al Gore. Gore's words are in italics. The full doc is obtainable from the author on: monckton@mail.com. Prof. Brignell also has some derisory comments on Gore's defence.
To begin with, there is a reason why new scientific research is peer-reviewed and then published in journals such as Science, Nature, and the Geophysical Research Letters, rather than the broadsheets.˜ The process is designed to ensure that trained scientists review the framing of the questions that are asked, the research and methodologies used to pursue the answers offered, and even, in some cases, to monitor the funding of the laboratories - all in order to ensure that errors and biases are detected and corrected before reaching the public.
There were some 90 references to learned papers in the scientific journals in the document supporting my article on the science of climate change that was posted on the Telegraph's website. This commentary, too, is supported by a substantial list of some 60 references to learned papers in journals including the three mentioned by Gore. The many journal references (hundreds more could have been cited) demonstrate that there is no scientific consensus that the effect of increased greenhouse-gas concentrations on the climate will be as serious as the UN's reports suggest. But I shall also take some references from the UN's assessment reports, with apologies that they are more political and less scientific than the papers in the journals. The Summaries for Policymakers at the head of each of the UN's reports are written not by scientists at all but by the political representatives of governments. There is repeated evidence of substantial and significant departures from the science in these political Summaries. In every instance, the discrepancies move in the direction of overstating and exaggerating the supposed problem even more than the scientific sections.
That level of scrutiny is typically not applied to newspaper columns of course, but since the stakes are so high in the debate over the climate crisis I would like to review here just a few of the misleading claims in Viscount Monckton's submissions to illustrate my belief that readers of The Telegraph should rely upon more reliable and authoritative sources than the Viscount for information on the latest climate science.
That level of scrutiny is typically not applied to books or films, of course, but since the stakes are so high in the debate over the climate "crisis" I should like to review here just a few of the misleading claims in Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth, to illustrate my belief that cinema-goers should rely upon more reliable and authoritative sources than Gore for information on the latest climate science. Here is Senator James Inhofe's list of some of Gore's scientific errors:
* Gore promoted the now-debunked "hockey stick" temperature chart for the past 1,000 years in an attempt to prove man's overwhelming impact on the climate, and attempted to debunk the significance of the mediaeval warm period and little ice age (for discussion and references, see below).
* Gore insisted on a link between increased hurricane activity and global warming that most sciences believe does not exist (for discussion and references, see below).
* Gore asserted that today's Arctic is experiencing unprecedented warmth while ignoring that temperatures in the 1930's were as warm or warmer (NCDC, 2006);
* Gore said the Antarctic was warming and losing ice but failed to note, that is only true of a small region and the vast bulk has been cooling and gaining ice (see my first article).
* Gore hyped unfounded fears that Greenland's ice is in danger of disappearing (for discussion and references, see below).
* Gore erroneously claimed that ice cap on Mt. Kilimanjaro is disappearing due to global warming, though satellite measurements show no temperature change at the summit, and the peer-reviewed scientific literature suggests that desiccation of the atmosphere in the region caused by post-colonial deforestation is the cause of the glacial recession (see my first article).
* Gore made assertions of massive future sea level rise that is way out side of any supposed scientific "consensus" and is not supported in even the most alarmist literature (for discussion and references, see below).
* Gore incorrectly implied that a Peruvian glacier's retreat is due to global warming, while ignoring the fact that the region has been cooling since the 1930s and other glaciers in South America are advancing (see Polissar et al., 2005, for an interesting discussion of glaciers in the tropical Andes).
* Gore blamed global warming for water loss in Africa's Lake Chad, though NASA scientists had concluded that local water-use and grazing patterns are probably to blame (Foley and Coe, 2001).
* Gore inaccurately said polar bears are drowning in significant numbers due to melting ice when in fact 11 of the 13 main groups in Canada are thriving, and there is evidence that the only groups that are not thriving are in a region of the Arctic that has cooled (Taylor, 2006).
* Gore did not tell viewers that the 48 scientists whom he quoted as having accused President Bush of distorting science were part of a political advocacy group set up to support the Democrat Presidential candidate, John Kerry, in 2004.
Gore is now an adviser to the UK Government on climate change.
First, Monckton claims that Dr. James Hansen of NASA said that the temperature would rise by 0.3C and that the sea level would rise by several feet.˜ But Hansen did not say that at all, and the claim that he did is extremely misleading. In fact, Dr. Hansen presented three scenarios to the U.S. Senate (high, medium, and low).˜ He explained that the middle scenario was "most plausible" and, as it turned out, the middle scenario was almost exactly right.˜
Hansen's three scenarios, presented to Congress during the very hot summer of 1988, projected global mean temperature increases of 0.3C, 0.25C and 0.45C respectively in the 12 years to 2000: an average of 0.33C. But 0.06C was the actual increase (NCDC, 2006). I fairly said 0.3C and 0.1C.
As to sea levels, I corrected this point in my second article. Mean sea level is difficult to measure. It probably rose by less than 1 inch between 1988 and 2000; the rate of increase - 1 inch every 15 years - has not risen for a century; and there is little reason to suppose that the rate of increase should accelerate. Morner (2004), who has spent a lifetime in the study of sea levels, provides an "official evaluation of the sea-level changes that are to be expected in the near future." He finds that "sea level records are now dominated by the irregular redistribution of water masses over the globe ... primarily driven by variations in ocean current intensity and in the atmospheric circulation system and maybe even in some deformation of the gravitational potential surface."
Morner says: "The mean eustatic rise in sea level for the period 1850-1930 was in the order of 1.0-1.1 mm/year," but that "after 1930-40, this rise seems to have stopped (Pirazzoli et al., 1989; Morner, 1973, 2000)."˜This stasis, in his words, "lasted, at least, up to the mid-60s."˜Thereafter, "the record can be divided into three parts: (1) 1993-1996 with a clear trend of stability, (2) 1997-1998 with a high-amplitude rise and fall recording the ENSO event of these years and (3) 1998-2000 with an irregular record of no clear tendency."˜Most important of all, in his words, "There is a total absence of any recent `acceleration in sea level rise' as often claimed by IPCC and related groups."
He concludes: "When we consider past records, recorded variability, causational processes involved and the last century's data, our best estimate of possible future sea-level changes is +10 +/- 10cm in a century, or, maybe, even +5 +/- 15cm." See also Morner (1995); INQUA (2000).
Van der Veen (2002) intended "to evaluate the applicability of accumulation and ablation models on which predicted ice-sheet contributions to global sea level are based, and to assess the level of uncertainty in these predictions arising from uncertain model parameters."˜He concluded that "the validity of the parameterizations used by glaciological modeling studies to estimate changes in surface accumulation and ablation under changing climate conditions has not been convincingly demonstrated."
Munk (2003) says: "Surveys of glaciers, ice sheets, and other continental water storage can place only very broad limits of -1 to +1 mm/year on sea level rise from freshwater export." It is not known how the cryosphere will respond to global warming.˜
Braithwaite and Raper (2002) analyze mountain glaciers and ice caps, excluding the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets.˜ They begin by saying: "The temperature sensitivity of sea level rise depends upon the global distribution of glacier areas, the temperature sensitivity of glacier mass balance in each region, the expected change of climate in each region, and changes in glacier geometry resulting from climate change."˜ They end by reporting that "None of these are particularly well known at present," and they conclude that "glacier areas, altitudes, shape characteristics and mass balance sensitivity are still not known for many glacierized regions and ways must be found to fill gaps."
Monckton goes on to level a serious accusation at all the scientists involved in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, claiming that they have "repealed a fundamental physical law" and as a result have misled the people of the world by exaggerating the sensitivity of the Earth's climate to extra carbon dioxide.˜If this were true, the entire global scientific community would owe Monckton a deep debt of gratitude for cleverly discovering a gross and elementary mistake that had somehow escaped the attention of all the leading experts in the field.
Here and elsewhere, I shall not respond to ad hominem remarks, but shall comment only ad rem. As will be shown below, the shortfall between the observed 20th-century temperature increase of 0.45 to 0.6C and the 20th-century increase of 1.6 to 3.75C that would have been expected from the projections made by the models upon which the UN relies is unwarranted either in the laws of physics or in the 20th-century global mean surface air temperature record. This shortfall between reality and the UN's projections is well established in the scientific literature (see, for instance, Hansen, 2006), though until my article was published it was not known to the public. There is certainly no scientific consensus on the reason for the very substantial discrepancy. Some, such as the Hadley Centre (IPCC 2001, quoted by Lindzen, 2006) blame pollutant aerosols for reflecting some of the Sun's radiance back to space. Others (such as Barnett, 2005, or Levitus, 2005), say the oceans are acting as a heat-sink. If there is in fact no good reason for the discrepancy between reality and projection, and if - as I am by no means alone in thinking - the UN's models are simply over-projecting the likely temperature effects of elevated greenhouse gas concentrations, then the UN's projections of future temperature increases may be around three times greater than they should be.
But again, this charge is also completely wrong, and it appears in this case to spring from the Viscount's failure to understand that these complex, carefully constructed supercomputer climate models not only have built into them the physical law he thinks he has discovered is missing, but also many others that he doesn't mention, including the fundamentally important responses of water vapor, ice and clouds that act to increase the effects of extra carbon dioxide.
The laws of physics say the increase in temperature is 0.3C for every additional watt per square metre of temperature. The UN says 0.5C (IPCC 2001). Several physicists have confirmed my result, which readers may like to check for themselves using a scientific calculator.....
Both in my article and in the supporting discussion document and calculations, I explicitly mentioned climate feedbacks from water vapour and ice-melt. I did not mention climate feedbacks from clouds because, as the UN itself says, even the direction of the change in radiative forcing and hence in temperature caused by clouds is not known (IPCC 2001). I explained that the UN's reason for using a figure nearly twice what the laws of physics mandate for the increase in temperature for each watt of additional forcing was to incorporate an allowance for climate feedbacks.
However, I demonstrated that, if one assumed that the UN's positive climate feedbacks were matched by negative feedbacks, the observed climate response over the 98 years 1900-1998 was identical to the climate sensitivity projected by use of the UN's greenhouse-gas forcing equation. In short, there is no direct observational evidence in the 20th-century global mean surface air temperature record that any allowance at all should be made for climate feedbacks in response to temperature increases arising from elevated greenhouse-gas concentrations in the atmosphere. As will be seen, the implications for forward projections of temperature increase are substantial.
Moreover, direct observations from the 20th century, from the last ice age and from the atmosphere's response to volcanic eruptions, all give estimates of the earth's sensitivity to extra CO2 that are exactly in line with model results (around a 3 degrees Celsius warming for a doubling of the CO2 concentration).
The UN gives observed centennial temperature change as 0.6C, equivalent to 1.98wm-2. So projected figure of 5.36wm-2 derived from the UN's model results using the UN's own formula and coefficients projects a sensitivity to extra CO2 that is not exactly or even approximately in line with observation, but is in fact 2.7 times greater than what was actually observed.
Direct observations from the last ice age
Direct observations from the last ice age were not possible. We were not here. Temperatures and CO2 concentrations have been indirectly deduced from samples of air from former ages locked in the ice of Greenland or Antarctica. The results do not provide a basis for reliable estimates of the earth's sensitivity to extra CO2: they show that increases in CO2 do not precede increases in temperature - they follow it.
Petit et al. (1999) reconstructed surface air temperature and atmospheric CO2 concentration profiles from Vostok ice core samples covering 420,000 years, concluding that during glaciation "the CO2 decrease lags the temperature decrease by several thousand years" and "the same sequence of climate forcing operated during each termination."
Using sections of ice core records from the last three inter-glacial transitions, Fischer et al. (1999) decided that "the time lag of the rise in CO2 concentrations with respect to temperature change is on the order of 400 to 1000 years during all three glacial-interglacial transitions."
On the basis of atmospheric carbon dioxide data obtained from Antarctic Taylor Dome ice core samples, and temperature data obtained from the Vostok ice core, Indermuhle et al. (2000) looked at the relationship between these two variables over the period 60,000-20,000 years ago. A statistical test on the data showed that movement in the air's CO2 content lagged behind shifts in air temperature by approximately 900 years, while a second statistical test yielded a mean lag-time of 1200 years.
Similarly, in a study of air temperature and CO2 data obtained from high time resolution samples at the Antarctic Concordia Dome site, for the period 22,000-9,000 ago, covering the last glacial-to-interglacial transition, Monnin et al. (2001) found that the start of the CO2 increase lagged the start of the temperature increase by 800 years.
In yet another study of the 420,000-year Vostok ice-cores, Mudelsee (2001) concluded that variations in atmospheric CO2 concentration lagged behind variations in air temperature by 1,300 to 5,000 years.
In a study using different methodology, Yokoyama et al. (2000) analyzed sediments in the tectonically stable Bonaparte Gulf of Australia to determine the timing of the initial melting phase of the last great ice age.
Commenting on the results of that study, Clark and Mix (2000) note that the rapid rise in sea level caused by the melting of land-based ice that began approximately 19,000 years ago preceded the post-glacial rise in atmospheric CO2 concentration by about 3,000 years.
Caillon et al. (2003) focused on an isotope of argon (40Ar) that can be taken as a climate proxy, thus providing constraints about the relative timing of CO2 shifts and climate change. Air bubbles in the Vostok ice core over the period that comprises Glacial Termination III - which occurred 240,000 years ago - were studied. They found that "the CO2 increase lagged behind Antarctic deglacial warming by 800 ~ 200 years."
We conclude that there is plentiful evidence in the scientific literature that increases in atmospheric CO2 have followed increases in temperature in former ages and cannot have been the cause of those increases. In this respect, ice-core studies can tell us no more than that there may be a small climate feedback from increased atmospheric CO2 in response to temperature.
Direct observations of the atmosphere's response to volcanic eruptions
The most recent major volcanic eruption to have been observed directly was that of Mount Pinatubo, in the Philippines, in June 1991. Sassen (1992) reported that cirrus clouds were produced during the eruption, Lindzen et al. (2001) proposed that cirrus clouds might provide a possible negative feedback that might partially counteract the positive feedbacks assumed in the UN's climate feedback factor.
Douglass and Knox (2005) considered this negative climate feedback in some detail: "We determined the volcano climate sensitivity and response time for the Mount Pinatubo eruption, using observational measurements of the temperature anomalies of the lower troposphere, measurements of the long wave outgoing radiation, and the aerosol optical density." They reported "a short atmospheric response time, of the order of several months, leaving no volcano effect in the pipeline, and a negative feedback to its forcing."
They also note that the short intrinsic climate response time they derived (6.8 ~ 1.5 months) "confirms suggestions of Lindzen and Giannitsis (1998, 2002) that a low sensitivity and small lifetime are more appropriate" than the "long response times and positive feedback" assumed in the UN's models. They conclude that "Hansen et al.'s hope that the dramatic Pinatubo climate event would provide an `acid test' of climate models has been fulfilled, although with an unexpected result."
Conclusion
We conclude, on the basis of a study of the UN's own reports and of the academic literature in the peer-reviewed scientific journals, that the UN may have failed to take negative climate feedbacks sufficiently into account, there is no consensus among climate scientists on any of the three classes of evidence for the UN's estimate of climate sensitivity cited by Gore, and that in all three classes - 20th-century observation, palaeoclimatological reconstruction and studies of volcanic eruption - there is recent, frequent and compelling evidence in the scientific literature that raises serious questions about the validity of the "consensus" position.
And, despite Viscount Monckton's recycled claims about the so-called "hockey stick" graph (an old and worn-out hobby horse of the pollution lobby in the U.S.), this faux controversy has long since been thoroughly debunked. The global warming deniers in the U.S. were so enthusiastic about this particular canard that our National Academy of Sciences eventually put together a formal panel, comprised of a broad range of scientists including some of the most skeptical, which vindicated the main findings embodied in the "hockey stick" and definitely rejected the claims Monckton is now recycling for British readers.
No. In fact the committee of the National Research Council, (North et al., 2006), which answers to the National Academies of Sciences and of Engineering, while confident that today's temperatures are warmer than at any time in the past 400 years, was "less confident" about the UN "hockey-stick" graph's abolition of the mediaeval warm period, because of a lack of data before 1600 AD. The committee's report criticized the methodology of the authors of the "hockey-stick", The committee notes explicitly, on pages 91 and 111, that the method used in compiling the UN's "hockey-stick" temperature graph has no validation skill significantly different from zero. Methods without a validation skill are usually considered useless.
Similar grounds for concern were listed in a report by three independent statisticians for the US House of Representatives (Wegman et al., 2005), who found that the calculations behind the "hockey-stick" graph were "obscure and incomplete". Criticisms of the hockey-stick summarized in my article came from papers in the learned journals: e.g. McIntyre and McKitrick (2005). Wegman et al. (2005) found these criticisms "valid and compelling". It found that the scientists who had compiled the graph had not used statistical techniques properly, and found no evidence that they had "had significant interactions with mainstream statisticians". It found that the scientists' "sharing of research material, data and results was haphazardly and grudgingly done." It found that the peer review process, by which other scientists are supposed to verify learned papers before publication, "was not necessarily independent". Finally, it found that the "hockey-stick" scientists' "assessments that the decade of the 1990s was the hottest decade of the millennium and that 1998 was the hottest year of the millennium cannot be supported by their analysis". It recommended that State-funded scientific research should be more carefully and independently peer-reviewed in future, not only by the learned journals but also by the UN's climate change panel. It recommended that authors of the UN's scientific assessments should not be the same as the authors of the learned papers on which the UN relies; that State-funded scientists should make their data and calculations openly and promptly available; and that statistical results by scientists who were not statisticians should be peer-reviewed by statisticians.
The NAS stated that the late 20th century warming in the Northern Hemisphere was unprecedented during at least the last 1,000 years and probably for much longer than that. They also noted that the finding has "subsequently been supported by an array of evidence."
No. In fact, North et al. (2006) said this: "Less confidence can be placed in proxy-based reconstructions of surface temperatures for A.D. 900 to 1600, although the available proxy evidence does indicate that many locations were warmer during the past 25 years than during any other 25-year period since 900. ˜Very little confidence can be placed in statements about average global surface temperatures prior to A.D. 900 because the proxy data for that time frame are sparse." These quotations, taken from an executive summary signed by all members of the committee that prepared the report, bear no relation to what Gore says they said.
As to the "array of evidence" supporting the "hockey-stick" graph's conclusion that there was no mediaeval warm period - a conclusion which could not be properly drawn from the methodology used to produce the graph itself - Wegman et al. (2005) said: "In our further exploration of the social network of authorships in temperature reconstruction, we found that at least 43 authors have direct ties to [the graph's lead author] by virtue of coauthored papers with him. Our findings from this analysis suggest that authors in the area of paleoclimate studies are closely connected and thus `independent studies' may not be as independent as they might appear on the surface."
So, no matter how many charts or graphs the Viscount might want to create, the basic facts remain the same. What the models have shown, unequivocally, is that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases mainly released from industrial activities are warming the planet.
My first article said: "There are more greenhouse gases in the air than there were, so the world should warm a bit, but that's as far as the `consensus' goes." There is no consensus at all on how much warming there will be, or about whether or when it will be dangerous. Models are of theoretical interest, but they are not definitive. Until recently they contained "flux adjustments" - or fudge-factors - many times larger than the very small changes in tropospheric radiant energy that are at issue.
Computer models are not capable of showing anything "unequivocally": they are suitable only for making projections, which may or may not prove reliable. The models upon which the UN so heavily relied failed to predict either the timing or the magnitude of the El Nino Southern Oscillation event in 1998. More recently they have failed to predict the sharp cooling of the climate-relevant surface layer of the ocean that has occurred in the past two years (Lyman, 2006).
Sixty Canadian scientists expert in climate and related fields, writing to the Canadian Prime Minister earlier this year (Canada, 2006) said: "Observational evidence does not support today's computer climate models, so there is little reason to trust model predictions of the future."
Dr. Vincent Gray, a research scientist and a reviewer working on the UN's 2001 report (IPCC, 2001) has noted, "The effects of aerosols, and their uncertainties, are such as to nullify completely the reliability of any of the climate models."
Freeman Dyson, an eminent physicist, said this in a talk to the American Physical Society (Dyson, 1999): "The bad news is that the climate models on which so much effort is expended is unreliable. The models are unreliable because they still use fudge-factors rather than physics to represent processes occurring on scales smaller than the grid-size. . The models fail to predict the marine stratus clouds that often cover large areas of ocean. The climate models do not take into account the anomalous absorption of radiation revealed by the Atmospheric Radiation Measurements. This is not a small error. If the ARM are correct, the error in the atmospheric absorption of sunlight calculated by the climate models is about 28 watts per square metre, averaged over the whole Earth, day and night, summer and winter. The entire effect of doubling the present abundance of carbon dioxide is calculated to be about four watts per square metre. So the error in the models is much larger than the global warming effect that the models are supposed to predict. Until the ARM were done, the error was not detected, because it was compensated by fudge-factors that forced the models to agree with the existing climate. Other equally large errors may still be hiding in the models, concealed by other fudge-factors. Until the fudge-factors are eliminated and the computer programs are solidly based on local observations and on the laws of physics, we have no good reason to believe the predictions of the models. . They are not yet adequate tools for predicting climate. . We must continue to warn the politicians and the public, `Don't believe the numbers just because they come out of a supercomputer.'"
Eugene Parker, a leading solar physicist, has said: "The inescapable conclusion is that we will have to know a lot more about the Sun and the terrestrial atmosphere before we can understand the nature of the contemporary changes in climate. . In our present state of ignorance it is not possible to assess the importance of individual factors. The biggest mistake that we could make would be to think that we know the answers when we do not" (Parker, 1999).
Scientists have also carefully examined the real world evidence (temperature change as measured by air balloons, ground and satellite measurements, proxies like ice cores and tree rings, for example) and have found that the models do indeed match the observations.
Until last year, the observations did not even match each other. NASA (2005) said the trend in satellite measurements of the lower troposphere (from the surface to about 5 miles up) was just 0.08C per decade since 1979, but the trend in surface temperature measured on the ground (NCDC, 2006) is twice that, 0.16C per decade in the same period. NASA (2005) commented: "These differences are the basis for discussions over whether our knowledge of how the atmosphere works might be in error, since the warming aloft in the troposphere should be at least as strong as that observed at the surface." More recently, however, NASA has found that its satellite sensors had been pointing in the wrong direction. Satellite tropospheric temperature trends now accord with those at the surface. Balloon temperatures were also out of alignment with both surface and satellite temperatures for many years. Recently, however, a correction has been made to the handling of the data and they now conform.
Furthermore, the fact of warming does not tell us its cause. Though carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are likely to be a contributing factor, they are not likely to be the only factor, and may not even be the main one. Even if greenhouse gases are the sole factor, there is no consensus about the UN's projected warming trend for the future. Besides, as we have shown, the models do not match the observed change in temperature, the discrepancy is large, and there is no consensus either about the reason for the discrepancy or about whether the discrepancy is real.
It is important to understand that there is not just one single strand of evidence leading us to believe that global warming is occurring, but rather that all of the peer-reviewed evidence, from scientists around the world, points in the same direction.
Mr. Gore says that all of the peer-reviewed evidence points in the same direction. A very large proportion of it points in the opposite direction, as the papers listed here make plain. For instance, Soon and Baliunas (2003) listed some 240 scientific papers in which a period of at least 50 years of anomalous drought, rainfall or temperature were indicated at some time during the mediaeval warm period. The authors of the "hockey-stick" graph angrily dismissed Soon and Baliunas (2003) as irrelevant, but - whatever the paper's faults - it demonstrates that the "consensus" repeatedly claimed by the UN and its supporters is far from real.
To be sure, not all of the finest workings of the climate system are yet fully understood to the finest grain. However, all of the basics are absolutely clear.˜ Global warming is real, human activities are causing the problem, many of the solutions are available to us now, it is not too late to avoid the worst, and all we need to get started solving the crisis is the political will to act.
"Global Warming Is Real", says Gore. Sixty leading climatologists and scientists in related fields wrote to the Canadian Prime Minister (Canada, 2006): "Climate Change Is Real" is a meaningless phrase used repeatedly by activists to convince the public that a climate change catastrophe is looming and humanity is the cause. Neither of these fears is justified. Global climate changes occur all the time due to natural causes, and the human impact still remains impossible to distinguish from the natural `noise'."
For the third time Gore recites the already-agreed fact of warming. However, there is no consensus on whether or to what degree human activities are causing "the problem", or even whether there is a problem. Global cooling, widely predicted in the 1970s, would have been much more dangerous than warming. The unusual hot weather in mainland Europe killed 3,000 elderly Frenchmen a couple of years ago. Like so many other events, it was blamed on global warming but was not caused by manmade climate change. It arose from natural climate variability. The most recent cold snap in the UK killed 25,000 people.
This is what prompted the national academies of science in the 11 most influential nations on the planet to come together to jointly call on every nation to "acknowledge that the threat of climate change is clear and increasing." They added that the "scientific understanding of climate changes is now sufficiently clear to justify nations taking prompt action."
The "scientific understanding" is so crude that the central question - by how much can the temperature be expected to rise as a result of a given additional amount of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere - has not been definitively established either empirically or theoretically. It has been established by laboratory experiment that increased CO2 concentrations can cause additional scattering of outgoing longwave radiation at the tropopause, but not at or near the surface, and only at the fringes of one of the three principal absorption bands of CO2. It has been established that the stratosphere is cooling, suggesting that less outgoing radiation is emerging from the tropopause. But it is insufficiently clear whether or to what extent the temperature increase since 1900 is attributable to anthropogenic as opposed to natural factors, and it is not even clear by how much the temperature rose between 1900 and 1998 (NCDC US global mean temperature anomaly 0.3C, AccuWeather from land-based stations 0.45C, NCDC global mean 0.53C; UN 0.6C).
Another crazy Muslim: "A Muslim who killed a swan while fasting during Ramadan has been given a two-month prison sentence. Shamsu Miah, 52, killed the mute swan at a boating pond in Llandudno, North Wales, on September 25.When challenged by police he said: "I am a Muslim, I am fasting, I needed to eat." Llandudno magistrates were told that Miah, from the town, had white feathers stuck in his beard and blood on his shirt. Jim Neary, for the prosecution, said: "The officers told him the swan was the property of the Queen and he replied, `I hate the Queen, I hate this country'." Miah, who has no previous convictions, pleaded guilty at an earlier hearing to intentionally killing a wild bird and possessing a bladed article. He was released from custody, having served two months on remand."
By Glenn Sacks
The mayor of London compares him to Osama bin Laden. He's been dubbed a "menace" holding a city for "ransom," as well as a lunatic and an extremist. What has 36 year-old David Chick done to arouse such anger? He loves his little daughter, from whom he's been forcibly separated, and he had the courage to do something about it.
The now world famous Englishman recently ended his traffic stopping, six day, one man protest atop a 150 foot high crane near the Tower Bridge in London. Dressed as Spiderman because he is his two year-old daughter's favorite comic book character, Chick says his daughter's mother has not allowed him to see his girl for eight months and has tried to alienate her from him. Interviewed by English newspapers, the ex-girlfriend admits blocking the standard yet paltry twice a month visitation which English courts have granted Chick. To date, she has declined to offer a reason publicly.
Chick is one of hundreds of thousands of English fathers who have been cut off from their children after divorce or separation. Their voices have crystallized into a widely popular campaign by the activist group Fathers 4 Justice. This campaign seeks to reform the family law system to allow divorced and unwed fathers to play a meaningful role in their children's lives.
The English Lord Chancellor's Department admits that mothers win custody in about four-fifths of all cases in English and Welsh courts, and English courts are notorious for their failure to enforce fathers' visitation rights. According to Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips, "some senior judges recently acknowledged that with so many contact [visitation] orders being flouted by mothers, the law is being brought into disrepute."
When one judge recently did transfer care of a child from the child's alienating mother to the father, it was such an event that it merited inclusion in Phillips' column. In reality, these types of transfers should be more common, and would no doubt have a salutary effect on the behavior of parents who try to prevent their children from seeing their exes.
Chick's plight will sound familiar to many American fathers. According to the Children's Rights Council, a Washington-based advocacy group, more than five million American children each year have their access to their noncustodial parents interfered with or blocked by custodial parents. And while politicians and the media hammer away at absent fathers on both sides of the Atlantic, they too often fail to examine the critical role that family courts and vengeful exes play in creating the problem.
To the minimal extent that defenders of the current system have been forced to justify mothers' actions, they claim--as the mayor of London now does--that these men often should not have access to their children.
This is no doubt true on occasion, but is inaccurate in most cases of access and visitation denial. Those opposing fathers' rights claim they are defending women and children from abusive fathers. However, according to the US Department of Health and Human Services, the vast majority of child abuse, parental murder of children, child neglect, and child endangerment are committed by mothers, not fathers. In addition, decades of research, including that carried out by the National Institute of Mental Health, show that women are just as likely to be violent towards their spouses as men are.
According to Carol Plummer, Chick's sister, "David would never harm his daughter or Jo [the ex-girlfriend]. He doesn't want custody of his daughter, he just wants to see her. But Jo is making him suffer by depriving him of seeing his daughter, who is his life."
Though one can sense a smear campaign against Chick on the horizon, two weeks of digging for dirt on him have turned up little. He was convicted of cannabis possession three years ago and of public indecency (for consensual sexual activity) while a teenager. According to Chick's brother Steven Reed, in the cannabis conviction David took the rap for his ex-girlfriend.
Chick says: "[My daughter] is the most precious thing in my world. I was there for the scans when she was still in the womb, I was there for her birth. I fed her, bathed her, got up in the night with her, cuddled her when she cried. "Now I'm just another statistic--another dad who has no part in his daughter's life. For me, it is a living bereavement."
Today fathers in England, America and most of the Western world stand upon a foundation of sand, knowing that our loved ones can be ripped away from us and there is often little we can do about it. We invest our lives in the children we love and tell them that we will always be there for them. But in the back of our minds we can't help but think of a question which Spiderman no doubt considered before he began his ascent up that crane hanging over Tower Bridge: will we be allowed to?
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Britain: The ‘school meals revolution’: a dog’s dinner
Scare stories about kids eating 'shit' have created a crisis in school dinners. What a shock!
‘It is about one decent man’s heroic battle against an uncaring, bureaucratic system; about the exploitation of dinner ladies and everybody else who has to struggle away on the front line in a country which no longer values leadership, principles and standards; about the corruption of childhood; and the loss of virtue.’ So said a columnist in the Daily Telegraph after celebrity chef Jamie Oliver launched his Channel 4 TV campaign – nay, crusade – to rescue British school meals from multinationals, and children from their own bad eating habits and feckless parents. What has been the upshot of Oliver’s ‘heroic battle’? Increased bureaucratic monitoring of parents; fewer children eating school meals; even greater exploitation of dinner ladies; and local authorities struggling to pay for all this new found ‘virtue’.
New rules on meals, including restrictions on vending machines, came into force in September. This week, the BBC reported on the results of a survey conducted in 59 local authorities to find out how they had fared. In 35 of them, fewer children were eating school meals – that is, they are no longer having a hot dinner during the day. Of these, 71 per cent felt that Oliver’s campaign was one of the reasons. As it happens, Oliver is far from being solely responsible. But he has been the most high-profile promoter of an obsession with freshly prepared food, locally-sourced, at the expense of ‘junk’ containing salt, sugar and fat. If he’s happy to accept the plaudits, he should also take a few brickbats.
The fresh-food obsession has been cut-and-pasted into a school meals service that doesn’t do that kind of thing, and which has been in steady decline. With staff not accustomed to actually doing much cooking, instead just heating pre-packed food, the jump to food preparation has been mainly at their expense. Across the country, dinner ladies have been working late and starting early to get everything done – usually without extra pay. This is hardly a surprise. In the original series, Jamie’s School Dinners, his sidekick and long-suffering school cook Nora Sands seemed to have her life taken over by the demands of making and promoting Jamie’s food.
In May this year, spiked‘s Brendan O’Neill interviewed Cathy Stewart, a dinner lady in Hackney in London and a union rep, for the New Statesman. ‘Overnight, we were expected to start seasoning meat and peeling hundreds of carrots - but that takes time and we’re not being paid for it’, said Stewart. ‘They want dinner ladies to become professional chefs. But they won’t give us the resources we need. We have outdated equipment and we don’t have enough staff.’ (2) Stewart was balloting members about industrial action.
When the food is finally ready, many children are turning their noses up at it. It’s not just that the food is unfamiliar – it’s also not actually allowed to taste of anything. In post-Jamie’s School Dinners Britain, salt is treated like nerve poison rather than an essential element of flavour, and is banned from canteen tables. When given a choice, kids have tended to choose the ‘junk’ and vote with their feet against the new options. School caterers in Denbighshire in North Wales found that 40 per cent fewer children ate meals on ‘healthy’ food days (3).
If the kids don’t like the food, they will struggle to find alternative sustenance like crisps and chocolate bars in school. The ban on ‘tuck’, along with the extra costs of ingredients, has been a double whammy for school food budgets. As the follow-up Channel 4 programme, Jamie’s Return to School Dinners, showed at Kidbrooke School, this didn’t stop children from eating sweets and savoury snacks. It simply meant that they bought them on the way to school instead – enriching local shopkeepers and depriving the school of important revenue; a sum that ran well into five figures in Kidbrooke’s case.
In other schools, it is reported that children have set up their own ‘black markets’ in junk food, selling sweets to each other behind the bike sheds or in the toilets, as if they were dealing in deadly substances. This might show that children are as wily as ever when it comes to breaking the rules; it also suggests they are developing a pretty screwed-up attitude to the joys of food in general (see The junk food smugglers).
If the sums are getting uncomfortable at Kidbrooke, they’re downright serious in Denbighshire. A report has warned councillors in the county that the school meals service is ‘no longer financially viable’ after servings were down by 100,000. The service lost £81,000 in the last year – a major blow for a relatively small local authority. Part of the problem was the decision to go for locally-sourced meat – a nice subsidy to farmers which looks like a luxury now that sales are down.
What started out as a crusade has become mired not only in the hubris of Oliver’s fantasy of a ‘school meals revolution’ (replacing chips with ciabatta does not qualify as a revolution) but also in the dumping of every other modern food prejudice into the mix. For one thing, we’ve been forced to listen to Oliver’s tirades against parents and packed lunches (see Jamie Oliver: what a ‘tosser’ and Are packed lunches the ‘biggest evil’? by Rob Lyons). This tirade became a chorus of indignation from all right-thinking newspaper hacks when two mothers started supplying takeaway food to kids at a Rotherham school. The fact that the children were struggling to be fed in the ludicrously short lunchbreak, and didn’t much like the food when they did manage to get it, was simply ignored. Parents getting involved with schools is usually regarded as a wholesome example of community spirit - except when it’s off-message like this.
We also now have the prospect of ‘fat charts’ in schools, where children will be weighed by school staff to see if they are the ‘right weight’ for their age, height and gender (4). Such a measure will effectively institutionalise that age-old trend of bullying the fat kid of the class, where children who fall short of state-imposed waist measurements will be made to feel like outcasts not only by their peers but also by the school system itself. And these fat charts are also yet another example of the undermining of parents’ authority: the clear message is that mums and dads can’t be trusted to keep their children in shape, so the authorities will have to do it.
A significant chunk of the extra millions spent on school meals has actually gone to create the School Food Trust, a quango designed to promote healthy eating (5). Did we really need another body to tell us that kids are getting too fat, or remind us of the ‘Seven Deadly Sins: food facts that every parent should know’? And vilifying the catering giants like Sodexho might provide a thrill for those who hate big corporations, but having handed a swathe of school meals over to them, it might have been easier to take a more constructive approach to working with them.
Jamie Oliver, and the government ministers and journalists who fell at his feet, told us that schools are feeding our children ‘shit’, and today’s children will be the first generation to die before their parents. None of this was based in fact, but unsurprisingly such kneejerk scaremongering has had a negative rather than a positive impact. After Jamie has ridden off on his scooter into the sunset, the school meals service may actually settle down and recover - but only if staff and parents work very hard to fix it while quietly dropping or subverting many of his more nonsensical ideas, and while kicking against that new layer of school-meals bureaucracy that is at least as obsessed with lecturing mums, dads and their children as it is with replacing butter with olive oil.
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Godless Dawkins challenges British schools
RICHARD DAWKINS, the Oxford University professor and campaigning atheist, is planning to take his fight against God into the classroom by flooding schools with anti-religious literature. He is setting up a charity that will subsidise books, pamphlets and DVDs attacking the "educational scandal" of theories such as creationism while promoting rational and scientific thought. The foundation will also attempt to divert donations from the hands of "missionaries" and church-based charities.
His plans are sparking criticism from academics, religious leaders and fellow scientists. The Church of England described them as "disturbing", while others complained that Dawkins's foundation bore the "whiff of a campaigning organisation" rather than a charity.
John Hall, dean of Westminster and the Church of England's chief education officer, said: "I would be very disturbed if this project was going to be widely supported because it's not based on reasoned argument."
Dawkins, Oxford's professor of the public understanding of science, is the author of various bestsellers extolling evolution, such as The Selfish Gene. His latest book, The God Delusion, is a sustained polemic against religious faith. He established his foundation in both Britain and America earlier this year and is now applying for charitable status. It was founded in response to what he calls the "organised ignorance" that is promoting creationism, the belief that the Old Testament account of the origins of man is true. Another challenge comes in the form of "intelligent design", the suggestion that life is the result of a guiding force rather than pure evolutionary natural selection.
"The enlightenment is under threat," Dawkins said. "So is reason. So is truth. We have to devote a significant proportion of our time and resources to defending it from deliberate attack from organised ignorance. We even have to go out on the attack ourselves, for the sake of reason and sanity."
Creationism is less widespread in Britain than in the US, but there is a growing movement lobbying to have it introduced as part of the national curriculum. The Emmanuel Schools Foundation, sponsored by Sir Peter Vardy, the Christian car dealer, has been criticised for featuring creationist theories in lessons in the three comprehensives it runs. A spokesman for the foundation denied the claims. However, Steve Layfield, head of science at Emmanuel College in Gateshead, is a director of Truth in Science, a Christian group campaigning to have "intelligent design" in science lessons. Truth in Science has sent DVDs and educational materials to thousands of secondary schools to encourage them to debate intelligent design. Andy McIntosh, director at the organisation and professor of thermodynamics at Leeds University, said: "We are not flat-earthers. We're just trying to encourage good scientific discussion."
Dawkins, however, describes the theory as a "bronze-age myth" and plans to send his own material to schools to counter the "subversion of science". He also plans to campaign against children being labelled with the religion of their parents. "It is immoral to brand children with religion," he said. "This is a Catholic child. That is a Muslim child. I want everyone to flinch when they hear such a phrase, just as they would if they heard that is a Marxist child."
But Hall said: "The European convention on human rights is clear that parents have the right to bring up children within the faith they hold."
Dawkins is also critical of donating money to religion-based charities, warning that pledges for disaster victims should not end up in the hands of "missionaries". His foundation will maintain a database of charities free of "church contamination".
Christian Aid, however, believes Dawkins is "tarring a lot of excellent charities with the same brush". Dominic Nutt, a spokesman, said: "Many charities give aid only on the basis of need."
Dawkins's approach has also offended fellow scientists. Steven Rose, emeritus professor of biology at the Open University, said: "I worry that Richard's view about belief is too simplistic, and so hostile that as a committed secularist myself I am uneasy about it. We need to recognise that our own science also depends on certain assumptions about the way the world is - assumptions that he and I of course share."
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MONCKTON DEBUNKS MONBIOT
The original moonbat is a scientific ignoramus
It's a shame that George Monbiot didn't check his facts with me before using his column to describe my two recent Sunday Telegraph articles on climate change as "nonsense from start to finish" (This is a dazzling debunking of climate change science. It is also wildly wrong, November 14). He implies that a classically trained peer ought not to express scientific opinions. It's still a free country, George. And at least I got the science right.
George says my physics is "bafflingly bad" and contains "downright misrepresentation and pseudo-scientific gibberish". Yet he himself nonsensically refers to "lambda" as a "constant" in the Stefan-Boltzmann radiative-transfer equation. Lambda is not a constant, and it's not a term in the equation.
He wrongly states that the equation only describes "black bodies" that absorb all radiant energy reaching them. No qualified physicist would make such a schoolboy howler. Of course the equation isn't limited to black bodies. Its emissivity variable runs from zero for white bodies to 1 for black bodies. The Earth/troposphere system is a rather badly-behaved grey body with emissivity about 0.6.
He lifted these errors verbatim from a blog run by two authors of a now-discredited UN graph that tried to abolish the medieval warm period. I'd exposed the graph in my articles. Check your sources, George.
He says I was wrong to reinstate the medieval warm period cited by the UN in 1990 but abolished by it in 2001. A growing body of scientific papers, some of which I cited, shows that the warm period was real, global and up to 3C warmer than now. Check them out, George.
He says I shouldn't have said the Viking presence in the middle ages shows Greenland was warmer than now. The Viking farmsteads in Greenland are now under permafrost, and you can't farm permafrost.
He says I was wrong to say James Hansen told Congress in 1988 that world temperature would rise 0.3C by 2000. Hansen projected 0.25 and 0.45C, averaging 0.35C. Outturn was 0.05C. I fairly said 0.3C and 0.1C. He says my source was a work of fiction by Michael Crichton. It wasn't: it was Hansen's graph.
He says I overlooked the difference between the immediate and delayed temperature response to changing conditions. In fact I expressly addressed it, citing evidence on both sides of the theory that the delayed air-temperature response arises from warming of the oceans.
He says I said the warming effects of carbon dioxide had been "made up". I didn't. I said all were agreed that there was more CO2 around and that we could expect some warming. But there is no consensus on how much.
He says I claimed to know better than the UN's scientists. I'm arrogant, George, but not that arrogant: I said the contrarians were probably a lot closer to the truth than the UN.
Too many facts wrong. Too much argument ad hominem instead of ad rem. Too much ignorance of the elementary physics of radiative transfer and equilibrium temperature. Still, gie the puir numpty a cigar - at least he spelled my name right.
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Gore gored
Below are some excerpts from Viscount Monckton's detailed reply to Al Gore. Gore's words are in italics. The full doc is obtainable from the author on: monckton@mail.com. Prof. Brignell also has some derisory comments on Gore's defence.
To begin with, there is a reason why new scientific research is peer-reviewed and then published in journals such as Science, Nature, and the Geophysical Research Letters, rather than the broadsheets.˜ The process is designed to ensure that trained scientists review the framing of the questions that are asked, the research and methodologies used to pursue the answers offered, and even, in some cases, to monitor the funding of the laboratories - all in order to ensure that errors and biases are detected and corrected before reaching the public.
There were some 90 references to learned papers in the scientific journals in the document supporting my article on the science of climate change that was posted on the Telegraph's website. This commentary, too, is supported by a substantial list of some 60 references to learned papers in journals including the three mentioned by Gore. The many journal references (hundreds more could have been cited) demonstrate that there is no scientific consensus that the effect of increased greenhouse-gas concentrations on the climate will be as serious as the UN's reports suggest. But I shall also take some references from the UN's assessment reports, with apologies that they are more political and less scientific than the papers in the journals. The Summaries for Policymakers at the head of each of the UN's reports are written not by scientists at all but by the political representatives of governments. There is repeated evidence of substantial and significant departures from the science in these political Summaries. In every instance, the discrepancies move in the direction of overstating and exaggerating the supposed problem even more than the scientific sections.
That level of scrutiny is typically not applied to newspaper columns of course, but since the stakes are so high in the debate over the climate crisis I would like to review here just a few of the misleading claims in Viscount Monckton's submissions to illustrate my belief that readers of The Telegraph should rely upon more reliable and authoritative sources than the Viscount for information on the latest climate science.
That level of scrutiny is typically not applied to books or films, of course, but since the stakes are so high in the debate over the climate "crisis" I should like to review here just a few of the misleading claims in Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth, to illustrate my belief that cinema-goers should rely upon more reliable and authoritative sources than Gore for information on the latest climate science. Here is Senator James Inhofe's list of some of Gore's scientific errors:
* Gore promoted the now-debunked "hockey stick" temperature chart for the past 1,000 years in an attempt to prove man's overwhelming impact on the climate, and attempted to debunk the significance of the mediaeval warm period and little ice age (for discussion and references, see below).
* Gore insisted on a link between increased hurricane activity and global warming that most sciences believe does not exist (for discussion and references, see below).
* Gore asserted that today's Arctic is experiencing unprecedented warmth while ignoring that temperatures in the 1930's were as warm or warmer (NCDC, 2006);
* Gore said the Antarctic was warming and losing ice but failed to note, that is only true of a small region and the vast bulk has been cooling and gaining ice (see my first article).
* Gore hyped unfounded fears that Greenland's ice is in danger of disappearing (for discussion and references, see below).
* Gore erroneously claimed that ice cap on Mt. Kilimanjaro is disappearing due to global warming, though satellite measurements show no temperature change at the summit, and the peer-reviewed scientific literature suggests that desiccation of the atmosphere in the region caused by post-colonial deforestation is the cause of the glacial recession (see my first article).
* Gore made assertions of massive future sea level rise that is way out side of any supposed scientific "consensus" and is not supported in even the most alarmist literature (for discussion and references, see below).
* Gore incorrectly implied that a Peruvian glacier's retreat is due to global warming, while ignoring the fact that the region has been cooling since the 1930s and other glaciers in South America are advancing (see Polissar et al., 2005, for an interesting discussion of glaciers in the tropical Andes).
* Gore blamed global warming for water loss in Africa's Lake Chad, though NASA scientists had concluded that local water-use and grazing patterns are probably to blame (Foley and Coe, 2001).
* Gore inaccurately said polar bears are drowning in significant numbers due to melting ice when in fact 11 of the 13 main groups in Canada are thriving, and there is evidence that the only groups that are not thriving are in a region of the Arctic that has cooled (Taylor, 2006).
* Gore did not tell viewers that the 48 scientists whom he quoted as having accused President Bush of distorting science were part of a political advocacy group set up to support the Democrat Presidential candidate, John Kerry, in 2004.
Gore is now an adviser to the UK Government on climate change.
First, Monckton claims that Dr. James Hansen of NASA said that the temperature would rise by 0.3C and that the sea level would rise by several feet.˜ But Hansen did not say that at all, and the claim that he did is extremely misleading. In fact, Dr. Hansen presented three scenarios to the U.S. Senate (high, medium, and low).˜ He explained that the middle scenario was "most plausible" and, as it turned out, the middle scenario was almost exactly right.˜
Hansen's three scenarios, presented to Congress during the very hot summer of 1988, projected global mean temperature increases of 0.3C, 0.25C and 0.45C respectively in the 12 years to 2000: an average of 0.33C. But 0.06C was the actual increase (NCDC, 2006). I fairly said 0.3C and 0.1C.
As to sea levels, I corrected this point in my second article. Mean sea level is difficult to measure. It probably rose by less than 1 inch between 1988 and 2000; the rate of increase - 1 inch every 15 years - has not risen for a century; and there is little reason to suppose that the rate of increase should accelerate. Morner (2004), who has spent a lifetime in the study of sea levels, provides an "official evaluation of the sea-level changes that are to be expected in the near future." He finds that "sea level records are now dominated by the irregular redistribution of water masses over the globe ... primarily driven by variations in ocean current intensity and in the atmospheric circulation system and maybe even in some deformation of the gravitational potential surface."
Morner says: "The mean eustatic rise in sea level for the period 1850-1930 was in the order of 1.0-1.1 mm/year," but that "after 1930-40, this rise seems to have stopped (Pirazzoli et al., 1989; Morner, 1973, 2000)."˜This stasis, in his words, "lasted, at least, up to the mid-60s."˜Thereafter, "the record can be divided into three parts: (1) 1993-1996 with a clear trend of stability, (2) 1997-1998 with a high-amplitude rise and fall recording the ENSO event of these years and (3) 1998-2000 with an irregular record of no clear tendency."˜Most important of all, in his words, "There is a total absence of any recent `acceleration in sea level rise' as often claimed by IPCC and related groups."
He concludes: "When we consider past records, recorded variability, causational processes involved and the last century's data, our best estimate of possible future sea-level changes is +10 +/- 10cm in a century, or, maybe, even +5 +/- 15cm." See also Morner (1995); INQUA (2000).
Van der Veen (2002) intended "to evaluate the applicability of accumulation and ablation models on which predicted ice-sheet contributions to global sea level are based, and to assess the level of uncertainty in these predictions arising from uncertain model parameters."˜He concluded that "the validity of the parameterizations used by glaciological modeling studies to estimate changes in surface accumulation and ablation under changing climate conditions has not been convincingly demonstrated."
Munk (2003) says: "Surveys of glaciers, ice sheets, and other continental water storage can place only very broad limits of -1 to +1 mm/year on sea level rise from freshwater export." It is not known how the cryosphere will respond to global warming.˜
Braithwaite and Raper (2002) analyze mountain glaciers and ice caps, excluding the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets.˜ They begin by saying: "The temperature sensitivity of sea level rise depends upon the global distribution of glacier areas, the temperature sensitivity of glacier mass balance in each region, the expected change of climate in each region, and changes in glacier geometry resulting from climate change."˜ They end by reporting that "None of these are particularly well known at present," and they conclude that "glacier areas, altitudes, shape characteristics and mass balance sensitivity are still not known for many glacierized regions and ways must be found to fill gaps."
Monckton goes on to level a serious accusation at all the scientists involved in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, claiming that they have "repealed a fundamental physical law" and as a result have misled the people of the world by exaggerating the sensitivity of the Earth's climate to extra carbon dioxide.˜If this were true, the entire global scientific community would owe Monckton a deep debt of gratitude for cleverly discovering a gross and elementary mistake that had somehow escaped the attention of all the leading experts in the field.
Here and elsewhere, I shall not respond to ad hominem remarks, but shall comment only ad rem. As will be shown below, the shortfall between the observed 20th-century temperature increase of 0.45 to 0.6C and the 20th-century increase of 1.6 to 3.75C that would have been expected from the projections made by the models upon which the UN relies is unwarranted either in the laws of physics or in the 20th-century global mean surface air temperature record. This shortfall between reality and the UN's projections is well established in the scientific literature (see, for instance, Hansen, 2006), though until my article was published it was not known to the public. There is certainly no scientific consensus on the reason for the very substantial discrepancy. Some, such as the Hadley Centre (IPCC 2001, quoted by Lindzen, 2006) blame pollutant aerosols for reflecting some of the Sun's radiance back to space. Others (such as Barnett, 2005, or Levitus, 2005), say the oceans are acting as a heat-sink. If there is in fact no good reason for the discrepancy between reality and projection, and if - as I am by no means alone in thinking - the UN's models are simply over-projecting the likely temperature effects of elevated greenhouse gas concentrations, then the UN's projections of future temperature increases may be around three times greater than they should be.
But again, this charge is also completely wrong, and it appears in this case to spring from the Viscount's failure to understand that these complex, carefully constructed supercomputer climate models not only have built into them the physical law he thinks he has discovered is missing, but also many others that he doesn't mention, including the fundamentally important responses of water vapor, ice and clouds that act to increase the effects of extra carbon dioxide.
The laws of physics say the increase in temperature is 0.3C for every additional watt per square metre of temperature. The UN says 0.5C (IPCC 2001). Several physicists have confirmed my result, which readers may like to check for themselves using a scientific calculator.....
Both in my article and in the supporting discussion document and calculations, I explicitly mentioned climate feedbacks from water vapour and ice-melt. I did not mention climate feedbacks from clouds because, as the UN itself says, even the direction of the change in radiative forcing and hence in temperature caused by clouds is not known (IPCC 2001). I explained that the UN's reason for using a figure nearly twice what the laws of physics mandate for the increase in temperature for each watt of additional forcing was to incorporate an allowance for climate feedbacks.
However, I demonstrated that, if one assumed that the UN's positive climate feedbacks were matched by negative feedbacks, the observed climate response over the 98 years 1900-1998 was identical to the climate sensitivity projected by use of the UN's greenhouse-gas forcing equation. In short, there is no direct observational evidence in the 20th-century global mean surface air temperature record that any allowance at all should be made for climate feedbacks in response to temperature increases arising from elevated greenhouse-gas concentrations in the atmosphere. As will be seen, the implications for forward projections of temperature increase are substantial.
Moreover, direct observations from the 20th century, from the last ice age and from the atmosphere's response to volcanic eruptions, all give estimates of the earth's sensitivity to extra CO2 that are exactly in line with model results (around a 3 degrees Celsius warming for a doubling of the CO2 concentration).
The UN gives observed centennial temperature change as 0.6C, equivalent to 1.98wm-2. So projected figure of 5.36wm-2 derived from the UN's model results using the UN's own formula and coefficients projects a sensitivity to extra CO2 that is not exactly or even approximately in line with observation, but is in fact 2.7 times greater than what was actually observed.
Direct observations from the last ice age
Direct observations from the last ice age were not possible. We were not here. Temperatures and CO2 concentrations have been indirectly deduced from samples of air from former ages locked in the ice of Greenland or Antarctica. The results do not provide a basis for reliable estimates of the earth's sensitivity to extra CO2: they show that increases in CO2 do not precede increases in temperature - they follow it.
Petit et al. (1999) reconstructed surface air temperature and atmospheric CO2 concentration profiles from Vostok ice core samples covering 420,000 years, concluding that during glaciation "the CO2 decrease lags the temperature decrease by several thousand years" and "the same sequence of climate forcing operated during each termination."
Using sections of ice core records from the last three inter-glacial transitions, Fischer et al. (1999) decided that "the time lag of the rise in CO2 concentrations with respect to temperature change is on the order of 400 to 1000 years during all three glacial-interglacial transitions."
On the basis of atmospheric carbon dioxide data obtained from Antarctic Taylor Dome ice core samples, and temperature data obtained from the Vostok ice core, Indermuhle et al. (2000) looked at the relationship between these two variables over the period 60,000-20,000 years ago. A statistical test on the data showed that movement in the air's CO2 content lagged behind shifts in air temperature by approximately 900 years, while a second statistical test yielded a mean lag-time of 1200 years.
Similarly, in a study of air temperature and CO2 data obtained from high time resolution samples at the Antarctic Concordia Dome site, for the period 22,000-9,000 ago, covering the last glacial-to-interglacial transition, Monnin et al. (2001) found that the start of the CO2 increase lagged the start of the temperature increase by 800 years.
In yet another study of the 420,000-year Vostok ice-cores, Mudelsee (2001) concluded that variations in atmospheric CO2 concentration lagged behind variations in air temperature by 1,300 to 5,000 years.
In a study using different methodology, Yokoyama et al. (2000) analyzed sediments in the tectonically stable Bonaparte Gulf of Australia to determine the timing of the initial melting phase of the last great ice age.
Commenting on the results of that study, Clark and Mix (2000) note that the rapid rise in sea level caused by the melting of land-based ice that began approximately 19,000 years ago preceded the post-glacial rise in atmospheric CO2 concentration by about 3,000 years.
Caillon et al. (2003) focused on an isotope of argon (40Ar) that can be taken as a climate proxy, thus providing constraints about the relative timing of CO2 shifts and climate change. Air bubbles in the Vostok ice core over the period that comprises Glacial Termination III - which occurred 240,000 years ago - were studied. They found that "the CO2 increase lagged behind Antarctic deglacial warming by 800 ~ 200 years."
We conclude that there is plentiful evidence in the scientific literature that increases in atmospheric CO2 have followed increases in temperature in former ages and cannot have been the cause of those increases. In this respect, ice-core studies can tell us no more than that there may be a small climate feedback from increased atmospheric CO2 in response to temperature.
Direct observations of the atmosphere's response to volcanic eruptions
The most recent major volcanic eruption to have been observed directly was that of Mount Pinatubo, in the Philippines, in June 1991. Sassen (1992) reported that cirrus clouds were produced during the eruption, Lindzen et al. (2001) proposed that cirrus clouds might provide a possible negative feedback that might partially counteract the positive feedbacks assumed in the UN's climate feedback factor.
Douglass and Knox (2005) considered this negative climate feedback in some detail: "We determined the volcano climate sensitivity and response time for the Mount Pinatubo eruption, using observational measurements of the temperature anomalies of the lower troposphere, measurements of the long wave outgoing radiation, and the aerosol optical density." They reported "a short atmospheric response time, of the order of several months, leaving no volcano effect in the pipeline, and a negative feedback to its forcing."
They also note that the short intrinsic climate response time they derived (6.8 ~ 1.5 months) "confirms suggestions of Lindzen and Giannitsis (1998, 2002) that a low sensitivity and small lifetime are more appropriate" than the "long response times and positive feedback" assumed in the UN's models. They conclude that "Hansen et al.'s hope that the dramatic Pinatubo climate event would provide an `acid test' of climate models has been fulfilled, although with an unexpected result."
Conclusion
We conclude, on the basis of a study of the UN's own reports and of the academic literature in the peer-reviewed scientific journals, that the UN may have failed to take negative climate feedbacks sufficiently into account, there is no consensus among climate scientists on any of the three classes of evidence for the UN's estimate of climate sensitivity cited by Gore, and that in all three classes - 20th-century observation, palaeoclimatological reconstruction and studies of volcanic eruption - there is recent, frequent and compelling evidence in the scientific literature that raises serious questions about the validity of the "consensus" position.
And, despite Viscount Monckton's recycled claims about the so-called "hockey stick" graph (an old and worn-out hobby horse of the pollution lobby in the U.S.), this faux controversy has long since been thoroughly debunked. The global warming deniers in the U.S. were so enthusiastic about this particular canard that our National Academy of Sciences eventually put together a formal panel, comprised of a broad range of scientists including some of the most skeptical, which vindicated the main findings embodied in the "hockey stick" and definitely rejected the claims Monckton is now recycling for British readers.
No. In fact the committee of the National Research Council, (North et al., 2006), which answers to the National Academies of Sciences and of Engineering, while confident that today's temperatures are warmer than at any time in the past 400 years, was "less confident" about the UN "hockey-stick" graph's abolition of the mediaeval warm period, because of a lack of data before 1600 AD. The committee's report criticized the methodology of the authors of the "hockey-stick", The committee notes explicitly, on pages 91 and 111, that the method used in compiling the UN's "hockey-stick" temperature graph has no validation skill significantly different from zero. Methods without a validation skill are usually considered useless.
Similar grounds for concern were listed in a report by three independent statisticians for the US House of Representatives (Wegman et al., 2005), who found that the calculations behind the "hockey-stick" graph were "obscure and incomplete". Criticisms of the hockey-stick summarized in my article came from papers in the learned journals: e.g. McIntyre and McKitrick (2005). Wegman et al. (2005) found these criticisms "valid and compelling". It found that the scientists who had compiled the graph had not used statistical techniques properly, and found no evidence that they had "had significant interactions with mainstream statisticians". It found that the scientists' "sharing of research material, data and results was haphazardly and grudgingly done." It found that the peer review process, by which other scientists are supposed to verify learned papers before publication, "was not necessarily independent". Finally, it found that the "hockey-stick" scientists' "assessments that the decade of the 1990s was the hottest decade of the millennium and that 1998 was the hottest year of the millennium cannot be supported by their analysis". It recommended that State-funded scientific research should be more carefully and independently peer-reviewed in future, not only by the learned journals but also by the UN's climate change panel. It recommended that authors of the UN's scientific assessments should not be the same as the authors of the learned papers on which the UN relies; that State-funded scientists should make their data and calculations openly and promptly available; and that statistical results by scientists who were not statisticians should be peer-reviewed by statisticians.
The NAS stated that the late 20th century warming in the Northern Hemisphere was unprecedented during at least the last 1,000 years and probably for much longer than that. They also noted that the finding has "subsequently been supported by an array of evidence."
No. In fact, North et al. (2006) said this: "Less confidence can be placed in proxy-based reconstructions of surface temperatures for A.D. 900 to 1600, although the available proxy evidence does indicate that many locations were warmer during the past 25 years than during any other 25-year period since 900. ˜Very little confidence can be placed in statements about average global surface temperatures prior to A.D. 900 because the proxy data for that time frame are sparse." These quotations, taken from an executive summary signed by all members of the committee that prepared the report, bear no relation to what Gore says they said.
As to the "array of evidence" supporting the "hockey-stick" graph's conclusion that there was no mediaeval warm period - a conclusion which could not be properly drawn from the methodology used to produce the graph itself - Wegman et al. (2005) said: "In our further exploration of the social network of authorships in temperature reconstruction, we found that at least 43 authors have direct ties to [the graph's lead author] by virtue of coauthored papers with him. Our findings from this analysis suggest that authors in the area of paleoclimate studies are closely connected and thus `independent studies' may not be as independent as they might appear on the surface."
So, no matter how many charts or graphs the Viscount might want to create, the basic facts remain the same. What the models have shown, unequivocally, is that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases mainly released from industrial activities are warming the planet.
My first article said: "There are more greenhouse gases in the air than there were, so the world should warm a bit, but that's as far as the `consensus' goes." There is no consensus at all on how much warming there will be, or about whether or when it will be dangerous. Models are of theoretical interest, but they are not definitive. Until recently they contained "flux adjustments" - or fudge-factors - many times larger than the very small changes in tropospheric radiant energy that are at issue.
Computer models are not capable of showing anything "unequivocally": they are suitable only for making projections, which may or may not prove reliable. The models upon which the UN so heavily relied failed to predict either the timing or the magnitude of the El Nino Southern Oscillation event in 1998. More recently they have failed to predict the sharp cooling of the climate-relevant surface layer of the ocean that has occurred in the past two years (Lyman, 2006).
Sixty Canadian scientists expert in climate and related fields, writing to the Canadian Prime Minister earlier this year (Canada, 2006) said: "Observational evidence does not support today's computer climate models, so there is little reason to trust model predictions of the future."
Dr. Vincent Gray, a research scientist and a reviewer working on the UN's 2001 report (IPCC, 2001) has noted, "The effects of aerosols, and their uncertainties, are such as to nullify completely the reliability of any of the climate models."
Freeman Dyson, an eminent physicist, said this in a talk to the American Physical Society (Dyson, 1999): "The bad news is that the climate models on which so much effort is expended is unreliable. The models are unreliable because they still use fudge-factors rather than physics to represent processes occurring on scales smaller than the grid-size. . The models fail to predict the marine stratus clouds that often cover large areas of ocean. The climate models do not take into account the anomalous absorption of radiation revealed by the Atmospheric Radiation Measurements. This is not a small error. If the ARM are correct, the error in the atmospheric absorption of sunlight calculated by the climate models is about 28 watts per square metre, averaged over the whole Earth, day and night, summer and winter. The entire effect of doubling the present abundance of carbon dioxide is calculated to be about four watts per square metre. So the error in the models is much larger than the global warming effect that the models are supposed to predict. Until the ARM were done, the error was not detected, because it was compensated by fudge-factors that forced the models to agree with the existing climate. Other equally large errors may still be hiding in the models, concealed by other fudge-factors. Until the fudge-factors are eliminated and the computer programs are solidly based on local observations and on the laws of physics, we have no good reason to believe the predictions of the models. . They are not yet adequate tools for predicting climate. . We must continue to warn the politicians and the public, `Don't believe the numbers just because they come out of a supercomputer.'"
Eugene Parker, a leading solar physicist, has said: "The inescapable conclusion is that we will have to know a lot more about the Sun and the terrestrial atmosphere before we can understand the nature of the contemporary changes in climate. . In our present state of ignorance it is not possible to assess the importance of individual factors. The biggest mistake that we could make would be to think that we know the answers when we do not" (Parker, 1999).
Scientists have also carefully examined the real world evidence (temperature change as measured by air balloons, ground and satellite measurements, proxies like ice cores and tree rings, for example) and have found that the models do indeed match the observations.
Until last year, the observations did not even match each other. NASA (2005) said the trend in satellite measurements of the lower troposphere (from the surface to about 5 miles up) was just 0.08C per decade since 1979, but the trend in surface temperature measured on the ground (NCDC, 2006) is twice that, 0.16C per decade in the same period. NASA (2005) commented: "These differences are the basis for discussions over whether our knowledge of how the atmosphere works might be in error, since the warming aloft in the troposphere should be at least as strong as that observed at the surface." More recently, however, NASA has found that its satellite sensors had been pointing in the wrong direction. Satellite tropospheric temperature trends now accord with those at the surface. Balloon temperatures were also out of alignment with both surface and satellite temperatures for many years. Recently, however, a correction has been made to the handling of the data and they now conform.
Furthermore, the fact of warming does not tell us its cause. Though carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are likely to be a contributing factor, they are not likely to be the only factor, and may not even be the main one. Even if greenhouse gases are the sole factor, there is no consensus about the UN's projected warming trend for the future. Besides, as we have shown, the models do not match the observed change in temperature, the discrepancy is large, and there is no consensus either about the reason for the discrepancy or about whether the discrepancy is real.
It is important to understand that there is not just one single strand of evidence leading us to believe that global warming is occurring, but rather that all of the peer-reviewed evidence, from scientists around the world, points in the same direction.
Mr. Gore says that all of the peer-reviewed evidence points in the same direction. A very large proportion of it points in the opposite direction, as the papers listed here make plain. For instance, Soon and Baliunas (2003) listed some 240 scientific papers in which a period of at least 50 years of anomalous drought, rainfall or temperature were indicated at some time during the mediaeval warm period. The authors of the "hockey-stick" graph angrily dismissed Soon and Baliunas (2003) as irrelevant, but - whatever the paper's faults - it demonstrates that the "consensus" repeatedly claimed by the UN and its supporters is far from real.
To be sure, not all of the finest workings of the climate system are yet fully understood to the finest grain. However, all of the basics are absolutely clear.˜ Global warming is real, human activities are causing the problem, many of the solutions are available to us now, it is not too late to avoid the worst, and all we need to get started solving the crisis is the political will to act.
"Global Warming Is Real", says Gore. Sixty leading climatologists and scientists in related fields wrote to the Canadian Prime Minister (Canada, 2006): "Climate Change Is Real" is a meaningless phrase used repeatedly by activists to convince the public that a climate change catastrophe is looming and humanity is the cause. Neither of these fears is justified. Global climate changes occur all the time due to natural causes, and the human impact still remains impossible to distinguish from the natural `noise'."
For the third time Gore recites the already-agreed fact of warming. However, there is no consensus on whether or to what degree human activities are causing "the problem", or even whether there is a problem. Global cooling, widely predicted in the 1970s, would have been much more dangerous than warming. The unusual hot weather in mainland Europe killed 3,000 elderly Frenchmen a couple of years ago. Like so many other events, it was blamed on global warming but was not caused by manmade climate change. It arose from natural climate variability. The most recent cold snap in the UK killed 25,000 people.
This is what prompted the national academies of science in the 11 most influential nations on the planet to come together to jointly call on every nation to "acknowledge that the threat of climate change is clear and increasing." They added that the "scientific understanding of climate changes is now sufficiently clear to justify nations taking prompt action."
The "scientific understanding" is so crude that the central question - by how much can the temperature be expected to rise as a result of a given additional amount of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere - has not been definitively established either empirically or theoretically. It has been established by laboratory experiment that increased CO2 concentrations can cause additional scattering of outgoing longwave radiation at the tropopause, but not at or near the surface, and only at the fringes of one of the three principal absorption bands of CO2. It has been established that the stratosphere is cooling, suggesting that less outgoing radiation is emerging from the tropopause. But it is insufficiently clear whether or to what extent the temperature increase since 1900 is attributable to anthropogenic as opposed to natural factors, and it is not even clear by how much the temperature rose between 1900 and 1998 (NCDC US global mean temperature anomaly 0.3C, AccuWeather from land-based stations 0.45C, NCDC global mean 0.53C; UN 0.6C).
Another crazy Muslim: "A Muslim who killed a swan while fasting during Ramadan has been given a two-month prison sentence. Shamsu Miah, 52, killed the mute swan at a boating pond in Llandudno, North Wales, on September 25.When challenged by police he said: "I am a Muslim, I am fasting, I needed to eat." Llandudno magistrates were told that Miah, from the town, had white feathers stuck in his beard and blood on his shirt. Jim Neary, for the prosecution, said: "The officers told him the swan was the property of the Queen and he replied, `I hate the Queen, I hate this country'." Miah, who has no previous convictions, pleaded guilty at an earlier hearing to intentionally killing a wild bird and possessing a bladed article. He was released from custody, having served two months on remand."
Thursday, November 23, 2006
Is "Obese" Correct?
British doctors are having a debate over whether it is OK to call kids "obese". See here. It is felt that the term might "stigmatize" fat kids.
I would think it might have the reverse effect -- by "medicalizing" a normal condition. Kids who already get called "Fatso" and "Fatguts" don't feel bad about it? Tell me another one!
I think fatties might feel that it is a defense to say: "I'm not fat. I'm obese. I can't help it". And they might be right about that.
If the doctors REALLY want to help fat kids not to feel victimized, they might start telling the unpopular truth -- that moderately overweight people live longer than slim people. Even the very overweight live roughly as long as slim people.
If there's one thing far worse than the BNP, it is using a botched political prosecution of that far-right party as another stick to beat free speech and jury trials
Comment by Mick Hume
The state stages a transparent politically-motivated trial of weak opponents, in order to lay down the law on the limits of official tolerance. Unfortunately the authorities fail to persuade the jury, which finds the dissident politicians not guilty. In response to this embarrassing failure to get their way, government ministers declare that the law must be changed, in order to ensure that their enemies are found guilty of crimes against society next time.
To some, this might sound like the stuff of a police state in a ‘banana republic’, or perhaps of the sort of dystopian futuristic drama beloved of the BBC. But in fact it is what happened in the UK last week, when the leader of the British National Party was cleared of stirring up racial hatred by attacking Islam, and New Labour ministers had an authoritarian tantrum in response.
(However, it is funny you should mention the BBC, as the broadcasting corporation was heavily involved in this little piece of real-world political theatre – scarier than anything seen in its conspiracy dramas.)
The case was prompted by an undercover BBC documentary. The BBC secretly filmed a meeting of BNP supporters, during which Nick Griffin, the party leader, condemned Islam as ‘a wicked, vicious faith’. In the media-inspired furore that followed, Griffin and Mark Collett, BNP publicity director, were charged with incitement to racial hatred. Griffin repeated his views on Islam from the dock. After their first trial, the jury failed to reach a verdict. Last Friday a second jury found them both not guilty.
On hearing of this disgraceful display of independent thinking by the jurors of Yorkshire, New Labour and the rest of the anti-racist establishment immediately threw all of its toys out of the pram. No less a figure than chancellor Gordon Brown, prime minister in waiting and a man not noted for hot-blooded political speeches, immediately intimated to the BBC that this sort of thing would not be tolerated on his watch. ‘I think any preaching of religious or racial hatred will offend mainstream opinion in this country and I think we have got to do whatever we can to root it out from whatever quarter it comes. And if that means we have got to look at the laws again, then we will have to do so.’
Other New Labour ministers were quick to join the chorus, while one anti-racist campaign condemned the verdict as ‘a travesty of justice’ because ‘the BNP are guilty of inciting racial hatred’, as if the party should have been on trial for its views in general, rather than Griffin for anything specific he might have said or done. Insiders pointed out that the government’s attempt to introduce a tough law against incitement to religious hatred had been defeated earlier this year; surely the failure of this prosecution for incitement to racial hatred proved that law was needed now? And there were mutterings about the problem of trying such cases before unreliable juries – particularly when, as almost every report made clear, this was an ‘all-white’ jury.
Here on spiked we have no sympathy or time for racists. But this carry-on is far more worrying than anything the BNP might say. The political motives behind the prosecution were transparent. First the BBC played its self-appointed role as broadcasting wing of the Commission for Racial Equality, with a programme clearly scripted to ‘expose’ the fact that the BNP is not a friend of immigrants and Islam (shock horror!). Then the state stepped in and announced the decision to prosecute the BNP pair the day before the launch of last year’s General Election campaign – a campaign in which bashing the BNP became a ploy for all the major parties to demonstrate their decency. It now seems that even West Yorkshire police were concerned that this heavy-handed exercise would present the BNP with a ‘no-lose opportunity’, whatever the eventual outcome of the trial.
If there is one thing worse (and a lot worse) than the feeble far-right, it is the state using that little political faction as the pretext for another political clampdown on liberty and democracy. After all, it is not the BNP that is now planning to introduce new laws further to limit freedom of expression, laying down new rules about what we are allowed to say about religion, or floating ideas in high places about the ‘problem’ of jury trials. Griffin can only vent his illiberal prejudices at private meetings of his party activists. The government has the power to try to turn its illiberal prejudices into public custom and law.
Chancellor Brown’s statement that we cannot tolerate opinions which ‘offend mainstream opinion in this country’ sums up the outlook of the political class today. There is a powerful mood of conformism, of intolerant tolerance, an attitude of ‘You cannot say THAT!’ which seeks to restrict the terms of public debate. And in this climate, offending what is deemed to be ‘the mainstream’ often seems to be considered the worst offence of all. You can have all the ‘diversity’ you want, so long as it does not diverge too far from the centre. The mainstream is the only stream in town (see The age of intolerant tolerance, by Mick Hume).
As we have consistently argued on spiked, however, free speech is not divisible. Expression cannot be half-free. And the ‘freedom’ to say only what does not offend the mainstream is no freedom at all. Indeed, as champions of free speech from Mill to Orwell have long pointed out, it is only the fringe, ‘extreme’ or unconventional opinions that need protecting – mainstream opinion is quite capable of looking after itself.
If defending fully free speech is important as a general principle, it is also politically vital in the particular circumstances of today. The unresolved problems of division and tension in our society are not going to be addressed by burying them underground and forcing everybody to abide by an empty etiquette of tolerance. That is simply storing up more explosive trouble for the future. We need genuine tolerance that allows the expression of views with which you vehemently disagree, more clear opinions and sharp debate not less, a no-holds barred argument about the sort of society in which we want to live. That must involve the liberty to criticise Islam, Christianity or any other religion as wrong or even ‘wicked’ – the freedom for Griffin and the BNP to attack Islam, for Muslim radicals to denounce the Pope, or for Sir Elton John to call for a ban on all religion as homophobic. It also, of course, includes the freedom of religious types to tell the likes of me that we are going to hell.
The law on incitement is a dangerous instrument that needs to be handled with great care even when it applies to a real crime such as murder. When we are dealing with racial or religious hatred, however, incitement laws have no place. It is a peculiar situation where feeling hatred itself is, quite rightly, not a crime, but incitement to that non-crime can itself be deemed a criminal offence. The criminal law is here intruding into the realm of ideas and thought-policing, and it should be shown the door again. If a racist instructs somebody to go and attack a mosque, and hands him the petrol can, he should be held responsible. But if somebody were to hear the likes of Nick Griffin say Islam is wicked, and then takes it into his head to launch such an attack, the speaker cannot be held to account for the actions of another. However unpleasant words might be, we need to insist upon the distinction between speech and deed (see ‘Free speech’ is more than a slogan, by Dolan Cummings).
I recall a case from America a few years ago, where a racist firebrand who told a crowd of (largely armed) supporters that America would be better off without blacks and Jews was found not guilty of conspiracy to murder. As his defence lawyers argued, in a free society, so long as we are dealing with words rather than violent actions, people should be free to hate.
As I always have to insist at this point, we are not interested in upholding any human right to be racist. This is not primarily about Griffin and Co, it is about freedom for the rest of us – our liberty to listen to all of the arguments, stupid as well as sensible, and judge the truth for ourselves. That is the freedom the authorities now seem to fear most of all. The venom that they direct against the BNP reflects their fear that the simpleton white working classes are putty in the hands of such rabble-rousers. Lord Falconer, the Lord Chancellor, backed Brown’s call for a change in the law after last week’s case, on the ground that ‘what is being said to young Muslim people of this country is that we as a country are anti-Islam and we have got to demonstrate without compromising freedom that we are not’. It sounded as if he was suggesting that the BNP speaks for Britons! Solution? Shut them up – without compromising freedom, of course.
Whatever else it might be the BNP does not represent Nazism on the march. Indeed, in some ways it embodies an eccentric version of the fashionable political attitudes of the age: Griffin has welcomed the rise of the politics of ethnic diversity, in which whites vote BNP while Muslims vote RESPECT, and both he and Collett emerged from court wearing blue ribbons for their cause.
The BNP is an empty receptacle for the disaffection of sections of the white working class who have never read its programme, but feel intensely alienated from the mainstream of the political class. And this cack-handed attempt to crack down on its views from on high will hardly alter that state of affairs. Indeed, the tragedy is that the BNP has now been able to claim the high ground as the champion of free speech. It will have turned many a stomach to see Griffin standing on the steps of the court boasting that ‘They can’t take our FREEDOM!’ But the government’s response – to threaten to change the law to do just that – is more sickening, and can only make matters far worse.
It is high time we had a campaign for free speech and genuine tolerance, in defence of jury trials and democracy, and against illiberalism in all its forms, whether it is directed at immigrants or white voters. No doubt that might ‘offend mainstream opinion’, and upset New Labour as well as the BNP. But it’s a free country – isn’t it?
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DISCREDITED BRITISH HIGH SCHOOL QUALIFICATIONS
Eton College is leading a rebellion that could result in it dropping A levels in favour of an alternative examination system with no coursework and tougher questions. Tony Little, Eton Head Master, said that "Pre-U" examinations being developed at Cambridge University would offer pupils more stimulation and a system of testing that rewarded creativity and lateral thinking. He said that A levels forced children to "think inside a very small box" and discriminated against highly imaginative pupils, whose exam answers were often marked down because they were considered too sophisticated. "We are very interested in adopting it and in looking at anything that thinks afresh and in a creative way, which has a stimulating syllabus. We want the best courses that challenge our students and, if that means doing the Pre-U instead of A Level, then we will do it."
Eton is among at least 100 leading independent schools to have shown strong interest in the Pre-U. Others include Harrow, Dulwich College, Winchester and Charterhouse. But there are fears of the creation of a two-tier examination system for rich and poor pupils, with independent schools opting for the Pre-U and state schools remaining with the discredited A-level system. Graham Able, Master of Dulwich College, who is on a steering group advising on the Pre-U, said the diploma would better prepare pupils for university. "It will take us back to the original idea of A levels from the 1950s as a qualification for university entrance," he said.
Barnaby Lenon, Head Master of Harrow, said that A levels were flawed because too many pupils got top grades, examiners made too many mistakes when marking and coursework was vulnerable to cheats. "The Pre-U combines the flexibility of A level with regard to subject choice together with the promise of harder questions and reliable examining," he said. Richard Cairns, headmaster of Brighton College, said that he believed that most independent schools would be in favour of the Pre-U when it is introduced in 2008. "A levels do not discriminate enough at the top end of the ability range. If government reforms to A levels are not satisfactory, we will go with the Pre-U and so will most others," he said.
Kevin Stannard, of Cambridge International Examinations, said that about 20 state schools and colleges had also expressed an interest in the Pre-U. "They represent the tip of the iceberg," he said, adding that he expected more state schools to sign up once it had been officially recognised. Growing support for the Pre-U will put pressure on the Government to speed up reforms of the A-level system. It has promised to make A levels harder. An extended essay will be introduced, together with more open-ended questions in place of those that lead students through a series of highly structured answers. Coursework is also being cut back to reduce plagiarism. A new A+ grade is being considered. Many heads fear that these reforms may be too late, as they will not be ready before September 2008, the date the Pre-U is due to begin.
Dr Stannard predicted that 2008 would mark a turning point. "Schools will have to choose between the reformed A level, the Pre-U and any other alternative," he said. One alternative, the International Baccalaureate (IB), has been adopted by about 90 independent schools, but most have retained A levels as well. After an initial surge of interest, support has levelled off. Many schools find it too prescriptive and too heavily weighted towards very academic pupils. Andrew Boggis, Warden of Forest School, in East London, and chairman of the Headmasters' and Headmistresses' Conference of independent schools, says that neither Pre-U nor IB is the answer. He has called for the reform of A levels, with coursework being dropped from final grades. A government spokesman said that A levels were here to stay. "However, as standards in schools rise, we need to make sure that we are stretching and challenging all students, particularly our brightest," he said.
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Britain: The ‘school meals revolution’: a dog’s dinner
Scare stories about kids eating 'shit' have created a crisis in school dinners. What a shock!
‘It is about one decent man’s heroic battle against an uncaring, bureaucratic system; about the exploitation of dinner ladies and everybody else who has to struggle away on the front line in a country which no longer values leadership, principles and standards; about the corruption of childhood; and the loss of virtue.’ So said a columnist in the Daily Telegraph after celebrity chef Jamie Oliver launched his Channel 4 TV campaign – nay, crusade – to rescue British school meals from multinationals, and children from their own bad eating habits and feckless parents. What has been the upshot of Oliver’s ‘heroic battle’? Increased bureaucratic monitoring of parents; fewer children eating school meals; even greater exploitation of dinner ladies; and local authorities struggling to pay for all this new found ‘virtue’.
New rules on meals, including restrictions on vending machines, came into force in September. This week, the BBC reported on the results of a survey conducted in 59 local authorities to find out how they had fared. In 35 of them, fewer children were eating school meals – that is, they are no longer having a hot dinner during the day. Of these, 71 per cent felt that Oliver’s campaign was one of the reasons. As it happens, Oliver is far from being solely responsible. But he has been the most high-profile promoter of an obsession with freshly prepared food, locally-sourced, at the expense of ‘junk’ containing salt, sugar and fat. If he’s happy to accept the plaudits, he should also take a few brickbats.
The fresh-food obsession has been cut-and-pasted into a school meals service that doesn’t do that kind of thing, and which has been in steady decline. With staff not accustomed to actually doing much cooking, instead just heating pre-packed food, the jump to food preparation has been mainly at their expense. Across the country, dinner ladies have been working late and starting early to get everything done – usually without extra pay. This is hardly a surprise. In the original series, Jamie’s School Dinners, his sidekick and long-suffering school cook Nora Sands seemed to have her life taken over by the demands of making and promoting Jamie’s food.
In May this year, spiked‘s Brendan O’Neill interviewed Cathy Stewart, a dinner lady in Hackney in London and a union rep, for the New Statesman. ‘Overnight, we were expected to start seasoning meat and peeling hundreds of carrots - but that takes time and we’re not being paid for it’, said Stewart. ‘They want dinner ladies to become professional chefs. But they won’t give us the resources we need. We have outdated equipment and we don’t have enough staff.’ (2) Stewart was balloting members about industrial action.
When the food is finally ready, many children are turning their noses up at it. It’s not just that the food is unfamiliar – it’s also not actually allowed to taste of anything. In post-Jamie’s School Dinners Britain, salt is treated like nerve poison rather than an essential element of flavour, and is banned from canteen tables. When given a choice, kids have tended to choose the ‘junk’ and vote with their feet against the new options. School caterers in Denbighshire in North Wales found that 40 per cent fewer children ate meals on ‘healthy’ food days (3).
If the kids don’t like the food, they will struggle to find alternative sustenance like crisps and chocolate bars in school. The ban on ‘tuck’, along with the extra costs of ingredients, has been a double whammy for school food budgets. As the follow-up Channel 4 programme, Jamie’s Return to School Dinners, showed at Kidbrooke School, this didn’t stop children from eating sweets and savoury snacks. It simply meant that they bought them on the way to school instead – enriching local shopkeepers and depriving the school of important revenue; a sum that ran well into five figures in Kidbrooke’s case.
In other schools, it is reported that children have set up their own ‘black markets’ in junk food, selling sweets to each other behind the bike sheds or in the toilets, as if they were dealing in deadly substances. This might show that children are as wily as ever when it comes to breaking the rules; it also suggests they are developing a pretty screwed-up attitude to the joys of food in general (see The junk food smugglers).
If the sums are getting uncomfortable at Kidbrooke, they’re downright serious in Denbighshire. A report has warned councillors in the county that the school meals service is ‘no longer financially viable’ after servings were down by 100,000. The service lost £81,000 in the last year – a major blow for a relatively small local authority. Part of the problem was the decision to go for locally-sourced meat – a nice subsidy to farmers which looks like a luxury now that sales are down.
What started out as a crusade has become mired not only in the hubris of Oliver’s fantasy of a ‘school meals revolution’ (replacing chips with ciabatta does not qualify as a revolution) but also in the dumping of every other modern food prejudice into the mix. For one thing, we’ve been forced to listen to Oliver’s tirades against parents and packed lunches (see Jamie Oliver: what a ‘tosser’ and Are packed lunches the ‘biggest evil’? by Rob Lyons). This tirade became a chorus of indignation from all right-thinking newspaper hacks when two mothers started supplying takeaway food to kids at a Rotherham school. The fact that the children were struggling to be fed in the ludicrously short lunchbreak, and didn’t much like the food when they did manage to get it, was simply ignored. Parents getting involved with schools is usually regarded as a wholesome example of community spirit - except when it’s off-message like this.
We also now have the prospect of ‘fat charts’ in schools, where children will be weighed by school staff to see if they are the ‘right weight’ for their age, height and gender (4). Such a measure will effectively institutionalise that age-old trend of bullying the fat kid of the class, where children who fall short of state-imposed waist measurements will be made to feel like outcasts not only by their peers but also by the school system itself. And these fat charts are also yet another example of the undermining of parents’ authority: the clear message is that mums and dads can’t be trusted to keep their children in shape, so the authorities will have to do it.
A significant chunk of the extra millions spent on school meals has actually gone to create the School Food Trust, a quango designed to promote healthy eating (5). Did we really need another body to tell us that kids are getting too fat, or remind us of the ‘Seven Deadly Sins: food facts that every parent should know’? And vilifying the catering giants like Sodexho might provide a thrill for those who hate big corporations, but having handed a swathe of school meals over to them, it might have been easier to take a more constructive approach to working with them.
Jamie Oliver, and the government ministers and journalists who fell at his feet, told us that schools are feeding our children ‘shit’, and today’s children will be the first generation to die before their parents. None of this was based in fact, but unsurprisingly such kneejerk scaremongering has had a negative rather than a positive impact. After Jamie has ridden off on his scooter into the sunset, the school meals service may actually settle down and recover - but only if staff and parents work very hard to fix it while quietly dropping or subverting many of his more nonsensical ideas, and while kicking against that new layer of school-meals bureaucracy that is at least as obsessed with lecturing mums, dads and their children as it is with replacing butter with olive oil.
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Weird: NHS hospitals to advertise themselves
Spending the money on hiring more doctors and reducing their waiting lists has not occurred to anybody, apparently
NHS hospitals are to be allowed to attract patients by advertising, under a Department of Health code. A draft version says that the NHS needs to give “reliable information” to assist patient choice, and should not spend too much on advertisements. There is unlikely to be a cap on trusts’ spending but costly television advertising is likely to be ruled out.
In consultation with GPs, patients now have a choice, albeit limited, of which hospital to have treatment at. Under the new payment-by-results system, hospitals are being given funds per patient treated. The successes of hospitals could be presented to patients through advertising; some independent hospital chains already advertise their services to GPs.
Gill Morgan, of the NHS Confederation, said: “We are trying to change the NHS from being a service where you get what you’re given, really, to a service where patients are much more able to choose what they want.”
Jonathan Fielden, of the British Medical Association, said: “NHS hospitals will have no option but to invest in marketing tactics if they are to survive against private firms. It is a sad indictment of government policy to consider spending public money on advertising NHS services when hospitals are having to make cutbacks in patient care, and redundancies.” The department said that a code on advertising would be put out to consultation soon.
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Nutty British "security": "It's a Boy's Own gift that will be stuffed into thousands of Christmas stockings, but a retired brigadier has discovered that the credit card-sized toolkit - complete with 5cm (2in) blade, compass, tweezers and toothpick - could put the recipients on the wrong side of the law. Tom Foulkes, 56, who spent 35 years working for the Ministry of Defence developing real weapons, was arrested, locked up and had his fingerprints and DNA sample taken after the kit was discovered in his overnight bag by police. The former Royal Engineer was preparing to board a Paris-bound train at Waterloo when an X-ray machine alarm was triggered by the toolkit. He was hauled from the station, placed in a cage in a van and taken to a police station for questioning. Four hours later he was released and cautioned"
Britain: What about the human rights of the general public? "A man who has been barred from every pub in his village after behaving aggressively towards staff at his local is being backed by a leading civil liberties group. Liberty is contending that the ban infringes the man's human rights."
British doctors are having a debate over whether it is OK to call kids "obese". See here. It is felt that the term might "stigmatize" fat kids.
I would think it might have the reverse effect -- by "medicalizing" a normal condition. Kids who already get called "Fatso" and "Fatguts" don't feel bad about it? Tell me another one!
I think fatties might feel that it is a defense to say: "I'm not fat. I'm obese. I can't help it". And they might be right about that.
If the doctors REALLY want to help fat kids not to feel victimized, they might start telling the unpopular truth -- that moderately overweight people live longer than slim people. Even the very overweight live roughly as long as slim people.
If there's one thing far worse than the BNP, it is using a botched political prosecution of that far-right party as another stick to beat free speech and jury trials
Comment by Mick Hume
The state stages a transparent politically-motivated trial of weak opponents, in order to lay down the law on the limits of official tolerance. Unfortunately the authorities fail to persuade the jury, which finds the dissident politicians not guilty. In response to this embarrassing failure to get their way, government ministers declare that the law must be changed, in order to ensure that their enemies are found guilty of crimes against society next time.
To some, this might sound like the stuff of a police state in a ‘banana republic’, or perhaps of the sort of dystopian futuristic drama beloved of the BBC. But in fact it is what happened in the UK last week, when the leader of the British National Party was cleared of stirring up racial hatred by attacking Islam, and New Labour ministers had an authoritarian tantrum in response.
(However, it is funny you should mention the BBC, as the broadcasting corporation was heavily involved in this little piece of real-world political theatre – scarier than anything seen in its conspiracy dramas.)
The case was prompted by an undercover BBC documentary. The BBC secretly filmed a meeting of BNP supporters, during which Nick Griffin, the party leader, condemned Islam as ‘a wicked, vicious faith’. In the media-inspired furore that followed, Griffin and Mark Collett, BNP publicity director, were charged with incitement to racial hatred. Griffin repeated his views on Islam from the dock. After their first trial, the jury failed to reach a verdict. Last Friday a second jury found them both not guilty.
On hearing of this disgraceful display of independent thinking by the jurors of Yorkshire, New Labour and the rest of the anti-racist establishment immediately threw all of its toys out of the pram. No less a figure than chancellor Gordon Brown, prime minister in waiting and a man not noted for hot-blooded political speeches, immediately intimated to the BBC that this sort of thing would not be tolerated on his watch. ‘I think any preaching of religious or racial hatred will offend mainstream opinion in this country and I think we have got to do whatever we can to root it out from whatever quarter it comes. And if that means we have got to look at the laws again, then we will have to do so.’
Other New Labour ministers were quick to join the chorus, while one anti-racist campaign condemned the verdict as ‘a travesty of justice’ because ‘the BNP are guilty of inciting racial hatred’, as if the party should have been on trial for its views in general, rather than Griffin for anything specific he might have said or done. Insiders pointed out that the government’s attempt to introduce a tough law against incitement to religious hatred had been defeated earlier this year; surely the failure of this prosecution for incitement to racial hatred proved that law was needed now? And there were mutterings about the problem of trying such cases before unreliable juries – particularly when, as almost every report made clear, this was an ‘all-white’ jury.
Here on spiked we have no sympathy or time for racists. But this carry-on is far more worrying than anything the BNP might say. The political motives behind the prosecution were transparent. First the BBC played its self-appointed role as broadcasting wing of the Commission for Racial Equality, with a programme clearly scripted to ‘expose’ the fact that the BNP is not a friend of immigrants and Islam (shock horror!). Then the state stepped in and announced the decision to prosecute the BNP pair the day before the launch of last year’s General Election campaign – a campaign in which bashing the BNP became a ploy for all the major parties to demonstrate their decency. It now seems that even West Yorkshire police were concerned that this heavy-handed exercise would present the BNP with a ‘no-lose opportunity’, whatever the eventual outcome of the trial.
If there is one thing worse (and a lot worse) than the feeble far-right, it is the state using that little political faction as the pretext for another political clampdown on liberty and democracy. After all, it is not the BNP that is now planning to introduce new laws further to limit freedom of expression, laying down new rules about what we are allowed to say about religion, or floating ideas in high places about the ‘problem’ of jury trials. Griffin can only vent his illiberal prejudices at private meetings of his party activists. The government has the power to try to turn its illiberal prejudices into public custom and law.
Chancellor Brown’s statement that we cannot tolerate opinions which ‘offend mainstream opinion in this country’ sums up the outlook of the political class today. There is a powerful mood of conformism, of intolerant tolerance, an attitude of ‘You cannot say THAT!’ which seeks to restrict the terms of public debate. And in this climate, offending what is deemed to be ‘the mainstream’ often seems to be considered the worst offence of all. You can have all the ‘diversity’ you want, so long as it does not diverge too far from the centre. The mainstream is the only stream in town (see The age of intolerant tolerance, by Mick Hume).
As we have consistently argued on spiked, however, free speech is not divisible. Expression cannot be half-free. And the ‘freedom’ to say only what does not offend the mainstream is no freedom at all. Indeed, as champions of free speech from Mill to Orwell have long pointed out, it is only the fringe, ‘extreme’ or unconventional opinions that need protecting – mainstream opinion is quite capable of looking after itself.
If defending fully free speech is important as a general principle, it is also politically vital in the particular circumstances of today. The unresolved problems of division and tension in our society are not going to be addressed by burying them underground and forcing everybody to abide by an empty etiquette of tolerance. That is simply storing up more explosive trouble for the future. We need genuine tolerance that allows the expression of views with which you vehemently disagree, more clear opinions and sharp debate not less, a no-holds barred argument about the sort of society in which we want to live. That must involve the liberty to criticise Islam, Christianity or any other religion as wrong or even ‘wicked’ – the freedom for Griffin and the BNP to attack Islam, for Muslim radicals to denounce the Pope, or for Sir Elton John to call for a ban on all religion as homophobic. It also, of course, includes the freedom of religious types to tell the likes of me that we are going to hell.
The law on incitement is a dangerous instrument that needs to be handled with great care even when it applies to a real crime such as murder. When we are dealing with racial or religious hatred, however, incitement laws have no place. It is a peculiar situation where feeling hatred itself is, quite rightly, not a crime, but incitement to that non-crime can itself be deemed a criminal offence. The criminal law is here intruding into the realm of ideas and thought-policing, and it should be shown the door again. If a racist instructs somebody to go and attack a mosque, and hands him the petrol can, he should be held responsible. But if somebody were to hear the likes of Nick Griffin say Islam is wicked, and then takes it into his head to launch such an attack, the speaker cannot be held to account for the actions of another. However unpleasant words might be, we need to insist upon the distinction between speech and deed (see ‘Free speech’ is more than a slogan, by Dolan Cummings).
I recall a case from America a few years ago, where a racist firebrand who told a crowd of (largely armed) supporters that America would be better off without blacks and Jews was found not guilty of conspiracy to murder. As his defence lawyers argued, in a free society, so long as we are dealing with words rather than violent actions, people should be free to hate.
As I always have to insist at this point, we are not interested in upholding any human right to be racist. This is not primarily about Griffin and Co, it is about freedom for the rest of us – our liberty to listen to all of the arguments, stupid as well as sensible, and judge the truth for ourselves. That is the freedom the authorities now seem to fear most of all. The venom that they direct against the BNP reflects their fear that the simpleton white working classes are putty in the hands of such rabble-rousers. Lord Falconer, the Lord Chancellor, backed Brown’s call for a change in the law after last week’s case, on the ground that ‘what is being said to young Muslim people of this country is that we as a country are anti-Islam and we have got to demonstrate without compromising freedom that we are not’. It sounded as if he was suggesting that the BNP speaks for Britons! Solution? Shut them up – without compromising freedom, of course.
Whatever else it might be the BNP does not represent Nazism on the march. Indeed, in some ways it embodies an eccentric version of the fashionable political attitudes of the age: Griffin has welcomed the rise of the politics of ethnic diversity, in which whites vote BNP while Muslims vote RESPECT, and both he and Collett emerged from court wearing blue ribbons for their cause.
The BNP is an empty receptacle for the disaffection of sections of the white working class who have never read its programme, but feel intensely alienated from the mainstream of the political class. And this cack-handed attempt to crack down on its views from on high will hardly alter that state of affairs. Indeed, the tragedy is that the BNP has now been able to claim the high ground as the champion of free speech. It will have turned many a stomach to see Griffin standing on the steps of the court boasting that ‘They can’t take our FREEDOM!’ But the government’s response – to threaten to change the law to do just that – is more sickening, and can only make matters far worse.
It is high time we had a campaign for free speech and genuine tolerance, in defence of jury trials and democracy, and against illiberalism in all its forms, whether it is directed at immigrants or white voters. No doubt that might ‘offend mainstream opinion’, and upset New Labour as well as the BNP. But it’s a free country – isn’t it?
Source
DISCREDITED BRITISH HIGH SCHOOL QUALIFICATIONS
Eton College is leading a rebellion that could result in it dropping A levels in favour of an alternative examination system with no coursework and tougher questions. Tony Little, Eton Head Master, said that "Pre-U" examinations being developed at Cambridge University would offer pupils more stimulation and a system of testing that rewarded creativity and lateral thinking. He said that A levels forced children to "think inside a very small box" and discriminated against highly imaginative pupils, whose exam answers were often marked down because they were considered too sophisticated. "We are very interested in adopting it and in looking at anything that thinks afresh and in a creative way, which has a stimulating syllabus. We want the best courses that challenge our students and, if that means doing the Pre-U instead of A Level, then we will do it."
Eton is among at least 100 leading independent schools to have shown strong interest in the Pre-U. Others include Harrow, Dulwich College, Winchester and Charterhouse. But there are fears of the creation of a two-tier examination system for rich and poor pupils, with independent schools opting for the Pre-U and state schools remaining with the discredited A-level system. Graham Able, Master of Dulwich College, who is on a steering group advising on the Pre-U, said the diploma would better prepare pupils for university. "It will take us back to the original idea of A levels from the 1950s as a qualification for university entrance," he said.
Barnaby Lenon, Head Master of Harrow, said that A levels were flawed because too many pupils got top grades, examiners made too many mistakes when marking and coursework was vulnerable to cheats. "The Pre-U combines the flexibility of A level with regard to subject choice together with the promise of harder questions and reliable examining," he said. Richard Cairns, headmaster of Brighton College, said that he believed that most independent schools would be in favour of the Pre-U when it is introduced in 2008. "A levels do not discriminate enough at the top end of the ability range. If government reforms to A levels are not satisfactory, we will go with the Pre-U and so will most others," he said.
Kevin Stannard, of Cambridge International Examinations, said that about 20 state schools and colleges had also expressed an interest in the Pre-U. "They represent the tip of the iceberg," he said, adding that he expected more state schools to sign up once it had been officially recognised. Growing support for the Pre-U will put pressure on the Government to speed up reforms of the A-level system. It has promised to make A levels harder. An extended essay will be introduced, together with more open-ended questions in place of those that lead students through a series of highly structured answers. Coursework is also being cut back to reduce plagiarism. A new A+ grade is being considered. Many heads fear that these reforms may be too late, as they will not be ready before September 2008, the date the Pre-U is due to begin.
Dr Stannard predicted that 2008 would mark a turning point. "Schools will have to choose between the reformed A level, the Pre-U and any other alternative," he said. One alternative, the International Baccalaureate (IB), has been adopted by about 90 independent schools, but most have retained A levels as well. After an initial surge of interest, support has levelled off. Many schools find it too prescriptive and too heavily weighted towards very academic pupils. Andrew Boggis, Warden of Forest School, in East London, and chairman of the Headmasters' and Headmistresses' Conference of independent schools, says that neither Pre-U nor IB is the answer. He has called for the reform of A levels, with coursework being dropped from final grades. A government spokesman said that A levels were here to stay. "However, as standards in schools rise, we need to make sure that we are stretching and challenging all students, particularly our brightest," he said.
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Britain: The ‘school meals revolution’: a dog’s dinner
Scare stories about kids eating 'shit' have created a crisis in school dinners. What a shock!
‘It is about one decent man’s heroic battle against an uncaring, bureaucratic system; about the exploitation of dinner ladies and everybody else who has to struggle away on the front line in a country which no longer values leadership, principles and standards; about the corruption of childhood; and the loss of virtue.’ So said a columnist in the Daily Telegraph after celebrity chef Jamie Oliver launched his Channel 4 TV campaign – nay, crusade – to rescue British school meals from multinationals, and children from their own bad eating habits and feckless parents. What has been the upshot of Oliver’s ‘heroic battle’? Increased bureaucratic monitoring of parents; fewer children eating school meals; even greater exploitation of dinner ladies; and local authorities struggling to pay for all this new found ‘virtue’.
New rules on meals, including restrictions on vending machines, came into force in September. This week, the BBC reported on the results of a survey conducted in 59 local authorities to find out how they had fared. In 35 of them, fewer children were eating school meals – that is, they are no longer having a hot dinner during the day. Of these, 71 per cent felt that Oliver’s campaign was one of the reasons. As it happens, Oliver is far from being solely responsible. But he has been the most high-profile promoter of an obsession with freshly prepared food, locally-sourced, at the expense of ‘junk’ containing salt, sugar and fat. If he’s happy to accept the plaudits, he should also take a few brickbats.
The fresh-food obsession has been cut-and-pasted into a school meals service that doesn’t do that kind of thing, and which has been in steady decline. With staff not accustomed to actually doing much cooking, instead just heating pre-packed food, the jump to food preparation has been mainly at their expense. Across the country, dinner ladies have been working late and starting early to get everything done – usually without extra pay. This is hardly a surprise. In the original series, Jamie’s School Dinners, his sidekick and long-suffering school cook Nora Sands seemed to have her life taken over by the demands of making and promoting Jamie’s food.
In May this year, spiked‘s Brendan O’Neill interviewed Cathy Stewart, a dinner lady in Hackney in London and a union rep, for the New Statesman. ‘Overnight, we were expected to start seasoning meat and peeling hundreds of carrots - but that takes time and we’re not being paid for it’, said Stewart. ‘They want dinner ladies to become professional chefs. But they won’t give us the resources we need. We have outdated equipment and we don’t have enough staff.’ (2) Stewart was balloting members about industrial action.
When the food is finally ready, many children are turning their noses up at it. It’s not just that the food is unfamiliar – it’s also not actually allowed to taste of anything. In post-Jamie’s School Dinners Britain, salt is treated like nerve poison rather than an essential element of flavour, and is banned from canteen tables. When given a choice, kids have tended to choose the ‘junk’ and vote with their feet against the new options. School caterers in Denbighshire in North Wales found that 40 per cent fewer children ate meals on ‘healthy’ food days (3).
If the kids don’t like the food, they will struggle to find alternative sustenance like crisps and chocolate bars in school. The ban on ‘tuck’, along with the extra costs of ingredients, has been a double whammy for school food budgets. As the follow-up Channel 4 programme, Jamie’s Return to School Dinners, showed at Kidbrooke School, this didn’t stop children from eating sweets and savoury snacks. It simply meant that they bought them on the way to school instead – enriching local shopkeepers and depriving the school of important revenue; a sum that ran well into five figures in Kidbrooke’s case.
In other schools, it is reported that children have set up their own ‘black markets’ in junk food, selling sweets to each other behind the bike sheds or in the toilets, as if they were dealing in deadly substances. This might show that children are as wily as ever when it comes to breaking the rules; it also suggests they are developing a pretty screwed-up attitude to the joys of food in general (see The junk food smugglers).
If the sums are getting uncomfortable at Kidbrooke, they’re downright serious in Denbighshire. A report has warned councillors in the county that the school meals service is ‘no longer financially viable’ after servings were down by 100,000. The service lost £81,000 in the last year – a major blow for a relatively small local authority. Part of the problem was the decision to go for locally-sourced meat – a nice subsidy to farmers which looks like a luxury now that sales are down.
What started out as a crusade has become mired not only in the hubris of Oliver’s fantasy of a ‘school meals revolution’ (replacing chips with ciabatta does not qualify as a revolution) but also in the dumping of every other modern food prejudice into the mix. For one thing, we’ve been forced to listen to Oliver’s tirades against parents and packed lunches (see Jamie Oliver: what a ‘tosser’ and Are packed lunches the ‘biggest evil’? by Rob Lyons). This tirade became a chorus of indignation from all right-thinking newspaper hacks when two mothers started supplying takeaway food to kids at a Rotherham school. The fact that the children were struggling to be fed in the ludicrously short lunchbreak, and didn’t much like the food when they did manage to get it, was simply ignored. Parents getting involved with schools is usually regarded as a wholesome example of community spirit - except when it’s off-message like this.
We also now have the prospect of ‘fat charts’ in schools, where children will be weighed by school staff to see if they are the ‘right weight’ for their age, height and gender (4). Such a measure will effectively institutionalise that age-old trend of bullying the fat kid of the class, where children who fall short of state-imposed waist measurements will be made to feel like outcasts not only by their peers but also by the school system itself. And these fat charts are also yet another example of the undermining of parents’ authority: the clear message is that mums and dads can’t be trusted to keep their children in shape, so the authorities will have to do it.
A significant chunk of the extra millions spent on school meals has actually gone to create the School Food Trust, a quango designed to promote healthy eating (5). Did we really need another body to tell us that kids are getting too fat, or remind us of the ‘Seven Deadly Sins: food facts that every parent should know’? And vilifying the catering giants like Sodexho might provide a thrill for those who hate big corporations, but having handed a swathe of school meals over to them, it might have been easier to take a more constructive approach to working with them.
Jamie Oliver, and the government ministers and journalists who fell at his feet, told us that schools are feeding our children ‘shit’, and today’s children will be the first generation to die before their parents. None of this was based in fact, but unsurprisingly such kneejerk scaremongering has had a negative rather than a positive impact. After Jamie has ridden off on his scooter into the sunset, the school meals service may actually settle down and recover - but only if staff and parents work very hard to fix it while quietly dropping or subverting many of his more nonsensical ideas, and while kicking against that new layer of school-meals bureaucracy that is at least as obsessed with lecturing mums, dads and their children as it is with replacing butter with olive oil.
Source
Weird: NHS hospitals to advertise themselves
Spending the money on hiring more doctors and reducing their waiting lists has not occurred to anybody, apparently
NHS hospitals are to be allowed to attract patients by advertising, under a Department of Health code. A draft version says that the NHS needs to give “reliable information” to assist patient choice, and should not spend too much on advertisements. There is unlikely to be a cap on trusts’ spending but costly television advertising is likely to be ruled out.
In consultation with GPs, patients now have a choice, albeit limited, of which hospital to have treatment at. Under the new payment-by-results system, hospitals are being given funds per patient treated. The successes of hospitals could be presented to patients through advertising; some independent hospital chains already advertise their services to GPs.
Gill Morgan, of the NHS Confederation, said: “We are trying to change the NHS from being a service where you get what you’re given, really, to a service where patients are much more able to choose what they want.”
Jonathan Fielden, of the British Medical Association, said: “NHS hospitals will have no option but to invest in marketing tactics if they are to survive against private firms. It is a sad indictment of government policy to consider spending public money on advertising NHS services when hospitals are having to make cutbacks in patient care, and redundancies.” The department said that a code on advertising would be put out to consultation soon.
Source
Nutty British "security": "It's a Boy's Own gift that will be stuffed into thousands of Christmas stockings, but a retired brigadier has discovered that the credit card-sized toolkit - complete with 5cm (2in) blade, compass, tweezers and toothpick - could put the recipients on the wrong side of the law. Tom Foulkes, 56, who spent 35 years working for the Ministry of Defence developing real weapons, was arrested, locked up and had his fingerprints and DNA sample taken after the kit was discovered in his overnight bag by police. The former Royal Engineer was preparing to board a Paris-bound train at Waterloo when an X-ray machine alarm was triggered by the toolkit. He was hauled from the station, placed in a cage in a van and taken to a police station for questioning. Four hours later he was released and cautioned"
Britain: What about the human rights of the general public? "A man who has been barred from every pub in his village after behaving aggressively towards staff at his local is being backed by a leading civil liberties group. Liberty is contending that the ban infringes the man's human rights."
Wednesday, November 22, 2006
Harrods bans soldiers on Poppy Day
Might the fact that Harrods is owned by a Muslim have something to do with it?
A serving Army officer was banned from entering Harrods on Remembrance Day in case his uniform upset other shoppers. Lieutenant Daniel Lenherr had just taken part in a parade honouring Britain's war dead when the London department store turned him away at the door. The security guard told him other customers might be intimidated by the uniform.
The 26-year-old soldier, who serves in the 1st regiment of the Royal Horse Artillery, had been at commemorations in Hyde Park Corner last weekend when he decided to visit the shop with his wife Michelle and their one-year-old son. Mrs Lenherr, who lives in Tidworth, Hampshire, said: "We were horrified when we were refused entry on a day when we honoured the men who sacrificed so much for our freedom. I find it sad this can happen."
The store has stood by their dress policy, saying: "There is a long-standing tradition at Harrods that would normally preclude customers who are wearing non-civilian attire from entering the store. "A lot of people assume that somebody in uniform is either there on official duty, which could cause them alarm, or they assume they're a member of staff and ask them where the lavatories are and so on."
But the shop came under fire for its ban. Shadow Defence Minister Mark Harper said: "It's an outrageous slap in the face to our Armed Forces who are serving our country around the world. On Remembrance Sunday it's even more of an insult. I cannot see any legitimate reason for a shop not to let in members of the Armed Forces in uniform."
And Thomas Carter MBE, a former Warrant Officer in the Royal Horse Artillery, said Mr Lenherr had been treated disgracefully. The 78-year-old said: "Harrods' policy is a load of rubbish. It treats members of the Armed Forces as sixth-rate citizens. It definitely makes it worse that it was on Remembrance Sunday, as that's the day everybody wears uniform." Rival department stores Selfridges and Harvey Nichols said they had no problem with service personnel entering their stores in uniform.
Source
BRITAIN: ELITE UNIVERSITIES MUST BE DESTROYED
That's the underlying agenda of Britain's Leftist government. First, stop awarding research funding on merit ....
Britain's elite research universities were warned last night that they could forfeit millions of pounds in a shake-up of higher education. David Eastwood, head of England's university funding council, told The Times that, in future, universities that admit a large number of students from poor backgrounds were likely to receive as much public funding as those that concentrate on research. The shift will make it harder for middle-class students to get places at university.
At present almost a third (32 per cent) of all research funding goes to just five institutions: Oxford, Cambridge, Manchester, Imperial and University College London. These admit among the lowest number of students from poor backgrounds. They said last night that they feared they would have to fight harder for fewer funds and would struggle to compete with competitors, particularly in America.
The Higher Education Funding Council for England (Hefce) spends 6.7 billion pounds on teaching and research in universities. Of this, 1.6 billion goes on research, 332 million on raising the number of working-class students attending university and 118 million on developing regional business links. Professor Eastwood, its chief executive, said that as students pay higher fees and employers invest more in the sector, universities must play a greater role in society. While insisting that research funding will not be cut, the former Vice-Chancellor of the University of East Anglia said that ensuring more young people attended university was as important as the take-up of subjects such as maths, engineering and physics.
However, Malcolm Grant, Provost of University College London and chairman of the Russell Group of leading universities, said that while all would like to see the funding gap in teaching costs close, that gap was worst for research universities that compete globally for staff. "While we applaud widening participation, it would seem sensible for Hefce to look at ways to allow our world-class universities to compete at an international level and not to tax research funding to cross-subsidise widening participation across the sector," Professor Grant said. While universities have concentrated traditionally on teaching and research, Professor Eastwood said it was now time for institutions to work out what they were good at and act upon it. It was not possible for all universities to excel in all areas, he said, and instead of competing with the large research-led universities for diminishing returns, they should capitalise on excellent teaching and regional economic growth.
Five universities are already involved in pilot projects, including Sheffield Hallam, which has been given 1.2 million to undertake research on food waste, packaging and better ingredients with companies in the region. Forty-two per cent of 18 to 30-year-olds attend university and the Government has set itself a target of 50 per cent reaching that level by 2010. Since the introduction of 3,000 pounds-a-year tuition fees, the numbers applying to university have dropped, especially among poorer school-leavers.
The University of Reading's decision last night to close its world-class physics department, despite the prospect of a government rescue package, was met with dismay by the scientific community.
Source
The wi-fi scare
Some British schools are ripping out their wi-fi networks because of complaints from neurotic parents
In the 1950s, anything that went wrong - the weather, a bout of flu, England losing at cricket - tended to be blamed on the effects of nuclear tests. There was, of course, no connection. Today radio signals from mobile phones, mobile phone masts and now wi-fi installations have taken over where nuclear tests left off. Feeling a bit peaky? It's probably that mobile mast round the corner.
It can't be said often enough that there is hardly a shred of worthwhile evidence to support the worries. In some US schools, and even in a university in Canada, wi-fi has been banned until it can be "proved safe". Can Canadian academic standards be so low that they do not know it is impossible to prove anything safe? The best that can be hoped for is no evidence of risk: evidence of no risk is asking the impossible.
People who worry about mobile phones and wi-fi should be asked why they don't worry about TV transmitters, radar installations, or telephones you can carry about the house, which communicate with their base stations using radio signals. Ever since Marconi, we have been enveloped in a fog of radio-frequency transmissions of various powers and wavelengths. They activate our TV sets, and play a pretty tune on the tranny. Until somebody started the alarm over mobile phones, nobody except the mentally disturbed gave radio waves a second thought.
Wi-fi works at much lower power levels and over shorter ranges than mobile phone networks, so is even less likely to cause a problem. But even writing this implies that mobile phones themselves may be a problem when there is no persuasive evidence that they are.
It would be much better if these scares could be strangled at birth, before they have a chance to become embedded in the psyche of the anxious. But they never are. Stand by for a Government inquiry, a programme of research (paid for by the industry, naturally, not the protesters) and the invocation of the Precautionary Principle. Wake me when it's all over.
Source
Muslim Britain: "Rival groups of Muslim inmates have created a potentially explosive situation over the interpretation of the Koran in Britain's biggest jail, prison watchdogs said yesterday. Deep divisions among Muslims in Wandsworth jail developed after the appointment of an imam with particular views of the Koran's teachings. Some Muslim inmates at the jail in southwest London are also pressurising fellow Muslim prisoners to adopt more militant beliefs and lifestyle. The disclosures will fuel fears that attempts are being made to radicalise young Muslims held in jails in England and Wales."
Might the fact that Harrods is owned by a Muslim have something to do with it?
A serving Army officer was banned from entering Harrods on Remembrance Day in case his uniform upset other shoppers. Lieutenant Daniel Lenherr had just taken part in a parade honouring Britain's war dead when the London department store turned him away at the door. The security guard told him other customers might be intimidated by the uniform.
The 26-year-old soldier, who serves in the 1st regiment of the Royal Horse Artillery, had been at commemorations in Hyde Park Corner last weekend when he decided to visit the shop with his wife Michelle and their one-year-old son. Mrs Lenherr, who lives in Tidworth, Hampshire, said: "We were horrified when we were refused entry on a day when we honoured the men who sacrificed so much for our freedom. I find it sad this can happen."
The store has stood by their dress policy, saying: "There is a long-standing tradition at Harrods that would normally preclude customers who are wearing non-civilian attire from entering the store. "A lot of people assume that somebody in uniform is either there on official duty, which could cause them alarm, or they assume they're a member of staff and ask them where the lavatories are and so on."
But the shop came under fire for its ban. Shadow Defence Minister Mark Harper said: "It's an outrageous slap in the face to our Armed Forces who are serving our country around the world. On Remembrance Sunday it's even more of an insult. I cannot see any legitimate reason for a shop not to let in members of the Armed Forces in uniform."
And Thomas Carter MBE, a former Warrant Officer in the Royal Horse Artillery, said Mr Lenherr had been treated disgracefully. The 78-year-old said: "Harrods' policy is a load of rubbish. It treats members of the Armed Forces as sixth-rate citizens. It definitely makes it worse that it was on Remembrance Sunday, as that's the day everybody wears uniform." Rival department stores Selfridges and Harvey Nichols said they had no problem with service personnel entering their stores in uniform.
Source
BRITAIN: ELITE UNIVERSITIES MUST BE DESTROYED
That's the underlying agenda of Britain's Leftist government. First, stop awarding research funding on merit ....
Britain's elite research universities were warned last night that they could forfeit millions of pounds in a shake-up of higher education. David Eastwood, head of England's university funding council, told The Times that, in future, universities that admit a large number of students from poor backgrounds were likely to receive as much public funding as those that concentrate on research. The shift will make it harder for middle-class students to get places at university.
At present almost a third (32 per cent) of all research funding goes to just five institutions: Oxford, Cambridge, Manchester, Imperial and University College London. These admit among the lowest number of students from poor backgrounds. They said last night that they feared they would have to fight harder for fewer funds and would struggle to compete with competitors, particularly in America.
The Higher Education Funding Council for England (Hefce) spends 6.7 billion pounds on teaching and research in universities. Of this, 1.6 billion goes on research, 332 million on raising the number of working-class students attending university and 118 million on developing regional business links. Professor Eastwood, its chief executive, said that as students pay higher fees and employers invest more in the sector, universities must play a greater role in society. While insisting that research funding will not be cut, the former Vice-Chancellor of the University of East Anglia said that ensuring more young people attended university was as important as the take-up of subjects such as maths, engineering and physics.
However, Malcolm Grant, Provost of University College London and chairman of the Russell Group of leading universities, said that while all would like to see the funding gap in teaching costs close, that gap was worst for research universities that compete globally for staff. "While we applaud widening participation, it would seem sensible for Hefce to look at ways to allow our world-class universities to compete at an international level and not to tax research funding to cross-subsidise widening participation across the sector," Professor Grant said. While universities have concentrated traditionally on teaching and research, Professor Eastwood said it was now time for institutions to work out what they were good at and act upon it. It was not possible for all universities to excel in all areas, he said, and instead of competing with the large research-led universities for diminishing returns, they should capitalise on excellent teaching and regional economic growth.
Five universities are already involved in pilot projects, including Sheffield Hallam, which has been given 1.2 million to undertake research on food waste, packaging and better ingredients with companies in the region. Forty-two per cent of 18 to 30-year-olds attend university and the Government has set itself a target of 50 per cent reaching that level by 2010. Since the introduction of 3,000 pounds-a-year tuition fees, the numbers applying to university have dropped, especially among poorer school-leavers.
The University of Reading's decision last night to close its world-class physics department, despite the prospect of a government rescue package, was met with dismay by the scientific community.
Source
The wi-fi scare
Some British schools are ripping out their wi-fi networks because of complaints from neurotic parents
In the 1950s, anything that went wrong - the weather, a bout of flu, England losing at cricket - tended to be blamed on the effects of nuclear tests. There was, of course, no connection. Today radio signals from mobile phones, mobile phone masts and now wi-fi installations have taken over where nuclear tests left off. Feeling a bit peaky? It's probably that mobile mast round the corner.
It can't be said often enough that there is hardly a shred of worthwhile evidence to support the worries. In some US schools, and even in a university in Canada, wi-fi has been banned until it can be "proved safe". Can Canadian academic standards be so low that they do not know it is impossible to prove anything safe? The best that can be hoped for is no evidence of risk: evidence of no risk is asking the impossible.
People who worry about mobile phones and wi-fi should be asked why they don't worry about TV transmitters, radar installations, or telephones you can carry about the house, which communicate with their base stations using radio signals. Ever since Marconi, we have been enveloped in a fog of radio-frequency transmissions of various powers and wavelengths. They activate our TV sets, and play a pretty tune on the tranny. Until somebody started the alarm over mobile phones, nobody except the mentally disturbed gave radio waves a second thought.
Wi-fi works at much lower power levels and over shorter ranges than mobile phone networks, so is even less likely to cause a problem. But even writing this implies that mobile phones themselves may be a problem when there is no persuasive evidence that they are.
It would be much better if these scares could be strangled at birth, before they have a chance to become embedded in the psyche of the anxious. But they never are. Stand by for a Government inquiry, a programme of research (paid for by the industry, naturally, not the protesters) and the invocation of the Precautionary Principle. Wake me when it's all over.
Source
Muslim Britain: "Rival groups of Muslim inmates have created a potentially explosive situation over the interpretation of the Koran in Britain's biggest jail, prison watchdogs said yesterday. Deep divisions among Muslims in Wandsworth jail developed after the appointment of an imam with particular views of the Koran's teachings. Some Muslim inmates at the jail in southwest London are also pressurising fellow Muslim prisoners to adopt more militant beliefs and lifestyle. The disclosures will fuel fears that attempts are being made to radicalise young Muslims held in jails in England and Wales."
Tuesday, November 21, 2006
Sinking ... poor white boys are the new failing class
British working-class white boys have taken over from their black counterparts as school under-achievers. Michael Collins explains why
If confirmation were needed that the urban white working class has moved away from the archaic image of a cockney cap-wearing armchair revolutionary, it came via a report published last week from the Social Justice Policy Group: a think tank created by David Cameron and chaired by the former Tory party leader Iain Duncan Smith. While liberals stand accused of demonising and disenfranchising the white working class, and new Labour legislates on the food that should go in their mouths and the words that should come out, the Conservatives have weighed in with news regarding this urban tribe’s rising generation. The prognosis isn’t favourable: things ain’t what they used to be. The report, entitled State of the Nation - Education Failure, casts the young of the tribe in an image that takes up the baton from Vicky Pollard of Little Britain and the chav industry that erupted a couple of years ago. It brings news of an illiterate underclass, spiralling towards drug dependency, crime and homelessness.
Apparently the rot begins with truancy and poor exam results. For the first time boys from white working-class backgrounds are performing less well in their studies than their contemporaries in any other ethnic group. Just 17% of white working-class boys achieve five good-grade GCSEs, 2% fewer than black boys and far below those from Indian and Chinese backgrounds.
If it's true that urban white boys have long since come to emulate the style, attitude and language of their black contemporaries, this latest development takes the transformation to the nth degree. Respect?
Throwing cash at the problem is not going to improve matters as, to paraphrase the report, the parents are to blame. A lack of parental interest in a child's education is listed along with parental drug and alcohol abuse for the underperformance of working class white lads.
Some of this was evident at some level in many urban neighbourhoods from the 1980s, a point the report fails to reflect on. What's happened in the past 20 years is that the problem has expanded and deepened. As GK Chesterton once said of writers trying to predict the future: "They took something or other that was going on in their time, and then said that it would go on more and more until something extraordinary happened."
According to the report, we are now in the throes of something extraordinary happening. But it strikes me that this is not exclusively a 21st-century issue. Just over 100 years ago, authors, anthropologists and reformers descended on working-class neighbourhoods. The class they were observing then was one that was said to exist without a voice, in the form of a political vote, and emerged as an identifiable crowd only when celebrating a patriotic victory, sporting or otherwise (at which point they were said to emerge like "rats from the sewers", sing drunken songs and attack each other with pigs' bladders).
Reformers put the emphasis on the need for education and thrift in order to lead the voiceless underclass from gambling, alcohol, licentiousness, vice and crime. Some were concerned that greater wealth might lead to further debasement. This is echoed today in those who believe the masses are destroying the planet with their fast food and holidays in Benidorm.
With the emergence of universal suffrage, healthcare and education, the white working-class profile altered. They became seen as salt-of-the-earth toilers, living out their lives in the same streets they'd been born in before a backdrop of factory, pub, market and betting shop and lots of communal singing, a dab of fisticuffs, and perhaps a bit of politics and patriotism thrown in.
In the early 20th century, working-class culture was localised and family based and, even if the emphasis wasn't on education, it largely valued working hard and doing well.
How things have changed. As well as highlighting the underachievement of white working-class boys, last week's report found that the young males who are doing best at school come from the Chinese and Indian communities, which have perhaps the most insular and inward-looking ethnic backgrounds. Iain Duncan Smith says in the report that boys from Chinese and Indian homes do well because "family structures are strong and learning is highly valued". He adds that marrying-in and keeping the faith are fostered.
The irony is that back in the 20th century, similar elements kept the white working class together in a tightly knit, localised culture. Once, it too had its own rituals and community cohesion. But that all changed and a social class that was, economically, already bottom of the pile was forced to experience more upheaval than any other social group. After the second world war and the bombing that had destroyed many of the old terraces and tenements in urban areas, so many people were rehoused in new concrete estates which broke down many of the old community ties. From the 1950s onwards there were incessant waves of immigration, with the white working class forced to share what were already cramped quarters with a huge influx of immigrants.
When they complained, they were dismissed by the chattering classes as Little Englanders and racists. The incessant attempts to accommodate an increasingly dense population scattered the white working class out of their original habitat. Many moved out to the suburbs, geographically fracturing the strong family networks and communities.
Before that the working class were born and bred in the place they would live for the rest of their lives. Existing cheek by jowl with family, friends and neighbours meant that everybody knew everybody else and their business. A lack of respect or a stepping out of line could haunt you for life; there was an incentive to keep your nose clean and do as you would be done by. That enforced morality and standard of behaviour began to unravel in the anonymity of the new estates.
Changing social mores also hit hard as teenage pregnancy and single mothers bred boys without father figures and dependent on benefits. Added to those problems are the increased awareness among the working classes of the lives of the rich: rather than living among their own kind, television provided a window to another way of living.
For many young lads, education seemed a long route to riches, particularly when huge sums were on offer to footballers or musicians, or lately to anyone who appears on reality television. Today's working-class lads are as clued up as anyone on what wealth is about and its signifiers. Burberry, anyone?
The culture of political correctness and the widespread (and often accurate) view among many working-class people that every other social and ethnic group's needs came above theirs when it came to government resources bred resentment. From the 1980s the multiculturalists formed part of a breed within civic bodies, keen to erase evidence of the local heritage of the white working class and emphasise the historical presence of every other creed and colour. Had all this been done to any other ethnic or social group, its problems would not have remained so hidden. "If the experience of poor urban whites were happening to other groups, there would be an outcry, followed by inquiries, commissions, reports, and positive action plans," wrote one columnist last week. "But nothing of the sort will occur. The entire thrust of the state machine is to address the needs of ethnic minorities."
I would argue that divorcing today's young working-class lads from a sense of their own history and belonging has played a large part in their underperformance. When the poor academic performance of black boys became an issue, experts were quick to point to the causes: a lack of positive male role models, racism and history. The poor performance of black boys at school first became an issue in the 1970s. Nobody then mentioned what was happening to the likes of us. I left a comprehensive school with one CSE. Only a handful of my white working-class contemporaries went on to further education. Now, 30 years on, it is depressing to say the least that things have got even worse.
Source
Christian Union under Threat, Students Prepare for Legal Action
Christian Unions across Britain are preparing to take legal action as they face increasing persecution from university authorities which deem them 'too exclusive'
Christian Unions across Britain are seeking legal advice after four university campus branches were banned from official lists of societies or denied access to university facilities and privileges. Now Christian Unions at Edinburgh, Heriot-Watt and Birmingham universities are seeking legal advice in the face of accusations that they are excluding non-Christians, promoting homophobia and discriminating against those of transgender sexuality.
The 150-strong Christian Union in Birmingham was suspended this year after refusing to alter its constitution to allow non-Christians to address meetings and to amend its literature to include references to gays, lesbians, bisexuals and those of transgender sexuality. Edinburgh University has banned an event run by the Christian Union called PURE which promotes a traditional biblical view of personal and sexual relationships.
The university defended the ban, saying that PURE was in breach of its equality and diversity policy because PURE claims that any sexual activity outside heterosexual marriage is not God-ordained. The pressure came principally from the Gay and Lesbian Society at Edinburgh University and follows the university's decision last year to ban copies of the Bible in its halls of residence after protests from the students' union.
The Lawyers' Christian Fellowship criticised the decision to ban PURE, saying, "This incident is an attack on freedom of speech in an institution where an open exchange of views and a search after truth should be strongly upheld. "In this instance the Christian Union is being denied freedom of expression because what they say and believe is uncomfortable for some groups in the university."
Christian Unions elsewhere are also coming under increasing attack. Christian students are threatening to take Exeter University and students' guild to court over human rights breaches after the university temporarily suspended the Christian Union from the official list of student societies on campus. The Exeter Christian Union - which has a 50-year history at the university - has also had its Student Union bank account frozen and has been banned from free use of students' guild premises or advertising within guild facilities.
Exeter University's student guild claims the Christian Union constitution and activities do not conform to its Equal Opportunities Policies, which have only recently been introduced.Exeter Christian Union told the university Thursday that it would take legal action after 14 days if it was not fully re-instated as a student society by the guild with full rights and was allowed to call itself the Christian Union. Emma Brewster, Christian Union worker at Exeter University said: "This is a fundamental issue of freedom of speech and of common sense. Legal action is the last thing we want to take, and we certainly don't relish it, but we are fully prepared to stand our ground for truth and freedom. "We want to be able to study in a university that allows students - of all faiths and of none - to freely express their views from whatever stance they might take, be able to disagree with one another, and yet to co-exist alongside one another. Surely that is a truly democratic society?
"The Christian Union here, as at almost every university in the UK, holds the orthodox Christian views which churches of all denominations have also held for 2,000 years. In 50 years, this is the first complaint about our name and what we stand for."The action currently taken by the guild does nothing to enhance the reputation of Exeter University, or its students to prospective employers, nor does it demonstrate that this university seeks to encourage all its students to freely develop their ideas, thoughts, values and beliefs."
The Lawyers' Christian Fellowship has provided informal legal advice to the students at Exeter but expects a wave of legal action to follow. "We haven't seen examples of this sort of discrimination against any other groups and we are puzzled by why Christian unions seem to be being singled out," said Andrea Minichiello Williams, public policy officer for the Lawyers' Christian Fellowship in The Times.
Meanwhile, the Universities and Colleges Christian Fellowship (UCCF), the umbrella group for the 350 Christian Unions across Britain, said that the Christian Unions faced a struggle "unprecedented" in their 83-year history.Pod Bhogal, the fellowship's head of communications, said: "The politically correct agenda is being used to shut people up under the guise of tolerance when, in fact, you tolerate anything other than the thing you disagree with The UCCF has asked that as many people as possible write to the Principal of Edinburgh University to express their disapproval at the censorship of the Christian Union at the university.
Source
THE PRICE OF CLIMATE ALARMISM: "GREEN POLICIES THREATEN UK ECONOMY, MILLIONS OF JOBS"
British Airways has warned that businesses will quit Britain if the battle against global warming dictates the government's aviation policy and plans for a third runway at Heathrow airport are delayed.
Willie Walsh, BA's chief executive, said last night that millions of jobs would be affected if Heathrow was allowed to stagnate as an international flight hub. The department for transport is expected to update plans to build extra runways at Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted airports when it publishes a progress report on its aviation white paper before Christmas.
Politicians and the environmental lobby have demanded action against the aviation industry, which is one of the fastest-growing contributors to carbon dioxide emissions and is under pressure to curb expansion plans. So far its response has been mixed. Ryanair chief Michael O'Leary has described calls for aviation taxes as "the usual horseshit", while Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Atlantic airline is forming a green aviation body.
Mr Walsh said in a speech at the Royal Aeronautical Society in London that Heathrow was losing its competitive edge to European rivals such as Frankfurt. He said its cramped conditions were putting off travellers while other flight hubs offered access to international destinations with fewer delays. BA has asked the government to hold a public consultation next year on whether there should be a third Heathrow runway, with a view to building it by 2015.
"In 25 years, Heathrow could be an aviation backwater - as relevant to the world economy of the mid 21st century as London's former East End docks. Even if we focus solely on Europe, we can see the threat to Heathrow's position over the next decade if nothing is done to increase runway capacity," he said.
If the rate of competitive decline continued, Heathrow's network of destinations would be nearly half the size of that offered by airports in Frankfurt, Paris and Amsterdam, which would affect the British economy and threaten millions of jobs, he said. "Without convenient access to markets, suppliers and investors, businesses cannot grow - and will simply relocate to centres that offer them the connectivity they need. Under present constraints, that means out of the UK," he said.
A 2km runway would increase the number of flights to and from Heathrow to 700,000 per year, up from 470,000, said Mr Walsh. A forthcoming study by Oxford Economic Forecasting is expected to back the case for a third runway by arguing that expansion at Heathrow would boost the economy. A report by the Treasury published three years ago said increased capacity at the airport would contribute o7.8bn to British gross domestic product.
"We cannot hope to maintain London's status as a premier league business centre, supporting millions of jobs across the country, unless we provide the world-class air links that businesses need in a global economy," Mr Walsh said.
His comments met with immediate criticism from the green lobby. Tony Bosworth, aviation campaigner at Friends of the Earth, said the government must rule out expansion of Heathrow as part of any drive to reduce carbon emissions.
Aviation accounts for 5.5% of British carbon emissions, but that could rise to a quarter by 2050 if no action is taken to curb airlines' emissions, according to a recent report from Oxford University.
"Aviation is the fastest-growing source of carbon dioxide emissions in the UK. More runways will mean more emissions at a time when we are trying to make big cuts. If the government is serious about tackling climate change it must abandon its airport expansion plans," Mr Bosworth said.
The DfT backed a third runway in an aviation industry white paper three years ago. However, it said the runway should be moved to Gatwick if Heathrow's owner, BAA, was unable to reduce noise pollution and cut concentrations of nitrogen dioxide around the airport.
The BA chief executive reiterated the company's support for the EU carbon emissions trading scheme, which will put a cap on aviation emissions and charge airlines that exceed their quotas.
He said that blocking all the airport expansion proposals in the white paper, which also advocated a second runway at Stansted, would have a minimal effect on global warming. If all the proposals were implemented, global carbon emissions would increase by 0.03% by 2030.
Source
EUROBUNGLING
Like some overblown African dictatorship, the EU keeps confusing grandiose ego projects with sensible expenditures on defense; as a result of which Europe and Britain look increasingly vulnerable and defenseless. On the day after Milton Friedman's passing it is a reminder of the bizarre and self-destructive nature of politicized decision-making-- because that's the trouble, of course: Everything in the EU is political, and all large military projects are pork-barreled to ensure that enough bacon fat goes to France, Italy, Germany and Britain itself. It works about as well as nationalized health care.
Britain's MOD spent almost twice as much money for a German anti-artillery radar than a US version would have cost. More than five hundred million dollars were wasted on a failed effort to produce European anti-tank missiles, which then had to be purchased from the US anyway. An armored vehicle had to be dumped after spending about 75 million dollars because it was too big to go into Hercules transport planes.
The Defense Ministry has ordered 232 Eurofighters at more than 90 million dollars each for "an acknowledged Cold War relic." The Eurofighter can't perform ground support or other bombing missions, but the terrorists don't have fighter jets to knock out.
To top it all off, Europe has embarked an a completely unnecessary doubling of the US GPS system for navigation; since the GPS system is free to users all over the world, it's like building a second world-wide web
More here
Is Pornography Hate Speech?
British feminists say it is. "Pornography constitutes a type of hate speech in which explicitly anti-women messages are transmitted, and should not be defensible under freedom of speech".
It is views such as that which appear to behind the latest British legal assault on pornograhy. Possessing child pornography is already deeply criminal in Britain but bondage and sado-masochism are now in the sights of Britain's Leftist government. Most pornographic bondage and sado-masochist scenes are play-acted and harm nobody but that is not going to matter, apparently. Just possessing a portrayal of it will send you to jail. Why? Apparently the feminist reasoning above is behind it.
Details here.
British working-class white boys have taken over from their black counterparts as school under-achievers. Michael Collins explains why
If confirmation were needed that the urban white working class has moved away from the archaic image of a cockney cap-wearing armchair revolutionary, it came via a report published last week from the Social Justice Policy Group: a think tank created by David Cameron and chaired by the former Tory party leader Iain Duncan Smith. While liberals stand accused of demonising and disenfranchising the white working class, and new Labour legislates on the food that should go in their mouths and the words that should come out, the Conservatives have weighed in with news regarding this urban tribe’s rising generation. The prognosis isn’t favourable: things ain’t what they used to be. The report, entitled State of the Nation - Education Failure, casts the young of the tribe in an image that takes up the baton from Vicky Pollard of Little Britain and the chav industry that erupted a couple of years ago. It brings news of an illiterate underclass, spiralling towards drug dependency, crime and homelessness.
Apparently the rot begins with truancy and poor exam results. For the first time boys from white working-class backgrounds are performing less well in their studies than their contemporaries in any other ethnic group. Just 17% of white working-class boys achieve five good-grade GCSEs, 2% fewer than black boys and far below those from Indian and Chinese backgrounds.
If it's true that urban white boys have long since come to emulate the style, attitude and language of their black contemporaries, this latest development takes the transformation to the nth degree. Respect?
Throwing cash at the problem is not going to improve matters as, to paraphrase the report, the parents are to blame. A lack of parental interest in a child's education is listed along with parental drug and alcohol abuse for the underperformance of working class white lads.
Some of this was evident at some level in many urban neighbourhoods from the 1980s, a point the report fails to reflect on. What's happened in the past 20 years is that the problem has expanded and deepened. As GK Chesterton once said of writers trying to predict the future: "They took something or other that was going on in their time, and then said that it would go on more and more until something extraordinary happened."
According to the report, we are now in the throes of something extraordinary happening. But it strikes me that this is not exclusively a 21st-century issue. Just over 100 years ago, authors, anthropologists and reformers descended on working-class neighbourhoods. The class they were observing then was one that was said to exist without a voice, in the form of a political vote, and emerged as an identifiable crowd only when celebrating a patriotic victory, sporting or otherwise (at which point they were said to emerge like "rats from the sewers", sing drunken songs and attack each other with pigs' bladders).
Reformers put the emphasis on the need for education and thrift in order to lead the voiceless underclass from gambling, alcohol, licentiousness, vice and crime. Some were concerned that greater wealth might lead to further debasement. This is echoed today in those who believe the masses are destroying the planet with their fast food and holidays in Benidorm.
With the emergence of universal suffrage, healthcare and education, the white working-class profile altered. They became seen as salt-of-the-earth toilers, living out their lives in the same streets they'd been born in before a backdrop of factory, pub, market and betting shop and lots of communal singing, a dab of fisticuffs, and perhaps a bit of politics and patriotism thrown in.
In the early 20th century, working-class culture was localised and family based and, even if the emphasis wasn't on education, it largely valued working hard and doing well.
How things have changed. As well as highlighting the underachievement of white working-class boys, last week's report found that the young males who are doing best at school come from the Chinese and Indian communities, which have perhaps the most insular and inward-looking ethnic backgrounds. Iain Duncan Smith says in the report that boys from Chinese and Indian homes do well because "family structures are strong and learning is highly valued". He adds that marrying-in and keeping the faith are fostered.
The irony is that back in the 20th century, similar elements kept the white working class together in a tightly knit, localised culture. Once, it too had its own rituals and community cohesion. But that all changed and a social class that was, economically, already bottom of the pile was forced to experience more upheaval than any other social group. After the second world war and the bombing that had destroyed many of the old terraces and tenements in urban areas, so many people were rehoused in new concrete estates which broke down many of the old community ties. From the 1950s onwards there were incessant waves of immigration, with the white working class forced to share what were already cramped quarters with a huge influx of immigrants.
When they complained, they were dismissed by the chattering classes as Little Englanders and racists. The incessant attempts to accommodate an increasingly dense population scattered the white working class out of their original habitat. Many moved out to the suburbs, geographically fracturing the strong family networks and communities.
Before that the working class were born and bred in the place they would live for the rest of their lives. Existing cheek by jowl with family, friends and neighbours meant that everybody knew everybody else and their business. A lack of respect or a stepping out of line could haunt you for life; there was an incentive to keep your nose clean and do as you would be done by. That enforced morality and standard of behaviour began to unravel in the anonymity of the new estates.
Changing social mores also hit hard as teenage pregnancy and single mothers bred boys without father figures and dependent on benefits. Added to those problems are the increased awareness among the working classes of the lives of the rich: rather than living among their own kind, television provided a window to another way of living.
For many young lads, education seemed a long route to riches, particularly when huge sums were on offer to footballers or musicians, or lately to anyone who appears on reality television. Today's working-class lads are as clued up as anyone on what wealth is about and its signifiers. Burberry, anyone?
The culture of political correctness and the widespread (and often accurate) view among many working-class people that every other social and ethnic group's needs came above theirs when it came to government resources bred resentment. From the 1980s the multiculturalists formed part of a breed within civic bodies, keen to erase evidence of the local heritage of the white working class and emphasise the historical presence of every other creed and colour. Had all this been done to any other ethnic or social group, its problems would not have remained so hidden. "If the experience of poor urban whites were happening to other groups, there would be an outcry, followed by inquiries, commissions, reports, and positive action plans," wrote one columnist last week. "But nothing of the sort will occur. The entire thrust of the state machine is to address the needs of ethnic minorities."
I would argue that divorcing today's young working-class lads from a sense of their own history and belonging has played a large part in their underperformance. When the poor academic performance of black boys became an issue, experts were quick to point to the causes: a lack of positive male role models, racism and history. The poor performance of black boys at school first became an issue in the 1970s. Nobody then mentioned what was happening to the likes of us. I left a comprehensive school with one CSE. Only a handful of my white working-class contemporaries went on to further education. Now, 30 years on, it is depressing to say the least that things have got even worse.
Source
Christian Union under Threat, Students Prepare for Legal Action
Christian Unions across Britain are preparing to take legal action as they face increasing persecution from university authorities which deem them 'too exclusive'
Christian Unions across Britain are seeking legal advice after four university campus branches were banned from official lists of societies or denied access to university facilities and privileges. Now Christian Unions at Edinburgh, Heriot-Watt and Birmingham universities are seeking legal advice in the face of accusations that they are excluding non-Christians, promoting homophobia and discriminating against those of transgender sexuality.
The 150-strong Christian Union in Birmingham was suspended this year after refusing to alter its constitution to allow non-Christians to address meetings and to amend its literature to include references to gays, lesbians, bisexuals and those of transgender sexuality. Edinburgh University has banned an event run by the Christian Union called PURE which promotes a traditional biblical view of personal and sexual relationships.
The university defended the ban, saying that PURE was in breach of its equality and diversity policy because PURE claims that any sexual activity outside heterosexual marriage is not God-ordained. The pressure came principally from the Gay and Lesbian Society at Edinburgh University and follows the university's decision last year to ban copies of the Bible in its halls of residence after protests from the students' union.
The Lawyers' Christian Fellowship criticised the decision to ban PURE, saying, "This incident is an attack on freedom of speech in an institution where an open exchange of views and a search after truth should be strongly upheld. "In this instance the Christian Union is being denied freedom of expression because what they say and believe is uncomfortable for some groups in the university."
Christian Unions elsewhere are also coming under increasing attack. Christian students are threatening to take Exeter University and students' guild to court over human rights breaches after the university temporarily suspended the Christian Union from the official list of student societies on campus. The Exeter Christian Union - which has a 50-year history at the university - has also had its Student Union bank account frozen and has been banned from free use of students' guild premises or advertising within guild facilities.
Exeter University's student guild claims the Christian Union constitution and activities do not conform to its Equal Opportunities Policies, which have only recently been introduced.Exeter Christian Union told the university Thursday that it would take legal action after 14 days if it was not fully re-instated as a student society by the guild with full rights and was allowed to call itself the Christian Union. Emma Brewster, Christian Union worker at Exeter University said: "This is a fundamental issue of freedom of speech and of common sense. Legal action is the last thing we want to take, and we certainly don't relish it, but we are fully prepared to stand our ground for truth and freedom. "We want to be able to study in a university that allows students - of all faiths and of none - to freely express their views from whatever stance they might take, be able to disagree with one another, and yet to co-exist alongside one another. Surely that is a truly democratic society?
"The Christian Union here, as at almost every university in the UK, holds the orthodox Christian views which churches of all denominations have also held for 2,000 years. In 50 years, this is the first complaint about our name and what we stand for."The action currently taken by the guild does nothing to enhance the reputation of Exeter University, or its students to prospective employers, nor does it demonstrate that this university seeks to encourage all its students to freely develop their ideas, thoughts, values and beliefs."
The Lawyers' Christian Fellowship has provided informal legal advice to the students at Exeter but expects a wave of legal action to follow. "We haven't seen examples of this sort of discrimination against any other groups and we are puzzled by why Christian unions seem to be being singled out," said Andrea Minichiello Williams, public policy officer for the Lawyers' Christian Fellowship in The Times.
Meanwhile, the Universities and Colleges Christian Fellowship (UCCF), the umbrella group for the 350 Christian Unions across Britain, said that the Christian Unions faced a struggle "unprecedented" in their 83-year history.Pod Bhogal, the fellowship's head of communications, said: "The politically correct agenda is being used to shut people up under the guise of tolerance when, in fact, you tolerate anything other than the thing you disagree with The UCCF has asked that as many people as possible write to the Principal of Edinburgh University to express their disapproval at the censorship of the Christian Union at the university.
Source
THE PRICE OF CLIMATE ALARMISM: "GREEN POLICIES THREATEN UK ECONOMY, MILLIONS OF JOBS"
British Airways has warned that businesses will quit Britain if the battle against global warming dictates the government's aviation policy and plans for a third runway at Heathrow airport are delayed.
Willie Walsh, BA's chief executive, said last night that millions of jobs would be affected if Heathrow was allowed to stagnate as an international flight hub. The department for transport is expected to update plans to build extra runways at Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted airports when it publishes a progress report on its aviation white paper before Christmas.
Politicians and the environmental lobby have demanded action against the aviation industry, which is one of the fastest-growing contributors to carbon dioxide emissions and is under pressure to curb expansion plans. So far its response has been mixed. Ryanair chief Michael O'Leary has described calls for aviation taxes as "the usual horseshit", while Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Atlantic airline is forming a green aviation body.
Mr Walsh said in a speech at the Royal Aeronautical Society in London that Heathrow was losing its competitive edge to European rivals such as Frankfurt. He said its cramped conditions were putting off travellers while other flight hubs offered access to international destinations with fewer delays. BA has asked the government to hold a public consultation next year on whether there should be a third Heathrow runway, with a view to building it by 2015.
"In 25 years, Heathrow could be an aviation backwater - as relevant to the world economy of the mid 21st century as London's former East End docks. Even if we focus solely on Europe, we can see the threat to Heathrow's position over the next decade if nothing is done to increase runway capacity," he said.
If the rate of competitive decline continued, Heathrow's network of destinations would be nearly half the size of that offered by airports in Frankfurt, Paris and Amsterdam, which would affect the British economy and threaten millions of jobs, he said. "Without convenient access to markets, suppliers and investors, businesses cannot grow - and will simply relocate to centres that offer them the connectivity they need. Under present constraints, that means out of the UK," he said.
A 2km runway would increase the number of flights to and from Heathrow to 700,000 per year, up from 470,000, said Mr Walsh. A forthcoming study by Oxford Economic Forecasting is expected to back the case for a third runway by arguing that expansion at Heathrow would boost the economy. A report by the Treasury published three years ago said increased capacity at the airport would contribute o7.8bn to British gross domestic product.
"We cannot hope to maintain London's status as a premier league business centre, supporting millions of jobs across the country, unless we provide the world-class air links that businesses need in a global economy," Mr Walsh said.
His comments met with immediate criticism from the green lobby. Tony Bosworth, aviation campaigner at Friends of the Earth, said the government must rule out expansion of Heathrow as part of any drive to reduce carbon emissions.
Aviation accounts for 5.5% of British carbon emissions, but that could rise to a quarter by 2050 if no action is taken to curb airlines' emissions, according to a recent report from Oxford University.
"Aviation is the fastest-growing source of carbon dioxide emissions in the UK. More runways will mean more emissions at a time when we are trying to make big cuts. If the government is serious about tackling climate change it must abandon its airport expansion plans," Mr Bosworth said.
The DfT backed a third runway in an aviation industry white paper three years ago. However, it said the runway should be moved to Gatwick if Heathrow's owner, BAA, was unable to reduce noise pollution and cut concentrations of nitrogen dioxide around the airport.
The BA chief executive reiterated the company's support for the EU carbon emissions trading scheme, which will put a cap on aviation emissions and charge airlines that exceed their quotas.
He said that blocking all the airport expansion proposals in the white paper, which also advocated a second runway at Stansted, would have a minimal effect on global warming. If all the proposals were implemented, global carbon emissions would increase by 0.03% by 2030.
Source
EUROBUNGLING
Like some overblown African dictatorship, the EU keeps confusing grandiose ego projects with sensible expenditures on defense; as a result of which Europe and Britain look increasingly vulnerable and defenseless. On the day after Milton Friedman's passing it is a reminder of the bizarre and self-destructive nature of politicized decision-making-- because that's the trouble, of course: Everything in the EU is political, and all large military projects are pork-barreled to ensure that enough bacon fat goes to France, Italy, Germany and Britain itself. It works about as well as nationalized health care.
Britain's MOD spent almost twice as much money for a German anti-artillery radar than a US version would have cost. More than five hundred million dollars were wasted on a failed effort to produce European anti-tank missiles, which then had to be purchased from the US anyway. An armored vehicle had to be dumped after spending about 75 million dollars because it was too big to go into Hercules transport planes.
The Defense Ministry has ordered 232 Eurofighters at more than 90 million dollars each for "an acknowledged Cold War relic." The Eurofighter can't perform ground support or other bombing missions, but the terrorists don't have fighter jets to knock out.
To top it all off, Europe has embarked an a completely unnecessary doubling of the US GPS system for navigation; since the GPS system is free to users all over the world, it's like building a second world-wide web
More here
Is Pornography Hate Speech?
British feminists say it is. "Pornography constitutes a type of hate speech in which explicitly anti-women messages are transmitted, and should not be defensible under freedom of speech".
It is views such as that which appear to behind the latest British legal assault on pornograhy. Possessing child pornography is already deeply criminal in Britain but bondage and sado-masochism are now in the sights of Britain's Leftist government. Most pornographic bondage and sado-masochist scenes are play-acted and harm nobody but that is not going to matter, apparently. Just possessing a portrayal of it will send you to jail. Why? Apparently the feminist reasoning above is behind it.
Details here.
Monday, November 20, 2006
"ADVICE" FOR BULLIES?
Loony Britain at work again
ANTI-BULLYING advisers should be employed by local councils to help to combat bullying in schools, according to recommendations from the Office of the Children's Commissioner. The advisers would mediate in cases where parents complained that bullies were not being disciplined. They would also dissuade bullies from abusing other pupils and provide advice for victims.
The new report, Bullying in Schools, commissioned by the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) and to be published this week, states that parents often find that head teachers dismiss allegations that a child is being bullied. The new anti-bullying advisers would be selected and employed by local authorities. The report recommends that the parents of a bullied child should have the right to a hearing before a committee of school governors. It also wants new powers for the local government ombudsmen to intervene in schools where discipline is a problem.
Professor Carolyn Hamilton, senior legal adviser to the Office of the Children's Commissioner, writes in the report: "Some heads still respond to parents by rejecting the suggestion that there is any bullying in the school. "It may be alleged that the parent is overprotective or even a troublemaker. There may be hurtful suggestions that the bullied child is oversensitive or antisocial."
A DfES spokesman said the proposals would be examined by Alan Johnson, the education secretary. The spokesman said: "While in the vast majority of cases of bullying, schools do an excellent job, we want to ensure that every case is investigated thoroughly and that parents have an effective route of complaint if they feel inadequate action has been taken."
Sir Al Aynsley-Green, the children's commissioner, said of the report: "There is evidence that the present system is not satisfactory. Our proposals would lead to a more formal appeals process involving the governors and above all an independent aspect which has been missing until now." Aynsley-Green was himself bullied as a 10-year-old when his family moved to London from Northumberland and he was victimised because of his accent. He said that bullying is an "enormous problem" and he is keen for it to be "on the front burner". He added that new technology meant bullies had new ways to make their victims' lives miserable: "Until recently, if children are being bullied at school, they could go home and be in a safe environment. Now they can't escape because they are bullied on their mobiles or by e-mail."
Up to 70% of children have experienced bullying, according to a survey of 8,574 children released earlier this month by the charity Bullying Online. Half of bullied pupils said they had been physically hurt. When bullying was reported to a teacher, children said that in 55% of cases it did not stop. A report from the Office of the Children's Commissioner, Bullying Today, said Muslim children had experienced greater victimisation after the September 11 attacks in America and the July 2005 London bombings. [Odd that!]
Source
BRITISH FAITH SCHOOLS DO WELL
FAITH schools have this year increased their dominance at the top of The Sunday Times's state primary league table - taking 60% of places in the list of the 500 best schools. The dominance of faith schools is likely to reopen the debate over whether such schools should change their strict admission policies. Since 2002, there has been a 10% increase in the number of church and Jewish primary schools in the top 500.
Alan Johnson, the education secretary, was last month forced into a climbdown over his plans to introduce reforms to ensure up to 25% of pupils at new faith schools came from other backgrounds. Kenneth Baker, a former Conservative education secretary, described the climbdown as "the fastest U-turn in British political history".
In the league tables published today, the most successful schools are Catholic and Jewish. Out of 1,700 Catholic primary schools, 141 are in the top 500; and out of 28 Jewish primary schools, six are in the top 500. A significantly smaller proportion of Church of England schools enjoy such success. Of 4,400 Church of England schools, only 142 are in the top 500.
In the two highest performing schools - North Cheshire Jewish school in Cheadle and St Mary and St Thomas Aquinas RC primary in Blaydon-on-Tyne in Gateshead - all pupils have achieved the maximum score in English, maths and science tests for the past three years. Experts have suggested the success of faith schools may be a result of their popularity with middle-class parents. Tony and Cherie Blair have sent their four children to Catholic primary schools.
According to Chris Woodhead, a former chief inspector of schools, faith schools are often the only realistic option for some parents in inner city areas. "If you cannot afford independent school fees, the local faith school may be the only one offering a decent education," he said.
Head teachers of faith schools, however, argue that a school's values rather than a middle-class intake is the key to success. Wendy Duffy, acting head of St Mary and St Thomas Aquinas, said her pupils were drawn from both affluent and less well-off backgrounds. "I think the strength of the school lies in its ethos," she said. "Gospel values are very important. They are essential to our mission."
Norma Massel, head teacher for the past seven years at North Cheshire Jewish school, said the moral and discipline code imposed by religious schools was a key to their performance. Her school in Cheadle, north Cheshire, draws pupils from as far as Northwich, which is 25 miles away from the school.
It can take dedication by parents to get places at church schools with some parents starting to go to church solely to get a place for their child. However, even this is no guarantee in some inner-city areas with schools reporting as many as three applications for every place. Others apply strict criteria: at the Our Lady of Victories primary, a small Catholic school in Putney, south London, children are only admitted if their parents have attended church diligently for at least three years. The head teacher, Margaret Ryall, said: "It is almost a register that is taken by the priest at the end of mass on Sunday. We impose a strict system so it is fair to all. I doubt whether non-Catholic parents could keep up that level of attendance."
Despite the prevalence of faith schools in the top 500, some community schools have enjoyed success. South Farnham community junior school in Surrey is one of three non-faith schools in the top 10. The school has more than 100 pupils sitting the tests and this year they all achieved the maximum score. Andrew Carter, head teacher for 18 years, said his results were the result of systematic teaching. "Smaller schools can rely on one excellent teacher, but this school has four classes sitting the test. "There is excellent teaching plus analysis of what extra effort is required to get all of them through the tests. There are a lot of small church schools that do well, but we take everybody."
There are no Muslim or Sikh primary schools in the top 500, but such faith schools are rare in the state sector. There are only five Muslim and two Sikh primary schools in the country.
Johnson last month announced plans to pass new laws to force faith schools to take more pupils from other faiths and non-religious backgrounds. He scrapped the proposals after lobbying from the Catholic church and complaints from backbench MPs.
The league tables of primary and secondary schools and the independent school tables are contained on the Parent Power CD-Rom and online.
Source
An open and shut case?
After 50 years of conflicting evidence and advice, the fats in our food have been tried and sentenced. But have the real killers been identified — or are they still wrecking lives? Investigation by Britain's Richard Girling
Food scares. Don’t they bring you out in sores? Proselytising zealots on the one hand try to tell us that “natural” is best, and on the other hand that, well, it’s only best if you skim off the fatty bits that actually make it taste of something. The penalty for noncompliance with dietary high command used to be rickets. Now it’s bad skin, obesity, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, depression, diabetes and cancer.
New Trident to go ahead: "The [British] government will signal within the next two to three weeks that it wants to continue with the submarine-based Trident missile system as the UK's nuclear deterrent, according to Whitehall sources, writes Michael Smith. Tony Blair has promised MPs a full debate on the issue and reportedly told a cabinet meeting last week that he wants the debate to begin quickly "because a decision needs to be made". The government has promised to launch the debate with a white paper outlining options, but defence sources said the key decisions have in effect "been made".
Loony Britain at work again
ANTI-BULLYING advisers should be employed by local councils to help to combat bullying in schools, according to recommendations from the Office of the Children's Commissioner. The advisers would mediate in cases where parents complained that bullies were not being disciplined. They would also dissuade bullies from abusing other pupils and provide advice for victims.
The new report, Bullying in Schools, commissioned by the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) and to be published this week, states that parents often find that head teachers dismiss allegations that a child is being bullied. The new anti-bullying advisers would be selected and employed by local authorities. The report recommends that the parents of a bullied child should have the right to a hearing before a committee of school governors. It also wants new powers for the local government ombudsmen to intervene in schools where discipline is a problem.
Professor Carolyn Hamilton, senior legal adviser to the Office of the Children's Commissioner, writes in the report: "Some heads still respond to parents by rejecting the suggestion that there is any bullying in the school. "It may be alleged that the parent is overprotective or even a troublemaker. There may be hurtful suggestions that the bullied child is oversensitive or antisocial."
A DfES spokesman said the proposals would be examined by Alan Johnson, the education secretary. The spokesman said: "While in the vast majority of cases of bullying, schools do an excellent job, we want to ensure that every case is investigated thoroughly and that parents have an effective route of complaint if they feel inadequate action has been taken."
Sir Al Aynsley-Green, the children's commissioner, said of the report: "There is evidence that the present system is not satisfactory. Our proposals would lead to a more formal appeals process involving the governors and above all an independent aspect which has been missing until now." Aynsley-Green was himself bullied as a 10-year-old when his family moved to London from Northumberland and he was victimised because of his accent. He said that bullying is an "enormous problem" and he is keen for it to be "on the front burner". He added that new technology meant bullies had new ways to make their victims' lives miserable: "Until recently, if children are being bullied at school, they could go home and be in a safe environment. Now they can't escape because they are bullied on their mobiles or by e-mail."
Up to 70% of children have experienced bullying, according to a survey of 8,574 children released earlier this month by the charity Bullying Online. Half of bullied pupils said they had been physically hurt. When bullying was reported to a teacher, children said that in 55% of cases it did not stop. A report from the Office of the Children's Commissioner, Bullying Today, said Muslim children had experienced greater victimisation after the September 11 attacks in America and the July 2005 London bombings. [Odd that!]
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BRITISH FAITH SCHOOLS DO WELL
FAITH schools have this year increased their dominance at the top of The Sunday Times's state primary league table - taking 60% of places in the list of the 500 best schools. The dominance of faith schools is likely to reopen the debate over whether such schools should change their strict admission policies. Since 2002, there has been a 10% increase in the number of church and Jewish primary schools in the top 500.
Alan Johnson, the education secretary, was last month forced into a climbdown over his plans to introduce reforms to ensure up to 25% of pupils at new faith schools came from other backgrounds. Kenneth Baker, a former Conservative education secretary, described the climbdown as "the fastest U-turn in British political history".
In the league tables published today, the most successful schools are Catholic and Jewish. Out of 1,700 Catholic primary schools, 141 are in the top 500; and out of 28 Jewish primary schools, six are in the top 500. A significantly smaller proportion of Church of England schools enjoy such success. Of 4,400 Church of England schools, only 142 are in the top 500.
In the two highest performing schools - North Cheshire Jewish school in Cheadle and St Mary and St Thomas Aquinas RC primary in Blaydon-on-Tyne in Gateshead - all pupils have achieved the maximum score in English, maths and science tests for the past three years. Experts have suggested the success of faith schools may be a result of their popularity with middle-class parents. Tony and Cherie Blair have sent their four children to Catholic primary schools.
According to Chris Woodhead, a former chief inspector of schools, faith schools are often the only realistic option for some parents in inner city areas. "If you cannot afford independent school fees, the local faith school may be the only one offering a decent education," he said.
Head teachers of faith schools, however, argue that a school's values rather than a middle-class intake is the key to success. Wendy Duffy, acting head of St Mary and St Thomas Aquinas, said her pupils were drawn from both affluent and less well-off backgrounds. "I think the strength of the school lies in its ethos," she said. "Gospel values are very important. They are essential to our mission."
Norma Massel, head teacher for the past seven years at North Cheshire Jewish school, said the moral and discipline code imposed by religious schools was a key to their performance. Her school in Cheadle, north Cheshire, draws pupils from as far as Northwich, which is 25 miles away from the school.
It can take dedication by parents to get places at church schools with some parents starting to go to church solely to get a place for their child. However, even this is no guarantee in some inner-city areas with schools reporting as many as three applications for every place. Others apply strict criteria: at the Our Lady of Victories primary, a small Catholic school in Putney, south London, children are only admitted if their parents have attended church diligently for at least three years. The head teacher, Margaret Ryall, said: "It is almost a register that is taken by the priest at the end of mass on Sunday. We impose a strict system so it is fair to all. I doubt whether non-Catholic parents could keep up that level of attendance."
Despite the prevalence of faith schools in the top 500, some community schools have enjoyed success. South Farnham community junior school in Surrey is one of three non-faith schools in the top 10. The school has more than 100 pupils sitting the tests and this year they all achieved the maximum score. Andrew Carter, head teacher for 18 years, said his results were the result of systematic teaching. "Smaller schools can rely on one excellent teacher, but this school has four classes sitting the test. "There is excellent teaching plus analysis of what extra effort is required to get all of them through the tests. There are a lot of small church schools that do well, but we take everybody."
There are no Muslim or Sikh primary schools in the top 500, but such faith schools are rare in the state sector. There are only five Muslim and two Sikh primary schools in the country.
Johnson last month announced plans to pass new laws to force faith schools to take more pupils from other faiths and non-religious backgrounds. He scrapped the proposals after lobbying from the Catholic church and complaints from backbench MPs.
The league tables of primary and secondary schools and the independent school tables are contained on the Parent Power CD-Rom and online.
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An open and shut case?
After 50 years of conflicting evidence and advice, the fats in our food have been tried and sentenced. But have the real killers been identified — or are they still wrecking lives? Investigation by Britain's Richard Girling
Food scares. Don’t they bring you out in sores? Proselytising zealots on the one hand try to tell us that “natural” is best, and on the other hand that, well, it’s only best if you skim off the fatty bits that actually make it taste of something. The penalty for noncompliance with dietary high command used to be rickets. Now it’s bad skin, obesity, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, depression, diabetes and cancer.
It’s a peculiarly human thing. Birds and animals know instinctively what is good and bad to eat, which is all to do with how food looks, smells and tastes. Humans, by contrast, have been taught to sublimate their instincts and eat what they’re told. The result is a confused populace that seldom understands the terms in which it is being addressed, but picks up the mantras of “good” and “bad” fat, high-fibre, five-portions-a-day and chuck-away-the-frying-pan. It swallows either the most recent prescriptions of the diet lobby or what is urged upon it by the wilier practitioners of the advertising industry. Sometimes – for nothing sells better than the promise of good health – the messages coincide. “Low-fat” foods are a good example. So are the plastic tubs of primrose-coloured grease that are slid across the table in some households when you ask for butter.
In the 1970s, specially selected stupid people were challenged in television commercials to “tell Stork from butter”, and we were asked to believe that 7 out of 10 couldn’t do it. Aside from arguments about how such a result could have been achieved (did they poll only smokers with a Capstan Full Strength on the go?), the hottest controversy then was whether the G in margarine should be hard or soft. Nobody doubted the twin prongs of the advertisers’ message – that the stuff spread straight from the fridge (demonstrably true) and that it was better for you than hard, saturated fats churned from cows’ milk (taken on trust). The eventual brand leader, Flora, built its whole image on the health benefits of eating hydrogenated vegetable oils in place of butter – a marketing slant that was bang in line with government health policy.
Nobody imagined that one day these very same oils would find themselves in the dock alongside the fat old lags they were designed to replace. But there they stand: accused, convicted and condemned. Hydrogenated vegetable oils contain trans fats, or “trans-fatty acids”, which it turns out are even worse for our hearts than the saturated fats we were taught to abhor. The current, highly publicised unrest in New York, where the health department wants to ban trans fats from restaurants and takeaways, is the latest flare-up in a war that has been rumbling for years. As in so many food scares, however, the truth struggles to live up to the headlines.
As in many food scares, too, mention of life-threatening disease has stimulated something very close to panic. In the UK this summer, a new rash of headlines was provoked, first, by some long-term American research showing that monkeys fed on polyunsaturates put on 30% more belly fat than those given monounsaturates; and then by the British Medical Journal, which argued in an editorial that – in the UK as in America – trans fats should be compulsorily labelled, just like the old-school killers saturated fats. It was all a bit late, though. Hydrogenated vegetable oils have been purged from spreads, and retailers and manufacturers (see panel on page 25) are racing each other to remove them from the plethora of other products – cakes and biscuits, pies and pastries, sweets, ready meals, chocolate, even Horlicks – in which they have been ubiquitous.
The old-school killers themselves, meanwhile, are rampaging around the supermarket as if they own the place. Buyers of processed meat products may not be the most discriminating consumers, but some will have wised up to the fact that the “meat” in their dinner, if laid out in its raw state, would not look appetising. The truth is, it would test the appetite of a hyena. To keep the lawyers happy, manufacturers have to satisfy the official “European definition of meat” introduced in 2003, which, you won’t be surprised to learn, differs in several respects from any definition your grandmother might have recognised. This has been tightened up somewhat (it now excludes, for example, brains, feet, intestines, lungs, oesophagus, rectum, spinal cord, spleen, stomach, testicles and udder), but there’s plenty of slithery stuff still going on, and half the “meat” could be fat, rind and gristle.
The trans-fat story began with that old-fashioned word “margarine”, and it’s a longer story than many people think. The word itself comes from the Greek margarites, meaning pearl – an oddly poetic image coined by its inventor, the 19th-century French chemist Hippolyte Mège-Mouriès. His recipe, processed suet mixed with buttermilk and water, patented in 1869, was inspired by the need for a cheaper rather than healthier alternative to butter. Moneyed folk continued to prefer milk fat, and the comparison with butter has obsessed margarine-makers ever since. Mège-Mouriès sold out to a Dutch company in 1871, and by 1889 factories were turning out margarine in Germany, Austria, America, Norway, Sweden, Denmark and England. By 1906 the supply of suet was being outstripped by the demand, and factories began to look instead to vegetable oils – a switch that was all but complete by 1920.
Margarine’s inferiority complex found some relief in the 1960s when it first realised the power of the health card. In that decade too, the original hard margarines, packeted like the butter they so desperately wanted to imitate, were replaced by soft varieties in tubs. The first margarine “high in polyunsaturates, low in saturated fats” hit the shelves in 1964. Twenty years later, the Committee on Medical Aspects of Food and Nutrition Policy (Coma) published its report Diet and Cardiovascular Disease, which once and for all spelt out the heart-stopping dangers of saturated fats. City streets began to vibrate with wobble-bottomed joggers staggering home not to naughty butter but to smears of vegetable yuk. In a London restaurant, I watched a man hack the fat from his parma ham as if he was fighting for his life. Proper butchers went on selling proper meat, but supermarkets were packaging stuff that looked as if it had been cut from Victoria Beckham.
Yet even as one branch of the food industry was pulling the saturated fats out of our diet, another was shoving them in again. Sausages, burgers, pies and pasties were being bulked out with body fat and other bits and pieces discarded by the butchers. Remember mechanically recovered meat (MRM)? The official definition quoted in the report of the BSE inquiry was unflinching: “Residual material, off bones, obtained by machines operating on pressure principles in such manner that the cellular structure of the material is broken down sufficiently for it to flow as purée from the bone.” As far as the law went, it was perfectly okay for these intimate scrapings, with their cellular structure broken down into gloop, to be described on packaging as “meat”. It was this very stuff, gleaned from places other recipes could not reach, that built the bridge between BSE and its nightmare human twin, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Don’t imagine it has been banned, however. Manufacturers are simply not allowed to describe it in the labelling as “meat”. It will appear instead as “recovered pork”, or whatever.
There is another irony too. Cookery writers like to applaud the peasant cuisines of continental Europe and marvel at their thrift. It has been repeated so often that it has become a cliché: they use every part of a pig except its squeak. But the same middle-class writers clutched their throats when the principle was seized upon by pie-makers. If Britain had any living equivalent of peasant cuisine, it was – still is – ingredients of rock-bottom cheapness chemically enhanced to give flavour, shelf life and “mouth-feel”, then fashioned into the resemblance of food that needs little chewing but can only be swallowed with ketchup.
While all this was going on, the health-obsessed middle classes were piling on the polyunsaturates, even if they didn’t quite understand what they were – food science is as opaque as lard, and twice as slippery. Most people know at least that, like butter, hard margarine and cheese, lard itself is a “saturated” fat, hard at room temperature. This is the stuff that raises cholesterol, blocks our arteries and – by some accounts – hastens the onset of Alzheimer’s disease. Pretty much every health authority on the planet urges us to go easy on it.
Many people also understand “unsaturated” fats stay runny at room temperature and subdivide into polyunsaturates and monounsaturates. Polyunsaturates are said to protect against heart disease and arthritis, and are found in oily fish, soft margarines and some cooking oils (safflower, grapeseed, sunflower and corn oils, for example). Monounsaturates are said to be more or less health-neutral, though there is a suggestion they may reduce the risk of heart disease. They are found in olives, olive oil, nut oils and avocados. After that it all gets a bit hazy.
Even mainstream health advice wriggles with weasels such as “some experts now believe that”, which invites you to conclude that other experts think differently, and raises the question: how expert are the experts? Margarine, or “synthetic edible fat” as the Butter Board would prefer us to call it, remains the benchmark of dietary false idols. Unlike butter, it was not something you could make at home. Liquid vegetable oils were stiffened to a butter-like consistency (in other words, had their melting point raised) by a high-tech industrial process that involved extreme heat, metallic catalysts (nickel, for example) and hydrogen. A bit of fiddling with flavouring and colouring agents, stabilisers and salt turned these “hydrogenated vegetable oils”, now “high in polyunsaturates”, into margarine.
It was not long before scientists started adding some rationalist caveats to the good-health gospel. As early as 1974, Australian researchers found a link between polyunsaturates and skin cancer. In 1975 a group from the University of Glamorgan began to suspect that hydrogenated vegetable oils were implicated in coronary heart disease. Others around the world found links with cancers of the colon and breast. There was a particular kerfuffle in 1989 when the clinical pharmacology department at Cambridge University backed the earlier findings on heart disease. When The Sunday Times reported this, it drew an angry letter from the president of the Margarine and Shortening Manufacturers’ Association (who was also chairman of Van den Berghs, the manufacturers of Flora), complaining that the issues “had not been substantiated”. Van den Berghs itself followed up with full-page newspaper advertisements headed “Polyunsaturates Are Essential for Health”.
And so it went on. In 1991 the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition announced that “polyunsaturated vegetable oils promote cancer more effectively than do saturated fats or polyunsaturated fish oils”. In 2001, researchers at the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne reported that a heavy intake of polyunsaturates could more than double a child’s risk of asthma. In 2002 a link with depression was suggested, and Walter Willett, head of Harvard University’s department of nutrition, famously added his weight to the opinion that low-fat diets were making people obese. In 2004 a researcher at the Medical University of South Carolina reported a possible link with Alzheimer’s disease.
But medical opinion is like a merry-go-round with the merriment removed. Assertion meets counter-assertion; rival camps ridicule each other’s methods and conclusions; each headline contradicts another. For consumers who can’t tell a linoleate from an eicosanoid from a bowl of custard, the result is like a babble of tongues in a science bazaar. We must assume, however, that the Food Standards Agency (FSA), the UK’s highest authority on such things, listens and understands. Its advice remains unaltered: polyunsaturates are good for us, and we should eat more of them. On the basis of reviews of evidence by the World Cancer Research Fund in 1997 and the British Nutrition Foundation in 1995, it rejects the idea that either polyunsaturates or trans fats are carcinogenic. Which, if we are looking for something to worry about, leaves just coronary heart disease.
By the early 1990s it was clear that the apparent risk in polyunsaturates came from the trans fats that were produced as a by-product of the hydrogenation process. In 1994, Flora quietly reduced the level of trans fats in its formulation from around 7% to 1.5%, and “margarine” slid towards obsolescence. Surprising to some, the word has a legal definition – it may be applied only to products with a fat content of between 80-90%. Any lower and it’s not margarine at all, but reduced-fat or low-fat spread bulked out with water (which is why it’s not good to cook with). According to the UK Margarine and Spreads Association (MSA), all non-dairy spreads are now less than 80% fat, so “margarine” is technically obsolete. By further chemical jiggery-pokery, says the MSA, the spreads mostly have a trans-acid content of less than 1%.
As things stand, however, unless you home-make everything and never eat out, you’ll have about as much chance of avoiding trans fats as you do of avoiding Christmas.
The first problem is knowing where they are – trans fats do not have to be listed on food labels. But, says the FSA, hydrogenated vegetable oils do have to be declared, which means that “if the ingredients list includes hydrogenated vegetable oil, there may also be trans fats in the product”.
Or there may not. Who knows? The difficulty arises because, truly speaking, it is only partially hydrogenated vegetable oils – the semi-soft ones – that contain trans fats. Fully hydrogenated ones do not. Yet the labelling regulations make no distinction. Partially or fully hydrogenated, it’s all the same: the label will list only “hydrogenated vegetable oil”. And the muddle continues. As the FSA puts it, “Trans fats count as part of the total fat in the nutritional information on the label. They are not classed as saturates, monounsaturates or polyunsaturates, so they won’t be included in the figures for these.”
So, the only certain way to be sure your food contains no added trans fats is to buy organic. The FSA says it will seek an “appropriate amendment” when the EU nutrition-labelling directive is revised next year, but in the meantime it is being left to food companies to clean up their recipes.
This is actually less of an evasion than it sounds. Though the headlines have elevated trans fats into the most determined killers of humankind since the plague rat, the fact is that most of us eat very little of them. In common with the World Health Organization, the FSA warns that no more than 2% of our daily energy intake should come from trans fats. The most recent National Diet and Nutrition Survey (NDNS) of adults, in 2000-1, showed a national average of just 1.2%. And neither did this look like a statistical artefact with a low average disguising high peaks. The same survey showed that 97% of adults were consuming within the safety zone. An earlier NDNS of young people aged 4-18, carried out in 1997, showed that 96% of even this temptation-prone group were staying within limits. Since then the herd impulse of the packaged-food industry has seen them stamp on trans fats with the exterminating zeal of cockroach-hunters, so that popular brands now commonly contain no more than the trace amounts found in raw ingredients. The latest estimate for trans fats is down to 1.1% of total daily energy intake. Hence the FSA’s apparent insouciance.
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The organic delusion
The [British] Food Standards Agency, having examined the evidence, does not yet accept that organic food is any healthier than its non-organic equivalent. Meanwhile, its nationwide inquiry into food fraud, we learnt last week, has uncovered an industry riddled with sharp practice and Jesuitical labelling. Not only have we been taking it on trust that organic food is better for us; it turns out we've been taking it on trust that it's organic food at all. It can cost as much as five times the price of ordinary food and yet sales are rising by 12% every year. Why - do we all have money to burn?
I don't believe there is any rationale to it really. I think that when people buy organic it's a purely emotional thing: an all-purpose placebo to keep any number of middle-class anxieties at bay. Pay a little extra for those chemical-free vegetables and hey, maybe the children do watch too much television, maybe I needn't have used the car this morning . . . but dammit, these vegetables are so expensive they must be doing us good. At least I'm doing something right.
Look around. We have a population with a life expectancy verging towards treble figures. More or less. People - and not just the organic-eating classes - are growing faster, taller and stronger every year; our babies are born healthier; our children by and large are thriving. If we are what we eat then clearly we've been doing something right for some time - since long before this new organic explosion.
A woman I know recently invited her son's six-year-old friend over for supper. After accepting the invitation, the friend's mother proceeded to give a long list of the things the boy wouldn't eat - including pizzas, burgers and chips, so she was obviously lying. Then she said, with a slightly mad, hysterical giggle, "And of course, I mean, we all eat organic, don't we?" My friend's response was a lot more polite than mine would have been.
There is something vaguely disgusting about the modern obsession with healthy eating when so much of the world is starving. Whether or not organic food proves to be better in long run, I think - for the sake of good taste if for nothing else - that it's time we all learnt to be be a bit cooler. After all, we face a neverending stream of health warnings and health scares and we should have learnt by now that they never come to much. We have not been wiped out by BSE. We were not wiped out by Edwina Currie's salmonella and we won't be wiped out by this week's salmonella scare either. Avian flu scared the living daylights out of us but it never came to much. In any case the sad fact is, somehow or other, death will come even to the children of the middle classes. Even if they are fed organic.
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UK: Muslim cop banned from guarding Blair
The super-correct Mr Blair does not mess around with his own safety
Britain's Metropolitan Police is being sued by a Muslim officer upset he was removed from the force protecting dignitaries like Prime Minister Tony Blair. Constable Amjad Farooq, 39, had his special security revoked and was removed from the Diplomatic Protection Group after just six weeks, The Independent reported Tuesday. Farooq said he was told he had failed a security background check because two of his sons had attended a mosque associated with a Muslim cleric linked to a suspected terrorist group.
He claims in his legal challenge he was informed his presence on the unit might upset the U.S. Secret Service, which works with the department's close-protection unit, The Telegraph reported. Farooq is claiming racial and religious discrimination against the department for the December 2003 incident, and a tribunal will hear the case next year, the reports said. Last month, at the height of the Israeli-Lebanon conflict, another Muslim constable was excused from guarding the Israeli Embassy in London because of concern about his family's Lebanese links.
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For someone who is "denied" free speech, this guy sure gets a big hearing
A leading British historian has sparked a row about free speech in America after an article criticising Israel prompted a backlash from Jewish groups and the cancellation of meetings where he was due to speak. Tony Judt, a liberal Jew and former kibbutznik, was accused of calling for the destruction of Israel after he wrote an article in The New York Review of Books in 2003, and in The Sunday Times, arguing for the creation of a secular bi-national state of Jews and Palestinians.
More than 100 leading academics signed a letter in last week's New York Review of Books protesting at the suppression of Judt's talks.
The former Oxford history don, who has been professor of European studies at New York University for 20 years, again became a magnet for criticism this year when he defended an essay written by Stephen Walt of Harvard and John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago which criticised the "Israel lobby" in America.
Judt was due to give a talk on the subject of the lobby at the Polish consulate in New York last month, but it was cancelled at an hour's notice after two Jewish organisations, the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee, signalled their displeasure. "The phone calls were very elegant but may be interpreted as exercising a delicate pressure," said Krzysztof Kasprzyk, the Polish consul-general.
Judt said: "It is a very sensitive issue for Poles. They are uniquely vulnerable because the country has a long history of moral ambivalence towards Jews." The historian also withdrew from a lecture on the Holocaust at a Catholic college in New York after learning that it was to be picketed by Holocaust survivors dressed in pyjamas.
The academics' letter supporting Judt - whose latest book, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945, was well received and was Cherie Blair's holiday reading this summer - said: "The Polish consulate is not obliged to promote free speech. But the rules of the game in America oblige citizens to encourage rather than stifle public debate."
Judt intends to hit back with a lecture on December 4 in New York on self-censorship and free speech in open societies. "I've been accused of being a self- hating Jew, a conspiracy theorist and an anti-semite," he said. "It's absurd but it is an echo of what is said to non-Jews when they criticise Israel."
He contrasted the lively debate about his views in Israel to the reaction in America, where he has been accused of advocating a "genocidal liberalism" that would lead to the slaughter of Jews. Abraham Foxman, director of the Anti-Defamation League, admitted that a member of his staff had rung the Polish consulate, but denied that he had sought to cancel Judt's talk. "We are perturbed by his views but not enough to prevent him from speaking," Foxman said.
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BRITAIN CONCEDES DEFEAT: POST-KYOTO DEAL IS OUT OF REACH
A global post-Kyoto agreement is still out of reach as the UN summit on climate change concludes its final day of talks in Nairobi, David Miliband admitted today. Speaking exclusive to Guardian Unlimited on the closing day of a fortnight of talks, the environment secretary said the summit had failed to gain sufficient momentum to agree a deal on greenhouse gas emissions because of a glaring "gap" between science and politics.
Mr Miliband lauded the significant progress made over adaptation funding for developing countries, and what he called a vigorous commitment to a works programme. But he said some "very difficult discussions" were still under way over the strength of international commitment to a deal. "Where the final drive of negotiations needs to take place over the next few hours concerns the ability to inject a new momentum in the long-term discussions of a global emissions deal," he said.
Mr Miliband held out little hope that a firm international commitment would be ratified on the final day of talks. "That is where we have a real crunch point on some of the issues we have been discussing," he said. Mr Miliband refused to name recalcitrant countries, but he hinted that industrialised and developing countries alike were hesitant. The latter group feared they would be expected to make the same level of contributions as their wealthier neighbours, he said. "There are some richer countries who are concerned that that no country can have a free pass on this, and although not all countries will take on hard targets, every country needs to play some role. "That is the essential balance. The need [is] for a global deal in which every country plays a part, but the fact is that richer countries are going to be able to contribute more. "I am confident we can offer two cheers for this process. But the third cheer is going to rely on a real drive over the next year because 2007 is going to be a critical year for putting urgency and momentum into the drive for a global emissions deal."
The environment secretary added: "One of the reflections we will have is about the size of the gap between science and politics." It was a "real issue" that only the UK and Germany had set binding, long-term targets for reducing carbon emissions. Mr Miliband said the forthcoming G8 talks in Germany would provide an opportunity to revisit the need for "urgency and drive" in moving towards a new climate change agreement to operate after the current Kyoto commitments end in 2012.
The environment secretary declined to say whether a specific adaptation funding deal had been struck to help African countries cope with climate change, but he said general overseas aid should also be "carbon-proofed". "We have to make sure there is an adaptation fund, but we also have to make sure that aid policies are generally sustainable", he said.
Mr Miliband, who is due to close the Commons debate on the Queen's speech this Monday, said he would tell government colleagues they all had a "part to play" in delivering the climate change agenda. "From the prime minister to the chancellor and the foreign secretary, and me as environment secretary, every member of the cabinet has a role to play." Earlier this week, Mr Miliband scotched rumours of a rift with the chancellor, Gordon Brown, over planned environmental policies targeted at business.
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Must not Quote the Koran
Last year, two Christian pastors in Australia were prosecuted for quoting some of the more discreditable passages in the Koran and it seems that Britain also has such a taboo:
"Something similar happened at this year's Hay-on-Wye festival, sponsored by the Guardian, where a five-person panel discussed "Are there are any limits to free speech?" One of the Muslim panelists said if anyone offended his religion, he would strike him. A lawyer, Anthony Julius, responded that Jews had lived as minorities under two powerful hegemonies, Christian and Muslim, and had been obliged to learn how to deal nonviolently with offense caused to them by the sacred scriptures of both. He started by referring to an anti-Semitic passage in the New Testament — which passed without comment. But when he began to list the passages in the Koran that denigrate Jews, describing them as monkeys and pigs, the panelists went ballistic. One of them, Madeline Bunting of the Guardian, put her hand over the microphone and said words to the effect, "I am not going to sit here and listen to any criticisms of Muslims." She was cheered, and not one of the journalists in the audience from right or left uttered a word about free speech — not hate speech, mind you, but free speech of a moderate nature.
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New Trident to go ahead: "The [British] government will signal within the next two to three weeks that it wants to continue with the submarine-based Trident missile system as the UK's nuclear deterrent, according to Whitehall sources, writes Michael Smith. Tony Blair has promised MPs a full debate on the issue and reportedly told a cabinet meeting last week that he wants the debate to begin quickly "because a decision needs to be made". The government has promised to launch the debate with a white paper outlining options, but defence sources said the key decisions have in effect "been made".
Sunday, November 19, 2006
Stupid accusation about Tasmania from a leading British newspaper
The stupid political correctness described below is added to by the newspaper's accusation that the Tasmanian blacks were "eradicated by genocide". The accusation is scurrilous but is a favourite of Leftist historians worldwide. All the evidence shows that the Tasmanian blacks were already dying out when white men first arrived and that their demise was hastened by the diseases of the white settlers to which the blacks had no immunity. See here and here
One of the world's most significant collections of human remains is to be lost to science, after the Natural History Museum (NHM) today agreed to repatriate it to an Australian aboriginal community. Bones and teeth from 17 aboriginal Tasmanians, which were collected in the 19th century, will be sent back to Australia next April, where they are expected to be cremated.
The specimens are the first from the museum's collection of almost 20,000 human remains to be repatriated since the law was changed last year to allow it to do so. The request from the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre (TAC), supported by the Australian Government, was accepted by the museum's trustees even though its own scientists had argued strongly that it should be kept intact as "a particularly important collection to the global scientific community." The ruling sets a precedent that could ultimately see thousands of items from the NHM's collection returned to indigenous communities for burial or cremation. Although 54 per cent of its human remains are from the UK, all those from abroad that are less than 1,000 years old could now qualify for repatriation if an appropriate request is made.
The Australian Government has already begun negotiations about the return of a further 450 items that originated in Australia, and Native American and New Zealand Maori groups are also in discussions with the museum. The prospect of losing so many specimens from one of the world's foremost repositories of human remains has dismayed some scientists, who argue that they retain great importance. Original remains are valuable for studies in fields as varied as human evolution and forensic science.
The Tasmanian collection is particularly signficant because the island has been isolated from the Austrialian mainland for thousands of years, and its aboriginal population offers valuable insights into human evolution that cannot be obtained from other sources. A few dozen museum specimens are all that remains of this unique ethnic group, which was eradicated by genocide in the 19th century.
"Failure to maintain scholarly access to these remains would reduce the ability of all people to know aspects of their common heritage, to the detriment of both the Tasmanians and the wider community," NHM scientists said in their response to the repatriation request. "The Tasmanian human remains must continue to be available for scientific research, either at the NHM or at another repository."
While most scientists accept the case for repatriating remains where a clear line of descent to living individuals or communities can be proven, many object to the idea of granting broad claims where ancestry is less certain. Some modern aborigine groups can trace descent to full Tasmanian aborigines, but have heavily interbred with other populations. The NHM's trustees, however, agreed to the TAC submission, which argued that the remains were taken without consent from an oppressed people, and should be returned for cremation in accordance with local spiritual and religious traditions.
The museum, however, has approved a three-month period of extensive scientific research on the remains before they are returned, including DNA analysis and CT scanning. The TAC had explicitly asked that no further research be conducted on the specimens. Michael Dixon, the museum's director, said: "This is something of a momentous day for the museum. It is a landmark decision, following our first opportunity to consider the repatriation of human remains. "We acknowledge our decision may be questioned by community groups or by some scientists. However, we believe the decision to return the Tasmanian remains, following a short period of data collection, is a commonsense one that balances the requirements of all those with an interest in the remains."
Chris Stringer, Head of Human Origins at the museum, said: "I regret the future loss of scientific data from these specimens," he said. "If the Tasmanian people in the future want to investigate their own past, they will no longer be available."
The decision marks only the second time that a national museum has agreed to repatriate human remains since the Human Tissue Act allowed them to do so. Prior to last year, the NHM and other state collections were banned from parting with any of their specimens by the British Museum Act of 1963. This provision was repealed following the Palmer Committee's 2003 report into collections of human remains, which recommended that institutions should normally seek to return such specimens if an appropriate modern ethnic group requested them.
Several private collections, such as the University of Manchester, the Royal College of Surgeons and the Pitt Rivers museum in Oxford, have already returned specimens voluntarily, and the British Museum has returned cremation ash bundles to Tasmania since the law was changed. The NHM will also return a skull of an aboriginal Australian that was exported illegally in 1913. This decision was not contested by scientists.
Source
Gross mental health negligence in Britain
Cumulative failure of staff at a London hospital led to the murder of a former banker by a man whose schizophrenic condition made him dangerous, a report into the killing found yesterday. The independent inquiry recorded a number of errors in the treatment of John Barrett, 42, who was allowed to walk out of a secure unit despite a history of violence and mental illness. Barrett repeatedly stabbed Denis Finnegan, 50, a retired banker, as he cycled through Richmond Park on September 2, 2004. Two days earlier, Barrett had been admitted to the Springfield Mental Health Hospital in Tooting after hearing voices in his head, and was in a medium- security unit.
The inquiry named Gillian Mezey as the psychiatrist who made the "seriously flawed" decision to grant permission by phone for Barrett to have an hour's unescorted leave in the hospital grounds, even though she had not assessed his condition.
Robert Robinson, the lawyer who chaired the inquiry, was even more critical of management at the hospital and the South West London and St George's Trust, which runs it. He said that clinical decisions were often unsupported by evidence and were rarely challenged by colleagues. In a direct attack on the judgment of Dr Mezey and other clinicians, he said that staff had been too reluctant to intervene against Barrett's wishes, going along with what he wanted in the hope of maintaining his co-operation. That was con- trary to all legal and clinical guidelines, but management at the trust had failed to take action. "The trust knew there were problems and didn't do anything about them," he said.
Many senior managers have been replaced. In conclusion, the 422-page report casts doubt on whether the new senior staff at the trust were up to the job and recommended that a new team of experts be sent in to force through change. "We doubt whether there is the managerial capacity within forensic (psychiatric) services or the wider trust to achieve the necessary changes," it said. It called for the secure unit at Springfield hospital, in which Barrett was treated, to be closed. The trust has rejected this advice.
Dr Mezey, who is also a police adviser on domestic violence and murder, is still employed by the hospital but no longer deals directly with patients. Nigel Fisher, chief executive of the trust at the time of the murder, has been promoted to a job at the Department of Health, where he advises hospitals on how to win foundation status.
Peter Houghton, the trust's new chief executive, said now that the inquiry had been published he would explore whether disciplinary action would be taken. Along with the criticism of the health trust, the inquiry condemned the independent Mental Health Review Tribunal that allowed Barrett to leave secure care at Springfield hospital in 2003, only a year after he had stabbed three people at random at an outpatient clinic in St George's Hospital. One man almost died in the attack.
The tribunal spent only 45 minutes considering the case, examining reports from Springfield hospital that recommended conditional discharge. At the time of the 2002 stabbing he was considered so dangerous that he was placed under the direct care of the Home Office. Only the Home Office raised objections to his release, making it clear that it did not want him back in the community. Barrett failed to adhere to the conditions laid down for his release, including taking his antipsychotic drugs and staying off recreational drugs. The conditions were not monitored or enforced, and he began to behave erratically and complained of hearing whispering voices. That led to his returning to Springfield hospital on August 31, 2004. He was furious when he was placed in a secure ward, believing that he should have been placed on an open ward. In the hope of calming him down and retaining his co-operation for treatment, Dr Mezey granted him "ground leave" from which he absconded and murdered Mr Finnegan, a stranger.
Michael Howlett, director of the Zito Trust, a mental health charity set up in 1994 after the murder of Jonathan Zito by a man suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, said that it was the most damning report he had seen in the past decade. "It beggars belief that John Barrett, who was a restricted patient under the responsibility of the Home Office for a very serious offence of violence in which he very nearly killed a man in 2002, should have been granted a conditional discharge by a mental health review tribunal as early as 2003," he said.
Source
Iranian fanatic funds British university: "Durham university is in the process of opening a new centre for Shii Studies with financial support from Mesbah Yazdi. An Ayotllah whose statement "If anyone insults the Islamic sanctities, Islam has permitted for his blood to be spilled, no court needed either" made headline news in Iran, is funding a British university!"
The stupid political correctness described below is added to by the newspaper's accusation that the Tasmanian blacks were "eradicated by genocide". The accusation is scurrilous but is a favourite of Leftist historians worldwide. All the evidence shows that the Tasmanian blacks were already dying out when white men first arrived and that their demise was hastened by the diseases of the white settlers to which the blacks had no immunity. See here and here
One of the world's most significant collections of human remains is to be lost to science, after the Natural History Museum (NHM) today agreed to repatriate it to an Australian aboriginal community. Bones and teeth from 17 aboriginal Tasmanians, which were collected in the 19th century, will be sent back to Australia next April, where they are expected to be cremated.
The specimens are the first from the museum's collection of almost 20,000 human remains to be repatriated since the law was changed last year to allow it to do so. The request from the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre (TAC), supported by the Australian Government, was accepted by the museum's trustees even though its own scientists had argued strongly that it should be kept intact as "a particularly important collection to the global scientific community." The ruling sets a precedent that could ultimately see thousands of items from the NHM's collection returned to indigenous communities for burial or cremation. Although 54 per cent of its human remains are from the UK, all those from abroad that are less than 1,000 years old could now qualify for repatriation if an appropriate request is made.
The Australian Government has already begun negotiations about the return of a further 450 items that originated in Australia, and Native American and New Zealand Maori groups are also in discussions with the museum. The prospect of losing so many specimens from one of the world's foremost repositories of human remains has dismayed some scientists, who argue that they retain great importance. Original remains are valuable for studies in fields as varied as human evolution and forensic science.
The Tasmanian collection is particularly signficant because the island has been isolated from the Austrialian mainland for thousands of years, and its aboriginal population offers valuable insights into human evolution that cannot be obtained from other sources. A few dozen museum specimens are all that remains of this unique ethnic group, which was eradicated by genocide in the 19th century.
"Failure to maintain scholarly access to these remains would reduce the ability of all people to know aspects of their common heritage, to the detriment of both the Tasmanians and the wider community," NHM scientists said in their response to the repatriation request. "The Tasmanian human remains must continue to be available for scientific research, either at the NHM or at another repository."
While most scientists accept the case for repatriating remains where a clear line of descent to living individuals or communities can be proven, many object to the idea of granting broad claims where ancestry is less certain. Some modern aborigine groups can trace descent to full Tasmanian aborigines, but have heavily interbred with other populations. The NHM's trustees, however, agreed to the TAC submission, which argued that the remains were taken without consent from an oppressed people, and should be returned for cremation in accordance with local spiritual and religious traditions.
The museum, however, has approved a three-month period of extensive scientific research on the remains before they are returned, including DNA analysis and CT scanning. The TAC had explicitly asked that no further research be conducted on the specimens. Michael Dixon, the museum's director, said: "This is something of a momentous day for the museum. It is a landmark decision, following our first opportunity to consider the repatriation of human remains. "We acknowledge our decision may be questioned by community groups or by some scientists. However, we believe the decision to return the Tasmanian remains, following a short period of data collection, is a commonsense one that balances the requirements of all those with an interest in the remains."
Chris Stringer, Head of Human Origins at the museum, said: "I regret the future loss of scientific data from these specimens," he said. "If the Tasmanian people in the future want to investigate their own past, they will no longer be available."
The decision marks only the second time that a national museum has agreed to repatriate human remains since the Human Tissue Act allowed them to do so. Prior to last year, the NHM and other state collections were banned from parting with any of their specimens by the British Museum Act of 1963. This provision was repealed following the Palmer Committee's 2003 report into collections of human remains, which recommended that institutions should normally seek to return such specimens if an appropriate modern ethnic group requested them.
Several private collections, such as the University of Manchester, the Royal College of Surgeons and the Pitt Rivers museum in Oxford, have already returned specimens voluntarily, and the British Museum has returned cremation ash bundles to Tasmania since the law was changed. The NHM will also return a skull of an aboriginal Australian that was exported illegally in 1913. This decision was not contested by scientists.
Source
Gross mental health negligence in Britain
Cumulative failure of staff at a London hospital led to the murder of a former banker by a man whose schizophrenic condition made him dangerous, a report into the killing found yesterday. The independent inquiry recorded a number of errors in the treatment of John Barrett, 42, who was allowed to walk out of a secure unit despite a history of violence and mental illness. Barrett repeatedly stabbed Denis Finnegan, 50, a retired banker, as he cycled through Richmond Park on September 2, 2004. Two days earlier, Barrett had been admitted to the Springfield Mental Health Hospital in Tooting after hearing voices in his head, and was in a medium- security unit.
The inquiry named Gillian Mezey as the psychiatrist who made the "seriously flawed" decision to grant permission by phone for Barrett to have an hour's unescorted leave in the hospital grounds, even though she had not assessed his condition.
Robert Robinson, the lawyer who chaired the inquiry, was even more critical of management at the hospital and the South West London and St George's Trust, which runs it. He said that clinical decisions were often unsupported by evidence and were rarely challenged by colleagues. In a direct attack on the judgment of Dr Mezey and other clinicians, he said that staff had been too reluctant to intervene against Barrett's wishes, going along with what he wanted in the hope of maintaining his co-operation. That was con- trary to all legal and clinical guidelines, but management at the trust had failed to take action. "The trust knew there were problems and didn't do anything about them," he said.
Many senior managers have been replaced. In conclusion, the 422-page report casts doubt on whether the new senior staff at the trust were up to the job and recommended that a new team of experts be sent in to force through change. "We doubt whether there is the managerial capacity within forensic (psychiatric) services or the wider trust to achieve the necessary changes," it said. It called for the secure unit at Springfield hospital, in which Barrett was treated, to be closed. The trust has rejected this advice.
Dr Mezey, who is also a police adviser on domestic violence and murder, is still employed by the hospital but no longer deals directly with patients. Nigel Fisher, chief executive of the trust at the time of the murder, has been promoted to a job at the Department of Health, where he advises hospitals on how to win foundation status.
Peter Houghton, the trust's new chief executive, said now that the inquiry had been published he would explore whether disciplinary action would be taken. Along with the criticism of the health trust, the inquiry condemned the independent Mental Health Review Tribunal that allowed Barrett to leave secure care at Springfield hospital in 2003, only a year after he had stabbed three people at random at an outpatient clinic in St George's Hospital. One man almost died in the attack.
The tribunal spent only 45 minutes considering the case, examining reports from Springfield hospital that recommended conditional discharge. At the time of the 2002 stabbing he was considered so dangerous that he was placed under the direct care of the Home Office. Only the Home Office raised objections to his release, making it clear that it did not want him back in the community. Barrett failed to adhere to the conditions laid down for his release, including taking his antipsychotic drugs and staying off recreational drugs. The conditions were not monitored or enforced, and he began to behave erratically and complained of hearing whispering voices. That led to his returning to Springfield hospital on August 31, 2004. He was furious when he was placed in a secure ward, believing that he should have been placed on an open ward. In the hope of calming him down and retaining his co-operation for treatment, Dr Mezey granted him "ground leave" from which he absconded and murdered Mr Finnegan, a stranger.
Michael Howlett, director of the Zito Trust, a mental health charity set up in 1994 after the murder of Jonathan Zito by a man suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, said that it was the most damning report he had seen in the past decade. "It beggars belief that John Barrett, who was a restricted patient under the responsibility of the Home Office for a very serious offence of violence in which he very nearly killed a man in 2002, should have been granted a conditional discharge by a mental health review tribunal as early as 2003," he said.
Source
Iranian fanatic funds British university: "Durham university is in the process of opening a new centre for Shii Studies with financial support from Mesbah Yazdi. An Ayotllah whose statement "If anyone insults the Islamic sanctities, Islam has permitted for his blood to be spilled, no court needed either" made headline news in Iran, is funding a British university!"
Saturday, November 18, 2006
The nursery rhyme police - British parents to take lessons in reading and singing
Parents could be forced to go to special classes to learn to sing their children nursery rhymes, a minister said. Those who fail to read stories or sing to their youngsters threaten their children's future and the state must put them right, Children's Minister Beverley Hughes said. Their children's well-being is at risk 'unless we act', she declared. And Mrs Hughes said the state would train a new 'parenting workforce' to ensure parents who fail to do their duty with nursery rhymes are found and 'supported'.
The call for state intervention in the minute details of family life followed a series of Labour efforts to reduce anti-social behaviour and improve educational standards by imposing rigorous controls on the lives of the youngest children. Mrs Hughes has established a national curriculum to set down how babies are taught to speak in childcare from the age of three months. Her efforts have gone alongside a push by other ministers to determine exactly how parents treat their children down to how they should brush their teeth.
Tony Blair has backed the idea of 'fasbos' - efforts to identify and correct the lives of children who are likely to fail even before they are born - and new laws to compel parents to attend parenting classes are on the way. This autumn is likely to see an extension of parenting orders that can force parents to attend parenting classes so that they can be used on the say so of local councils against parents. For the first time, parenting orders are likely to be directed against parents whose children have committed no criminal offence.
The threat of action against parents who fail to sing nursery rhymes was unveiled by Mrs Hughes as she gave the first details of Mr Blair's 'national parenting academy', a body that will train teachers, psychologists and social workers to intervene in the lives of families and become the 'parenting workforce'. Mrs Hughes said that it was necessary for children to develop 'emotional intelligence and flexibility, and to have good problem-solving and interpersonal skills too.' She added: 'These attitudes start with good family experiences, in the home, with strong, loving, aspirational parents. So supporting parents and providing good early years education can pay dividends here.'
Mrs Hughes said: 'It is now clear that what parents actually do has a huge impact on children's well-being and capacity to succeed, both at the time and in future. 'Some parents already know that reading and singing nursery rhymes with their young children will get them off to a flying start - often because this is how they themselves were brought up. 'For other parents without this inheritance these simple techniques are a mystery and are likely to remain so - unless we act and draw them to their attention.' She added: 'If friendly and skilful early years practitioners work in partnership with disadvantaged parents, as co-educators of their children, these gaps in children's development and achievement can be narrowed.'
The National Academy for Parenting Practitioner, Mrs Hughes said, would operate from next autumn to train a parenting workforce and 'support the Government's parenting agenda as it develops'. She did not mention any figures for the cost of the scheme.
Mrs Hughes condemned the way governments before 1997 thought they had no role in the upbringing of children, which it 'regarded as the entirely private arrangements families make.' She praised the Government's record of pouring billions into state benefits for single parents, into providing subsidies for childcare, into pushing mothers into work, and into the 'Sure Start' children's centres. 'Over the past 10 years what I have described is, I believe, an example of the enabling 21st century state in action,' Mrs Hughes said. Without Labour's policies, she said, 'we would be on the road to ruin, that is back to where we were 10 years ago.'
Mrs Hughes did not refer to independent reports on the success of Sure Start commissioned by Whitehall which say that despite £20 billion of planned spending it has been a failure in helping the most deprived children who are its target.
Critics of Government family policies condemned the 'nursery rhyme' intervention plan as intrusive and arrogant yesterday. Jill Kirby of the centre right think tank Centre for Policy Studies said: 'This is the micro-management of family life. 'They have told us the books that our children should read and how to brush their teeth. Now they tell us what we should sing to them. 'This is what happens when a government has failed to do anything at all about the real problems of family breakdown, fatherless families and neglect of children. It is setting about wasting its time and our money.'
Anastasia de Waal of the Civitas civic values study group said: 'The problem in the real world is not that people are bad parents but that they are not parenting at all. We know that some children hardly see their parents and many don't have two parents at all. 'This is just one more worthless scheme that will have no impact at all on children's lives.'
New powers for councils to impose parenting orders are expected to be announced in the Queen's Speech tomorrow. Part of Mr Blair's 'Respect Agenda', they extend current powers for courts to instruct parents of children who commit crimes to attend parenting classes. Mrs Hughes' parenting workforce will include local council social workers who are likely to have the new powers.
Her speech to the National Family and Parenting Institute - an organisation set up by Labour eight years ago to further its family agenda - ignored the question of two-parent families which has begun feature in left-wing debate. Mr Blair's Government has long declared that all families are equal. However, in recent weeks Work and Pensions Secretary John Hutton has acknowledged that children with two natural parents fare better. Last week the Blairite think tank, the Institute for Public Policy Research, also acknowledged that children brought up by single parents are more likely to end up without jobs and on state benefits.
Source
U.K.: Police-check fiasco stops 12,000 nurses working
Thousands of nurses and public sector staff have been left unable to work for months because of a backlog of police checks. Up to 50,000 workers, including 12,000 nurses, were caught in delays as new computer equipment meant criminal records checks were stockpiled. A row has broken out between the Metropolitan Police and the Criminal Records Bureau over who is to blame for the fiasco.
The delay occurred when the bureau installed a new computer system which was not compatible with the Met's software. It meant all new applications were stacked up until the police fitted their own new system. During that time nurses and other staff could not legally work. Agency nurse Sally Powell, from Islington, threatened to sue the police after delays meant she was unable to work for five months. A letter to her from the Met, passed to Nursing Times, said: "The problem arose because the Criminal Records Bureau went live with a computer system linking to a national database in February 2006. "The Metropolitan Police Service told the Criminal Records Bureau that its computer system would not be ready to link into this in time and that they should not send referrals on that system until the Metropolitan Police Service was live. "However the bureau went ahead anyway and the Met had no choice but to stockpile the CRB referrals."
Ms Powell, 53, filed her application in April but did not get clearance to work until September. Ms Powell, a senior nurse who has been in the NHS since 1969, said: "99.99 per cent of the time you never even need these checks but every time you change organisation you have to get it done. "I was told the check would take between four and six weeks but it took five months. I had to take work doing odd jobs. I had to freeze my mortgage because I had no money coming in. "Some nurses have had to wait for eight months and that has impoverished them. It is an infringement of my civil rights to employment as a qualified nurse. I have written to the Home Secretary." Ms Powell was told by the Met that 50,000 people had been caught up in the delay and 12,000 of those were nurses.
A spokesman for the Met said: "The technical problems which are referred to in the letter sent to Ms Powell were addressed when the MPS system went live on 2 May 2006. "There are a number of outstanding checks - however the backlog referred to has been reduced considerably. Since the new system went live the Metropolitan Police have been processing 50,000 checks a month." A spokeswoman for the Criminal Records Bureau said the problem arose as new systems were introduced and data was added to a national database. She said: "The CRB's first and foremost priority is to help protect children and vulnerable adults by assisting organisations who are recruiting people into positions of trust. "Priority must be the safety of children and vulnerable adults - neither the CRB or the Met will sacrifice quality for speed.
Source
Rewrite History to Remove the N-word?
An old and popular British comic book has just been reprinted:
The n-word is probably less offensive in Britain than it is in the USA. The High Court of Australia recently ruled that in Australia it is not offensive at all.
Food fads invite fakery
If there's no discernable difference, faking a label must be very tempting
The Food Standards Agency has begun a comprehensive inquiry into food fraud in Britain. Trading standards officers throughout the country have been reporting irregularities from fake organic chickens to labels written in felt pen on certified foods at market stalls. Some butchers have also been trying to cash in on the higher value of organic meat, which can sell at prices up to five times those of meat from a conventionally reared animal. A nationwide survey into bogus organic foods by trading standards will not be completed until the new year, but the agency has already been alerted to possible scams.
With consumers demanding high quality and healthy food and people willing to pay a premium, David Statham, head of enforcement at the agency, has recognised that the market is one in which cheats are prepared to take a chance. Investigations are being conducted to root out the fraudsters and to assess the scale of illegal activity around the country and on the internet. They follow the disclosure in The Times yesterday that shoppers have been duped into buying bogus free-range eggs and paying double the usual prices for eggs from factory farms on the Continent.
The agency is investigating a range of activities. There is particular concern about the authenticity of beef being sold under premium labels such as Aberdeen Angus or Scotch beef when it is imported meat from South America or poor-quality beef from Britain. Similarly the alarm has been raised over farmed salmon being passed off as wild salmon, as rogue traders cash in on the public demand for higher-priced ethically produced food. The growth in popularity of expensive corn-fed chickens has also caught the attention of enforcement officers. It is an easy label to put on a bird that has not eaten a crumb of corn. A new isotope test can show whether a bird has had a corn diet.
Mr Statham said: "Three studies are under way and we expect the results in March. We are particularly concerned about geographic origin of beef because what it is on the label does not mean where it has come from. If you are buying a prime piece of English or Scotch beef and it has come from South America you are being defrauded." It will distribute new testing kits that will enable trading standards officers to speed up the identification of fakes without spending hours on a paperwork trail.
A test now exists to distinguish organic vegetables from non-organic. A product can now be tested to see whether a nitrogen-based fertiliser had been used during production. Any vegetable showing traces of the chemical will not meet the organic standard. Similarly the agency, in collaboration with the Central Science Laboratory in York, is just completing a test that can detect a piece of organic meat from meat from a conventionally farmed animal. Animals on organic farms may only have one therapeutic dose of an antibiotic in a year. The new tests can detect the build up of anti- biotics from a piece of meat.
Source
Parents could be forced to go to special classes to learn to sing their children nursery rhymes, a minister said. Those who fail to read stories or sing to their youngsters threaten their children's future and the state must put them right, Children's Minister Beverley Hughes said. Their children's well-being is at risk 'unless we act', she declared. And Mrs Hughes said the state would train a new 'parenting workforce' to ensure parents who fail to do their duty with nursery rhymes are found and 'supported'.
The call for state intervention in the minute details of family life followed a series of Labour efforts to reduce anti-social behaviour and improve educational standards by imposing rigorous controls on the lives of the youngest children. Mrs Hughes has established a national curriculum to set down how babies are taught to speak in childcare from the age of three months. Her efforts have gone alongside a push by other ministers to determine exactly how parents treat their children down to how they should brush their teeth.
Tony Blair has backed the idea of 'fasbos' - efforts to identify and correct the lives of children who are likely to fail even before they are born - and new laws to compel parents to attend parenting classes are on the way. This autumn is likely to see an extension of parenting orders that can force parents to attend parenting classes so that they can be used on the say so of local councils against parents. For the first time, parenting orders are likely to be directed against parents whose children have committed no criminal offence.
The threat of action against parents who fail to sing nursery rhymes was unveiled by Mrs Hughes as she gave the first details of Mr Blair's 'national parenting academy', a body that will train teachers, psychologists and social workers to intervene in the lives of families and become the 'parenting workforce'. Mrs Hughes said that it was necessary for children to develop 'emotional intelligence and flexibility, and to have good problem-solving and interpersonal skills too.' She added: 'These attitudes start with good family experiences, in the home, with strong, loving, aspirational parents. So supporting parents and providing good early years education can pay dividends here.'
Mrs Hughes said: 'It is now clear that what parents actually do has a huge impact on children's well-being and capacity to succeed, both at the time and in future. 'Some parents already know that reading and singing nursery rhymes with their young children will get them off to a flying start - often because this is how they themselves were brought up. 'For other parents without this inheritance these simple techniques are a mystery and are likely to remain so - unless we act and draw them to their attention.' She added: 'If friendly and skilful early years practitioners work in partnership with disadvantaged parents, as co-educators of their children, these gaps in children's development and achievement can be narrowed.'
The National Academy for Parenting Practitioner, Mrs Hughes said, would operate from next autumn to train a parenting workforce and 'support the Government's parenting agenda as it develops'. She did not mention any figures for the cost of the scheme.
Mrs Hughes condemned the way governments before 1997 thought they had no role in the upbringing of children, which it 'regarded as the entirely private arrangements families make.' She praised the Government's record of pouring billions into state benefits for single parents, into providing subsidies for childcare, into pushing mothers into work, and into the 'Sure Start' children's centres. 'Over the past 10 years what I have described is, I believe, an example of the enabling 21st century state in action,' Mrs Hughes said. Without Labour's policies, she said, 'we would be on the road to ruin, that is back to where we were 10 years ago.'
Mrs Hughes did not refer to independent reports on the success of Sure Start commissioned by Whitehall which say that despite £20 billion of planned spending it has been a failure in helping the most deprived children who are its target.
Critics of Government family policies condemned the 'nursery rhyme' intervention plan as intrusive and arrogant yesterday. Jill Kirby of the centre right think tank Centre for Policy Studies said: 'This is the micro-management of family life. 'They have told us the books that our children should read and how to brush their teeth. Now they tell us what we should sing to them. 'This is what happens when a government has failed to do anything at all about the real problems of family breakdown, fatherless families and neglect of children. It is setting about wasting its time and our money.'
Anastasia de Waal of the Civitas civic values study group said: 'The problem in the real world is not that people are bad parents but that they are not parenting at all. We know that some children hardly see their parents and many don't have two parents at all. 'This is just one more worthless scheme that will have no impact at all on children's lives.'
New powers for councils to impose parenting orders are expected to be announced in the Queen's Speech tomorrow. Part of Mr Blair's 'Respect Agenda', they extend current powers for courts to instruct parents of children who commit crimes to attend parenting classes. Mrs Hughes' parenting workforce will include local council social workers who are likely to have the new powers.
Her speech to the National Family and Parenting Institute - an organisation set up by Labour eight years ago to further its family agenda - ignored the question of two-parent families which has begun feature in left-wing debate. Mr Blair's Government has long declared that all families are equal. However, in recent weeks Work and Pensions Secretary John Hutton has acknowledged that children with two natural parents fare better. Last week the Blairite think tank, the Institute for Public Policy Research, also acknowledged that children brought up by single parents are more likely to end up without jobs and on state benefits.
Source
U.K.: Police-check fiasco stops 12,000 nurses working
Thousands of nurses and public sector staff have been left unable to work for months because of a backlog of police checks. Up to 50,000 workers, including 12,000 nurses, were caught in delays as new computer equipment meant criminal records checks were stockpiled. A row has broken out between the Metropolitan Police and the Criminal Records Bureau over who is to blame for the fiasco.
The delay occurred when the bureau installed a new computer system which was not compatible with the Met's software. It meant all new applications were stacked up until the police fitted their own new system. During that time nurses and other staff could not legally work. Agency nurse Sally Powell, from Islington, threatened to sue the police after delays meant she was unable to work for five months. A letter to her from the Met, passed to Nursing Times, said: "The problem arose because the Criminal Records Bureau went live with a computer system linking to a national database in February 2006. "The Metropolitan Police Service told the Criminal Records Bureau that its computer system would not be ready to link into this in time and that they should not send referrals on that system until the Metropolitan Police Service was live. "However the bureau went ahead anyway and the Met had no choice but to stockpile the CRB referrals."
Ms Powell, 53, filed her application in April but did not get clearance to work until September. Ms Powell, a senior nurse who has been in the NHS since 1969, said: "99.99 per cent of the time you never even need these checks but every time you change organisation you have to get it done. "I was told the check would take between four and six weeks but it took five months. I had to take work doing odd jobs. I had to freeze my mortgage because I had no money coming in. "Some nurses have had to wait for eight months and that has impoverished them. It is an infringement of my civil rights to employment as a qualified nurse. I have written to the Home Secretary." Ms Powell was told by the Met that 50,000 people had been caught up in the delay and 12,000 of those were nurses.
A spokesman for the Met said: "The technical problems which are referred to in the letter sent to Ms Powell were addressed when the MPS system went live on 2 May 2006. "There are a number of outstanding checks - however the backlog referred to has been reduced considerably. Since the new system went live the Metropolitan Police have been processing 50,000 checks a month." A spokeswoman for the Criminal Records Bureau said the problem arose as new systems were introduced and data was added to a national database. She said: "The CRB's first and foremost priority is to help protect children and vulnerable adults by assisting organisations who are recruiting people into positions of trust. "Priority must be the safety of children and vulnerable adults - neither the CRB or the Met will sacrifice quality for speed.
Source
Rewrite History to Remove the N-word?
An old and popular British comic book has just been reprinted:
"Race watchdogs have launched a probe into a relaunched 1939 Dandy annual after claims it uses racist and inflammatory language.
The children's annual, which has been reprinted for the Christmas market, has been branded racist for using the word 'n*gger.'
In the 1939 comic strip, Smarty Grandpa, the word is used four times by characters during the course of single-page story.
Source
The n-word is probably less offensive in Britain than it is in the USA. The High Court of Australia recently ruled that in Australia it is not offensive at all.
Food fads invite fakery
If there's no discernable difference, faking a label must be very tempting
The Food Standards Agency has begun a comprehensive inquiry into food fraud in Britain. Trading standards officers throughout the country have been reporting irregularities from fake organic chickens to labels written in felt pen on certified foods at market stalls. Some butchers have also been trying to cash in on the higher value of organic meat, which can sell at prices up to five times those of meat from a conventionally reared animal. A nationwide survey into bogus organic foods by trading standards will not be completed until the new year, but the agency has already been alerted to possible scams.
With consumers demanding high quality and healthy food and people willing to pay a premium, David Statham, head of enforcement at the agency, has recognised that the market is one in which cheats are prepared to take a chance. Investigations are being conducted to root out the fraudsters and to assess the scale of illegal activity around the country and on the internet. They follow the disclosure in The Times yesterday that shoppers have been duped into buying bogus free-range eggs and paying double the usual prices for eggs from factory farms on the Continent.
The agency is investigating a range of activities. There is particular concern about the authenticity of beef being sold under premium labels such as Aberdeen Angus or Scotch beef when it is imported meat from South America or poor-quality beef from Britain. Similarly the alarm has been raised over farmed salmon being passed off as wild salmon, as rogue traders cash in on the public demand for higher-priced ethically produced food. The growth in popularity of expensive corn-fed chickens has also caught the attention of enforcement officers. It is an easy label to put on a bird that has not eaten a crumb of corn. A new isotope test can show whether a bird has had a corn diet.
Mr Statham said: "Three studies are under way and we expect the results in March. We are particularly concerned about geographic origin of beef because what it is on the label does not mean where it has come from. If you are buying a prime piece of English or Scotch beef and it has come from South America you are being defrauded." It will distribute new testing kits that will enable trading standards officers to speed up the identification of fakes without spending hours on a paperwork trail.
A test now exists to distinguish organic vegetables from non-organic. A product can now be tested to see whether a nitrogen-based fertiliser had been used during production. Any vegetable showing traces of the chemical will not meet the organic standard. Similarly the agency, in collaboration with the Central Science Laboratory in York, is just completing a test that can detect a piece of organic meat from meat from a conventionally farmed animal. Animals on organic farms may only have one therapeutic dose of an antibiotic in a year. The new tests can detect the build up of anti- biotics from a piece of meat.
Source
Friday, November 17, 2006
U.K. dental shortage leads man to superglue own tooth
The Brits have paid their government to provide them with health insurance but collecting what they have paid for is another matter
A man fixed his front tooth with superglue after failing to find an NHS dentist. Gordon Cook, 55, has used the bizarre "DIY dentistry" technique on a loose crown for the last three years - with each fresh application of glue lasting around two months. The father of seven, who was erased from his original dentist's register after moving to a new home in Tranmere, Merseyside, said he turned to glue after losing hope of finding a dentist. He said: "I tried to find a new dentist but they had all gone private. "A lot of them said they would take me on as an NHS patient, but only if I agreed to have the loose crown fixed as a private patient, which would cost around 100 pounds.
"In the end, I just decided to take matters into my own hands. I had read somewhere that super glue was invented for medical use, to bond skin, so I gave it a go. "I tried a few different brands but the one I use now, which is just called Industrial Super Glue, is the best. "You can't really taste it but you do have to be careful not to use too much, in case you glue your mouth shut." Mr Cook, a security manager, has now found an NHS dentist and hopes to have the crown fixed professionally.
Councillor Chris Blakeley, chairman of Wirral Council's social care and health overview and scrutiny committee, said: "Mr Cook's solution was rather extreme but he is not alone when it comes to dentistry horror stories. "People are finding it extremely difficult to find an NHS dentist, and we are currently gathering evidence to assess the scale of the problem, which is not unique to this area."
Source
MERCURY CRAZE THREATENS BAROMETERS
Only safe for the moment
The centuries-old British craft of barometer-making has won a reprieve from a European Union ban on the use of toxic metal in measuring devices. Although the mercury thermometer is being consigned to history, barometer production and restoration, kept alive by three British companies, survived thanks to a lobbying campaign at the European Parliament. MEPs voted by 327 to 274 yesterday for an amendment exempting manufacturers from the ban. They were persuaded that the last producers could do more to protect the environment if they were allowed to stay in business, offering recycling and repair services.
However, European green campaigners vowed to carry on their fight to outlaw the mercury barometer along with the thermometer, the manometer and the sphygmomanometer (for measuring blood pressure), all of which, under the EU directive, are no longer to be made.
Philip Collins, owner of Barometer World in Merton, Devon, which employs five staff, said: "For once it was a victory for the little guy." His campaign, backed by the Federation of Small Businesses and the Conservative MEP Martin Callanan, argued that the barometer industry accounted for a tiny fraction of mercury compared with thermometer production. Annual usage for thermometers and other medical devices was put at more than 25 tonnes in Europe compared with 60kg for new and repaired barometers. "The idea of the directive is to stop mercury getting into the environment - but if people like us are put out of business, people who break their barometer will have nowhere to go for repairs and it is more likely to end up as waste," Mr Collins said. "Some barometers we make sell for 2,000 pounds - they do not get thrown away if they break, they get repaired." His signature barometer is the Admiral Fitzroy, named after the first head of the Met Office, who used mercury measurements to produce the first published weather forecast, which appeared in The Times on July 31, 1861.
Matthew Knowles, of the Federation of Small Businesses, said: "This vote has prevented the strange situation where more mercury would have entered the environment in the name of green policies." Mr Callanan said that safety warnings and controls would allow the continuation of barometer manufacturer and repair, safeguarding jobs at eight producers around Europe. He added: "Mercury does need to be controlled, but banning the household barometer is using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. "The barometer industry in the UK may be small, but it is a tradition that harks back to our maritime roots. A ban would see the end of the tradition of barometer-making begun in the mid-1600s when mercury barometers were introduced."
However, yesterday's development was only the first reading of the directive. When it returns to MEPs in six months, Greens will try again to have new barometers outlawed.
The Swedish Green MEP Carl Schlyter said yesterday: "The decision of the European Parliament to exempt barometers from an EU ban on measuring devices risks completely derailing this legislative proposal on this highly toxic substance. "It is a disgrace that a handful of small producers should be able to hold public health to ransom by de facto blocking an agreement on the phase-out of mercury, and it is irresponsible of those MEPs who have pushed for this."
Source
Islamic fruitcake works in British immigration office: "A senior member of the Islamist group Hizb ut- Tahrir is working as a computer technician at the Home Office, despite calls by Tony Blair for the group to be banned. The activist, named as Abid Javaid, is said to be an official at the Immigration and Nationality Directorate in Croydon, one of the department's most sensitive branches. Shortly after the July 7 bombing attacks, the Prime Minister included the group in a list of those he planned to proscribe, but it has not been among those banned. An investigation by the BBC Two programme Newsnight also claimed that the group preached hatred to young men using staged videos of persecution of Muslims. Newsnight said that Hizb ut-Tahrir targeted disaffected youngsters, particularly the unemployed and members of gangs in South London, and encouraged them to attack non-believers - a claim denied by the group's spokesman, Abdul Wahid, on the programme... The Home Office refused to confirm whether Mr Javaid worked at the Immigration and Nationality Directorate but added: "All Home Office civil servants are expected to abide by Home Office rules governing their conduct and are subject to the Civil Service Code."
Nuke attack on Britain: "British intelligence officials believe that al-Qaida is determined to attack the UK with a nuclear weapon, it emerged yesterday. The announcement, from an officially organised Foreign Office counter-terrorism briefing for the media, was the latest in a series of bleak assessments by senior officials and ministers about the terrorist threat facing Britain. UK officials have detected "an awful lot of chatter" on jihadi websites expressing the desire to acquire chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear weapons. Asked whether there was any doubt that al-Qaida was trying to gain the technology to attack the west, including the UK, with a nuclear weapon, a senior Foreign Office counter-terrorism official said: "No doubt at all."
The Brits have paid their government to provide them with health insurance but collecting what they have paid for is another matter
A man fixed his front tooth with superglue after failing to find an NHS dentist. Gordon Cook, 55, has used the bizarre "DIY dentistry" technique on a loose crown for the last three years - with each fresh application of glue lasting around two months. The father of seven, who was erased from his original dentist's register after moving to a new home in Tranmere, Merseyside, said he turned to glue after losing hope of finding a dentist. He said: "I tried to find a new dentist but they had all gone private. "A lot of them said they would take me on as an NHS patient, but only if I agreed to have the loose crown fixed as a private patient, which would cost around 100 pounds.
"In the end, I just decided to take matters into my own hands. I had read somewhere that super glue was invented for medical use, to bond skin, so I gave it a go. "I tried a few different brands but the one I use now, which is just called Industrial Super Glue, is the best. "You can't really taste it but you do have to be careful not to use too much, in case you glue your mouth shut." Mr Cook, a security manager, has now found an NHS dentist and hopes to have the crown fixed professionally.
Councillor Chris Blakeley, chairman of Wirral Council's social care and health overview and scrutiny committee, said: "Mr Cook's solution was rather extreme but he is not alone when it comes to dentistry horror stories. "People are finding it extremely difficult to find an NHS dentist, and we are currently gathering evidence to assess the scale of the problem, which is not unique to this area."
Source
MERCURY CRAZE THREATENS BAROMETERS
Only safe for the moment
The centuries-old British craft of barometer-making has won a reprieve from a European Union ban on the use of toxic metal in measuring devices. Although the mercury thermometer is being consigned to history, barometer production and restoration, kept alive by three British companies, survived thanks to a lobbying campaign at the European Parliament. MEPs voted by 327 to 274 yesterday for an amendment exempting manufacturers from the ban. They were persuaded that the last producers could do more to protect the environment if they were allowed to stay in business, offering recycling and repair services.
However, European green campaigners vowed to carry on their fight to outlaw the mercury barometer along with the thermometer, the manometer and the sphygmomanometer (for measuring blood pressure), all of which, under the EU directive, are no longer to be made.
Philip Collins, owner of Barometer World in Merton, Devon, which employs five staff, said: "For once it was a victory for the little guy." His campaign, backed by the Federation of Small Businesses and the Conservative MEP Martin Callanan, argued that the barometer industry accounted for a tiny fraction of mercury compared with thermometer production. Annual usage for thermometers and other medical devices was put at more than 25 tonnes in Europe compared with 60kg for new and repaired barometers. "The idea of the directive is to stop mercury getting into the environment - but if people like us are put out of business, people who break their barometer will have nowhere to go for repairs and it is more likely to end up as waste," Mr Collins said. "Some barometers we make sell for 2,000 pounds - they do not get thrown away if they break, they get repaired." His signature barometer is the Admiral Fitzroy, named after the first head of the Met Office, who used mercury measurements to produce the first published weather forecast, which appeared in The Times on July 31, 1861.
Matthew Knowles, of the Federation of Small Businesses, said: "This vote has prevented the strange situation where more mercury would have entered the environment in the name of green policies." Mr Callanan said that safety warnings and controls would allow the continuation of barometer manufacturer and repair, safeguarding jobs at eight producers around Europe. He added: "Mercury does need to be controlled, but banning the household barometer is using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. "The barometer industry in the UK may be small, but it is a tradition that harks back to our maritime roots. A ban would see the end of the tradition of barometer-making begun in the mid-1600s when mercury barometers were introduced."
However, yesterday's development was only the first reading of the directive. When it returns to MEPs in six months, Greens will try again to have new barometers outlawed.
The Swedish Green MEP Carl Schlyter said yesterday: "The decision of the European Parliament to exempt barometers from an EU ban on measuring devices risks completely derailing this legislative proposal on this highly toxic substance. "It is a disgrace that a handful of small producers should be able to hold public health to ransom by de facto blocking an agreement on the phase-out of mercury, and it is irresponsible of those MEPs who have pushed for this."
Source
Islamic fruitcake works in British immigration office: "A senior member of the Islamist group Hizb ut- Tahrir is working as a computer technician at the Home Office, despite calls by Tony Blair for the group to be banned. The activist, named as Abid Javaid, is said to be an official at the Immigration and Nationality Directorate in Croydon, one of the department's most sensitive branches. Shortly after the July 7 bombing attacks, the Prime Minister included the group in a list of those he planned to proscribe, but it has not been among those banned. An investigation by the BBC Two programme Newsnight also claimed that the group preached hatred to young men using staged videos of persecution of Muslims. Newsnight said that Hizb ut-Tahrir targeted disaffected youngsters, particularly the unemployed and members of gangs in South London, and encouraged them to attack non-believers - a claim denied by the group's spokesman, Abdul Wahid, on the programme... The Home Office refused to confirm whether Mr Javaid worked at the Immigration and Nationality Directorate but added: "All Home Office civil servants are expected to abide by Home Office rules governing their conduct and are subject to the Civil Service Code."
Nuke attack on Britain: "British intelligence officials believe that al-Qaida is determined to attack the UK with a nuclear weapon, it emerged yesterday. The announcement, from an officially organised Foreign Office counter-terrorism briefing for the media, was the latest in a series of bleak assessments by senior officials and ministers about the terrorist threat facing Britain. UK officials have detected "an awful lot of chatter" on jihadi websites expressing the desire to acquire chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear weapons. Asked whether there was any doubt that al-Qaida was trying to gain the technology to attack the west, including the UK, with a nuclear weapon, a senior Foreign Office counter-terrorism official said: "No doubt at all."
Thursday, November 16, 2006
LEAVING ON A JET PLANE, CLIMATOLOGISTS HIT THE SKIES TO TALK GLOBAL WARMING
A group of climate scientists from the UK's Met Office have flown to Nairobi to meet colleagues from around the world to discuss climate research and present their most recent findings. They have taken with them an imaginatively titled report detailing the predicted effect climate change will have on the developing world (It's called "Effects of climate change on developing countries"). The report is based on climate models running on PRECIS, a regional climate modelling system developed by the Met Office to run on personal computers.
The Met Office's Dr Vicky Pope will set out the main conclusions of their research: the likely increases in areas affected by extreme drought from three per cent of the globe to 30 per cent by 2100, and severe drought increasing from eight per cent to 40 per cent of the planet. In news that will no doubt confuse climate change sceptics like Jeremy Clarkson, their models also predict some areas will have a lower incidence of drought if the planet gets hotter.
However, nowhere in the government announcement of the visit is there a calculation of the amount of carbon that will be produced by sending all these climatologists to Nairobi, when they could all have stayed home and had a video conference instead. Tch tch. [The climatologists are not stupid: they know where the good weather is in November]
Source
U.K.: ANOTHER CRACKDOWN ON HUGGING
The anus running this school should be delighted that the kids are affectionate towards one-another
A school has told pupils to avoid hugging because they are taking too much time to reach their lessons. Callington Community College, a mixed comprehensive in Cornwall with 1,250 pupils, said hugging had begun to cause "problems". The headmaster, Stephen Kenning, wrote on the school's website: "Hugging has become very acceptable amongst students. This has led to some students believing that it is okay to go up to anyone and hug them, sometimes inappropriately. "This is very serious not only for the victim but also for anyone accused of acting inappropriately. To avoid putting anyone at risk please avoid hugging."
Yesterday, Mr Kenning added: "During the changing of lessons, girls were hugging each other and taking too much time to get to lessons. "We also had complaints from other students about inappropriate hugging. It was going on too often and people were abusing it. The school has not banned it. However, it is being discouraged and we are asking pupils to cut out anything unnecessary and only hug when they need to hug." Pupils would not get into trouble if they ignored the advice, he added.
However, Kath Pascoe, a local councillor who has two grandchildren at the college, said: "I don't see anything wrong with hugging - better that than fighting and arguing. Surely it can't take that long to get to lessons?"
Mr Kenning said he had had one complaint from parents about the anti-hugging drive and that pupils had taken the advice on board. David Cohen, a member of the British Psychological Society and author of the book Body Language said hugging was a basic human instinct. He said: "Human beings are touchy-feely creatures by nature. It is only a problem if you invade someone's personal space. Surely it is better youngsters get the human contact they need innocently. If you ban it, they are far more likely to seek it round the back of the bike sheds." Pupils said there had been detentions at the school for hugging, and a "naming and shaming" policy in assembly.
Source
UK: Fox hunters outfoxing the law
Eighteen months ago hunting was banned. Or was it? The hounds are still running, foxes are still being killed and the number of people taking part has actually increased. As the new season begins, Stephen Moss saddles up and discovers how the hunts are outfoxing the law.
'Are you pro or anti?" Florence (aka Florrie, aka Flossie) asks me. "Neither," I insist, sitting firmly on the fence. "I'm here to report, to see both sides, to be objective, to tell it as it is, to -" "Yes, but are you pro or anti?" she asks again, seeing through my obfuscation. Florrie is nine, and nine-year-olds just won't put up with bullshit.
"My children have grown up marching," says Florrie's mother, Philippa Mayo. She is the head of the Countryside Alliance's hunting campaign, and one of the reasons I am sitting on a horse, about to follow the hounds across the Leicestershire countryside.
Eighteen months ago, hunting was banned. Remember? Hounds were going to be slaughtered; red coats abandoned; huntsmen sacked. It was the end of hunting - and probably the end of rural life, too. Today, however, there are more hunts than there were at the time of the ban; more hunters, too, according to the Countryside Alliance. No stores selling hunting gear have gone bust. Indeed, business is buoyant, according to Jane White at equestrian store Calcutts in Sutton Scotney, Hampshire. "There was a drastic dip in 2004, the year of the ban," she says. "People didn't know what was going to happen. Last year saw a slight improvement, and this year has picked up incredibly. A lot of people have taken it up." Hunting, a banned activity, appears to be booming.
Mayo lives in a village on the border between Leicestershire and Rutland. This is a place where everyone says good morning; despite the November chill, elderly ladies engage in lengthy conversations outside the post office; and the newsagent's counter is covered not with copies of Closer and Heat, but with Horse and Hound, the Field, Sporting Gun. Here, field sports call the shots.
Mayo has convinced me that I should ride with the Cottesmore in my quest to discover how hunting has survived the ban. She is lending me a horse and promises to keep me company during the hunt. I haven't ridden for four years, so anything could happen. The Cottesmore is what might be called a middle-ranking hunt - not as posh as the neighbouring Quorn, but more upscale than the farmers' packs in Wales and the West Country. There are about 70 riders this Saturday morning, with another 40 or so people following in cars. Hunting's car followers are often forgotten, but they are a vital part of its ecology.
The other misconception is that all these 70 riders are engaged in the act of hunting. They aren't. The only people who hunt are the professional huntsman, his two whippers-in (also usually professional hunt servants), and two or three trusted volunteers. They and the hounds do the hunting; everyone else - "the field", in the jargon - tries to keep up as best they can. But they are expressly forbidden to get too close in case they distract the hounds. Hunting is a secretive activity, often undertaken in wooded areas that are out of bounds to the field, and largely impenetrable to the non-expert. All of which makes it very difficult to decide whether huntsmen are acting legally.
And that is the crux. Does the legislation outlaw hunting or not? Those who succeeded in getting the Hunting Act on to the statute books in 2004 are in no doubt - hunting is banned. "Hunting live quarry is illegal," says the RSPCA's Becky Hawkes. "If dogs are not being kept under control and people going out hunting are aware of that, then the law would be broken." "Any pursuit or chase is illegal," insists Barry Hugill of the League Against Cruel Sports. They are right - up to a point. There it is in the first line of the act: "A person commits an offence if he hunts a wild mammal with a dog." Couldn't be clearer. Except there are a further five words in that sentence: "... unless his hunting is exempt." Those five words - and the list of exemptions in schedule one of the act - have been the salvation of hunting. One exemption in particular has been manna to the hunters: "Flushing a wild mammal from cover is exempt hunting if undertaken for the purpose of enabling a bird of prey to hunt the wild mammal." And so hunts have begun using packs of hounds in combination with birds of prey.
Today the Cottesmore is out with its golden eagle, Anna (they did think about calling it Notil, as in Notil-eagle, but pulled back). It is perched on the arm of its handler, Vernon Moore, and is the most important participant in the day's hunting. Without the bird of prey, it would not be legal to flush out a fox using a pack of hounds. All that would be permissible would be the use of a pair of hounds to flush out a fox to be shot. Some hunts are using the latter exemption, but it is the presence of a bird of prey that permits the hounds to work as a pack of 30 or 40 - the essence of hunting, in the view of connoisseurs. "The exemptions in the act allow us to do an awful lot," admits Mayo, "and the mood is much more optimistic now than it was. For so long we had the ban hanging over us, and then the worst that could ever happen happened. Now we're over that huge hump. We've survived two seasons, and for the first time in years there is a real prospect of my grandchildren being able to hunt. Meltdown didn't happen." ....
The hunts are using every grey area in the act. What they cannot afford is a chase across open country, which would be a clear breach of the law, might be witnessed or photographed, and could end up with the huntsman in court. Overall, it's a mess, a farce, a typical British fudge that leaves no one happy except the lawyers......
The ultimate objective, of course, is repeal, and for the hunters there is a knight on a white charger on the horizon. David Cameron has pledged that, if he becomes prime minister, he will allow another free vote on the issue. With a Conservative majority, backed by a group of Labour pro-hunters and about half the Lib Dems, the hunts are convinced they will get repeal. All they have to do is sit tight and live with pseudo-hunting for the next four or five years....
Seed says the present chaos helps no one - least of all the foxes, which are being shot in far greater numbers than when farmers left them for hunts to deal with. "The hunts are continuing; the hounds are continuing; all those misguided parliamentarians have done is condemn a far greater number of foxes to a slower and longer death." When hounds kill, hunters argue, death is instantaneous. A man with a rifle may only wound a fox, leaving it to die lingeringly.
More here
THE BRITISH DENTAL DISASTER CONTINUES
Plenty of money for ever more bureaucrats but cutbacks in money for employing dentists -- with the inevitable results. Sad that it is hurting kids, though
THOUSANDS of children are being forced to wait three years or more for braces or corrective dental treatment, after new government regulations that affect the way dentists work. Patients needing treatment to straighten protruding teeth or correct misaligned jaws are facing long waits and permanent dental damage because of a shortage of practitioners and a lack of funding for orthodontic work, the British Dental Association (BDA) has said.
An estimated two million Britons are now unable to find NHS dentists after the introduction of dental contracts by the Department of Health in April, prompting increasing numbers to seek treatment abroad.
While many children require dental surgery before adulthood to prevent permanent damage, the new contracts will cut the number of children receiving orthodontic work by up to a fifth, the BDA says. Under the previous system, dentists were responsible for budgeting for orthodontic treatment. They are now limited to spending a certain amount each year, forcing them to limit treatment to the most needy.
A lack of funding for training has also exacerbated the shortage of specialist orthodontic dentists, experts say. A BDA spokeswoman told The Times: "The BDA is aware that since the introduction of the new dental contract in April, access to orthodontic treatment has been reduced. "This is a national issue surrounding the funding for these treatments. Only those patients who most need treatment will be able to get it on the NHS. "It's estimated the new criteria will reduce the number of children treated by up to 20 per cent. Those who do qualify for treatment may find they are on a waiting list of several years."
Some dentists who formerly provided orthodontics in less complex cases have now been given purely dental contracts, which has led to a reduction in the amount of orthodontic treatment, the BDA said. The Department of Health said yesterday: "The transition to the new arrangements has inevitably thrown up some challenges, but we are confident the NHS is now taking advantage of the reforms to put orthodontic services onto a more secure footing for the future." [Pure waffle!]
Source
Big cars to be hit hard in London: "Drivers of gas-guzzling cars may have to pay 25 pounds a day to enter London's enlarged congestion charge zone, under plans by Ken Livingstone to tackle climate change. The Mayor of London is proposing an emissions-based congestion charge fee that will penalise drivers of the highest-polluting vehicles, including many 4x4s and luxury saloons. The new 25 pound rate would apply to cars rated in band G for vehicle excise duty, which covers those emitting more than 225g of carbon dioxide per kilometre..... Owners of fuel-inefficient cars in Richmond upon Thames, southwest London, are already facing a tripling in the cost of parking permits to œ300, under proposals put forward by the local council."
Futile attempt to make British bureaucrats work: "Being told to clear your desk used to be synonymous with dismissal. But civil servants have been asked to remove photographs, food and mobile phones in an attempt to improve efficiency. Under an edict sent to Revenue & Customs staff in tax offices, desks have to be tidy, clean and free from clutter to promote "efficient business processing". The so-called Lean programme, designed to improve productivity in government offices, has provoked a work-to-rule among 14,000 civil servants. An internal memo from a senior manager in North Wales outlining the process evoked claims from the Public and Commercial Services Union that the organisation was trying to "dehumanise" working conditions."
A group of climate scientists from the UK's Met Office have flown to Nairobi to meet colleagues from around the world to discuss climate research and present their most recent findings. They have taken with them an imaginatively titled report detailing the predicted effect climate change will have on the developing world (It's called "Effects of climate change on developing countries"). The report is based on climate models running on PRECIS, a regional climate modelling system developed by the Met Office to run on personal computers.
The Met Office's Dr Vicky Pope will set out the main conclusions of their research: the likely increases in areas affected by extreme drought from three per cent of the globe to 30 per cent by 2100, and severe drought increasing from eight per cent to 40 per cent of the planet. In news that will no doubt confuse climate change sceptics like Jeremy Clarkson, their models also predict some areas will have a lower incidence of drought if the planet gets hotter.
However, nowhere in the government announcement of the visit is there a calculation of the amount of carbon that will be produced by sending all these climatologists to Nairobi, when they could all have stayed home and had a video conference instead. Tch tch. [The climatologists are not stupid: they know where the good weather is in November]
Source
U.K.: ANOTHER CRACKDOWN ON HUGGING
The anus running this school should be delighted that the kids are affectionate towards one-another
A school has told pupils to avoid hugging because they are taking too much time to reach their lessons. Callington Community College, a mixed comprehensive in Cornwall with 1,250 pupils, said hugging had begun to cause "problems". The headmaster, Stephen Kenning, wrote on the school's website: "Hugging has become very acceptable amongst students. This has led to some students believing that it is okay to go up to anyone and hug them, sometimes inappropriately. "This is very serious not only for the victim but also for anyone accused of acting inappropriately. To avoid putting anyone at risk please avoid hugging."
Yesterday, Mr Kenning added: "During the changing of lessons, girls were hugging each other and taking too much time to get to lessons. "We also had complaints from other students about inappropriate hugging. It was going on too often and people were abusing it. The school has not banned it. However, it is being discouraged and we are asking pupils to cut out anything unnecessary and only hug when they need to hug." Pupils would not get into trouble if they ignored the advice, he added.
However, Kath Pascoe, a local councillor who has two grandchildren at the college, said: "I don't see anything wrong with hugging - better that than fighting and arguing. Surely it can't take that long to get to lessons?"
Mr Kenning said he had had one complaint from parents about the anti-hugging drive and that pupils had taken the advice on board. David Cohen, a member of the British Psychological Society and author of the book Body Language said hugging was a basic human instinct. He said: "Human beings are touchy-feely creatures by nature. It is only a problem if you invade someone's personal space. Surely it is better youngsters get the human contact they need innocently. If you ban it, they are far more likely to seek it round the back of the bike sheds." Pupils said there had been detentions at the school for hugging, and a "naming and shaming" policy in assembly.
Source
UK: Fox hunters outfoxing the law
Eighteen months ago hunting was banned. Or was it? The hounds are still running, foxes are still being killed and the number of people taking part has actually increased. As the new season begins, Stephen Moss saddles up and discovers how the hunts are outfoxing the law.
'Are you pro or anti?" Florence (aka Florrie, aka Flossie) asks me. "Neither," I insist, sitting firmly on the fence. "I'm here to report, to see both sides, to be objective, to tell it as it is, to -" "Yes, but are you pro or anti?" she asks again, seeing through my obfuscation. Florrie is nine, and nine-year-olds just won't put up with bullshit.
"My children have grown up marching," says Florrie's mother, Philippa Mayo. She is the head of the Countryside Alliance's hunting campaign, and one of the reasons I am sitting on a horse, about to follow the hounds across the Leicestershire countryside.
Eighteen months ago, hunting was banned. Remember? Hounds were going to be slaughtered; red coats abandoned; huntsmen sacked. It was the end of hunting - and probably the end of rural life, too. Today, however, there are more hunts than there were at the time of the ban; more hunters, too, according to the Countryside Alliance. No stores selling hunting gear have gone bust. Indeed, business is buoyant, according to Jane White at equestrian store Calcutts in Sutton Scotney, Hampshire. "There was a drastic dip in 2004, the year of the ban," she says. "People didn't know what was going to happen. Last year saw a slight improvement, and this year has picked up incredibly. A lot of people have taken it up." Hunting, a banned activity, appears to be booming.
Mayo lives in a village on the border between Leicestershire and Rutland. This is a place where everyone says good morning; despite the November chill, elderly ladies engage in lengthy conversations outside the post office; and the newsagent's counter is covered not with copies of Closer and Heat, but with Horse and Hound, the Field, Sporting Gun. Here, field sports call the shots.
Mayo has convinced me that I should ride with the Cottesmore in my quest to discover how hunting has survived the ban. She is lending me a horse and promises to keep me company during the hunt. I haven't ridden for four years, so anything could happen. The Cottesmore is what might be called a middle-ranking hunt - not as posh as the neighbouring Quorn, but more upscale than the farmers' packs in Wales and the West Country. There are about 70 riders this Saturday morning, with another 40 or so people following in cars. Hunting's car followers are often forgotten, but they are a vital part of its ecology.
The other misconception is that all these 70 riders are engaged in the act of hunting. They aren't. The only people who hunt are the professional huntsman, his two whippers-in (also usually professional hunt servants), and two or three trusted volunteers. They and the hounds do the hunting; everyone else - "the field", in the jargon - tries to keep up as best they can. But they are expressly forbidden to get too close in case they distract the hounds. Hunting is a secretive activity, often undertaken in wooded areas that are out of bounds to the field, and largely impenetrable to the non-expert. All of which makes it very difficult to decide whether huntsmen are acting legally.
And that is the crux. Does the legislation outlaw hunting or not? Those who succeeded in getting the Hunting Act on to the statute books in 2004 are in no doubt - hunting is banned. "Hunting live quarry is illegal," says the RSPCA's Becky Hawkes. "If dogs are not being kept under control and people going out hunting are aware of that, then the law would be broken." "Any pursuit or chase is illegal," insists Barry Hugill of the League Against Cruel Sports. They are right - up to a point. There it is in the first line of the act: "A person commits an offence if he hunts a wild mammal with a dog." Couldn't be clearer. Except there are a further five words in that sentence: "... unless his hunting is exempt." Those five words - and the list of exemptions in schedule one of the act - have been the salvation of hunting. One exemption in particular has been manna to the hunters: "Flushing a wild mammal from cover is exempt hunting if undertaken for the purpose of enabling a bird of prey to hunt the wild mammal." And so hunts have begun using packs of hounds in combination with birds of prey.
Today the Cottesmore is out with its golden eagle, Anna (they did think about calling it Notil, as in Notil-eagle, but pulled back). It is perched on the arm of its handler, Vernon Moore, and is the most important participant in the day's hunting. Without the bird of prey, it would not be legal to flush out a fox using a pack of hounds. All that would be permissible would be the use of a pair of hounds to flush out a fox to be shot. Some hunts are using the latter exemption, but it is the presence of a bird of prey that permits the hounds to work as a pack of 30 or 40 - the essence of hunting, in the view of connoisseurs. "The exemptions in the act allow us to do an awful lot," admits Mayo, "and the mood is much more optimistic now than it was. For so long we had the ban hanging over us, and then the worst that could ever happen happened. Now we're over that huge hump. We've survived two seasons, and for the first time in years there is a real prospect of my grandchildren being able to hunt. Meltdown didn't happen." ....
The hunts are using every grey area in the act. What they cannot afford is a chase across open country, which would be a clear breach of the law, might be witnessed or photographed, and could end up with the huntsman in court. Overall, it's a mess, a farce, a typical British fudge that leaves no one happy except the lawyers......
The ultimate objective, of course, is repeal, and for the hunters there is a knight on a white charger on the horizon. David Cameron has pledged that, if he becomes prime minister, he will allow another free vote on the issue. With a Conservative majority, backed by a group of Labour pro-hunters and about half the Lib Dems, the hunts are convinced they will get repeal. All they have to do is sit tight and live with pseudo-hunting for the next four or five years....
Seed says the present chaos helps no one - least of all the foxes, which are being shot in far greater numbers than when farmers left them for hunts to deal with. "The hunts are continuing; the hounds are continuing; all those misguided parliamentarians have done is condemn a far greater number of foxes to a slower and longer death." When hounds kill, hunters argue, death is instantaneous. A man with a rifle may only wound a fox, leaving it to die lingeringly.
More here
THE BRITISH DENTAL DISASTER CONTINUES
Plenty of money for ever more bureaucrats but cutbacks in money for employing dentists -- with the inevitable results. Sad that it is hurting kids, though
THOUSANDS of children are being forced to wait three years or more for braces or corrective dental treatment, after new government regulations that affect the way dentists work. Patients needing treatment to straighten protruding teeth or correct misaligned jaws are facing long waits and permanent dental damage because of a shortage of practitioners and a lack of funding for orthodontic work, the British Dental Association (BDA) has said.
An estimated two million Britons are now unable to find NHS dentists after the introduction of dental contracts by the Department of Health in April, prompting increasing numbers to seek treatment abroad.
While many children require dental surgery before adulthood to prevent permanent damage, the new contracts will cut the number of children receiving orthodontic work by up to a fifth, the BDA says. Under the previous system, dentists were responsible for budgeting for orthodontic treatment. They are now limited to spending a certain amount each year, forcing them to limit treatment to the most needy.
A lack of funding for training has also exacerbated the shortage of specialist orthodontic dentists, experts say. A BDA spokeswoman told The Times: "The BDA is aware that since the introduction of the new dental contract in April, access to orthodontic treatment has been reduced. "This is a national issue surrounding the funding for these treatments. Only those patients who most need treatment will be able to get it on the NHS. "It's estimated the new criteria will reduce the number of children treated by up to 20 per cent. Those who do qualify for treatment may find they are on a waiting list of several years."
Some dentists who formerly provided orthodontics in less complex cases have now been given purely dental contracts, which has led to a reduction in the amount of orthodontic treatment, the BDA said. The Department of Health said yesterday: "The transition to the new arrangements has inevitably thrown up some challenges, but we are confident the NHS is now taking advantage of the reforms to put orthodontic services onto a more secure footing for the future." [Pure waffle!]
Source
Big cars to be hit hard in London: "Drivers of gas-guzzling cars may have to pay 25 pounds a day to enter London's enlarged congestion charge zone, under plans by Ken Livingstone to tackle climate change. The Mayor of London is proposing an emissions-based congestion charge fee that will penalise drivers of the highest-polluting vehicles, including many 4x4s and luxury saloons. The new 25 pound rate would apply to cars rated in band G for vehicle excise duty, which covers those emitting more than 225g of carbon dioxide per kilometre..... Owners of fuel-inefficient cars in Richmond upon Thames, southwest London, are already facing a tripling in the cost of parking permits to œ300, under proposals put forward by the local council."
Futile attempt to make British bureaucrats work: "Being told to clear your desk used to be synonymous with dismissal. But civil servants have been asked to remove photographs, food and mobile phones in an attempt to improve efficiency. Under an edict sent to Revenue & Customs staff in tax offices, desks have to be tidy, clean and free from clutter to promote "efficient business processing". The so-called Lean programme, designed to improve productivity in government offices, has provoked a work-to-rule among 14,000 civil servants. An internal memo from a senior manager in North Wales outlining the process evoked claims from the Public and Commercial Services Union that the organisation was trying to "dehumanise" working conditions."
Wednesday, November 15, 2006
THE RETURN OF THE FOUNTAIN PEN
THE fountain pen, complete with leaky nibs, bursting cartridges and indelibly stained shirts, is making a compulsory comeback in a last-ditch attempt to save the nation's handwriting. The spread of vowel-free text messages among the young and the rise of grammarless e-mails across all age ranges is leaving children, university students and even teachers unable to write legibly by hand.
But now a leading independent school has ordered pupils aged nine and over to write only with fountain pens. Bryan Lewis, the headmaster of The Mary Erskine & Stewart's Melville Junior School in Edinburgh, believes that his pupils' educational attainment and sense of self-worth will all benefit. "All teachers who join our junior school are taught a handwriting style by my colleagues and they, in turn, teach all our children the same style," Mr Lewis said. "They are helped by our insistence that children from primary 5 onwards write in fountain pen. "Learning to write in fountain pen not only results in beautiful presentation but also has the not-insignificant bonus of developing children's selfesteem."
Mr Lewis's policy is likely to be well-received by those in authority. Tony Blair is a fountain-pen user and has been known to give heavyweight Churchill pens as gifts. The Prime Minister, who was educated in the Scottish private school system, writes all his speeches in longhand with a favourite fountain pen before passing them to his secretaries to be typed.
At Mr Blair's end of the market, fountain pen sales are reportedly booming. Purveyors of expensive jewellery such as Bulgari and Chopard are starting to produce luxury pens.
It is widely accepted that the use of the fountain pen, necessarily slower and more deliberate than the ballpoint or rollerpen, produces more elegant handwriting. Those who write for a living tend to profess affection for the fountain pen. In Eighteenth, the poet, Kate Bingham, praised the "low-tech simplicity" of the instrument and recalled the excitement of watching "the tip of a new pen touch its first white sheet, the hand behind solemn and quivering, unsure whether to doodle or draw or let the nib try for itself, licking the page in thirsty blue-black stripes". John Banville, the Booker prize-winning Irish author, also prefers to use a fountain pen. He has been reported as saying that "a fountain pen is about the right speed. A machine goes too fast. It goes faster than I can think."
But the fall of the fountain pen from common usage was once widely welcomed because of its association with ruined school uniforms, messy pages and classroom squabbles. In the days when fountain pens were widespread, was there ever a pupil whose school blazer did not have a giant inky map all over the lining or a blue puddle in the top pocket? The fountain pen was also a favourite weapon of the naughty schoolboy. The nib could be used to jab other pupils and some models, especially those which filled from bottles by pistons or levers, were ideal for squirting ink. The more primitive dip-in types also made crude darts. But the favourite of every schoolboy was the ink pellet - the blotting-paper-and-ink device detested by every teacher.
Mr Lewis is adamant that the return of pen and ink will have positive results for his pupils. The demise of the fountain pen and handwriting went hand-in-hand, he argues, with the rise of "progressive" teaching methods. He added: "Modern teaching methods overwhelmed the curriculum in the late 1970s and early 1980s. They proved to be no more than an excuse for the lowering of standards of basic literacy and numeracy under the guise of freedom of expression. From that time generations of children were no longer taught to write properly. They couldn't recognise the importance of spelling, to read with expression and understanding, and to master numbers. "In many cases the pupils of that era are now today's teachers. They can hardly be expected to teach basic literacy and numeracy skills when they went through childhood either unaware of, or indifferent to, rules of grammar and spelling."
The Scottish Qualifications Authority has lamented that the standard of handwriting on some exam papers was so poor that its markers could not read them. A spokesman for the Campaign for Real Education said: "Good spelling, handwriting, grammar and punctuation make for confident use of language and smooth communication."
Source
A straight-talking black bishop of the church of England
The Archbishop of York has launched a withering attack on BBC bias, the chattering classes and the consumerism surrounding Christmas. Dr John Sentamu also questioned the right of Muslim women to wear the veil in public, saying it did not "conform to norms of decency". Dr Sentamu, who ranks second in the Anglican church hierarchy, used an interview to rail against what he described as the destruction of Britain's Christian heritage by the wilfulness of the chattering classes.
Some of his strongest comments were reserved for the BBC, which he claimed was biased against the Church of England. "We get more knocks. They can do to us what they dare not do to the Muslims," he said. "We are fair game because they can get away with it. We don't go down there and say, `We are going to bomb your place.' It is not within our nature."
The Ugandan-born cleric, 57, said that Britain's minorities could not expect society to be reconfigured around them. When asked whether it was right for Muslim women in Britain to wear the full veil in every aspect of their lives he replied: "Muslim scholars would say three things. First, does it conform to norms of decency? Secondly, does it render you more secure? And thirdly, what kind of Islam are you projecting by wearing it? "I think in the British context it renders you less secure because you stick out and it brings you unwelcome attention. On the first question, I don't think it does conform.
"You know, when I visit Orthodox synagogues I never take a cross. When I go into Muslim mosques I take it off. When I go into a Sikh temple I cover my head. And I can't simply say, `Take me as I am, whether you like it or not'." "I think the thing is in British society you can wear what you want, but you can't expect British society to be reconfigured around you. No minority can expect to impose this on the public or civic life."
The Archbishop's comments put him at odds with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, who has defended the right of Muslim women to wear the full veil, arguing that it would be politically dangerous to ban visible signs of faith.
Dr Sentamu's views on society's rejection of Christian heritage will probably be shared by the majority of the Church's senior clerics. He criticised the consumerism that surrounds Christmas, highlighting the recent arrival of a Chinese cargo ship laden with consumer items. Dr Sentamu said that Christmas should be a more charitable occasion. "Do we need those toys?" he asked. "I would suggest that this Advent we should be eating less and not spending so much. Give up a little bit and find charities that give clean water.
"Also, support our farmers, buy more products from this country, If you lose farmers, you are going to lose this green and pleasant land."
Perhaps his strongest criticism was reserved for those who rejected the country's Christian heritage. The Archbishop, who had trained as a lawyer in Uganda before fleeing Idi Amin's rule in 1974, said: "When I was in Uganda, everything that was British was the best. If you went to a shop to buy a ruler, you looked for one that said `Made in Britain'. But now this country disbelieves itself in an amazing way. "It almost dislikes its own culture. It doesn't realise that the arts, music, buildings have grown out of a strong Christian tradition. John Betjeman would be shocked that the nation is not interested in helping preserve these things."
He claimed in an interview with today's Daily Mail that the urban liberal elite were to blame. "They see themselves as holding the flag for Britain and that Britain is definitely secular and atheist. I want them to have their say, but not to lord it over the rest of us."
Dr Sentamu also said that parental neglect of children was leading to children's behavioural problems that could not be blamed on schools. "Once children have reached 11 and you have not been with them, then you have lost them. That is the difference between what happens in a Jewish home or a Muslim home, where the raising of children is paramount," he said.
ON THE BBC
"We get more knocks. They can do to us what they dare not do to the Muslims. We are fair game because they can get away with it. We don't go down there and say, `We are going to bomb your place'. It is not within our nature."
ON THE VEIL
"I think the thing is in British society you can wear what you want, but you can't expect British society to be reconfigured around you. No minority can expect to impose this on the public or civic life."
ON THE `CHATTERING CLASSES'
"They see themselves as holding the flag for Britain and that Britain is definitely secular and atheist. I want them to have their say, but not to lord it over the rest of us."
Source
Christian charity bans Christmas themed children's gifts
Christian charity Samaritan's Purse fears anything relating to Jesus may offend Muslims
It is a Christian charity bringing Christmas cheer to needy children abroad. So its decision to ban Jesus, God and anything else connected with its own faith has been greeted with little short of puzzlement. Operation Christmas Child, run by the charity Samaritan's Purse, sends festive packages to deprived youngsters in countries ravaged by war and famine. Donors are asked to pack shoeboxes with a cuddly toy, a toothbrush and toothpaste, soap and flannel, notepads, colouring books and crayons - but nothing to do with Christmas. Stories from the Bible, images of Jesus and any other Christian literature are expressely forbidden - in case Muslims are offended.
Yesterday the charity's policy of censoring its own faith was described as political correctness gone mad. Last Christmas, Britons filled 1.13 million shoeboxes for Samaritan's Purse to send to children abroad. But Barbara Hill, who works at the worldwide charity's UK headquarters in Buckhurst Hill, Essex, said: "Anything we find in the boxes which has a religious nature will be removed. "If a box was opened by a Muslim child in a Muslim country they may be offended so we try to avoid religious images." The charity has also banned war-related items such as Action Man-type figures, as well as chocolate and cake.
Yesterday the policy was condemned as "bizarre". John Midgley, cofounder of the Campaign Against Political Correctness, said: "It seems extraordinary that a Christian charity is so concerned about political correctness that it is banning itself from its own core values. "We have members from all faiths who would be appalled at this patronising sort of attitude." Mike Slade, the Rural Dean of Locking, Somerset, added: "Personally I think it is a great shame that we can't share the gift of Christmas which comes from the Christian faith with children all over the world. "I think a number of Muslim people would respect Christians sharing their faith as they would accept respect from us. Political correctness is increasingly creeping into many spheres of life. We are very sad to hear about this."
A Church of England spokesman said: "We are very clear that in Britain, Muslims are not offended by Christians celebrating Christmas." But he added: "In other parts of the world, in Muslim countries, if Muslims have strong values that would regard this as a hostile act, it is different. "Ideally, a child would receive a present with a Madonna and Child card, but if that is not possible, it is more important than the aid gets through than the Christian message."
The appeal sends shoe boxes from Britain to children in countries including Azerbaijan, Armenia, Romania, Serbia, Sudan and Mozambique. Although no Christian literature is included in the boxes, the charity does separately distribute Christmas stories from the Bible and encourages Bible study in areas where it gives toys out. A spokesman for Samaritan's Purse, which was introduced to Britain by evangelist Billy Graham and is run internationally by his son Franklin, said: "Christianity motivates many of our supporters to help children in need. We are a Christian charity and that's about helping people. "But it's our policy not to put religious, political or military items in boxes which go to areas of different cultures. "All shoeboxes are checked in the UK warehouses in case someone has ignored the instruction and put such an item into a shoebox and, if found, any such item is removed."
Devoutly Christian MP Ann Widdecombe said: "Either this is being done in the name of Christ or it isn't. This is Christmas, a Christian festival. If it's being done for Christmas, there is no reason on earth why they should not have Christian symbols." Last year, Lambeth Council in South London renamed its Christmas street decorations 'Winter Lights' to avoid offending non-Christians, while several years ago, Birmingham City Council notoriously rebranded the Christmas holidays 'Winterval'.
Source
Britain's latest "human rights" nonsense
ALMOST 200 criminals who were forced to stop taking drugs in jail have won payouts of up to œ5,000 each from the Prison Service. The awards were made after the Home Office "reluctantly" settled out of court a test case brought by six inmates. The payouts will go to 198 applicants and not just the six involved in the test case who alleged that "cold turkey" withdrawal treatment forced upon them amounted to assault.
The Home Office defended the decision to settle the case out of court, which was taken on the advice of Government lawyers who warned that the Prison Service was likely to lose. A Home Office spokeswoman said: "It was decided, however reluctantly, to settle these cases in order to minimise costs to the taxpayer. "These cases concern action against medical practice in prison which dates back to the early 1990s."
Six inmates and former inmates who used heroin and other opiates were granted leave to sue the Home Office in a test case this year. They alleged that the "cold turkey" withdrawal they were forced to undergo amounted to assault.
David Davis, the Shadow Home Secretary, said the case set a disastrous precedent and accused John Reid, the Home Secretary, of failing to protect the public. Mr Davis said: "Presumably the Government does not want to be embarrassed by losing such a case under its own human rights legislation. "Drugs are a scourge on society and completely undermine all our other efforts to fight crime. By doing this Mr Reid would be letting down the taxpayer, the victims of these offenders and the drug addicts themselves. The precedent would be disastrous."
Ann Widdecombe, the Tory former Prisons Minister, said: "It is an insult to every victim and every law-abiding person. "As far as I'm concerned there is no human right to continue a drug habit when you go to prison. This Prison Service will be paying out money it should not be."
The prisoners were bringing the action based on trespass, because they say that they did not consent to the treatment, and for alleged clinical negligence. The criminals also claimed breaches under Articles 3 and 14 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which ban discrimination, torture or inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, and Article 8, which enshrines the right to respect for private life.
Source
GREENIES NOW ATTACKING CHRISTMAS CELEBRATIONS
If the green campaigners manage to change the habits of the nation, it will be popcorn and fruit, not glittering baubles, dangling from the branches of Christmas trees this year. Traditional tree decorations are all under fire from environmental campaigners attempting to change the colour of Christmas from white to green. Even the fairy will be missing, as she has been condemned as an eco-hazard. Campaigners want the fairies, stars, tinsel and baubles that usually adorn the tree to be replaced with edible decorations that can be given to the birds when Christmas is over. And forget about the annual trip to see grandma. For a really green Christmas the car should be left in the garage and "kith and kin" wished seasons greetings over the internet.
Tree lights, cards and wrapping paper are also targeted as wasteful in the guidance on how to have a green Christmas. Advice contained in the Green Guide to Christmas urges the public to use fewer lights, turn off those that remain during the day and to recycle Christmas cards. Wrapping paper could, the guide suggests, be replaced with tin foil that can be used later in the kitchen, or with old newspapers, magazines or brown paper. Artificial trees ought to be eschewed in favour of the real thing. "Our favourite option is to buy a new fir tree with its roots still attached from an ecologically sustainable source and plant it in your garden after Christmas," says the report issued by Green Guide. "Do this every year until you have a mini forest in your backyard." They recognised that planting rows of trees over the years was not feasible for all householders but said that unwanted firs could be composted in the new year.
Of tree and other decorations, they say: "Many of the decorations available in high street stores have been treated chemically to colour the paper or are made out of nonbiodegradable substances. "Avoid anything which cannot be recycled or has not been made from recycled materials. Use edible tree decorations that can be given to garden birds afterwards, like popcorn and cranberry strings."
Amid growing concerns about global warming being caused by increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the guide urges restraint on energy consumption. "Increasingly there are options for you to both reduce the amount of energy you use and to seek out more sustainable sources," it says. "What really lies at the heart of the issue is the need for us to make a cultural change. We need to stop assuming that we can go on as we are indefinitely."
Muslim leaders joined their Christian counterparts yesterday in criticising politicians and town hall leaders who want to play down Christmas. The Christian Muslim Forum said that right-wing extremism was being fuelled by attempts to remove religion from the festival, such as Birmingham's decision to rename its celebrations Winterval. The forum said: "The desire to secularise religious festivals is offensive to both of our communities. Those who use the fact of religious pluralism as an excuse to de-Christianise British society unthinkingly become recuiting agents for the extreme Right."
Source
THE fountain pen, complete with leaky nibs, bursting cartridges and indelibly stained shirts, is making a compulsory comeback in a last-ditch attempt to save the nation's handwriting. The spread of vowel-free text messages among the young and the rise of grammarless e-mails across all age ranges is leaving children, university students and even teachers unable to write legibly by hand.
But now a leading independent school has ordered pupils aged nine and over to write only with fountain pens. Bryan Lewis, the headmaster of The Mary Erskine & Stewart's Melville Junior School in Edinburgh, believes that his pupils' educational attainment and sense of self-worth will all benefit. "All teachers who join our junior school are taught a handwriting style by my colleagues and they, in turn, teach all our children the same style," Mr Lewis said. "They are helped by our insistence that children from primary 5 onwards write in fountain pen. "Learning to write in fountain pen not only results in beautiful presentation but also has the not-insignificant bonus of developing children's selfesteem."
Mr Lewis's policy is likely to be well-received by those in authority. Tony Blair is a fountain-pen user and has been known to give heavyweight Churchill pens as gifts. The Prime Minister, who was educated in the Scottish private school system, writes all his speeches in longhand with a favourite fountain pen before passing them to his secretaries to be typed.
At Mr Blair's end of the market, fountain pen sales are reportedly booming. Purveyors of expensive jewellery such as Bulgari and Chopard are starting to produce luxury pens.
It is widely accepted that the use of the fountain pen, necessarily slower and more deliberate than the ballpoint or rollerpen, produces more elegant handwriting. Those who write for a living tend to profess affection for the fountain pen. In Eighteenth, the poet, Kate Bingham, praised the "low-tech simplicity" of the instrument and recalled the excitement of watching "the tip of a new pen touch its first white sheet, the hand behind solemn and quivering, unsure whether to doodle or draw or let the nib try for itself, licking the page in thirsty blue-black stripes". John Banville, the Booker prize-winning Irish author, also prefers to use a fountain pen. He has been reported as saying that "a fountain pen is about the right speed. A machine goes too fast. It goes faster than I can think."
But the fall of the fountain pen from common usage was once widely welcomed because of its association with ruined school uniforms, messy pages and classroom squabbles. In the days when fountain pens were widespread, was there ever a pupil whose school blazer did not have a giant inky map all over the lining or a blue puddle in the top pocket? The fountain pen was also a favourite weapon of the naughty schoolboy. The nib could be used to jab other pupils and some models, especially those which filled from bottles by pistons or levers, were ideal for squirting ink. The more primitive dip-in types also made crude darts. But the favourite of every schoolboy was the ink pellet - the blotting-paper-and-ink device detested by every teacher.
Mr Lewis is adamant that the return of pen and ink will have positive results for his pupils. The demise of the fountain pen and handwriting went hand-in-hand, he argues, with the rise of "progressive" teaching methods. He added: "Modern teaching methods overwhelmed the curriculum in the late 1970s and early 1980s. They proved to be no more than an excuse for the lowering of standards of basic literacy and numeracy under the guise of freedom of expression. From that time generations of children were no longer taught to write properly. They couldn't recognise the importance of spelling, to read with expression and understanding, and to master numbers. "In many cases the pupils of that era are now today's teachers. They can hardly be expected to teach basic literacy and numeracy skills when they went through childhood either unaware of, or indifferent to, rules of grammar and spelling."
The Scottish Qualifications Authority has lamented that the standard of handwriting on some exam papers was so poor that its markers could not read them. A spokesman for the Campaign for Real Education said: "Good spelling, handwriting, grammar and punctuation make for confident use of language and smooth communication."
Source
A straight-talking black bishop of the church of England
The Archbishop of York has launched a withering attack on BBC bias, the chattering classes and the consumerism surrounding Christmas. Dr John Sentamu also questioned the right of Muslim women to wear the veil in public, saying it did not "conform to norms of decency". Dr Sentamu, who ranks second in the Anglican church hierarchy, used an interview to rail against what he described as the destruction of Britain's Christian heritage by the wilfulness of the chattering classes.
Some of his strongest comments were reserved for the BBC, which he claimed was biased against the Church of England. "We get more knocks. They can do to us what they dare not do to the Muslims," he said. "We are fair game because they can get away with it. We don't go down there and say, `We are going to bomb your place.' It is not within our nature."
The Ugandan-born cleric, 57, said that Britain's minorities could not expect society to be reconfigured around them. When asked whether it was right for Muslim women in Britain to wear the full veil in every aspect of their lives he replied: "Muslim scholars would say three things. First, does it conform to norms of decency? Secondly, does it render you more secure? And thirdly, what kind of Islam are you projecting by wearing it? "I think in the British context it renders you less secure because you stick out and it brings you unwelcome attention. On the first question, I don't think it does conform.
"You know, when I visit Orthodox synagogues I never take a cross. When I go into Muslim mosques I take it off. When I go into a Sikh temple I cover my head. And I can't simply say, `Take me as I am, whether you like it or not'." "I think the thing is in British society you can wear what you want, but you can't expect British society to be reconfigured around you. No minority can expect to impose this on the public or civic life."
The Archbishop's comments put him at odds with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, who has defended the right of Muslim women to wear the full veil, arguing that it would be politically dangerous to ban visible signs of faith.
Dr Sentamu's views on society's rejection of Christian heritage will probably be shared by the majority of the Church's senior clerics. He criticised the consumerism that surrounds Christmas, highlighting the recent arrival of a Chinese cargo ship laden with consumer items. Dr Sentamu said that Christmas should be a more charitable occasion. "Do we need those toys?" he asked. "I would suggest that this Advent we should be eating less and not spending so much. Give up a little bit and find charities that give clean water.
"Also, support our farmers, buy more products from this country, If you lose farmers, you are going to lose this green and pleasant land."
Perhaps his strongest criticism was reserved for those who rejected the country's Christian heritage. The Archbishop, who had trained as a lawyer in Uganda before fleeing Idi Amin's rule in 1974, said: "When I was in Uganda, everything that was British was the best. If you went to a shop to buy a ruler, you looked for one that said `Made in Britain'. But now this country disbelieves itself in an amazing way. "It almost dislikes its own culture. It doesn't realise that the arts, music, buildings have grown out of a strong Christian tradition. John Betjeman would be shocked that the nation is not interested in helping preserve these things."
He claimed in an interview with today's Daily Mail that the urban liberal elite were to blame. "They see themselves as holding the flag for Britain and that Britain is definitely secular and atheist. I want them to have their say, but not to lord it over the rest of us."
Dr Sentamu also said that parental neglect of children was leading to children's behavioural problems that could not be blamed on schools. "Once children have reached 11 and you have not been with them, then you have lost them. That is the difference between what happens in a Jewish home or a Muslim home, where the raising of children is paramount," he said.
ON THE BBC
"We get more knocks. They can do to us what they dare not do to the Muslims. We are fair game because they can get away with it. We don't go down there and say, `We are going to bomb your place'. It is not within our nature."
ON THE VEIL
"I think the thing is in British society you can wear what you want, but you can't expect British society to be reconfigured around you. No minority can expect to impose this on the public or civic life."
ON THE `CHATTERING CLASSES'
"They see themselves as holding the flag for Britain and that Britain is definitely secular and atheist. I want them to have their say, but not to lord it over the rest of us."
Source
Christian charity bans Christmas themed children's gifts
Christian charity Samaritan's Purse fears anything relating to Jesus may offend Muslims
It is a Christian charity bringing Christmas cheer to needy children abroad. So its decision to ban Jesus, God and anything else connected with its own faith has been greeted with little short of puzzlement. Operation Christmas Child, run by the charity Samaritan's Purse, sends festive packages to deprived youngsters in countries ravaged by war and famine. Donors are asked to pack shoeboxes with a cuddly toy, a toothbrush and toothpaste, soap and flannel, notepads, colouring books and crayons - but nothing to do with Christmas. Stories from the Bible, images of Jesus and any other Christian literature are expressely forbidden - in case Muslims are offended.
Yesterday the charity's policy of censoring its own faith was described as political correctness gone mad. Last Christmas, Britons filled 1.13 million shoeboxes for Samaritan's Purse to send to children abroad. But Barbara Hill, who works at the worldwide charity's UK headquarters in Buckhurst Hill, Essex, said: "Anything we find in the boxes which has a religious nature will be removed. "If a box was opened by a Muslim child in a Muslim country they may be offended so we try to avoid religious images." The charity has also banned war-related items such as Action Man-type figures, as well as chocolate and cake.
Yesterday the policy was condemned as "bizarre". John Midgley, cofounder of the Campaign Against Political Correctness, said: "It seems extraordinary that a Christian charity is so concerned about political correctness that it is banning itself from its own core values. "We have members from all faiths who would be appalled at this patronising sort of attitude." Mike Slade, the Rural Dean of Locking, Somerset, added: "Personally I think it is a great shame that we can't share the gift of Christmas which comes from the Christian faith with children all over the world. "I think a number of Muslim people would respect Christians sharing their faith as they would accept respect from us. Political correctness is increasingly creeping into many spheres of life. We are very sad to hear about this."
A Church of England spokesman said: "We are very clear that in Britain, Muslims are not offended by Christians celebrating Christmas." But he added: "In other parts of the world, in Muslim countries, if Muslims have strong values that would regard this as a hostile act, it is different. "Ideally, a child would receive a present with a Madonna and Child card, but if that is not possible, it is more important than the aid gets through than the Christian message."
The appeal sends shoe boxes from Britain to children in countries including Azerbaijan, Armenia, Romania, Serbia, Sudan and Mozambique. Although no Christian literature is included in the boxes, the charity does separately distribute Christmas stories from the Bible and encourages Bible study in areas where it gives toys out. A spokesman for Samaritan's Purse, which was introduced to Britain by evangelist Billy Graham and is run internationally by his son Franklin, said: "Christianity motivates many of our supporters to help children in need. We are a Christian charity and that's about helping people. "But it's our policy not to put religious, political or military items in boxes which go to areas of different cultures. "All shoeboxes are checked in the UK warehouses in case someone has ignored the instruction and put such an item into a shoebox and, if found, any such item is removed."
Devoutly Christian MP Ann Widdecombe said: "Either this is being done in the name of Christ or it isn't. This is Christmas, a Christian festival. If it's being done for Christmas, there is no reason on earth why they should not have Christian symbols." Last year, Lambeth Council in South London renamed its Christmas street decorations 'Winter Lights' to avoid offending non-Christians, while several years ago, Birmingham City Council notoriously rebranded the Christmas holidays 'Winterval'.
Source
Britain's latest "human rights" nonsense
ALMOST 200 criminals who were forced to stop taking drugs in jail have won payouts of up to œ5,000 each from the Prison Service. The awards were made after the Home Office "reluctantly" settled out of court a test case brought by six inmates. The payouts will go to 198 applicants and not just the six involved in the test case who alleged that "cold turkey" withdrawal treatment forced upon them amounted to assault.
The Home Office defended the decision to settle the case out of court, which was taken on the advice of Government lawyers who warned that the Prison Service was likely to lose. A Home Office spokeswoman said: "It was decided, however reluctantly, to settle these cases in order to minimise costs to the taxpayer. "These cases concern action against medical practice in prison which dates back to the early 1990s."
Six inmates and former inmates who used heroin and other opiates were granted leave to sue the Home Office in a test case this year. They alleged that the "cold turkey" withdrawal they were forced to undergo amounted to assault.
David Davis, the Shadow Home Secretary, said the case set a disastrous precedent and accused John Reid, the Home Secretary, of failing to protect the public. Mr Davis said: "Presumably the Government does not want to be embarrassed by losing such a case under its own human rights legislation. "Drugs are a scourge on society and completely undermine all our other efforts to fight crime. By doing this Mr Reid would be letting down the taxpayer, the victims of these offenders and the drug addicts themselves. The precedent would be disastrous."
Ann Widdecombe, the Tory former Prisons Minister, said: "It is an insult to every victim and every law-abiding person. "As far as I'm concerned there is no human right to continue a drug habit when you go to prison. This Prison Service will be paying out money it should not be."
The prisoners were bringing the action based on trespass, because they say that they did not consent to the treatment, and for alleged clinical negligence. The criminals also claimed breaches under Articles 3 and 14 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which ban discrimination, torture or inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, and Article 8, which enshrines the right to respect for private life.
Source
GREENIES NOW ATTACKING CHRISTMAS CELEBRATIONS
If the green campaigners manage to change the habits of the nation, it will be popcorn and fruit, not glittering baubles, dangling from the branches of Christmas trees this year. Traditional tree decorations are all under fire from environmental campaigners attempting to change the colour of Christmas from white to green. Even the fairy will be missing, as she has been condemned as an eco-hazard. Campaigners want the fairies, stars, tinsel and baubles that usually adorn the tree to be replaced with edible decorations that can be given to the birds when Christmas is over. And forget about the annual trip to see grandma. For a really green Christmas the car should be left in the garage and "kith and kin" wished seasons greetings over the internet.
Tree lights, cards and wrapping paper are also targeted as wasteful in the guidance on how to have a green Christmas. Advice contained in the Green Guide to Christmas urges the public to use fewer lights, turn off those that remain during the day and to recycle Christmas cards. Wrapping paper could, the guide suggests, be replaced with tin foil that can be used later in the kitchen, or with old newspapers, magazines or brown paper. Artificial trees ought to be eschewed in favour of the real thing. "Our favourite option is to buy a new fir tree with its roots still attached from an ecologically sustainable source and plant it in your garden after Christmas," says the report issued by Green Guide. "Do this every year until you have a mini forest in your backyard." They recognised that planting rows of trees over the years was not feasible for all householders but said that unwanted firs could be composted in the new year.
Of tree and other decorations, they say: "Many of the decorations available in high street stores have been treated chemically to colour the paper or are made out of nonbiodegradable substances. "Avoid anything which cannot be recycled or has not been made from recycled materials. Use edible tree decorations that can be given to garden birds afterwards, like popcorn and cranberry strings."
Amid growing concerns about global warming being caused by increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the guide urges restraint on energy consumption. "Increasingly there are options for you to both reduce the amount of energy you use and to seek out more sustainable sources," it says. "What really lies at the heart of the issue is the need for us to make a cultural change. We need to stop assuming that we can go on as we are indefinitely."
Muslim leaders joined their Christian counterparts yesterday in criticising politicians and town hall leaders who want to play down Christmas. The Christian Muslim Forum said that right-wing extremism was being fuelled by attempts to remove religion from the festival, such as Birmingham's decision to rename its celebrations Winterval. The forum said: "The desire to secularise religious festivals is offensive to both of our communities. Those who use the fact of religious pluralism as an excuse to de-Christianise British society unthinkingly become recuiting agents for the extreme Right."
Source
Tuesday, November 14, 2006
WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT: "BRITISH GOVERNMENT TWISTING SCIENCE FOR POLITICAL PURPOSES" (And it's even "The Guardian" saying so)
The government often hides behind a figleaf of scientific respectability when spinning unpalatable or controversial policies to make them acceptable to voters, according to a report by MPs critical of the way science is used in policy.
The parliamentary science and technology select committee said that scientific evidence was often misused or distorted to justify policy decisions which were really based on ideological or social grounds.
The report, the culmination of a nine-month inquiry, calls for a "radical re-engineering" of the way the government uses science. "Abuse of the term 'evidence based' ... is a form of fraud which corrupts the whole use of science in government," said Evan Harris, the Liberal Democrats' science spokesman and a member of the committee. "It's critical that the currency of an evidence base is not devalued by false claims."
FULL STORY here
INCREASE THE SUPPLY OF ENERGY RATHER THAN RATIONING IT
The consensus on how to handle climate change has become suffocating. There is near universal agreement that the solution lies primarily in rationing energy consumption. On an individual level this generally means the imposition of `green taxes' to make such activities as driving and air travel more expensive. On a larger scale the emphasis is on `carbon trading', which is about reducing greenhouse gas emissions from businesses and the public sector.
This lack of debate is tragic, as the challenge of global warming could provide an invaluable opportunity to transform the world for the better. A huge investment in energy would enable humanity to tackle climate change and end the curse of world poverty at the same time. Such investment would not even require the invention of new technology - although more innovation would be hugely beneficial. Nuclear power and hydroelectric power could potentially provide plentiful energy without greenhouse gas emissions. Carbon sequestration - capturing carbon dioxide emissions and storing them - could make energy derived from fossil fuels far less harmful. The extra energy could fuel economic growth without doing significant damage to the climate.
If the solution is so obvious, why is it not recognised? The answer can be gleaned by examining the Stern report on the economics of climate change, commissioned by the British government. Although the report is more nuanced than any minister's speech, it is informed by a neurotic small-mindedness that is characteristic of the climate change discussion. Rather than boldly search for imaginative solutions to the challenge, it is steeped in anxiety and caution.
The starting point of the Stern report is the argument that climate change reveals the flaws of capitalism. `It is the greatest example of market failure we have ever seen', says the report (p1). The fact that the market system is seen as driving the world to disaster is a strong indication of the nervous mindset of its authors and its government sponsor. Stern portrays climate change as what in economics is called an `externality' (p23). In other words, the costs of greenhouse gas emissions are not paid for by those who create them. For example, if someone drives a car the cost of the damage it does to the environment is not factored into the price the driver pays to purchase or run the vehicle. Similarly, the environmental costs of using plentiful electricity are not paid by the rich consumers of the West.
From these assumptions it is easy to draw the conclusion that rationing must be central to any solution. Stern gives many examples of how this can be achieved. Putting a price on carbon - whether through tax, trading or regulation - is seen as central. Encouraging `behavioural change', for example through public `education' (read government propaganda), is also portrayed as important. To be fair to Stern, the report does discuss other policies that are not reliant on rationing. The possibility of switching to low carbon technologies which do not emit greenhouse gases is considered. It also sees a role for adaptation - for instance, building modern flood defences. But the discussion of these options often seems half-hearted or secondary to the alternatives. In any case, when it comes to the government's imminent climate change bill, it looks certain that rationing will be at the centre of its approach.
Stern is also sensitive to the charge that a strategy based on rationing could curb economic growth. It points out, correctly, that economic growth has historically been closely correlated with rising greenhouse gas emissions (p169). It is almost an iron law of economics that as societies become richer they use more energy per head. And historically, fossil fuels have supplied the vast majority of the world's energy needs.
One way Stern responds to this recognition is to downplay the economics costs of its approach. It estimates that the strategy it proposes need only cost 1 per cent of GDP by 2050. But its limited horizons are apparent in the notion of sustainable development that it advocates: `Future generations should have a right to a standard of living no lower than the current one.' (p42) So Stern seems to find it acceptable that humanity should continue in its present state of widespread poverty. This in a world where more than a billion still live on less than one dollar a day, and 2.7 billion live on less than two dollars.
More dishonest is the report's counterposition between an approach based on rationing and `business as usual'. It argues - correctly - that doing nothing could ultimately have enormous economic costs. But why should the alternative to rationing be doing nothing? No one is suggesting that Bangladeshis should be left to drown or that Africans should be condemned to die of drought. Nor should malaria or other diseases go unchecked.
On the contrary, rapid economic growth would be enormously beneficial to the Third World, as well as bolstering its ability to tackle climate change. Economic growth would enable Africans, Asians and Latin Americans to share the benefits of prosperity that we in the West take for granted. It would also give them the resources to reduce their vulnerability to climate change. A subsistence farmer clearly has little flexibility to react to changes in his environment. A modern city-dweller, by contrast, has access to networks and resources to protect himself from the climate. Why should anyone die of heatstroke if they live in an air-conditioned building? How can there be drought if there are the resources to build desalination plants? Why should malaria continue to be a threat with modern preventative measures and hospitals?
So the time to act against global poverty and to tackle climate change is here. Let's have a massive investment in new global energy supplies. With modern innovations there is no reason why it should lead to significant increases in greenhouse gas emissions. Indeed, over time there could be reductions. The challenge of climate change could be turned into an opportunity to transform the world into a better, richer place.
Source
THE DANGERS OF CRYING WOLF OVER THE CLIMATE
The climate change debate has taken on a pantomine character, with lurid plots and stage villains, says Dominic Lawson
The studio audience of The Late Edition, the BBC's only live comedy show, last week witnessed the following elevated debate between the host, Marcus Brigstocke, and your columnist. Brigstocke: "All those who question the extent of manmade climate change are in the pay of the oil companies." Self: "Oh no, they're not." Brigstocke: "Oh yes, they are!" Self: "Oh no, they're not!"
At this point I half-expected the audience to start chanting along with us, in the manner of a Christmas panto. At times it has seemed as if the entire British debate on climate change has taken on the character of a pantomime, with lurid plots, grotesque caricatures, and stage villains. Indeed, some of the outfits worn at the Stop Climate Chaos rally in London on Saturday looked as though they had been hired from theatrical costumiers.
In the world of grown-ups, the man who has probably thought more deeply than anyone else in this country about climate change is distinctly unamused. Professor Mike Hulme is the founding director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research and the coordinating lead author of the chapter on "climate change scenarios" for the third assessment of the International Panel on Climate Change. On the day that 22,000 supporters of Stop Climate Chaos rallied in Trafalgar Square, Professor Hulme delivered a thunderous rebuke, which was posted to the Green Room, the BBC's website for 'thought provoking environmental opinion pieces'.
"Over the last few years a new environmental phenomenon has been constructed in this country - the phenomenon of 'catastrophic' climate change'" wrote Prof. Hulme. "The increasing use of this term and its bedfellow qualifiers 'chaotic', 'irreversible' and 'rapid' has altered the public discourse [which] is now characterised by phrases such as 'irreversible tipping in the Earth's climate' and 'we are at the point of no return.'" "Some recent examples of the catastrophists include Tony Blair, who [states] 'We have a window of only 10-15 years to take the steps we need to avoid crossing a catastrophic tipping point.' Why is it not just campaigners, but politicians and scientists too, who are openly confusing the language of fear, terror and disaster with the observable physical reality of climate change, actively ignoring the careful hedging which surrounds science's predictions? ... By 'sexing it up' we exacerbate...the very risks we are trying to ward off. The careless (or conspiratorial?) translation of concern about Saddam Hussein's putative military threat into the case for WMD has had major geopolitical repercussions. We need to make sure the agents in our society which would seek to amplify climate change risks do not lead us down a similar counter-productive pathway." ....
So far, very few in this country have questioned the 'facts' assembled by Sir Nicholas Stern . One of his fellow economists abroad has, however. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Bjorn Lomborg made the following observations. The cost of hurricanes in the US appears as both 0.13 per cent of GDP and also as 1.3 per cent in Stern's report. Stern declares that the "social cost" of carbon is $85 a ton. Yet one of the world's most distinguished environmental economists, Yale's William Nordhaus, praised in the Stern report as having the "approach closest in spirit to ours", insists that the social cost of carbon is $2.50 a ton. Stern tells us that the cost of flooding in the UK will quadruple from 0.1% to 0.4% of GDP. Yet the British Government's own figures, which take into account a small increase in flood prevention measures, say that the cost will decline sharply to 0.04% of GDP, despite climate change.
One of the more entertaining aspects of the current "climate catastrophe" caterwauling is that some of the scientists who are most alarmist - such as that brilliant writer James Lovelock-were thirty years ago warning that we were on the verge of a new Ice Age. One reason was that between 1945 and 1975 global temperatures fell. Between 1975 and 1998 global temperatures rose slightly - and set off a symmetrically divergent panic. Over the past eight years, global temperatures have been as close to stable as makes no difference. I can therefore understand Professor Hulme's agitation. He knows that the alarmists have based their scare tactics on a dramatic rise in temperatures across the world in the very near future. That won't happen. When that fact dawns on most people, they will begin to ignore all experts' warnings about the weather. Then, if a serious figure such as Professor Hulme discovers a genuine reason to panic, he will be dismissed as yet another Chicken Little, who thought that because an acorn landed on his head, the sky was falling in.
More here
DRUGGED-UP BRITISH KIDS
This summer, the influential European Medicines Agency (EMEA) officially advocated the prescription of the antidepressant Prozac within the EU for children from the age of eight upwards, reinforcing a similar recommendation made last year by the UK's Nice (the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence), despite the known dangerous side effects of the drug on children and adolescents.
The nub of the medical authorities' argument is that there are mental conditions that only Prozac or Prozac-type drugs can reach. Prozac (or fluoxetine) came off patent five years ago, prompting the manufacture of a number of generic drugs of essentially the same chemical compound. As for the side effects, which include the risk of suicide, everything depends, the medical authorities advise, on the circumstances and care with which the Prozac-type drug is prescribed and monitored.
The EMEA and Nice have insisted that treatment with fluoxetine should be preceded and attended by psychotherapy. But Sane, the mental-health charity, and YoungMinds, the childhood mental-illness watchdog, are concerned about the lack of adequate resources in the National Health Service for the provision of psychotherapy for children.
Nor is there legislation in place that prevents doctors from prescribing fluoxetine to children without the recommended safeguards. There is ample evidence that some doctors have been prescribing the drug "off licence" to toddlers - in other words, they are doling them out outside of recommended usage, as an antidote to infant "agitation". A study made by a pharmacology unit at Southampton University recently surveyed a small sample of 100 general practices in the UK, and found that 19 children - whose ages range from 1 to 12 - were on fluoxetine.
Against the background of the huge increase in the use of the amphetamine-like drug Ritalin for attention-deficit hyperactive disorder (ADHD), especially for middle-class children, there are fears, says Professor David Healey of the University of North Wales, that Prozac could follow a similar pattern of rapidly expanding usage as a quick fix for children deemed to be "low" or depressed. "Companies have been enabled to medicalise childhood distress, and as the rapidly changing culture surrounding the management of such problems indicates, companies have the power to change cultures and to do so in astonishingly short periods of time." According to Department of Health (DoH) figures, the past 10 years have seen a tenfold increase in prescriptions for Ritalin in Britain to combat a range of perceived childhood and adolescent problems - from restlessness to lack of concentration in class.
According to the DoH, an estimated 30,000-40,000 children and teenagers are already being prescribed antidepressants in Britain (off licence in the case of pre-puberty children), and about half of those are treated with fluoxetine or Prozac. In total, the UK Prescription Pricing Authority reports a rise in courses of Prozac-type drugs from 3.7m in 2000 to 4.4m last year. No figures are as yet available for 2006 following the recommendation of Nice, and the authority offers no breakdown for prescriptions for children anyway. But prescriptions for children are clearly set to rise despite serious doubts about fluoxetine that have persisted ever since the drug first reached our pharmacies in the mid-1980s.
The debate over all antidepressants and children has been especially fierce in the US, where a federal panel of drug experts last year found a proven link between antidepressants and suicide in children and teenagers. The risk, according to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), is high when the course of treatment starts, or when there is a change of dosage, or sudden withdrawal. Last year an American teenager, Jeff Weise, shot dead nine men, women and children before committing suicide at Red Lake high school, Minnesota. His aunt Tammy Lussier told journalists that he first attempted suicide after he went on Prozac. After that, he was taking increased dosages, she said: "I can't help but think it was too much, that it must have set him off."
Fluoxetine is a compound designed to combat low activity of a natural brain chemical called serotonin - a condition associated with depression and obsessive-compulsive disorders, such as nonstop hand-washing. Problems begin, say neuropharmacologists, when serotonin is absorbed too speedily into the billions of minuscule "receptor sites" at the synapses - the contact points between brain cells. Fluoxetine latches onto the receptors like a key in a lock, to switch off serotonin absorption, or "serotonin reuptake", thus increasing the presence and action of this vital natural chemical in the brain. Hence, Prozac is known as an SSRI -a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor - which, scientists claim, elevates the mood of the depressed and increases "impulse control".
Questions have been raised, however, as to whether an individual, with paranoid fantasies that have been rendered inactive in the depths of depression, gains impetus as a result of fluoxetine to fulfil a murderous fantasy rather than control the impulse. This was the explanation proposed in a civil action in America following 47-year-old Joe Wesbecker's shooting spree in 1989. He shot 20 of his co-workers at the Louisville Courier-Journal printing plant, killing eight of them, before killing himself. He had been on Prozac for one month.
The SSRI strategy is based on the belief that there is a direct link between the state of our brain molecules and our moods. The co-inventor of Prozac, the late Dr Ray Fuller, once told me during the Wesbecker trial that the SSRI proceeds from the principle that "behind every crooked thought there lies a crooked molecule".
Three years ago, the UK Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) issued warnings about most antidepressants for children, specifically including SSRIs, on the grounds of risk of suicide. The view was based on a review by a group of medical experts studying all available evidence of clinical trials on both sides of the Atlantic.
The MHRA asserted that the benefits of treating under-18s with any SSRI, except one, Prozac, were outweighed by the risks of side effects. The drugs mentioned were paroxetine (Seroxat), sertraline (Lustral), citalopram (Cipramil) and fluvoxamine (Faverin).
Fluoxetine alone was judged on statistical evidence, and in strict specific circumstances (of which more later), to have a positive balance of risks versus benefits in the treatment of the most severe forms of depression in the under-18s. In other words, when risk of suicide, for example, is so great and persistent that it outweighs the worst-case-possible side effects of the drug.
But the gap between an 18-year-old and an eight-year-old is huge in brain-developmental terms. And Prozac itself has been associated with suicidal patients of all ages, as well as side effects such as stunted growth and deleterious effects on the sexual organs of children. SSRIs have been associated with atrophy of gonadal tissue in boys, indicating future problems with puberty and sexual activity later in life.
It is still not known whether there could be a deleterious effect on a girl's ovaries. Two years ago, researchers at Columbia University in New York found that young mice exposed to fluoxetine and other SSRIs were prone to abnormal brain development; the drugs appeared to be inhibiting normal neural growth factors. Animal studies have claimed that SSRIs weaken bone growth. There are also addiction issues, as yet unexplored in children owing to lack of longitudinal studies.....
Philosophy and sentiment apart, the neurophysiological unknowns are substantial. The American professors of psychology Alison Gopnik and Andrew Meltzoff claim in their book How Babies Think that typically by the age of three "the number of synapses reaches its peak when there are about 15,000 synapses for each brain cell, which is actually many more than in an adult brain". They argue that children have brains that are "literally more active, more connected, and much more flexible than adult brains". So under what conditions could a child, still subject to rapid neurobiological development, show signs of clinical depression comparable to an adult, or even an adolescent, so as to be a suitable case for treatment with powerful mind-altering drugs?
More here
BRITISH ANTISEMITISM
Addressing the rising tide of British anti-Semitism, the British columnist Nick Cohen recently wrote, "Anti-Semitism isn't a local side effect of a dirty war over a patch of land smaller than Wales. It's everywhere, from Malaysia to Morocco, and it has arrived here. If you challenge liberal orthodoxy, your argument cannot be debated on its merits. You have to be in the pay of global media moguls. You have to be a Jew."
Robert Wistrich, a scholar of history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, also examines the history of modern anti-Semitism in Britain, pointing out that "Great Britain is today second only to France in serious anti-Semitic incidents reported among European countries." Wistrich documents the persistence and wide reach of anti-Jewish mainstream prejudice, particularly among the media and the upper echelons of British society - "the same group that supported Hitler in the 1930s."
Thus, the Muslim promotion of anti-Semitism in England has been very successful, perhaps because it has been able to graft onto longstanding, well-established British anti-Semitism. Most disturbing, "anti-Semitic sentiment is a part of mainstream discourse, continually resurfacing among the academic, political, and media elites," often taking the form of unsubstantiated, unreasoning criticism of Israel, while Arab terror is condoned or excused.
We should not be surprised. The Brits have never much liked Jews - their unwritten law being, "no Jew can be a gentleman" - and their greatest writers, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Dickens, T.S. Eliot, Kipling, even the sainted George Orwell, have all had their innings at Jew-bashing.
And now, the Israeli Jews are taking on, in the eyes of the Brits, and especially the British left, all the grossness that Shakespeare once imputed to Shylock: that they are bloody-minded, implacable killers of their helpless, innocent victims. The only difference between Shakespeare's portrait and that drawn by both the British extreme right and the left is that now Shylock goes armed: now he has his own country and his own army.
As long as the Jews were weak and dispossessed, the Brits limited themselves to well-bred anti-Semitism: snide references to "Sammies," and the like. But with the advent of Zionist pioneering, when Shylock started amassing land and collecting an arsenal, British cultural anti-Semitism escalated: it became politicized, and even militarized. The cycle of British wars against the Jews was initiated.
The British war effort was at the outset ambivalent, indecisive. From '36 to '39, when the Palestinian Arabs, upset by the influx of Jewish refugees from Hitler, started a three-year Intifada, the British Mandate authorities in Palestine alternated between grudging support of the embattled Jews and outright sabotage of their efforts at self-defense. On one hand, they made Jewish arms illegal, and forced the Hagana people to hide their store of antiquated rifles under kibbutz manure piles. On the other hand, they assigned one of their most brilliant field officers, Orde Wingate, to be a kind of T.E. Lawrence of the Jews, and to train them, in his Special Night Squads, in the arts of irregular warfare.
However, as the Brits mobilized for the coming war against Hitler, their policy makers resolved their ambivalence in favor of appeasing the Arabs, and outright hostility to the Jews. Together with Hitler, they acted so as to create the maximum tally of dead European Jews........
It appears that the game is afoot once again, with the task no longer out-sourced to Palestinians alone, but to the much larger body of radical Islamists now piling into Britain, all eager for the treat. The Brits still limit themselves to talk, but from all accounts, the chatter in the trendiest salons, at party congresses both of the Left and the Right, at A-List dinner parties and scholarly gatherings, has become obsessively, fiercely anti-Israel, anti-Zionist and at times frankly anti-Semitic, to the point where the received and conventional wisdom has it that Israel has no right to exist, and should be eliminated. Again, this genocidal act will presumably be left to radical Islam, or to Iran's nukes, while the British gentlefolk avert their eyes - or in a few cases, feast them.
The Brits tolerated Hitler's anti-Semitism because, out of fear, they wanted to appease him, and because many of them covertly shared his obsession with the Jews. They fostered Arab anti-Semitism as a way of keeping their access to Middle-Eastern oil, and later as a way of holding on to Palestine. But now, when there are fewer, obvious strategic reasons for their Jew-hatred, it appears to be more vigorous than ever. Explaining this, the Brits will cite the Jews' oppression of the Palestinians, and more recently, their punishment of Lebanon. In effect, they might hint, the Palestinians have become the body of Christ, and the Jews are up to their dirty tricks, crucifying him yet again in Palestine.
In effect, the Brits are telling us how compassionate they are, in contrast to those bloody Christ-killers. Bully for them; but as they stress Brit idealism, they avoid any mention of Brit fear - the fear of militant Islam that appears to be gripping all of Europe now, and that - I would suggest - is partially alleviated through anti-Semitism. The Brit's rationales for that anti-Semitism are designed to do them credit, as possessors of superior conscience, but they mask some smelly motives.
We have never truly appreciated the terror inspired by terror tactics - especially suicide bombing, and in particular the destruction of the Twin Towers. As the great towers collapsed into billowing smoke and fire, they called to mind the fearsome imagery of nuclear war, combined with the retributive judgment of Almighty God. Linked to such overwhelming images, the terrorists and their faith have become more terrifying than we are willing to admit.
But denied motives can still drive our acts and our ideas. Along with the rest of what is now being called "Eurabia," the Brits are soothing the Muslims among them by acts of appeasement. In 1938, they bought a year of peace by offering Czechoslovakia to Hitler; now, for a temporary peace, they offer Muslims a piece of the Jews who are like the unlucky passenger tossed from the sled to appease the ravening wolves.
Once again, Albion may have found the cohort that will kill Jews for it, leaving the Brits, temporarily at least, "sans peur et sans reproche" - without fear and without blame.
More here
The government often hides behind a figleaf of scientific respectability when spinning unpalatable or controversial policies to make them acceptable to voters, according to a report by MPs critical of the way science is used in policy.
The parliamentary science and technology select committee said that scientific evidence was often misused or distorted to justify policy decisions which were really based on ideological or social grounds.
The report, the culmination of a nine-month inquiry, calls for a "radical re-engineering" of the way the government uses science. "Abuse of the term 'evidence based' ... is a form of fraud which corrupts the whole use of science in government," said Evan Harris, the Liberal Democrats' science spokesman and a member of the committee. "It's critical that the currency of an evidence base is not devalued by false claims."
FULL STORY here
INCREASE THE SUPPLY OF ENERGY RATHER THAN RATIONING IT
The consensus on how to handle climate change has become suffocating. There is near universal agreement that the solution lies primarily in rationing energy consumption. On an individual level this generally means the imposition of `green taxes' to make such activities as driving and air travel more expensive. On a larger scale the emphasis is on `carbon trading', which is about reducing greenhouse gas emissions from businesses and the public sector.
This lack of debate is tragic, as the challenge of global warming could provide an invaluable opportunity to transform the world for the better. A huge investment in energy would enable humanity to tackle climate change and end the curse of world poverty at the same time. Such investment would not even require the invention of new technology - although more innovation would be hugely beneficial. Nuclear power and hydroelectric power could potentially provide plentiful energy without greenhouse gas emissions. Carbon sequestration - capturing carbon dioxide emissions and storing them - could make energy derived from fossil fuels far less harmful. The extra energy could fuel economic growth without doing significant damage to the climate.
If the solution is so obvious, why is it not recognised? The answer can be gleaned by examining the Stern report on the economics of climate change, commissioned by the British government. Although the report is more nuanced than any minister's speech, it is informed by a neurotic small-mindedness that is characteristic of the climate change discussion. Rather than boldly search for imaginative solutions to the challenge, it is steeped in anxiety and caution.
The starting point of the Stern report is the argument that climate change reveals the flaws of capitalism. `It is the greatest example of market failure we have ever seen', says the report (p1). The fact that the market system is seen as driving the world to disaster is a strong indication of the nervous mindset of its authors and its government sponsor. Stern portrays climate change as what in economics is called an `externality' (p23). In other words, the costs of greenhouse gas emissions are not paid for by those who create them. For example, if someone drives a car the cost of the damage it does to the environment is not factored into the price the driver pays to purchase or run the vehicle. Similarly, the environmental costs of using plentiful electricity are not paid by the rich consumers of the West.
From these assumptions it is easy to draw the conclusion that rationing must be central to any solution. Stern gives many examples of how this can be achieved. Putting a price on carbon - whether through tax, trading or regulation - is seen as central. Encouraging `behavioural change', for example through public `education' (read government propaganda), is also portrayed as important. To be fair to Stern, the report does discuss other policies that are not reliant on rationing. The possibility of switching to low carbon technologies which do not emit greenhouse gases is considered. It also sees a role for adaptation - for instance, building modern flood defences. But the discussion of these options often seems half-hearted or secondary to the alternatives. In any case, when it comes to the government's imminent climate change bill, it looks certain that rationing will be at the centre of its approach.
Stern is also sensitive to the charge that a strategy based on rationing could curb economic growth. It points out, correctly, that economic growth has historically been closely correlated with rising greenhouse gas emissions (p169). It is almost an iron law of economics that as societies become richer they use more energy per head. And historically, fossil fuels have supplied the vast majority of the world's energy needs.
One way Stern responds to this recognition is to downplay the economics costs of its approach. It estimates that the strategy it proposes need only cost 1 per cent of GDP by 2050. But its limited horizons are apparent in the notion of sustainable development that it advocates: `Future generations should have a right to a standard of living no lower than the current one.' (p42) So Stern seems to find it acceptable that humanity should continue in its present state of widespread poverty. This in a world where more than a billion still live on less than one dollar a day, and 2.7 billion live on less than two dollars.
More dishonest is the report's counterposition between an approach based on rationing and `business as usual'. It argues - correctly - that doing nothing could ultimately have enormous economic costs. But why should the alternative to rationing be doing nothing? No one is suggesting that Bangladeshis should be left to drown or that Africans should be condemned to die of drought. Nor should malaria or other diseases go unchecked.
On the contrary, rapid economic growth would be enormously beneficial to the Third World, as well as bolstering its ability to tackle climate change. Economic growth would enable Africans, Asians and Latin Americans to share the benefits of prosperity that we in the West take for granted. It would also give them the resources to reduce their vulnerability to climate change. A subsistence farmer clearly has little flexibility to react to changes in his environment. A modern city-dweller, by contrast, has access to networks and resources to protect himself from the climate. Why should anyone die of heatstroke if they live in an air-conditioned building? How can there be drought if there are the resources to build desalination plants? Why should malaria continue to be a threat with modern preventative measures and hospitals?
So the time to act against global poverty and to tackle climate change is here. Let's have a massive investment in new global energy supplies. With modern innovations there is no reason why it should lead to significant increases in greenhouse gas emissions. Indeed, over time there could be reductions. The challenge of climate change could be turned into an opportunity to transform the world into a better, richer place.
Source
THE DANGERS OF CRYING WOLF OVER THE CLIMATE
The climate change debate has taken on a pantomine character, with lurid plots and stage villains, says Dominic Lawson
The studio audience of The Late Edition, the BBC's only live comedy show, last week witnessed the following elevated debate between the host, Marcus Brigstocke, and your columnist. Brigstocke: "All those who question the extent of manmade climate change are in the pay of the oil companies." Self: "Oh no, they're not." Brigstocke: "Oh yes, they are!" Self: "Oh no, they're not!"
At this point I half-expected the audience to start chanting along with us, in the manner of a Christmas panto. At times it has seemed as if the entire British debate on climate change has taken on the character of a pantomime, with lurid plots, grotesque caricatures, and stage villains. Indeed, some of the outfits worn at the Stop Climate Chaos rally in London on Saturday looked as though they had been hired from theatrical costumiers.
In the world of grown-ups, the man who has probably thought more deeply than anyone else in this country about climate change is distinctly unamused. Professor Mike Hulme is the founding director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research and the coordinating lead author of the chapter on "climate change scenarios" for the third assessment of the International Panel on Climate Change. On the day that 22,000 supporters of Stop Climate Chaos rallied in Trafalgar Square, Professor Hulme delivered a thunderous rebuke, which was posted to the Green Room, the BBC's website for 'thought provoking environmental opinion pieces'.
"Over the last few years a new environmental phenomenon has been constructed in this country - the phenomenon of 'catastrophic' climate change'" wrote Prof. Hulme. "The increasing use of this term and its bedfellow qualifiers 'chaotic', 'irreversible' and 'rapid' has altered the public discourse [which] is now characterised by phrases such as 'irreversible tipping in the Earth's climate' and 'we are at the point of no return.'" "Some recent examples of the catastrophists include Tony Blair, who [states] 'We have a window of only 10-15 years to take the steps we need to avoid crossing a catastrophic tipping point.' Why is it not just campaigners, but politicians and scientists too, who are openly confusing the language of fear, terror and disaster with the observable physical reality of climate change, actively ignoring the careful hedging which surrounds science's predictions? ... By 'sexing it up' we exacerbate...the very risks we are trying to ward off. The careless (or conspiratorial?) translation of concern about Saddam Hussein's putative military threat into the case for WMD has had major geopolitical repercussions. We need to make sure the agents in our society which would seek to amplify climate change risks do not lead us down a similar counter-productive pathway." ....
So far, very few in this country have questioned the 'facts' assembled by Sir Nicholas Stern . One of his fellow economists abroad has, however. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Bjorn Lomborg made the following observations. The cost of hurricanes in the US appears as both 0.13 per cent of GDP and also as 1.3 per cent in Stern's report. Stern declares that the "social cost" of carbon is $85 a ton. Yet one of the world's most distinguished environmental economists, Yale's William Nordhaus, praised in the Stern report as having the "approach closest in spirit to ours", insists that the social cost of carbon is $2.50 a ton. Stern tells us that the cost of flooding in the UK will quadruple from 0.1% to 0.4% of GDP. Yet the British Government's own figures, which take into account a small increase in flood prevention measures, say that the cost will decline sharply to 0.04% of GDP, despite climate change.
One of the more entertaining aspects of the current "climate catastrophe" caterwauling is that some of the scientists who are most alarmist - such as that brilliant writer James Lovelock-were thirty years ago warning that we were on the verge of a new Ice Age. One reason was that between 1945 and 1975 global temperatures fell. Between 1975 and 1998 global temperatures rose slightly - and set off a symmetrically divergent panic. Over the past eight years, global temperatures have been as close to stable as makes no difference. I can therefore understand Professor Hulme's agitation. He knows that the alarmists have based their scare tactics on a dramatic rise in temperatures across the world in the very near future. That won't happen. When that fact dawns on most people, they will begin to ignore all experts' warnings about the weather. Then, if a serious figure such as Professor Hulme discovers a genuine reason to panic, he will be dismissed as yet another Chicken Little, who thought that because an acorn landed on his head, the sky was falling in.
More here
DRUGGED-UP BRITISH KIDS
This summer, the influential European Medicines Agency (EMEA) officially advocated the prescription of the antidepressant Prozac within the EU for children from the age of eight upwards, reinforcing a similar recommendation made last year by the UK's Nice (the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence), despite the known dangerous side effects of the drug on children and adolescents.
The nub of the medical authorities' argument is that there are mental conditions that only Prozac or Prozac-type drugs can reach. Prozac (or fluoxetine) came off patent five years ago, prompting the manufacture of a number of generic drugs of essentially the same chemical compound. As for the side effects, which include the risk of suicide, everything depends, the medical authorities advise, on the circumstances and care with which the Prozac-type drug is prescribed and monitored.
The EMEA and Nice have insisted that treatment with fluoxetine should be preceded and attended by psychotherapy. But Sane, the mental-health charity, and YoungMinds, the childhood mental-illness watchdog, are concerned about the lack of adequate resources in the National Health Service for the provision of psychotherapy for children.
Nor is there legislation in place that prevents doctors from prescribing fluoxetine to children without the recommended safeguards. There is ample evidence that some doctors have been prescribing the drug "off licence" to toddlers - in other words, they are doling them out outside of recommended usage, as an antidote to infant "agitation". A study made by a pharmacology unit at Southampton University recently surveyed a small sample of 100 general practices in the UK, and found that 19 children - whose ages range from 1 to 12 - were on fluoxetine.
Against the background of the huge increase in the use of the amphetamine-like drug Ritalin for attention-deficit hyperactive disorder (ADHD), especially for middle-class children, there are fears, says Professor David Healey of the University of North Wales, that Prozac could follow a similar pattern of rapidly expanding usage as a quick fix for children deemed to be "low" or depressed. "Companies have been enabled to medicalise childhood distress, and as the rapidly changing culture surrounding the management of such problems indicates, companies have the power to change cultures and to do so in astonishingly short periods of time." According to Department of Health (DoH) figures, the past 10 years have seen a tenfold increase in prescriptions for Ritalin in Britain to combat a range of perceived childhood and adolescent problems - from restlessness to lack of concentration in class.
According to the DoH, an estimated 30,000-40,000 children and teenagers are already being prescribed antidepressants in Britain (off licence in the case of pre-puberty children), and about half of those are treated with fluoxetine or Prozac. In total, the UK Prescription Pricing Authority reports a rise in courses of Prozac-type drugs from 3.7m in 2000 to 4.4m last year. No figures are as yet available for 2006 following the recommendation of Nice, and the authority offers no breakdown for prescriptions for children anyway. But prescriptions for children are clearly set to rise despite serious doubts about fluoxetine that have persisted ever since the drug first reached our pharmacies in the mid-1980s.
The debate over all antidepressants and children has been especially fierce in the US, where a federal panel of drug experts last year found a proven link between antidepressants and suicide in children and teenagers. The risk, according to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), is high when the course of treatment starts, or when there is a change of dosage, or sudden withdrawal. Last year an American teenager, Jeff Weise, shot dead nine men, women and children before committing suicide at Red Lake high school, Minnesota. His aunt Tammy Lussier told journalists that he first attempted suicide after he went on Prozac. After that, he was taking increased dosages, she said: "I can't help but think it was too much, that it must have set him off."
Fluoxetine is a compound designed to combat low activity of a natural brain chemical called serotonin - a condition associated with depression and obsessive-compulsive disorders, such as nonstop hand-washing. Problems begin, say neuropharmacologists, when serotonin is absorbed too speedily into the billions of minuscule "receptor sites" at the synapses - the contact points between brain cells. Fluoxetine latches onto the receptors like a key in a lock, to switch off serotonin absorption, or "serotonin reuptake", thus increasing the presence and action of this vital natural chemical in the brain. Hence, Prozac is known as an SSRI -a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor - which, scientists claim, elevates the mood of the depressed and increases "impulse control".
Questions have been raised, however, as to whether an individual, with paranoid fantasies that have been rendered inactive in the depths of depression, gains impetus as a result of fluoxetine to fulfil a murderous fantasy rather than control the impulse. This was the explanation proposed in a civil action in America following 47-year-old Joe Wesbecker's shooting spree in 1989. He shot 20 of his co-workers at the Louisville Courier-Journal printing plant, killing eight of them, before killing himself. He had been on Prozac for one month.
The SSRI strategy is based on the belief that there is a direct link between the state of our brain molecules and our moods. The co-inventor of Prozac, the late Dr Ray Fuller, once told me during the Wesbecker trial that the SSRI proceeds from the principle that "behind every crooked thought there lies a crooked molecule".
Three years ago, the UK Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) issued warnings about most antidepressants for children, specifically including SSRIs, on the grounds of risk of suicide. The view was based on a review by a group of medical experts studying all available evidence of clinical trials on both sides of the Atlantic.
The MHRA asserted that the benefits of treating under-18s with any SSRI, except one, Prozac, were outweighed by the risks of side effects. The drugs mentioned were paroxetine (Seroxat), sertraline (Lustral), citalopram (Cipramil) and fluvoxamine (Faverin).
Fluoxetine alone was judged on statistical evidence, and in strict specific circumstances (of which more later), to have a positive balance of risks versus benefits in the treatment of the most severe forms of depression in the under-18s. In other words, when risk of suicide, for example, is so great and persistent that it outweighs the worst-case-possible side effects of the drug.
But the gap between an 18-year-old and an eight-year-old is huge in brain-developmental terms. And Prozac itself has been associated with suicidal patients of all ages, as well as side effects such as stunted growth and deleterious effects on the sexual organs of children. SSRIs have been associated with atrophy of gonadal tissue in boys, indicating future problems with puberty and sexual activity later in life.
It is still not known whether there could be a deleterious effect on a girl's ovaries. Two years ago, researchers at Columbia University in New York found that young mice exposed to fluoxetine and other SSRIs were prone to abnormal brain development; the drugs appeared to be inhibiting normal neural growth factors. Animal studies have claimed that SSRIs weaken bone growth. There are also addiction issues, as yet unexplored in children owing to lack of longitudinal studies.....
Philosophy and sentiment apart, the neurophysiological unknowns are substantial. The American professors of psychology Alison Gopnik and Andrew Meltzoff claim in their book How Babies Think that typically by the age of three "the number of synapses reaches its peak when there are about 15,000 synapses for each brain cell, which is actually many more than in an adult brain". They argue that children have brains that are "literally more active, more connected, and much more flexible than adult brains". So under what conditions could a child, still subject to rapid neurobiological development, show signs of clinical depression comparable to an adult, or even an adolescent, so as to be a suitable case for treatment with powerful mind-altering drugs?
More here
BRITISH ANTISEMITISM
Addressing the rising tide of British anti-Semitism, the British columnist Nick Cohen recently wrote, "Anti-Semitism isn't a local side effect of a dirty war over a patch of land smaller than Wales. It's everywhere, from Malaysia to Morocco, and it has arrived here. If you challenge liberal orthodoxy, your argument cannot be debated on its merits. You have to be in the pay of global media moguls. You have to be a Jew."
Robert Wistrich, a scholar of history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, also examines the history of modern anti-Semitism in Britain, pointing out that "Great Britain is today second only to France in serious anti-Semitic incidents reported among European countries." Wistrich documents the persistence and wide reach of anti-Jewish mainstream prejudice, particularly among the media and the upper echelons of British society - "the same group that supported Hitler in the 1930s."
Thus, the Muslim promotion of anti-Semitism in England has been very successful, perhaps because it has been able to graft onto longstanding, well-established British anti-Semitism. Most disturbing, "anti-Semitic sentiment is a part of mainstream discourse, continually resurfacing among the academic, political, and media elites," often taking the form of unsubstantiated, unreasoning criticism of Israel, while Arab terror is condoned or excused.
We should not be surprised. The Brits have never much liked Jews - their unwritten law being, "no Jew can be a gentleman" - and their greatest writers, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Dickens, T.S. Eliot, Kipling, even the sainted George Orwell, have all had their innings at Jew-bashing.
And now, the Israeli Jews are taking on, in the eyes of the Brits, and especially the British left, all the grossness that Shakespeare once imputed to Shylock: that they are bloody-minded, implacable killers of their helpless, innocent victims. The only difference between Shakespeare's portrait and that drawn by both the British extreme right and the left is that now Shylock goes armed: now he has his own country and his own army.
As long as the Jews were weak and dispossessed, the Brits limited themselves to well-bred anti-Semitism: snide references to "Sammies," and the like. But with the advent of Zionist pioneering, when Shylock started amassing land and collecting an arsenal, British cultural anti-Semitism escalated: it became politicized, and even militarized. The cycle of British wars against the Jews was initiated.
The British war effort was at the outset ambivalent, indecisive. From '36 to '39, when the Palestinian Arabs, upset by the influx of Jewish refugees from Hitler, started a three-year Intifada, the British Mandate authorities in Palestine alternated between grudging support of the embattled Jews and outright sabotage of their efforts at self-defense. On one hand, they made Jewish arms illegal, and forced the Hagana people to hide their store of antiquated rifles under kibbutz manure piles. On the other hand, they assigned one of their most brilliant field officers, Orde Wingate, to be a kind of T.E. Lawrence of the Jews, and to train them, in his Special Night Squads, in the arts of irregular warfare.
However, as the Brits mobilized for the coming war against Hitler, their policy makers resolved their ambivalence in favor of appeasing the Arabs, and outright hostility to the Jews. Together with Hitler, they acted so as to create the maximum tally of dead European Jews........
It appears that the game is afoot once again, with the task no longer out-sourced to Palestinians alone, but to the much larger body of radical Islamists now piling into Britain, all eager for the treat. The Brits still limit themselves to talk, but from all accounts, the chatter in the trendiest salons, at party congresses both of the Left and the Right, at A-List dinner parties and scholarly gatherings, has become obsessively, fiercely anti-Israel, anti-Zionist and at times frankly anti-Semitic, to the point where the received and conventional wisdom has it that Israel has no right to exist, and should be eliminated. Again, this genocidal act will presumably be left to radical Islam, or to Iran's nukes, while the British gentlefolk avert their eyes - or in a few cases, feast them.
The Brits tolerated Hitler's anti-Semitism because, out of fear, they wanted to appease him, and because many of them covertly shared his obsession with the Jews. They fostered Arab anti-Semitism as a way of keeping their access to Middle-Eastern oil, and later as a way of holding on to Palestine. But now, when there are fewer, obvious strategic reasons for their Jew-hatred, it appears to be more vigorous than ever. Explaining this, the Brits will cite the Jews' oppression of the Palestinians, and more recently, their punishment of Lebanon. In effect, they might hint, the Palestinians have become the body of Christ, and the Jews are up to their dirty tricks, crucifying him yet again in Palestine.
In effect, the Brits are telling us how compassionate they are, in contrast to those bloody Christ-killers. Bully for them; but as they stress Brit idealism, they avoid any mention of Brit fear - the fear of militant Islam that appears to be gripping all of Europe now, and that - I would suggest - is partially alleviated through anti-Semitism. The Brit's rationales for that anti-Semitism are designed to do them credit, as possessors of superior conscience, but they mask some smelly motives.
We have never truly appreciated the terror inspired by terror tactics - especially suicide bombing, and in particular the destruction of the Twin Towers. As the great towers collapsed into billowing smoke and fire, they called to mind the fearsome imagery of nuclear war, combined with the retributive judgment of Almighty God. Linked to such overwhelming images, the terrorists and their faith have become more terrifying than we are willing to admit.
But denied motives can still drive our acts and our ideas. Along with the rest of what is now being called "Eurabia," the Brits are soothing the Muslims among them by acts of appeasement. In 1938, they bought a year of peace by offering Czechoslovakia to Hitler; now, for a temporary peace, they offer Muslims a piece of the Jews who are like the unlucky passenger tossed from the sled to appease the ravening wolves.
Once again, Albion may have found the cohort that will kill Jews for it, leaving the Brits, temporarily at least, "sans peur et sans reproche" - without fear and without blame.
More here
Monday, November 13, 2006
CCTV picture 'infringes conwoman's human rights'
Jewellers in Kensington being targeted in their shops by a thief have been told not to put up warning pictures of the woman - because it would infringe her human rights. The latest trader to fall victim to the con artist was even told by police to detain the thief herself.
CCTV footage shows the woman distracting a young shop assistant as she pockets thousands of pounds of expensive rings and necklaces. Posing as a wealthy woman from Dubai, she snatches jewellery after asking junior assistants to fetch or wrap up other items. She then says she has to get a credit card from her driver and disappears - only for shocked staff to discover that stock is missing. Jewellery designer Isabel Kurtenbach, 38, became the latest victim when 2,000 pounds of white gold and silver rings, necklaces and earrings were stolen on Tuesday afternoon. The thief struck when she left a 24-year-old assistant in charge of her shop - Isabel Kurtenbach Design in Kensington Church Walk.
Ms Kurtenbach said: "I know the woman well, all the shops around here do. She knows I will ask her to leave, so she comes when I'm not here. She is well-spoken, well-dressed and claims to be from Dubai. She says she is very rich and owns lots of property there." Ms Kurtenbach added: "It is only when you look closely and see her teeth and fingernails - which are in a terrible state - that you realise it's all a lie."
Police have still not collected the CCTV footage from Ms Kurtenbach, but she was advised by a Pc over the phone to try to hold the woman herself, dial 999 and wait for officers to arrive. Ms Kurtenbach said: "I could not believe it - this woman is a criminal. If I tried to stop her she might attack me, she might have a knife."
Other traders are so sick of being targeted they have asked Ms Kurtenbach to give them a picture of her that can be put up in their shops to warn staff. But when Ms Kurtenbach asked the police officer if she could do this she was told it would be an infringement of the woman's human rights.
Michelle Manguette owns the nearby Manguette Jewellery store and told how the same woman stole items worth 3,000 pounds four years ago. She said: "The woman asked to see lots of stock and then said she was going to get her card from her driver. Then she disappeared. "She comes around every year, but won't bother trying if I'm here because she knows I know her. She looks to see if an assistant is here on their own." The woman also visited Manguette and another jewellery shop in the area in the latest attempt but was asked to leave.
The owner of a nearby clothes shop, who asked not to be named, told how 1,000 pounds of cashmere jumpers were recently taken from her shop. She said: "She came in and took some stuff into the changing rooms. Then she said she was going to get her credit card from her driver. "But she never came back and then I noticed the jumpers were gone. I was furious and went after her, but it was too late."
A Scotland Yard spokesman confirmed officers were investigating the latest theft.
Source
The hidden white victims of racism
Last week’s horrifying trial of three Asians is part of a worrying trend, says Brendan Montague in the London "Times"
No one who saw Angela Donald giving her dignified statement that “justice had been done” outside the High Court in Edinburgh as the racist murderers of her 15-year-old son were jailed last week could feel anything but sympathy. For Margaret Massey there was more, though — a sense of fellow-feeling and anger.
Source
CAT CORRECTNESS DEFEATED
A government guide that tells pet owners to provide private lavatories for their cats - and "mental stimulation" to prevent them getting bored -is to be withdrawn. The draft code of conduct for cat owners was drawn up by the Department for Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) alongside the Animal Welfare Bill, which received royal assent in Parliament yesterday. But after protests by MPs, the department admitted that it was scrapping the document because it was "over the top" and too "prescriptive".
The code states that a breach of its recommendations would not constitute an offence in itself but would be taken into account when judgments were made on whether an offence of cruelty had been committed. The 17-page document lays down rules that cat owners should abide by to ensure the health, safety and happiness of their pets. It says cats "need to go to the lavatory somewhere where they can behave naturally and feel comfortable". Like humans, it says, they value their privacy. "Your cat should have somewhere private to go to the toilet with sufficient clean litter." Equally vital, its says, is the need to provide entertainment and mental stimulation to cats. "Cats that are kept indoors or prefer this lifestyle rely on you to provide everything for them. "You should ensure your cat gets enough mental stimulation from you and from its environment so that it does not become bored and frustrated."
Ann Widdecombe, MP and cat-lover, who protested about the "lunacy" of the code in the House of Commons this week, welcomed its withdrawal. The former Tory Home Office minister said it was the product of a government that interfered in all aspects of life. Miss Widdecombe, who has two cats, Arbuthnot, 12, and Pugwash, 11, said she was also flabbergasted to read in the code that all cat owners should be aware of the exact weight of their animal if they were to be safe from prosecution. She told MPs: "I am now being told that I commit an offence if I cannot say - which I cannot - how much my cat should weigh in order to keep me within the law, relevant to its bone structure, its size and its breed."
A spokesman for Defra said the draft code would be replaced by a new document that would be more thoroughly thought through. It would not be available until 2008. A similar code would be produced for dog owners. "We start with a clean slate," said the spokesman. "This draft document was over the top."
The main body of the Animal Welfare Bill, which received wide support on all sides of the House, allows the police and other organisations such as the RSPCA to intervene in cases where people fail in their duty of care to animals. Previously they could intervene only in cases where animals were suffering.
Source
JIHAD UNIVERSITIES IN BRITAIN
Islamic extremists have infiltrated at least four British universities to radicalise Muslim students, says a "troubleshooting" imam who sends teams to campuses to tackle indoctrination. Sheikh Musa Admani believes fundamentalists are bypassing campus bans on groups with radical links by presenting themselves as "ordinary Muslims" to fellow students or forming societies with alternative names. Some students, says Admani, have been so deeply indoctrinated that they are close to travelling to Afghanistan and Iraq to engage in jihad, or holy war.
Admani, a Muslim chaplain at London Metropolitan University, runs a charity that helps to rehabilitate young men who have fallen prey to extremism. He is also an adviser on Muslim affairs to Bill Rammell, the higher education minister. "We are dealing with people filled with hatred," said Admani. "It's hatred for the white man and the West in particular, because they have read the works of Qutb and Maududi (Islamist ideologues followed by Al-Qaeda) who set Muslims apart from everyone else."
Admani's claims come in the wake of a warning by Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, the head of MI5, about the extent of the threat faced from home-grown Islamic extremists. She said the domestic security service has identified 200 terrorist networks involving at least 1,600 people, and 30 "Priority 1" plots to kill are being investigated. "Radicalising elements within communities are trying to exploit grievances for terrorist purposes; it is the youth who are being actively targeted, groomed, radicalised and set on a path that frighteningly quickly could end in their involvement in mass murder of their fellow UK citizens, or their early death in a suicide attack or on a foreign battlefield," said Manningham-Buller.
Yesterday Sir Ian Blair, the Metropolitan police commissioner, called for new measures to combat the growing terrorist threat. One of the "truly shocking" things about the recent alleged transatlantic airliner bomb plot, he said, was "the apparent speed with which young, reasonably affluent, some reasonably well educated British-born people" were radicalised to the point where they were prepared to murder thousands in alleged suicide attacks.
Admani's charity, the Luqman Institute of Education and Development, has been tackling the effects of this indoctrination by sending volunteers to campuses to challenge "the warped view of Islam" spread by extremists. The charity has received reports from students about fundamentalists operating in at least four UK institutions: Brunel University, west London, Bedfordshire University, Luton, Sheffield Hallam University and Manchester Metropolitan University. Up to 10 students at Brunel are being "deradicalised" by a caseworker from the institute. Jawad Syed, who nearly succumbed to extremism himself when he was a Brunel student, said: "Some of the students are watching jihadi videos and might be listening to different sheikhs encouraging jihad."
Earlier this year the Islamic society at Sheffield Hallam University hosted a lecture by Sheikh Khalid Yasin, an American preacher who favours the death penalty for homosexuals. Shakeel Begg, another radical cleric, recently urged students at Kingston University, southwest London, to wage jihad in Palestine. In a tape-recorded speech obtained by The Sunday Times, Begg, who is a Muslim chaplain at Goldsmiths College, part of London University, said: "You want to make jihad? Very good . . . Take some money and go to Palestine and fight, fight the terrorists, fight the Zionists." British-born Asif Hanif, who killed three people in a suicide attack on a bar in Tel Aviv, Israel, in 2003, had attended Kingston.
Admani said some extremists win their peers' trust in university prayer rooms before inviting them to off-campus lectures. In other cases, groups banned by the National Union of Students, such as Hizb-ut Tahrir, are thought to be operating under alternative names. Last month students at Staffordshire University were invited to attend a discussion entitled "The true word of God: the Koran or the Bible". The event was addressed by a former member of Al-Muhajiroun, a proscribed organisation.
A further twist on extremism and campus life emerged in court last week when it was revealed that Dhiren Barot, the most senior Al-Qaeda plotter to be captured in Britain, had used a forged pass to carry out research at Brunel. Barot, 34, a Hindu convert to Islam, was sentenced to at least 40 years in jail after he admitted planning terrorist attacks that could have caused "carnage, bloodshed and butchery" in Britain and America. Brunel University said: "The safety of our students and staff is paramount, as is the security of our campus. We will look into the [Luqman] institute's claims and respond accordingly."
Referring to Begg's lecture at Kingston, Professor Peter Scott, the university's vice-chancellor, said: "Should the university be made aware of any concerns about the views expressed at such events, it has the protocols in place to investigate." Staffordshire University said it was investigating last month's lecture. "No extremists of any kind will be welcome at our campus," said a spokesman. Manchester Metropolitan University said: "If any evidence of extremism comes to light, we will immediately act upon it." Bedfordshire University and Sheffield Hallam University denied that extremists were operating on their campuses. [Good British ostriches]
Source
UNPLEASANT NURSES IN THE NHS
A NATIONAL Health Service trust is offering nurses free cappuccinos and chocolate chip biscuits to encourage them to smile at patients. King's College hospital NHS Trust in London introduced the reward scheme after surveys raised concerns that nurses were not being nice enough to the sick. One common complaint was that nurses almost ignored the patient and chatted about the person's condition as if he or she were not present.
In recent years there have been growing concerns about nurses who are "too posh to wash" and prefer to spend their time on administrative and technical tasks rather than basic care. Two years ago a resolution at the annual congress of the Royal College of Nursing proposed that nurses were now "too clever to care" and suggested that the compassionate part of their job should be delegated to healthcare assistants. The provocative motion was a reference to nurses increasingly concentrating on technical duties.
The new motivational scheme originated in a Seattle fish market, where it was used to boost sales. Trusts are introducing new initiatives to improve their "customer services" because, under government reforms, hospitals now need to compete for patients. Matrons at King's College hospital hand special thank-you cards to nurses who are seen smiling at patients or relatives, chatting with patients, having a positive attitude or doing something to make someone's day better. The thank-you cards are then entered in a draw and nurses whose cards are picked out are entitled to free coffee and biscuits at the hospital cafe.
Selina Truman, head of nursing in general medicine at the trust, said: "When our patient survey and complaints came through, we could see that the attitude of some of the nurses was not as positive as it might be. Patients said nurses did not spend enough time with them. We felt that the way in which nurses engaged with patients could be better. "This scheme is very motivating because matrons and ward sisters praise the nurses directly. It has put patients back at the centre of our work." Truman added that although staff were initially cautious about how the scheme would work, they had enjoyed receiving the praise and the treat.
However, an editorial in Nursing Times magazine said nurses did not need bribes to be helpful and pleasant to patients. It said: "Excessive workloads and paperwork prevent nurses from spending time with their patients and caring for them properly. This is a fundamental problem that can never be rectified with a hot drink and a biscuit, or other such imports from industry." Katherine Murphy, of The Patients Association, said: "Good patient care should be part and parcel of the job of nursing, not an add-on."
Source
Jewellers in Kensington being targeted in their shops by a thief have been told not to put up warning pictures of the woman - because it would infringe her human rights. The latest trader to fall victim to the con artist was even told by police to detain the thief herself.
CCTV footage shows the woman distracting a young shop assistant as she pockets thousands of pounds of expensive rings and necklaces. Posing as a wealthy woman from Dubai, she snatches jewellery after asking junior assistants to fetch or wrap up other items. She then says she has to get a credit card from her driver and disappears - only for shocked staff to discover that stock is missing. Jewellery designer Isabel Kurtenbach, 38, became the latest victim when 2,000 pounds of white gold and silver rings, necklaces and earrings were stolen on Tuesday afternoon. The thief struck when she left a 24-year-old assistant in charge of her shop - Isabel Kurtenbach Design in Kensington Church Walk.
Ms Kurtenbach said: "I know the woman well, all the shops around here do. She knows I will ask her to leave, so she comes when I'm not here. She is well-spoken, well-dressed and claims to be from Dubai. She says she is very rich and owns lots of property there." Ms Kurtenbach added: "It is only when you look closely and see her teeth and fingernails - which are in a terrible state - that you realise it's all a lie."
Police have still not collected the CCTV footage from Ms Kurtenbach, but she was advised by a Pc over the phone to try to hold the woman herself, dial 999 and wait for officers to arrive. Ms Kurtenbach said: "I could not believe it - this woman is a criminal. If I tried to stop her she might attack me, she might have a knife."
Other traders are so sick of being targeted they have asked Ms Kurtenbach to give them a picture of her that can be put up in their shops to warn staff. But when Ms Kurtenbach asked the police officer if she could do this she was told it would be an infringement of the woman's human rights.
Michelle Manguette owns the nearby Manguette Jewellery store and told how the same woman stole items worth 3,000 pounds four years ago. She said: "The woman asked to see lots of stock and then said she was going to get her card from her driver. Then she disappeared. "She comes around every year, but won't bother trying if I'm here because she knows I know her. She looks to see if an assistant is here on their own." The woman also visited Manguette and another jewellery shop in the area in the latest attempt but was asked to leave.
The owner of a nearby clothes shop, who asked not to be named, told how 1,000 pounds of cashmere jumpers were recently taken from her shop. She said: "She came in and took some stuff into the changing rooms. Then she said she was going to get her credit card from her driver. "But she never came back and then I noticed the jumpers were gone. I was furious and went after her, but it was too late."
A Scotland Yard spokesman confirmed officers were investigating the latest theft.
Source
The hidden white victims of racism
Last week’s horrifying trial of three Asians is part of a worrying trend, says Brendan Montague in the London "Times"
No one who saw Angela Donald giving her dignified statement that “justice had been done” outside the High Court in Edinburgh as the racist murderers of her 15-year-old son were jailed last week could feel anything but sympathy. For Margaret Massey there was more, though — a sense of fellow-feeling and anger.
Kriss Donald was snatched off the street by an Asian gang and subjected to a terrible ordeal: beaten, stabbed, doused in petrol and set ablaze. Massey’s son Lee, a rugby player, was also the subject of a racially motivated attack when he was set upon by a gang of Iraqi asylum seekers “out looking for someone” to hurt. He and two friends were stabbed in a car park in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, in October 2003. Lee was then thrown into the air and suffered devastating brain injuries when one of the gang used a car to run him down. Three years later he has not fully recovered.
Massey still feels aggrieved that — in her view — the police inquiry was hindered by political correctness because officers feared that reporting that a white man had been so brutally attacked by asylum seekers would further fuel racial tensions following several such brawls in the area.
“The police didn’t charge 13 members of the gang even though I believe there was some evidence,” she says.
“If our Lee had run over one of the Iraqis he would have been arrested right away and sent to prison for the rest of his life. The police are nervous when white people are attacked. In this area this is happening more and more often.”
The killing of Stephen Lawrence 13 years ago sparked off an orgy of soul-searching throughout liberal Britain.
But we have never quite acknowledged that violence comes from both sides. Gavin Hopley, 19, was kicked to death by up to eight Asian men in Oldham in February 2002. Six men were convicted of violent disorder and theft offences but no one has been convicted of his murder.
An Asian gang was also responsible for the violent killing of 17-year-old Ross Parker, who was savagely stabbed with hunting knives during an attack in Peterborough in 2001. David Lees, 23, was run over and killed during a fight between whites and a gang of Asians in Prestwich, Manchester, only last month.
There has been numerous inquiries and new legislation since the Lawrence case and almost everyone concerned with race relations will confirm that policing in cases involving race has improved immeasurably since that tragic event.
However, the debate about the white victims of racist attacks seems to have progressed no further in the past 10 years — because of fears of “political correctness” and the threat of the far right making political capital out of personal tragedy.
Sir Ian Blair, Britain’s most senior police officer, even attacked the press as “institutionally racist” in January this year because cases such as the killing of Tom ap Rhys Pryce, the solicitor, had gained more publicity than the equally terrible death on the same day of Balbir Matharu, who had tried to stop thieves ripping the radio from his car.
An extensive search of national and regional newspaper reports, however, shows that cases involving black and minority ethnic victims are widely reported, while there is an almost total boycott of stories involving the white victims of similar attacks. Is this because newspapers fear their reports appearing on BNP leaflets, or because the police are less likely to issue appeals for help?
Peter Fahy, chief constable of Cheshire police and spokesman on race issues for the Association of Chief Police Officers, said: “A lot of police officers and other professionals feel almost the best thing to do is to try and avoid [discussing such attacks] for fear of being criticised. This is not healthy.”
The silence means it is impossible to know how many white people are victims of racist attacks in today’s multicultural Britain and whether they are right to feel aggrieved that the attacks they suffer do not appear to get the same recognition as those of black victims.
Source
CAT CORRECTNESS DEFEATED
A government guide that tells pet owners to provide private lavatories for their cats - and "mental stimulation" to prevent them getting bored -is to be withdrawn. The draft code of conduct for cat owners was drawn up by the Department for Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) alongside the Animal Welfare Bill, which received royal assent in Parliament yesterday. But after protests by MPs, the department admitted that it was scrapping the document because it was "over the top" and too "prescriptive".
The code states that a breach of its recommendations would not constitute an offence in itself but would be taken into account when judgments were made on whether an offence of cruelty had been committed. The 17-page document lays down rules that cat owners should abide by to ensure the health, safety and happiness of their pets. It says cats "need to go to the lavatory somewhere where they can behave naturally and feel comfortable". Like humans, it says, they value their privacy. "Your cat should have somewhere private to go to the toilet with sufficient clean litter." Equally vital, its says, is the need to provide entertainment and mental stimulation to cats. "Cats that are kept indoors or prefer this lifestyle rely on you to provide everything for them. "You should ensure your cat gets enough mental stimulation from you and from its environment so that it does not become bored and frustrated."
Ann Widdecombe, MP and cat-lover, who protested about the "lunacy" of the code in the House of Commons this week, welcomed its withdrawal. The former Tory Home Office minister said it was the product of a government that interfered in all aspects of life. Miss Widdecombe, who has two cats, Arbuthnot, 12, and Pugwash, 11, said she was also flabbergasted to read in the code that all cat owners should be aware of the exact weight of their animal if they were to be safe from prosecution. She told MPs: "I am now being told that I commit an offence if I cannot say - which I cannot - how much my cat should weigh in order to keep me within the law, relevant to its bone structure, its size and its breed."
A spokesman for Defra said the draft code would be replaced by a new document that would be more thoroughly thought through. It would not be available until 2008. A similar code would be produced for dog owners. "We start with a clean slate," said the spokesman. "This draft document was over the top."
The main body of the Animal Welfare Bill, which received wide support on all sides of the House, allows the police and other organisations such as the RSPCA to intervene in cases where people fail in their duty of care to animals. Previously they could intervene only in cases where animals were suffering.
Source
JIHAD UNIVERSITIES IN BRITAIN
Islamic extremists have infiltrated at least four British universities to radicalise Muslim students, says a "troubleshooting" imam who sends teams to campuses to tackle indoctrination. Sheikh Musa Admani believes fundamentalists are bypassing campus bans on groups with radical links by presenting themselves as "ordinary Muslims" to fellow students or forming societies with alternative names. Some students, says Admani, have been so deeply indoctrinated that they are close to travelling to Afghanistan and Iraq to engage in jihad, or holy war.
Admani, a Muslim chaplain at London Metropolitan University, runs a charity that helps to rehabilitate young men who have fallen prey to extremism. He is also an adviser on Muslim affairs to Bill Rammell, the higher education minister. "We are dealing with people filled with hatred," said Admani. "It's hatred for the white man and the West in particular, because they have read the works of Qutb and Maududi (Islamist ideologues followed by Al-Qaeda) who set Muslims apart from everyone else."
Admani's claims come in the wake of a warning by Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, the head of MI5, about the extent of the threat faced from home-grown Islamic extremists. She said the domestic security service has identified 200 terrorist networks involving at least 1,600 people, and 30 "Priority 1" plots to kill are being investigated. "Radicalising elements within communities are trying to exploit grievances for terrorist purposes; it is the youth who are being actively targeted, groomed, radicalised and set on a path that frighteningly quickly could end in their involvement in mass murder of their fellow UK citizens, or their early death in a suicide attack or on a foreign battlefield," said Manningham-Buller.
Yesterday Sir Ian Blair, the Metropolitan police commissioner, called for new measures to combat the growing terrorist threat. One of the "truly shocking" things about the recent alleged transatlantic airliner bomb plot, he said, was "the apparent speed with which young, reasonably affluent, some reasonably well educated British-born people" were radicalised to the point where they were prepared to murder thousands in alleged suicide attacks.
Admani's charity, the Luqman Institute of Education and Development, has been tackling the effects of this indoctrination by sending volunteers to campuses to challenge "the warped view of Islam" spread by extremists. The charity has received reports from students about fundamentalists operating in at least four UK institutions: Brunel University, west London, Bedfordshire University, Luton, Sheffield Hallam University and Manchester Metropolitan University. Up to 10 students at Brunel are being "deradicalised" by a caseworker from the institute. Jawad Syed, who nearly succumbed to extremism himself when he was a Brunel student, said: "Some of the students are watching jihadi videos and might be listening to different sheikhs encouraging jihad."
Earlier this year the Islamic society at Sheffield Hallam University hosted a lecture by Sheikh Khalid Yasin, an American preacher who favours the death penalty for homosexuals. Shakeel Begg, another radical cleric, recently urged students at Kingston University, southwest London, to wage jihad in Palestine. In a tape-recorded speech obtained by The Sunday Times, Begg, who is a Muslim chaplain at Goldsmiths College, part of London University, said: "You want to make jihad? Very good . . . Take some money and go to Palestine and fight, fight the terrorists, fight the Zionists." British-born Asif Hanif, who killed three people in a suicide attack on a bar in Tel Aviv, Israel, in 2003, had attended Kingston.
Admani said some extremists win their peers' trust in university prayer rooms before inviting them to off-campus lectures. In other cases, groups banned by the National Union of Students, such as Hizb-ut Tahrir, are thought to be operating under alternative names. Last month students at Staffordshire University were invited to attend a discussion entitled "The true word of God: the Koran or the Bible". The event was addressed by a former member of Al-Muhajiroun, a proscribed organisation.
A further twist on extremism and campus life emerged in court last week when it was revealed that Dhiren Barot, the most senior Al-Qaeda plotter to be captured in Britain, had used a forged pass to carry out research at Brunel. Barot, 34, a Hindu convert to Islam, was sentenced to at least 40 years in jail after he admitted planning terrorist attacks that could have caused "carnage, bloodshed and butchery" in Britain and America. Brunel University said: "The safety of our students and staff is paramount, as is the security of our campus. We will look into the [Luqman] institute's claims and respond accordingly."
Referring to Begg's lecture at Kingston, Professor Peter Scott, the university's vice-chancellor, said: "Should the university be made aware of any concerns about the views expressed at such events, it has the protocols in place to investigate." Staffordshire University said it was investigating last month's lecture. "No extremists of any kind will be welcome at our campus," said a spokesman. Manchester Metropolitan University said: "If any evidence of extremism comes to light, we will immediately act upon it." Bedfordshire University and Sheffield Hallam University denied that extremists were operating on their campuses. [Good British ostriches]
Source
UNPLEASANT NURSES IN THE NHS
A NATIONAL Health Service trust is offering nurses free cappuccinos and chocolate chip biscuits to encourage them to smile at patients. King's College hospital NHS Trust in London introduced the reward scheme after surveys raised concerns that nurses were not being nice enough to the sick. One common complaint was that nurses almost ignored the patient and chatted about the person's condition as if he or she were not present.
In recent years there have been growing concerns about nurses who are "too posh to wash" and prefer to spend their time on administrative and technical tasks rather than basic care. Two years ago a resolution at the annual congress of the Royal College of Nursing proposed that nurses were now "too clever to care" and suggested that the compassionate part of their job should be delegated to healthcare assistants. The provocative motion was a reference to nurses increasingly concentrating on technical duties.
The new motivational scheme originated in a Seattle fish market, where it was used to boost sales. Trusts are introducing new initiatives to improve their "customer services" because, under government reforms, hospitals now need to compete for patients. Matrons at King's College hospital hand special thank-you cards to nurses who are seen smiling at patients or relatives, chatting with patients, having a positive attitude or doing something to make someone's day better. The thank-you cards are then entered in a draw and nurses whose cards are picked out are entitled to free coffee and biscuits at the hospital cafe.
Selina Truman, head of nursing in general medicine at the trust, said: "When our patient survey and complaints came through, we could see that the attitude of some of the nurses was not as positive as it might be. Patients said nurses did not spend enough time with them. We felt that the way in which nurses engaged with patients could be better. "This scheme is very motivating because matrons and ward sisters praise the nurses directly. It has put patients back at the centre of our work." Truman added that although staff were initially cautious about how the scheme would work, they had enjoyed receiving the praise and the treat.
However, an editorial in Nursing Times magazine said nurses did not need bribes to be helpful and pleasant to patients. It said: "Excessive workloads and paperwork prevent nurses from spending time with their patients and caring for them properly. This is a fundamental problem that can never be rectified with a hot drink and a biscuit, or other such imports from industry." Katherine Murphy, of The Patients Association, said: "Good patient care should be part and parcel of the job of nursing, not an add-on."
Source
Sunday, November 12, 2006
AMAZING LOSS OF BASIC VALUES IN BUREAUCRATIC BRITAIN
Judges have attacked a fire authority which asked for an injured fireman to be denied compensation because he "should not have attempted to save a driver's life".
John Pennington was involved in a desperate bid to free a trapped driver following a multiple pile-up on the M25. During the rescue attempt the experienced firefighter lost part of his left forefinger while using a power ram in a last-ditch effort to save the stricken motorist, who later died.
He was awarded compensation, but Surrey fire officials said Mr Pennington should never have been involved in the rescue attempt as he was not trained to use the equipment. Appealing against the pay-out, Surrey Fire Service and Surrey County Council have spent thousands of pounds arguing firemen must put their own safety first, even if that means abandoning accident victims to their fate. But judges at the Court of Appeal yesterday dismissed the claim as "unrealistic", saying Mr Pennington had "acted reasonably" in attempting to save the driver's life.
The 46-year-old arrived at the crash scene to find a critically-injured lorry driver trapped in his crushed cab. After a colleague was "overwhelmed by fatigue and exhaustion", Mr Pennington stepped in to take over the power ram which was being used to straighten out the mangled metal. He had never used the equipment before and his hand got caught in its workings, injuring his finger despite the fact he wore protective gloves.
Last year a judge awarded Mr Pennington, of Selsey, West Sussex, 3,115 pounds compensation for the injury. But county fire officials have since spent several times the sum on an unsuccessful legal bid to strip the firefighter of his pay-out.
Rejecting the appeal, Lord Justice Pill said: "Without any training or experience on the ram, Mr Pennington took over the urgent attempt to save life. "I find quite unacceptable the authorities approach to their duties as employers in such circumstances."
Fire officials claimed it was Mr Pennington's decision to use the ram and that firefighters "must put their own health and safety first, however unpalatable the consequences." The judge added: "The implication is that Mr Pennington ought not to have taken over from the leading hand and should not have attempted to save the driver's life. "Not only is it unrealistic to conclude that Mr Pennington should not have continued with the rescue attempt, but he did what was expected of him. On the evidence, he acted reasonably." Agreeing that the authorities' appeal should be dismissed, Lady Justice Arden said: "It was a situation of great stress, with the life of a road traffic victim at stake. "There is no doubt that the fire and council authorities must have expected firemen to be called upon to use this machinery in some fairly horrific road accidents. "They must have expected him to do his best in this situation and he was entitled to training to help him do so without risk to himself. "On that basis it was not only Mr Pennington's own devotion to duty, without more, that was causative of this injury. The lack of training played a role too."
Motoring campaigners condemned the authorities' stance and encouraged people to come to the aid of stricken drivers. "Everyone should do their utmost to save an injured motorist and Mr Pennington should be commended for his actions, not dragged through the courts," said a spokesman for the Association of British Drivers. "The fire and council authorities' approach is ridiculous. They should be encouraging people to save lives, not discouraging them."
Source
THE FEMINIZATION OF BRITISH SCHOOLTEACHING
Teaching is fast becoming an all-female profession with women outnumbering men in the classroom as much as 13 to one, dramatic new figures revealed today. The number of male teachers has plummeted to an all-time low, threatening a classroom discipline crisis as a generation of boys misses out on authority role models. In parts of the country worst-hit by the male recruitment slump, fewer than 10 per cent of primary teachers are men. In Reading, just 38 primary teachers are male compared with 478 women.
But the decline has been particularly marked in secondary schools, fuelling fears of rising misbehaviour among disaffected teenage boys whose lives lack male authority figures. Analysts believe male teachers are "fast becoming an endangered species" as salaries rise more quickly for other graduate jobs, especially high-flying City roles which traditionally attract men. There are also fears men are being scared away by the fear of false child abuse allegations while others are thought to be put off by the absence of male companionship in primary schools.
It means that in the space of a generation, the proportion of secondary school male teachers has dropped from 55 per cent to 41 per cent. Across all state schools, just a quarter of teachers are men. The shortage is most severe in the commuter belt surrounding London where soaring house prices and high cost of living renders teaching merely the 'second income' for many couples, according to an analysis conducted for the relaunch issue of the Times Educational Supplement. Local authority areas with the fewest male teachers include Reading, Sutton, Windsor and Maidenhead, Surrey, Wokingham, Richmond-upon-Thames, Harrow, Camden and Bracknell Forest.
Teachers are said to be 'mostly women whose husbands or partners have good jobs'. The highest concentrations of male teachers are found in lower-cost areas such as Cornwall, Devon, Norfolk, North East Lincolnshire and Hull.
The findings sparked calls last night for urgent measures to make teaching more attractive, especially in the South East. The imposition this September of 3,000 pounds-a-year top-up fees on university courses is thought to have particularly deterred male applicants. Multi-million pound Government advertising campaigns aimed at tempting more men into teaching are thought to have mainly benefited fee-paying schools, where salaries tend to be higher, it emerged.
Experts are concerned the lack of male role models in the classroom could have serious implications for boys' performance in exams. It is thought to be one of the key reasons why boys now lag behind girls in every major school examination. Analysts from the research firm Education Data Surveys said the trend warranted national debate. Professor John Howson, EDS director and visiting professor at Oxford Brookes University, said: "We've all known it's been like this in primaries. When you add in all the classroom assistants, the dinner ladies and the office staff, probably only about one per cent of the primary workforce in somewhere like Reading is male. "We've rather accepted it. But do we want secondary schools to go the same way?" Since men are more likely to become heads and deputies, who are registered as teachers but often do not have active teaching duties, the number of male teachers actually in the classroom is even smaller.
Professor Howson continued: "In the classroom, the division is even more stark. It is perfectly possible for a child to go through their whole education and be taught entirely by women. That may not necessarily be a bad thing, but it is an issue that society has to have a debate about. "Clearly some schools where all the teachers are women are functioning very well but there may be groups, particularly the older age group of pupils, for whom having some more male role models around would be helpful in making them better operating schools."
The Training and Development Agency, the teacher training body, said male teachers were "important". A spokeswoman said: "Different people bring different qualities to the classroom. It is important that children are exposed to a teaching force which is representative of society." But the agency is concerned men still have "misconceptions" about teaching such as the likely salaries they can earn. Professor Howson said a senior teacher leading a large secondary school department could command more than 50,000 pounds-a-year in London, and 46,000 outside.
Source
Amazing: A MUSLIM Convicted of Hate Speech!
Maybe all is not lost in Britain. Advocacy of violence punished:
Good to see dying the double standard which has so far protected Muslims while penalizing others.
British Jury Defends Free Speech
Should you be prosecuted for things you say in private that are critical of Islam? The British govcernment twice prosecuted two members of the British National party for just that. What Nick Griffin and Mark Collett said at a private meeting was that Islam is a "wicked, vicious faith" etc. That was claimed to fall foul of Britain's "hate speech" laws. Fortunately, a jury disagreed and the men have just been cleared of all charges. Story here. Note that there seems to have been advocacy of political action only, not advocacy of violence.
Gordon Brown, a senior member of the British government, has however responded by saying that the laws against hate speech must be "tightened". No respect for free speech there.
Judges have attacked a fire authority which asked for an injured fireman to be denied compensation because he "should not have attempted to save a driver's life".
John Pennington was involved in a desperate bid to free a trapped driver following a multiple pile-up on the M25. During the rescue attempt the experienced firefighter lost part of his left forefinger while using a power ram in a last-ditch effort to save the stricken motorist, who later died.
He was awarded compensation, but Surrey fire officials said Mr Pennington should never have been involved in the rescue attempt as he was not trained to use the equipment. Appealing against the pay-out, Surrey Fire Service and Surrey County Council have spent thousands of pounds arguing firemen must put their own safety first, even if that means abandoning accident victims to their fate. But judges at the Court of Appeal yesterday dismissed the claim as "unrealistic", saying Mr Pennington had "acted reasonably" in attempting to save the driver's life.
The 46-year-old arrived at the crash scene to find a critically-injured lorry driver trapped in his crushed cab. After a colleague was "overwhelmed by fatigue and exhaustion", Mr Pennington stepped in to take over the power ram which was being used to straighten out the mangled metal. He had never used the equipment before and his hand got caught in its workings, injuring his finger despite the fact he wore protective gloves.
Last year a judge awarded Mr Pennington, of Selsey, West Sussex, 3,115 pounds compensation for the injury. But county fire officials have since spent several times the sum on an unsuccessful legal bid to strip the firefighter of his pay-out.
Rejecting the appeal, Lord Justice Pill said: "Without any training or experience on the ram, Mr Pennington took over the urgent attempt to save life. "I find quite unacceptable the authorities approach to their duties as employers in such circumstances."
Fire officials claimed it was Mr Pennington's decision to use the ram and that firefighters "must put their own health and safety first, however unpalatable the consequences." The judge added: "The implication is that Mr Pennington ought not to have taken over from the leading hand and should not have attempted to save the driver's life. "Not only is it unrealistic to conclude that Mr Pennington should not have continued with the rescue attempt, but he did what was expected of him. On the evidence, he acted reasonably." Agreeing that the authorities' appeal should be dismissed, Lady Justice Arden said: "It was a situation of great stress, with the life of a road traffic victim at stake. "There is no doubt that the fire and council authorities must have expected firemen to be called upon to use this machinery in some fairly horrific road accidents. "They must have expected him to do his best in this situation and he was entitled to training to help him do so without risk to himself. "On that basis it was not only Mr Pennington's own devotion to duty, without more, that was causative of this injury. The lack of training played a role too."
Motoring campaigners condemned the authorities' stance and encouraged people to come to the aid of stricken drivers. "Everyone should do their utmost to save an injured motorist and Mr Pennington should be commended for his actions, not dragged through the courts," said a spokesman for the Association of British Drivers. "The fire and council authorities' approach is ridiculous. They should be encouraging people to save lives, not discouraging them."
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THE FEMINIZATION OF BRITISH SCHOOLTEACHING
Teaching is fast becoming an all-female profession with women outnumbering men in the classroom as much as 13 to one, dramatic new figures revealed today. The number of male teachers has plummeted to an all-time low, threatening a classroom discipline crisis as a generation of boys misses out on authority role models. In parts of the country worst-hit by the male recruitment slump, fewer than 10 per cent of primary teachers are men. In Reading, just 38 primary teachers are male compared with 478 women.
But the decline has been particularly marked in secondary schools, fuelling fears of rising misbehaviour among disaffected teenage boys whose lives lack male authority figures. Analysts believe male teachers are "fast becoming an endangered species" as salaries rise more quickly for other graduate jobs, especially high-flying City roles which traditionally attract men. There are also fears men are being scared away by the fear of false child abuse allegations while others are thought to be put off by the absence of male companionship in primary schools.
It means that in the space of a generation, the proportion of secondary school male teachers has dropped from 55 per cent to 41 per cent. Across all state schools, just a quarter of teachers are men. The shortage is most severe in the commuter belt surrounding London where soaring house prices and high cost of living renders teaching merely the 'second income' for many couples, according to an analysis conducted for the relaunch issue of the Times Educational Supplement. Local authority areas with the fewest male teachers include Reading, Sutton, Windsor and Maidenhead, Surrey, Wokingham, Richmond-upon-Thames, Harrow, Camden and Bracknell Forest.
Teachers are said to be 'mostly women whose husbands or partners have good jobs'. The highest concentrations of male teachers are found in lower-cost areas such as Cornwall, Devon, Norfolk, North East Lincolnshire and Hull.
The findings sparked calls last night for urgent measures to make teaching more attractive, especially in the South East. The imposition this September of 3,000 pounds-a-year top-up fees on university courses is thought to have particularly deterred male applicants. Multi-million pound Government advertising campaigns aimed at tempting more men into teaching are thought to have mainly benefited fee-paying schools, where salaries tend to be higher, it emerged.
Experts are concerned the lack of male role models in the classroom could have serious implications for boys' performance in exams. It is thought to be one of the key reasons why boys now lag behind girls in every major school examination. Analysts from the research firm Education Data Surveys said the trend warranted national debate. Professor John Howson, EDS director and visiting professor at Oxford Brookes University, said: "We've all known it's been like this in primaries. When you add in all the classroom assistants, the dinner ladies and the office staff, probably only about one per cent of the primary workforce in somewhere like Reading is male. "We've rather accepted it. But do we want secondary schools to go the same way?" Since men are more likely to become heads and deputies, who are registered as teachers but often do not have active teaching duties, the number of male teachers actually in the classroom is even smaller.
Professor Howson continued: "In the classroom, the division is even more stark. It is perfectly possible for a child to go through their whole education and be taught entirely by women. That may not necessarily be a bad thing, but it is an issue that society has to have a debate about. "Clearly some schools where all the teachers are women are functioning very well but there may be groups, particularly the older age group of pupils, for whom having some more male role models around would be helpful in making them better operating schools."
The Training and Development Agency, the teacher training body, said male teachers were "important". A spokeswoman said: "Different people bring different qualities to the classroom. It is important that children are exposed to a teaching force which is representative of society." But the agency is concerned men still have "misconceptions" about teaching such as the likely salaries they can earn. Professor Howson said a senior teacher leading a large secondary school department could command more than 50,000 pounds-a-year in London, and 46,000 outside.
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Amazing: A MUSLIM Convicted of Hate Speech!
Maybe all is not lost in Britain. Advocacy of violence punished:
"A website designer was convicted yesterday of stirring up racial hatred during a protest by Muslims over cartoons of the prophet Muhammad.
Mizanur Rahman, of Palmers Green, North London, carried placards that called for non-Muslims to be "annihilated" and "beheaded" as he addressed more than 300 protesters outside the Danish Embassy in London on February 3.
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Good to see dying the double standard which has so far protected Muslims while penalizing others.
British Jury Defends Free Speech
Should you be prosecuted for things you say in private that are critical of Islam? The British govcernment twice prosecuted two members of the British National party for just that. What Nick Griffin and Mark Collett said at a private meeting was that Islam is a "wicked, vicious faith" etc. That was claimed to fall foul of Britain's "hate speech" laws. Fortunately, a jury disagreed and the men have just been cleared of all charges. Story here. Note that there seems to have been advocacy of political action only, not advocacy of violence.
Gordon Brown, a senior member of the British government, has however responded by saying that the laws against hate speech must be "tightened". No respect for free speech there.
Saturday, November 11, 2006
Give us this day our daily organic loaf and forgive us our cheap flights
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O YE OF LITTLE faith, who still doubt that greenery is our official pseudoreligion, or that “C of E” should now stand for the Church of the Environment! Look ye upon the results of this week’s Times/Populus poll, surveying Britons’ exaggerated claims about our ecofriendly habits, and weep! The poll found a gaping “green divide” between what people say they do to save energy, and what really happens in Britain today. So 65 per cent claim only ever to buy those dim energy-saving lightbulbs — yet these account for less than 20 per cent of bulbs sold; 76 per cent say they recycle everything possible, yet only 22 per cent of British household waste is recycled. It was a similar story with everything from flying to leaving the TV on standby.
Here we have a set of pious beliefs observed more in the breach than the observance. Remind you of anything? As with other religions, in between the sermons and prayers, believers have to get on with real life; even many Catholics use birth control these days. Thus do people feel obliged to repeat the green catechism, yet still eschew the bus and grab cheap flights. They consume, but weighed down with guilt as well as shopping bags, and a feeling that they should atone perhaps by paying extra to plant a tree.
The eco-religion has as many rituals as the old faiths, only more fashionably look-at-me. Not for the green faithful the privacy of the confessional box or the pew; we are supposed to show off our piety in the recycling box or the organic produce aisle.
What’s more, it is a state religion, backed by all parties in our eco-theocracy, soon to be able to charge a modern tithe through new green taxes. No wonder leaders of the old C of E are attracted to the new one, where calling on us to repent in the name of global warming gives them a rare moral authority. Thus the Archbishop of Canterbury has cautioned that “millions, billions” will die from climate change and a bishop told last weekend’s demo on climate change that global warming is caused by humanity playing God. For that he got a cheer from the secular zealots of the new crusade.
Unlike the old faiths, the new pseudoreligion does not even offer us the prospect of salvation in the next life. Just a miserable existence in this one, while we wait for the four horse-persons of the eco-apocalypse — pestilence, war, famine and death by boredom.
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DANGEROUS TO GET SICK IN SCOTLAND
Feeling under the weather? Be careful who you tell. Health Service Journal (Nov 2) reports on plans by the Scottish Executive to quarantine anyone with a serious infectious disease in their own home. A consultation document also proposes that, under revamped public health laws, people could be compelled to undergo examination or treatment against their will.
Tim Brett, the director of Health Protection Scotland, says that the measures would help in a flu pandemic. “I’m sure the vast majority of people would accept any such requirement.” The plans recognise the significant human rights issues raised by such measures but Scotland’s Chief Medical Officer says that it is time public health laws were updated. They date from 1897.
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"Persistent standing" incorrect
British weirdness extends even to football
A club in trouble needs all the backing it can get from its own supporters. So, what does West Ham do? It punishes its fans for standing up too much. Last week, 20 season ticket holders received letters from the club saying: `You have ignored repeated requests to remain seated and are therefore placing the club in jeopardy of losing capacity. As a result you are banned from attending Upton Park for two matches.' Don't you just love traditional cockney hospitality?
There are a lot of stupid, petty regulations at football these days. There's a law, for example, that prohibits spectators from drinking alcohol within sight of the pitch. Why? Well, God knows what might happen? A tantalising glimpse of luscious green turf, the heady scent of freshly mown grass.it's enough to drive an Englishman stark raving bonkers. There are all sorts of silly edicts about what you're not allowed to take through the turnstiles - I remember a blind caller to Danny Baker's radio phone-in show recounting how his white stick had been confiscated by stewards.
But the ban on persistent standing at football match has got to be one of the most asinine rules ever invented. The Football Licensing Authority says that persistent standing is a health and safety hazard. Run that past me again? I can see how setting off fireworks or hurling missiles might be dangerous. But persistent standing? It's got to be one of the most unthreatening, innocuous activities known to mankind. Persistent standing isn't considered hazardous in any other social context. People persistently stand all the time - at bus stops, on railway platforms, in banks, at supermarket checkouts - and nobody bats an eyelid. But stand up at a Premiership football match and you're a hooligan. Ridiculous! Persistent standing isn't even proscribed under Sharia law - a measure of how draconian this ban is.
The Football Licensing Authority claims that persistent standing could lead to fans toppling like dominoes or else falling off the upper tier of a football stand. Have these things ever happened? No. How many football spectators have been killed our seriously injured as a result of persistent standing in all-seater stadiums? None. `What about Hillsborough?' say the football authorities. It's a tired old refrain. Invoking Hillsborough is not so much an argument as a dishonest method of closing down any debate about standing. But did anyone die at Hillsborough because of persistent standing? No. The overcrowding which led to 96 Liverpool fans been crushed to death was caused by what Lord Justice Taylor's official report described as the `failure of police control'.
West Ham fans have waged a protracted battle with the club over their right to stand during games. A group of enterprising fans have set up the Stand Up Sit Down campaign which is calling for `safe standing' sections at football grounds. Now, I'm all in favour of fans standing up if that's how they prefer to follow their team. And yes, dishing out bans for persistent standing is a very shabby way to treat your own season ticket holders. But I'm not sure I want licensed standing sections either.
Stand Up Sit Down argue that enforced seating is responsible for the muted atmosphere at many Premiership stadiums. Excuse the pun but I don't think their argument stands up. The minority of fans who prefer to stand up are usually the ones making all the noise anyway. Give them their own safe standing enclosures and they'll still be vocal but it doesn't follow that everyone else will join in. Enforced seating is just one of a number of factors that have contributed to the deathly hush at football grounds. The restrictions on alcohol consumption, the rules governing obscene chanting, the piped music blasting out over PA systems: these measures have all contributed to the pacification of football crowds.
What I object to isn't so much being forced to sit down but no longer being free to support my team as I see fit. It's not just enforced seating; it's the broader regimentation of fan conduct that's the problem. I don't want official permission to stand any more than I want to be forced to sit down. But nor do I want a raft of rules circumscribing drinking, chanting, swearing, and smoking. And it's the unshackling of fans from all these killjoy constraints that we should be standing up for.
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Forget race, we have prejudices you haven't dreamt of
Roland White attended a diversity training class that revealed how fed up we are becoming with enforced cultural sensitivity
In our modern multiracial world, it is no picnic being called Mr White. People do tend to make such assumptions. Which is why I am sitting in a rather dreary hotel in the Midlands, staring at a flip chart and waiting to receive my very first dose of diversity training.
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Prime suspect
Lifelong Labour supporter Maureen Freely has been at the thick of family policy for a decade as an author, academic and political commentator — and as a mother of four. But she can take no more. The government, she argues, has killed family life. And all the evidence points to Tony Blair being the main culprit
Let me begin with a confession. For the past 10 years I have led a double life. The first was with my family, my colleagues, my students, my neighbours and my friends. The second I spent with those who set the rules by which we live. These are the politicians, civil servants, academics and activists who gathered together after new Labour’s landslide victory to transform family policy. Their brief was to formalise the relationship between government and parents: in bald terms, to turn parents into a new breed of line managers. For if families were right to expect the government to provide proper public services, then the government was right to expect families to turn out proper children. And if they didn’t, well, it was only right that the government step in to sort them out.Did I ever buy this? No. I had my doubts from the beginning. I feared that the people at the top were interested in families only because they saw in them a source of cheap labour. No, let me correct that. A source of unpaid labour. Slave labour. They weren’t very happy with these substandard children we were producing: we were now to be improved. As alarmed as I was by that prospect, I was more alarmed by the factory imagery in which it was couched. Taken literally, the future of Blair’s and Straw’s and Blunkett’s dreams was an assembly line, along which we, the parent line managers, would impose company discipline to produce the highest-quality product at the lowest possible cost.For 10 years, I tried hard to convince myself it was wrong to read too much into a metaphor. This couldn’t be what they really meant. Committed Labourite that I was, I had to believe they were castigating parents in the press so they could fob off the Daily Mail. But it wasn’t just blind faith that lulled me. At the conferences, seminars and panel discussions I attended, the talk was very different. Here I found many others who lived double lives like mine. Whatever their professional titles, they had first-hand experience of the hell that is working parenthood. Like me, many had lived through separation and divorce. Married or unmarried, they’d had to care for their parents as well as their children. They had concluded – as I had – that the way we lived today was mad and unworkable. Which was why they were here. Why we were all here. But, reader, we were conned.I’ll begin as the villains of this piece so often do, by naming and shaming: Harriet Harman, who brokered the new deal for single mothers so they could know the “dignity of work” and give their children a future, but forgot to join the dots; Jack Straw, who dazzled the nation with his bright new package of joined-up policies that promised not just to support families, but to treat them as partners in the enterprise, only to swan off to the Foreign Office, after which nothing ever joined up again; Gordon Brown, who tried but failed to end child poverty; David Blunkett, who, having found lazy teachers, feckless parents and their wayward children to be the source of all social ills, went on to hector and punish them; and last but not least, Tony Blair, the man at the top, who did not just neglect to join up his own policies, but sometimes seemed to go out of his way to make sure they failed. He has not just turned parents into line managers, but vastly augmented our job description: never before have we been expected to work to such high standards or faced such an array of legal sanctions should we fail to make the grade. Never before have we been expected to do so much with our children in so little time. For we are less and less likely to be at home with them, and more and more likely to be in paid employment – which is, I think, just where Blair wants us. But he has failed to honour his side of the bargain. Though he set up systems that might have made it possible to square the circle, he has starved most of them of funds, making it impossible for them to deliver. He has also refused to heed the messages coming from his own experts, whose studies consistently show that parent support only works if it is respectful, responsive and non-punitive. Instead he has encouraged his disciples to take a fire-and-brimstone approach with failing families. His definitions of failure have become so broad that the day cannot be far off when they subsume us all.If families are worse off today than they were 10 years ago, it’s Tony Blair who has the most to answer for. So, in the spirit of fair play, let me acknowledge the ways his government has helped many families, at least in some small way. Of course you’ll know about these already. Whenever a new one is introduced, his spin machine ensures maximum coverage.The government has increased child benefit and introduced a working families’ tax credit and a childcare tax credit that has been taken up by 6m families. The 12.5 hours’ weekly free entitlement to childcare now covers 38 weeks of the year. It has opened 1,000 Sure Start Children’s Centres, all in underprivileged urban areas, offering comprehensive and integrated services to almost 1m children and their families. It has extended paid maternity leave and introduced two whole weeks of paternity leave for new fathers, and given all parents with children under six and the parents of disabled children under 18 the right to ask for flexible working hours. It has significantly increased childcare provision, largely in the private sector, and offered special assistance to lone parents wishing to return to work. In 2004 it launched a nationwide policy called Every Child Matters, which pledges to provide greatly extended parent and child services, using schools as the hub, by the end of the decade. But it has failed to create a level playing field for women at work, or men at home. Why? Because it’s afraid. Afraid of what Business Might Say. This despite the fact that the business case for work-life balance is well rehearsed. Blair could declare it a national priority, suggest to business and other concerned parties that working together to figure out a better way of integrating work and domestic responsibilities would benefit us all, and even (as research has shown) increase productivity. What nation can prosper if it sends well over half its population to work dog-tired?Instead of addressing the central contradiction of our time, Tony Blair has pretended it isn’t there. Though he’s put more pressure, much more pressure, on mothers to go into paid employment, he has done next to nothing to address the discrimination against mothers in the workplace. After nine years of lip service to equality, 20% of women still face dismissal or financial loss because of a pregnancy. If they choose to work part-time while their children are young, they will earn 40% less per hour than men doing the same job full-time. If they return to full employment after only one year in part-time work, they will still be earning 10% less 15 years on. Some losses they will never recover: despite recent tinkering, pensions are still designed for people who work full-time all their working lives, thus discriminating against those who take time off to care for their families.But what about men? Shouldn’t they shoulder some of the responsibility? Increasingly, they are. After three decades of arguing about where a woman’s place really was, a recent EOC (Equal Opportunities Commission) poll found that only 15% of women and 20% of men in this country think women should stay at home. Fathers, meanwhile, are spending more time with their children, undertaking about one-third of their care. Where mothers have jobs, one-third cite fathers as the main carer. So it should make a difference that they now have the right to ask their employers for flexible work. Sadly, it doesn’t. Since 2003, 19% of eligible mothers and 10% of eligible fathers have requested flexible hours, but employers (who have the right to say no) still view men’s requests less favourably. This reflects and reinforces the idea that women should put their children first and accept second-class status at work. It also dooms men, especially family men, to work the longest hours in Europe. And for what? According to calculations by the accountants Grant Thornton, many middle-class households can expect to see half their income disappear in taxes, either when they earn it or when they spend it. According to Ernst & Young, rises in income have not matched rising energy costs and council taxes, making Britain’s families 10% worse off than they were four years ago. So even if some can afford flexible work and the penalties it brings, reducing working hours is not an option for most of us. And still the government bangs on about parenting standards. When, I ask, are we to practise what they preach? How dare they preach at all? Their own record on childcare – I’m sorry, but this makes me angry – is a disgrace. Almost a decade after the glittering launch of its National Childcare Strategy, there is still only one registered place for every four children under eight. Most of those places are private businesses, and half of all nurseries fail. As the government’s own inspectors have found, most existing nurseries offer substandard care.Childcare costs continue to be prohibitive. The Daycare Trust’s 2005 survey found that the typical cost of a full-time place with a childminder was £127 a week, or over £6,600 a year. A full-time nursery place for a child under two was £141 a week in England, or £7,300 annually. In some parts of the country it was £18,000. This may explain why 42% of lone parents actively seeking work say the scarcity or cost of childcare prevents them getting a job.Though Gordon Brown has seemed to offer generous support to Sure Start (integrated child centres), the people on the ground say it doesn’t begin to cover its expansion costs. There are, in addition, concerns about his emphasis on urban areas, which means there is very little help on offer for the also deserving rural poor. And though Brown’s much-vaunted tax credits have made a real difference for many lower-income families, they are so complicated and so hard to calculate, even the Treasury seems to have trouble understanding how they work. There have been serious cockups, with the Treasury’s computers overpaying almost 2m families an average of £1,000 in tax credits, then, without prior notice, clawing the money back, forcing many of those families to live on food parcels. The Child Support Agency (CSA), founded under Thatcher to make nonresident fathers pay for their children’s support, was this year announced to be “under review” for the third time in its 13-year existence, having clocked up £3.4 billion in unrecovered payments. We are now assured it is to be scrapped and replaced with a more “streamlined” body. But yet again, the details are still to be disclosed.Which brings us to the D-word – yet another abject failure. Though officially committed to shared parenting after separation and divorce, and fully aware that our family court system is a disaster – exacerbating conflicts between parents, creating conflicts where none existed, and often permanently excluding one parent, generally the father, for reasons anybody who was not a judge or a family court welfare officer would call capricious – the government has changed nothing. It has commissioned a few reports and pilot projects and left it at that. Meanwhile, families continue to travel through this discredited system at the rate of 80,000 a year. If we calculate that the average family includes two children, we can see that family courts affect the lives of a quarter of a million men, women and children annually, and often adversely. Not a very good deal, then, this family business. In a poll of over 2,000 adults last October, the EOC found that nearly three out of five thought it was harder for working women to balance work and family life than 30 years ago. Over half of men aged 35-44 thought it was harder for men. This may explain why our birth rate is falling. At 1.8 per woman, it is not at its lowest point ever, and is by no means the lowest in Europe (that honour goes to Germany, where only 700,000 babies were born last year, in a population of around 80m), but is well below replacement rate. Half a century ago, only 10% of women reached the end of their fertile lives without bearing children. Now that has doubled. It is sure to rise.A recent Guardian/ICM poll found that 64% of men and 51% of women thought that it was more important for women to “enjoy themselves” than to have children. Only 32% said bringing up children was more important than material success. Sixty-one per cent of men and women said that living comfortably was more important than having children. When asked what put them off the idea of having children, 63% cited the career demands and the difficulty of balancing these with family life, and 54% cited the high and rising costs. These views are in line with those measured in other European countries with declining birth rates. Wherever it is hard for parents to combine work and family, fewer and fewer even want to try.But even the men and women who decide to forgo families may find themselves obliged to care for their parents. And if they don’t? For one thing, they should give up all hope of inheriting the family home. The government will want it sold to pay for the substandard care it will provide in their stead. The government’s record on elder-care is even worse than it is on childcare. But if you asked me where its greatest failure is, I would have to say education.I say this even though two of my children went through the system during the 1980s and 90s, and were not (in my view) well served by the Tories. But I have two younger children who started school around the same time Blair came into office. And I teach at Warwick University, where for 10 years now I have been asked to bend and twist as the government exercises its will from on high. I see the same patterns in my children’s schools. Blair inherited a system fraught with problems, and his policies have exacerbated all of them, first by bombarding teachers at every level of the system with targets that do not take into account what we actually do, then by forcing us to assess our students and ourselves by quality-assurance standards that were designed – and I mean it literally this time – for factories. If we fail to fashion ourselves into the right sort of worker, turning out the right sort of product, we are severely punished.But at least I’m never asked to turn around and punish my students’ parents. This is what teachers at primary and secondary level are now expected to do. It began in the late 1990s with home-school contracts. Before long, parents were being prosecuted and even jailed for failing to stop their children playing truant. Under the new education bill, parents who fail to keep children excluded for five days or less, under lock and key at home, even if they are single and in employment, will face the same sanctions.This government has vastly expanded its repertoire of punishments for parents it deems to be substandard. It has at the same time convinced people that such parents must be dealt with harshly because they refused earlier offers of help. In fact, and contrary to the spin generated by an endless parade of initiatives, pilots and taskforces, there are huge swathes of the country where there is no help whatsover for parents struggling with difficult or distressed children.Here we come to new Labour’s strangest and most fatal flaw: it trashes its own programmes. By this I mean it sets up or underwrites parent-support organisations which it presents to the nation at glitzy launches, then forgets. Or if it doesn’t forget them, it grossly underfunds them, so all they can do is operate a modest website. Let me describe a few of these for you. Since its inception seven years ago, the government-funded National Family and Parenting Institute (NFPI) has been working hard to gather together all academics, professionals, and activists concerned with family policy to discuss best practice. It has fostered and disseminated research, so anything the government does, it can do on the basis of solid evidence. It has also engaged with parents, reflecting their views back to government, and arguing for policies that meet parents’ needs. During the same period, the EOC has campaigned tirelessly for an end to the pay gap, mothers’ and fathers’ rights at home as well as in the workplace, and pension reform.
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BRITISH UNIVERSITY STUDENTS DEMAND TO BE TAUGHT
Final year history undergraduates at the University of Bristol have complained after learning that they will have only two hours of lecture time a week. The students who paid 1,200 pounds each in tuition fees claim that they are not getting value for money as each class they attend will cost the equivalent of 20 pounds an hour.
With students who started courses this year now paying fees of 3,000 pounds, universities are bracing themselves for similar complaints from students and parents, who want to see the extra fee income spent on increased contact time with lecturers and smaller class sizes.
Huge variations in the number of teaching hours of academics in different disciplines were revealed in a report last week by the Higher Education Policy Institute. Students in medicine and dentistry have the highest number of contact hours at 21.4 hours a week, but teaching time is as low as eight hours a week in subjects such as history and philosophical studies.
The University of Bristol claims its new history timetable has been designed to allow time for "independent learning" and says students should be doing independent research rather than sitting in class. But Steven Hayes, 20, from Birmingham, said: "When I saw the two hours on my timetable I was shocked. It really does make one wonder whether to commute for those two hours a week." Another student told the university's newspaper Epigram: "I thought I was paying to be educated by leading academics, not for a library membership and a reading list."
When the 100 students applied for the history degree course they were told there would be a minimum of six hours a week tuition in the final year. They found out that had been reduced by two-thirds when they were handed their timetables last month. In the first two years they received between seven and nine hours of class time but the third year was designated as being "research led".
Teachers at the department claim the changes were made after "considerable consideration with students, staff and leading historians from other universities". Dr Brendan Smith, head of history, said: "The new syllabus has been introduced at a time when pressures on resources are incredible and we have to make decisions about which forms of teaching will be most stimulating and effective."
Students say they chose the University of Bristol because it offered more structured teaching than Oxford or Cambridge.
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U.K.: Exams watchdogs bid to remove World Wars from curriculum sparks outrage
Exams watchdogs have been accused of drawing up plans to allow schools to drop the two world wars from history lessons. They want teachers to cut back on world history in a drive to improve pupils' performance in the three Rs. But Government exams chiefs stood accused yesterday of indicating to schools they will be allowed to ditch the first and second world wars altogether.
The proposal from the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, which emerged just three days before Remembrance Sunday, provoked furious and widespread condemnation from war veterans, historians and politicians from all parties. Education Secretary Alan Johnson said the plan must be "stamped on" immediately. He said he had heard reports that the QCA intended to allow teachers to drop the wars from the syllabus. He went on: "If it is an idea anywhere - and I have heard the same rumours - it needs to be squashed pretty quickly and I will make sure I do that."
However the Government itself faced criticism for ordering the secondary school curriculum to be slimmed down in the first place. Ministers had asked the QCA to trim the content of crucial subjects to give teachers more time to run catch-up classes for pupils still lacking basic skills. Planned changes for history involve specifically highlighting the British Empire to try to reverse years of neglect of the subject. But guidance on other British, European and world events would be slashed.
According to drafts produced earlier this year, studies on six compulsory periods of time would be replaced with an emphasis on themes running throughout time. Pupils currently study mandatory units including one headed "The World after 1900", which covers World War I, World War II, the Holocaust, the Cold War and the Vietnam War. But the planned guidance shown to some schools failed to specifically mention the world wars. One teacher said: "It is very British-centric. It does not mention world and European history at all."
In designing the shake-up of lessons for 11 to 14-year-olds, the QCA is acting on ministers' concerns that teachers are not left enough time to ensure pupils are mastering English and maths. The QCA has previously said that schools are concentrating too much on teaching about "Hitler and Henry" and should broaden their pupils' knowledge in history.
But now Mr Johnson has moved to slap down the QCA for apparently going too far. Asked about the reports at a Westminster lunch, he said: "I've heard the same thing and if this is an idea that the QCA are developing or anyone else we should make sure that it is stamped on very quickly. "We need to have the two 20th century world wars as part of our curriculum. "We need it not just because we are wearing poppies and coming up to Remembrance Sunday and they need to know what they are remembering, which I think is crucial and very important. "But I think also because it is a crucial part of where we are now...if you think of how the European Union developed out of the conflict of two world wars of the 20th century and it is so relevant to everything that we do in this country now. "If it is an idea anywhere - and I have heard the same rumours - it needs to be squashed pretty quickly and I will make sure I do that."
However veterans' groups expressed dismay and outrage that dropping the two world wars from compulsory studies was even being considered. Bill Bond, founder of the Battle of Britain Historical Society, said: "This is really very, very sad and also very dangerous. You can't learn from mistakes if you don't know about them. "If young people are not taught about mistakes that were made these mistakes will get made again. For example, the rise of fascism. Young people may not even know what the word means. "History is an easy target when it comes to cutting down but this is nonsense. We should be teaching the basics as a matter of course but history with it."
The QCA last night denied planning to drop the world wars from the curriculum. In a statement, it said: "The QCA has not given advice to the Secretary of State on this matter. "The two world wars are a significant part of the curriculum in history and they will always be an important part of classroom teaching. There are no plans to change this. It appears some people have been misinformed." A spokesman added: "The world wars will be in there but it is premature to say exactly where in programmes of study." New draft syllabuses are due out early next year.
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Feeling under the weather? Be careful who you tell. Health Service Journal (Nov 2) reports on plans by the Scottish Executive to quarantine anyone with a serious infectious disease in their own home. A consultation document also proposes that, under revamped public health laws, people could be compelled to undergo examination or treatment against their will.
Tim Brett, the director of Health Protection Scotland, says that the measures would help in a flu pandemic. “I’m sure the vast majority of people would accept any such requirement.” The plans recognise the significant human rights issues raised by such measures but Scotland’s Chief Medical Officer says that it is time public health laws were updated. They date from 1897.
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"Persistent standing" incorrect
British weirdness extends even to football
A club in trouble needs all the backing it can get from its own supporters. So, what does West Ham do? It punishes its fans for standing up too much. Last week, 20 season ticket holders received letters from the club saying: `You have ignored repeated requests to remain seated and are therefore placing the club in jeopardy of losing capacity. As a result you are banned from attending Upton Park for two matches.' Don't you just love traditional cockney hospitality?
There are a lot of stupid, petty regulations at football these days. There's a law, for example, that prohibits spectators from drinking alcohol within sight of the pitch. Why? Well, God knows what might happen? A tantalising glimpse of luscious green turf, the heady scent of freshly mown grass.it's enough to drive an Englishman stark raving bonkers. There are all sorts of silly edicts about what you're not allowed to take through the turnstiles - I remember a blind caller to Danny Baker's radio phone-in show recounting how his white stick had been confiscated by stewards.
But the ban on persistent standing at football match has got to be one of the most asinine rules ever invented. The Football Licensing Authority says that persistent standing is a health and safety hazard. Run that past me again? I can see how setting off fireworks or hurling missiles might be dangerous. But persistent standing? It's got to be one of the most unthreatening, innocuous activities known to mankind. Persistent standing isn't considered hazardous in any other social context. People persistently stand all the time - at bus stops, on railway platforms, in banks, at supermarket checkouts - and nobody bats an eyelid. But stand up at a Premiership football match and you're a hooligan. Ridiculous! Persistent standing isn't even proscribed under Sharia law - a measure of how draconian this ban is.
The Football Licensing Authority claims that persistent standing could lead to fans toppling like dominoes or else falling off the upper tier of a football stand. Have these things ever happened? No. How many football spectators have been killed our seriously injured as a result of persistent standing in all-seater stadiums? None. `What about Hillsborough?' say the football authorities. It's a tired old refrain. Invoking Hillsborough is not so much an argument as a dishonest method of closing down any debate about standing. But did anyone die at Hillsborough because of persistent standing? No. The overcrowding which led to 96 Liverpool fans been crushed to death was caused by what Lord Justice Taylor's official report described as the `failure of police control'.
West Ham fans have waged a protracted battle with the club over their right to stand during games. A group of enterprising fans have set up the Stand Up Sit Down campaign which is calling for `safe standing' sections at football grounds. Now, I'm all in favour of fans standing up if that's how they prefer to follow their team. And yes, dishing out bans for persistent standing is a very shabby way to treat your own season ticket holders. But I'm not sure I want licensed standing sections either.
Stand Up Sit Down argue that enforced seating is responsible for the muted atmosphere at many Premiership stadiums. Excuse the pun but I don't think their argument stands up. The minority of fans who prefer to stand up are usually the ones making all the noise anyway. Give them their own safe standing enclosures and they'll still be vocal but it doesn't follow that everyone else will join in. Enforced seating is just one of a number of factors that have contributed to the deathly hush at football grounds. The restrictions on alcohol consumption, the rules governing obscene chanting, the piped music blasting out over PA systems: these measures have all contributed to the pacification of football crowds.
What I object to isn't so much being forced to sit down but no longer being free to support my team as I see fit. It's not just enforced seating; it's the broader regimentation of fan conduct that's the problem. I don't want official permission to stand any more than I want to be forced to sit down. But nor do I want a raft of rules circumscribing drinking, chanting, swearing, and smoking. And it's the unshackling of fans from all these killjoy constraints that we should be standing up for.
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Forget race, we have prejudices you haven't dreamt of
Roland White attended a diversity training class that revealed how fed up we are becoming with enforced cultural sensitivity
In our modern multiracial world, it is no picnic being called Mr White. People do tend to make such assumptions. Which is why I am sitting in a rather dreary hotel in the Midlands, staring at a flip chart and waiting to receive my very first dose of diversity training.
The first thing you notice is that we’re not particularly diverse. My classmates all work for an NHS team that looks after drug addicts. There are 14 white people, and just one black woman. Our instructor is also a white male, Laurence Harvey. He is certainly not the stereotypical diversity trainer. A former salesman and drummer in a small-time rock band, he became interested in the world of equality and diversity while working as a police constable in Northampton. But while he might be an unusual teacher, I suspect that we are a very typical class. All of us have been sent here by our employers, and very few of us look grateful.
“What do you expect from today’s course?” asks Harvey brightly. “Why did you come here?” “Because we’ve been told we have to,” says one woman with brutal honesty. A male colleague is even more frank. He is bald and stocky, and looks — by his own description – like a thug. “I’ve been on lots of these before,” he says, tucking a pencil behind his ear, “and I’m interested to see which racial group is fashionably more equal these days.”
Later in the morning we will be asked to tick off our own prejudices from a list of 36 possible targets. These include men with ginger hair, women with tattoos, Germans on holiday and caravan drivers. If you are a ginger-haired German on a caravanning holiday this might be an uncomfortable moment. But there is something missing. Because I’d bet that right at the top of many people’s list of dislikes is diversity training itself.
We are all supposed to be embracing diversity, but the evidence suggests we’re not embracing it all that warmly. According to the Migrationwatch pressure group, around 726,000 immigrants arrived in London in the 10 years up to 2005. In response, 606,000 Londoners seem to have packed up and moved to other parts of the country. We have an example right here on our course. She is a secretary who arrived in the Midlands three years ago from north London. “I was beginning to feel that I was the foreigner,” she says.
“I couldn’t actually say that I was proud to be English because that wasn’t acceptable.” Some people go even further. According to figures released last week, nearly 200,000 Britons emigrated last year.
The Orwellian attitude adopted by parts of the race relations industry has not helped. When Oona King wanted to adopt a child, a social worker queried her application form. The former Labour MP had described herself as “mixed race”. The white social worker, after taking advice from a black colleague, insisted the correct term was now “dual heritage”.
Just last week two workers on the London Underground were hauled before a court — and quickly cleared — over an incident involving a bag of black jelly babies. Station manager Victor Cooney told the court: “One time I gave him a bag of jelly babies and he called me a racist because there were too many black ones in the bag.”
It was also reported last week that Kirklees council in West Yorkshire has just reversed a long-term equality policy that — among other things — banned the phrase “political correctness”. Council leader Robert Light explained: “Nowadays we all live in a diverse community and we realise that this sort of simplistic approach belittles the concept of equality.”
It’s a change that is long overdue, especially in the world of diversity training. Under the old-fashioned approach, people — usually white people — were often forced to role play so that they could explore the depths of their supposed bigotry. “On a previous course I was asked how I wanted my coffee,” says my stocky male classmate. “When I said black I was told that was not acceptable and I should have asked for coffee without milk.” On another course he listened resentfully as a black tutor explained how white people could never truly understand discrimination.
Perhaps the most controversial diversity specialist is an American called Jane Elliott, who divides her classes into “blue-eyed” and “brown-eyed”. The brown-eyed classmates then get to mock their blue-eyed workmates. According to Elliott, this gives them a feeling of what it is like to be black. Elliott, by the way, is white.
Critics of this approach say it creates bitterness and resentment. They also insist that it doesn’t work. In a report published in September, Harvard professor Frank Dobbin said diversity training simply wasn’t worth the money. “For the past 40 years companies have tried to increase diversity, spending millions of dollars without actually stopping to determine whether or not their efforts have been worth it. Certainly in the case of diversity training the answer is no.”
Yet it’s still big business. It was recently reported that Scotland Yard alone had spent £450m on equality and diversity in the past three years. And in that time, race discrimination claims have risen by 24%.
Harvey and his company, Actuate Learning and Development, have a completely different approach. In fact he hardly mentions race at all. Don’t look at people as members of any racial group, he advises, but approach them as individuals. “Previous courses have told people about taking their shoes off when visiting a Muslim’s house,” he says. “The trouble is, not all Muslims will ask you to take off your shoes. On the other hand, I might ask you to remove your shoes if I have a new carpet put in. It’s just a question of common sense.”
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Prime suspect
Lifelong Labour supporter Maureen Freely has been at the thick of family policy for a decade as an author, academic and political commentator — and as a mother of four. But she can take no more. The government, she argues, has killed family life. And all the evidence points to Tony Blair being the main culprit
Let me begin with a confession. For the past 10 years I have led a double life. The first was with my family, my colleagues, my students, my neighbours and my friends. The second I spent with those who set the rules by which we live. These are the politicians, civil servants, academics and activists who gathered together after new Labour’s landslide victory to transform family policy. Their brief was to formalise the relationship between government and parents: in bald terms, to turn parents into a new breed of line managers. For if families were right to expect the government to provide proper public services, then the government was right to expect families to turn out proper children. And if they didn’t, well, it was only right that the government step in to sort them out.Did I ever buy this? No. I had my doubts from the beginning. I feared that the people at the top were interested in families only because they saw in them a source of cheap labour. No, let me correct that. A source of unpaid labour. Slave labour. They weren’t very happy with these substandard children we were producing: we were now to be improved. As alarmed as I was by that prospect, I was more alarmed by the factory imagery in which it was couched. Taken literally, the future of Blair’s and Straw’s and Blunkett’s dreams was an assembly line, along which we, the parent line managers, would impose company discipline to produce the highest-quality product at the lowest possible cost.For 10 years, I tried hard to convince myself it was wrong to read too much into a metaphor. This couldn’t be what they really meant. Committed Labourite that I was, I had to believe they were castigating parents in the press so they could fob off the Daily Mail. But it wasn’t just blind faith that lulled me. At the conferences, seminars and panel discussions I attended, the talk was very different. Here I found many others who lived double lives like mine. Whatever their professional titles, they had first-hand experience of the hell that is working parenthood. Like me, many had lived through separation and divorce. Married or unmarried, they’d had to care for their parents as well as their children. They had concluded – as I had – that the way we lived today was mad and unworkable. Which was why they were here. Why we were all here. But, reader, we were conned.I’ll begin as the villains of this piece so often do, by naming and shaming: Harriet Harman, who brokered the new deal for single mothers so they could know the “dignity of work” and give their children a future, but forgot to join the dots; Jack Straw, who dazzled the nation with his bright new package of joined-up policies that promised not just to support families, but to treat them as partners in the enterprise, only to swan off to the Foreign Office, after which nothing ever joined up again; Gordon Brown, who tried but failed to end child poverty; David Blunkett, who, having found lazy teachers, feckless parents and their wayward children to be the source of all social ills, went on to hector and punish them; and last but not least, Tony Blair, the man at the top, who did not just neglect to join up his own policies, but sometimes seemed to go out of his way to make sure they failed. He has not just turned parents into line managers, but vastly augmented our job description: never before have we been expected to work to such high standards or faced such an array of legal sanctions should we fail to make the grade. Never before have we been expected to do so much with our children in so little time. For we are less and less likely to be at home with them, and more and more likely to be in paid employment – which is, I think, just where Blair wants us. But he has failed to honour his side of the bargain. Though he set up systems that might have made it possible to square the circle, he has starved most of them of funds, making it impossible for them to deliver. He has also refused to heed the messages coming from his own experts, whose studies consistently show that parent support only works if it is respectful, responsive and non-punitive. Instead he has encouraged his disciples to take a fire-and-brimstone approach with failing families. His definitions of failure have become so broad that the day cannot be far off when they subsume us all.If families are worse off today than they were 10 years ago, it’s Tony Blair who has the most to answer for. So, in the spirit of fair play, let me acknowledge the ways his government has helped many families, at least in some small way. Of course you’ll know about these already. Whenever a new one is introduced, his spin machine ensures maximum coverage.The government has increased child benefit and introduced a working families’ tax credit and a childcare tax credit that has been taken up by 6m families. The 12.5 hours’ weekly free entitlement to childcare now covers 38 weeks of the year. It has opened 1,000 Sure Start Children’s Centres, all in underprivileged urban areas, offering comprehensive and integrated services to almost 1m children and their families. It has extended paid maternity leave and introduced two whole weeks of paternity leave for new fathers, and given all parents with children under six and the parents of disabled children under 18 the right to ask for flexible working hours. It has significantly increased childcare provision, largely in the private sector, and offered special assistance to lone parents wishing to return to work. In 2004 it launched a nationwide policy called Every Child Matters, which pledges to provide greatly extended parent and child services, using schools as the hub, by the end of the decade. But it has failed to create a level playing field for women at work, or men at home. Why? Because it’s afraid. Afraid of what Business Might Say. This despite the fact that the business case for work-life balance is well rehearsed. Blair could declare it a national priority, suggest to business and other concerned parties that working together to figure out a better way of integrating work and domestic responsibilities would benefit us all, and even (as research has shown) increase productivity. What nation can prosper if it sends well over half its population to work dog-tired?Instead of addressing the central contradiction of our time, Tony Blair has pretended it isn’t there. Though he’s put more pressure, much more pressure, on mothers to go into paid employment, he has done next to nothing to address the discrimination against mothers in the workplace. After nine years of lip service to equality, 20% of women still face dismissal or financial loss because of a pregnancy. If they choose to work part-time while their children are young, they will earn 40% less per hour than men doing the same job full-time. If they return to full employment after only one year in part-time work, they will still be earning 10% less 15 years on. Some losses they will never recover: despite recent tinkering, pensions are still designed for people who work full-time all their working lives, thus discriminating against those who take time off to care for their families.But what about men? Shouldn’t they shoulder some of the responsibility? Increasingly, they are. After three decades of arguing about where a woman’s place really was, a recent EOC (Equal Opportunities Commission) poll found that only 15% of women and 20% of men in this country think women should stay at home. Fathers, meanwhile, are spending more time with their children, undertaking about one-third of their care. Where mothers have jobs, one-third cite fathers as the main carer. So it should make a difference that they now have the right to ask their employers for flexible work. Sadly, it doesn’t. Since 2003, 19% of eligible mothers and 10% of eligible fathers have requested flexible hours, but employers (who have the right to say no) still view men’s requests less favourably. This reflects and reinforces the idea that women should put their children first and accept second-class status at work. It also dooms men, especially family men, to work the longest hours in Europe. And for what? According to calculations by the accountants Grant Thornton, many middle-class households can expect to see half their income disappear in taxes, either when they earn it or when they spend it. According to Ernst & Young, rises in income have not matched rising energy costs and council taxes, making Britain’s families 10% worse off than they were four years ago. So even if some can afford flexible work and the penalties it brings, reducing working hours is not an option for most of us. And still the government bangs on about parenting standards. When, I ask, are we to practise what they preach? How dare they preach at all? Their own record on childcare – I’m sorry, but this makes me angry – is a disgrace. Almost a decade after the glittering launch of its National Childcare Strategy, there is still only one registered place for every four children under eight. Most of those places are private businesses, and half of all nurseries fail. As the government’s own inspectors have found, most existing nurseries offer substandard care.Childcare costs continue to be prohibitive. The Daycare Trust’s 2005 survey found that the typical cost of a full-time place with a childminder was £127 a week, or over £6,600 a year. A full-time nursery place for a child under two was £141 a week in England, or £7,300 annually. In some parts of the country it was £18,000. This may explain why 42% of lone parents actively seeking work say the scarcity or cost of childcare prevents them getting a job.Though Gordon Brown has seemed to offer generous support to Sure Start (integrated child centres), the people on the ground say it doesn’t begin to cover its expansion costs. There are, in addition, concerns about his emphasis on urban areas, which means there is very little help on offer for the also deserving rural poor. And though Brown’s much-vaunted tax credits have made a real difference for many lower-income families, they are so complicated and so hard to calculate, even the Treasury seems to have trouble understanding how they work. There have been serious cockups, with the Treasury’s computers overpaying almost 2m families an average of £1,000 in tax credits, then, without prior notice, clawing the money back, forcing many of those families to live on food parcels. The Child Support Agency (CSA), founded under Thatcher to make nonresident fathers pay for their children’s support, was this year announced to be “under review” for the third time in its 13-year existence, having clocked up £3.4 billion in unrecovered payments. We are now assured it is to be scrapped and replaced with a more “streamlined” body. But yet again, the details are still to be disclosed.Which brings us to the D-word – yet another abject failure. Though officially committed to shared parenting after separation and divorce, and fully aware that our family court system is a disaster – exacerbating conflicts between parents, creating conflicts where none existed, and often permanently excluding one parent, generally the father, for reasons anybody who was not a judge or a family court welfare officer would call capricious – the government has changed nothing. It has commissioned a few reports and pilot projects and left it at that. Meanwhile, families continue to travel through this discredited system at the rate of 80,000 a year. If we calculate that the average family includes two children, we can see that family courts affect the lives of a quarter of a million men, women and children annually, and often adversely. Not a very good deal, then, this family business. In a poll of over 2,000 adults last October, the EOC found that nearly three out of five thought it was harder for working women to balance work and family life than 30 years ago. Over half of men aged 35-44 thought it was harder for men. This may explain why our birth rate is falling. At 1.8 per woman, it is not at its lowest point ever, and is by no means the lowest in Europe (that honour goes to Germany, where only 700,000 babies were born last year, in a population of around 80m), but is well below replacement rate. Half a century ago, only 10% of women reached the end of their fertile lives without bearing children. Now that has doubled. It is sure to rise.A recent Guardian/ICM poll found that 64% of men and 51% of women thought that it was more important for women to “enjoy themselves” than to have children. Only 32% said bringing up children was more important than material success. Sixty-one per cent of men and women said that living comfortably was more important than having children. When asked what put them off the idea of having children, 63% cited the career demands and the difficulty of balancing these with family life, and 54% cited the high and rising costs. These views are in line with those measured in other European countries with declining birth rates. Wherever it is hard for parents to combine work and family, fewer and fewer even want to try.But even the men and women who decide to forgo families may find themselves obliged to care for their parents. And if they don’t? For one thing, they should give up all hope of inheriting the family home. The government will want it sold to pay for the substandard care it will provide in their stead. The government’s record on elder-care is even worse than it is on childcare. But if you asked me where its greatest failure is, I would have to say education.I say this even though two of my children went through the system during the 1980s and 90s, and were not (in my view) well served by the Tories. But I have two younger children who started school around the same time Blair came into office. And I teach at Warwick University, where for 10 years now I have been asked to bend and twist as the government exercises its will from on high. I see the same patterns in my children’s schools. Blair inherited a system fraught with problems, and his policies have exacerbated all of them, first by bombarding teachers at every level of the system with targets that do not take into account what we actually do, then by forcing us to assess our students and ourselves by quality-assurance standards that were designed – and I mean it literally this time – for factories. If we fail to fashion ourselves into the right sort of worker, turning out the right sort of product, we are severely punished.But at least I’m never asked to turn around and punish my students’ parents. This is what teachers at primary and secondary level are now expected to do. It began in the late 1990s with home-school contracts. Before long, parents were being prosecuted and even jailed for failing to stop their children playing truant. Under the new education bill, parents who fail to keep children excluded for five days or less, under lock and key at home, even if they are single and in employment, will face the same sanctions.This government has vastly expanded its repertoire of punishments for parents it deems to be substandard. It has at the same time convinced people that such parents must be dealt with harshly because they refused earlier offers of help. In fact, and contrary to the spin generated by an endless parade of initiatives, pilots and taskforces, there are huge swathes of the country where there is no help whatsover for parents struggling with difficult or distressed children.Here we come to new Labour’s strangest and most fatal flaw: it trashes its own programmes. By this I mean it sets up or underwrites parent-support organisations which it presents to the nation at glitzy launches, then forgets. Or if it doesn’t forget them, it grossly underfunds them, so all they can do is operate a modest website. Let me describe a few of these for you. Since its inception seven years ago, the government-funded National Family and Parenting Institute (NFPI) has been working hard to gather together all academics, professionals, and activists concerned with family policy to discuss best practice. It has fostered and disseminated research, so anything the government does, it can do on the basis of solid evidence. It has also engaged with parents, reflecting their views back to government, and arguing for policies that meet parents’ needs. During the same period, the EOC has campaigned tirelessly for an end to the pay gap, mothers’ and fathers’ rights at home as well as in the workplace, and pension reform.
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BRITISH UNIVERSITY STUDENTS DEMAND TO BE TAUGHT
Final year history undergraduates at the University of Bristol have complained after learning that they will have only two hours of lecture time a week. The students who paid 1,200 pounds each in tuition fees claim that they are not getting value for money as each class they attend will cost the equivalent of 20 pounds an hour.
With students who started courses this year now paying fees of 3,000 pounds, universities are bracing themselves for similar complaints from students and parents, who want to see the extra fee income spent on increased contact time with lecturers and smaller class sizes.
Huge variations in the number of teaching hours of academics in different disciplines were revealed in a report last week by the Higher Education Policy Institute. Students in medicine and dentistry have the highest number of contact hours at 21.4 hours a week, but teaching time is as low as eight hours a week in subjects such as history and philosophical studies.
The University of Bristol claims its new history timetable has been designed to allow time for "independent learning" and says students should be doing independent research rather than sitting in class. But Steven Hayes, 20, from Birmingham, said: "When I saw the two hours on my timetable I was shocked. It really does make one wonder whether to commute for those two hours a week." Another student told the university's newspaper Epigram: "I thought I was paying to be educated by leading academics, not for a library membership and a reading list."
When the 100 students applied for the history degree course they were told there would be a minimum of six hours a week tuition in the final year. They found out that had been reduced by two-thirds when they were handed their timetables last month. In the first two years they received between seven and nine hours of class time but the third year was designated as being "research led".
Teachers at the department claim the changes were made after "considerable consideration with students, staff and leading historians from other universities". Dr Brendan Smith, head of history, said: "The new syllabus has been introduced at a time when pressures on resources are incredible and we have to make decisions about which forms of teaching will be most stimulating and effective."
Students say they chose the University of Bristol because it offered more structured teaching than Oxford or Cambridge.
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U.K.: Exams watchdogs bid to remove World Wars from curriculum sparks outrage
Exams watchdogs have been accused of drawing up plans to allow schools to drop the two world wars from history lessons. They want teachers to cut back on world history in a drive to improve pupils' performance in the three Rs. But Government exams chiefs stood accused yesterday of indicating to schools they will be allowed to ditch the first and second world wars altogether.
The proposal from the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, which emerged just three days before Remembrance Sunday, provoked furious and widespread condemnation from war veterans, historians and politicians from all parties. Education Secretary Alan Johnson said the plan must be "stamped on" immediately. He said he had heard reports that the QCA intended to allow teachers to drop the wars from the syllabus. He went on: "If it is an idea anywhere - and I have heard the same rumours - it needs to be squashed pretty quickly and I will make sure I do that."
However the Government itself faced criticism for ordering the secondary school curriculum to be slimmed down in the first place. Ministers had asked the QCA to trim the content of crucial subjects to give teachers more time to run catch-up classes for pupils still lacking basic skills. Planned changes for history involve specifically highlighting the British Empire to try to reverse years of neglect of the subject. But guidance on other British, European and world events would be slashed.
According to drafts produced earlier this year, studies on six compulsory periods of time would be replaced with an emphasis on themes running throughout time. Pupils currently study mandatory units including one headed "The World after 1900", which covers World War I, World War II, the Holocaust, the Cold War and the Vietnam War. But the planned guidance shown to some schools failed to specifically mention the world wars. One teacher said: "It is very British-centric. It does not mention world and European history at all."
In designing the shake-up of lessons for 11 to 14-year-olds, the QCA is acting on ministers' concerns that teachers are not left enough time to ensure pupils are mastering English and maths. The QCA has previously said that schools are concentrating too much on teaching about "Hitler and Henry" and should broaden their pupils' knowledge in history.
But now Mr Johnson has moved to slap down the QCA for apparently going too far. Asked about the reports at a Westminster lunch, he said: "I've heard the same thing and if this is an idea that the QCA are developing or anyone else we should make sure that it is stamped on very quickly. "We need to have the two 20th century world wars as part of our curriculum. "We need it not just because we are wearing poppies and coming up to Remembrance Sunday and they need to know what they are remembering, which I think is crucial and very important. "But I think also because it is a crucial part of where we are now...if you think of how the European Union developed out of the conflict of two world wars of the 20th century and it is so relevant to everything that we do in this country now. "If it is an idea anywhere - and I have heard the same rumours - it needs to be squashed pretty quickly and I will make sure I do that."
However veterans' groups expressed dismay and outrage that dropping the two world wars from compulsory studies was even being considered. Bill Bond, founder of the Battle of Britain Historical Society, said: "This is really very, very sad and also very dangerous. You can't learn from mistakes if you don't know about them. "If young people are not taught about mistakes that were made these mistakes will get made again. For example, the rise of fascism. Young people may not even know what the word means. "History is an easy target when it comes to cutting down but this is nonsense. We should be teaching the basics as a matter of course but history with it."
The QCA last night denied planning to drop the world wars from the curriculum. In a statement, it said: "The QCA has not given advice to the Secretary of State on this matter. "The two world wars are a significant part of the curriculum in history and they will always be an important part of classroom teaching. There are no plans to change this. It appears some people have been misinformed." A spokesman added: "The world wars will be in there but it is premature to say exactly where in programmes of study." New draft syllabuses are due out early next year.
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Friday, November 10, 2006
Ocean Circulation: New evidence (Yes), slowdown (No)
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Free church parking banned as 'discriminatory'
A thin excuse for anti-Christian attitudes. They could have extended free parking to the 1% who are of other faiths if discrimination was the concern
A city council is to impose new car parking charges for Sunday morning church services so they are not 'discriminatory to other faiths and religious praying days'. Plymouth City Council had allowed free parking in some car parks for church-goers, but now has brought in a œ1-an-hour charge so they do not offend other faiths. The move has angered church groups in the city, and a protest letter has been sent to the authority.
A council parking representative replied, explaining that free parking would be discriminatory. "The basis of your representation was rejected on the grounds that the current free parking on a Sunday morning is discriminatory to other faiths and religious praying days," they said. "Dispensation is not given to other religions."
Church regular Mary Hooker, 66, said: "It is rather unforgiving. I have been going to church for 50 years and I have never had to pay."
The 2001 census survey revealed that the combined total of Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and Sikhs in Plymouth amounted to 1.1 per cent of the population. The city has one Mosque which serves all of the Muslim population, estimated to be around 800, Plymouth also has one Buddhist centre, serving about 470 people, and one Synagogue for nearly 200 practising Jews in the community. There are 150 Christian churches in the city.
The charges are part of a range of changes to car parking tolls across the city. The income from all of the Sunday charging proposals will be approximately 144,000 pounds.
The rector of Plymouth's biggest church, St Andrew's, has said that the authority's reasoning "betrays a total lack of understanding of the multi-faith agenda and serves only to divide communities." The Rev Nick McKinnel said: "It does seem extraordinary to invoke other faiths as a reason to charge those who go to church."
Source
British Left attacks charities
They want everybody to be dependant on the government
Next week, the new Charities' Bill will finish its passage through Parliament. It should become law before the end of the year. In spite of being billed as "the biggest review of charity legislation in the past 400 years", it has generated very little comment. This is surprising, because the Bill will vastly increase the power of the Charities' Commission to dissolve charities, confiscate their endowments and assets, and give them to what the Commission considers a more genuinely "charitable" cause.
That threat is alarming and real. It used to be taken for granted that organisations devoted to education, to religion, or to the relief of poverty, were automatically providing a "public benefit". The new legislation dissolves that assumption. Even more worryingly, it also leaves it up to the Charities Commission to decide what constitutes a "public benefit". There is no guidance in the legislation on how that slippery notion should be defined. Ministers and members of the Commission have referred to "case law", but there is almost none, precisely because, for the last 400 years, there has been so firm a consensus that education, religion and the relief of poverty constitute public benefits.
It means that the Commission will be able to use whatever definition of "public benefit" it likes. The motive behind redefining that notion seems to have been the desire to ensure that charities benefit all the public, not just some small section of it. That is why, for instance, schools and hospitals that charge fees are being threatened with the withdrawal of their charitable status: they are said only to benefit people who can afford to pay, and not the whole of the British public.
In fact, every charity benefits a portion of the population rather than all of it: charities for disabled people benefit those who are disabled; hospital charities benefit sick people; charities for women benefit women rather than men. and so on. Charities for starving farmers in the Third World do not benefit the "public" in this country at all. And as for charities for animals, they do not benefit people of any description, unless you count the pleasure some people get from knowing that animals are being cared for.
So will the Charities' Commission now declare the RSPCA and the hundreds of other organisations that dispense money and care only for animals, or only for men, or only for children, or only for people in the Third World, as ineligible for charitable status because they do not benefit the whole British public?
The preposterousness of that idea is obvious, and it demonstrates that the "public benefit" test will, in practice, simply amount to the bureaucrats on the Commission deciding whether they approve of the aims of a given organisation. If they do, it will be allowed charitable status and reap the enormous benefits that flow from it, from tax-breaks to the possibility of organising public collections. If they do not, the Commission will declare the organisation no longer a charity. And then, under the new Bill, its endowments can be seized and given to a charity of whose aims the bureaucrats do approve.
This is a terrifying extension of arbitrary, unaccountable state power, albeit under the guise of a quango rather than a government department. The charity sector is one of the few parts of modern Britain that actually functions pretty well at the moment. It is vigorous and effective, and provides services worth billions every year, largely because the Government hasn't managed to get its paws all over it. This new law is going to change that. Unfortunately, it now seems too late to do anything about it. And this time, the whole British public will be the loser.
Source
BRITISH WRITER GETS IT
In a riveting speech to The New Culture Forum last night, the writer and broadcaster Douglas Murray warned that Britain was in danger of taking the path to cultural defeat if it continued to stifle criticism of, and debate about, the threat of fundamentalist Islam.
Speaking to a packed audience at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies - an audience which included Lord Trimble, Paul Goodman MP and many high-profile journalists - Murray declared that just as there was no right to respect, so there was no right not to be offended. `I believe we must speak out - and for very immediate reasons. Silence on the problems of Islam elevates Islam. It affords it a unique place in our culture that it does not deserve and should not have. You do not have to be believers in a thing to propagate it. We do so by our silence. Our fear and self-censorship are complicity: they act as a votary.
`Every day cartoonists in the Western free press portray democratic leaders of the West as baby-killers, baby-eaters and homicidal maniacs,' he told the meeting, which was chaired by the NCF's director Peter Whittle, and which also included a lively audience discussion. `At least we now know why they don't draw cartoons even touching on Islam. ` `Cutting-edge' novels routinely and boringly lambaste the traditions of the West or pretend that the Western tradition doesn't even exist. But write a novel mentioning Mohammed, and Salman Rushdie can explain the consequences to you.'
Murray, who wrote the critically praised book `Neoconservatism: why we need it', went on to explain how the canard that by mentioning the problem, you are yourself the problem, had sunk deep and was the degraded response of a people whom seemed, to him, to be asleep.
He talked in depth about the experience of the Netherlands, where, almost exactly two years ago, Theo Van Gogh, the director of the short film Submission, about women's experience under Islam, was murdered in the street by an Islamic fanatic. The audience then watched a screening of the film, which because of the perceived `sensitivity' of the subject matter, has rarely been seen since van Gogh's death.
Murray explained that the uproar and protest which followed in Holland had, however, proved to be short-lived. `Some writers and public figures took the decision to stop mentioning Islam,' he went on. `One friend of mine, a prominent newspaper columnist before van Gogh's murder, vowed never to write about Islam again. I asked him once how he felt about the decision he had taken and he was clear: `The terrorists have won' he said.
After talking about the rapid demographic changes in Holland, and quoting a government report from 2004 which concluded that by 2017 the majority of the people in the country would be non-Dutch, Murray left the audience with a serious question. `Europeans are going to have to start asking: do we want to keep what we have? Do we want to salvage something? Or is there genuinely nothing which we wish to save?' he said. `I recommend to you - go to Amsterdam and walk around. Look at the woman in the burkha, and the druggy baby-boomer running the cannabis cafe and ask yourself who is going to be running this place in twenty years time.'
Source
Bright Britons deserting universities
Universities will be dominated by foreign academics soon unless more British graduates are persuaded to stay in higher education, the Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge has told The Times. Alison Richard - who has a quarter of her staff and more than half of her postgraduates from overseas - raises the prospect of universities depending increasingly on foreign academics for regeneration.
The situation across the country is most acute in science, technology and mathematics, as fewer British students are recruited to undergraduate courses, which restricts the pool going on with postgraduate study. Professor Richard's comments are echoed by Universities UK, the umbrella group of vice-chancellors, which cautions that the danger of relying wholly on non-British researchers in some subjects is not only that they go home, but also that the lack of home-grown talent spirals downwards into less interest in schools.
While Professor Richard, an anthropologist who has returned to England after 30 years at Yale, delighted in the cosmopolitan make-up of her staff, she said that she was concerned that the brightest students did not want to follow in her shoes. "What does it say about the perception of universities in this country if an ever-falling proportion of really bright British undergraduates is not considering continuing with this as a career?" she said. "We will always be able to staff Cambridge with brilliant people from all over the world, but if you can't get your own students then British universities will carry on, of course - but without their own."
For the past two decades the number of overseas students undertaking postgraduate research at Cambridge has risen each year. Last year 53 per cent of its postgraduates were foreign students. At undergraduate level overseas students made up only 15 per cent of the total, and overall more than one in four (27 per cent) of all its students came from abroad. "Twenty-five per cent of Cambridge's academics are from outside the UK and it's a wonderful cosmopolitan international mix and I think it's quite splendid that we are as international as we are," she said. "Now the question is - if it were 75 per cent from outside the UK would that be a `bad thing'? I don't know how to answer that question. "So should we be troubled if none of our brightest British undergraduates goes on to further studies and PhDs? Actually, if the truth be told, that does trouble me."
Professor Richard says that lecturers' historic poor salaries are partly to blame, as is the old public opprobrium of universities as irrelevant ivory towers. While that has changed, she says universities are still underfunded and competing with a more exciting world. Although it is not a problem for all disciplines, Professor Richard is clearly concerned about the lack of children studying science, technology and maths (STEM) at a higher level at school. Currently roughly 39 per cent of STEM postgraduates at British universities are from overseas.
Drummond Bone, president of Universities UK, agreed that an overreliance on foreign academics in those subjects was a concern. "The long-term issues for UK business, industry and universities are very serious, because some proportion of overseas academics will stay in Britain, but a good number will go home," he said. "In some subjects we can already see this - especially in maths - where we're seeing huge numbers of people from Eastern Europe in the staff. They are very good, but there is a shortage of home-grown talent."
Professor Bone, who is also Vice-Chancellor of Liverpool, said that the danger was that Britain would not generate its own core of academics. He said this problem had already been encountered in Australia, where some universities were dependent on Asian academics. Last week a study found that nearly two thirds of British academics had considered leaving the country to work overseas and that more than half had considered abandoning university life completely for a better-paid job in the private sector. The biggest gripe among lecturers was bureaucracy, with one in three spending at least 16 hours a week on paperwork.
Source
Sometimes journalists are so focused on a particular story that they 'hear what they want to hear and disregard the rest'. There was a perfect example of this last week in the Guardian reporting from the RAPID Climate Change conference in Birmingham (UK) which I was attending. The conference, whose theme was observations, modelling and paleo-climate related to the Thermohaline and Meridional overturning circulation (MOC) in the North Atlantic, could have been expected to attract media attention (particularly in the Europe) and indeed it did. However, the Guardian story, which started "Scientists have uncovered more evidence for a dramatic weakening in the vast ocean current that gives Britain its relatively balmy climate" was in complete opposition to the actual evidence presented and I wasn't the only person to notice. How could the reporting be so wrong?
First, a bit of background: RAPID is a focused research program being run mainly out of the UK, but with contributions from Norway, the Netherlands and from the US. One of their main achievments has been to set up a mooring array (which consists of a dozen or so permanently attached monitors of temperature, salinity and pressure) that can continuously monitor the circulation in the North Atlantic across a section at 26øN. Measurements taken as the moorings were first installed were highlighted in the Bryden et al paper last year. As readers will no doubt recall, that publication, suggesting that a long term decrease in the MOC was underway, was greeted by a media storm. We cautioned at the time that the results were preliminary and, specifically, that the internal variability was probably high enough to make it unlikely that the changes had risen above the noise.
At the meeting this week, Bryden and colleagues gave an update of the work, specifically focusing on the first year of data from the moored array. This is the first time that there has ever been such a continuous set of estimates across the whole Atlantic and so reports of the size and nature of the variability were eagerly anticipated. And they did not disappoint! There were two key observations: first, that the approximations that had been used in the Bryden et al study were actually valid, and secondly, that the variations day by day varied by around 5 Sv (1 Sv is about 10 times the flow of the Amazon). The mean over the year for the MOC was 18 Sv - very close to what was expected and in the middle of recent estimates - and significantly, larger than the value seen in the 2004 snapshot. Given that degree of 'noise', this implies that no conclusions about trends over recent decades can be supported.
Other results presented supported this basic picture: transport estimates at different latitudes were not coherent with the initial results, model variability in the best ocean models was large (suggesting that detectability of a MOC slowdown before 2030-2050 was unlikely), and temperature, salinity and velocity changes in the overflow waters beteen Greenland and Europe showed significant connections to the North Atlantic Oscillation but no obvious trends. A number of records that had seemed to be trending strongly when first looked at, now seem to be simply more variable than first thought. This was something of a theme at the conference - the closer we look at the ocean, the more dynamic it appears.
So why was the Guardian story so wrong? Well, the nature of variability invariably implies that there are periods when the values are above the mean, and periods when it is below the mean. The minimum values appeared to be during a 10 day interval in November 2004 when the inferred deep western boundary current appeared to be very weak indeed. But then it came back. Now, recall that we have never seen this quality of data before and explanations for the variability (deep eddies? waves?) are not yet available. Thus, no-one has any clue whether this is normal or unusual - right now it's simply an interesting phenomenon. Picking this out of the results is therefore a little perverse. The big story should have been the phenomenal effort that has gone into exploring this important issue, the much improved context for previous measurements and a welcome reassessment of the significance of previous results. It's a shame the Guardian missed it.
Source
Free church parking banned as 'discriminatory'
A thin excuse for anti-Christian attitudes. They could have extended free parking to the 1% who are of other faiths if discrimination was the concern
A city council is to impose new car parking charges for Sunday morning church services so they are not 'discriminatory to other faiths and religious praying days'. Plymouth City Council had allowed free parking in some car parks for church-goers, but now has brought in a œ1-an-hour charge so they do not offend other faiths. The move has angered church groups in the city, and a protest letter has been sent to the authority.
A council parking representative replied, explaining that free parking would be discriminatory. "The basis of your representation was rejected on the grounds that the current free parking on a Sunday morning is discriminatory to other faiths and religious praying days," they said. "Dispensation is not given to other religions."
Church regular Mary Hooker, 66, said: "It is rather unforgiving. I have been going to church for 50 years and I have never had to pay."
The 2001 census survey revealed that the combined total of Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and Sikhs in Plymouth amounted to 1.1 per cent of the population. The city has one Mosque which serves all of the Muslim population, estimated to be around 800, Plymouth also has one Buddhist centre, serving about 470 people, and one Synagogue for nearly 200 practising Jews in the community. There are 150 Christian churches in the city.
The charges are part of a range of changes to car parking tolls across the city. The income from all of the Sunday charging proposals will be approximately 144,000 pounds.
The rector of Plymouth's biggest church, St Andrew's, has said that the authority's reasoning "betrays a total lack of understanding of the multi-faith agenda and serves only to divide communities." The Rev Nick McKinnel said: "It does seem extraordinary to invoke other faiths as a reason to charge those who go to church."
Source
British Left attacks charities
They want everybody to be dependant on the government
Next week, the new Charities' Bill will finish its passage through Parliament. It should become law before the end of the year. In spite of being billed as "the biggest review of charity legislation in the past 400 years", it has generated very little comment. This is surprising, because the Bill will vastly increase the power of the Charities' Commission to dissolve charities, confiscate their endowments and assets, and give them to what the Commission considers a more genuinely "charitable" cause.
That threat is alarming and real. It used to be taken for granted that organisations devoted to education, to religion, or to the relief of poverty, were automatically providing a "public benefit". The new legislation dissolves that assumption. Even more worryingly, it also leaves it up to the Charities Commission to decide what constitutes a "public benefit". There is no guidance in the legislation on how that slippery notion should be defined. Ministers and members of the Commission have referred to "case law", but there is almost none, precisely because, for the last 400 years, there has been so firm a consensus that education, religion and the relief of poverty constitute public benefits.
It means that the Commission will be able to use whatever definition of "public benefit" it likes. The motive behind redefining that notion seems to have been the desire to ensure that charities benefit all the public, not just some small section of it. That is why, for instance, schools and hospitals that charge fees are being threatened with the withdrawal of their charitable status: they are said only to benefit people who can afford to pay, and not the whole of the British public.
In fact, every charity benefits a portion of the population rather than all of it: charities for disabled people benefit those who are disabled; hospital charities benefit sick people; charities for women benefit women rather than men. and so on. Charities for starving farmers in the Third World do not benefit the "public" in this country at all. And as for charities for animals, they do not benefit people of any description, unless you count the pleasure some people get from knowing that animals are being cared for.
So will the Charities' Commission now declare the RSPCA and the hundreds of other organisations that dispense money and care only for animals, or only for men, or only for children, or only for people in the Third World, as ineligible for charitable status because they do not benefit the whole British public?
The preposterousness of that idea is obvious, and it demonstrates that the "public benefit" test will, in practice, simply amount to the bureaucrats on the Commission deciding whether they approve of the aims of a given organisation. If they do, it will be allowed charitable status and reap the enormous benefits that flow from it, from tax-breaks to the possibility of organising public collections. If they do not, the Commission will declare the organisation no longer a charity. And then, under the new Bill, its endowments can be seized and given to a charity of whose aims the bureaucrats do approve.
This is a terrifying extension of arbitrary, unaccountable state power, albeit under the guise of a quango rather than a government department. The charity sector is one of the few parts of modern Britain that actually functions pretty well at the moment. It is vigorous and effective, and provides services worth billions every year, largely because the Government hasn't managed to get its paws all over it. This new law is going to change that. Unfortunately, it now seems too late to do anything about it. And this time, the whole British public will be the loser.
Source
BRITISH WRITER GETS IT
In a riveting speech to The New Culture Forum last night, the writer and broadcaster Douglas Murray warned that Britain was in danger of taking the path to cultural defeat if it continued to stifle criticism of, and debate about, the threat of fundamentalist Islam.
Speaking to a packed audience at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies - an audience which included Lord Trimble, Paul Goodman MP and many high-profile journalists - Murray declared that just as there was no right to respect, so there was no right not to be offended. `I believe we must speak out - and for very immediate reasons. Silence on the problems of Islam elevates Islam. It affords it a unique place in our culture that it does not deserve and should not have. You do not have to be believers in a thing to propagate it. We do so by our silence. Our fear and self-censorship are complicity: they act as a votary.
`Every day cartoonists in the Western free press portray democratic leaders of the West as baby-killers, baby-eaters and homicidal maniacs,' he told the meeting, which was chaired by the NCF's director Peter Whittle, and which also included a lively audience discussion. `At least we now know why they don't draw cartoons even touching on Islam. ` `Cutting-edge' novels routinely and boringly lambaste the traditions of the West or pretend that the Western tradition doesn't even exist. But write a novel mentioning Mohammed, and Salman Rushdie can explain the consequences to you.'
Murray, who wrote the critically praised book `Neoconservatism: why we need it', went on to explain how the canard that by mentioning the problem, you are yourself the problem, had sunk deep and was the degraded response of a people whom seemed, to him, to be asleep.
He talked in depth about the experience of the Netherlands, where, almost exactly two years ago, Theo Van Gogh, the director of the short film Submission, about women's experience under Islam, was murdered in the street by an Islamic fanatic. The audience then watched a screening of the film, which because of the perceived `sensitivity' of the subject matter, has rarely been seen since van Gogh's death.
Murray explained that the uproar and protest which followed in Holland had, however, proved to be short-lived. `Some writers and public figures took the decision to stop mentioning Islam,' he went on. `One friend of mine, a prominent newspaper columnist before van Gogh's murder, vowed never to write about Islam again. I asked him once how he felt about the decision he had taken and he was clear: `The terrorists have won' he said.
After talking about the rapid demographic changes in Holland, and quoting a government report from 2004 which concluded that by 2017 the majority of the people in the country would be non-Dutch, Murray left the audience with a serious question. `Europeans are going to have to start asking: do we want to keep what we have? Do we want to salvage something? Or is there genuinely nothing which we wish to save?' he said. `I recommend to you - go to Amsterdam and walk around. Look at the woman in the burkha, and the druggy baby-boomer running the cannabis cafe and ask yourself who is going to be running this place in twenty years time.'
Source
Bright Britons deserting universities
Universities will be dominated by foreign academics soon unless more British graduates are persuaded to stay in higher education, the Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge has told The Times. Alison Richard - who has a quarter of her staff and more than half of her postgraduates from overseas - raises the prospect of universities depending increasingly on foreign academics for regeneration.
The situation across the country is most acute in science, technology and mathematics, as fewer British students are recruited to undergraduate courses, which restricts the pool going on with postgraduate study. Professor Richard's comments are echoed by Universities UK, the umbrella group of vice-chancellors, which cautions that the danger of relying wholly on non-British researchers in some subjects is not only that they go home, but also that the lack of home-grown talent spirals downwards into less interest in schools.
While Professor Richard, an anthropologist who has returned to England after 30 years at Yale, delighted in the cosmopolitan make-up of her staff, she said that she was concerned that the brightest students did not want to follow in her shoes. "What does it say about the perception of universities in this country if an ever-falling proportion of really bright British undergraduates is not considering continuing with this as a career?" she said. "We will always be able to staff Cambridge with brilliant people from all over the world, but if you can't get your own students then British universities will carry on, of course - but without their own."
For the past two decades the number of overseas students undertaking postgraduate research at Cambridge has risen each year. Last year 53 per cent of its postgraduates were foreign students. At undergraduate level overseas students made up only 15 per cent of the total, and overall more than one in four (27 per cent) of all its students came from abroad. "Twenty-five per cent of Cambridge's academics are from outside the UK and it's a wonderful cosmopolitan international mix and I think it's quite splendid that we are as international as we are," she said. "Now the question is - if it were 75 per cent from outside the UK would that be a `bad thing'? I don't know how to answer that question. "So should we be troubled if none of our brightest British undergraduates goes on to further studies and PhDs? Actually, if the truth be told, that does trouble me."
Professor Richard says that lecturers' historic poor salaries are partly to blame, as is the old public opprobrium of universities as irrelevant ivory towers. While that has changed, she says universities are still underfunded and competing with a more exciting world. Although it is not a problem for all disciplines, Professor Richard is clearly concerned about the lack of children studying science, technology and maths (STEM) at a higher level at school. Currently roughly 39 per cent of STEM postgraduates at British universities are from overseas.
Drummond Bone, president of Universities UK, agreed that an overreliance on foreign academics in those subjects was a concern. "The long-term issues for UK business, industry and universities are very serious, because some proportion of overseas academics will stay in Britain, but a good number will go home," he said. "In some subjects we can already see this - especially in maths - where we're seeing huge numbers of people from Eastern Europe in the staff. They are very good, but there is a shortage of home-grown talent."
Professor Bone, who is also Vice-Chancellor of Liverpool, said that the danger was that Britain would not generate its own core of academics. He said this problem had already been encountered in Australia, where some universities were dependent on Asian academics. Last week a study found that nearly two thirds of British academics had considered leaving the country to work overseas and that more than half had considered abandoning university life completely for a better-paid job in the private sector. The biggest gripe among lecturers was bureaucracy, with one in three spending at least 16 hours a week on paperwork.
Source
Thursday, November 09, 2006
Incorrect to face the reality of black crime
From the figures below it looks as if blacks are even more the source of crime in the UK than they are in the USA
RACE watchdogs are to investigate Britain's national DNA database over revelations that about three-quarters of young black men will soon have their profiles stored. Trevor Phillips, the chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, will examine whether the database breaches race relations laws. "This is tantamount to criminalising a generation of young black men," Mr Phillips said. An estimated 135,000 black males aged 15 to 34 will be entered in the crime-fighting database by next April, equivalent to 77 per cent of the young black male population in England and Wales. By contrast, only 22 per cent of young white males, and 6 per cent of the general population, will be on the database.
All arrested crime suspects have their DNA taken and their profile stored for life, even if they are later cleared or the arrest is found to be a case of mistaken identity. Children under 10 also can have their DNA recorded.
Mr Phillips said his team will investigate whether the policy of retaining DNA from suspects, who are never convicted of a crime, results in discrimination against black men, who are more likely to come into contact with police than their white counterparts. "Statistics suggest that black males are more likely to be stopped simply because they are young black males," he said. "This figure is just perpetuating this stereotype, and does nothing to instil confidence in a measure that seeks to serve all members of our community. It is provocative, unfair and unjust and will do little to reduce crime." If the commission discovers that the database fails to comply with the law, it will consider what legal steps can be taken, Mr Phillips said.
The new figures, calculated from the Home Office's own projections, will fuel fears that Britain is becoming a "surveillance society" in which some ethnic groups are monitored more closely than others. The figures arise from Home Office projections released to Bob Spink, a Conservative MP, which show that by April 2007 the DNA database will hold 3.7 million profiles, including 3 million "white-skinned Europeans" and 257,099 "Afro-Caribbeans".
The Home Office could not break down the figures for each ethnic group by age or sex. But, in general, 82 per cent of individuals on the database are male, while 64 per cent are aged 15 to 34. It means that, assuming a similar sex and age balance for all ethnic groups, there will be 135,000 young black men on the database next April. Figures for the last census in 2001 showed there were 175,000 black men, aged 15 to 34, in England and Wales.
The calculation method has been endorsed by experts, including Dr David Owen, of Warwick University's Centre for Research in Ethnic Relations, who described the figures as "disturbingly high". Professor Sir Bob Hepple, QC, who is leading an inquiry by the Nuffield Council on Bioethics into the DNA database, said they would add to concerns about discrimination.
Source
Christmas defended
Christian leaders go marching as to war today, aiming to put their stamp on the debate about the role of religion in modern public life. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, and the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, are introducing a new think-tank report that challenges the secular dream of taking Christ out of Christmas or anything else. Among the report's targets are "the annual rash of winterval stories" about councils that try to rename Christmas as part of a trend towards politically correct public symbolism that ends up as "insipid and uninspiring".
The report comes as the Royal Mail eschews religious imagery on its Christmas stamps, which go on sale today. The stamps feature Santa Claus, a reindeer, snowmen and a Christmas tree. The Church of England said that it "regretted" the omission of a Christian theme.
The new think-tank, Theos, named after the Greek word for God, issues its report, Doing God: A Future for Faith in the Public Square, at a time of controversy over the role of religion. The past few weeks have seen rows over faith schools and Muslim veils, a British Airways employee fighting for her right to wear a cross and the atheist scientist Richard Dawkins entering the bestseller lists with his book The God Delusion.
The heads of British Anglicans and Roman Catholics argue that British society is experiencing a "moment of perplexity" when new questions are being asked about the place of religion in public life and debate. "Issues of belief and faith, of how human beings experience the world, have rarely been so important in a society, or so badly misunderstood," they say. In a joint foreword, they welcome the conclusion of the report that faith is not just important for human flourishing, but that society can only flourish if faith is "given space" to contribute and challenge. "Many secularist commentators argue that the growing role of faith in society represents a dangerous development," the archbishops say. "However, they fail to recognise that public atheism is itself an intolerant faith position. If we pay attention to what is actually happening in the United Kingdom and beyond, we will see that religiously inspired public engagement need not be sectarian, and can in fact be radically inclusive."
The report by Nick Spencer, a researcher and writer on religious trends, takes its title from the comment by Tony Blair's former press officer, Alistair Campbell: "We don't do God." The report argues against confining faith to the private sphere, and says that religion will play an increasingly significant role because of the return of civil society, research about the role it plays in happiness and the politics of identity. Mr Spencer also says that faith is the answer to consumerism, or what he describes as "chequebook citizenship". He advises public figures to take care if introducing God into debate and to make sure that they are not doing so for personal or divisive reasons. But he adds: "We should not react with bewilderment when a public figure does `do God'. We should be less scared of public figures citing religious texts in mainstream contexts. We should be more willing to treat other value systems as coherent, reasonable and even valuable rather than as primitive or grotesque mutations of the liberal humanism to which every sane person adheres."
The comments drew rapid fire from the National Secular Society, whose vice-president, Terry Sanderson, said: "This report is self-serving, self-deluding and a recommendation for the imposition of a new authoritarianism on an unwilling population. The idea that religion should play an even bigger part in the public arena than it does already is one that will bring a backlash. The British public does not want its life to be dictated by religious institutions, which it sees as nasty, small-minded and controlling. "Atheists or secularists may ask questions that archbishops would prefer not to hear, but religious intolerance in Britain, especially over freedom of speech, comes almost exclusively from Christian evangelicals and minority faiths."
The Royal Mail said that Christmas stamp designs alternate between religious and non-religious every year. Last year's set included a controversial image of a man and a woman with Hindu markings worshipping the infant Christ.
Source
Incorrect to refer to immigrant problems
A Conservative councillor has been suspended from the party after a racist e-mail was sent from her account that instructed foreigners to "P*** off - we're full". Ellenor Bland, who stood as a parliamentary candidate in last year's election, was reported to race relations watchdogs by Liberal Democrats who branded the message as offensive and deeply unpleasant.
The e-mail, sent from Ms Bland's address, included a poem about Pakistani immigrants coming to Britain to claim benefits, along with a cartoon of the white cliffs of Dover bearing the offensive phrase. The text, entitled Illegal Immigrants Poem, describes how a migrant comes to Britain "poor and broke" and makes money by claiming welfare benefits before inviting friends from his home country to join him. They take over the area after white neighbours move out.
Ms Bland, who represents the Conservatives on Calne Town Council in Wiltshire, denied sending the message. But she admitted knowing the contents of the poem and said no offence could be caused by it, calling the reaction political correctness gone mad. Ms Bland, who runs a clothes shop in Wootton Bassett, Wiltshire, lives in the village of Quemerford and has been a Calne town councillor since 2003. She said that the e-mail had been sent by her husband. "I haven't sent anything that I'm accused of sending. Someone else did. My e-mail address is something that's used by my husband, too. It's not my personal e-mail account." She added: "From what I remember of it, it was a very light-hearted poem. We have Asian friends and we work well together and all accept each other's different ways."
A senior Conservative said that Ms Bland had been suspended from the Tories' election candidate list and from the party pending an investigation into the allegations surrounding the e-mail. A spokesman said: "The Conservative Party disassociates itself entirely from the sentiments in this poem. Ellenor Bland has been suspended from the candidates' list and from the party pending a full investigation."
Ed Davey, the Liberal Democrat chairman of campaigns and communications, said: "It is totally unacceptable for elected representatives to be distributing this kind of material. Racism has absolutely no place in British politics and I am asking the CRE to advise on what further action can be taken. If David Cameron wants to retain any credibility he must immediately take the strongest action against the person responsible."
The poem had also appeared on the website of Boris Johnson, the Conservatives' higher education spokesman. But the MP said that it had been posted on a message board by a visitor to his site and that he had no idea that it was there. "It's an utterly dreadful poem and I condemn it unreservedly," he said. "I had absolutely no knowledge it was on my website."
POEM EXTRACT
I cross ocean poor and broke
Take bus, see employment folk.
Nice man treat me good in there.
Say I need to see welfare.
Welfare say, "You come no more,
We send cash right to your door."
Write to your friends in motherland.
Tell them, "Come fast as you can."
They come in turbans and Ford trucks.
I buy big house with welfare bucks!
Britain crazy! They pay all year,
To keep welfare running here.
We think UK darn good place.
Too darn good for the white man race!
If they no like us, they can scram.
Got lots of room in Pakistan!
Source
British girl died waiting for life-saving Valium jab
Britain's power-mad health bureaucracy treats a common-as-dirt prescription drug as if it were heroin
Britain's largest ambulance service is calling for a change in the law to allow emergency response crews to supply a life-saving tranquilliser, after the death of a teenage girl who suffered a severe epileptic fit. Kayleigh Macilwraith-Christie, 15, suffered heart failure earlier this year after ambulance controllers repeatedly failed to get a trained paramedic to her who could administer an injection of diazepam, better known as Valium, a Class C controlled drug.
Source
Fruitcake in charge of education
Children as young as 12 should help to appoint teachers and take a much bigger role in running their schools, the Schools Minister has declared. In a ringing endorsement of pupil power, Lord Adonis said that headteachers should consider following the example of Finland, where children were full members of governing bodies. The former Downing Street adviser said that he wanted to see a cultural change to allow children to interview candidates for teaching posts.
Pupils have been allowed to be associate members of governing bodies in England's schools since 2003. But to date only a handful of schools have taken up the opportunity.
Lord Adonis told the Commons Education Select Committee that he was impressed by how schools were run in Finland. "One of the things I was very struck by is the degree of pupil participation in the schools," he said. "School governing bodies now routinely in Finland have pupils as full members. That is something we don't have here." In England, governors have to be 18 in order to be full members but pupils can take part as associate members, he said. "These sorts of ideas are ones we should be prepared to look at to see whether there's anything we can learn," he said.
Lord Adonis was giving evidence to the committee's inquiry into citizenship education in schools. He said that he had visited a school in England where children were consulted on appointments. He said that some head teachers believed that it was vital that the school council of pupils should express views on appointments, while others were against the plan. He added: "Every school could help children get to grips with the techniques of interviewing and selecting job applicants. Every school has senior staff who are trained in interview techniques," he said. "The issue isn't whether the skills are available within the school, it is whether the school leadership regards this as a sufficiently high priority for them to do it. "My own view is that they should make the effort. That is the kind of cultural change we need to spread over an increasing number of schools."
Citizenship became a compulsory part of the national curriculum four years ago. The subject is designed to give pupils a knowledge and understanding of current affairs, encourage them to question their social and moral responsibility, and render them politically literate. But inspectors claim that it is taught inadequately in a quarter of schools.
Lord Adonis said that schools should develop school councils, promote volunteering and help pupils to promote their debating skills in order to make more of a contribution to their community.
Source
STERN ON STERN
His recommendations as he summarizes them to a reporter sound more like what George Bush has been doing than anything else
The relaxed demeanour of the man deployed by British Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown to put a price on global warming is of a piece with his central message: a potential catastrophe looms, but avoiding it does not require a hair shirt or giving up the good things in life. "I think it would be hard to sell people on carrots, tents and bicycles. We're not saying that."
Last week the Stern report changed the landscape of the global warming debate. It matched the scientific arguments for taking action with economic ones and it came up with a cautiously optimistic conclusion: a surprisingly small investment in curbing emissions now could save thousands of billions in the future. The 700-page report contains dense thickets of equations and calculations, as well as the names of some of the world's most eminent economists.....
Stern has faced a counterattack on several fronts this week, most eloquently from Nigel Lawson, a former chancellor of the exchequer, who accused him of "eco-fundamentalism ... that is irrational and intolerant". At the mention of Lawson, Stern lives up to his name for the first time: "I am always polite to Nigel Lawson," he says with a steel glint. "But Nigel is wrong. "Are we saying, like other fundamentalisms, that you have to change your life? No! We're saying, do a few things differently. Where's the fundamentalism in that? "Fundamentalism is radical. What could be very radical is doing nothing."
The Stern report gives warning that environmental "business as usual" will have consequences similar to "the great wars and the economic depression of the first half of the 20th century". It is an allusion that perhaps comes easily to a man whose father escaped Nazi Germany in 1938, and he summons up the wartime spirit as an example of the collaboration needed, he says, to fight climate change......
His argument is couched in the language of market economics, while making a passionate demand for state action. Midway through a discussion about the precise percentage of gross domestic product needed to avert calamity, he swerves into an ecological lament: "The snows on Kilimanjaro are virtually gone, the Barrier Reef is probably going, snows are going off the Andes, threatening the water supply of Quito and La Paz."
His repeated references to his age (although he is only 60) and to his grandchildren as yet unborn (he has three daughters, the eldest in her 30s) suggest a man who feels time is short. "If we do nothing, there is at least a 50-50 chance of rising above 5C by the end of the century. "Five degrees is very, very big. The last ice age was minus five."
But while the cost of doing nothing may be huge, he insists the immediate cost of averting future crisis is relatively small. A 5C temperature rise would be "transformational in terms of where you can live and how you can live your lives". But his estimated cost of averting disaster ("in the ballpark of" 1 per cent of GDP) would not dramatically change the way we live: "Suppose all cars are plug-in in 15 years' time, that's not transformational, it's just that your engine works differently.
"This is essentially an optimistic report," he insists: a little pain today for a big reduction in pain later on, without sacrificing our way of life. The champagne bottle is half full, from Stern's perspective, not half empty....
More here
CLIMATE CHANGE ISSUES: THE PROBLEM OF UNWARRANTED TRUST
Comment from David Henderson, Westminster Business School
On 2 November 2006 I took the chair at a talk given in London by Dr Dieter Helm in the Beesley Lectures series on problems of regulation. His subject was 'Energy Policy and Climate Change'. The procedure for the Beesley Lectures provides for a personal 15-minute contribution by the chairman, to be made after the talk and before the discussion is thrown open. The text that follows formed the basis for the main part of my contribution, which focused on climate change rather than energy policy. It includes some comments on the Stern Review on 'The Economics of Climate Change', which had appeared a few days before the lecture, but my main criticisms are directed against the way in which governments across the world are handling issues relating to climate change.
Introduction
The Stern Review is a formidable document. Its main text comprises over 550 pages, and covers a vast range of issues. It reflects the work of a team of over 20 officials under the direction of Sir Nicholas Stern, backed by a substantial number of consultants. The Review draws on an array of already published studies and papers, as well on a substantial number of specially commissioned outside contributions. I cannot offer you now even a preliminary considered assessment of the Review as a whole, nor would this be appropriate for today's agenda. Let me however mention that a group of us, comprising both scientists and economists, hope to publish before long an assessment which will be as extensive as we can make it. What we have in mind is two linked review articles, one focusing on scientific and the other on economic aspects. Though authorship would be largely or wholly separate, the two articles are being prepared in conjunction: they will be cross-referenced and mutually supporting. These twin contributions are scheduled to appear in a coming issue of the journal World Economics, which has already carried, in its summer issue, some exchanges between Sir Nicholas and the nine economists who are members of the group. This evening I want to make some personal comments on one particular aspect of the climate change debate.
Grounds for concern
I am not a climate scientist, and I am a relative newcomer to climate change issues. I am an economist, and I became involved with the subject, almost by accident, just four years ago. My initial main involvement was with some economic and statistical aspects of this vast array of topics, but over time my interests and concerns have broadened. Increasingly - and this was neither expected nor intended on my part - I have become critical of the way in which issues relating to climate change are being viewed and treated by governments across the world. In particular, I have become a critic of the role and conduct of the chosen instrument of governments in this area of policy, namely, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
The IPCC process, and the massive assessment reports which are its main single product, are widely seen, by governments and public opinion alike, as thorough, balanced and authoritative. There is a general belief that the Panel has created a world-wide scientific consensus, based on an informed and objective professional assessment, which provides a sound basis for policy. Since its inception in 1988, the IPCC process has established itself, in the eyes of the great majority of its member governments, as their sole authoritative and continuing source of information, evidence, analysis, interpretation and advice on the whole range of issues relating to climate change
In my view, there are good reasons to query the claims to authority and representative status that are made by and on behalf of the Panel, and hence to question the unique status, one of virtual monopoly, that it now holds. The trust so widely placed in it is unwarranted. To begin with, the principle of creating a single would-be authoritative fount of wisdom is itself open to doubt. Even if the IPCC process were indisputably and consistently rigorous, objective and professionally watertight, it is imprudent for governments to place exclusive reliance, in matters of extraordinary complexity where huge uncertainties prevail, on a single source of analysis and advice and a single process of inquiry. The very notion of setting consensus as an aim appears as questionable if not ill-judged.
In any case, the ideal conditions have not been realised. The IPCC process is far from being a model of rigour, inclusiveness and impartiality. In this connection, there are several related aspects that I would emphasise. First, the Panel's treatment of economic issues has been flawed. Writings that feature in its Third Assessment Report contain what many economists and economic statisticians would regard as basic errors, showing a lack of awareness of relevant published sources; and the same is true of more recent IPCC-related writings, as also of material published by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) which is one of the Panel's twin parent agencies. In this area, what I call the IPCC milieu is neither fully competent nor representative.
Second, the built-in process of peer review, which the IPCC and member governments view and refer to as a guarantee of quality and reliability, does not adequately serve this purpose, for two reasons.
* Reason No. 1 is that providing for peer review is no safeguard against dubious assumptions, arguments and conclusions if the peers are largely drawn from the same restricted professional milieu.
* Reason No. 2 is that the peer review process as such, here as elsewhere, may be insufficiently rigorous. Its main purpose is to elicit expert advice on whether a paper is worth publishing in a particular journal. Because it does not normally go beyond this, peer review does not typically guarantee that data and methods are open to scrutiny or that results are reproducible.
Third, in response to criticisms that have been made of published and peer-reviewed work that the IPCC has drawn on, and queries that have been raised, the authors concerned have failed to make full and voluntary disclosure of data, sources and procedures. A leading instance is that of the celebrated 'hockey-stick' diagram, which was prominently displayed and drawn on in the Panel's Third Assessment Report and afterwards. Probably no single piece of alleged evidence relating to climate change has been so widely cited and influential. The authors concerned failed to make due disclosure, and neither the publishing journals nor the IPCC required them to do so. As a result, fundamental errors and evidence of deficient statistical properties did not emerge until very recently.
Fourth, the response of the Panel's directing circle and milieu to informed criticism has typically been inadequate or dismissive. Within the scientific community, these dismissive attitudes have sometimes gone together with a disturbing intolerance of dissenting views and ideas.
Fifth, I believe that both the Panel's directing circle and the IPCC milieu more generally are characterised by an endemic bias towards alarmist assessments and conclusions. Partly because of this bias, the treatment of climate change issues by environmental and scientific journalists and commentators across the world is overwhelmingly one-sided and sensationalist: non-alarmist studies and results are typically played down or disregarded, while the lack of knowledge and the huge uncertainties which still loom large in climate science are passed over.
This chronic lack of objectivity on the part of so many commentators is in itself a matter for concern; but even more worrying, to my mind, is the fact that leading figures and organisations connected with the IPCC process, including government departments and international agencies, do little or nothing to ensure that a more balanced picture is presented. Some of them have become accomplices of alarmism.
Alarmist attitudes and presumptions in relation to world issues, together with a fondness for radical so-called 'solutions', have in fact a long history: they go back well before climate change issues came into prominence, and hence predate the creation of the IPCC. They have been characteristic of the Panel's sponsoring departments and agencies, and in particular of the UNEP and the ministries which it reports to. From the outset, the IPCC's affiliations with what I have termed global salvationism have affected its capacity and readiness to treat the issues in a balanced way.
To sum up: the IPCC process, which is widely taken to be thorough, objective, representative and authoritative, is in fact deeply flawed: despite its scale, pretensions and reputation, it is not professionally up to the mark.
FULL TEXT here
THE POOR ARE PAYING THE PRICE OF BRITAIN'S FLAWED ENERGY POLICY
AROUND 90,000 children in Scotland are living in homes where families cannot afford to pay energy bills, new figures released today revealed. In 2002, the Scottish Executive estimated 46,000 children were living in such households, meaning the figure has nearly doubled in four years. During the same period, electricity prices have risen by more than 60 per cent and gas prices by more than 90 per cent.
The research was carried out by a group of charities who looked at rises in investment in energy efficiency over the past four years. The coalition of Barnardo's, Children in Scotland, Child Poverty Action Group, Capability Scotland and Save the Children blamed the increase in children affected on high fuel prices. Tam Baillie of Barnardo's Scotland said: "For those living in fuel poverty, the consequences are misery, discomfort, ill health and debt. "No Scottish child should live in a cold, damp home, and no parent should have to choose between feeding their kids and keeping them warm."
Typical Scottish Leftist blames the power companies rather than government and Greenie restrictions on them: Graham Kerr of energywatch Scotland said: "Energy companies have a social responsibility and are in prime position to play a major part in tackling fuel poverty. "They should develop discounted energy products for low income households and scrap higher charges for people using prepayment meters. "This would help stop high prices from undoing much of the positive work done by the Scottish Executive and others."
Source
From the figures below it looks as if blacks are even more the source of crime in the UK than they are in the USA
RACE watchdogs are to investigate Britain's national DNA database over revelations that about three-quarters of young black men will soon have their profiles stored. Trevor Phillips, the chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, will examine whether the database breaches race relations laws. "This is tantamount to criminalising a generation of young black men," Mr Phillips said. An estimated 135,000 black males aged 15 to 34 will be entered in the crime-fighting database by next April, equivalent to 77 per cent of the young black male population in England and Wales. By contrast, only 22 per cent of young white males, and 6 per cent of the general population, will be on the database.
All arrested crime suspects have their DNA taken and their profile stored for life, even if they are later cleared or the arrest is found to be a case of mistaken identity. Children under 10 also can have their DNA recorded.
Mr Phillips said his team will investigate whether the policy of retaining DNA from suspects, who are never convicted of a crime, results in discrimination against black men, who are more likely to come into contact with police than their white counterparts. "Statistics suggest that black males are more likely to be stopped simply because they are young black males," he said. "This figure is just perpetuating this stereotype, and does nothing to instil confidence in a measure that seeks to serve all members of our community. It is provocative, unfair and unjust and will do little to reduce crime." If the commission discovers that the database fails to comply with the law, it will consider what legal steps can be taken, Mr Phillips said.
The new figures, calculated from the Home Office's own projections, will fuel fears that Britain is becoming a "surveillance society" in which some ethnic groups are monitored more closely than others. The figures arise from Home Office projections released to Bob Spink, a Conservative MP, which show that by April 2007 the DNA database will hold 3.7 million profiles, including 3 million "white-skinned Europeans" and 257,099 "Afro-Caribbeans".
The Home Office could not break down the figures for each ethnic group by age or sex. But, in general, 82 per cent of individuals on the database are male, while 64 per cent are aged 15 to 34. It means that, assuming a similar sex and age balance for all ethnic groups, there will be 135,000 young black men on the database next April. Figures for the last census in 2001 showed there were 175,000 black men, aged 15 to 34, in England and Wales.
The calculation method has been endorsed by experts, including Dr David Owen, of Warwick University's Centre for Research in Ethnic Relations, who described the figures as "disturbingly high". Professor Sir Bob Hepple, QC, who is leading an inquiry by the Nuffield Council on Bioethics into the DNA database, said they would add to concerns about discrimination.
Source
Christmas defended
Christian leaders go marching as to war today, aiming to put their stamp on the debate about the role of religion in modern public life. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, and the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, are introducing a new think-tank report that challenges the secular dream of taking Christ out of Christmas or anything else. Among the report's targets are "the annual rash of winterval stories" about councils that try to rename Christmas as part of a trend towards politically correct public symbolism that ends up as "insipid and uninspiring".
The report comes as the Royal Mail eschews religious imagery on its Christmas stamps, which go on sale today. The stamps feature Santa Claus, a reindeer, snowmen and a Christmas tree. The Church of England said that it "regretted" the omission of a Christian theme.
The new think-tank, Theos, named after the Greek word for God, issues its report, Doing God: A Future for Faith in the Public Square, at a time of controversy over the role of religion. The past few weeks have seen rows over faith schools and Muslim veils, a British Airways employee fighting for her right to wear a cross and the atheist scientist Richard Dawkins entering the bestseller lists with his book The God Delusion.
The heads of British Anglicans and Roman Catholics argue that British society is experiencing a "moment of perplexity" when new questions are being asked about the place of religion in public life and debate. "Issues of belief and faith, of how human beings experience the world, have rarely been so important in a society, or so badly misunderstood," they say. In a joint foreword, they welcome the conclusion of the report that faith is not just important for human flourishing, but that society can only flourish if faith is "given space" to contribute and challenge. "Many secularist commentators argue that the growing role of faith in society represents a dangerous development," the archbishops say. "However, they fail to recognise that public atheism is itself an intolerant faith position. If we pay attention to what is actually happening in the United Kingdom and beyond, we will see that religiously inspired public engagement need not be sectarian, and can in fact be radically inclusive."
The report by Nick Spencer, a researcher and writer on religious trends, takes its title from the comment by Tony Blair's former press officer, Alistair Campbell: "We don't do God." The report argues against confining faith to the private sphere, and says that religion will play an increasingly significant role because of the return of civil society, research about the role it plays in happiness and the politics of identity. Mr Spencer also says that faith is the answer to consumerism, or what he describes as "chequebook citizenship". He advises public figures to take care if introducing God into debate and to make sure that they are not doing so for personal or divisive reasons. But he adds: "We should not react with bewilderment when a public figure does `do God'. We should be less scared of public figures citing religious texts in mainstream contexts. We should be more willing to treat other value systems as coherent, reasonable and even valuable rather than as primitive or grotesque mutations of the liberal humanism to which every sane person adheres."
The comments drew rapid fire from the National Secular Society, whose vice-president, Terry Sanderson, said: "This report is self-serving, self-deluding and a recommendation for the imposition of a new authoritarianism on an unwilling population. The idea that religion should play an even bigger part in the public arena than it does already is one that will bring a backlash. The British public does not want its life to be dictated by religious institutions, which it sees as nasty, small-minded and controlling. "Atheists or secularists may ask questions that archbishops would prefer not to hear, but religious intolerance in Britain, especially over freedom of speech, comes almost exclusively from Christian evangelicals and minority faiths."
The Royal Mail said that Christmas stamp designs alternate between religious and non-religious every year. Last year's set included a controversial image of a man and a woman with Hindu markings worshipping the infant Christ.
Source
Incorrect to refer to immigrant problems
A Conservative councillor has been suspended from the party after a racist e-mail was sent from her account that instructed foreigners to "P*** off - we're full". Ellenor Bland, who stood as a parliamentary candidate in last year's election, was reported to race relations watchdogs by Liberal Democrats who branded the message as offensive and deeply unpleasant.
The e-mail, sent from Ms Bland's address, included a poem about Pakistani immigrants coming to Britain to claim benefits, along with a cartoon of the white cliffs of Dover bearing the offensive phrase. The text, entitled Illegal Immigrants Poem, describes how a migrant comes to Britain "poor and broke" and makes money by claiming welfare benefits before inviting friends from his home country to join him. They take over the area after white neighbours move out.
Ms Bland, who represents the Conservatives on Calne Town Council in Wiltshire, denied sending the message. But she admitted knowing the contents of the poem and said no offence could be caused by it, calling the reaction political correctness gone mad. Ms Bland, who runs a clothes shop in Wootton Bassett, Wiltshire, lives in the village of Quemerford and has been a Calne town councillor since 2003. She said that the e-mail had been sent by her husband. "I haven't sent anything that I'm accused of sending. Someone else did. My e-mail address is something that's used by my husband, too. It's not my personal e-mail account." She added: "From what I remember of it, it was a very light-hearted poem. We have Asian friends and we work well together and all accept each other's different ways."
A senior Conservative said that Ms Bland had been suspended from the Tories' election candidate list and from the party pending an investigation into the allegations surrounding the e-mail. A spokesman said: "The Conservative Party disassociates itself entirely from the sentiments in this poem. Ellenor Bland has been suspended from the candidates' list and from the party pending a full investigation."
Ed Davey, the Liberal Democrat chairman of campaigns and communications, said: "It is totally unacceptable for elected representatives to be distributing this kind of material. Racism has absolutely no place in British politics and I am asking the CRE to advise on what further action can be taken. If David Cameron wants to retain any credibility he must immediately take the strongest action against the person responsible."
The poem had also appeared on the website of Boris Johnson, the Conservatives' higher education spokesman. But the MP said that it had been posted on a message board by a visitor to his site and that he had no idea that it was there. "It's an utterly dreadful poem and I condemn it unreservedly," he said. "I had absolutely no knowledge it was on my website."
POEM EXTRACT
I cross ocean poor and broke
Take bus, see employment folk.
Nice man treat me good in there.
Say I need to see welfare.
Welfare say, "You come no more,
We send cash right to your door."
Write to your friends in motherland.
Tell them, "Come fast as you can."
They come in turbans and Ford trucks.
I buy big house with welfare bucks!
Britain crazy! They pay all year,
To keep welfare running here.
We think UK darn good place.
Too darn good for the white man race!
If they no like us, they can scram.
Got lots of room in Pakistan!
Source
British girl died waiting for life-saving Valium jab
Britain's power-mad health bureaucracy treats a common-as-dirt prescription drug as if it were heroin
Britain's largest ambulance service is calling for a change in the law to allow emergency response crews to supply a life-saving tranquilliser, after the death of a teenage girl who suffered a severe epileptic fit. Kayleigh Macilwraith-Christie, 15, suffered heart failure earlier this year after ambulance controllers repeatedly failed to get a trained paramedic to her who could administer an injection of diazepam, better known as Valium, a Class C controlled drug.
The London Ambulance Service NHS Trust sent a series of emergency medical technicians, who are trained in advanced first aid but are not permitted to provide the tranquilliser. Further delays by the Ambulance Service meant that the teenager did not get the injection until she reached Whittington Hospital, 50 minutes after suffering the fit on July 14.
Her mother, Jean Murphy,is to deliver to the Prime Minister a 12,000-name petition demanding that a trained paramedic be put on every ambulance.
The Ambulance Service has since held an investigation and admitted failings with regard to Kayleigh’s death. The trust is now seeking an amendment to regulations to allow technicians, who can already administer some other drugs, to administer diazepam.
A statement from the service, said: “We accept that Kayleigh may have benefited from paramedic intervention and we are committed to learning lessons from this case.”
Source
Fruitcake in charge of education
Children as young as 12 should help to appoint teachers and take a much bigger role in running their schools, the Schools Minister has declared. In a ringing endorsement of pupil power, Lord Adonis said that headteachers should consider following the example of Finland, where children were full members of governing bodies. The former Downing Street adviser said that he wanted to see a cultural change to allow children to interview candidates for teaching posts.
Pupils have been allowed to be associate members of governing bodies in England's schools since 2003. But to date only a handful of schools have taken up the opportunity.
Lord Adonis told the Commons Education Select Committee that he was impressed by how schools were run in Finland. "One of the things I was very struck by is the degree of pupil participation in the schools," he said. "School governing bodies now routinely in Finland have pupils as full members. That is something we don't have here." In England, governors have to be 18 in order to be full members but pupils can take part as associate members, he said. "These sorts of ideas are ones we should be prepared to look at to see whether there's anything we can learn," he said.
Lord Adonis was giving evidence to the committee's inquiry into citizenship education in schools. He said that he had visited a school in England where children were consulted on appointments. He said that some head teachers believed that it was vital that the school council of pupils should express views on appointments, while others were against the plan. He added: "Every school could help children get to grips with the techniques of interviewing and selecting job applicants. Every school has senior staff who are trained in interview techniques," he said. "The issue isn't whether the skills are available within the school, it is whether the school leadership regards this as a sufficiently high priority for them to do it. "My own view is that they should make the effort. That is the kind of cultural change we need to spread over an increasing number of schools."
Citizenship became a compulsory part of the national curriculum four years ago. The subject is designed to give pupils a knowledge and understanding of current affairs, encourage them to question their social and moral responsibility, and render them politically literate. But inspectors claim that it is taught inadequately in a quarter of schools.
Lord Adonis said that schools should develop school councils, promote volunteering and help pupils to promote their debating skills in order to make more of a contribution to their community.
Source
STERN ON STERN
His recommendations as he summarizes them to a reporter sound more like what George Bush has been doing than anything else
The relaxed demeanour of the man deployed by British Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown to put a price on global warming is of a piece with his central message: a potential catastrophe looms, but avoiding it does not require a hair shirt or giving up the good things in life. "I think it would be hard to sell people on carrots, tents and bicycles. We're not saying that."
Last week the Stern report changed the landscape of the global warming debate. It matched the scientific arguments for taking action with economic ones and it came up with a cautiously optimistic conclusion: a surprisingly small investment in curbing emissions now could save thousands of billions in the future. The 700-page report contains dense thickets of equations and calculations, as well as the names of some of the world's most eminent economists.....
Stern has faced a counterattack on several fronts this week, most eloquently from Nigel Lawson, a former chancellor of the exchequer, who accused him of "eco-fundamentalism ... that is irrational and intolerant". At the mention of Lawson, Stern lives up to his name for the first time: "I am always polite to Nigel Lawson," he says with a steel glint. "But Nigel is wrong. "Are we saying, like other fundamentalisms, that you have to change your life? No! We're saying, do a few things differently. Where's the fundamentalism in that? "Fundamentalism is radical. What could be very radical is doing nothing."
The Stern report gives warning that environmental "business as usual" will have consequences similar to "the great wars and the economic depression of the first half of the 20th century". It is an allusion that perhaps comes easily to a man whose father escaped Nazi Germany in 1938, and he summons up the wartime spirit as an example of the collaboration needed, he says, to fight climate change......
His argument is couched in the language of market economics, while making a passionate demand for state action. Midway through a discussion about the precise percentage of gross domestic product needed to avert calamity, he swerves into an ecological lament: "The snows on Kilimanjaro are virtually gone, the Barrier Reef is probably going, snows are going off the Andes, threatening the water supply of Quito and La Paz."
His repeated references to his age (although he is only 60) and to his grandchildren as yet unborn (he has three daughters, the eldest in her 30s) suggest a man who feels time is short. "If we do nothing, there is at least a 50-50 chance of rising above 5C by the end of the century. "Five degrees is very, very big. The last ice age was minus five."
But while the cost of doing nothing may be huge, he insists the immediate cost of averting future crisis is relatively small. A 5C temperature rise would be "transformational in terms of where you can live and how you can live your lives". But his estimated cost of averting disaster ("in the ballpark of" 1 per cent of GDP) would not dramatically change the way we live: "Suppose all cars are plug-in in 15 years' time, that's not transformational, it's just that your engine works differently.
"This is essentially an optimistic report," he insists: a little pain today for a big reduction in pain later on, without sacrificing our way of life. The champagne bottle is half full, from Stern's perspective, not half empty....
More here
CLIMATE CHANGE ISSUES: THE PROBLEM OF UNWARRANTED TRUST
Comment from David Henderson, Westminster Business School
On 2 November 2006 I took the chair at a talk given in London by Dr Dieter Helm in the Beesley Lectures series on problems of regulation. His subject was 'Energy Policy and Climate Change'. The procedure for the Beesley Lectures provides for a personal 15-minute contribution by the chairman, to be made after the talk and before the discussion is thrown open. The text that follows formed the basis for the main part of my contribution, which focused on climate change rather than energy policy. It includes some comments on the Stern Review on 'The Economics of Climate Change', which had appeared a few days before the lecture, but my main criticisms are directed against the way in which governments across the world are handling issues relating to climate change.
Introduction
The Stern Review is a formidable document. Its main text comprises over 550 pages, and covers a vast range of issues. It reflects the work of a team of over 20 officials under the direction of Sir Nicholas Stern, backed by a substantial number of consultants. The Review draws on an array of already published studies and papers, as well on a substantial number of specially commissioned outside contributions. I cannot offer you now even a preliminary considered assessment of the Review as a whole, nor would this be appropriate for today's agenda. Let me however mention that a group of us, comprising both scientists and economists, hope to publish before long an assessment which will be as extensive as we can make it. What we have in mind is two linked review articles, one focusing on scientific and the other on economic aspects. Though authorship would be largely or wholly separate, the two articles are being prepared in conjunction: they will be cross-referenced and mutually supporting. These twin contributions are scheduled to appear in a coming issue of the journal World Economics, which has already carried, in its summer issue, some exchanges between Sir Nicholas and the nine economists who are members of the group. This evening I want to make some personal comments on one particular aspect of the climate change debate.
Grounds for concern
I am not a climate scientist, and I am a relative newcomer to climate change issues. I am an economist, and I became involved with the subject, almost by accident, just four years ago. My initial main involvement was with some economic and statistical aspects of this vast array of topics, but over time my interests and concerns have broadened. Increasingly - and this was neither expected nor intended on my part - I have become critical of the way in which issues relating to climate change are being viewed and treated by governments across the world. In particular, I have become a critic of the role and conduct of the chosen instrument of governments in this area of policy, namely, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
The IPCC process, and the massive assessment reports which are its main single product, are widely seen, by governments and public opinion alike, as thorough, balanced and authoritative. There is a general belief that the Panel has created a world-wide scientific consensus, based on an informed and objective professional assessment, which provides a sound basis for policy. Since its inception in 1988, the IPCC process has established itself, in the eyes of the great majority of its member governments, as their sole authoritative and continuing source of information, evidence, analysis, interpretation and advice on the whole range of issues relating to climate change
In my view, there are good reasons to query the claims to authority and representative status that are made by and on behalf of the Panel, and hence to question the unique status, one of virtual monopoly, that it now holds. The trust so widely placed in it is unwarranted. To begin with, the principle of creating a single would-be authoritative fount of wisdom is itself open to doubt. Even if the IPCC process were indisputably and consistently rigorous, objective and professionally watertight, it is imprudent for governments to place exclusive reliance, in matters of extraordinary complexity where huge uncertainties prevail, on a single source of analysis and advice and a single process of inquiry. The very notion of setting consensus as an aim appears as questionable if not ill-judged.
In any case, the ideal conditions have not been realised. The IPCC process is far from being a model of rigour, inclusiveness and impartiality. In this connection, there are several related aspects that I would emphasise. First, the Panel's treatment of economic issues has been flawed. Writings that feature in its Third Assessment Report contain what many economists and economic statisticians would regard as basic errors, showing a lack of awareness of relevant published sources; and the same is true of more recent IPCC-related writings, as also of material published by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) which is one of the Panel's twin parent agencies. In this area, what I call the IPCC milieu is neither fully competent nor representative.
Second, the built-in process of peer review, which the IPCC and member governments view and refer to as a guarantee of quality and reliability, does not adequately serve this purpose, for two reasons.
* Reason No. 1 is that providing for peer review is no safeguard against dubious assumptions, arguments and conclusions if the peers are largely drawn from the same restricted professional milieu.
* Reason No. 2 is that the peer review process as such, here as elsewhere, may be insufficiently rigorous. Its main purpose is to elicit expert advice on whether a paper is worth publishing in a particular journal. Because it does not normally go beyond this, peer review does not typically guarantee that data and methods are open to scrutiny or that results are reproducible.
Third, in response to criticisms that have been made of published and peer-reviewed work that the IPCC has drawn on, and queries that have been raised, the authors concerned have failed to make full and voluntary disclosure of data, sources and procedures. A leading instance is that of the celebrated 'hockey-stick' diagram, which was prominently displayed and drawn on in the Panel's Third Assessment Report and afterwards. Probably no single piece of alleged evidence relating to climate change has been so widely cited and influential. The authors concerned failed to make due disclosure, and neither the publishing journals nor the IPCC required them to do so. As a result, fundamental errors and evidence of deficient statistical properties did not emerge until very recently.
Fourth, the response of the Panel's directing circle and milieu to informed criticism has typically been inadequate or dismissive. Within the scientific community, these dismissive attitudes have sometimes gone together with a disturbing intolerance of dissenting views and ideas.
Fifth, I believe that both the Panel's directing circle and the IPCC milieu more generally are characterised by an endemic bias towards alarmist assessments and conclusions. Partly because of this bias, the treatment of climate change issues by environmental and scientific journalists and commentators across the world is overwhelmingly one-sided and sensationalist: non-alarmist studies and results are typically played down or disregarded, while the lack of knowledge and the huge uncertainties which still loom large in climate science are passed over.
This chronic lack of objectivity on the part of so many commentators is in itself a matter for concern; but even more worrying, to my mind, is the fact that leading figures and organisations connected with the IPCC process, including government departments and international agencies, do little or nothing to ensure that a more balanced picture is presented. Some of them have become accomplices of alarmism.
Alarmist attitudes and presumptions in relation to world issues, together with a fondness for radical so-called 'solutions', have in fact a long history: they go back well before climate change issues came into prominence, and hence predate the creation of the IPCC. They have been characteristic of the Panel's sponsoring departments and agencies, and in particular of the UNEP and the ministries which it reports to. From the outset, the IPCC's affiliations with what I have termed global salvationism have affected its capacity and readiness to treat the issues in a balanced way.
To sum up: the IPCC process, which is widely taken to be thorough, objective, representative and authoritative, is in fact deeply flawed: despite its scale, pretensions and reputation, it is not professionally up to the mark.
FULL TEXT here
THE POOR ARE PAYING THE PRICE OF BRITAIN'S FLAWED ENERGY POLICY
AROUND 90,000 children in Scotland are living in homes where families cannot afford to pay energy bills, new figures released today revealed. In 2002, the Scottish Executive estimated 46,000 children were living in such households, meaning the figure has nearly doubled in four years. During the same period, electricity prices have risen by more than 60 per cent and gas prices by more than 90 per cent.
The research was carried out by a group of charities who looked at rises in investment in energy efficiency over the past four years. The coalition of Barnardo's, Children in Scotland, Child Poverty Action Group, Capability Scotland and Save the Children blamed the increase in children affected on high fuel prices. Tam Baillie of Barnardo's Scotland said: "For those living in fuel poverty, the consequences are misery, discomfort, ill health and debt. "No Scottish child should live in a cold, damp home, and no parent should have to choose between feeding their kids and keeping them warm."
Typical Scottish Leftist blames the power companies rather than government and Greenie restrictions on them: Graham Kerr of energywatch Scotland said: "Energy companies have a social responsibility and are in prime position to play a major part in tackling fuel poverty. "They should develop discounted energy products for low income households and scrap higher charges for people using prepayment meters. "This would help stop high prices from undoing much of the positive work done by the Scottish Executive and others."
Source
Wednesday, November 08, 2006
British town hall tyrants waging class war
"We are the masters now," Labour Attorney-General Sir Hartley Shawcross sneered at the Tory opposition during a stormy Commons debate in 1946. It was a comment that reflected a mood of arrogant triumphalism within Labour following its general election landslide of a year earlier.
Today, a similar mood of political arrogance seems be growing within our town halls. No longer the servants of the British public, municipal bureaucrats now appear to believe they have the right to harass and punish local citizens who are deemed not to be behaving in the correct ideological manner. And, as with most forms of institutional bullying, the increasing authoritarianism of local government is perpetrated in the name of civic progress.
The decision by Richmond council in south-west London to hammer owners of large cars is a further example of this worrying trend. Self-righteously parading their supposed environmental credentials, the Liberal Democrat burghers have come up with a sliding scale of charges for residents' parking permits, under which those with Jaguars, Range Rovers or 4x4s will see a 200 per cent increase in their bills to some 300 pounds a year.
The justification for this municipal larceny is that the high emissions from such vehicles are creating long-term damage to the planet. So, in the twisted mindset of Richmond's rulers, a local resident wanting to park his own car outside his own house in his own street has been transformed into a nasty polluter who should be heavily penalised for his selfish irresponsibility. Though presented as an environmental measure, in truth this is little more than an act of class war against the affluent. It is a form of megalomania by the council to try to dictate patterns of car ownership within its boundaries.
But Richmond's decision is part of a wider pattern of ideological fervour that is sweeping across local authorities, trampling on personal rights and demanding complete obedience to a fashionable Left-dominated political agenda. We can see a similar approach in the official obsession with recycling, which has reached such a lunatic level that individuals are now being criminalised for allegedly failing to dispose of their waste correctly. In one bizarre case last week, Michael Reeves, a writer from Swansea, was fined 200 pounds for putting an item of junk mail in a recycling bag meant for glass. Mr Reeves denied the charge, and there was no evidence against him, either from witnesses or CCTV footage. But traditions of natural justice mean nothing to the green revolutionaries of the town hall, who refuse to tolerate any dissent.
Indeed, the recycling maniacs of the Devon local authority of Teinbridge are now acting just like apparatchiks from the old East Germany, urging the public to act as spies against those failing to comply with the new municipal creed. "People who can't or won't recycle," proclaims a leaflet from Teinbridge. It continues with the menacing words: "Do you know someone in your road who is not doing their bit," before giving out the number of a hotline that snitches can ring to get hold of the local Stasi, sorry, recycling "sheriff". In this fixation with recycling, more than a third of all town halls have now ended weekly refuse collections. As a result, both fly tipping and the rat population is on the increase as streets become dirtier.
But the town hall tyrants are not interested in debate, only in submission to their bureaucracy. We can see the same arrogance in their relentless increases in council tax bills, which have gone up by more than 90 per cent in the past decade, or in the way they use health and safety as an excuse to throw around their weight; Bristol council recently banned its tenants from having doormats outside their front entrances because they were deemed a "tripping hazard". Local authority schools now feel they have the right to rummage through pupils' lunchboxes to ensure full compliance with healthy eating policies.
The crackdown on smoking in public, which will come into force next year, will give further scope for municipal oppression. Sutton council, which, like Richmond, is run by the Lib Dems, is banning smoking anywhere near council buildings or parks. Even tenants in their own homes have been told that they cannot smoke in the presence of council employees.
Political hectoring can also be seen in the aggressive promotion of multi-culturalism, which schools and social services now regard as their primary civic duty, under which any firm doing business with a town hall has to follow lengthy contract compliance regulations to prove its commitment to diversity.
The causes of promoting anti-racism, protecting children's health and saving the planet have proved the ideal weapons with which town halls can beat the public and expand their bureaucratic empires. And their influence is about to become even stronger, as the Government pledges to give local government more powers in the name of devolution.
One particularly worrying development is the proposal that, in order to carry out a revaluation of properties for council tax, municipal officials be given the right to enter homes and take photographs of every room. Anyone who refuses to comply will be liable to a fine of up to 1,000 pounds. The detailed information gained from these intrusive surveys could see council tax bills rocket, as is already happening in Northern Ireland, where such a scheme is now being tried out; average bills are expected to go up by 50 per cent next year as a result.
This mounting abuse of power by town halls brings nothing but misery and expense to most of the public. A fortune is being squandered on endless tiers of management, on sprawling departments of pen-pushers, while key services such as education, refuse collection and social work are not delivering. As we saw in the old socialist tyrannies of eastern Europe, the more the politburos declared their determination to uphold the public good, the deeper became their contempt for the public. It is time some of our town hall officials recognised who is paying their bloated salaries.
Source
Low IQ Correlates with Poor Health
But you are not supposed to say so:
In his studies of high IQ Americans, initiated in the 1920s, Terman found that they had some physical as well as mental advantages, including better health. And a recent study by Friedman & Markey has now shown that the same group live a bit longer too.
So the finding causing the uproar should be no surprise to those who know the relevant research. The brain is just one organ of the body so we should not be surprised that there is some tendency for well-functioning brains to be found in bodies that are well-functioning generally.
Reference:
Friedman, H. S. & Markey, C.N. (2003). Paths to longevity in the highly intelligent Terman cohort. In C.E. Finch, J-M. Robine & Y. Christen (eds.), Brain and Longevity (pp. 165-175). NY: Springer.
"We are the masters now," Labour Attorney-General Sir Hartley Shawcross sneered at the Tory opposition during a stormy Commons debate in 1946. It was a comment that reflected a mood of arrogant triumphalism within Labour following its general election landslide of a year earlier.
Today, a similar mood of political arrogance seems be growing within our town halls. No longer the servants of the British public, municipal bureaucrats now appear to believe they have the right to harass and punish local citizens who are deemed not to be behaving in the correct ideological manner. And, as with most forms of institutional bullying, the increasing authoritarianism of local government is perpetrated in the name of civic progress.
The decision by Richmond council in south-west London to hammer owners of large cars is a further example of this worrying trend. Self-righteously parading their supposed environmental credentials, the Liberal Democrat burghers have come up with a sliding scale of charges for residents' parking permits, under which those with Jaguars, Range Rovers or 4x4s will see a 200 per cent increase in their bills to some 300 pounds a year.
The justification for this municipal larceny is that the high emissions from such vehicles are creating long-term damage to the planet. So, in the twisted mindset of Richmond's rulers, a local resident wanting to park his own car outside his own house in his own street has been transformed into a nasty polluter who should be heavily penalised for his selfish irresponsibility. Though presented as an environmental measure, in truth this is little more than an act of class war against the affluent. It is a form of megalomania by the council to try to dictate patterns of car ownership within its boundaries.
But Richmond's decision is part of a wider pattern of ideological fervour that is sweeping across local authorities, trampling on personal rights and demanding complete obedience to a fashionable Left-dominated political agenda. We can see a similar approach in the official obsession with recycling, which has reached such a lunatic level that individuals are now being criminalised for allegedly failing to dispose of their waste correctly. In one bizarre case last week, Michael Reeves, a writer from Swansea, was fined 200 pounds for putting an item of junk mail in a recycling bag meant for glass. Mr Reeves denied the charge, and there was no evidence against him, either from witnesses or CCTV footage. But traditions of natural justice mean nothing to the green revolutionaries of the town hall, who refuse to tolerate any dissent.
Indeed, the recycling maniacs of the Devon local authority of Teinbridge are now acting just like apparatchiks from the old East Germany, urging the public to act as spies against those failing to comply with the new municipal creed. "People who can't or won't recycle," proclaims a leaflet from Teinbridge. It continues with the menacing words: "Do you know someone in your road who is not doing their bit," before giving out the number of a hotline that snitches can ring to get hold of the local Stasi, sorry, recycling "sheriff". In this fixation with recycling, more than a third of all town halls have now ended weekly refuse collections. As a result, both fly tipping and the rat population is on the increase as streets become dirtier.
But the town hall tyrants are not interested in debate, only in submission to their bureaucracy. We can see the same arrogance in their relentless increases in council tax bills, which have gone up by more than 90 per cent in the past decade, or in the way they use health and safety as an excuse to throw around their weight; Bristol council recently banned its tenants from having doormats outside their front entrances because they were deemed a "tripping hazard". Local authority schools now feel they have the right to rummage through pupils' lunchboxes to ensure full compliance with healthy eating policies.
The crackdown on smoking in public, which will come into force next year, will give further scope for municipal oppression. Sutton council, which, like Richmond, is run by the Lib Dems, is banning smoking anywhere near council buildings or parks. Even tenants in their own homes have been told that they cannot smoke in the presence of council employees.
Political hectoring can also be seen in the aggressive promotion of multi-culturalism, which schools and social services now regard as their primary civic duty, under which any firm doing business with a town hall has to follow lengthy contract compliance regulations to prove its commitment to diversity.
The causes of promoting anti-racism, protecting children's health and saving the planet have proved the ideal weapons with which town halls can beat the public and expand their bureaucratic empires. And their influence is about to become even stronger, as the Government pledges to give local government more powers in the name of devolution.
One particularly worrying development is the proposal that, in order to carry out a revaluation of properties for council tax, municipal officials be given the right to enter homes and take photographs of every room. Anyone who refuses to comply will be liable to a fine of up to 1,000 pounds. The detailed information gained from these intrusive surveys could see council tax bills rocket, as is already happening in Northern Ireland, where such a scheme is now being tried out; average bills are expected to go up by 50 per cent next year as a result.
This mounting abuse of power by town halls brings nothing but misery and expense to most of the public. A fortune is being squandered on endless tiers of management, on sprawling departments of pen-pushers, while key services such as education, refuse collection and social work are not delivering. As we saw in the old socialist tyrannies of eastern Europe, the more the politburos declared their determination to uphold the public good, the deeper became their contempt for the public. It is time some of our town hall officials recognised who is paying their bloated salaries.
Source
Low IQ Correlates with Poor Health
But you are not supposed to say so:
"The London School of Economics is embroiled in a row over academic freedom after one of its lecturers published a paper alleging that African states were poor and suffered chronic ill-health because their populations were less intelligent than people in richer countries.
Source
In his studies of high IQ Americans, initiated in the 1920s, Terman found that they had some physical as well as mental advantages, including better health. And a recent study by Friedman & Markey has now shown that the same group live a bit longer too.
So the finding causing the uproar should be no surprise to those who know the relevant research. The brain is just one organ of the body so we should not be surprised that there is some tendency for well-functioning brains to be found in bodies that are well-functioning generally.
Reference:
Friedman, H. S. & Markey, C.N. (2003). Paths to longevity in the highly intelligent Terman cohort. In C.E. Finch, J-M. Robine & Y. Christen (eds.), Brain and Longevity (pp. 165-175). NY: Springer.
Tuesday, November 07, 2006
Prejudice against white Eastern Europeans OK
`Britain faces an explosion of crime when Romania and Bulgaria join the EU,' warned the Sun newspaper this week. According to a `secret Cabinet memo', Eastern European gangs will trigger dramatic increases in street violence, vice rackets, cash point theft and fraud. Some 85 per cent of robberies at cash points, the report said, is said to be committed by Romanians. Quite how the authorities have worked that out is anyone's guess. But it's clear that Eastern Europeans are now targeted as a problem-in-waiting by the police, politicians and pundits. So just what is so awful about these Eastern Europeans?
Since the summer, panics and prejudices about migrants from the former Eastern Bloc countries have been aired by left and right alike. They've ranged from the age-old Malthusian concerns of `too many people, not enough resources'; to last week's statement by Trevor Phillips that Bulgarians and Romanians have racist attitudes towards black people. Now, Romanians are a bunch of sex-traffickers and cash-point robbers ready to wreck havoc in the UK. `It doesn't bode well for the future', said Sir Andrew Green of Migration Watch.
When preposterous figures such as `Romanians commit 85 per cent of crime at cash points' is peddled by the government it doesn't bode well for John Reid's sense of perspective. Are there even enough Romanians in the UK to commit nearly all robberies at cash machines? Do teams of Romanians travel the breadth of the UK to make sure no cash-machine is left safe? According to those ridiculous figures, they must certainly have to.
Panics surrounding ethnic groups and criminality are, of course, nothing new. Back in the 1970s, the press and Metropolitan police force launched the infamous `mugging' panic. Then it was young black men who were said to be causing an `epidemic' of street robberies across Britain, even though such recorded crimes had gone down since the peak of 1968. The moral panic was accepted because it confirmed and exacerbated racial prejudice and hostility to black people. Today, the government and media's drive against Eastern Europeans is also driven by panics and prejudices, but of a different but no less reactionary kind.
Even though it has benefited the UK, the relatively big hike in migration from Eastern Europe has rattled New Labour on a number of levels. Firstly, the free-movement of migrants in and out of the UK goes against their regulatory, controlling instincts. UK Home Secretary John Reid's plans to impose a limited quota on migrants from Romania, for instance, says more about New Labour's target-driven approach to governance than any real consideration on migration and the economy.
More importantly, though, it seems any discussions on Eastern Europeans can be aired freely precisely because they're white. After all, who could accuse them of playing the `racist immigration card'? Therefore, low-life scare stories about cash robbers and sex traffickers wouldn't be loudly proclaimed if the migrants were from Africa. White migrants are considered fair game because, as Mick Hume has pointed out, it's a reflection of how the political class sees white working-class Britons too. When Trevor Philips said that Bulgarians have backward attitudes towards black people, and therefore should be denied entry into Britain, he could have easily followed that up with: `haven't we got enough of those types of people already?'
It's worth remembering that a few years back, a leaked government memo reckoned that British pensioners couldn't be accommodated into New Britain because of their dated `racist attitudes'. Clearly, though, it hasn't stopped with pensioners either. Younger generations of white Britons and now Eastern European migrants are either under suspicion or downright guilty of harbouring hostility to non-whites. The old pub philosophy of `there's good and bad everywhere amongst people', it seems, no longer applies.
All this, though, is simply a consequence of `objective subjectivism' that lies at the heart of multicultural thinking. What this means is that humans are no longer seen as transformative agents, but having fixed or `essential' characteristics passed on through traditions, values and beliefs. So according to the sociologist Tariq Modood, ethnicity or cultural belonging should be viewed `as being essential to a person's characteristic as skin or eye colour'. In other words, there's no escape from our cultural heritage.
This is why today black people are viewed solely as victims of slavery and racism and therefore objects of pity. British Muslims are seen either as victims of Islamophobia and therefore inherently anti-western and/or ultra-religious, while whites are viewed as racial supremacists itching to cause pogroms or go lynching. If humans really are automated products of generational cultural influences, then it makes sense to manage them accordingly. This is why the language used to justify restrictions against Eastern European migrants and to regulate the `backward' white masses of Britain are often the same. What it really demonstrates, however, is the deeply anti-human thinking of official, multicultural thinking.
It's no longer enough that morality has been re-drawn around who is considered racist or anti-racist (though more often, officialdom is in the latter, self-flattering camp). Instead, the essentialist outlook of multiculturalism means that some groups in society will be guilty through historical association, rather than anything they've actually done. The current hysterical panic against the supposed racism, and now the criminality, of Eastern Europeans says as much about what the political class thinks of white Britons over here as it does Romanians and Bulgarians over there.
Source
U.K.: A BISHOP WHO GETS IT
The Church of England's only Asian bishop, whose father converted from Islam, has criticised many Muslims for their "dual psychology", in which they desire both "victimhood and domination". In the most outspoken critique of Muslims by a church leader, Michael Nazir-Ali, the Bishop of Rochester, said that because of this view it would never be possible to satisfy all their demands. "Their complaint often boils down to the position that it is always right to intervene when Muslims are victims, as in Bosnia or Kosovo, and always wrong when the Muslims are the oppressors or terrorists, as with the Taliban or in Iraq," said Nazir-Ali. "Given the world view that has given rise to such grievances, there can never be sufficient appeasement and new demands will continue to be made." The failure to counter such beliefs meant that radical Islam had flourished in Britain, spread by extremist imams indoctrinating children for
up to four hours a day, he said.
Nazir-Ali added that rigorous checks, from which the government had retreated in face of Muslims' protests, should be imposed to ensure that arriving clerics were committed to the British way of life. "Characteristic British values have developed from the Christian faith and its vision of personal and common good," said the bishop in an interview with The Sunday Times. "After they were clarified by the enlightenment they became the bedrock of our modern political life. These values need to be recovered to help us to inculcate the virtues of generosity, loyalty, moderation and love."
Nazir-Ali, who was born in Pakistan and whose father converted from Islam to Catholicism, said radical Islam was being taught in mosque schools across Britain. "While radical teaching may not be happening everywhere, its presence is felt across the country. It affects all Muslims," he said. "The two main causes of the present situation [rising extremism] are fundamentalist imams and material on the internet." He proposed to filter out imams who might whip up extremism: "They must be vetted for appropriate qualifications, they must have a reasonable knowledge of the English language and they must take part in a recognised process of learning about British life and culture."
The government, after lobbying from Muslim groups, retreated from proposals to toughen entry requirements put forward by David Blunkett, the former home secretary, two years ago. Plans to require foreign clerics to sit a test on British civic values a year after arriving were cancelled along with the introduction of a requirement to speak English to conversational level.
Nazir-Ali also criticised women wearing veils that cover the whole face. Tony Blair called the full veil a "mark of separation", but Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, said any curbs on wearing it would be "politically dangerous".
Nazir-Ali drew attention to a "huge increase" in the wearing of Muslim dress in Egypt, Malaysia and Pakistan, saying that in Britain there were circumstances where the full veil should not be worn: "I can see nothing in Islam that prescribes the wearing of a full-face veil. In the supermarket those at the cash tills need to be recognised. Teaching is another context in which society requires recognition and identification."
Nazir-Ali, 57, was born a Catholic in Karachi, converted to Protestantism and was received into the Church of Pakistan at 20. He settled in Britain in the 1980s and became the youngest bishop in the world at 35.
Muhammad Abdul Bari, secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain, said his comments were not "very helpful for community relationships".
Source
Climate chaos? Don't believe it
By Christopher Monckton
Download Christopher Monckton's references and detailed calculations [pdf]
The Stern report last week predicted dire economic and social effects of unchecked global warming. In what many will see as a highly controversial polemic, Christopher Monckton disputes the 'facts' of this impending apocalypse and accuses the UN and its scientists of distorting the truth
Last week, Gordon Brown and his chief economist both said global warming was the worst "market failure" ever. That loaded soundbite suggests that the "climate-change" scare is less about saving the planet than, in Jacques Chirac's chilling phrase, "creating world government". This week and next, I'll reveal how politicians, scientists and bureaucrats contrived a threat of Biblical floods, droughts, plagues, and extinctions worthier of St John the Divine than of science.
Sir Nicholas Stern's report on the economics of climate change, which was published last week, says that the debate is over. It isn't. There are more greenhouse gases in the air than there were, so the world should warm a bit, but that's as far as the "consensus" goes. After the recent hysteria, you may not find the truth easy to believe. So you can find all my references and detailed calculations here.
The Royal Society says there's a worldwide scientific consensus. It brands Apocalypse-deniers as paid lackeys of coal and oil corporations. I declare my interest: I once took the taxpayer's shilling and advised Margaret Thatcher, FRS, on scientific scams and scares. Alas, not a red cent from Exxon.
In 1988, James Hansen, a climatologist, told the US Congress that temperature would rise 0.3C by the end of the century (it rose 0.1C), and that sea level would rise several feet (no, one inch). The UN set up a transnational bureaucracy, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The UK taxpayer unwittingly meets the entire cost of its scientific team, which, in 2001, produced the Third Assessment Report, a Bible-length document presenting apocalyptic conclusions well beyond previous reports.
This week, I'll show how the UN undervalued the sun's effects on historical and contemporary climate, slashed the natural greenhouse effect, overstated the past century's temperature increase, repealed a fundamental law of physics and tripled the man-made greenhouse effect. Next week, I'll demonstrate the atrocious economic, political and environmental cost of the high-tax, zero-freedom, bureaucratic centralism implicit in Stern's report; I'll compare the global-warming scare with previous sci-fi alarums; and I'll show how the environmentalists' "precautionary principle" (get the state to interfere now, just in case) is killing people.
So to the scare. First, the UN implies that carbon dioxide ended the last four ice ages. It displays two 450,000-year graphs: a sawtooth curve of temperature and a sawtooth of airborne CO2 that's scaled to look similar. Usually, similar curves are superimposed for comparison. The UN didn't do that. If it had, the truth would have shown: the changes in temperature preceded the changes in CO2 levels.
Next, the UN abolished the medieval warm period (the global warming at the end of the First Millennium AD). In 1995, David Deming, a geoscientist at the University of Oklahoma, had written an article reconstructing 150 years of North American temperatures from borehole data. He later wrote: "With the publication of the article in Science, I gained significant credibility in the community of scientists working on climate change. They thought I was one of them, someone who would pervert science in the service of social and political causes. One of them let his guard down. A major person working in the area of climate change and global warming sent me an astonishing email that said: 'We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period.' "
So they did. The UN's second assessment report, in 1996, showed a 1,000-year graph demonstrating that temperature in the Middle Ages was warmer than today. But the 2001 report contained a new graph showing no medieval warm period. It wrongly concluded that the 20th century was the warmest for 1,000 years. The graph looked like an ice hockey-stick. The wrongly flat AD1000-AD1900 temperature line was the shaft: the uptick from 1900 to 2000 was the blade. Here's how they did it:
* They gave one technique for reconstructing pre-thermometer temperature 390 times more weight than any other (but didn't say so).
* The technique they overweighted was one which the UN's 1996 report had said was unsafe: measurement of tree-rings from bristlecone pines. Tree-rings are wider in warmer years, but pine-rings are also wider when there's more carbon dioxide in the air: it's plant food. This carbon dioxide fertilisation distorts the calculations.
* They said they had included 24 data sets going back to 1400. Without saying so, they left out the set showing the medieval warm period, tucking it into a folder marked "Censored Data".
* They used a computer model to draw the graph from the data, but scientists later found that the model almost always drew hockey-sticks even if they fed in random, electronic "red noise".
The large, full-colour "hockey-stick" was the key graph in the UN's 2001 report, and the only one to appear six times. The Canadian Government copied it to every household. Four years passed before a leading scientific journal would publish the truth about the graph. Did the UN or the Canadian government apologise? Of course not. The UN still uses the graph in its publications.
Even after the "hockey stick" graph was exposed, scientific papers apparently confirming its abolition of the medieval warm period appeared. The US Senate asked independent statisticians to investigate. They found that the graph was meretricious, and that known associates of the scientists who had compiled it had written many of the papers supporting its conclusion.
The UN, echoed by Stern, says the graph isn't important. It is. Scores of scientific papers show that the medieval warm period was real, global and up to 3C warmer than now. Then, there were no glaciers in the tropical Andes: today they're there. There were Viking farms in Greenland: now they're under permafrost. There was little ice at the North Pole: a Chinese naval squadron sailed right round the Arctic in 1421 and found none.
The Antarctic, which holds 90 per cent of the world's ice and nearly all its 160,000 glaciers, has cooled and gained ice-mass in the past 30 years, reversing a 6,000-year melting trend. Data from 6,000 boreholes worldwide show global temperatures were higher in the Middle Ages than now. And the snows of Kilimanjaro are vanishing not because summit temperature is rising (it isn't) but because post-colonial deforestation has dried the air. Al Gore please note.
In some places it was also warmer than now in the Bronze Age and in Roman times. It wasn't CO2 that caused those warm periods. It was the sun. So the UN adjusted the maths and all but extinguished the sun's role in today's warming. Here's how:
* The UN dated its list of "forcings" (influences on temperature) from 1750, when the sun, and consequently air temperature, was almost as warm as now. But its start-date for the increase in world temperature was 1900, when the sun, and temperature, were much cooler.
* Every "forcing" produces "climate feedbacks" making temperature rise faster. For instance, as temperature rises in response to a forcing, the air carries more water vapour, the most important greenhouse gas; and polar ice melts, increasing heat absorption. Up goes the temperature again. The UN more than doubled the base forcings from greenhouse gases to allow for climate feedbacks. It didn't do the same for the base solar forcing.
Two centuries ago, the astronomer William Herschel was reading Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations when he noticed that quoted grain prices fell when the number of sunspots rose. Gales of laughter ensued, but he was right. At solar maxima, when the sun was at its hottest and sunspots showed, temperature was warmer, grain grew faster and prices fell. Such observations show that even small solar changes affect climate detectably.
But recent solar changes have been big. Sami Solanki, a solar physicist, says that in the past half-century the sun has been warmer, for longer, than at any time in at least the past 11,400 years, contributing a base forcing equivalent to a quarter of the past century's warming. That's before adding climate feedbacks.
The UN expresses its heat-energy forcings in watts per square metre per second. It estimates that the sun caused just 0.3 watts of forcing since 1750. Begin in 1900 to match the temperature start-date, and the base solar forcing more than doubles to 0.7 watts. Multiply by 2.7, which the Royal Society suggests is the UN's current factor for climate feedbacks, and you get 1.9 watts – more than six times the UN's figure. The entire 20th-century warming from all sources was below 2 watts. The sun could have caused just about all of it.
Next, the UN slashed the natural greenhouse effect by 40 per cent from 33C in the climate-physics textbooks to 20C, making the man-made additions appear bigger. Then the UN chose the biggest 20th-century temperature increase it could find. Stern says: "As anticipated by scientists, global mean surface temperatures have risen over the past century." As anticipated? Only 30 years ago, scientists were anticipating a new Ice Age and writing books called The Cooling. In the US, where weather records have been more reliable than elsewhere, 20th-century temperature went up by only 0.3C. AccuWeather, a worldwide meteorological service, reckons world temperature rose by 0.45C. The US National Climate Data Centre says 0.5C. Any advance on 0.5? The UN went for 0.6C, probably distorted by urban growth near many of the world's fast-disappearing temperature stations. The number of temperature stations round the world peaked at 6,000 in 1970. It's fallen by two-thirds to 2,000 now: a real "hockey-stick" curve, and an instance of the UN's growing reliance on computer guesswork rather than facts.
Even a 0.6C temperature rise wasn't enough. So the UN repealed a fundamental physical law. Buried in a sub-chapter in its 2001 report is a short but revealing section discussing "lambda": the crucial factor converting forcings to temperature. The UN said its climate models had found lambda near-invariant at 0.5C per watt of forcing. You don't need computer models to "find" lambda. Its value is given by a century-old law, derived experimentally by a Slovenian professor and proved by his Austrian student (who later committed suicide when his scientific compatriots refused to believe in atoms). The Stefan-Boltzmann law, not mentioned once in the UN's 2001 report, is as central to the thermodynamics of climate as Einstein's later equation is to astrophysics. Like Einstein's, it relates energy to the square of the speed of light, but by reference to temperature rather than mass. The bigger the value of lambda, the bigger the temperature increase the UN could predict. Using poor Ludwig Boltzmann's law, lambda's true value is just 0.22-0.3C per watt. In 2001, the UN effectively repealed the law, doubling lambda to 0.5C per watt. A recent paper by James Hansen says lambda should be 0.67, 0.75 or 1C: take your pick. Sir John Houghton, who chaired the UN's scientific assessment working group until recently, tells me it now puts lambda at 0.8C: that's 3C for a 3.7-watt doubling of airborne CO2. Most of the UN's computer models have used 1C. Stern implies 1.9C.
On the UN's figures, the entire greenhouse-gas forcing in the 20th century was 2 watts. Multiplying by the correct value of lambda gives a temperature increase of 0.44 to 0.6C, in line with observation. But using Stern's 1.9C per watt gives 3.8C. Where did 85 per cent of his imagined 20th-century warming go? As Professor Dick Lindzen of MIT pointed out in The Sunday Telegraph last week, the UK's Hadley Centre had the same problem, and solved it by dividing its modelled output by three to "predict" 20th-century temperature correctly.
A spate of recent scientific papers, gearing up for the UN's fourth report next year, gives a different reason for the failure of reality to keep up with prediction. The oceans, we're now told, are acting as a giant heat-sink. In these papers the well-known, central flaw (not mentioned by Stern) is that the computer models' "predictions" of past ocean temperature changes only approach reality if they are averaged over a depth of at least a mile and a quarter. Deep-ocean temperature hasn't changed at all, it's barely above freezing. The models tend to over-predict the warming of the climate-relevant surface layer up to threefold. A recent paper by John Lyman, of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, reports that the oceans have cooled sharply in the past two years. The computers didn't predict this. Sea level is scarcely rising faster today than a century ago: an inch every 15 years. Hansen now says that the oceanic "flywheel effect" gives us extra time to act, so Stern's alarmism is misplaced.
Finally, the UN's predictions are founded not only on an exaggerated forcing-to-temperature conversion factor justified neither by observation nor by physical law, but also on an excessive rate of increase in airborne carbon dioxide. The true rate is 0.38 per cent year on year since records began in 1958. The models assume 1 per cent per annum, more than two and a half times too high. In 2001, the UN used these and other adjustments to predict a 21st-century temperature increase of 1.5 to 6C. Stern suggests up to 10C.
Dick Lindzen emailed me last week to say that constant repetition of wrong numbers doesn't make them right. Removing the UN's solecisms, and using reasonable data and assumptions, a simple global model shows that temperature will rise by just 0.1 to 1.4C in the coming century, with a best estimate of 0.6C, well within the medieval temperature range and only a fifth of the UN's new, central projection.
Why haven't air or sea temperatures turned out as the UN's models predicted? Because the science is bad, the "consensus" is wrong, and Herr Professor Ludwig Boltzmann, FRS, was as right about energy-to-temperature as he was about atoms.
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SOME REAL GREENIES
Allow me to introduce you to the greenest people I have ever known. They are paragons. If the world had only followed their example we might not now be facing the threat of either drowning in the floodwaters created by global warming or watching fertile land turn into desert. To what extent we'd be enjoying our lives is for you to judge.
They do not own a car and never have. They have never been on an aeroplane. To get where they need to go they use either bus or train. Very occasionally - if they have a particularly heavy suitcase - they might use a taxi, but no more than once or twice a year.
They do not shop in out-of-town supermarkets or buy fancy fruit out of season. They have never tasted a strawberry in January or a kiwi fruit or mange tout at any time of the year. Most of their vegetables are grown in the back garden or their allotment and the food they have to buy comes from local shops.
They have no need for recycling bins because there is virtually nothing to put in them. Indeed, the very notion of recycling is alien to them. The woman uses a shopping bag, so there are no plastic bags to get rid of and she buys her milk in bottles that are washed and returned. Every scrap of potato peeling or old cabbage leaf ends up in the compost heap and there is no kitchen waste because, quite simply, there is no waste. Stale bread is turned into delicious bread pudding and leftover vegetables into a fry-up.
They buy only what they need because they have no fridge. The larder stays cool enough year round and nothing goes rotten. Ever.
They turn off the light if they are not in the room and if they had central heating they would turn that down too. But they don't. They have a fire in one room and the rest of the house is as cold as charity.
You may be starting to smell a rat by now and, yes, I am cheating a little. This virtuous couple with an ecological footprint smaller than a dormouse's paw happens to be my mother and father. It is an accurate picture of how they (and I) lived until I was in my teens. You may very well recognise them if, like me, you were born into a relatively poor working class family 50 or 60 years ago. They were probably your parents too.
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BACK TO TRADITION FOR BRITISH GOVERNMENT SCHOOLS?
The cadet corps and the "house" system may be considered vestiges of Tom Brown's schooldays, but prefects, sporting societies and communal discipline could soon be making a far more prominent return. State schools are encouraged today to adopt the traditions of the public schools to prevent the gap between rich and poor growing ever wider. An influential left-wing think-tank has taken the rare step of advocating a return to some of the structures associated with public schools - including the house system and forcing young people to take part in structured and uniformed activities - to help the working class to gain personal skills for the 21st century.
The recommendations may be aired commonly in society's more conservative wings, but they have now emerged in a far more surprising quarter. The Institute for Public Policy Research believes that the young can no longer rely on good exam results to get on and that gaining personal and social skills will become more important to self advancement. It says that failing to teach these vital skills will lead to a widening social-class gap between rich and poor and make it more difficult for the working class to move up the social ladder. "We have looked hard at the evidence and children do better in these conditions," Richard Darlington, of the institute, said. He added: "We have to challenge some of the hippy tendencies of the Left on youth activities. Actually what works is structure, discipline, uniform and hierarchy."
All state schools should be encouraged to adopt the "house system" found in public schools and aped in grammar schools. "House systems are a good way to harness peer effects in a positive way. There are three main benefits to this approach: it ensures the pupils interact with older and younger peers, that their identity within school is not solely determined by their year or class and that they are members of structured hierarchies," the report, Freedom's Orphans, says. It adds that the house system would also encourage them to work collectively towards goals while breaking up traditional peer groups. All children aged 11 to 16 should be made to take part in two hours of structured activity in an extended school day under the institute's proposals. Activities could include martial arts, a cadet force or the Scouts - and most would involve wearing a uniform. Parents who failed to ensure their children attended the activities should face fines just as they are punished if their child is a persistent truant.
The report says that activities such as the Scouts and Guides can help to improve educational attainment, behaviour and personal and social skills. Mr Darlington added: "The evidence shows that wearing a uniform, be it in the Scouts or for martial arts, football or sports clubs, helps." The benefits of joining the Scouts or the Sea Scouts or cadet corps are, according to the institute, proven. Those who had participated in structured activities by the time they were 30 were less likely to be depressed. less likely to be single, separated or divorced and less likely to be in social housing. The report found that skills such as communication, self-esteem, planning and self-control had become 33 times more important in determining earnings between the generation born in 1958 and those in 1970.
Nick Pearce, director of the institute, said that there had always been class divides in education, but there was now a personal skills divide that was contributing to a decline in social mobility.
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Surprising sense from a senior British Leftist: "Gordon Brown has called for a new global alliance of governments, business leaders and public figures to fight the reactionary "Luddites" opposed to globalisation and break the "dangerous global log jam" that is threatening world trade. The Chancellor, writing today in The Times, challenges leaders to show the determination necessary to stop the world slipping back into a new era of protectionism, comparing it to the effort needed to rebuild the international order after the Second World War."
`Britain faces an explosion of crime when Romania and Bulgaria join the EU,' warned the Sun newspaper this week. According to a `secret Cabinet memo', Eastern European gangs will trigger dramatic increases in street violence, vice rackets, cash point theft and fraud. Some 85 per cent of robberies at cash points, the report said, is said to be committed by Romanians. Quite how the authorities have worked that out is anyone's guess. But it's clear that Eastern Europeans are now targeted as a problem-in-waiting by the police, politicians and pundits. So just what is so awful about these Eastern Europeans?
Since the summer, panics and prejudices about migrants from the former Eastern Bloc countries have been aired by left and right alike. They've ranged from the age-old Malthusian concerns of `too many people, not enough resources'; to last week's statement by Trevor Phillips that Bulgarians and Romanians have racist attitudes towards black people. Now, Romanians are a bunch of sex-traffickers and cash-point robbers ready to wreck havoc in the UK. `It doesn't bode well for the future', said Sir Andrew Green of Migration Watch.
When preposterous figures such as `Romanians commit 85 per cent of crime at cash points' is peddled by the government it doesn't bode well for John Reid's sense of perspective. Are there even enough Romanians in the UK to commit nearly all robberies at cash machines? Do teams of Romanians travel the breadth of the UK to make sure no cash-machine is left safe? According to those ridiculous figures, they must certainly have to.
Panics surrounding ethnic groups and criminality are, of course, nothing new. Back in the 1970s, the press and Metropolitan police force launched the infamous `mugging' panic. Then it was young black men who were said to be causing an `epidemic' of street robberies across Britain, even though such recorded crimes had gone down since the peak of 1968. The moral panic was accepted because it confirmed and exacerbated racial prejudice and hostility to black people. Today, the government and media's drive against Eastern Europeans is also driven by panics and prejudices, but of a different but no less reactionary kind.
Even though it has benefited the UK, the relatively big hike in migration from Eastern Europe has rattled New Labour on a number of levels. Firstly, the free-movement of migrants in and out of the UK goes against their regulatory, controlling instincts. UK Home Secretary John Reid's plans to impose a limited quota on migrants from Romania, for instance, says more about New Labour's target-driven approach to governance than any real consideration on migration and the economy.
More importantly, though, it seems any discussions on Eastern Europeans can be aired freely precisely because they're white. After all, who could accuse them of playing the `racist immigration card'? Therefore, low-life scare stories about cash robbers and sex traffickers wouldn't be loudly proclaimed if the migrants were from Africa. White migrants are considered fair game because, as Mick Hume has pointed out, it's a reflection of how the political class sees white working-class Britons too. When Trevor Philips said that Bulgarians have backward attitudes towards black people, and therefore should be denied entry into Britain, he could have easily followed that up with: `haven't we got enough of those types of people already?'
It's worth remembering that a few years back, a leaked government memo reckoned that British pensioners couldn't be accommodated into New Britain because of their dated `racist attitudes'. Clearly, though, it hasn't stopped with pensioners either. Younger generations of white Britons and now Eastern European migrants are either under suspicion or downright guilty of harbouring hostility to non-whites. The old pub philosophy of `there's good and bad everywhere amongst people', it seems, no longer applies.
All this, though, is simply a consequence of `objective subjectivism' that lies at the heart of multicultural thinking. What this means is that humans are no longer seen as transformative agents, but having fixed or `essential' characteristics passed on through traditions, values and beliefs. So according to the sociologist Tariq Modood, ethnicity or cultural belonging should be viewed `as being essential to a person's characteristic as skin or eye colour'. In other words, there's no escape from our cultural heritage.
This is why today black people are viewed solely as victims of slavery and racism and therefore objects of pity. British Muslims are seen either as victims of Islamophobia and therefore inherently anti-western and/or ultra-religious, while whites are viewed as racial supremacists itching to cause pogroms or go lynching. If humans really are automated products of generational cultural influences, then it makes sense to manage them accordingly. This is why the language used to justify restrictions against Eastern European migrants and to regulate the `backward' white masses of Britain are often the same. What it really demonstrates, however, is the deeply anti-human thinking of official, multicultural thinking.
It's no longer enough that morality has been re-drawn around who is considered racist or anti-racist (though more often, officialdom is in the latter, self-flattering camp). Instead, the essentialist outlook of multiculturalism means that some groups in society will be guilty through historical association, rather than anything they've actually done. The current hysterical panic against the supposed racism, and now the criminality, of Eastern Europeans says as much about what the political class thinks of white Britons over here as it does Romanians and Bulgarians over there.
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U.K.: A BISHOP WHO GETS IT
The Church of England's only Asian bishop, whose father converted from Islam, has criticised many Muslims for their "dual psychology", in which they desire both "victimhood and domination". In the most outspoken critique of Muslims by a church leader, Michael Nazir-Ali, the Bishop of Rochester, said that because of this view it would never be possible to satisfy all their demands. "Their complaint often boils down to the position that it is always right to intervene when Muslims are victims, as in Bosnia or Kosovo, and always wrong when the Muslims are the oppressors or terrorists, as with the Taliban or in Iraq," said Nazir-Ali. "Given the world view that has given rise to such grievances, there can never be sufficient appeasement and new demands will continue to be made." The failure to counter such beliefs meant that radical Islam had flourished in Britain, spread by extremist imams indoctrinating children for
up to four hours a day, he said.
Nazir-Ali added that rigorous checks, from which the government had retreated in face of Muslims' protests, should be imposed to ensure that arriving clerics were committed to the British way of life. "Characteristic British values have developed from the Christian faith and its vision of personal and common good," said the bishop in an interview with The Sunday Times. "After they were clarified by the enlightenment they became the bedrock of our modern political life. These values need to be recovered to help us to inculcate the virtues of generosity, loyalty, moderation and love."
Nazir-Ali, who was born in Pakistan and whose father converted from Islam to Catholicism, said radical Islam was being taught in mosque schools across Britain. "While radical teaching may not be happening everywhere, its presence is felt across the country. It affects all Muslims," he said. "The two main causes of the present situation [rising extremism] are fundamentalist imams and material on the internet." He proposed to filter out imams who might whip up extremism: "They must be vetted for appropriate qualifications, they must have a reasonable knowledge of the English language and they must take part in a recognised process of learning about British life and culture."
The government, after lobbying from Muslim groups, retreated from proposals to toughen entry requirements put forward by David Blunkett, the former home secretary, two years ago. Plans to require foreign clerics to sit a test on British civic values a year after arriving were cancelled along with the introduction of a requirement to speak English to conversational level.
Nazir-Ali also criticised women wearing veils that cover the whole face. Tony Blair called the full veil a "mark of separation", but Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, said any curbs on wearing it would be "politically dangerous".
Nazir-Ali drew attention to a "huge increase" in the wearing of Muslim dress in Egypt, Malaysia and Pakistan, saying that in Britain there were circumstances where the full veil should not be worn: "I can see nothing in Islam that prescribes the wearing of a full-face veil. In the supermarket those at the cash tills need to be recognised. Teaching is another context in which society requires recognition and identification."
Nazir-Ali, 57, was born a Catholic in Karachi, converted to Protestantism and was received into the Church of Pakistan at 20. He settled in Britain in the 1980s and became the youngest bishop in the world at 35.
Muhammad Abdul Bari, secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain, said his comments were not "very helpful for community relationships".
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Climate chaos? Don't believe it
By Christopher Monckton
Download Christopher Monckton's references and detailed calculations [pdf]
The Stern report last week predicted dire economic and social effects of unchecked global warming. In what many will see as a highly controversial polemic, Christopher Monckton disputes the 'facts' of this impending apocalypse and accuses the UN and its scientists of distorting the truth
Last week, Gordon Brown and his chief economist both said global warming was the worst "market failure" ever. That loaded soundbite suggests that the "climate-change" scare is less about saving the planet than, in Jacques Chirac's chilling phrase, "creating world government". This week and next, I'll reveal how politicians, scientists and bureaucrats contrived a threat of Biblical floods, droughts, plagues, and extinctions worthier of St John the Divine than of science.
Sir Nicholas Stern's report on the economics of climate change, which was published last week, says that the debate is over. It isn't. There are more greenhouse gases in the air than there were, so the world should warm a bit, but that's as far as the "consensus" goes. After the recent hysteria, you may not find the truth easy to believe. So you can find all my references and detailed calculations here.
The Royal Society says there's a worldwide scientific consensus. It brands Apocalypse-deniers as paid lackeys of coal and oil corporations. I declare my interest: I once took the taxpayer's shilling and advised Margaret Thatcher, FRS, on scientific scams and scares. Alas, not a red cent from Exxon.
In 1988, James Hansen, a climatologist, told the US Congress that temperature would rise 0.3C by the end of the century (it rose 0.1C), and that sea level would rise several feet (no, one inch). The UN set up a transnational bureaucracy, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The UK taxpayer unwittingly meets the entire cost of its scientific team, which, in 2001, produced the Third Assessment Report, a Bible-length document presenting apocalyptic conclusions well beyond previous reports.
This week, I'll show how the UN undervalued the sun's effects on historical and contemporary climate, slashed the natural greenhouse effect, overstated the past century's temperature increase, repealed a fundamental law of physics and tripled the man-made greenhouse effect. Next week, I'll demonstrate the atrocious economic, political and environmental cost of the high-tax, zero-freedom, bureaucratic centralism implicit in Stern's report; I'll compare the global-warming scare with previous sci-fi alarums; and I'll show how the environmentalists' "precautionary principle" (get the state to interfere now, just in case) is killing people.
So to the scare. First, the UN implies that carbon dioxide ended the last four ice ages. It displays two 450,000-year graphs: a sawtooth curve of temperature and a sawtooth of airborne CO2 that's scaled to look similar. Usually, similar curves are superimposed for comparison. The UN didn't do that. If it had, the truth would have shown: the changes in temperature preceded the changes in CO2 levels.
Next, the UN abolished the medieval warm period (the global warming at the end of the First Millennium AD). In 1995, David Deming, a geoscientist at the University of Oklahoma, had written an article reconstructing 150 years of North American temperatures from borehole data. He later wrote: "With the publication of the article in Science, I gained significant credibility in the community of scientists working on climate change. They thought I was one of them, someone who would pervert science in the service of social and political causes. One of them let his guard down. A major person working in the area of climate change and global warming sent me an astonishing email that said: 'We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period.' "
So they did. The UN's second assessment report, in 1996, showed a 1,000-year graph demonstrating that temperature in the Middle Ages was warmer than today. But the 2001 report contained a new graph showing no medieval warm period. It wrongly concluded that the 20th century was the warmest for 1,000 years. The graph looked like an ice hockey-stick. The wrongly flat AD1000-AD1900 temperature line was the shaft: the uptick from 1900 to 2000 was the blade. Here's how they did it:
* They gave one technique for reconstructing pre-thermometer temperature 390 times more weight than any other (but didn't say so).
* The technique they overweighted was one which the UN's 1996 report had said was unsafe: measurement of tree-rings from bristlecone pines. Tree-rings are wider in warmer years, but pine-rings are also wider when there's more carbon dioxide in the air: it's plant food. This carbon dioxide fertilisation distorts the calculations.
* They said they had included 24 data sets going back to 1400. Without saying so, they left out the set showing the medieval warm period, tucking it into a folder marked "Censored Data".
* They used a computer model to draw the graph from the data, but scientists later found that the model almost always drew hockey-sticks even if they fed in random, electronic "red noise".
The large, full-colour "hockey-stick" was the key graph in the UN's 2001 report, and the only one to appear six times. The Canadian Government copied it to every household. Four years passed before a leading scientific journal would publish the truth about the graph. Did the UN or the Canadian government apologise? Of course not. The UN still uses the graph in its publications.
Even after the "hockey stick" graph was exposed, scientific papers apparently confirming its abolition of the medieval warm period appeared. The US Senate asked independent statisticians to investigate. They found that the graph was meretricious, and that known associates of the scientists who had compiled it had written many of the papers supporting its conclusion.
The UN, echoed by Stern, says the graph isn't important. It is. Scores of scientific papers show that the medieval warm period was real, global and up to 3C warmer than now. Then, there were no glaciers in the tropical Andes: today they're there. There were Viking farms in Greenland: now they're under permafrost. There was little ice at the North Pole: a Chinese naval squadron sailed right round the Arctic in 1421 and found none.
The Antarctic, which holds 90 per cent of the world's ice and nearly all its 160,000 glaciers, has cooled and gained ice-mass in the past 30 years, reversing a 6,000-year melting trend. Data from 6,000 boreholes worldwide show global temperatures were higher in the Middle Ages than now. And the snows of Kilimanjaro are vanishing not because summit temperature is rising (it isn't) but because post-colonial deforestation has dried the air. Al Gore please note.
In some places it was also warmer than now in the Bronze Age and in Roman times. It wasn't CO2 that caused those warm periods. It was the sun. So the UN adjusted the maths and all but extinguished the sun's role in today's warming. Here's how:
* The UN dated its list of "forcings" (influences on temperature) from 1750, when the sun, and consequently air temperature, was almost as warm as now. But its start-date for the increase in world temperature was 1900, when the sun, and temperature, were much cooler.
* Every "forcing" produces "climate feedbacks" making temperature rise faster. For instance, as temperature rises in response to a forcing, the air carries more water vapour, the most important greenhouse gas; and polar ice melts, increasing heat absorption. Up goes the temperature again. The UN more than doubled the base forcings from greenhouse gases to allow for climate feedbacks. It didn't do the same for the base solar forcing.
Two centuries ago, the astronomer William Herschel was reading Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations when he noticed that quoted grain prices fell when the number of sunspots rose. Gales of laughter ensued, but he was right. At solar maxima, when the sun was at its hottest and sunspots showed, temperature was warmer, grain grew faster and prices fell. Such observations show that even small solar changes affect climate detectably.
But recent solar changes have been big. Sami Solanki, a solar physicist, says that in the past half-century the sun has been warmer, for longer, than at any time in at least the past 11,400 years, contributing a base forcing equivalent to a quarter of the past century's warming. That's before adding climate feedbacks.
The UN expresses its heat-energy forcings in watts per square metre per second. It estimates that the sun caused just 0.3 watts of forcing since 1750. Begin in 1900 to match the temperature start-date, and the base solar forcing more than doubles to 0.7 watts. Multiply by 2.7, which the Royal Society suggests is the UN's current factor for climate feedbacks, and you get 1.9 watts – more than six times the UN's figure. The entire 20th-century warming from all sources was below 2 watts. The sun could have caused just about all of it.
Next, the UN slashed the natural greenhouse effect by 40 per cent from 33C in the climate-physics textbooks to 20C, making the man-made additions appear bigger. Then the UN chose the biggest 20th-century temperature increase it could find. Stern says: "As anticipated by scientists, global mean surface temperatures have risen over the past century." As anticipated? Only 30 years ago, scientists were anticipating a new Ice Age and writing books called The Cooling. In the US, where weather records have been more reliable than elsewhere, 20th-century temperature went up by only 0.3C. AccuWeather, a worldwide meteorological service, reckons world temperature rose by 0.45C. The US National Climate Data Centre says 0.5C. Any advance on 0.5? The UN went for 0.6C, probably distorted by urban growth near many of the world's fast-disappearing temperature stations. The number of temperature stations round the world peaked at 6,000 in 1970. It's fallen by two-thirds to 2,000 now: a real "hockey-stick" curve, and an instance of the UN's growing reliance on computer guesswork rather than facts.
Even a 0.6C temperature rise wasn't enough. So the UN repealed a fundamental physical law. Buried in a sub-chapter in its 2001 report is a short but revealing section discussing "lambda": the crucial factor converting forcings to temperature. The UN said its climate models had found lambda near-invariant at 0.5C per watt of forcing. You don't need computer models to "find" lambda. Its value is given by a century-old law, derived experimentally by a Slovenian professor and proved by his Austrian student (who later committed suicide when his scientific compatriots refused to believe in atoms). The Stefan-Boltzmann law, not mentioned once in the UN's 2001 report, is as central to the thermodynamics of climate as Einstein's later equation is to astrophysics. Like Einstein's, it relates energy to the square of the speed of light, but by reference to temperature rather than mass. The bigger the value of lambda, the bigger the temperature increase the UN could predict. Using poor Ludwig Boltzmann's law, lambda's true value is just 0.22-0.3C per watt. In 2001, the UN effectively repealed the law, doubling lambda to 0.5C per watt. A recent paper by James Hansen says lambda should be 0.67, 0.75 or 1C: take your pick. Sir John Houghton, who chaired the UN's scientific assessment working group until recently, tells me it now puts lambda at 0.8C: that's 3C for a 3.7-watt doubling of airborne CO2. Most of the UN's computer models have used 1C. Stern implies 1.9C.
On the UN's figures, the entire greenhouse-gas forcing in the 20th century was 2 watts. Multiplying by the correct value of lambda gives a temperature increase of 0.44 to 0.6C, in line with observation. But using Stern's 1.9C per watt gives 3.8C. Where did 85 per cent of his imagined 20th-century warming go? As Professor Dick Lindzen of MIT pointed out in The Sunday Telegraph last week, the UK's Hadley Centre had the same problem, and solved it by dividing its modelled output by three to "predict" 20th-century temperature correctly.
A spate of recent scientific papers, gearing up for the UN's fourth report next year, gives a different reason for the failure of reality to keep up with prediction. The oceans, we're now told, are acting as a giant heat-sink. In these papers the well-known, central flaw (not mentioned by Stern) is that the computer models' "predictions" of past ocean temperature changes only approach reality if they are averaged over a depth of at least a mile and a quarter. Deep-ocean temperature hasn't changed at all, it's barely above freezing. The models tend to over-predict the warming of the climate-relevant surface layer up to threefold. A recent paper by John Lyman, of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, reports that the oceans have cooled sharply in the past two years. The computers didn't predict this. Sea level is scarcely rising faster today than a century ago: an inch every 15 years. Hansen now says that the oceanic "flywheel effect" gives us extra time to act, so Stern's alarmism is misplaced.
Finally, the UN's predictions are founded not only on an exaggerated forcing-to-temperature conversion factor justified neither by observation nor by physical law, but also on an excessive rate of increase in airborne carbon dioxide. The true rate is 0.38 per cent year on year since records began in 1958. The models assume 1 per cent per annum, more than two and a half times too high. In 2001, the UN used these and other adjustments to predict a 21st-century temperature increase of 1.5 to 6C. Stern suggests up to 10C.
Dick Lindzen emailed me last week to say that constant repetition of wrong numbers doesn't make them right. Removing the UN's solecisms, and using reasonable data and assumptions, a simple global model shows that temperature will rise by just 0.1 to 1.4C in the coming century, with a best estimate of 0.6C, well within the medieval temperature range and only a fifth of the UN's new, central projection.
Why haven't air or sea temperatures turned out as the UN's models predicted? Because the science is bad, the "consensus" is wrong, and Herr Professor Ludwig Boltzmann, FRS, was as right about energy-to-temperature as he was about atoms.
Source
SOME REAL GREENIES
Allow me to introduce you to the greenest people I have ever known. They are paragons. If the world had only followed their example we might not now be facing the threat of either drowning in the floodwaters created by global warming or watching fertile land turn into desert. To what extent we'd be enjoying our lives is for you to judge.
They do not own a car and never have. They have never been on an aeroplane. To get where they need to go they use either bus or train. Very occasionally - if they have a particularly heavy suitcase - they might use a taxi, but no more than once or twice a year.
They do not shop in out-of-town supermarkets or buy fancy fruit out of season. They have never tasted a strawberry in January or a kiwi fruit or mange tout at any time of the year. Most of their vegetables are grown in the back garden or their allotment and the food they have to buy comes from local shops.
They have no need for recycling bins because there is virtually nothing to put in them. Indeed, the very notion of recycling is alien to them. The woman uses a shopping bag, so there are no plastic bags to get rid of and she buys her milk in bottles that are washed and returned. Every scrap of potato peeling or old cabbage leaf ends up in the compost heap and there is no kitchen waste because, quite simply, there is no waste. Stale bread is turned into delicious bread pudding and leftover vegetables into a fry-up.
They buy only what they need because they have no fridge. The larder stays cool enough year round and nothing goes rotten. Ever.
They turn off the light if they are not in the room and if they had central heating they would turn that down too. But they don't. They have a fire in one room and the rest of the house is as cold as charity.
You may be starting to smell a rat by now and, yes, I am cheating a little. This virtuous couple with an ecological footprint smaller than a dormouse's paw happens to be my mother and father. It is an accurate picture of how they (and I) lived until I was in my teens. You may very well recognise them if, like me, you were born into a relatively poor working class family 50 or 60 years ago. They were probably your parents too.
Source
BACK TO TRADITION FOR BRITISH GOVERNMENT SCHOOLS?
The cadet corps and the "house" system may be considered vestiges of Tom Brown's schooldays, but prefects, sporting societies and communal discipline could soon be making a far more prominent return. State schools are encouraged today to adopt the traditions of the public schools to prevent the gap between rich and poor growing ever wider. An influential left-wing think-tank has taken the rare step of advocating a return to some of the structures associated with public schools - including the house system and forcing young people to take part in structured and uniformed activities - to help the working class to gain personal skills for the 21st century.
The recommendations may be aired commonly in society's more conservative wings, but they have now emerged in a far more surprising quarter. The Institute for Public Policy Research believes that the young can no longer rely on good exam results to get on and that gaining personal and social skills will become more important to self advancement. It says that failing to teach these vital skills will lead to a widening social-class gap between rich and poor and make it more difficult for the working class to move up the social ladder. "We have looked hard at the evidence and children do better in these conditions," Richard Darlington, of the institute, said. He added: "We have to challenge some of the hippy tendencies of the Left on youth activities. Actually what works is structure, discipline, uniform and hierarchy."
All state schools should be encouraged to adopt the "house system" found in public schools and aped in grammar schools. "House systems are a good way to harness peer effects in a positive way. There are three main benefits to this approach: it ensures the pupils interact with older and younger peers, that their identity within school is not solely determined by their year or class and that they are members of structured hierarchies," the report, Freedom's Orphans, says. It adds that the house system would also encourage them to work collectively towards goals while breaking up traditional peer groups. All children aged 11 to 16 should be made to take part in two hours of structured activity in an extended school day under the institute's proposals. Activities could include martial arts, a cadet force or the Scouts - and most would involve wearing a uniform. Parents who failed to ensure their children attended the activities should face fines just as they are punished if their child is a persistent truant.
The report says that activities such as the Scouts and Guides can help to improve educational attainment, behaviour and personal and social skills. Mr Darlington added: "The evidence shows that wearing a uniform, be it in the Scouts or for martial arts, football or sports clubs, helps." The benefits of joining the Scouts or the Sea Scouts or cadet corps are, according to the institute, proven. Those who had participated in structured activities by the time they were 30 were less likely to be depressed. less likely to be single, separated or divorced and less likely to be in social housing. The report found that skills such as communication, self-esteem, planning and self-control had become 33 times more important in determining earnings between the generation born in 1958 and those in 1970.
Nick Pearce, director of the institute, said that there had always been class divides in education, but there was now a personal skills divide that was contributing to a decline in social mobility.
Source
Surprising sense from a senior British Leftist: "Gordon Brown has called for a new global alliance of governments, business leaders and public figures to fight the reactionary "Luddites" opposed to globalisation and break the "dangerous global log jam" that is threatening world trade. The Chancellor, writing today in The Times, challenges leaders to show the determination necessary to stop the world slipping back into a new era of protectionism, comparing it to the effort needed to rebuild the international order after the Second World War."
Monday, November 06, 2006
SPOILT-BRAT UNIVERSITY STUDENTS IN BRITAIN
No apparent appreciation that they are in receipt of huge subsidies from the taxpayers, most of whom have NOT had the privilege of a university education
Student demonstrators gathered in central London last Sunday to protest against the new university top-up fees - up to 3000 pounds per year. You may have missed it; it was upstaged by an anti-war demo a few streets away, and the only live media coverage - on ITV news - noted that `motorists were disrupted today' as a number of students held up traffic. Talking to students over the weekend about why they didn't join the rally, many felt that the protest was `a bit late now' or, according to Daryn McCombe, union president at King's College London, `a bit early,' as the top-up fees policy which the National Union of Students (NUS) hoped to bring down is not up for review for another three to four years.
Daryn and I met up in King's College student union bar, which is called `The Waterfront' because it boasts a beautiful, sun-dappled view of the river Thames. The Waterfront's entry sign is subtitled `student life support', but inside it looks less like a counselling centre and more like a suburban cocktail bar. From the outside, the union is a dirty-looking concrete building with lots of windows, but on the third floor, plush is the word that describes it best. There are canvas photographs of London street scenes bolted to the brown walls, brown leather booths, plasma TV screens, games units, a fluorescent blue juke box, subtle orange lights highlighting the ceiling, and stylish white lamps drooping down from it like large plastic tear drops. The caf‚ sells `delicious gourmet coffee and Covent Garden soup'.
With all this lushness, it's slightly puzzling that students are still demanding more, more, more. But such is life in the brave new dawn of commercialised education. Since top-up fees came to King's, Daryn explains, students are increasingly asking `where's this, where's that? Why aren't there more water fountains?' They're not treating education `as a chance to look beyond themselves' but as a `career step'. As students now pay for their education, they feel entitled to buy themselves the right results. `Students are becoming more and more litigious,' Daryn explains. `They're appealing over and over again against marks. Three years ago the academic board received about 50 appeals for independent adjudication a year. This year, there were 250 appeals.'
One of Daryn's victories as union president has been to defeat an invasive measure to make students who wish to record lectures because of hearing problems prove their disability. This is not because `lecturers were reluctant to be recorded for reasons of copyright or intellectual property', but `because if lectures are recorded and students repeat a point made there in an exam and then has their answer marked "wrong" they can sue'. Although Daryn holds no truck with these sorts of complaints, he does uphold students' rights in terms of living conditions at the King's College student halls, which, he explains, `is a military hospital converted in the 1950s and it hasn't seen much refurbishment since then. There are tiled floors, bad beds, and mismatched furniture. When you're paying for education, that isn't really good enough'.
The turn out from King's at Sunday's demo was around 100. In the presidential office Daryn shows me digital photographs of the day. Before the demo, King's students held a `workshop' to widen participation and make their own personalised banners. Daryn describes the day itself as having `gone really well.' Smiling students flash up, holding banners. He was pleased that the NUS managed to restrain themselves from `wasting money' on placards `that just piss people off', like those saying `Fuck Fees'. He explains that `there are children in central London and it just doesn't help. It just perpetuates what is becoming legend already: that students are just the unwashed masses.'
Daryn was quietly annoyed by the small number of students who staged a sit-in on Parliament Square on Sunday as `they were never going to get any press coverage and all they did was annoy the police'. But why didn't more students from King's man the barricades? `The problem we have at King's is that it's a fairly good uni and it cares about its students. There's not a massive lot for students to protest about, so we're not going to inspire activism.' But if this is the case, why did Daryn go himself? Because, he tells me, he fundamentally believes in free education for all. It's like the war in Iraq, he says. The government has spent `billions and billions' on the war, but the attitude to the army is, `whatever they need, they can have - so why can't that attitude be applied to the public services?'
Although Daryn and many students believe that education should be free, they've thoroughly absorbed the idea that education should be a unit in the consumer economy. For instance, Daryn believes the many problems with science education today are down to fees: `Physics, for example, is good for the economy - but it's an expensive degree and that's putting people off,' he explains. You will find it difficult to find a student who argues that physics should be studied for free and purely for the sake of physics. You just can't sell that sort of line to society anymore. He disagrees with Tony Blair's `arbitrary 50 per cent target' for university enrolment. Instead, you need to `just look at what the economy needs and fill those needs. A lot of degrees, for example David Beckham studies at Birmingham or Norwich or wherever it was, are a pointless waste of time. We need to think about what's best in terms of outcomes.'
Education long ago ceased to be about education. An NUS leaflet, presenting the case against top-up fees, treats the economic facts of the university `market' in much the same way as the Daily Mail discusses house prices. Top-up fees are now a middle class whinge-fest. Did you know, for instance, that `according to the Department for Education and Skills (DfES), the extra money you will earn as a graduate compared to a non-graduate has gone down by over œ350,000 in the last three years alone! We deserve value for money in our teaching, high quality facilities, and world class resources to help us become better citizens.' But then don't students deserve Goa gap year tans, mummy to buy us a flat, cocktails in the union bar on a Thursday, matching halls furniture, crayfish and avocado wraps each lunchtime and an idiot-proof instruction leaflet on how to get top results too?
The ideal of free education - accessible to all regardless of income or heritage - is a good one. But if higher education is just about equipping people for jobs or making them `fit for society', then why shouldn't they pay for the benefits they accrue? If we understand education as merely `good for the market' then it's only a natural extension for it to be governed by market principles. But talk of education in terms of developing knowledge and critical faculties and then, and only then, do we have a rational argument against fee-dom and a real reason to go out and march.
Source
Science teaching: A breath of realism from Britain
TEACHERS of physics and chemistry should be paid more than those in other subjects so as to attract bright graduates and tackle a severe shortage which threatens Britain's competitiveness, a Lords committee warns today. A report from the science and technology committee says the government needs to act urgently to reverse a collapse in the number of state school pupils taking science subjects. The committee is concerned that the shortage of teachers is being compounded by schools worried about league table positions. The schools push pupils to study "soft" A-level subjects such as psychology, media studies and photography rather than academically demanding "hard" sciences. It calls for "significantly higher" salaries for physics and chemistry teachers.
If adopted, the move would be likely to spark opposition from teachers' unions, but Lord Broers, the former vice-chancellor of Cambridge University who chaired the inquiry, said that increased salaries were vital. "The government has to recognise market forces require them to pay science graduates more than others," said Broers. "The future of British science and engineering is at risk because pupils are not being inspired to study science."
Last Friday Tony Blair called for more young people to take up science to counter "irrational public debate" on subjects such as genetically modified foods and stem cell research. He added that science was "not a life all spent in a laboratory but has the best business and job prospects the modern world can offer".
The Lords committee adds urgency to Blair's call, documenting the steep decline, particularly in physics, in the past 15 years. The number studying the subject at A-level in comprehensives has gone down from 18,000 to 11,000. Across all schools, only 24,600 pupils took physics A-level in 2005. Half the A-grades are achieved by candidates from independent schools, which educate only 8% of the population. About a quarter of state schools for 11-16-year-olds do not even have a qualified physics teacher and 12% have no qualified chemistry teacher.
"Poor quality teaching means pupils do not choose the subject to study," said Broers. The report also accuses ministers of reneging on an election promise to spend 200 million pounds improving laboratories. Some 66% of science facilities in state schools have been assessed as "basic or unsatisfactory". Many schools, the report says, have almost given up practical science lessons. Teachers say science classes are too big or too badly behaved for practicals to be safe. The Lords also believes the government should broaden the number of subjects that pupils study after the age of 16.
Source
Flag Burning Issue Surfaces in Britain
We read:
No apparent appreciation that they are in receipt of huge subsidies from the taxpayers, most of whom have NOT had the privilege of a university education
Student demonstrators gathered in central London last Sunday to protest against the new university top-up fees - up to 3000 pounds per year. You may have missed it; it was upstaged by an anti-war demo a few streets away, and the only live media coverage - on ITV news - noted that `motorists were disrupted today' as a number of students held up traffic. Talking to students over the weekend about why they didn't join the rally, many felt that the protest was `a bit late now' or, according to Daryn McCombe, union president at King's College London, `a bit early,' as the top-up fees policy which the National Union of Students (NUS) hoped to bring down is not up for review for another three to four years.
Daryn and I met up in King's College student union bar, which is called `The Waterfront' because it boasts a beautiful, sun-dappled view of the river Thames. The Waterfront's entry sign is subtitled `student life support', but inside it looks less like a counselling centre and more like a suburban cocktail bar. From the outside, the union is a dirty-looking concrete building with lots of windows, but on the third floor, plush is the word that describes it best. There are canvas photographs of London street scenes bolted to the brown walls, brown leather booths, plasma TV screens, games units, a fluorescent blue juke box, subtle orange lights highlighting the ceiling, and stylish white lamps drooping down from it like large plastic tear drops. The caf‚ sells `delicious gourmet coffee and Covent Garden soup'.
With all this lushness, it's slightly puzzling that students are still demanding more, more, more. But such is life in the brave new dawn of commercialised education. Since top-up fees came to King's, Daryn explains, students are increasingly asking `where's this, where's that? Why aren't there more water fountains?' They're not treating education `as a chance to look beyond themselves' but as a `career step'. As students now pay for their education, they feel entitled to buy themselves the right results. `Students are becoming more and more litigious,' Daryn explains. `They're appealing over and over again against marks. Three years ago the academic board received about 50 appeals for independent adjudication a year. This year, there were 250 appeals.'
One of Daryn's victories as union president has been to defeat an invasive measure to make students who wish to record lectures because of hearing problems prove their disability. This is not because `lecturers were reluctant to be recorded for reasons of copyright or intellectual property', but `because if lectures are recorded and students repeat a point made there in an exam and then has their answer marked "wrong" they can sue'. Although Daryn holds no truck with these sorts of complaints, he does uphold students' rights in terms of living conditions at the King's College student halls, which, he explains, `is a military hospital converted in the 1950s and it hasn't seen much refurbishment since then. There are tiled floors, bad beds, and mismatched furniture. When you're paying for education, that isn't really good enough'.
The turn out from King's at Sunday's demo was around 100. In the presidential office Daryn shows me digital photographs of the day. Before the demo, King's students held a `workshop' to widen participation and make their own personalised banners. Daryn describes the day itself as having `gone really well.' Smiling students flash up, holding banners. He was pleased that the NUS managed to restrain themselves from `wasting money' on placards `that just piss people off', like those saying `Fuck Fees'. He explains that `there are children in central London and it just doesn't help. It just perpetuates what is becoming legend already: that students are just the unwashed masses.'
Daryn was quietly annoyed by the small number of students who staged a sit-in on Parliament Square on Sunday as `they were never going to get any press coverage and all they did was annoy the police'. But why didn't more students from King's man the barricades? `The problem we have at King's is that it's a fairly good uni and it cares about its students. There's not a massive lot for students to protest about, so we're not going to inspire activism.' But if this is the case, why did Daryn go himself? Because, he tells me, he fundamentally believes in free education for all. It's like the war in Iraq, he says. The government has spent `billions and billions' on the war, but the attitude to the army is, `whatever they need, they can have - so why can't that attitude be applied to the public services?'
Although Daryn and many students believe that education should be free, they've thoroughly absorbed the idea that education should be a unit in the consumer economy. For instance, Daryn believes the many problems with science education today are down to fees: `Physics, for example, is good for the economy - but it's an expensive degree and that's putting people off,' he explains. You will find it difficult to find a student who argues that physics should be studied for free and purely for the sake of physics. You just can't sell that sort of line to society anymore. He disagrees with Tony Blair's `arbitrary 50 per cent target' for university enrolment. Instead, you need to `just look at what the economy needs and fill those needs. A lot of degrees, for example David Beckham studies at Birmingham or Norwich or wherever it was, are a pointless waste of time. We need to think about what's best in terms of outcomes.'
Education long ago ceased to be about education. An NUS leaflet, presenting the case against top-up fees, treats the economic facts of the university `market' in much the same way as the Daily Mail discusses house prices. Top-up fees are now a middle class whinge-fest. Did you know, for instance, that `according to the Department for Education and Skills (DfES), the extra money you will earn as a graduate compared to a non-graduate has gone down by over œ350,000 in the last three years alone! We deserve value for money in our teaching, high quality facilities, and world class resources to help us become better citizens.' But then don't students deserve Goa gap year tans, mummy to buy us a flat, cocktails in the union bar on a Thursday, matching halls furniture, crayfish and avocado wraps each lunchtime and an idiot-proof instruction leaflet on how to get top results too?
The ideal of free education - accessible to all regardless of income or heritage - is a good one. But if higher education is just about equipping people for jobs or making them `fit for society', then why shouldn't they pay for the benefits they accrue? If we understand education as merely `good for the market' then it's only a natural extension for it to be governed by market principles. But talk of education in terms of developing knowledge and critical faculties and then, and only then, do we have a rational argument against fee-dom and a real reason to go out and march.
Source
Science teaching: A breath of realism from Britain
TEACHERS of physics and chemistry should be paid more than those in other subjects so as to attract bright graduates and tackle a severe shortage which threatens Britain's competitiveness, a Lords committee warns today. A report from the science and technology committee says the government needs to act urgently to reverse a collapse in the number of state school pupils taking science subjects. The committee is concerned that the shortage of teachers is being compounded by schools worried about league table positions. The schools push pupils to study "soft" A-level subjects such as psychology, media studies and photography rather than academically demanding "hard" sciences. It calls for "significantly higher" salaries for physics and chemistry teachers.
If adopted, the move would be likely to spark opposition from teachers' unions, but Lord Broers, the former vice-chancellor of Cambridge University who chaired the inquiry, said that increased salaries were vital. "The government has to recognise market forces require them to pay science graduates more than others," said Broers. "The future of British science and engineering is at risk because pupils are not being inspired to study science."
Last Friday Tony Blair called for more young people to take up science to counter "irrational public debate" on subjects such as genetically modified foods and stem cell research. He added that science was "not a life all spent in a laboratory but has the best business and job prospects the modern world can offer".
The Lords committee adds urgency to Blair's call, documenting the steep decline, particularly in physics, in the past 15 years. The number studying the subject at A-level in comprehensives has gone down from 18,000 to 11,000. Across all schools, only 24,600 pupils took physics A-level in 2005. Half the A-grades are achieved by candidates from independent schools, which educate only 8% of the population. About a quarter of state schools for 11-16-year-olds do not even have a qualified physics teacher and 12% have no qualified chemistry teacher.
"Poor quality teaching means pupils do not choose the subject to study," said Broers. The report also accuses ministers of reneging on an election promise to spend 200 million pounds improving laboratories. Some 66% of science facilities in state schools have been assessed as "basic or unsatisfactory". Many schools, the report says, have almost given up practical science lessons. Teachers say science classes are too big or too badly behaved for practicals to be safe. The Lords also believes the government should broaden the number of subjects that pupils study after the age of 16.
Source
Flag Burning Issue Surfaces in Britain
We read:
"The American Civil Liberties Union has shouted down various attempts by Congress to make burning or otherwise desecrating the Stars and Stripes a criminal offence, on the basis that it would infringe on freedom of thought and expression - burning a flag is an `expressive act', a form of `political speech', says the ACLU, and the authorities should keep their hands off it.
The British police are looking to go even further than Congress has tried but failed to: they want to criminalise `burning the flag of any country', not just the Union Jack. This is more brazen than anything attempted in other states....
In calling for a ban on any kind of flag-burning, the police show that their main aim is to clamp down on speech and protest. They are concerned not so much with `protecting national integrity' - as those various other laws against national flag-burning dubiously claim to - but rather with outlawing what they see as inflammatory (literally) protest. It's not the flag they're worried about, so much as the fire, the fiery passions of protesters and the public.
Source
Sunday, November 05, 2006
NHS staff give the lie to official waffle
It was a little like a parallel universe. While government officials have spent the day churning out ever more glorious statistics about the NHS, the staff who run the service have taken to the streets. From the bowels of the Department of Health's HQ, the familiar tales of falling waiting lists and increased staff numbers have been recounted. But outside on the streets of Westminster, doctors, nurses, cleaners and other support staff have been protesting at what they see as disastrous policies. Pensioners and health staff marched round Parliament Square waving placards saying "Save the NHS", while a double-decker bus circled the House of Commons drumming up support for the cause. A stone's throw away, at a packed Methodist Central Hall, a rally heard from union leaders and frontline staff about how Labour's policies were destroying the health service.
The buzz words became "creeping privatisation" and "fragmentation" as campaigners rallied against deficits, PFI hospital build schemes and privately-run NHS treatment centres. The day's protest has been organised by NHS Together, an alliance of 16 health unions which have come together to oppose the direction the NHS is heading in. Such unity among the health service's union movement is unheralded and begs the question: how can the views of government and health staff be so polarised?
Dr Jacky Davis, a consultant radiologist and member of the British Medical Association, said: "The problem is that the policies are being driven by ideological dogma. "There is no evidence that increasing the use of the private sector and scaling back on staff and hospitals will be beneficial. "No-one outside Number 10 believes it will, and so far they have refused to properly consult with us, so it is not surprising the government have not got staff on board." Listening to the campaigners, the problem seems to be that in many cases workers have had negative experiences of the government's policies.
Andrea Shields, a London paramedic, told the rally about a case recently involving a woman who went into labour prematurely at 29 weeks. Unable to locate a free neonatal bed in the London area after what she says have been cuts, her colleague was forced to drive to Portsmouth three hours away to get the care needed. "Not only did it put the mother and baby at risk, it took an ambulance out of the London service for six hours." And in a direct plea to ministers, she added: "All we want to do is to be able to do our jobs. Listen to us, the front-line staff, not the fancy management consultants."
But will the day of protest make any difference? Union officials and health workers also spent the day lobbying MPs - by mid-afternoon the queue outside the House of Commons was snaking down Millbank. Ruth Levin, a London regional officer for Unison, met with her local Labour MP. She said: "He did seem sympathetic to our concerns, particularly over the private sector, but it really requires a whole sea-change in the way politicians are handling the NHS." However, she acknowledged campaigners were facing a challenge as many MPs speak out sympathetically when their local hospital feels the pinch, only to continue voting for the government's policies inside the Palace of Westminster.
As for the government, it seems there will be no slow-down. As protesters took to the streets, ministers were touring the television and radio studios saying there was no turning back. As Health Minister Andy Burnham put it: "Actually, rather than putting the NHS under any threat, this is the NHS poised to make one of its biggest leaps forward in its history."
Source
Britain's Bonfire night: an annual display of pyrotechnical correctness
Fireworks! How about watching virtual pyrotechnics on a laptop in your bedroom with the curtains drawn, listening to recorded bangs on your iPod with the volume down and enjoying an organic hot dog labelled "This Dog May Be Hot"?
Far-fetched, perhaps. But so are reports that a Devon rugby club is showing a video projection of a bonfire at its fireworks party to avoid the costs of meeting health and safety regulations. Our local school has cancelled its display, because of a shortage of "trained firework lighters" (how long is that course?) and new guidelines on how far fireworks should be from people. We are a long way from the common sense advice on the old family fireworks box to "Light the blue touchpaper and retire immediately".
The annual explosion of pyrotechnical correctness about safety and "noise pollution" around firework night follows on from the Hallowe'en panic. There have been calls to ban children trick-or-treating as begging with menaces. Our local police sent out extra patrols on Hallowe'en, a spokesman explained, "because it is dark". Church figures gave warning about children falling prey to Darkness of another sort. Our young daughters dressed up as witches, went out with the neighbours and had a great time in the dark. Pity that so few would open their door.
What many people seem most anxious about today is not loud bangs, but noisy young people who they fear might explode at the drop of a witch's hat or a sparkler. Kids have always let off steam around Guy Fawkes night. I grew up with boys who enjoyed such traditional pastimes as throwing bangers (now banned) at cats, and firing rockets at bedroom windows. In those pre-trick-or-treat days, we sat in the street with a raggedy Guy asking strangers for money (which some gave us) without getting arrested.
Now youthful fooling around is equated with crime. One police spokesman told the BBC that his force would be "cracking down hard" on Hallowe'en antisocial behaviour, such as "knocking and running away from doors". In my day that was called Knock Down Ginger. The cowardly version was Knock Down Rosebud, in which you threw something at the door. The worst you would get was a rocket from the neighbours, or a "banger" round the ear from your dad. Today Ginger and Rosebud might expect ASBOs.
One MP told a youth justice conference this week: "The police are being called too often to tackle behaviour that only a few years ago would have been handled by teachers and parents." It would have been a good point had it not been made by Tony Blair, whose Government has encouraged us all to send up distress signals to the ASBO-happy authorities.
We also used to sing a song about building a bonfire, with "The teachers on the top/Put the prefects in the middle and burn the bloody lot." I hope that has been banned as incendiary hate-speech, if not for failing to comply with health and safety guidelines.
Source
The incorrectness of travel in wacky Britain
New Labour’s deep-seated hostility to popular mobility is holding back advances on roads, railways and in the air
Is the New Labour government concreting over the countryside, as greens suggest, so as to appease the all-powerful road lobby? Does it also pander to what one green columnist has referred to as `anti-social bastards who believe they should be allowed to do what they want, whenever they want, regardless of the consequences', to the `extreme libertarianism now beginning to take hold here', to an individualism that `begins on the road'?
Well: between 1997, when New Labour came to power, and 2004, the latest year for which figures are available, Britain opened 284 miles of new major roads and motorways. That's a grand total of 40 miles a year. Not too impressive, for the world's fifth largest economy.
Don't expect chancellor Gordon Brown's November pre-Budget report, or Sir Rod Eddington's late-running transport review, to bring about the swift, massive, nationwide renovation of short- and long-distance transport infrastructure most people want. Brown has already hinted that Eddington, ex-CEO of British Airways, will favour new transport within cities more than between them. That would anyway fit with general government policy, which is to confine new housing, and the working class, within cities, on brownfield sites.
In practice, the Eddington report will probably boil down to more bus lanes in cities and more cycleways, too; as well as more road tolls, pay-as-you-drive road pricing, urban congestion charges, urban parking charges, and general gas-guzzler charges. Already environment secretary David Miliband has sent Gordon Brown a letter recommending higher vehicle excise duty for fuel-inefficient cars - along with a rise in air passenger duty and the extension of VAT to flights.
Don't expect Department for Transport (DfT) secretary Douglas Alexander to dissent from this mania for new pricing schemes in road transport, rather than capacity expansion or technological progress. On 26 May, Alexander told Tony Blair he would be `seeking innovation and opportunities across all transport modes'. But by 27 June, he announced that only a tiny part, if any, of his Transport Innovation Fund would even improve major roads, let alone build new ones.
TIF money will rise slowly, from about 275 million pounds in 2008-9 to 2.75 billion by 2015. Initially, at least, most of it will go not on new roads, but on tinkering with traffic management, road pricing schemes, and the enhancement of gauges on those railway lines that carry freight. And like Crossrail, the `schemes' that Alexander says will now be `taken forward' will be taken forward for.`business case development and appraisal'. In the same spirit, Gordon Brown says that the Eddington report will `feed into' his own spending review `from 2008-11'
Well, let's not be too hasty! For the Department Against Transport (DAT), innovation means cutting car journeys, taxing them, and subjecting them to state surveillance through IT. Road congestion and the pollution that attends it are to be solved not through building more roads, for it is thought that selfish motorists will want to drive on them. Instead, New Labour innovation in road transport is now about cramming motorway drivers on to the hard shoulder.
The government has a deep-seated hostility to popular mobility. Of course, it justifies its coercive campaign to change motorists' behaviour in terms of the CO2 issuing from use of conventional petrol. But what does it propose to do about petrol use in terms of new technologies? In March, Brown's Budget ordered transport fuel suppliers to make five per cent of their product available as carbon-friendly biofuels by 2010/11. But the Department Against Transport has since found a new, more important worry. It frets about the `serious risk' that biofuels could themselves be developed `from highly unsustainable sources'. Yes, though biofuels take just 0.25 per cent of the UK transport fuels market at present, the government sees their further development as dangerous. And genetically-modified super-cellulose as the best possible substrate for biofuels? New Labour will never support it.
Government shows a similar disdain for innovation in Britain's major rail links. Germany can hope to put its recent accident with magnetic-levitation trains behind it. China can hope to spread its own version of maglev westwards, to Tibet. But Britain is different. As the Channel Tunnel Rail Link, the country's only new major rail line for many years, finally nears completion, the government has allowed Eurostar to strip Ashford, near the Thames Gateway mass housing development, of high-speed trains to Brussels - the political capital of Europe.
Still, in London, there appears to be a positive development. The government has decided to grant legal powers and planning consents to Network Rail in respect of its `Thameslink 2000 rail enhancement scheme' - better north-south railways for the nation's capital. But take a closer look. As DAT minister Stephen Ladyman stressed to parliament, `It is important to note that these decisions do not amount to a final go-ahead for the projects'.
If it is ever finished properly, Thameslink will be improved less around innovation, and more around tunnels that were built back in 1866. The whole atmosphere surrounding rail is steeped in lethargy. For proof, take Transport for London (TfL), the Ken Livingstone bauble that has just found 363million for Balfour Beatty and Carillion to extend the East London line by.2.25 miles. by 2010. Never bashful, TfL continues to protest that `concerns' about Thameslink raised by London Transport back in June 2000 `are still valid': the link's `strong emphasis on outer suburban services' means that it has few benefits for Londoners. For broadminded TfL, Thameslink is therefore of little value.
With air travel, too, New Labour runs a campaign to denigrate technological innovation. Earlier this month, Douglas Alexander told flying enthusiasts in Washington, DC: `We need to develop a coherent strategy encouraging and promoting technical improvements and operational gains - not just in aircraft design and fuel technologies, but also in areas such as air traffic control, which can have a significant impact on emissions.'
With its 787 Dreamliner, a long-haul, mid-sized plane to be flown for the first time next year, Boeing is struggling with composites and engines that, it hopes, will make a machine 20 per cent more fuel-efficient, per passenger, than previous models. Virgin's Sir Richard Branson has said he will invest 1.6 billion to try to put biofuel, not kerosene, into his jets. Some complain that these technological developments are all too little, too late. But what did Douglas Alexander add in the next sentence of his speech? `Relying on technology alone is not enough.'
Maybe so. But relying on new technologies would make a refreshing change from New Labour's ceaseless, tech-lite, authoritarian attempts to wean us stupid, selfish babies from our alleged `addiction' to the car and plane. It would make a change from promises of innovation in rail that amount only to recycling the underground tunnels of properly ambitious but physically diminutive Victorians. It would mean funding more and better international research into higher fuel efficiencies on the road and in the air, not hating motorists and plane users enough to want to tax - or ration - their every movement. Technology alone is not enough. But state controls on personal transport behaviour are always too much. To make people feel guilty every time they drive or fly will be the final triumph for British parochialism.
Source
LEAKED UN REPORT SHOWS STERN IS WRONG ON CLIMATE ECONOMICS
The British government has vastly underestimated the costs of its green agenda, which could turn out to be up to five times more expensive than ministers are predicting, according to a leaked United Nations (UN) report obtained by The Business. The action recommended by the British Stern Review - keeping greenhouse gas levels at 550 parts per million - would cost up to 5% of global gross domestic product (GDP), according to the UN. This is in stark contrast with the Stern review, which says it will probably cost only 1%. This much lower number is used by Stern to make the case for immediate action and steep taxes to cut back on the emission of greenhouse gases. But the UN estimate undermine Stern's economic rationale.
Stern also said the cost of not acting could be 5% to 20% of global GDP. If the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change figures are right, they open up the possibility that the British proposals would cost as much as they save, making them redundant. The new UN figures, exclusive to The Business, come from a draft copy of the 2007 review of the IPCC, which is the acknowledged global authority on climate change science. The Stern review itself was explicitly based on the IPCC's last report, which didn't calculate the cost of stabilising emissions.
Embarrassingly for the British government, the IPCC has done its own sums on restricting greenhouse gas emission to various levels and has found each of the targets far more expensive than the Stern review claimed.
The debate on what to do about global warming has focused on what target to set for greenhouse gas concentrations, now at 430 parts per million (ppm). On current economic trajectory, it is feared they could reach 700ppm by the end of the century.The Stern review directly links global warming scenarios to greenhouse gas concentration levels. At 550ppm, the studies quoted in the review claim the planet is likely to warm by 3øC. Stern considers this to be dangerous, but not catastrophic. The European Union has set a target of 450ppm but the Stern review said this is unlikely to be achieved because developing economies are growing so quickly. However, the 650ppm limit was shown by Stern as inviting catastrophic climate change.
So the review looks closely at the case for keeping emissions to 550ppm, which it underplays. Stern's executive summary states: "An upper bound for the expected annual cost of emissions consistent with a trajectory leading to stabilisation at 550ppm is likely to be 1% of GDP by 2050."
But the draft copy of the IPCC's Fourth Annual Review, due for publication next year, finds the cost of achieving the same goal to be between "1% and 5% loss of global GDP". The less-ambitious target of stabilising emissions at 650ppm would cost less than 2% of GDP.
The Stern review team would not comment on the draft report as it has not been published. But The Business understands that the leaks were made available to its scientists at the time of compilation.
Sir Nicholas Stern, a former World Bank economist now working for the British Treasury, has admitted from the offset that his report could only work if it was agreed on a global basis. Ministers are to travel to India and America to promote his findings.But being contradicted by IPCC research hardly helps Britain's case, since the IPCC figures are the only ones used to frame the global debate. The leaked UN draft is circulating on the internet and will serve to undermine Stern's authority.
Though the Stern review was received to universal acclaim in London, it has been attacked in other parts of the world for being alarmist and, in some cases, incompetent. His nightmare scenario - global warming costing between 5% to 20% of GDP - was achieved by using an unusually low discount rate in his calculations. This is a standard device to justify investments with a long-term payoff.
The 11-member Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec) has already given the Stern Review a cold reception. Mohammed Barkindo, Secretary-General of Opec, attacked the report at an energy conference in Moscow."We find some of the so-called initiatives of the rich industrialised countries, who are supposed to take the lead in combating climate change, rather alarming," he said. Adaptation to climate change, he added, cannot be conducted by "scenarios that have no foundations in either science or economics (referring to the Stern report's publication)".
In Washington, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) said the Stern review would have no traction internationally as its economic mistakes would be instantly recognised by experts in the field. "Stern's costs are actually more expensive than doing nothing about climate change itself," said Iain Murray, senior fellow at CEI specialising in climate change. "This is 'Chicken Little' stuff," said Murray, "except Chicken Little wasn't trying to scare the public in order to create Enron-style con games and line the pockets of Wall Street bankers at the expense of consumers."
This opprobrium sharply contrasts with the Stern review's reception in London, where his conclusions were welcomed by business and accepted by all mainstream British political parties.
Source
It was a little like a parallel universe. While government officials have spent the day churning out ever more glorious statistics about the NHS, the staff who run the service have taken to the streets. From the bowels of the Department of Health's HQ, the familiar tales of falling waiting lists and increased staff numbers have been recounted. But outside on the streets of Westminster, doctors, nurses, cleaners and other support staff have been protesting at what they see as disastrous policies. Pensioners and health staff marched round Parliament Square waving placards saying "Save the NHS", while a double-decker bus circled the House of Commons drumming up support for the cause. A stone's throw away, at a packed Methodist Central Hall, a rally heard from union leaders and frontline staff about how Labour's policies were destroying the health service.
The buzz words became "creeping privatisation" and "fragmentation" as campaigners rallied against deficits, PFI hospital build schemes and privately-run NHS treatment centres. The day's protest has been organised by NHS Together, an alliance of 16 health unions which have come together to oppose the direction the NHS is heading in. Such unity among the health service's union movement is unheralded and begs the question: how can the views of government and health staff be so polarised?
Dr Jacky Davis, a consultant radiologist and member of the British Medical Association, said: "The problem is that the policies are being driven by ideological dogma. "There is no evidence that increasing the use of the private sector and scaling back on staff and hospitals will be beneficial. "No-one outside Number 10 believes it will, and so far they have refused to properly consult with us, so it is not surprising the government have not got staff on board." Listening to the campaigners, the problem seems to be that in many cases workers have had negative experiences of the government's policies.
Andrea Shields, a London paramedic, told the rally about a case recently involving a woman who went into labour prematurely at 29 weeks. Unable to locate a free neonatal bed in the London area after what she says have been cuts, her colleague was forced to drive to Portsmouth three hours away to get the care needed. "Not only did it put the mother and baby at risk, it took an ambulance out of the London service for six hours." And in a direct plea to ministers, she added: "All we want to do is to be able to do our jobs. Listen to us, the front-line staff, not the fancy management consultants."
But will the day of protest make any difference? Union officials and health workers also spent the day lobbying MPs - by mid-afternoon the queue outside the House of Commons was snaking down Millbank. Ruth Levin, a London regional officer for Unison, met with her local Labour MP. She said: "He did seem sympathetic to our concerns, particularly over the private sector, but it really requires a whole sea-change in the way politicians are handling the NHS." However, she acknowledged campaigners were facing a challenge as many MPs speak out sympathetically when their local hospital feels the pinch, only to continue voting for the government's policies inside the Palace of Westminster.
As for the government, it seems there will be no slow-down. As protesters took to the streets, ministers were touring the television and radio studios saying there was no turning back. As Health Minister Andy Burnham put it: "Actually, rather than putting the NHS under any threat, this is the NHS poised to make one of its biggest leaps forward in its history."
Source
Britain's Bonfire night: an annual display of pyrotechnical correctness
Fireworks! How about watching virtual pyrotechnics on a laptop in your bedroom with the curtains drawn, listening to recorded bangs on your iPod with the volume down and enjoying an organic hot dog labelled "This Dog May Be Hot"?
Far-fetched, perhaps. But so are reports that a Devon rugby club is showing a video projection of a bonfire at its fireworks party to avoid the costs of meeting health and safety regulations. Our local school has cancelled its display, because of a shortage of "trained firework lighters" (how long is that course?) and new guidelines on how far fireworks should be from people. We are a long way from the common sense advice on the old family fireworks box to "Light the blue touchpaper and retire immediately".
The annual explosion of pyrotechnical correctness about safety and "noise pollution" around firework night follows on from the Hallowe'en panic. There have been calls to ban children trick-or-treating as begging with menaces. Our local police sent out extra patrols on Hallowe'en, a spokesman explained, "because it is dark". Church figures gave warning about children falling prey to Darkness of another sort. Our young daughters dressed up as witches, went out with the neighbours and had a great time in the dark. Pity that so few would open their door.
What many people seem most anxious about today is not loud bangs, but noisy young people who they fear might explode at the drop of a witch's hat or a sparkler. Kids have always let off steam around Guy Fawkes night. I grew up with boys who enjoyed such traditional pastimes as throwing bangers (now banned) at cats, and firing rockets at bedroom windows. In those pre-trick-or-treat days, we sat in the street with a raggedy Guy asking strangers for money (which some gave us) without getting arrested.
Now youthful fooling around is equated with crime. One police spokesman told the BBC that his force would be "cracking down hard" on Hallowe'en antisocial behaviour, such as "knocking and running away from doors". In my day that was called Knock Down Ginger. The cowardly version was Knock Down Rosebud, in which you threw something at the door. The worst you would get was a rocket from the neighbours, or a "banger" round the ear from your dad. Today Ginger and Rosebud might expect ASBOs.
One MP told a youth justice conference this week: "The police are being called too often to tackle behaviour that only a few years ago would have been handled by teachers and parents." It would have been a good point had it not been made by Tony Blair, whose Government has encouraged us all to send up distress signals to the ASBO-happy authorities.
We also used to sing a song about building a bonfire, with "The teachers on the top/Put the prefects in the middle and burn the bloody lot." I hope that has been banned as incendiary hate-speech, if not for failing to comply with health and safety guidelines.
Source
The incorrectness of travel in wacky Britain
New Labour’s deep-seated hostility to popular mobility is holding back advances on roads, railways and in the air
Is the New Labour government concreting over the countryside, as greens suggest, so as to appease the all-powerful road lobby? Does it also pander to what one green columnist has referred to as `anti-social bastards who believe they should be allowed to do what they want, whenever they want, regardless of the consequences', to the `extreme libertarianism now beginning to take hold here', to an individualism that `begins on the road'?
Well: between 1997, when New Labour came to power, and 2004, the latest year for which figures are available, Britain opened 284 miles of new major roads and motorways. That's a grand total of 40 miles a year. Not too impressive, for the world's fifth largest economy.
Don't expect chancellor Gordon Brown's November pre-Budget report, or Sir Rod Eddington's late-running transport review, to bring about the swift, massive, nationwide renovation of short- and long-distance transport infrastructure most people want. Brown has already hinted that Eddington, ex-CEO of British Airways, will favour new transport within cities more than between them. That would anyway fit with general government policy, which is to confine new housing, and the working class, within cities, on brownfield sites.
In practice, the Eddington report will probably boil down to more bus lanes in cities and more cycleways, too; as well as more road tolls, pay-as-you-drive road pricing, urban congestion charges, urban parking charges, and general gas-guzzler charges. Already environment secretary David Miliband has sent Gordon Brown a letter recommending higher vehicle excise duty for fuel-inefficient cars - along with a rise in air passenger duty and the extension of VAT to flights.
Don't expect Department for Transport (DfT) secretary Douglas Alexander to dissent from this mania for new pricing schemes in road transport, rather than capacity expansion or technological progress. On 26 May, Alexander told Tony Blair he would be `seeking innovation and opportunities across all transport modes'. But by 27 June, he announced that only a tiny part, if any, of his Transport Innovation Fund would even improve major roads, let alone build new ones.
TIF money will rise slowly, from about 275 million pounds in 2008-9 to 2.75 billion by 2015. Initially, at least, most of it will go not on new roads, but on tinkering with traffic management, road pricing schemes, and the enhancement of gauges on those railway lines that carry freight. And like Crossrail, the `schemes' that Alexander says will now be `taken forward' will be taken forward for.`business case development and appraisal'. In the same spirit, Gordon Brown says that the Eddington report will `feed into' his own spending review `from 2008-11'
Well, let's not be too hasty! For the Department Against Transport (DAT), innovation means cutting car journeys, taxing them, and subjecting them to state surveillance through IT. Road congestion and the pollution that attends it are to be solved not through building more roads, for it is thought that selfish motorists will want to drive on them. Instead, New Labour innovation in road transport is now about cramming motorway drivers on to the hard shoulder.
The government has a deep-seated hostility to popular mobility. Of course, it justifies its coercive campaign to change motorists' behaviour in terms of the CO2 issuing from use of conventional petrol. But what does it propose to do about petrol use in terms of new technologies? In March, Brown's Budget ordered transport fuel suppliers to make five per cent of their product available as carbon-friendly biofuels by 2010/11. But the Department Against Transport has since found a new, more important worry. It frets about the `serious risk' that biofuels could themselves be developed `from highly unsustainable sources'. Yes, though biofuels take just 0.25 per cent of the UK transport fuels market at present, the government sees their further development as dangerous. And genetically-modified super-cellulose as the best possible substrate for biofuels? New Labour will never support it.
Government shows a similar disdain for innovation in Britain's major rail links. Germany can hope to put its recent accident with magnetic-levitation trains behind it. China can hope to spread its own version of maglev westwards, to Tibet. But Britain is different. As the Channel Tunnel Rail Link, the country's only new major rail line for many years, finally nears completion, the government has allowed Eurostar to strip Ashford, near the Thames Gateway mass housing development, of high-speed trains to Brussels - the political capital of Europe.
Still, in London, there appears to be a positive development. The government has decided to grant legal powers and planning consents to Network Rail in respect of its `Thameslink 2000 rail enhancement scheme' - better north-south railways for the nation's capital. But take a closer look. As DAT minister Stephen Ladyman stressed to parliament, `It is important to note that these decisions do not amount to a final go-ahead for the projects'.
If it is ever finished properly, Thameslink will be improved less around innovation, and more around tunnels that were built back in 1866. The whole atmosphere surrounding rail is steeped in lethargy. For proof, take Transport for London (TfL), the Ken Livingstone bauble that has just found 363million for Balfour Beatty and Carillion to extend the East London line by.2.25 miles. by 2010. Never bashful, TfL continues to protest that `concerns' about Thameslink raised by London Transport back in June 2000 `are still valid': the link's `strong emphasis on outer suburban services' means that it has few benefits for Londoners. For broadminded TfL, Thameslink is therefore of little value.
With air travel, too, New Labour runs a campaign to denigrate technological innovation. Earlier this month, Douglas Alexander told flying enthusiasts in Washington, DC: `We need to develop a coherent strategy encouraging and promoting technical improvements and operational gains - not just in aircraft design and fuel technologies, but also in areas such as air traffic control, which can have a significant impact on emissions.'
With its 787 Dreamliner, a long-haul, mid-sized plane to be flown for the first time next year, Boeing is struggling with composites and engines that, it hopes, will make a machine 20 per cent more fuel-efficient, per passenger, than previous models. Virgin's Sir Richard Branson has said he will invest 1.6 billion to try to put biofuel, not kerosene, into his jets. Some complain that these technological developments are all too little, too late. But what did Douglas Alexander add in the next sentence of his speech? `Relying on technology alone is not enough.'
Maybe so. But relying on new technologies would make a refreshing change from New Labour's ceaseless, tech-lite, authoritarian attempts to wean us stupid, selfish babies from our alleged `addiction' to the car and plane. It would make a change from promises of innovation in rail that amount only to recycling the underground tunnels of properly ambitious but physically diminutive Victorians. It would mean funding more and better international research into higher fuel efficiencies on the road and in the air, not hating motorists and plane users enough to want to tax - or ration - their every movement. Technology alone is not enough. But state controls on personal transport behaviour are always too much. To make people feel guilty every time they drive or fly will be the final triumph for British parochialism.
Source
LEAKED UN REPORT SHOWS STERN IS WRONG ON CLIMATE ECONOMICS
The British government has vastly underestimated the costs of its green agenda, which could turn out to be up to five times more expensive than ministers are predicting, according to a leaked United Nations (UN) report obtained by The Business. The action recommended by the British Stern Review - keeping greenhouse gas levels at 550 parts per million - would cost up to 5% of global gross domestic product (GDP), according to the UN. This is in stark contrast with the Stern review, which says it will probably cost only 1%. This much lower number is used by Stern to make the case for immediate action and steep taxes to cut back on the emission of greenhouse gases. But the UN estimate undermine Stern's economic rationale.
Stern also said the cost of not acting could be 5% to 20% of global GDP. If the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change figures are right, they open up the possibility that the British proposals would cost as much as they save, making them redundant. The new UN figures, exclusive to The Business, come from a draft copy of the 2007 review of the IPCC, which is the acknowledged global authority on climate change science. The Stern review itself was explicitly based on the IPCC's last report, which didn't calculate the cost of stabilising emissions.
Embarrassingly for the British government, the IPCC has done its own sums on restricting greenhouse gas emission to various levels and has found each of the targets far more expensive than the Stern review claimed.
The debate on what to do about global warming has focused on what target to set for greenhouse gas concentrations, now at 430 parts per million (ppm). On current economic trajectory, it is feared they could reach 700ppm by the end of the century.The Stern review directly links global warming scenarios to greenhouse gas concentration levels. At 550ppm, the studies quoted in the review claim the planet is likely to warm by 3øC. Stern considers this to be dangerous, but not catastrophic. The European Union has set a target of 450ppm but the Stern review said this is unlikely to be achieved because developing economies are growing so quickly. However, the 650ppm limit was shown by Stern as inviting catastrophic climate change.
So the review looks closely at the case for keeping emissions to 550ppm, which it underplays. Stern's executive summary states: "An upper bound for the expected annual cost of emissions consistent with a trajectory leading to stabilisation at 550ppm is likely to be 1% of GDP by 2050."
But the draft copy of the IPCC's Fourth Annual Review, due for publication next year, finds the cost of achieving the same goal to be between "1% and 5% loss of global GDP". The less-ambitious target of stabilising emissions at 650ppm would cost less than 2% of GDP.
The Stern review team would not comment on the draft report as it has not been published. But The Business understands that the leaks were made available to its scientists at the time of compilation.
Sir Nicholas Stern, a former World Bank economist now working for the British Treasury, has admitted from the offset that his report could only work if it was agreed on a global basis. Ministers are to travel to India and America to promote his findings.But being contradicted by IPCC research hardly helps Britain's case, since the IPCC figures are the only ones used to frame the global debate. The leaked UN draft is circulating on the internet and will serve to undermine Stern's authority.
Though the Stern review was received to universal acclaim in London, it has been attacked in other parts of the world for being alarmist and, in some cases, incompetent. His nightmare scenario - global warming costing between 5% to 20% of GDP - was achieved by using an unusually low discount rate in his calculations. This is a standard device to justify investments with a long-term payoff.
The 11-member Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec) has already given the Stern Review a cold reception. Mohammed Barkindo, Secretary-General of Opec, attacked the report at an energy conference in Moscow."We find some of the so-called initiatives of the rich industrialised countries, who are supposed to take the lead in combating climate change, rather alarming," he said. Adaptation to climate change, he added, cannot be conducted by "scenarios that have no foundations in either science or economics (referring to the Stern report's publication)".
In Washington, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) said the Stern review would have no traction internationally as its economic mistakes would be instantly recognised by experts in the field. "Stern's costs are actually more expensive than doing nothing about climate change itself," said Iain Murray, senior fellow at CEI specialising in climate change. "This is 'Chicken Little' stuff," said Murray, "except Chicken Little wasn't trying to scare the public in order to create Enron-style con games and line the pockets of Wall Street bankers at the expense of consumers."
This opprobrium sharply contrasts with the Stern review's reception in London, where his conclusions were welcomed by business and accepted by all mainstream British political parties.
Source
Saturday, November 04, 2006
NHS UNSAFE
Patient safety in hospitals, doctors' surgeries and clinics needs to be improved in the NHS and independent sectors, according to the Government's healthcare watchdog. Most patients received safe care, but standards were inconsistent across England and Wales, with vague and widely varying estimates on numbers of avoidable deaths and injuries, the Healthcare Commission said. Sir Ian Kennedy, the commission's chairman, spoke as its annual State of Healthcare report was presented to Parliament. He said: "The NHS needs to take safety more seriously. It is frustrating that in 2006 we do not have a clearer idea of how many people die or are harmed in hospitals. We should all be troubled when the National Audit Office states that `estimates of death as a result of patient safety incidents range from 840 to 34,000, but in reality the NHS simply does not know'. "I recognise that it is not easy to get this information and that all major countries struggle with it. But without that knowledge, and the reasons behind it, improvement cannot take place."
The report marks the first publication of an overview of standards in the independent sector in England, which includes private and voluntary providers. It discloses that one in ten NHS trusts could not confirm that it fully met core standards on safety and one in ten providers in the independent sector was ordered to improve its management of risks last year.
More than a fifth of the complaints the commission handles relate to safety, which includes infection control, drug administration, clinical negligence, accidents and general health and safety legislation.
One fifth of trusts told the Commission that they could not ensure that all their staff had attended compulsory health and safety training and 13 per cent could not be sure that medical devices were properly decontaminated.
Sir Ian said that failings could also involve things such as GPs not keeping records properly or the misreading of tests. "There is clearly room for improvement in compliance with standards on safety," he added. "And this goes for the independent sector as well as the NHS." About 50 per cent of independent providers met all 32 minimum standards, but one in ten failed five or more, broadly in line with NHS organisations.
Andrew Lansley, the Shadow Health Secretary, said yesterday: "It is a shame that this willingness to improve patient safety is not shared by the Department of Health. In December 2003 the Chief Medical Officer ordered an audit of deaths caused by hospitalacquired infections. We are still waiting for it to be published."
A spokeswoman from the National Patient Safety Agency said that an exact figure had proved difficult to obtain. "There are several disputed extrapolations of deaths due to patient safety problems using different data sources and methods. The most widely quoted figure is 40,000 deaths per year in England. However, in our Patient Safety Observatory report last year we estimated that each year in NHS acute hospitals in England there are approximately 840 reported deaths resulting from patient safety incidents. This is probably an underestimate, but not by 39,000."
A Department of Health spokesman said: "As in any modern health service, mistakes and unforeseen incidents can and will happen. Any mistake is one too many but similar rates of patient safety incidents occur worldwide."
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Hospital kitchen hygiene 'poor' in NHS
Shocking hygiene standards have been found in some UK hospital kitchens, a consumer group reports. Which? reviewed hygiene inspection reports for 50 hospitals and found evidence of cockroaches, mice and mouldy cooking equipment. An online survey by the organisation also revealed 29% of NHS patients still felt hungry after their meals. But the Department of Health said hospital food had improved in the last few years.
Which? said it's trawl of three years' worth of hygiene reports revealed problems such as dirty equipment, cockroach infestations, lack of soap or hot water, with poor refrigeration also cropping up regularly.
Other hospitals used food fridges to store medical supplies, had out-of-date foods and failings in food safety procedures, Which? added. But it said not all hospital catering facilities were dirty and some were highlighted for their cleanliness.
In a separate online survey of 833 hospital patients, the consumer group also found some patients were going hungry. Twenty-nine percent of NHS patients questioned said they felt hungry after their hospital meal compared with 4% of private patients. Neil Fowler, editor of Which?, said: "Hospital food hasn't got the best of reputations but you'd expect the kitchens to be clean at the very least. Unfortunately, we've found this isn't always the case. "Our survey shows a low level of satisfaction with hospital food in NHS hospitals. The government paints a rosy picture but the reality is very different, with many patients left with a nasty taste in their mouths."
A Department of Health spokesperson said: "Last month the independent Healthcare Commission found that nearly all trusts (over 96%) were meeting the core standards on hospital food. "Last year, the independent Patient Environment Action Teams found that 90% of hospitals were rated good or excellent for food standards compared with 17% in 2002. "There are some excellent menus around but we recognise that more needs to be done. The government has made a commitment to establish nutritional standards for the NHS and this work is now under way."
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THE ECONOMICS AND POLITICS OF CLIMATE CHANGE: AN APPEAL TO REASON
By Lord Lawson
(Nigel Lawson is a former British Chancellor of the Exchequer and Secretary of State for Energy. Excerpts only below:)
The Centre for Policy Studies has kindly agreed to publish a greatly extended version of this lecture as a pamphlet, in which I will be able to do greater justice to that complexity and to quote the sources of a number of the statements I propose to make this evening. It will also enable me to deal at slightly greater length with the scaremongering Stern Report, published earlier this week. But the essence of it is what I have to say tonight.
But first, a very brief comment on Stern. If scaremongering seems a trifle harsh, I should point out that, as a good civil servant, he was simply doing his masters' bidding. As Mr Blair's guru, Lord Giddens (the inventor of the so-called third way), laid down in this context in a speech last year, "In order to manage risk, you must scare people". In fact, the voluminous Stern Report adds disappointingly little to what was already the conventional wisdom - apart from a battery of essentially spurious statistics based on theoretical models and conjectural worst cases.
This is clearly no basis for policy decisions which could have the most profound adverse effect on people's lives, and at a cost which Stern almost certainly underestimates. It is, in a very real sense, the story of the Iraq war, writ large.
So let us get back to basics, and seek the answers to three questions, of increasing complexity. First, is global warming occurring? Second, if so, why? And third, what should be done about it? As to the first question, there is of course little doubt that the twentieth century ended warmer than it began. According to the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research, an offshoot of Britain's Met Office: "Although there is considerable year-to-year variability in annual-mean global temperature, an upward trend can be clearly seen; firstly over the period from about 1920-1940, with little change or a small cooling from 1940-1975, followed by a sustained rise over the last three decades since then."
This last part is a trifle disingenuous, since what the graph actually shows is that the sustained rise took place entirely during the last quarter of the last century. Moreover, according to the Hadley Centre's data, there has so far been no further global warming since 1998. Whether the seven-year hiatus since then marks a change of trend or merely an unexplained and unpredicted blip in a continuing upward trend, time will tell.
Apart from the trend, there is of course the matter of the absolute numbers. The Hadley Centre graph shows that, for the first phase, from 1920 to 1940, the increase was 0.4 degrees centigrade. From 1940 to 1975 there was a cooling of about 0.2 degrees. (It was during this phase that alarmist articles by Professor James Lovelock and a number of other scientists appeared, warning of the onset of a new ice age.) Finally, since 1975 there has been a further warming of about 0.5 degrees, making a total increase of some 0.7 degrees over the 20th century as a whole (from 1900 to 1920 there was no change).
Why, then, has this modest - if somewhat intermittent - degree of global warming seems to have occurred. Why has this happened, and what does it portend for the future? The only honest answer is that we don't know. The conventional wisdom is that the principal reason why it has happened is the greatly increased amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as a result of the rapid worldwide growth of carbon-based energy consumption. Now, there is no doubt that atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide increased greatly during the 20th century - by some 30 per cent - and most scientists believe this increase to be largely man-made. And carbon dioxide is one of a number of so-called greenhouse gases whose combined effect in the earth's atmosphere is to keep the planet warmer than it would otherwise be.
Far and away the most important of these gases is water vapour, both in its gaseous form and suspended in clouds. Rather a long way back, carbon dioxide is the second most important greenhouse gas - and neither, incidentally, is a form of pollution. It is the published view of the Met Office that is it likely that more than half the warming of recent decades (say 0.3 degrees centigrade out of the overall 0.5 degrees increase between 1975 and 2000) is attributable to man-made sources of greenhouse gases - principally, although by no means exclusively, carbon dioxide. But this is highly uncertain, and reputable climate scientists differ sharply over the subject. It is simply not true to say that the science is settled; and the recent attempt of the Royal Society, of all bodies, to prevent the funding of climate scientists who do not share its alarmist view of the matter is truly shocking.
The uncertainty derives from a number of sources. For one thing, the science of clouds, which is clearly critical, is one of the least well understood aspects of climate science. Another uncertainty concerns the extent to which urbanisation (not least in the vicinity of climate stations) has contributed to the observed warming. There is no dispute that urbanisation raises near-surface temperatures: this has long been observed from satellite infra-red imagery. The uncertainty is over how much of the estimated 20th century warming this accounts for. Yet another uncertainty derives from the fact that, while the growth in manmade carbon dioxide emissions, and thus carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere, continued relentlessly during the 20th century, the global mean surface temperature, as I have already remarked, increased in fits and starts, for which there us no adequate explanation.
But then - and this is the other great source of uncertainty - the earth's climate has always been subject to natural variation, wholly unrelated to man's activities. Climate scientists differ about the causes of this, although most agree that variations in solar radiation play a key part. It is well established, for example, from historical accounts, that a thousand years ago, well before the onset of industrialisation, there was - at least in Europe - what has become known as the mediaeval warm period, when temperatures were probably at least as high as, if not higher than, they are today. Going back even further, during the Roman empire, it may have been even warmer. There is archaeological evidence that in Roman Britain, vineyards existed on a commercial scale at least as far north as Northamptonshire. More recently, during the 17th and early 18th centuries, there was what has become known as the little ice age, when the Thames was regularly frozen over in winter, and substantial ice fairs held on the frozen river - immortalised in colourful prints produced at the time - became a popular attraction. Historical treeline studies, showing how far up mountains trees are able to grow at different times, which is clearly correlated with climate change, confirm that these variations occurred outside Europe as well.
A rather different account of the past was given by the so-called "hockey-stick" chart of global temperatures over the past millennium, which purported to show that the earth's temperature was constant until the industrialisation of the 20th century. Reproduced in its 2001 Report by the supposedly authoritative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, set up under the auspices of the United Nations to advise governments on what is clearly a global issue, the chart featured prominently in (among other publications) the present Government's 2003 energy white paper. It has now been comprehensively discredited.
But it is not only over time that the earth's climate displays considerable natural variability. Change also varies geographically. For example, there are parts of the world where glaciers are retreating, and others where glaciers are advancing. The fringes of the Greenland ice shelf appear to be melting, while at the centre of the shelf the ice is thickening. Curiously enough, there are places where sea levels are perceptibly rising, while elsewhere they are static or even falling - suggesting that local factors still dominate any global warming effects on sea levels.
Again, extreme weather events, such as major storms in the Gulf of Mexico, have come and gone, at irregular intervals, for as long as records exist. Katrina, which caused so much damage to New Orleans, is regularly trotted out as a consequence of man-made climate change; yet the region's worst recorded hurricane was that which devastated Galveston in 1900. Following Katrina, the world's authorities on tropical storms set up an international panel, which included the relevant expert from the Met Office here in the UK. The panel reported, earlier this year, as follows: "The main conclusion we came to was that none of these high-impact tropical cyclones could be specifically attributed to global warming." This may not be all that surprising, given how little global warming has so far occurred; but I do not recall it featuring in Mr Gore's film.
But this diversity makes it all too easy for the Al Gores of this world to select local phenomena which best illustrate their predetermined alarmist global narrative. We need to stick firmly to the central point: what has been the rise in global mean temperatures over the past hundred years, why we believe this has occurred, how much temperatures are likely to rise over the next hundred years or so, and what the consequences are likely to be.
As is already clear, the only honest answer is that we do not know. Nevertheless, it is not unreasonable to try and guess; and this is essentially what the IPCC has devoted itself to doing. Its conclusion is that, by the end of this century, on a business-as-usual basis, global mean temperature might have risen by anything between 1 degree and 6 degrees centigrade. This is based on a combination of the immensely complex computer models of the relationship between carbon dioxide concentrations and global temperature, developed by the Hadley Centre and others, coupled with a range of different projections of the likely growth of carbon dioxide emissions.
This last part is not, of course, a scientific matter at all, but consists of economic forecasting. That is to say, it depends on the rate of world economic growth over the next hundred years (which in turn depends to a considerable extent on the projected world population), the energy-intensiveness of that growth, and the carbon-intensiveness of the energy used. The upper part of the IPCC's range of scenarios is distinctly unconvincing, depending as it does either on an implausibly high rate of population growth or, in particular, an unprecedented growth in energy intensiveness, which in fact has been steadily declining over the past 50 years. Equally implausible are its estimates of the costs of any warming that may occur.
For example, it makes great play of the damage to agriculture and food production from climate change. Quite apart from the fact there are many parts of the world where agriculture and food production would actually benefit from a warmer climate, the IPCC studies are vitiated by the fact that they assume that farmers would carry on much as before, growing the same crops in precisely the same way - the so-called 'dumb farmer' hypothesis. In reality, of course, farmers would adapt, switching as the need arose to strains or crops better suited to warmer climates, to improved methods of irrigation, and in many cases by cultivating areas which had hitherto been too cold to be economic.
It is important to bear in mind that, whatever climate alarmists like to make out, what we are confronted with, even on the Hadley Centre/IPCC hypothesis, is the probability of very gradual change over a large number of years. And this is something to which it is eminently practicable to adapt. This points to the first and most important part of the answer to the question of what we should do about the threat of global warming: adapt to it.
There are at least three reasons why adaptation is far and away the most cost-effective approach. The first is that many of the feared harmful consequences of climate change, such as coastal flooding in low-lying areas, are not new problems, but simply the exacerbation of existing ones; so that addressing these will bring benefits even if there is no further global warming at all. The second reason is that, unlike curbing carbon dioxide emissions, this approach will bring benefits whatever the cause of the warming, whether manmade or natural. And the third reason why adaptation - most of which, incidentally, will happen naturally, that is to say it will be market-driven, without much need for government intervention - is the most cost-effective approach is that all serious studies show that, not surprisingly, there are benefits as well as costs from global warming. Adaptation enables us to pocket the benefits while diminishing the costs.
The main argument advanced against relying principally on adaptation is that it is all right for the rich countries of the world, but not for the poor, which is unacceptable. As Professor Mendelsohn of Yale, author of a number of studies of the impact of climate change, has written, "The net damages to mid to high latitude countries [such as the UK] will be very small if not beneficial this coming century. The impacts to poor low latitude countries will be harmful across the board...Climate change will hurt the poorest people in the world most." This is no doubt true, although it is frequently exaggerated. But it does mean that those of us in the richer countries of the world have a clear moral obligation to do something about it - not least because, if the man-made warming thesis is correct, it is we who caused the problem. According to the IPCC, the greatest single threat posed by global warming is coastal flooding as sea levels rise. Sea levels have, in fact, been rising very gradually throughout the past hundred years, and even the last IPCC Report found little sign of any acceleration.
Nevertheless, Sir Nicholas Stern, charged by the Government to look into the economics of climate change is particularly concerned about this, especially the alleged melting of the Greenland ice sheet. He has written that: "The net effect of these changes is a release of 20 billion tonnes of water to the oceans each year, contributing around 0.05 millimetres a year to sea-level rise." This would imply an additional sea-level rise of less than a quarter of an inch per century, something it ought not to be too difficult to live with.
But the major source of projected sea-level rise is from ocean warming expanding the volume of water. As a result, some of those low-lying areas already subject to serious flooding could find things getting significantly worse, and there is a clear case for government money to be spent on improving sea defences in these areas. The Dutch, after all, have been doing this very effectively for the past 500 years. The governments of the richer countries, like the United States with its Gulf coast exposure, can be left to do it for themselves; but in the case of the poorer countries, such as Bangladesh, there is a powerful argument for international assistance.
Another problem for the poorer and hotter countries of the world, according to the IPCC, is an increase in vector-borne diseases, notably malaria. This is more controversial. Most experts believe that temperature has relatively little bearing on the spread of the disease, pointing out that it was endemic throughout Europe during the little ice age. Be that as it may, some two million children in the developing world die every year from malaria as it is; and the means of combating, if not eradicating, the scourge are well established. There is, again, a clear case for international assistance to achieve this. Of course assistance in either the building of effective sea defences or in the eradication of malaria will cost money. But that cost is only a very small fraction of what it would cost to attempt, by substantially curbing carbon dioxide emissions, to change the climate.
The argument that we need to cut back substantially on carbon dioxide emissions in order to help the world's poor is bizarre in the extreme. To the extent that their problems are climatic, these problems are not new ones, even if they may be exacerbated if current projections are correct. If, twenty years ago, when as Chancellor I was launching the first concerted poor-country debt forgiveness initiative, subsequently known as the Toronto terms, anyone had argued that the best way to help the developing countries was to make the world a colder place, I would probably have politely suggested that they see their doctor. It makes no more sense today than it would have done then. Indeed, it is worse than that. As Frances Cairncross, the Chairman of the Economic and Social Research Council, pointed out in her thoughtful and honest Presidential address on climate change to the British Association's annual conference in September, the cost of effectively curbing carbon dioxide emissions "will definitely be enormous". Precisely how large it is impossible to say - even by Sir Nicholas Stern.
Last year's report on the economics of climate change by the House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee quoted estimates ranging from $80 billion a year to $1,100 billion a year. It would depend greatly, among other things, on how it is achieved and how soon - the earlier it is done the greater the cost. Of critical importance is how great the increase in the price of carbon would need to be to stifle the demand for carbon sufficiently; and that we cannot know unless and until we do it. But it is clear that the cost will be large enough, among other consequences, to diminish significantly the export markets on which the future prosperity of the developing countries at least in part depends. So far from helping the world's poor, it is more likely to harm them.
Nevertheless, curbing carbon dioxide emissions, along the lines of the Kyoto accord, under which the industrialised countries of the world agreed to somewhat arbitrarily assigned limits to their CO2 emissions by 2012, remains the conventional answer to the challenge of global warming. It is hard to imagine a more absurd response. Even its strongest advocates admit that, even if fully implemented (which it is now clear it will not be, and there is no enforcement mechanism), the existing Kyoto agreement, which came into force last year, would do virtually nothing to reduce future rates of global warming.
Its importance, in their eyes, is as the first step towards further such agreements of a considerably more restrictive nature. But this is wholly unrealistic, and fundamentally flawed for a number of reasons. In the first place, the United States, the largest source of carbon dioxide emissions, has refused to ratify the treaty and has made clear its intention of having no part in any future such agreements. The principal American objection is that the developing countries - including such major contributors to future carbon dioxide emissions as China, India and Brazil - are effectively outside the process and determined to remain so. Indeed, both China and India currently subsidise carbon-based energy.
The developing countries' argument is a simple one. They contend that the industrialised countries of the western world achieved their prosperity on the basis of cheap carbon-based energy; and that it is now the turn of the poor developing countries to emulate them. And they add that if there is a problem now of excessive carbon dioxide concentrations in the earth's atmosphere, it is the responsibility of those that caused it to remedy it. Nor are they unaware of the uncertainty of the science on the basis of which they are being asked to slow down their people's escape from grinding poverty.
The consequences of the exclusion of the major developing countries from the process are immense. China alone last year embarked on a programme of building 562 large coal-fired power stations by 2012 - that is, a new coal-fired power station every five days for seven years. Putting it another way, China is adding the equivalent of Britain's entire power-generating capacity each year. Since coal-fired power stations emit roughly twice as much carbon dioxide per gigawatt of electricity as gas-fired ones, it is not surprising that it is generally accepted that within the next 20 years China will overtake the United States as the largest source of emissions.
India, which like China has substantial indigenous coal reserves, is set to follow a similar path, as is Brazil. Then there is the cost of the Kyoto approach to consider. The logic of Kyoto is to make emissions permits sufficiently scarce to raise their price to the point where carbon-based energy is so expensive that carbon-free energy sources, and other carbon-saving measures, become fully economic. This clearly involves a very much greater rise in energy prices than anything we have yet seen. The trebling of oil prices since Kyoto was agreed in 1997 has done little to reduce carbon emissions. There must be considerable doubt whether a rise in energy prices on the scale required would be politically sustainable. Particularly when the economic cost, in terms of slower economic growth, would be substantial.
In reality, if the Kyoto approach were to be pursued beyond 2012, which is - fortunately - unlikely, the price increase would in practice be mitigated in the global economy in which we now live. For as energy prices in Europe started to rise, with the prospect of further rises to come, energy-intensive industries and processes would progressively close down in Europe and relocate in countries like China, where relatively cheap energy was still available. No doubt Europe could, at some cost, adjust to this, as it has to the migration of most of its textile industry to China and elsewhere. But it is difficult to see the point of it. For if carbon dioxide emissions in Europe are reduced only to see them further increased in China, there is no net reduction in global emissions at all.
The extent of ill-informed wishful thinking on this issue is hard to exaggerate. To take just one example, the government's 2003 energy White Paper proposed a 60 per cent reduction in the UK's carbon dioxide emissions by 2050, based on the notion of supplying most if not all of the country's electricity needs from renewable sources, notably that particularly trendy source, wind power. But as experienced electrical engineers have pointed out, government estimates of the cost of wind power are grossly understated, since wind power (like most renewable sources of energy) is intermittent. In other words, the wind doesn't blow all the time. But the electricity supply does have to be on tap all the time. Given the fact that electricity cannot be economically stored on an industrial scale, this means that conventional generating capacity would have to be fully maintained to meet demand when the wind stops blowing, thus massively adding to the true cost of wind power.
There are all sorts of things we can do, from riding a bicycle to putting a windmill on our roof, that may make us feel good. But there is no escaping the two key truths. First, there is no way the growth in atmospheric carbon dioxide can be arrested without a very substantial rise in the cost of carbon, presumably via the imposition of a swingeing carbon tax, which would require, at least in the short to medium term, a radical change of lifestyle in the developed world. Are we seriously prepared to do this? (A tax would at least be preferable to the capricious and corrupt rationing system which half-heartedly exists today under Kyoto.)
And the second key truth is that, even if we were prepared to do this, it would still be useless unless the major developing nations - notably China, India and Brazil - were prepared to do the same, which they are manifestly and understandably not. So we are driven back to the need to adapt to a warmer world, and the moral obligation of the richer countries to help the poorer countries to do so.....
It is not difficult to understand, however, the appeal of the conventional climate change wisdom. Throughout the ages something deep in man's psyche has made him receptive to apocalyptic warnings: "the end of the world is nigh". Almost of all us are imbued with a sense of guilt and a sense of sin, and it is so much less uncomfortable to divert our attention away from our individual sins and causes of guilt, arising from how we have treated our neighbours, and to sublimate it in collective guilt and collective sin.
Throughout the ages, too, the weather has been an important part of the narrative. In primitive societies it was customary for extreme weather events to be explained as punishment from the gods for the sins of the people; and there is no shortage of examples of this theme in the Bible, either - particularly but not exclusively in the Old Testament. The main change is that the new priests are scientists (well rewarded with research grants for their pains) rather than clerics of the established religions, and the new religion is eco-fundamentalism. But it is a distinction without much of a difference.....
The second, and more fundamental, danger is that the global Salvationist movement is profoundly hostile to capitalism and the market economy. There are already increasing calls for green protectionism - for the imposition of trade restrictions against those countries which fail to agree to curb their carbon dioxide emissions. Given the fact that the only way in which the world's poor will ever be able to escape from their poverty is by embracing capitalism and the global market economy, this is not good news.
But the third danger is even more profound. Today we are very conscious of the threat we face from the supreme intolerance of Islamic fundamentalism. It could not be a worse time to abandon our own traditions of reason and tolerance, and to embrace instead the irrationality and intolerance of ecofundamentalism, where reasoned questioning of its mantras is regarded as a form of blasphemy. There is no greater threat to the people of this planet than the retreat from reason we see all around us today.
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Expensive Greenie roof in Scotland
Bosses of an acclaimed new government building with a grass roof were shocked to find it will cost 5,000 pounds to have it cut. The 13 million pound Scottish Natural Heritage HQ, praised for its eco-friendly credentials, includes a roof garden, reports the Daily Record. But health and safety regulations mean scaffolding and other safety measures must be installed when people are working above ground. It's believed one scaffolding firm tendered an estimate in the region of 5000 pounds.
It raises questions about the cost implications of the green credentials of Great Glen House in Inverness, opened last month by First Minister Jack McConnell. Local councillor Jimmy MacDonald said: "It seems the extra costs to cut the grass will make this building not as eco-friendly as first believed."
An SNH spokesman said: "The roof was chosen due to its low-maintenance regime, which is why it is so popular for green roof projects."
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The Sovietization of British school inspections
School inspections used to be about improving education. This is no longer the case, says Susan Elkin
I am teaching in an English department in a "bog standard" Kent high school and we are being inspected. Although we have only 500 pupils, we are joined by 13 men and women from London for a complete school week. One cerebral, interesting man is attached exclusively to the English department. Only five of us work in the department, so "our" inspector is with one or other of us almost continuously from Monday to Friday. He makes helpful comments and joins in. At the end of the week, he meets the whole department and shares some thoughts, ideas and observations with us. It is all very constructive.
When I pop along as usual to the music department at lunchtime on Tuesday to sing in the choir with the senior pupils, I find the music inspector helping our (only) music teacher by playing accompaniments so that she can get on with conducting. I also notice the science inspector apparently helping pupils with experiments when I pass the chemistry lab.
Did we know they were coming? Yes, we had a few weeks' notice and naturally we scurried around in advance to present our school in the best light. But there was no requirement to produce forests of pointless paper "policies" that no one ever looks at before or after the inspection. So, of course, this isn't Ofsted, with its dogma of discounting what isn't documented. I am winding the clock back more than 20 years to the early Eighties, when I was in a school that underwent a full inspection by Her Majesty's Inspectorate (HMI). Founded in the 19th century, HMI was the forerunner of Ofsted and has now been incorporated into it.
I was lucky to have this experience. HMI inspected schools like ours at random, but there was no brief to be exhaustive. It used to be said that, statistically, you could teach for 100 years and never see an inspector - clearly not ideal if you want teachers and schools to be accountable. Their method, however, was exemplary. No inspector in our school that week suggested there was one "correct" way of tackling a subject, organising a lesson, assessing work or relating to pupils. They had the wisdom to know that there are almost as many good learning methods as there are teachers, and that encouraging those who are clearly good at the job to build on their strengths and "to go with what works" is far more likely to get good results - and I don't mean just examination grades. There was no evidence of fixed criteria and there were certainly no tick boxes.
Compare that with the blinkered reductiveness of Ofsted, whose purpose is to enforce the Government's dumbed-down education policies and to suppress breadth and initiative. If a teacher isn't doing precisely what the Department for Education and Ofsted dictate, his or her lesson is publicly damned as "unsatisfactory". Anastasia de Waal, author of Inspection, Inspection, Inspection!, recently published by the think tank Civitas, argues that Ofsted is a Government lapdog, not the education watchdog it pretends to be. A spokesman for one of the schools Miss de Waal cites said: "If there is a box for it, it must be ticked and if something doesn't have box, it's ignored." Another commented: "When I challenged a judgment in discussion, the inspectors shrugged their shoulders, saying they simply had 'to follow the rules and tick the boxes'."
One of the Government's obsessions is with rigidly structured lessons. Mine always began with a greeting, a joke and then, mostly, "Let's start from where we got to yesterday". In 36 years of reasonably successful teaching, I rarely managed a self-contained lesson - because life and learning are simply not divisible into neat units for the convenience of petty bureaucrats. Moreover, good, confident teachers who know what they're doing and who care about learning can never quite predict where a lesson is going. A pupil might ask an interesting question and the discussion might veer off in a relevant, but unexpected, direction - anathema to control freaks and Ofsted inspectors.
Driven out partly by the absurdity of the Ofsted inspections, Sue Gibson no longer teaches garden history in a further education college. "I was criticised for not altering my method of delivery every 10 to 15 minutes," she says. "In a two-hour lesson, that would have meant changing my teaching method at least eight times. These were college students being prepared for the workplace. Producing students with a concentration span of only 15 minutes would, to any sane person's thinking, only add to the numbers of unemployed." Miss Gibson is relieved to be out of it, but says she regrets the waste of her years of experience and knowledge.
Ofsted has achieved what Miss de Waal calls the "homogenisation" of teaching. That means schools are getting worse, not better. They change to accommodate what Ofsted wants. Most are too frightened of the punishments that Ofsted can dole out - "special measures" and the like - to do anything else.
Although we weren't exactly thrilled to see HMI, there was mutual respect between teachers and inspectors in the 1980s. The inspectors were regarded as the creme de la creme in the teaching profession, and you had to be outstanding to make it as one. Today, the relationship of most teachers with Ofsted is based on well-founded mistrust and suspicion. Inspectors, typically, are part-time hirelings borrowed from schools that are clones of the ones they're inspecting. Independent they are not.
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Patient safety in hospitals, doctors' surgeries and clinics needs to be improved in the NHS and independent sectors, according to the Government's healthcare watchdog. Most patients received safe care, but standards were inconsistent across England and Wales, with vague and widely varying estimates on numbers of avoidable deaths and injuries, the Healthcare Commission said. Sir Ian Kennedy, the commission's chairman, spoke as its annual State of Healthcare report was presented to Parliament. He said: "The NHS needs to take safety more seriously. It is frustrating that in 2006 we do not have a clearer idea of how many people die or are harmed in hospitals. We should all be troubled when the National Audit Office states that `estimates of death as a result of patient safety incidents range from 840 to 34,000, but in reality the NHS simply does not know'. "I recognise that it is not easy to get this information and that all major countries struggle with it. But without that knowledge, and the reasons behind it, improvement cannot take place."
The report marks the first publication of an overview of standards in the independent sector in England, which includes private and voluntary providers. It discloses that one in ten NHS trusts could not confirm that it fully met core standards on safety and one in ten providers in the independent sector was ordered to improve its management of risks last year.
More than a fifth of the complaints the commission handles relate to safety, which includes infection control, drug administration, clinical negligence, accidents and general health and safety legislation.
One fifth of trusts told the Commission that they could not ensure that all their staff had attended compulsory health and safety training and 13 per cent could not be sure that medical devices were properly decontaminated.
Sir Ian said that failings could also involve things such as GPs not keeping records properly or the misreading of tests. "There is clearly room for improvement in compliance with standards on safety," he added. "And this goes for the independent sector as well as the NHS." About 50 per cent of independent providers met all 32 minimum standards, but one in ten failed five or more, broadly in line with NHS organisations.
Andrew Lansley, the Shadow Health Secretary, said yesterday: "It is a shame that this willingness to improve patient safety is not shared by the Department of Health. In December 2003 the Chief Medical Officer ordered an audit of deaths caused by hospitalacquired infections. We are still waiting for it to be published."
A spokeswoman from the National Patient Safety Agency said that an exact figure had proved difficult to obtain. "There are several disputed extrapolations of deaths due to patient safety problems using different data sources and methods. The most widely quoted figure is 40,000 deaths per year in England. However, in our Patient Safety Observatory report last year we estimated that each year in NHS acute hospitals in England there are approximately 840 reported deaths resulting from patient safety incidents. This is probably an underestimate, but not by 39,000."
A Department of Health spokesman said: "As in any modern health service, mistakes and unforeseen incidents can and will happen. Any mistake is one too many but similar rates of patient safety incidents occur worldwide."
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Hospital kitchen hygiene 'poor' in NHS
Shocking hygiene standards have been found in some UK hospital kitchens, a consumer group reports. Which? reviewed hygiene inspection reports for 50 hospitals and found evidence of cockroaches, mice and mouldy cooking equipment. An online survey by the organisation also revealed 29% of NHS patients still felt hungry after their meals. But the Department of Health said hospital food had improved in the last few years.
Which? said it's trawl of three years' worth of hygiene reports revealed problems such as dirty equipment, cockroach infestations, lack of soap or hot water, with poor refrigeration also cropping up regularly.
Other hospitals used food fridges to store medical supplies, had out-of-date foods and failings in food safety procedures, Which? added. But it said not all hospital catering facilities were dirty and some were highlighted for their cleanliness.
In a separate online survey of 833 hospital patients, the consumer group also found some patients were going hungry. Twenty-nine percent of NHS patients questioned said they felt hungry after their hospital meal compared with 4% of private patients. Neil Fowler, editor of Which?, said: "Hospital food hasn't got the best of reputations but you'd expect the kitchens to be clean at the very least. Unfortunately, we've found this isn't always the case. "Our survey shows a low level of satisfaction with hospital food in NHS hospitals. The government paints a rosy picture but the reality is very different, with many patients left with a nasty taste in their mouths."
A Department of Health spokesperson said: "Last month the independent Healthcare Commission found that nearly all trusts (over 96%) were meeting the core standards on hospital food. "Last year, the independent Patient Environment Action Teams found that 90% of hospitals were rated good or excellent for food standards compared with 17% in 2002. "There are some excellent menus around but we recognise that more needs to be done. The government has made a commitment to establish nutritional standards for the NHS and this work is now under way."
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THE ECONOMICS AND POLITICS OF CLIMATE CHANGE: AN APPEAL TO REASON
By Lord Lawson
(Nigel Lawson is a former British Chancellor of the Exchequer and Secretary of State for Energy. Excerpts only below:)
The Centre for Policy Studies has kindly agreed to publish a greatly extended version of this lecture as a pamphlet, in which I will be able to do greater justice to that complexity and to quote the sources of a number of the statements I propose to make this evening. It will also enable me to deal at slightly greater length with the scaremongering Stern Report, published earlier this week. But the essence of it is what I have to say tonight.
But first, a very brief comment on Stern. If scaremongering seems a trifle harsh, I should point out that, as a good civil servant, he was simply doing his masters' bidding. As Mr Blair's guru, Lord Giddens (the inventor of the so-called third way), laid down in this context in a speech last year, "In order to manage risk, you must scare people". In fact, the voluminous Stern Report adds disappointingly little to what was already the conventional wisdom - apart from a battery of essentially spurious statistics based on theoretical models and conjectural worst cases.
This is clearly no basis for policy decisions which could have the most profound adverse effect on people's lives, and at a cost which Stern almost certainly underestimates. It is, in a very real sense, the story of the Iraq war, writ large.
So let us get back to basics, and seek the answers to three questions, of increasing complexity. First, is global warming occurring? Second, if so, why? And third, what should be done about it? As to the first question, there is of course little doubt that the twentieth century ended warmer than it began. According to the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research, an offshoot of Britain's Met Office: "Although there is considerable year-to-year variability in annual-mean global temperature, an upward trend can be clearly seen; firstly over the period from about 1920-1940, with little change or a small cooling from 1940-1975, followed by a sustained rise over the last three decades since then."
This last part is a trifle disingenuous, since what the graph actually shows is that the sustained rise took place entirely during the last quarter of the last century. Moreover, according to the Hadley Centre's data, there has so far been no further global warming since 1998. Whether the seven-year hiatus since then marks a change of trend or merely an unexplained and unpredicted blip in a continuing upward trend, time will tell.
Apart from the trend, there is of course the matter of the absolute numbers. The Hadley Centre graph shows that, for the first phase, from 1920 to 1940, the increase was 0.4 degrees centigrade. From 1940 to 1975 there was a cooling of about 0.2 degrees. (It was during this phase that alarmist articles by Professor James Lovelock and a number of other scientists appeared, warning of the onset of a new ice age.) Finally, since 1975 there has been a further warming of about 0.5 degrees, making a total increase of some 0.7 degrees over the 20th century as a whole (from 1900 to 1920 there was no change).
Why, then, has this modest - if somewhat intermittent - degree of global warming seems to have occurred. Why has this happened, and what does it portend for the future? The only honest answer is that we don't know. The conventional wisdom is that the principal reason why it has happened is the greatly increased amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as a result of the rapid worldwide growth of carbon-based energy consumption. Now, there is no doubt that atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide increased greatly during the 20th century - by some 30 per cent - and most scientists believe this increase to be largely man-made. And carbon dioxide is one of a number of so-called greenhouse gases whose combined effect in the earth's atmosphere is to keep the planet warmer than it would otherwise be.
Far and away the most important of these gases is water vapour, both in its gaseous form and suspended in clouds. Rather a long way back, carbon dioxide is the second most important greenhouse gas - and neither, incidentally, is a form of pollution. It is the published view of the Met Office that is it likely that more than half the warming of recent decades (say 0.3 degrees centigrade out of the overall 0.5 degrees increase between 1975 and 2000) is attributable to man-made sources of greenhouse gases - principally, although by no means exclusively, carbon dioxide. But this is highly uncertain, and reputable climate scientists differ sharply over the subject. It is simply not true to say that the science is settled; and the recent attempt of the Royal Society, of all bodies, to prevent the funding of climate scientists who do not share its alarmist view of the matter is truly shocking.
The uncertainty derives from a number of sources. For one thing, the science of clouds, which is clearly critical, is one of the least well understood aspects of climate science. Another uncertainty concerns the extent to which urbanisation (not least in the vicinity of climate stations) has contributed to the observed warming. There is no dispute that urbanisation raises near-surface temperatures: this has long been observed from satellite infra-red imagery. The uncertainty is over how much of the estimated 20th century warming this accounts for. Yet another uncertainty derives from the fact that, while the growth in manmade carbon dioxide emissions, and thus carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere, continued relentlessly during the 20th century, the global mean surface temperature, as I have already remarked, increased in fits and starts, for which there us no adequate explanation.
But then - and this is the other great source of uncertainty - the earth's climate has always been subject to natural variation, wholly unrelated to man's activities. Climate scientists differ about the causes of this, although most agree that variations in solar radiation play a key part. It is well established, for example, from historical accounts, that a thousand years ago, well before the onset of industrialisation, there was - at least in Europe - what has become known as the mediaeval warm period, when temperatures were probably at least as high as, if not higher than, they are today. Going back even further, during the Roman empire, it may have been even warmer. There is archaeological evidence that in Roman Britain, vineyards existed on a commercial scale at least as far north as Northamptonshire. More recently, during the 17th and early 18th centuries, there was what has become known as the little ice age, when the Thames was regularly frozen over in winter, and substantial ice fairs held on the frozen river - immortalised in colourful prints produced at the time - became a popular attraction. Historical treeline studies, showing how far up mountains trees are able to grow at different times, which is clearly correlated with climate change, confirm that these variations occurred outside Europe as well.
A rather different account of the past was given by the so-called "hockey-stick" chart of global temperatures over the past millennium, which purported to show that the earth's temperature was constant until the industrialisation of the 20th century. Reproduced in its 2001 Report by the supposedly authoritative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, set up under the auspices of the United Nations to advise governments on what is clearly a global issue, the chart featured prominently in (among other publications) the present Government's 2003 energy white paper. It has now been comprehensively discredited.
But it is not only over time that the earth's climate displays considerable natural variability. Change also varies geographically. For example, there are parts of the world where glaciers are retreating, and others where glaciers are advancing. The fringes of the Greenland ice shelf appear to be melting, while at the centre of the shelf the ice is thickening. Curiously enough, there are places where sea levels are perceptibly rising, while elsewhere they are static or even falling - suggesting that local factors still dominate any global warming effects on sea levels.
Again, extreme weather events, such as major storms in the Gulf of Mexico, have come and gone, at irregular intervals, for as long as records exist. Katrina, which caused so much damage to New Orleans, is regularly trotted out as a consequence of man-made climate change; yet the region's worst recorded hurricane was that which devastated Galveston in 1900. Following Katrina, the world's authorities on tropical storms set up an international panel, which included the relevant expert from the Met Office here in the UK. The panel reported, earlier this year, as follows: "The main conclusion we came to was that none of these high-impact tropical cyclones could be specifically attributed to global warming." This may not be all that surprising, given how little global warming has so far occurred; but I do not recall it featuring in Mr Gore's film.
But this diversity makes it all too easy for the Al Gores of this world to select local phenomena which best illustrate their predetermined alarmist global narrative. We need to stick firmly to the central point: what has been the rise in global mean temperatures over the past hundred years, why we believe this has occurred, how much temperatures are likely to rise over the next hundred years or so, and what the consequences are likely to be.
As is already clear, the only honest answer is that we do not know. Nevertheless, it is not unreasonable to try and guess; and this is essentially what the IPCC has devoted itself to doing. Its conclusion is that, by the end of this century, on a business-as-usual basis, global mean temperature might have risen by anything between 1 degree and 6 degrees centigrade. This is based on a combination of the immensely complex computer models of the relationship between carbon dioxide concentrations and global temperature, developed by the Hadley Centre and others, coupled with a range of different projections of the likely growth of carbon dioxide emissions.
This last part is not, of course, a scientific matter at all, but consists of economic forecasting. That is to say, it depends on the rate of world economic growth over the next hundred years (which in turn depends to a considerable extent on the projected world population), the energy-intensiveness of that growth, and the carbon-intensiveness of the energy used. The upper part of the IPCC's range of scenarios is distinctly unconvincing, depending as it does either on an implausibly high rate of population growth or, in particular, an unprecedented growth in energy intensiveness, which in fact has been steadily declining over the past 50 years. Equally implausible are its estimates of the costs of any warming that may occur.
For example, it makes great play of the damage to agriculture and food production from climate change. Quite apart from the fact there are many parts of the world where agriculture and food production would actually benefit from a warmer climate, the IPCC studies are vitiated by the fact that they assume that farmers would carry on much as before, growing the same crops in precisely the same way - the so-called 'dumb farmer' hypothesis. In reality, of course, farmers would adapt, switching as the need arose to strains or crops better suited to warmer climates, to improved methods of irrigation, and in many cases by cultivating areas which had hitherto been too cold to be economic.
It is important to bear in mind that, whatever climate alarmists like to make out, what we are confronted with, even on the Hadley Centre/IPCC hypothesis, is the probability of very gradual change over a large number of years. And this is something to which it is eminently practicable to adapt. This points to the first and most important part of the answer to the question of what we should do about the threat of global warming: adapt to it.
There are at least three reasons why adaptation is far and away the most cost-effective approach. The first is that many of the feared harmful consequences of climate change, such as coastal flooding in low-lying areas, are not new problems, but simply the exacerbation of existing ones; so that addressing these will bring benefits even if there is no further global warming at all. The second reason is that, unlike curbing carbon dioxide emissions, this approach will bring benefits whatever the cause of the warming, whether manmade or natural. And the third reason why adaptation - most of which, incidentally, will happen naturally, that is to say it will be market-driven, without much need for government intervention - is the most cost-effective approach is that all serious studies show that, not surprisingly, there are benefits as well as costs from global warming. Adaptation enables us to pocket the benefits while diminishing the costs.
The main argument advanced against relying principally on adaptation is that it is all right for the rich countries of the world, but not for the poor, which is unacceptable. As Professor Mendelsohn of Yale, author of a number of studies of the impact of climate change, has written, "The net damages to mid to high latitude countries [such as the UK] will be very small if not beneficial this coming century. The impacts to poor low latitude countries will be harmful across the board...Climate change will hurt the poorest people in the world most." This is no doubt true, although it is frequently exaggerated. But it does mean that those of us in the richer countries of the world have a clear moral obligation to do something about it - not least because, if the man-made warming thesis is correct, it is we who caused the problem. According to the IPCC, the greatest single threat posed by global warming is coastal flooding as sea levels rise. Sea levels have, in fact, been rising very gradually throughout the past hundred years, and even the last IPCC Report found little sign of any acceleration.
Nevertheless, Sir Nicholas Stern, charged by the Government to look into the economics of climate change is particularly concerned about this, especially the alleged melting of the Greenland ice sheet. He has written that: "The net effect of these changes is a release of 20 billion tonnes of water to the oceans each year, contributing around 0.05 millimetres a year to sea-level rise." This would imply an additional sea-level rise of less than a quarter of an inch per century, something it ought not to be too difficult to live with.
But the major source of projected sea-level rise is from ocean warming expanding the volume of water. As a result, some of those low-lying areas already subject to serious flooding could find things getting significantly worse, and there is a clear case for government money to be spent on improving sea defences in these areas. The Dutch, after all, have been doing this very effectively for the past 500 years. The governments of the richer countries, like the United States with its Gulf coast exposure, can be left to do it for themselves; but in the case of the poorer countries, such as Bangladesh, there is a powerful argument for international assistance.
Another problem for the poorer and hotter countries of the world, according to the IPCC, is an increase in vector-borne diseases, notably malaria. This is more controversial. Most experts believe that temperature has relatively little bearing on the spread of the disease, pointing out that it was endemic throughout Europe during the little ice age. Be that as it may, some two million children in the developing world die every year from malaria as it is; and the means of combating, if not eradicating, the scourge are well established. There is, again, a clear case for international assistance to achieve this. Of course assistance in either the building of effective sea defences or in the eradication of malaria will cost money. But that cost is only a very small fraction of what it would cost to attempt, by substantially curbing carbon dioxide emissions, to change the climate.
The argument that we need to cut back substantially on carbon dioxide emissions in order to help the world's poor is bizarre in the extreme. To the extent that their problems are climatic, these problems are not new ones, even if they may be exacerbated if current projections are correct. If, twenty years ago, when as Chancellor I was launching the first concerted poor-country debt forgiveness initiative, subsequently known as the Toronto terms, anyone had argued that the best way to help the developing countries was to make the world a colder place, I would probably have politely suggested that they see their doctor. It makes no more sense today than it would have done then. Indeed, it is worse than that. As Frances Cairncross, the Chairman of the Economic and Social Research Council, pointed out in her thoughtful and honest Presidential address on climate change to the British Association's annual conference in September, the cost of effectively curbing carbon dioxide emissions "will definitely be enormous". Precisely how large it is impossible to say - even by Sir Nicholas Stern.
Last year's report on the economics of climate change by the House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee quoted estimates ranging from $80 billion a year to $1,100 billion a year. It would depend greatly, among other things, on how it is achieved and how soon - the earlier it is done the greater the cost. Of critical importance is how great the increase in the price of carbon would need to be to stifle the demand for carbon sufficiently; and that we cannot know unless and until we do it. But it is clear that the cost will be large enough, among other consequences, to diminish significantly the export markets on which the future prosperity of the developing countries at least in part depends. So far from helping the world's poor, it is more likely to harm them.
Nevertheless, curbing carbon dioxide emissions, along the lines of the Kyoto accord, under which the industrialised countries of the world agreed to somewhat arbitrarily assigned limits to their CO2 emissions by 2012, remains the conventional answer to the challenge of global warming. It is hard to imagine a more absurd response. Even its strongest advocates admit that, even if fully implemented (which it is now clear it will not be, and there is no enforcement mechanism), the existing Kyoto agreement, which came into force last year, would do virtually nothing to reduce future rates of global warming.
Its importance, in their eyes, is as the first step towards further such agreements of a considerably more restrictive nature. But this is wholly unrealistic, and fundamentally flawed for a number of reasons. In the first place, the United States, the largest source of carbon dioxide emissions, has refused to ratify the treaty and has made clear its intention of having no part in any future such agreements. The principal American objection is that the developing countries - including such major contributors to future carbon dioxide emissions as China, India and Brazil - are effectively outside the process and determined to remain so. Indeed, both China and India currently subsidise carbon-based energy.
The developing countries' argument is a simple one. They contend that the industrialised countries of the western world achieved their prosperity on the basis of cheap carbon-based energy; and that it is now the turn of the poor developing countries to emulate them. And they add that if there is a problem now of excessive carbon dioxide concentrations in the earth's atmosphere, it is the responsibility of those that caused it to remedy it. Nor are they unaware of the uncertainty of the science on the basis of which they are being asked to slow down their people's escape from grinding poverty.
The consequences of the exclusion of the major developing countries from the process are immense. China alone last year embarked on a programme of building 562 large coal-fired power stations by 2012 - that is, a new coal-fired power station every five days for seven years. Putting it another way, China is adding the equivalent of Britain's entire power-generating capacity each year. Since coal-fired power stations emit roughly twice as much carbon dioxide per gigawatt of electricity as gas-fired ones, it is not surprising that it is generally accepted that within the next 20 years China will overtake the United States as the largest source of emissions.
India, which like China has substantial indigenous coal reserves, is set to follow a similar path, as is Brazil. Then there is the cost of the Kyoto approach to consider. The logic of Kyoto is to make emissions permits sufficiently scarce to raise their price to the point where carbon-based energy is so expensive that carbon-free energy sources, and other carbon-saving measures, become fully economic. This clearly involves a very much greater rise in energy prices than anything we have yet seen. The trebling of oil prices since Kyoto was agreed in 1997 has done little to reduce carbon emissions. There must be considerable doubt whether a rise in energy prices on the scale required would be politically sustainable. Particularly when the economic cost, in terms of slower economic growth, would be substantial.
In reality, if the Kyoto approach were to be pursued beyond 2012, which is - fortunately - unlikely, the price increase would in practice be mitigated in the global economy in which we now live. For as energy prices in Europe started to rise, with the prospect of further rises to come, energy-intensive industries and processes would progressively close down in Europe and relocate in countries like China, where relatively cheap energy was still available. No doubt Europe could, at some cost, adjust to this, as it has to the migration of most of its textile industry to China and elsewhere. But it is difficult to see the point of it. For if carbon dioxide emissions in Europe are reduced only to see them further increased in China, there is no net reduction in global emissions at all.
The extent of ill-informed wishful thinking on this issue is hard to exaggerate. To take just one example, the government's 2003 energy White Paper proposed a 60 per cent reduction in the UK's carbon dioxide emissions by 2050, based on the notion of supplying most if not all of the country's electricity needs from renewable sources, notably that particularly trendy source, wind power. But as experienced electrical engineers have pointed out, government estimates of the cost of wind power are grossly understated, since wind power (like most renewable sources of energy) is intermittent. In other words, the wind doesn't blow all the time. But the electricity supply does have to be on tap all the time. Given the fact that electricity cannot be economically stored on an industrial scale, this means that conventional generating capacity would have to be fully maintained to meet demand when the wind stops blowing, thus massively adding to the true cost of wind power.
There are all sorts of things we can do, from riding a bicycle to putting a windmill on our roof, that may make us feel good. But there is no escaping the two key truths. First, there is no way the growth in atmospheric carbon dioxide can be arrested without a very substantial rise in the cost of carbon, presumably via the imposition of a swingeing carbon tax, which would require, at least in the short to medium term, a radical change of lifestyle in the developed world. Are we seriously prepared to do this? (A tax would at least be preferable to the capricious and corrupt rationing system which half-heartedly exists today under Kyoto.)
And the second key truth is that, even if we were prepared to do this, it would still be useless unless the major developing nations - notably China, India and Brazil - were prepared to do the same, which they are manifestly and understandably not. So we are driven back to the need to adapt to a warmer world, and the moral obligation of the richer countries to help the poorer countries to do so.....
It is not difficult to understand, however, the appeal of the conventional climate change wisdom. Throughout the ages something deep in man's psyche has made him receptive to apocalyptic warnings: "the end of the world is nigh". Almost of all us are imbued with a sense of guilt and a sense of sin, and it is so much less uncomfortable to divert our attention away from our individual sins and causes of guilt, arising from how we have treated our neighbours, and to sublimate it in collective guilt and collective sin.
Throughout the ages, too, the weather has been an important part of the narrative. In primitive societies it was customary for extreme weather events to be explained as punishment from the gods for the sins of the people; and there is no shortage of examples of this theme in the Bible, either - particularly but not exclusively in the Old Testament. The main change is that the new priests are scientists (well rewarded with research grants for their pains) rather than clerics of the established religions, and the new religion is eco-fundamentalism. But it is a distinction without much of a difference.....
The second, and more fundamental, danger is that the global Salvationist movement is profoundly hostile to capitalism and the market economy. There are already increasing calls for green protectionism - for the imposition of trade restrictions against those countries which fail to agree to curb their carbon dioxide emissions. Given the fact that the only way in which the world's poor will ever be able to escape from their poverty is by embracing capitalism and the global market economy, this is not good news.
But the third danger is even more profound. Today we are very conscious of the threat we face from the supreme intolerance of Islamic fundamentalism. It could not be a worse time to abandon our own traditions of reason and tolerance, and to embrace instead the irrationality and intolerance of ecofundamentalism, where reasoned questioning of its mantras is regarded as a form of blasphemy. There is no greater threat to the people of this planet than the retreat from reason we see all around us today.
More here
Expensive Greenie roof in Scotland
Bosses of an acclaimed new government building with a grass roof were shocked to find it will cost 5,000 pounds to have it cut. The 13 million pound Scottish Natural Heritage HQ, praised for its eco-friendly credentials, includes a roof garden, reports the Daily Record. But health and safety regulations mean scaffolding and other safety measures must be installed when people are working above ground. It's believed one scaffolding firm tendered an estimate in the region of 5000 pounds.
It raises questions about the cost implications of the green credentials of Great Glen House in Inverness, opened last month by First Minister Jack McConnell. Local councillor Jimmy MacDonald said: "It seems the extra costs to cut the grass will make this building not as eco-friendly as first believed."
An SNH spokesman said: "The roof was chosen due to its low-maintenance regime, which is why it is so popular for green roof projects."
Source
The Sovietization of British school inspections
School inspections used to be about improving education. This is no longer the case, says Susan Elkin
I am teaching in an English department in a "bog standard" Kent high school and we are being inspected. Although we have only 500 pupils, we are joined by 13 men and women from London for a complete school week. One cerebral, interesting man is attached exclusively to the English department. Only five of us work in the department, so "our" inspector is with one or other of us almost continuously from Monday to Friday. He makes helpful comments and joins in. At the end of the week, he meets the whole department and shares some thoughts, ideas and observations with us. It is all very constructive.
When I pop along as usual to the music department at lunchtime on Tuesday to sing in the choir with the senior pupils, I find the music inspector helping our (only) music teacher by playing accompaniments so that she can get on with conducting. I also notice the science inspector apparently helping pupils with experiments when I pass the chemistry lab.
Did we know they were coming? Yes, we had a few weeks' notice and naturally we scurried around in advance to present our school in the best light. But there was no requirement to produce forests of pointless paper "policies" that no one ever looks at before or after the inspection. So, of course, this isn't Ofsted, with its dogma of discounting what isn't documented. I am winding the clock back more than 20 years to the early Eighties, when I was in a school that underwent a full inspection by Her Majesty's Inspectorate (HMI). Founded in the 19th century, HMI was the forerunner of Ofsted and has now been incorporated into it.
I was lucky to have this experience. HMI inspected schools like ours at random, but there was no brief to be exhaustive. It used to be said that, statistically, you could teach for 100 years and never see an inspector - clearly not ideal if you want teachers and schools to be accountable. Their method, however, was exemplary. No inspector in our school that week suggested there was one "correct" way of tackling a subject, organising a lesson, assessing work or relating to pupils. They had the wisdom to know that there are almost as many good learning methods as there are teachers, and that encouraging those who are clearly good at the job to build on their strengths and "to go with what works" is far more likely to get good results - and I don't mean just examination grades. There was no evidence of fixed criteria and there were certainly no tick boxes.
Compare that with the blinkered reductiveness of Ofsted, whose purpose is to enforce the Government's dumbed-down education policies and to suppress breadth and initiative. If a teacher isn't doing precisely what the Department for Education and Ofsted dictate, his or her lesson is publicly damned as "unsatisfactory". Anastasia de Waal, author of Inspection, Inspection, Inspection!, recently published by the think tank Civitas, argues that Ofsted is a Government lapdog, not the education watchdog it pretends to be. A spokesman for one of the schools Miss de Waal cites said: "If there is a box for it, it must be ticked and if something doesn't have box, it's ignored." Another commented: "When I challenged a judgment in discussion, the inspectors shrugged their shoulders, saying they simply had 'to follow the rules and tick the boxes'."
One of the Government's obsessions is with rigidly structured lessons. Mine always began with a greeting, a joke and then, mostly, "Let's start from where we got to yesterday". In 36 years of reasonably successful teaching, I rarely managed a self-contained lesson - because life and learning are simply not divisible into neat units for the convenience of petty bureaucrats. Moreover, good, confident teachers who know what they're doing and who care about learning can never quite predict where a lesson is going. A pupil might ask an interesting question and the discussion might veer off in a relevant, but unexpected, direction - anathema to control freaks and Ofsted inspectors.
Driven out partly by the absurdity of the Ofsted inspections, Sue Gibson no longer teaches garden history in a further education college. "I was criticised for not altering my method of delivery every 10 to 15 minutes," she says. "In a two-hour lesson, that would have meant changing my teaching method at least eight times. These were college students being prepared for the workplace. Producing students with a concentration span of only 15 minutes would, to any sane person's thinking, only add to the numbers of unemployed." Miss Gibson is relieved to be out of it, but says she regrets the waste of her years of experience and knowledge.
Ofsted has achieved what Miss de Waal calls the "homogenisation" of teaching. That means schools are getting worse, not better. They change to accommodate what Ofsted wants. Most are too frightened of the punishments that Ofsted can dole out - "special measures" and the like - to do anything else.
Although we weren't exactly thrilled to see HMI, there was mutual respect between teachers and inspectors in the 1980s. The inspectors were regarded as the creme de la creme in the teaching profession, and you had to be outstanding to make it as one. Today, the relationship of most teachers with Ofsted is based on well-founded mistrust and suspicion. Inspectors, typically, are part-time hirelings borrowed from schools that are clones of the ones they're inspecting. Independent they are not.
Source
Friday, November 03, 2006
"Tolerance" and "Diversity" in the Church of England
We read:
The Church of England is tolerant of everything except Bible teachings.
BRITISH BUSINESS WELCOMES STERN REPORT, ASKS FOR FREE LUNCH
Business groups welcomed a report calling for a low-carbon economy but warned that companies must not foot climate change through green taxes.
David Frost, Director General of the British Chambers of Commerce, said: "Business has a leading role to play in tackling the impact of climate change and the signs are that many are accepting that responsibility. It is crucial however that business and the government continue to work together and the temptation to regulate and tax is resisted."
The Stern report published today warns that ignoring global warming could turn 200m people into refugees as their homes are hit by drought or flood. The report was drawn up by Sir Nicholas Stern, the Government's chief economist. Richard Lambert, director general of the CBI, said: "The Stern Review adds up to a powerful argument for collective action by the nations of the world. Provided we act with sufficient speed, we will not have to make a choice between averting climate change and promoting growth and investment."
The CBI called for a global system of carbon trading and a partnership between the public and private sectors to help combat climate change. Mr Lambert said: "A global system of carbon trading is urgently needed as the nucleus around which the worldwide action needed can be built in the most economically efficient way."
Brendan Barber, General Secretary of the TUC, said: "This review shows that immediate action against climate change could boost the economy. The Government urgently needs to use this opportunity to develop a green manufacturing strategy and plan to improve energy efficiency in the workplace. Tackling climate change by supporting the growth of low carbon and carbon free technologies - from renewable energy to low carbon vehicles - could also benefit British business and create jobs."
F&C, one of Europe's largest asset managers, said the investment industry is well placed to finance a transition to a low-carbon economy, but needs "long-term signals from Government that sensible, market-friendly solutions will be implemented." Alain Grisay, chief executive of F&C, said: "The Stern report makes it clear that the global economy is poised to enter a phase of massive economic transformation, akin to experience of the introduction of railways and electricity and more recently the global communications revolution. The big difference is that these earlier breakthroughs occurred spontaneously, whereas this time, we have to will into being what can only be described as a fundamental shift in our energy system." He added: "The imperative now is for a sensible policy framework that gives business and investors the confidence to plan ahead. The sooner we know what the rules will be, the sooner we can act."
The Prince of Wales' Corporate Leaders Group on Climate Change, which is made up of fourteen senior executives from some of the UK's leading businesses, also welcomed the report. Speaking for the group, James Smith, chairman of Shell UK said: "We hope that the Stern Review will create further impetus for discussions between British business and the Government about how the UK can scale-up its action on climate change in such a way as to ensure that we have first mover advantage in these massive new global markets".
Hugh Scott-Barrett, chief financial officer of ABN Amro added: "The City of London is already leading the world in terms of the volume of carbon traded. Policy leadership by the UK and the EU will help maintain the City's competitive advantage and will ensure that the money that has already started flowing into low-carbon funds gets invested in British and European innovation".
Neil Carson, chief executive of technology group Johnson Matthey, said: "We think that the transition to a low-carbon economy could have a profound impact on British businesses. As Stern points out, 'the innovation associated with tackling climate change could trigger a new wave of growth and creativity in the global economy'. Britain should be at the crest of this wave".
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PERSUADING THE BRITISH ELECTORATE TO COMMIT ECONOMIC SUICIDE
If there's one thing Gordon Brown loves, it's an inquiry. During the row over tuition fees, Charles Clarke, the then education secretary, told me that the clash between himself and the Chancellor hinged on Clarke's refusal to launch a long investigation into the problem of higher education finance on the model of Derek Wanless's NHS report.
On this basis, at least, Mr Brown will be very happy with Sir Nicholas Stern's inquiry on the economics of climate change due to be published tomorrow, and reported to weigh in at a forest-clearing 700 pages.
According to the Tories, Mr Brown's present preoccupation with climate change, a subject that was central to his conference speech in Manchester, is entirely political, a response to David Cameron's tireless green campaigning since he became leader.
If a Climate Change Bill follows Stern, the Tories will also claim the announcement as a triumph for renewable politics. When he was shadow environment secretary, Oliver Letwin proposed just such a bill with the support of the Lib Dems and invited the Government to come on board: nothing doing.
Two things have undoubtedly changed. The first is that the science of global warming has more or less arrived at a point of consensus, symbolised in popcorn politics by Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth. There are still doughty sceptics urging caution, such as Nigel Lawson, who will deliver his preliminary thoughts on Stern on Tuesday. But the political horse has already bolted.
The second shift is the electoral strategy to which Mr Cameron has now committed his party (which, it must be said, gave short shrift to climate change in its 2005 manifesto, drafted by one D. Cameron).
Last December, the new Tory leader quickly grasped that his party was second in 88 of Labour's top 100 marginal seats. It followed that, to win, he had to capture Lib Dem votes, and, to do that, he had to paint his party an appealing green. Hence, the party's demand that Tony Blair and David Miliband, the Environment Secretary, include a Climate Change Bill in the Queen's Speech (declaration of interest: my wife works for Mr Miliband).
In its principal contention, however, the Stern report soars above such petty party politics and delivers one of the most significant intellectual knockout blows of our times.
For decades, it has been orthodox to speak of green policy in terms of necessary sacrifice, subordinating economic growth and personal comfort to the survival of the species.
This, it must be said, made a great many people irritated. They suspected they were being subjected to a sneaky new Puritanism based on dubious science, by authoritarians who had lost the economic battle and were now looking for fresh ways of telling people what to do. The American Right called the first wave of environmentalist politicians the "water melons": green on the outside, red on the inside.
Stern, however, turns the argument on its head. If we want to stay rich, he says, we must be green. He sets the price of the measures needed to curb global warming at 1 per cent of GDP, and the cost of ignoring the science at 10 per cent (at least). If his economic model is correct, this is what we political analysts call a no-brainer. Pay the parking premium for your 4x4. Turn the television stand-by off at night. Put that green box out with the papers and the bottles on a Tuesday. Because, pesky as all this may be, it is a good deal less pesky than the alternative. Do you fancy paying the Tidal Wave Tax?
The politics of Stern will be hugely entertaining, as well as important. All sides will speak loftily of the need for cross-party consensus, and then savage their opponents for undermining it. It will be a terrific punch-up, even if it is initially conducted in the noble language of Gaia and our debt to future generations.
Ministers will claim that Green Dave has been captured by the Friends of the Earth just as Old Labour was captured by the National Union of Teachers. Mr Cameron will say the Government is just playing catch-up with his own campaign.
Tomorrow, the Environment Secretary is expected to make a statement to the Commons in response to the report. The Tories sniff that they will be busy showcasing their new Young Adult Trust for good works by young people, but something tells me that they will take time out from the activities of young adults to pile into the green debate. Once Stern is released, there will be a furious battle for control of the dossier.
In fact, the risks and the opportunities for each party reflect the respective positions of Opposition and Government. Mr Cameron has the freedom to voice outrage and -impatience and to prod the lumbering beast of Whitehall. In campaigning for a Climate Change Bill, he has positioned himself as a Green Chartist, frontman of the nifty "Can I have the Bill Please?" website petition.
The risk is that his elan as a campaigner may undermine his image as a prospective Prime Minister. The Conservatives' suspicion of Labour targets in public services has long been one of their strongest suits. Mr Cameron's argument that annual targets are needed for the reduction of carbon -emissions may sound gutsy, but I am not sure it has the ring of practical policy.
Still, it looks as if the Tory leader will get his main wish. One Downing Street source tells me that a rapid response to Stern is being planned and that "it is very likely now that a Climate Change Bill will be part of that".
At the heart of Stern's recommendations is a radical extension of the existing arrangements for "cap-and-trade": a market mechanism whereby those carbon producers who exceed their quota purchase credits which are invested elsewhere in clean -technology.
Who, precisely, would police such arrangements? Both parties are much taken by Arnold Schwarzenegger's initiative to make California the first state with a mandatory cap on greenhouse gas emissions. The Tories are enthused by the use of the California Air Resources Board to set industry-specific goals for emissions reductions. All Number 10 will say is that any comparable body in this country would be "independent". But how independent? As independent as the Bank of England?
But the most formidable task ahead of the Government is different. The contract that Messrs Blair, Brown and Miliband must put to the British people is that, if we can change our behaviour here, they have the influence to make a difference on the international scene.
It is extraordinary to consider that if every light in Britain were turned off for good and every gas-guzzling suburban citizen decided to live like Swampy, all the eco-slack would have been picked up by China in 13 months.
Senior officials have high hopes that the 44th President of the United States (McCain? Clinton?) will be responsive to the arguments in Stern. But he or she will not be inaugurated until January 2009. There are whispers of a shift of position by President Bush next year, but no more than that.
Meanwhile, there is enormous diplomatic pressure on Angela Merkel, who assumes the presidency of both the G8 and the EU in January, to deliver the beginnings of a post-Kyoto protocol that does not make China and India snort with laughter.
And this geopolitical dimension, much more than the expected Climate Change Bill, is the real problem: persuading the British electorate that it is worth the candle (literally, when it comes to turning off lights). That's the trouble with saving the planet. You have to get a whole species on side.
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TRULY DEMENTED LOCAL GOVERNMENT PC
A council has warned staff against using the phrase 'political correctness' at work because it might offend people. A booklet outlining 'equality' policy to council workers claims using the term at work can be damaging and even linked it to the Ku Klux Klan. The bizarre publication also orders staff not to use words like 'policeman', 'fireman' and 'chairman', suggesting they are classic examples of 'exclusionary language.' While the word 'ethnic' is also outlawed for being not 'appropriately descriptive.'
The 44-page training book called 'Equality Essentials' has been used for staff training courses at Kirklees Council in West Yorkshire. The publication outlines forms of damaging behaviour in the workplace and rates them on a five-level scale. The authors claim that moving things around on someone else's desk is as serious as punching or kicking them. And workers are instructed to come up with 10 things they can do every day to make colleagues feel better.
Tory MP for Shipley Phillip Davies, a patron of the Campaign Against Political Correctness, branded the pamphlet 'extreme and patronising.' 'How much is it costing to produce all this garbage?' he said. 'The policy is full of either the blindingly obvious or utterly ridiculous nonsense.'
A section of the 'PC booklet is devoted to denouncing the use of the words 'political correctness'. It states:'Political correctness is often used to describe what some of us think are unnecessary changes which don't really bother anyone. 'The term political correctness was coined in 1988 by John O'Sullivan III, who was a member of the Ku Klux Klan. He was making an after dinner speech complaining about how Black Americans were being allowed to take the jobs traditionally reserved for the white majority because of a wave of political correctness. 'Since then the phrase political correctness has almost universally been used to decry changes which aim to prevent offensive behaviour.' It goes on to say because this takes the form of 'blaming the victim, denying peoples experience or expressing the view of a popular majority,' using the phrase can represent a 'physical attack.'
The authority's new Tory leader Robert Light blamed his political opponents and said the booklet was no longer being used by council staff. 'We don't think it is relevant to use this booklet. We are trying to achieve the situation where the council has a more professional, modern approach. Diversity is still an issue for us but we will be taking a common sense approach rather than being part of the PC culture. 'Kirklees Council has had the title of most PC Council in Yorkshire and we are determined to change that view.'
Mr Light added:'References to the Ku Klux Klan and Nazi Germany are really extreme to use in a training guide even as a reference, it's very bizarre. 'I find it more unbelievable that they complain about the use of the word ethnic when it is the term that Government bodies, think-tanks and local leaders all use. It's very off the wall.' Kirklees Council employs more than 18,000 people and has a budget of more than 470 million pounds.
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PERSECUTED SCOTTISH FIREMEN GET HELP
The songwriter behind one of the most famous gay anthems has promised o50,000 to a group of firemen disciplined for refusing to hand out leaflets at a Gay Pride march. The Rev George Hargreaves, a former music mogul who is now a Pentecostal minister, still earns an estimated o10,000 a month in royalties from the 1985 pop song So Macho. The single was recorded by Sinitta, with an even camper B-side called Cruisin', and became an instant hit in gay clubs across Britain, thanks to its catchy disco tune and cheesy lyrics, which included the line: "He's gotta be big and strong, enough to turn me on."
More than 20 years later, its proceeds are to be used to help to fund a legal appeal by nine officers from Strathclyde Fire and Rescue who were punished for refusing to attend a gay parade. Mr Hargreaves, who believes that homosexuality is a sin, said he believed that the human rights of the firefighters were violated after they refused to attend a Pride Scotia event in Glasgow in June. The officers at the Cowcaddens station, led by watch manager Brian Herbert, claimed that they acted on moral grounds when they disobeyed an order to hand out fire safety literature at an event billed as a "gay, bisexual and transgender festival". They said that they also feared that they would be kissed by excited revellers.
Their stand was supported by the Fire Brigades Union, but the officers were sent written warnings and ordered to attend "diversity training" courses. Mr Herbert, who is just two years from retirement, was demoted to crew manager, resulting in a salary loss of 5,000 pounds per year.
At an internal hearing in Glasgow yesterday the firemen appealed against the punishments, arguing that they were entitled to object on grounds of conscience and that the public relations exercise was not a core part of their duties. The result is expected to be made public later this week. The men are likely to take the case to court if they are not exonerated formally. Their stance has attracted condemnation from gay rights groups, but was supported by the Roman Catholic Church, which said that obeying one's own conscience was "a higher duty than that of obeying orders".
Mr Hargreaves says that he owes his life to a firefighter who rescued him from a house fire when he was a boy. He is now pastor of the Hephzibah Christian Centre in Hackney, East London. He has homes in London and Scotland and plans to stand for Scottish Parliament next May. In an election broadcast on behalf of his party, the Christian Party, he said: "Consider the influence of minority interests, such as the homosexual lobby, on all aspects of society, simply because they've made their presence felt. The ancient city of Sodom could have been saved if only righteous people could be found." Last night he said: "I am not homophobic. In my music days I had many friends who were heterosexual playboys and many who were gay playboys. As we say in the Church, we love the sinner, whilst hating the sin."
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"HEALTHY" FOOD NO DIFFERENT
Fitness fanatics eat them for a quick breakfast and parents choose them for children's lunchboxes. Yet despite their wholesome image, many cereal bars contain so much sugar that they would qualify for red "junk food" alerts on packs under the traffic-light labelling system devised by the Food Standards Agency.
A survey of 20 well-known cereal bars by the consumer watchdog Which? found that each one would be classified as "high in sugar" and would require a red warning logo. More than half the bars also contained high levels of saturated fat that would require a red alert. A Kellogg's Fruit 'n' Fibre Bar, for example. contained 10g of sugar, more than a McVities Penguin bar, with 9.7g, and not far off a Nestl‚ two-finger KitKat. Jordans Original Crunchy Honey & Almond Bar contained the most fat overall, 6.8g. But the bars with the most saturated fat were the Nesquik Cereal & Milk Bar and the Nestl‚ Golden Grahams Cereal & Milk Bar, each with 2.1g of saturated fat. These contain more saturates than a Mr Kipling Almond Slice cake.
Researchers at Which? magazine decided to investigate cereal bars after a study in July found that three quarters of 275 breakfast cereals contained high sugar levels. Weetabix Weetos 20g Cereal Bars contained 8.2g of sugar and Kellogg's Coco Pops Cereal & Milk Bars 8g of sugar, both more than the sugar in two McVitie's HobNobs biscuits.
Neil Fowler, the editor of Which?, said: "Although the packs are plastered with wholesome images and claims, the 20 bars scrutinised were all high in sugar and more than half were also high in saturated fat "These findings are worrying given the recent report that showed that obesity in Britain is more prevalent than in many other European countries." The bar with the least sugar (5.6g) and least fat (1.6g) was Nestle's Fitnesse Original. This and Jordans Frusli Raisin and Hazelnut bar came out best for saturated fat, at 0.7g per bar.
In a statement in the Which? report, Kellogg said that it had been assumed "that eating cereal bars as a snack is a problem when, in fact, the consumption of high carbohydrate snacks between meals has been shown to lower overall daily calorie intake and helps reduce hunger". Nestle said it had been cutting saturated fat in its cereal and milk bars and planned further cuts. The Nesquik bar now has 2g of saturates and Golden Grahams 1.9g per bar. The company said that both provided important nutrients. Jordans said that to cut the fat level it would have to use artificial additives, which was against its policy of using only natural ingredients. It added that 87 per cent of the fat was from oats and nuts, which were "good" fats essential for health.
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TEXT LANGUAGE ACCEPTED IN SCOTTISH EXAMS
English literature students who reduce Hamlet's agonies to "2b or not 2b" will not be penalised so long as they display an understanding of the subject, an examinations authority has ruled. While the use of text message jargon would not achieve top marks, it would be accepted if the answer was right, a report by the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) said.
The SQA report on Standard Grade English - the equivalent of English and Welsh GCSEs - reveals that examiners are becoming increasingly concerned about literacy standards among pupils. Many students have a grasp of English so poor that they resort to the stunted shorthand of the text message. The assessor's report says that candidates are failing to achieve good grades because the quality of their English does not match the quality of their answers. The SQA said yesterday that while text shorthand was "not acceptable" in exams, the positive-marking philosophy of the Scottish system meant that marks would still be given for correct answers, even if they were written in text message.
"In English the candidates need to show knowledge [of the subject] and express it appropriately. Text message language is not considered appropriate," a spokesman for the SQA said. "However, an answer written in text would be accepted if it was correct, but the candidate would not get top marks. To get the best marks they would have to write in standard English."
The liberal approach is not echoed in England and Wales where GCSE candidates lose marks for failing to write in standard English. Edexcel, one of England's largest exam boards, said: "We acknowledged that text language has its own lexicon, but students need to know why it is inappropriate within a report, an exam or a business setting. "If in geography students used short forms of words and were rushing towards the end of an essay, and had used the words correctly earlier, they would be forgiven. "But in English text language would be frowned upon and they wouldn't be given marks for it."
Dave Smith, of the Plain English Campaign, said that it was no wonder more and more employers were complaining about the poor literacy skills of school leavers. The SQA report concluded that teachers should emphasise to pupils the importance of avoiding "informalities of talk and text language in written submissions except during direct speech".
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Scots want independence: "The majority of Scots favour breaking away from the rest of the UK and embracing independence, according to a poll on the eve of the 300th anniversary of the Act of Union between Scotland and England. The ICM poll showed support for Scottish independence running at 51 per cent, the first time since 1998, the year before devolution, that support for separation has passed the 50 per cent mark. Only 39 per cent of Scots are for the status quo, and 10 per cent said that they did not know whether they wanted independence, according to the poll of 1,000 voters north of the Border.
We read:
"The former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Carey of Clifton, has been banned from one of the oldest cathedrals in Britain after accusations that he has become an "instrument of disunity".
Lord Carey, who has become a champion of orthodoxy in the Anglican Church since stepping down from the top job in 2002, was due to speak at Bangor Cathedral, North Wales, in February. The Dean of Bangor, the Very Rev Alun Hawkins, is understood to have imposed the unprecedented ban because he feels that Lord Carey has become a "divisive force" and has been "disloyal" to his successor, Dr Rowan Williams, who was born in Wales.
Relations have been strained since Lord Carey blocked the appointment of Dr Williams as Bishop of Southwark because he believed that he was too liberal on the gay issue.
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The Church of England is tolerant of everything except Bible teachings.
BRITISH BUSINESS WELCOMES STERN REPORT, ASKS FOR FREE LUNCH
Business groups welcomed a report calling for a low-carbon economy but warned that companies must not foot climate change through green taxes.
David Frost, Director General of the British Chambers of Commerce, said: "Business has a leading role to play in tackling the impact of climate change and the signs are that many are accepting that responsibility. It is crucial however that business and the government continue to work together and the temptation to regulate and tax is resisted."
The Stern report published today warns that ignoring global warming could turn 200m people into refugees as their homes are hit by drought or flood. The report was drawn up by Sir Nicholas Stern, the Government's chief economist. Richard Lambert, director general of the CBI, said: "The Stern Review adds up to a powerful argument for collective action by the nations of the world. Provided we act with sufficient speed, we will not have to make a choice between averting climate change and promoting growth and investment."
The CBI called for a global system of carbon trading and a partnership between the public and private sectors to help combat climate change. Mr Lambert said: "A global system of carbon trading is urgently needed as the nucleus around which the worldwide action needed can be built in the most economically efficient way."
Brendan Barber, General Secretary of the TUC, said: "This review shows that immediate action against climate change could boost the economy. The Government urgently needs to use this opportunity to develop a green manufacturing strategy and plan to improve energy efficiency in the workplace. Tackling climate change by supporting the growth of low carbon and carbon free technologies - from renewable energy to low carbon vehicles - could also benefit British business and create jobs."
F&C, one of Europe's largest asset managers, said the investment industry is well placed to finance a transition to a low-carbon economy, but needs "long-term signals from Government that sensible, market-friendly solutions will be implemented." Alain Grisay, chief executive of F&C, said: "The Stern report makes it clear that the global economy is poised to enter a phase of massive economic transformation, akin to experience of the introduction of railways and electricity and more recently the global communications revolution. The big difference is that these earlier breakthroughs occurred spontaneously, whereas this time, we have to will into being what can only be described as a fundamental shift in our energy system." He added: "The imperative now is for a sensible policy framework that gives business and investors the confidence to plan ahead. The sooner we know what the rules will be, the sooner we can act."
The Prince of Wales' Corporate Leaders Group on Climate Change, which is made up of fourteen senior executives from some of the UK's leading businesses, also welcomed the report. Speaking for the group, James Smith, chairman of Shell UK said: "We hope that the Stern Review will create further impetus for discussions between British business and the Government about how the UK can scale-up its action on climate change in such a way as to ensure that we have first mover advantage in these massive new global markets".
Hugh Scott-Barrett, chief financial officer of ABN Amro added: "The City of London is already leading the world in terms of the volume of carbon traded. Policy leadership by the UK and the EU will help maintain the City's competitive advantage and will ensure that the money that has already started flowing into low-carbon funds gets invested in British and European innovation".
Neil Carson, chief executive of technology group Johnson Matthey, said: "We think that the transition to a low-carbon economy could have a profound impact on British businesses. As Stern points out, 'the innovation associated with tackling climate change could trigger a new wave of growth and creativity in the global economy'. Britain should be at the crest of this wave".
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PERSUADING THE BRITISH ELECTORATE TO COMMIT ECONOMIC SUICIDE
If there's one thing Gordon Brown loves, it's an inquiry. During the row over tuition fees, Charles Clarke, the then education secretary, told me that the clash between himself and the Chancellor hinged on Clarke's refusal to launch a long investigation into the problem of higher education finance on the model of Derek Wanless's NHS report.
On this basis, at least, Mr Brown will be very happy with Sir Nicholas Stern's inquiry on the economics of climate change due to be published tomorrow, and reported to weigh in at a forest-clearing 700 pages.
According to the Tories, Mr Brown's present preoccupation with climate change, a subject that was central to his conference speech in Manchester, is entirely political, a response to David Cameron's tireless green campaigning since he became leader.
If a Climate Change Bill follows Stern, the Tories will also claim the announcement as a triumph for renewable politics. When he was shadow environment secretary, Oliver Letwin proposed just such a bill with the support of the Lib Dems and invited the Government to come on board: nothing doing.
Two things have undoubtedly changed. The first is that the science of global warming has more or less arrived at a point of consensus, symbolised in popcorn politics by Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth. There are still doughty sceptics urging caution, such as Nigel Lawson, who will deliver his preliminary thoughts on Stern on Tuesday. But the political horse has already bolted.
The second shift is the electoral strategy to which Mr Cameron has now committed his party (which, it must be said, gave short shrift to climate change in its 2005 manifesto, drafted by one D. Cameron).
Last December, the new Tory leader quickly grasped that his party was second in 88 of Labour's top 100 marginal seats. It followed that, to win, he had to capture Lib Dem votes, and, to do that, he had to paint his party an appealing green. Hence, the party's demand that Tony Blair and David Miliband, the Environment Secretary, include a Climate Change Bill in the Queen's Speech (declaration of interest: my wife works for Mr Miliband).
In its principal contention, however, the Stern report soars above such petty party politics and delivers one of the most significant intellectual knockout blows of our times.
For decades, it has been orthodox to speak of green policy in terms of necessary sacrifice, subordinating economic growth and personal comfort to the survival of the species.
This, it must be said, made a great many people irritated. They suspected they were being subjected to a sneaky new Puritanism based on dubious science, by authoritarians who had lost the economic battle and were now looking for fresh ways of telling people what to do. The American Right called the first wave of environmentalist politicians the "water melons": green on the outside, red on the inside.
Stern, however, turns the argument on its head. If we want to stay rich, he says, we must be green. He sets the price of the measures needed to curb global warming at 1 per cent of GDP, and the cost of ignoring the science at 10 per cent (at least). If his economic model is correct, this is what we political analysts call a no-brainer. Pay the parking premium for your 4x4. Turn the television stand-by off at night. Put that green box out with the papers and the bottles on a Tuesday. Because, pesky as all this may be, it is a good deal less pesky than the alternative. Do you fancy paying the Tidal Wave Tax?
The politics of Stern will be hugely entertaining, as well as important. All sides will speak loftily of the need for cross-party consensus, and then savage their opponents for undermining it. It will be a terrific punch-up, even if it is initially conducted in the noble language of Gaia and our debt to future generations.
Ministers will claim that Green Dave has been captured by the Friends of the Earth just as Old Labour was captured by the National Union of Teachers. Mr Cameron will say the Government is just playing catch-up with his own campaign.
Tomorrow, the Environment Secretary is expected to make a statement to the Commons in response to the report. The Tories sniff that they will be busy showcasing their new Young Adult Trust for good works by young people, but something tells me that they will take time out from the activities of young adults to pile into the green debate. Once Stern is released, there will be a furious battle for control of the dossier.
In fact, the risks and the opportunities for each party reflect the respective positions of Opposition and Government. Mr Cameron has the freedom to voice outrage and -impatience and to prod the lumbering beast of Whitehall. In campaigning for a Climate Change Bill, he has positioned himself as a Green Chartist, frontman of the nifty "Can I have the Bill Please?" website petition.
The risk is that his elan as a campaigner may undermine his image as a prospective Prime Minister. The Conservatives' suspicion of Labour targets in public services has long been one of their strongest suits. Mr Cameron's argument that annual targets are needed for the reduction of carbon -emissions may sound gutsy, but I am not sure it has the ring of practical policy.
Still, it looks as if the Tory leader will get his main wish. One Downing Street source tells me that a rapid response to Stern is being planned and that "it is very likely now that a Climate Change Bill will be part of that".
At the heart of Stern's recommendations is a radical extension of the existing arrangements for "cap-and-trade": a market mechanism whereby those carbon producers who exceed their quota purchase credits which are invested elsewhere in clean -technology.
Who, precisely, would police such arrangements? Both parties are much taken by Arnold Schwarzenegger's initiative to make California the first state with a mandatory cap on greenhouse gas emissions. The Tories are enthused by the use of the California Air Resources Board to set industry-specific goals for emissions reductions. All Number 10 will say is that any comparable body in this country would be "independent". But how independent? As independent as the Bank of England?
But the most formidable task ahead of the Government is different. The contract that Messrs Blair, Brown and Miliband must put to the British people is that, if we can change our behaviour here, they have the influence to make a difference on the international scene.
It is extraordinary to consider that if every light in Britain were turned off for good and every gas-guzzling suburban citizen decided to live like Swampy, all the eco-slack would have been picked up by China in 13 months.
Senior officials have high hopes that the 44th President of the United States (McCain? Clinton?) will be responsive to the arguments in Stern. But he or she will not be inaugurated until January 2009. There are whispers of a shift of position by President Bush next year, but no more than that.
Meanwhile, there is enormous diplomatic pressure on Angela Merkel, who assumes the presidency of both the G8 and the EU in January, to deliver the beginnings of a post-Kyoto protocol that does not make China and India snort with laughter.
And this geopolitical dimension, much more than the expected Climate Change Bill, is the real problem: persuading the British electorate that it is worth the candle (literally, when it comes to turning off lights). That's the trouble with saving the planet. You have to get a whole species on side.
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TRULY DEMENTED LOCAL GOVERNMENT PC
A council has warned staff against using the phrase 'political correctness' at work because it might offend people. A booklet outlining 'equality' policy to council workers claims using the term at work can be damaging and even linked it to the Ku Klux Klan. The bizarre publication also orders staff not to use words like 'policeman', 'fireman' and 'chairman', suggesting they are classic examples of 'exclusionary language.' While the word 'ethnic' is also outlawed for being not 'appropriately descriptive.'
The 44-page training book called 'Equality Essentials' has been used for staff training courses at Kirklees Council in West Yorkshire. The publication outlines forms of damaging behaviour in the workplace and rates them on a five-level scale. The authors claim that moving things around on someone else's desk is as serious as punching or kicking them. And workers are instructed to come up with 10 things they can do every day to make colleagues feel better.
Tory MP for Shipley Phillip Davies, a patron of the Campaign Against Political Correctness, branded the pamphlet 'extreme and patronising.' 'How much is it costing to produce all this garbage?' he said. 'The policy is full of either the blindingly obvious or utterly ridiculous nonsense.'
A section of the 'PC booklet is devoted to denouncing the use of the words 'political correctness'. It states:'Political correctness is often used to describe what some of us think are unnecessary changes which don't really bother anyone. 'The term political correctness was coined in 1988 by John O'Sullivan III, who was a member of the Ku Klux Klan. He was making an after dinner speech complaining about how Black Americans were being allowed to take the jobs traditionally reserved for the white majority because of a wave of political correctness. 'Since then the phrase political correctness has almost universally been used to decry changes which aim to prevent offensive behaviour.' It goes on to say because this takes the form of 'blaming the victim, denying peoples experience or expressing the view of a popular majority,' using the phrase can represent a 'physical attack.'
The authority's new Tory leader Robert Light blamed his political opponents and said the booklet was no longer being used by council staff. 'We don't think it is relevant to use this booklet. We are trying to achieve the situation where the council has a more professional, modern approach. Diversity is still an issue for us but we will be taking a common sense approach rather than being part of the PC culture. 'Kirklees Council has had the title of most PC Council in Yorkshire and we are determined to change that view.'
Mr Light added:'References to the Ku Klux Klan and Nazi Germany are really extreme to use in a training guide even as a reference, it's very bizarre. 'I find it more unbelievable that they complain about the use of the word ethnic when it is the term that Government bodies, think-tanks and local leaders all use. It's very off the wall.' Kirklees Council employs more than 18,000 people and has a budget of more than 470 million pounds.
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PERSECUTED SCOTTISH FIREMEN GET HELP
The songwriter behind one of the most famous gay anthems has promised o50,000 to a group of firemen disciplined for refusing to hand out leaflets at a Gay Pride march. The Rev George Hargreaves, a former music mogul who is now a Pentecostal minister, still earns an estimated o10,000 a month in royalties from the 1985 pop song So Macho. The single was recorded by Sinitta, with an even camper B-side called Cruisin', and became an instant hit in gay clubs across Britain, thanks to its catchy disco tune and cheesy lyrics, which included the line: "He's gotta be big and strong, enough to turn me on."
More than 20 years later, its proceeds are to be used to help to fund a legal appeal by nine officers from Strathclyde Fire and Rescue who were punished for refusing to attend a gay parade. Mr Hargreaves, who believes that homosexuality is a sin, said he believed that the human rights of the firefighters were violated after they refused to attend a Pride Scotia event in Glasgow in June. The officers at the Cowcaddens station, led by watch manager Brian Herbert, claimed that they acted on moral grounds when they disobeyed an order to hand out fire safety literature at an event billed as a "gay, bisexual and transgender festival". They said that they also feared that they would be kissed by excited revellers.
Their stand was supported by the Fire Brigades Union, but the officers were sent written warnings and ordered to attend "diversity training" courses. Mr Herbert, who is just two years from retirement, was demoted to crew manager, resulting in a salary loss of 5,000 pounds per year.
At an internal hearing in Glasgow yesterday the firemen appealed against the punishments, arguing that they were entitled to object on grounds of conscience and that the public relations exercise was not a core part of their duties. The result is expected to be made public later this week. The men are likely to take the case to court if they are not exonerated formally. Their stance has attracted condemnation from gay rights groups, but was supported by the Roman Catholic Church, which said that obeying one's own conscience was "a higher duty than that of obeying orders".
Mr Hargreaves says that he owes his life to a firefighter who rescued him from a house fire when he was a boy. He is now pastor of the Hephzibah Christian Centre in Hackney, East London. He has homes in London and Scotland and plans to stand for Scottish Parliament next May. In an election broadcast on behalf of his party, the Christian Party, he said: "Consider the influence of minority interests, such as the homosexual lobby, on all aspects of society, simply because they've made their presence felt. The ancient city of Sodom could have been saved if only righteous people could be found." Last night he said: "I am not homophobic. In my music days I had many friends who were heterosexual playboys and many who were gay playboys. As we say in the Church, we love the sinner, whilst hating the sin."
Source
"HEALTHY" FOOD NO DIFFERENT
Fitness fanatics eat them for a quick breakfast and parents choose them for children's lunchboxes. Yet despite their wholesome image, many cereal bars contain so much sugar that they would qualify for red "junk food" alerts on packs under the traffic-light labelling system devised by the Food Standards Agency.
A survey of 20 well-known cereal bars by the consumer watchdog Which? found that each one would be classified as "high in sugar" and would require a red warning logo. More than half the bars also contained high levels of saturated fat that would require a red alert. A Kellogg's Fruit 'n' Fibre Bar, for example. contained 10g of sugar, more than a McVities Penguin bar, with 9.7g, and not far off a Nestl‚ two-finger KitKat. Jordans Original Crunchy Honey & Almond Bar contained the most fat overall, 6.8g. But the bars with the most saturated fat were the Nesquik Cereal & Milk Bar and the Nestl‚ Golden Grahams Cereal & Milk Bar, each with 2.1g of saturated fat. These contain more saturates than a Mr Kipling Almond Slice cake.
Researchers at Which? magazine decided to investigate cereal bars after a study in July found that three quarters of 275 breakfast cereals contained high sugar levels. Weetabix Weetos 20g Cereal Bars contained 8.2g of sugar and Kellogg's Coco Pops Cereal & Milk Bars 8g of sugar, both more than the sugar in two McVitie's HobNobs biscuits.
Neil Fowler, the editor of Which?, said: "Although the packs are plastered with wholesome images and claims, the 20 bars scrutinised were all high in sugar and more than half were also high in saturated fat "These findings are worrying given the recent report that showed that obesity in Britain is more prevalent than in many other European countries." The bar with the least sugar (5.6g) and least fat (1.6g) was Nestle's Fitnesse Original. This and Jordans Frusli Raisin and Hazelnut bar came out best for saturated fat, at 0.7g per bar.
In a statement in the Which? report, Kellogg said that it had been assumed "that eating cereal bars as a snack is a problem when, in fact, the consumption of high carbohydrate snacks between meals has been shown to lower overall daily calorie intake and helps reduce hunger". Nestle said it had been cutting saturated fat in its cereal and milk bars and planned further cuts. The Nesquik bar now has 2g of saturates and Golden Grahams 1.9g per bar. The company said that both provided important nutrients. Jordans said that to cut the fat level it would have to use artificial additives, which was against its policy of using only natural ingredients. It added that 87 per cent of the fat was from oats and nuts, which were "good" fats essential for health.
Source
TEXT LANGUAGE ACCEPTED IN SCOTTISH EXAMS
English literature students who reduce Hamlet's agonies to "2b or not 2b" will not be penalised so long as they display an understanding of the subject, an examinations authority has ruled. While the use of text message jargon would not achieve top marks, it would be accepted if the answer was right, a report by the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) said.
The SQA report on Standard Grade English - the equivalent of English and Welsh GCSEs - reveals that examiners are becoming increasingly concerned about literacy standards among pupils. Many students have a grasp of English so poor that they resort to the stunted shorthand of the text message. The assessor's report says that candidates are failing to achieve good grades because the quality of their English does not match the quality of their answers. The SQA said yesterday that while text shorthand was "not acceptable" in exams, the positive-marking philosophy of the Scottish system meant that marks would still be given for correct answers, even if they were written in text message.
"In English the candidates need to show knowledge [of the subject] and express it appropriately. Text message language is not considered appropriate," a spokesman for the SQA said. "However, an answer written in text would be accepted if it was correct, but the candidate would not get top marks. To get the best marks they would have to write in standard English."
The liberal approach is not echoed in England and Wales where GCSE candidates lose marks for failing to write in standard English. Edexcel, one of England's largest exam boards, said: "We acknowledged that text language has its own lexicon, but students need to know why it is inappropriate within a report, an exam or a business setting. "If in geography students used short forms of words and were rushing towards the end of an essay, and had used the words correctly earlier, they would be forgiven. "But in English text language would be frowned upon and they wouldn't be given marks for it."
Dave Smith, of the Plain English Campaign, said that it was no wonder more and more employers were complaining about the poor literacy skills of school leavers. The SQA report concluded that teachers should emphasise to pupils the importance of avoiding "informalities of talk and text language in written submissions except during direct speech".
Source
Scots want independence: "The majority of Scots favour breaking away from the rest of the UK and embracing independence, according to a poll on the eve of the 300th anniversary of the Act of Union between Scotland and England. The ICM poll showed support for Scottish independence running at 51 per cent, the first time since 1998, the year before devolution, that support for separation has passed the 50 per cent mark. Only 39 per cent of Scots are for the status quo, and 10 per cent said that they did not know whether they wanted independence, according to the poll of 1,000 voters north of the Border.
Thursday, November 02, 2006
STERN REPORT BASED ON AN ALARMIST AND IMPROBABLE MODEL
Basing it on observed reality (such as the halt in global warming since 1998) would be too much to expect altogether, of course. Comment on the Stern model below by Tim Worstall. Tim enlarges on his comments on his blog
The Stern Report is now out and as usual with these sorts of things we're going to have the most almighty cat fights about what it all means. A number of observations:
1) The report itself, although not much of the commentary upon it, gives a timescale of 'centuries to a millenium' for the melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps, if that indeed happens at all. No, despite what the papers seem to say, no one is predicting sea level rises of 7 metres in only 94 years time.
2) In order to make mitigation now work financially instead of adaptation later it is necessary to work on the concept of discount rates. The report insists that we should use very low ones with the effect that such mitigating spending now looks better.
3) Quite rightly (to my mind, of course) the point is made that the poor need to be encouraged, even aided, to become richer so that they will be more able to make whatever adaptations are necessary. This would seem to indicate once again that we should abandon our own trade restrictions: nothing helps the poor more than buying the things they make. Free Trade for Gaia perhaps?
There's one part, where they do their own modelling, that I think (again, please note, this is my opinion) is an horrendous error, so bad that I think it discredits everything else. The entire logic behind the call to action runs like this: If we don't change our ways now then people in the future will be poorer than they could have been if we did change our ways. As long as the costs to us are less than the increased income in the future from our doing so, then it is a moral imperative that we should indeed change.
However, the model of the future that is used to calculate said future incomes and costs is the 'A2' model from the Special Report on Emissions Scenarios (SRES), the basis of the IPCC report. (Page 61, chapter three of the Stern Report.) This assumes a medium high emissions scenario, a population of 15 billion in 2100 (!!) and a definite slowing of globalization so that we maintain a series of regional economies with little diffusion of technology. This is referred to as the business as usual (BAU) scenario.
However, that is something of a misunderstanding of the SRES scenarios. Each scenario has an equal probability, there is no such thing as 'this is what will happen unless we do something'. There are other families of scenarios, like the A1, B1 and B2 ones. The A1 family, for example, is based upon the international movement of people, ideas and technology and a strong commitment to market-based solutions. It's worth noting that this produces a world, in aggregate, twice as rich as the A2 one used by the Stern Report and given the lower population, one four times as rich per head of population.
So if indeed it is true that we have a moral duty to ensure that our descendants are as rich as possible (which is, after all, the report's justification for mitigation now) then don't we also have one to push the world in the A1 direction, not the A2? More globalization for example? That would have a much greater effect on their standards of living than any of the mitigation that the report proposes. Missing this point means that I'm rather less than impressed with the rest of the report. (Please note that all SRES scenarios assume no mitigation attempts.)
GREEN MISSIONARIES: BRITAIN SIGNS GORE, SENDS STERN TO CONVERT USA
Britain is to send the author of today's landmark review on global warming to try to win American hearts and minds to the urgent cause of cutting carbon emissions - as it emerged yesterday that the government has already signed up former US vice-president Al Gore to advise on the environment.
Sir Nicholas Stern, who this morning publishes an authoritative report on climate change warning that inaction could cause a worldwide recession as damaging as the Depression of the 1930s, will lobby politicians and business people in America at the turn of the year.
In a separate development, the environment secretary, David Miliband, said the government was discussing imposing green taxes. But the Treasury, which commissioned Sir Nicholas's study, stressed: "The key message of Stern is that international action is required ... The chancellor decides on taxes and he will do so in the pre-budget report and budget."
The government hopes the review will gain traction in the US because it focuses on the economic case for change. Sir Nicholas's analysis warns that doing nothing about climate change will cost the global economy between 5% and 20% of GDP, while reducing emissions now would cost 1%, equivalent to o184bn.
He argues that international negotiations to find a successor to the Kyoto protocol on reducing greenhouse gases must be accelerated, starting at UN talks in Nairobi next month.
The prime minister has said any such agreement needs the support of the US, which refused to join Kyoto because it said it would harm the economy. The White House said last night that it had not read the report. But Kristin Hellmer, the White House counsel on environmental quality, said: "The president has said from the beginning that climate change is a serious issue, and he is taking action on it."
She disputed charges from scientists that the administration had been hostile to the concept of global warming, and that it had set back international efforts to limit greenhouse gases by rejecting the Kyoto treaty.
Alden Meyer, director of policy and strategy with the Union of Concerned Scientists, a US group, suggested the only prospect for a policy shift before the next presidential election in 2008 would be if a delegation from the vast majority of US business - including the coal, utilities and car manufacturing industries - lobbied the White House for action. But he added of today's review: "It is a benchmark in a long process that is going to continue after the release."
Jonathan Porritt, director of the government's independent watchdog, the Sustainable Development Commission, added: "I think it is on a par with the influence of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the way in which the scientific evidence that they have marshalled has bit by bit obliged politicians to get into a much more pro-action stance on climate change."
Hopes of a political consensus on green taxes were raised yesterday as David Cameron, the Tory leader, told the BBC he would be prepared to impose taxes on aviation. His remarks followed the publication of a leaked memo from Mr Miliband urging Mr Brown to consider tough levies on flights, motoring and inefficient household appliances.
Source
BRITAIN'S BIGGEST TABLOID SEZ: "WRONG TARGET"
"The Sun", Editorial:
The government's plans to hammer motorists and holidaymakers with extra taxes to halt global warming are simply not good enough. Our readers are already among the world's most heavily taxed people. Huge numbers of them need cars to get to work. They toil for long hours to make an honest living. For many of them public transport can never provide an alternative.
Road charges and punitive taxes on fuel will break the financial back of many families. These are the families who already face massively increased council tax bills - imposed by an expensive army of new snoopers. After paying that lot, will workers be able to afford foreign holidays at all - let alone an extra 5 pounds on their flights?
The proposals contain far too much stick and not enough carrot. Hybrid "green" cars are still too expensive for the lower-paid. Zero road tax plus other financial incentives would help sell them. It must be remembered that the government has turned its back on REAL ways of tackling global warming for far too long. Now, in a panic, it typically tries to punish the people for mistakes of its own making.
This government has already frittered away billions on outdated public services and potty projects. It should bring forward plans to cut spending and make savings. If taxes are to help, they must be REPLACEMENT taxes, not new ones.
Without question global warming is the world's biggest problem. But the answer involves EVERYONE in the industrialised nations changing their ways. The British taxpayer can't do it alone.
GREEN TAXES SPLIT BRITISH LEFT
Consumers could be hit by steep price rises for a range of goods from food to hotel breaks under plans to tackle climate change being considered by David Miliband. The Environment Secretary is consulting taking sweeping powers to extend curbs on greenhouse gas emissions so that they cover many more businesses, including supermarkets and hotel chains - curbs that at present apply only to the big industrial users. The costs incurred are potentially huge and are likely to be passed on to the consumer. The proposal to take "enabling powers" to extend the carbon-trading scheme to other sectors will be taken in the new Climate Change Bill, Mr Miliband confirmed yesterday.
But amid signs of a government split on how to respond to Sir Nicholas Stern's report on the impact of global warming, Gordon Brown is to reject Cabinet calls for swingeing tax rises on motorists and domestic consumers, The Times has learnt. Airline passengers and drivers of large "gas-guzzling" vehicles will bear the brunt of green tax levies, to be introduced by the Chancellor in his last Budget in March. But Mr Brown is opposed strongly to measures that would allow petrol prices to rise even when the world price of oil slumped, as proposed in a leaked letter to him from Mr Miliband.
The disclosure over the weekend of Mr Miliband's "wish list" of taxation measures angered the Treasury and sources were blaming "rogue elements" in No 10 yesterday for its appearance over the weekend. Mr Brown was said to be upset because the leak focused attention on speculation about tax rises rather than on the central message of Sir Nicholas's report; that if the world took concerted action on global warming growth need not be affected. Allies of the Chancellor described the leak as an attempt to put pressure on Mr Brown and to test his modernising credentials.
When they appeared with Sir Nicholas at the launch of his report yesterday both Mr Brown and Tony Blair emphasised the importance of international action - rather than domestic taxes - to reduce carbon emissions. Mr Brown made it plain that he was pinning his hopes on a massive expansion of the carbon trading scheme, by which governments aim to reduce pollution through market mechanisms. He suggested that the scheme, under which firms have to buy credits to emit more than a set level of greenhouse gases, should be extended by linking it with others in California, Australia, Japan and elsewhere.
The Climate Change Bill will enshrine in law the Government's long-term aim of reducing carbon emissions by 60 per cent by 2050. Thousands of organisations, from supermarket groups to hotel chains, are not covered by EU schemes limiting carbon emissions. The "enabling powers" would allow ministers to extend these curbs at will across the rest of Britain's businesses - with potentially huge cost consequences. Many companies that broke possible limits on their emissions and were forced to buy "carbon credits" would be likely to pass on costs to the consumer.
The Environment Department confirmed that the powers could be used to extend curbs to "non-energy intensive" sectors. It said in the summer that measures for businesses not covered by the EU trading scheme, and which account for a tenth of Britain's greenhouse gases, could bring carbon savings of 1.2 million tonnes a year by 2020. David Frost, the head of the British Chambers of Commerce, said that the measures would amount to "stealth tax" in which "business becomes the villain".
Source
British Labour party loses faith in multi-culturalism
At his press briefing yesterday, the Prime Minister made it clear his Government's approach to cultural diversity had changed. He may have couched his position in careful language, but the conclusion was inescapable: integration, rather than multi-cultural separatism, is now official policy. By saying that he "fully supported" the decision of Kirklees council to suspend the Muslim teaching assistant who had refused to remove her veil at work, and then reinforcing this point with the observation that the veil was a "mark of separation", Mr Blair removed any doubt about the Government's position.
He was, in effect, affirming that the contentious views expressed over recent weeks by Jack Straw, Ruth Kelly and John Reid were not maverick individual opinions, but part of a larger, concerted revision of the Cabinet's stand. Mr Blair, unsurprisingly, wanted to avoid the appearance of an outright volte-face: at one point, he suggested that there should be "a balance between integration and multi-culturalism". This would be a logical impossibility, since the policy of multi-culturalism, as it has been understood and practised, is antithetical to integration.
Ministers are now clearly ready to embrace the argument that they have attacked for many years as insensitive, even bigoted: if Britain is to succeed in absorbing diverse peoples, ethnic minorities must accept the mores of their adopted country. Private religious observance should always be respected, but its practices cannot be permitted to contravene either civil law or the social rules that make community life workable.
Most crucially, the Government's new stand implies that there is an obligation on the part of all those who settle in this country to relate to the larger society and to accommodate its expectations. As the shadow home secretary, David Davis, has said, we cannot afford to encourage a form of "voluntary apartheid" by allowing minority groups to withdraw into cultural isolation. Mr Davis described this as a "series of closed societies within our open society". In fact, such separatism, which the philosophy of multi-culturalism promoted, is a threat to the very existence of an open society.
Mr Blair announced yesterday that he wants an "open and honest debate". That debate is already under way and it is becoming more open and honest by the moment. If ministers wish to engage in it, they must explain how they intend to deal with the small proportion of the British Muslim population that is aggressively opposed to integration, and acknowledge the need for an education system that equips the young of all races with the historical understanding and national pride they need to participate fully in British life.
Source
THE NEED FOR AN ENGLISH PARLIAMENT
Devolution has not - as its cheer-leaders endlessly proclaimed- strengthened the Union. It is weakening it. In Scotland, the clamour for full independence grows apace, while in Wales, the Assembly in Cardiff is hungry for greater power - and is getting it. Meanwhile, the 49 million people who live in that neglected corner of the United Kingdom called England face a yawning democratic deficit. This slumbering giant has yet to be particularly exercised by the intrinsically unfair nature of New Labour's half-cocked constitutional settlement.
Scottish and Welsh MPs can vote on matters affecting English constituencies, while English MPs have no such reciprocal rights over what happens in Scotland and Wales. This potential instability needs to be addressed now. If there is any "unfinished business" in New Labour's constitutional reforms, it is giving the English greater control over their affairs. Specifically English laws ought to be dealt with by English MPs - just as the Scottish Parliament deals exclusively with Scottish measures and the Welsh Assembly, in the new powers it gained in July, deals with Welsh matters.
More here. See also here
NEWER BRITISH UNIVERSITIES HAVE LOWER STANDARDS
Undergraduates who study for as little as 20 hours a week are more likely to be awarded a first-class degree at a newer university than those at older institutions, a survey says. Scientists at Cambridge have to work 45 hours a week to obtain a top-class degree; those studying physics and chemistry at the University of Central Lancashire have to study 19 hours a week for a 2:1 or a first.
The Higher Education Policy Institute survey of 15,000 first-year and second-year undergraduates questions the true value of a degree, showing that some students work far harder than others, depending on the subject. Although tuition fees are now paid upfront in a loan by the Government, graduates must pay them off once they earn 15,000 pounds. Banks estimate that by 2009 a student's debt will be approaching 30,000 pounds, which most will be paying off until their mid-thirties.
The survey, published today, shows that while, on average, students claim to be working 25.7 hours a week in lectures, seminars or private study, medics and dentists are apparently working ten hours a week more. Overall the study shows that undergraduates on courses in mass communications put in five hours fewer than the average each week. The differences were more pronounced between subjects than between different universities, although those at older universities studied more.
Bahram Bekhradnia, of the institute, said: "If students are putting 32 hours a week into engineering and 21 hours a week into business studies, is a degree telling you the same thing about the universities and the experience the students have had? You can get a 2:1 with different amounts of effort." The authors say: "This report does not prove that the degree classification system is flawed, but it certainly raises questions that need to be addressed." They note that 60.9 per cent of students of physical sciences at Plymouth University receive a 2:1 or first-class degree for working 20 hours a week. At Cambridge, where students may have twice the A-level points, they work 45 hours a week for the same class of degree.
About half of students were disappointed by some aspect of university - mostly with the quality of teaching. Nearly 30 per cent of overseas students - who pay much higher fees than British and other EU students - said that their university experience did not represent value for money.
Drummond Bone, of the vice-chancellors' group Universities UK, said: "There is no national curriculum in higher education, and so we should not be surprised that different courses at different institutions involve different use of facilities, contact hours and so on."
Oxford University plans to open a research centre in India next year, to exploit funding and talent in the fast-growing economy. The Said Business School is in talks on opening at least one centre, probably in Bombay or Bangalore, and hopes to open several. They will not offer degrees, but will link Indian policymakers, corporate leaders and researchers with experts at Oxford.
Source
Basing it on observed reality (such as the halt in global warming since 1998) would be too much to expect altogether, of course. Comment on the Stern model below by Tim Worstall. Tim enlarges on his comments on his blog
The Stern Report is now out and as usual with these sorts of things we're going to have the most almighty cat fights about what it all means. A number of observations:
1) The report itself, although not much of the commentary upon it, gives a timescale of 'centuries to a millenium' for the melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps, if that indeed happens at all. No, despite what the papers seem to say, no one is predicting sea level rises of 7 metres in only 94 years time.
2) In order to make mitigation now work financially instead of adaptation later it is necessary to work on the concept of discount rates. The report insists that we should use very low ones with the effect that such mitigating spending now looks better.
3) Quite rightly (to my mind, of course) the point is made that the poor need to be encouraged, even aided, to become richer so that they will be more able to make whatever adaptations are necessary. This would seem to indicate once again that we should abandon our own trade restrictions: nothing helps the poor more than buying the things they make. Free Trade for Gaia perhaps?
There's one part, where they do their own modelling, that I think (again, please note, this is my opinion) is an horrendous error, so bad that I think it discredits everything else. The entire logic behind the call to action runs like this: If we don't change our ways now then people in the future will be poorer than they could have been if we did change our ways. As long as the costs to us are less than the increased income in the future from our doing so, then it is a moral imperative that we should indeed change.
However, the model of the future that is used to calculate said future incomes and costs is the 'A2' model from the Special Report on Emissions Scenarios (SRES), the basis of the IPCC report. (Page 61, chapter three of the Stern Report.) This assumes a medium high emissions scenario, a population of 15 billion in 2100 (!!) and a definite slowing of globalization so that we maintain a series of regional economies with little diffusion of technology. This is referred to as the business as usual (BAU) scenario.
However, that is something of a misunderstanding of the SRES scenarios. Each scenario has an equal probability, there is no such thing as 'this is what will happen unless we do something'. There are other families of scenarios, like the A1, B1 and B2 ones. The A1 family, for example, is based upon the international movement of people, ideas and technology and a strong commitment to market-based solutions. It's worth noting that this produces a world, in aggregate, twice as rich as the A2 one used by the Stern Report and given the lower population, one four times as rich per head of population.
So if indeed it is true that we have a moral duty to ensure that our descendants are as rich as possible (which is, after all, the report's justification for mitigation now) then don't we also have one to push the world in the A1 direction, not the A2? More globalization for example? That would have a much greater effect on their standards of living than any of the mitigation that the report proposes. Missing this point means that I'm rather less than impressed with the rest of the report. (Please note that all SRES scenarios assume no mitigation attempts.)
GREEN MISSIONARIES: BRITAIN SIGNS GORE, SENDS STERN TO CONVERT USA
Britain is to send the author of today's landmark review on global warming to try to win American hearts and minds to the urgent cause of cutting carbon emissions - as it emerged yesterday that the government has already signed up former US vice-president Al Gore to advise on the environment.
Sir Nicholas Stern, who this morning publishes an authoritative report on climate change warning that inaction could cause a worldwide recession as damaging as the Depression of the 1930s, will lobby politicians and business people in America at the turn of the year.
In a separate development, the environment secretary, David Miliband, said the government was discussing imposing green taxes. But the Treasury, which commissioned Sir Nicholas's study, stressed: "The key message of Stern is that international action is required ... The chancellor decides on taxes and he will do so in the pre-budget report and budget."
The government hopes the review will gain traction in the US because it focuses on the economic case for change. Sir Nicholas's analysis warns that doing nothing about climate change will cost the global economy between 5% and 20% of GDP, while reducing emissions now would cost 1%, equivalent to o184bn.
He argues that international negotiations to find a successor to the Kyoto protocol on reducing greenhouse gases must be accelerated, starting at UN talks in Nairobi next month.
The prime minister has said any such agreement needs the support of the US, which refused to join Kyoto because it said it would harm the economy. The White House said last night that it had not read the report. But Kristin Hellmer, the White House counsel on environmental quality, said: "The president has said from the beginning that climate change is a serious issue, and he is taking action on it."
She disputed charges from scientists that the administration had been hostile to the concept of global warming, and that it had set back international efforts to limit greenhouse gases by rejecting the Kyoto treaty.
Alden Meyer, director of policy and strategy with the Union of Concerned Scientists, a US group, suggested the only prospect for a policy shift before the next presidential election in 2008 would be if a delegation from the vast majority of US business - including the coal, utilities and car manufacturing industries - lobbied the White House for action. But he added of today's review: "It is a benchmark in a long process that is going to continue after the release."
Jonathan Porritt, director of the government's independent watchdog, the Sustainable Development Commission, added: "I think it is on a par with the influence of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the way in which the scientific evidence that they have marshalled has bit by bit obliged politicians to get into a much more pro-action stance on climate change."
Hopes of a political consensus on green taxes were raised yesterday as David Cameron, the Tory leader, told the BBC he would be prepared to impose taxes on aviation. His remarks followed the publication of a leaked memo from Mr Miliband urging Mr Brown to consider tough levies on flights, motoring and inefficient household appliances.
Source
BRITAIN'S BIGGEST TABLOID SEZ: "WRONG TARGET"
"The Sun", Editorial:
The government's plans to hammer motorists and holidaymakers with extra taxes to halt global warming are simply not good enough. Our readers are already among the world's most heavily taxed people. Huge numbers of them need cars to get to work. They toil for long hours to make an honest living. For many of them public transport can never provide an alternative.
Road charges and punitive taxes on fuel will break the financial back of many families. These are the families who already face massively increased council tax bills - imposed by an expensive army of new snoopers. After paying that lot, will workers be able to afford foreign holidays at all - let alone an extra 5 pounds on their flights?
The proposals contain far too much stick and not enough carrot. Hybrid "green" cars are still too expensive for the lower-paid. Zero road tax plus other financial incentives would help sell them. It must be remembered that the government has turned its back on REAL ways of tackling global warming for far too long. Now, in a panic, it typically tries to punish the people for mistakes of its own making.
This government has already frittered away billions on outdated public services and potty projects. It should bring forward plans to cut spending and make savings. If taxes are to help, they must be REPLACEMENT taxes, not new ones.
Without question global warming is the world's biggest problem. But the answer involves EVERYONE in the industrialised nations changing their ways. The British taxpayer can't do it alone.
GREEN TAXES SPLIT BRITISH LEFT
Consumers could be hit by steep price rises for a range of goods from food to hotel breaks under plans to tackle climate change being considered by David Miliband. The Environment Secretary is consulting taking sweeping powers to extend curbs on greenhouse gas emissions so that they cover many more businesses, including supermarkets and hotel chains - curbs that at present apply only to the big industrial users. The costs incurred are potentially huge and are likely to be passed on to the consumer. The proposal to take "enabling powers" to extend the carbon-trading scheme to other sectors will be taken in the new Climate Change Bill, Mr Miliband confirmed yesterday.
But amid signs of a government split on how to respond to Sir Nicholas Stern's report on the impact of global warming, Gordon Brown is to reject Cabinet calls for swingeing tax rises on motorists and domestic consumers, The Times has learnt. Airline passengers and drivers of large "gas-guzzling" vehicles will bear the brunt of green tax levies, to be introduced by the Chancellor in his last Budget in March. But Mr Brown is opposed strongly to measures that would allow petrol prices to rise even when the world price of oil slumped, as proposed in a leaked letter to him from Mr Miliband.
The disclosure over the weekend of Mr Miliband's "wish list" of taxation measures angered the Treasury and sources were blaming "rogue elements" in No 10 yesterday for its appearance over the weekend. Mr Brown was said to be upset because the leak focused attention on speculation about tax rises rather than on the central message of Sir Nicholas's report; that if the world took concerted action on global warming growth need not be affected. Allies of the Chancellor described the leak as an attempt to put pressure on Mr Brown and to test his modernising credentials.
When they appeared with Sir Nicholas at the launch of his report yesterday both Mr Brown and Tony Blair emphasised the importance of international action - rather than domestic taxes - to reduce carbon emissions. Mr Brown made it plain that he was pinning his hopes on a massive expansion of the carbon trading scheme, by which governments aim to reduce pollution through market mechanisms. He suggested that the scheme, under which firms have to buy credits to emit more than a set level of greenhouse gases, should be extended by linking it with others in California, Australia, Japan and elsewhere.
The Climate Change Bill will enshrine in law the Government's long-term aim of reducing carbon emissions by 60 per cent by 2050. Thousands of organisations, from supermarket groups to hotel chains, are not covered by EU schemes limiting carbon emissions. The "enabling powers" would allow ministers to extend these curbs at will across the rest of Britain's businesses - with potentially huge cost consequences. Many companies that broke possible limits on their emissions and were forced to buy "carbon credits" would be likely to pass on costs to the consumer.
The Environment Department confirmed that the powers could be used to extend curbs to "non-energy intensive" sectors. It said in the summer that measures for businesses not covered by the EU trading scheme, and which account for a tenth of Britain's greenhouse gases, could bring carbon savings of 1.2 million tonnes a year by 2020. David Frost, the head of the British Chambers of Commerce, said that the measures would amount to "stealth tax" in which "business becomes the villain".
Source
British Labour party loses faith in multi-culturalism
At his press briefing yesterday, the Prime Minister made it clear his Government's approach to cultural diversity had changed. He may have couched his position in careful language, but the conclusion was inescapable: integration, rather than multi-cultural separatism, is now official policy. By saying that he "fully supported" the decision of Kirklees council to suspend the Muslim teaching assistant who had refused to remove her veil at work, and then reinforcing this point with the observation that the veil was a "mark of separation", Mr Blair removed any doubt about the Government's position.
He was, in effect, affirming that the contentious views expressed over recent weeks by Jack Straw, Ruth Kelly and John Reid were not maverick individual opinions, but part of a larger, concerted revision of the Cabinet's stand. Mr Blair, unsurprisingly, wanted to avoid the appearance of an outright volte-face: at one point, he suggested that there should be "a balance between integration and multi-culturalism". This would be a logical impossibility, since the policy of multi-culturalism, as it has been understood and practised, is antithetical to integration.
Ministers are now clearly ready to embrace the argument that they have attacked for many years as insensitive, even bigoted: if Britain is to succeed in absorbing diverse peoples, ethnic minorities must accept the mores of their adopted country. Private religious observance should always be respected, but its practices cannot be permitted to contravene either civil law or the social rules that make community life workable.
Most crucially, the Government's new stand implies that there is an obligation on the part of all those who settle in this country to relate to the larger society and to accommodate its expectations. As the shadow home secretary, David Davis, has said, we cannot afford to encourage a form of "voluntary apartheid" by allowing minority groups to withdraw into cultural isolation. Mr Davis described this as a "series of closed societies within our open society". In fact, such separatism, which the philosophy of multi-culturalism promoted, is a threat to the very existence of an open society.
Mr Blair announced yesterday that he wants an "open and honest debate". That debate is already under way and it is becoming more open and honest by the moment. If ministers wish to engage in it, they must explain how they intend to deal with the small proportion of the British Muslim population that is aggressively opposed to integration, and acknowledge the need for an education system that equips the young of all races with the historical understanding and national pride they need to participate fully in British life.
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THE NEED FOR AN ENGLISH PARLIAMENT
Devolution has not - as its cheer-leaders endlessly proclaimed- strengthened the Union. It is weakening it. In Scotland, the clamour for full independence grows apace, while in Wales, the Assembly in Cardiff is hungry for greater power - and is getting it. Meanwhile, the 49 million people who live in that neglected corner of the United Kingdom called England face a yawning democratic deficit. This slumbering giant has yet to be particularly exercised by the intrinsically unfair nature of New Labour's half-cocked constitutional settlement.
Scottish and Welsh MPs can vote on matters affecting English constituencies, while English MPs have no such reciprocal rights over what happens in Scotland and Wales. This potential instability needs to be addressed now. If there is any "unfinished business" in New Labour's constitutional reforms, it is giving the English greater control over their affairs. Specifically English laws ought to be dealt with by English MPs - just as the Scottish Parliament deals exclusively with Scottish measures and the Welsh Assembly, in the new powers it gained in July, deals with Welsh matters.
More here. See also here
NEWER BRITISH UNIVERSITIES HAVE LOWER STANDARDS
Undergraduates who study for as little as 20 hours a week are more likely to be awarded a first-class degree at a newer university than those at older institutions, a survey says. Scientists at Cambridge have to work 45 hours a week to obtain a top-class degree; those studying physics and chemistry at the University of Central Lancashire have to study 19 hours a week for a 2:1 or a first.
The Higher Education Policy Institute survey of 15,000 first-year and second-year undergraduates questions the true value of a degree, showing that some students work far harder than others, depending on the subject. Although tuition fees are now paid upfront in a loan by the Government, graduates must pay them off once they earn 15,000 pounds. Banks estimate that by 2009 a student's debt will be approaching 30,000 pounds, which most will be paying off until their mid-thirties.
The survey, published today, shows that while, on average, students claim to be working 25.7 hours a week in lectures, seminars or private study, medics and dentists are apparently working ten hours a week more. Overall the study shows that undergraduates on courses in mass communications put in five hours fewer than the average each week. The differences were more pronounced between subjects than between different universities, although those at older universities studied more.
Bahram Bekhradnia, of the institute, said: "If students are putting 32 hours a week into engineering and 21 hours a week into business studies, is a degree telling you the same thing about the universities and the experience the students have had? You can get a 2:1 with different amounts of effort." The authors say: "This report does not prove that the degree classification system is flawed, but it certainly raises questions that need to be addressed." They note that 60.9 per cent of students of physical sciences at Plymouth University receive a 2:1 or first-class degree for working 20 hours a week. At Cambridge, where students may have twice the A-level points, they work 45 hours a week for the same class of degree.
About half of students were disappointed by some aspect of university - mostly with the quality of teaching. Nearly 30 per cent of overseas students - who pay much higher fees than British and other EU students - said that their university experience did not represent value for money.
Drummond Bone, of the vice-chancellors' group Universities UK, said: "There is no national curriculum in higher education, and so we should not be surprised that different courses at different institutions involve different use of facilities, contact hours and so on."
Oxford University plans to open a research centre in India next year, to exploit funding and talent in the fast-growing economy. The Said Business School is in talks on opening at least one centre, probably in Bombay or Bangalore, and hopes to open several. They will not offer degrees, but will link Indian policymakers, corporate leaders and researchers with experts at Oxford.
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Wednesday, November 01, 2006
NHS JOB LOSSES CONTINUE
A total of 903 NHS staff have been made redundant in the last six months due to the financial crisis in the service, ministers admitted today. Statistics show that among the compulsory job losses, 167 were clinical staff such as doctors, nurses and therapists. The remainder were managers and administrators.
The Department of Health released the figures to prove that Tory and union estimates of 20,000 job losses were too high. Health minister Andy Burnham demanded that Conservative leader David Cameron apologise for his "grossly exaggerated claims". The Tory figures included measures such as not filling vacancies and using fewer agency staff.
Last week it emerged that 95 doctors, nurses, and administration staff at Kingston Hospital could be given their redundancy notices two weeks before Christmas. Tony Blair predicted that a "few hundred" NHS workers would lose their jobs as a result of financial pressures and changes to the way healthcare is delivered.
An independent watchdog was due to report today to Parliament on the standards of healthcare in the NHS. The Healthcare Commission's annual report is based on the experiences of patients. It covers a period in which many trusts have struggled with deficits which have forced cutbacks.
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SAGGING DISCIPLINE IN BRITISH SCHOOLS
Three quarters of parents think standards of discipline in schools are worsening despite repeated Government crackdowns, research shows. The Government's own polling revealed a widespread belief that pupils are becoming harder to control. In a blow to Labour almost a decade after taking office, it also showed declining public confidence in educational standards. The damning verdict came in a survey of 4,000 adults commissioned by the Department for Education and Skills.
School discipline was rated as by far the most important issue facing education - ahead of other matters like levels of funding. Just over three quarters of respondents believed that standards of behaviour in schools were getting worse. The scale of concern will embarrass ministers who have spent billions on a raft of policies aimed at restoring "respect" to classrooms ranging from parenting classes to school behaviour consultants.
The Daily Mail revealed on Saturday that more than 400 schools now have police officers stationed on site to help curb truancy and playground hooliganism.
Declining pupil behaviour is repeatedly cited by teachers choosing to leave the profession. "Over three-quarters felt that the general standards of behaviour in schools were getting worse" the report for the DfES concluded. "Around half felt that behaviour in their local schools was getting worse."
Both parents and childless respondents believed pupils' behaviour was deteriorating. A majority also thought the Government was not giving teachers enough support to tackle unruly behaviour. Even during the past year, public confidence in the education system has ebbed away, according to research by EdComs and ICM on behalf of ministers. More than half of respondents questioned in September last year thought exam results were the "best ever" but only 36 per cent agreed by June 2006. Meanwhile only 22 per cent agreed that there were "fewer poorly performing schools" by June, down from 30 per cent in September 2005. And just 25 per cent thought the quality of teaching had "never been better" by June, down from 31 per cent.
Declining numbers believe school adequately prepares children for the world of work. Only 32 per cent thought youngsters left school with a proper grip of the three Rs.
In a further blow to Tony Blair, the research found limited support for his flagship "trust schools" aimed at changing the face of the education system. Planned legislation will give businesses, faith groups, universities and other outside organisations a say in running schools but only 15 per cent of respondents declared themselves strongly in favour.
There was clear backing for the Prime Minister's drive to give parents more choice over where to send their children, "they were least in favour of involving outside organisations in the running of schools".
DfES officials acknowledged that parents were worried about standards of discipline. They said that new measures contained in proposed legislation would strengthen teachers' powers in law to assert their authority over troublesome pupils. Laws on physically restraining violent pupils will also be clarified. A spokesman said: "While Ofsted tell us that behaviour is good in most schools most of the time, this survey shows that parents are concerned about behaviour. "This is precisely why our Education Bill confirms the right to discipline so no pupil will be able to question a teacher's authority and gives teachers the legal right to restrain a pupil where they are a risk to themselves or others."
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QUACK MEDICINE OK IN BRITAIN
Lives will be put at risk by a controversial law which allows homeopathic medicines to make unproven scientific claims, leading doctors have warned. More than 700 medics, scientists and members of the public have signed a statement criticising a new law which they say makes a mockery out of conventional medicine. The Government's medicines safety watchdog says the change gives patients clearer information. But critics fear that giving legitimacy to pills and potions that are based on 'magic' rather than science will cost lives. One expert likened the change to categorising Smarties as a medicine, on the basis that chocolate makes you feel better.
Homeopathy, which has won the backing of Prince Charles, claims to prevent diseases such as malaria by using dilute forms of herbs, minerals and other materials that in higher concentrations could produce the symptoms of the condition. Popular treatments include arnica, a plant-based remedy used to treat cuts and bruises, and malaria nosode, anti-malaria tablets made from African swamp water, rotting plants and mosquito eggs and larvae. However, a recent study published in the Lancet suggested that the benefits of homeopathy are all in the imagination, with alternative remedies performing no better than dummy pills in clinical trials.
Until recently, homeopathic medicine manufacturers were banned from claiming new products could treat specific ailments. But regulations introduced last month by the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency allow the manufacturers to make such claims, as long as they can prove the remedy is safe. Unlike conventional medicines, they do not have to show that the remedies actually work. Instead, they only have to show that the remedy has a history of being used to treat an illness.
The change has so angered the medical establishment that hundreds of doctors and scientists have signed a statement drafted by the charity Sense About Science to oppose the new labelling system. Yesterday afternoon, the House of Lords debated the issue. The critics fear that the new system could lead to life-threatening illnesses going undiagnosed, or to people binning the tablets prescribed by their GP in favour of an unproven alternative. Edzard Ernst, professor of complimentary medicine at Exeter University, said it could cost lives. "makes a mockery out of evidence- based medicine," he said. "I feel very strongly that this is a very serious mistake. If there are claims being made, there has to be evidence for them. "Constipation could be a sign of bowel cancer and if somebody that has a treatable bowel cancer goes out and buys a homeopathic medicine, they might be untreatable tomorrow. Taken to the extreme, this regulation could cost lives."
Michael Baum, professor of surgery at University College London, accused the homoepathy industry of playing on people's beliefs in magic and superstition. He said: "Homeopathy websites advocate using mistletoe to treat breast cancer. The proving for mistletoe is that it grows on the bush in a way like cancer grows in a person. It is utterly barmy." Liberal Democrat MP Evan Harris, a former hospital doctor, said: "It is an extremely retrograde step for our medical regulator to decide a medicine can be licensed without proper evidence." Professor Adrian Newland, president of the Royal College of Pathologists, said he was "deeply alarmed" by the change, which could "encourage patients to use them as an alternative to conventional treatments".
Catherine Collins, chief dietician at St George's Hospital in London, said those who believe homeopathic medicine work are being misled by the "placebo effect", in which any benefit comes for the patient's expectations, rather than from the treatment itself. She said: "The only plausible explanation for any objectively determined benefit of homeopathy is the placebo effect. "I assume that the regulations would therefore legitimately be extended to cover Smarties used for similar 'treatment' purposes?"
The MHRA said the new regulations, which only apply to remedies aimed at minor ailments such as headaches, stomach pains and insomnia, provide customers with more information about the range of products available. A spokesman said quality and safety were tightly controlled, adding: "The label and/or packaging must have a clear statement of the homeopathic nature of the product, with a statement instructing the patient to consult their doctor if symptoms persist." The Society of Homeopaths said its members are bound by a code of ethics designed to protect patients. Spokesman Melanie Oxley stressed that the new rules only apply to remedies bought in chemist and health food shops and used to treat minor conditions. She added: "For treatment of a serious illness, we would hope a patient would approach a registered homeopath or their doctor."
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GREEN GOBBLEDEGOOK FROM THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT
I have often wondered how the Government would react if the world was faced with apocalypse now (or at least apocalypse sooner than expected), and now I know. First, they hold a press conference at which the press aren't allowed to ask questions (those apocalypse stories can be so gloomy). Then they get the Environment Secretary to come to the Commons and say that it is absolutely vital that we do something (our future depends on it) and he'll tell us what it is as soon as he finds out himself.
David Miliband gave what became known instantly as the Hot Air statement. I have to say that, in terms of actual production of thermal air, it was impressive. We must find a way to harness this abundant natural resource.
Britain's politicians are tackling climate change by producing historic levels of gobbledegook and we must find a way to turn that into fuel. Our future depends on it, as do our cheap holidays in Majorca.
David Miliband says that what our future really depends on is his climate change Bill (details to come). "Climate change is the greatest long-term threat faced by humanity," he said. "It could cause more human and financial suffering than the two world wars and the Great Depression put together." If that won't get you out there buying energyefficient light bulbs, then nothing will. Mr Miliband is almost a mythical figure in new Labour. Many see him as a future prime minister, but then they did not see him perform yesterday. Such is the hype that, in person, Mr Miliband never fails to disappoint. He may be young, bright and lanky but he also spouts total gibberish. Yesterday, for instance, he told us that forests grow on land. It was a shock to us all.
The climate-change bureaucracy is growing exponentially. In his statement yesterday, Mr Miliband told us about a new Public Private Partnership called the Energy Technologies Institute. Then there is a new joint task force on biofuels (its acronym is REEEP, which sounds suitably grim). Plus there is another new partnership to help to fund something called the "Energy Investment Framework". The Chancellor is going to host a conference next year to "kick off the partnership". But the really big news is that there is also going to be a new committee. I believe that, in the hierarchy of bureaucracy, a committee outranks partnerships and task forces. The new carbon committee sounds very important indeed. Mr Miliband emphasised that he will make sure it is independent. He added: "We will ensure that the committee's advice is transparent, equitable and mindful of sectoral and competitiveness impacts." What does he mean? We better find out because our future depends on it.
Peter Ainsworth, the Shadow Environment Secretary, is best known for his Beethoven hair. Yesterday it frizzed in anger as he claimed that the Government was stealing all of the Tories' green ideas. Mr Miliband said that the Tories were not green at all. "They are a shower no matter how many windmills they put on their roofs," he cried, for he is very jealous of that windmill.
Chris Huhne, for the Lib Dems, then said that Labour had stolen all of his party's green ideas. Mr Huhne then accused Mr Miliband of being an out-of-tune orchestra. He said that an in-tune orchestra would have set up a powerful committee to tackle climate change. At which point Mr Miliband looked outraged and said that Mr Huhne sounded like an old record. "If tackling climate change could be solved by setting up a committee," fumed Mr Miliband, "then I think successive governments would have solved this problem quite a long time ago."
I began to wonder if Mr Miliband had just forgotten that one of his four pillars for tackling climate change was to create a new powerful committee. I do hope he remembers soon. After all, our future depends on it.
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FROM ECONOMICS TO AIRCONOMICS
By Melanie Phillips
Not since Nostradamus penned his obscure 16th-century verses prophesying the end of the world has a publishing event had the anticipated impact of today's report by Sir Nicholas Stern, about the threat to the planet posed by man-made global warming.
If the leaks are correct, Sir Nicholas is saying that unless the world takes immediate drastic action, we are all doomed. Floods and other natural disasters caused by global warming will trigger an economic catastrophe worse than the 1929 Wall Street crash. Far from green policies putting prosperity at risk, it is only such policies, he says, that will keep our consumer societies from global economic catastrophe.
Even before his actual words were published, the political game of greener than-thou had begun in earnest. First past the post was the Environment Minister David Miliband, after a leak from his department of proposals aimed at addressing global warming which would simply end modern life as we know it.
If these were implemented, drivers would be forced off the roads by swingeing increases in taxes and fuel duties. Cheap air flights would become as distant a memory as Concorde. Household goods, from washing machines to lightbulbs, would be priced off the shelves. In other words, we would be taxed back to an earlier, less prosperous age, and those on modest incomes would be hit the hardest.
Mr Miliband was promptly fried to a carbonised crisp by Gordon Brown, doubtless for daring to steal the Treasury's own environmentally-friendly thunder. If Brown is to be the new green, the Chancellor wants to take the credit himself. Mr Miliband's greater crime, however, was surely that his outrageous proposals at least had the merit of honesty. Reducing carbon emissions must cause considerable pain to western consumer societies. But the deeper question is, for what gain?
After all, Britain accounts for a mere 2 per cent of the world's energy demand. If we garaged every car, grounded every plane and rationed families to one lightbulb apiece, it would make virtually no difference. China alone - which is opening a new power station every day - would make up our carbon emissions in 13 months. In short, whatever we do to curb our carbon emissions is all but irrelevant to the future of the planet.
Sir Nicholas is well aware of this fact. So his message is that the whole world has to co-operate in reducing carbon emissions. But the greatest flaw in his argument is that the science upon which he is basing his dire predictions is flaky.
Sir Nicholas, Mr Miliband, the Royal Society, the Government's chief scientific adviser Sir David King, and a host of other terrifically grand panjandrums all claim there is no longer any scientific debate about whether man-made global warming is happening. It's a settled fact. Argument over.
Phooey. They are all simply playing green politics. You have only to read the scientific assessments made by the ecological holy of holies itself, the International Panel on Climate Change, to see that the science that is used to support the theory actually stresses over and over again the uncertainties surrounding it, and the extreme unreliability of the computer models that produce the apocalyptic forecasts of huge rises in global temperature.
Such models bear about as much relation to reality as astrology. As the distinguished American meteorologist Professor Richard Lindzen observed last weekend, the computer modelling performed at the Hadley Centre, one of Britain's most vociferous proponents of man-made climate change, was seriously at odds with the actual warming that was taking place.
The facts are that the rise in temperature over the past century, 0.6C (plus or minus 0.2C), is unexceptional; and that clouds and water vapour are far more significant presences in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide.
Yet this is an issue where ideology is simply driving out evidence. Sir Nicholas will apparently highlight the threat of catastrophic rises in sea level. But according to the IPCC, the seas are not rising. Although they were higher in the last century than in the previous one, it says in its Third Scientific Report: 'No significant acceleration in the rate of sea-level rise during the 20th century has been detected.'
Yet people prefer to believe the absurdities propounded by former U.S. presidential candidate Al Gore in his eco-doomsday film An Inconvenient Truth. In the film he cites, for example, the Polynesian island of Tuvalu as a place where rising sea levels forced residents to evacuate their homes. But this isn't true. Sea levels at Tuvalu actually fell during the latter half of the 20th century. An inconvenient truth indeed. But who cares about the facts when there's money to be made out of human credulity?
For the Treasury, whose speciality has been to devise ever more fiendish stealth taxes, the hysteria over climate change has presented it with a bonanza plucked from the air (literally). It doubtless thinks it can impose eye-watering new taxes by proclaiming that this is the only way to save the planet. Since Sir Nicholas is a senior Treasury official, it might be assumed that the Chancellor intends to tax modern life until the electoral pipsqueaks turn green.
But this isn't the only pound sign now flashing emerald at the Treasury. A lot of people are making a fortune out of climate change doomsday scenarios. Carbon trading, in particular, is now an enormous global business.
This is how it works. Governments set limits on carbon emissions and then permit companies to trade in the credits they stack up for meeting these targets. If companies want to emit more, they must buy more credits from companies with a carbon surplus. The aim is to give firms an incentive to reduce their carbon emissions.
The credits, however, are given for a virtual commodity - tonnes of carbon dioxide which have not been put into the atmosphere. The system can easily be abused - by setting the targets too high, or by rewarding countries such as Russia or the Ukraine where emissions have fallen because their economies are failing.
Nevertheless, this virtual market is producing vast profits. Thus the bank Morgan Stanley recently unveiled a o1.6bn investment in carbon trading; and the World Bank, where Sir Nicholas previously worked as chief economist, is heavily involved in the trade. Is it any surprise, therefore, that his report is expected to give carbon trading an enormous boost?
And the Chancellor is already there before him. In a speech delivered last April, Mr Brown said: 'Our ultimate goal must be a global carbon market,' which he saw as a driver of future economic growth. In other words, on the back of an alleged global catastrophe, Mr Brown sees an unrivalled national business opportunity. Sir Nicholas, it would appear, was brought in to make the argument for a policy that had already been decided.
This is literally making money out of thin air. Surreal, or what? Our Chancellor is taking us from economics to airconomics. The biggest business opportunity of the century may make the South Sea Bubble look like the acme of prudence.
The great satirist Jonathan Swift mocked scientists by inventing a scheme by which they made sunbeams out of cucumbers. Making money out of the air, on the back of a scientifically unproven panic, would surely defy even the powers of a Swift to invent a more preposterous fiction.
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GREEN TAXES ARE NOT THE SOLUTION TO A BETTER WORLD
Green taxes are not the solution to a better world. Having exhausted stealth taxes, the Government is reaching for green taxes: levies on flying, driving and household appliances. The beauty of eco-taxes, from Gordon Brown's point of view, is that people won't want to be seen to be against them. Those who dispute their efficacy - including this newspaper - will be dismissed as having fallen for tendentious science, or being in the pay of the oil companies, or simply not caring about the viability of the planet. A few seconds' thought should reveal how asinine these accusations are. Surely we can take it as read that everyone is in favour of life on Earth.
The Daily Telegraph accepts that the planet is getting warmer, and that human activity is probably contributing to this. (Some scientists maintain that the change is due chiefly to the cyclical warming of the sun; but, given the stakes, we ought to err on the side of caution.) Although global warming might bring some benefits - warmer winters, wetter deserts and faster-growing plants - these are likely to be outweighed by its deleterious consequences, especially in equatorial regions.
Our objection to the Kyoto process has to do with proportionality, not objectives. For a fraction of what we are being asked to spend on compliance, we might eliminate malaria and all other water-borne diseases. In any case, Kyoto is mainly aimed at the industrialised world, when the surge in greenhouse emissions is coming from fast-developing countries such as China and India. If the United Kingdom were to eliminate its pollutants altogether, it would make almost no difference: Britain accounts for only two per cent of greenhouse gases.
Indeed, it is hard to avoid the suspicion that, for many on the Left, Kyoto is a handy way of advancing an agenda that has little to do with the environment: one that seeks always to blame the West, that is hostile to free trade, and that looks instinctively to state intervention. The trouble is that governments tend to be inefficient. There is no reason to expect the state to be any better at protecting the environment than it was at making cars or running the Millennium Dome.
It is a pity that all three main parties have bought into the idea that state regulation is the answer. Market mechanisms have proved highly effective at delivering green goals. Extending property rights to cover air and water quality, and allowing citizens to sue polluters, is a surer way of securing a clean environment than relying on government inspectors. Privatising rainforests gives owners an immediate stake in their protection. Treating endangered species as the property of those on whose land they roam encourages locals to treat them as a renewable resource.
This is not to say that green taxes are always and everywhere wrong. Where they can deliver an identifiable goal - as when Ireland introduced a small charge on supermarket bags - they have a place. But taxes should be used soberly, judiciously and reluctantly; never as a way of flaunting one's green credentials.
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BAN SPORT AND SAVE THE PLANET!
The latest brainwave from the original moonbat below:
One of the reasons why so little has been done to stop climate change is that everyone makes an exception for themselves. We can all agree, for example, that there are too many cars on the roads, while insisting that we cannot possibly leave ours at home. The same problem applies to businesses: the people who run them might agree that collective action urgently needs to be taken, but unfortunately their sector is just too important and its requirements too demanding. This seems to be the prevailing ethos at the moment in sport.
I don't want to be a killjoy and I recognise that many sports are considered a matter of life and death by their fans. But climate change really is a matter of life and death. However important the next fixture might seem, it doesn't compare to the drying out of sub-Saharan Africa or the flooding of some of the world's major cities. Almost all climate scientists now agree that two degrees of global warming would trigger off catastrophic climate change, with the potential to displace hundreds of millions of people. To avert it, the latest figures suggest, we need a 90 per cent cut in carbon emissions from every economic sector in the rich world by 2030. And that, I am sorry to say, includes sport.
Some sports are simply incompatible with any likely solution to the problem. The most obvious example is motor racing. There is a direct relationship between an engine's performance and the amount of greenhouse gases it produces: the faster the car, the quicker it cooks the planet. At the moment, there is no foreseeable means by which a racing car's emissions can be brought down by 90 per cent within the necessary time frame. Biodiesel currently causes more harm to people and the environment than good, as it pushes up food prices and encourages the felling of tropical forests. One day - perhaps in 20 or 30 years - racing cars might run on hydrogen or electricity. Unfortunately, that's too late: the major cuts have to be made right now.
Even sports such as football and athletics that are inherently harmless cause major environmental effects, thanks to the transport of spectators. The organisers of the Sydney Olympics did more or less all they could to make the Games as green as possible: they ran the buildings in the Olympic Village on solar power, used recycled materials and cleaned up contaminated sites. Even Greenpeace gave them a score of six out of 10. But Sydney is on the other side of the world. Just one return journey from the UK to Australia uses twice a person's sustainable emission of carbon dioxide for an entire year. Beijing is expecting
1.5 million visitors to the 2008 Games, a third of whom will come from overseas. Like most Olympic hosts, China hopes the new airport and tourist facilities it is building will attract custom for years. It is hard to think of a better formula than a global sporting event for causing maximum environmental damage.
Building these facilities also exerts a tremendous environmental cost. Because it has to be heated to 1,450oC, and because the chemical process itself releases carbon dioxide, every tonne of cement produces one tonne of climate-changing gas. Steel is even more polluting. Arsenal's recent move to the Emirates Stadium produced tens of thousands of tonnes of greenhouse gases. The impacts are even greater when a sport has to create an artificial environment. The exemplar is SkiDubai, a huge man-made mountain, which remains below freezing just a steel skin away from desert temperatures.
In August, the Evening Standard reported that most of the eco-features that were supposed to have made the London Olympics the 'greenest Games ever' have been quietly dropped. Instead of using 100 per cent renewable energy to power the Olympic Village, the real figure will now be more like 10 per cent.
Perhaps it's time to consider a fixed site for the Olympics and to encourage spectators to stay at home and watch international events on the telly. Perhaps we should recognise that some sports are simply too wasteful to be sustained. It is, after all, just entertainment. Can we really live with the idea that we might destroy the planet for fun?
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A total of 903 NHS staff have been made redundant in the last six months due to the financial crisis in the service, ministers admitted today. Statistics show that among the compulsory job losses, 167 were clinical staff such as doctors, nurses and therapists. The remainder were managers and administrators.
The Department of Health released the figures to prove that Tory and union estimates of 20,000 job losses were too high. Health minister Andy Burnham demanded that Conservative leader David Cameron apologise for his "grossly exaggerated claims". The Tory figures included measures such as not filling vacancies and using fewer agency staff.
Last week it emerged that 95 doctors, nurses, and administration staff at Kingston Hospital could be given their redundancy notices two weeks before Christmas. Tony Blair predicted that a "few hundred" NHS workers would lose their jobs as a result of financial pressures and changes to the way healthcare is delivered.
An independent watchdog was due to report today to Parliament on the standards of healthcare in the NHS. The Healthcare Commission's annual report is based on the experiences of patients. It covers a period in which many trusts have struggled with deficits which have forced cutbacks.
Source
SAGGING DISCIPLINE IN BRITISH SCHOOLS
Three quarters of parents think standards of discipline in schools are worsening despite repeated Government crackdowns, research shows. The Government's own polling revealed a widespread belief that pupils are becoming harder to control. In a blow to Labour almost a decade after taking office, it also showed declining public confidence in educational standards. The damning verdict came in a survey of 4,000 adults commissioned by the Department for Education and Skills.
School discipline was rated as by far the most important issue facing education - ahead of other matters like levels of funding. Just over three quarters of respondents believed that standards of behaviour in schools were getting worse. The scale of concern will embarrass ministers who have spent billions on a raft of policies aimed at restoring "respect" to classrooms ranging from parenting classes to school behaviour consultants.
The Daily Mail revealed on Saturday that more than 400 schools now have police officers stationed on site to help curb truancy and playground hooliganism.
Declining pupil behaviour is repeatedly cited by teachers choosing to leave the profession. "Over three-quarters felt that the general standards of behaviour in schools were getting worse" the report for the DfES concluded. "Around half felt that behaviour in their local schools was getting worse."
Both parents and childless respondents believed pupils' behaviour was deteriorating. A majority also thought the Government was not giving teachers enough support to tackle unruly behaviour. Even during the past year, public confidence in the education system has ebbed away, according to research by EdComs and ICM on behalf of ministers. More than half of respondents questioned in September last year thought exam results were the "best ever" but only 36 per cent agreed by June 2006. Meanwhile only 22 per cent agreed that there were "fewer poorly performing schools" by June, down from 30 per cent in September 2005. And just 25 per cent thought the quality of teaching had "never been better" by June, down from 31 per cent.
Declining numbers believe school adequately prepares children for the world of work. Only 32 per cent thought youngsters left school with a proper grip of the three Rs.
In a further blow to Tony Blair, the research found limited support for his flagship "trust schools" aimed at changing the face of the education system. Planned legislation will give businesses, faith groups, universities and other outside organisations a say in running schools but only 15 per cent of respondents declared themselves strongly in favour.
There was clear backing for the Prime Minister's drive to give parents more choice over where to send their children, "they were least in favour of involving outside organisations in the running of schools".
DfES officials acknowledged that parents were worried about standards of discipline. They said that new measures contained in proposed legislation would strengthen teachers' powers in law to assert their authority over troublesome pupils. Laws on physically restraining violent pupils will also be clarified. A spokesman said: "While Ofsted tell us that behaviour is good in most schools most of the time, this survey shows that parents are concerned about behaviour. "This is precisely why our Education Bill confirms the right to discipline so no pupil will be able to question a teacher's authority and gives teachers the legal right to restrain a pupil where they are a risk to themselves or others."
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QUACK MEDICINE OK IN BRITAIN
Lives will be put at risk by a controversial law which allows homeopathic medicines to make unproven scientific claims, leading doctors have warned. More than 700 medics, scientists and members of the public have signed a statement criticising a new law which they say makes a mockery out of conventional medicine. The Government's medicines safety watchdog says the change gives patients clearer information. But critics fear that giving legitimacy to pills and potions that are based on 'magic' rather than science will cost lives. One expert likened the change to categorising Smarties as a medicine, on the basis that chocolate makes you feel better.
Homeopathy, which has won the backing of Prince Charles, claims to prevent diseases such as malaria by using dilute forms of herbs, minerals and other materials that in higher concentrations could produce the symptoms of the condition. Popular treatments include arnica, a plant-based remedy used to treat cuts and bruises, and malaria nosode, anti-malaria tablets made from African swamp water, rotting plants and mosquito eggs and larvae. However, a recent study published in the Lancet suggested that the benefits of homeopathy are all in the imagination, with alternative remedies performing no better than dummy pills in clinical trials.
Until recently, homeopathic medicine manufacturers were banned from claiming new products could treat specific ailments. But regulations introduced last month by the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency allow the manufacturers to make such claims, as long as they can prove the remedy is safe. Unlike conventional medicines, they do not have to show that the remedies actually work. Instead, they only have to show that the remedy has a history of being used to treat an illness.
The change has so angered the medical establishment that hundreds of doctors and scientists have signed a statement drafted by the charity Sense About Science to oppose the new labelling system. Yesterday afternoon, the House of Lords debated the issue. The critics fear that the new system could lead to life-threatening illnesses going undiagnosed, or to people binning the tablets prescribed by their GP in favour of an unproven alternative. Edzard Ernst, professor of complimentary medicine at Exeter University, said it could cost lives. "makes a mockery out of evidence- based medicine," he said. "I feel very strongly that this is a very serious mistake. If there are claims being made, there has to be evidence for them. "Constipation could be a sign of bowel cancer and if somebody that has a treatable bowel cancer goes out and buys a homeopathic medicine, they might be untreatable tomorrow. Taken to the extreme, this regulation could cost lives."
Michael Baum, professor of surgery at University College London, accused the homoepathy industry of playing on people's beliefs in magic and superstition. He said: "Homeopathy websites advocate using mistletoe to treat breast cancer. The proving for mistletoe is that it grows on the bush in a way like cancer grows in a person. It is utterly barmy." Liberal Democrat MP Evan Harris, a former hospital doctor, said: "It is an extremely retrograde step for our medical regulator to decide a medicine can be licensed without proper evidence." Professor Adrian Newland, president of the Royal College of Pathologists, said he was "deeply alarmed" by the change, which could "encourage patients to use them as an alternative to conventional treatments".
Catherine Collins, chief dietician at St George's Hospital in London, said those who believe homeopathic medicine work are being misled by the "placebo effect", in which any benefit comes for the patient's expectations, rather than from the treatment itself. She said: "The only plausible explanation for any objectively determined benefit of homeopathy is the placebo effect. "I assume that the regulations would therefore legitimately be extended to cover Smarties used for similar 'treatment' purposes?"
The MHRA said the new regulations, which only apply to remedies aimed at minor ailments such as headaches, stomach pains and insomnia, provide customers with more information about the range of products available. A spokesman said quality and safety were tightly controlled, adding: "The label and/or packaging must have a clear statement of the homeopathic nature of the product, with a statement instructing the patient to consult their doctor if symptoms persist." The Society of Homeopaths said its members are bound by a code of ethics designed to protect patients. Spokesman Melanie Oxley stressed that the new rules only apply to remedies bought in chemist and health food shops and used to treat minor conditions. She added: "For treatment of a serious illness, we would hope a patient would approach a registered homeopath or their doctor."
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GREEN GOBBLEDEGOOK FROM THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT
I have often wondered how the Government would react if the world was faced with apocalypse now (or at least apocalypse sooner than expected), and now I know. First, they hold a press conference at which the press aren't allowed to ask questions (those apocalypse stories can be so gloomy). Then they get the Environment Secretary to come to the Commons and say that it is absolutely vital that we do something (our future depends on it) and he'll tell us what it is as soon as he finds out himself.
David Miliband gave what became known instantly as the Hot Air statement. I have to say that, in terms of actual production of thermal air, it was impressive. We must find a way to harness this abundant natural resource.
Britain's politicians are tackling climate change by producing historic levels of gobbledegook and we must find a way to turn that into fuel. Our future depends on it, as do our cheap holidays in Majorca.
David Miliband says that what our future really depends on is his climate change Bill (details to come). "Climate change is the greatest long-term threat faced by humanity," he said. "It could cause more human and financial suffering than the two world wars and the Great Depression put together." If that won't get you out there buying energyefficient light bulbs, then nothing will. Mr Miliband is almost a mythical figure in new Labour. Many see him as a future prime minister, but then they did not see him perform yesterday. Such is the hype that, in person, Mr Miliband never fails to disappoint. He may be young, bright and lanky but he also spouts total gibberish. Yesterday, for instance, he told us that forests grow on land. It was a shock to us all.
The climate-change bureaucracy is growing exponentially. In his statement yesterday, Mr Miliband told us about a new Public Private Partnership called the Energy Technologies Institute. Then there is a new joint task force on biofuels (its acronym is REEEP, which sounds suitably grim). Plus there is another new partnership to help to fund something called the "Energy Investment Framework". The Chancellor is going to host a conference next year to "kick off the partnership". But the really big news is that there is also going to be a new committee. I believe that, in the hierarchy of bureaucracy, a committee outranks partnerships and task forces. The new carbon committee sounds very important indeed. Mr Miliband emphasised that he will make sure it is independent. He added: "We will ensure that the committee's advice is transparent, equitable and mindful of sectoral and competitiveness impacts." What does he mean? We better find out because our future depends on it.
Peter Ainsworth, the Shadow Environment Secretary, is best known for his Beethoven hair. Yesterday it frizzed in anger as he claimed that the Government was stealing all of the Tories' green ideas. Mr Miliband said that the Tories were not green at all. "They are a shower no matter how many windmills they put on their roofs," he cried, for he is very jealous of that windmill.
Chris Huhne, for the Lib Dems, then said that Labour had stolen all of his party's green ideas. Mr Huhne then accused Mr Miliband of being an out-of-tune orchestra. He said that an in-tune orchestra would have set up a powerful committee to tackle climate change. At which point Mr Miliband looked outraged and said that Mr Huhne sounded like an old record. "If tackling climate change could be solved by setting up a committee," fumed Mr Miliband, "then I think successive governments would have solved this problem quite a long time ago."
I began to wonder if Mr Miliband had just forgotten that one of his four pillars for tackling climate change was to create a new powerful committee. I do hope he remembers soon. After all, our future depends on it.
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FROM ECONOMICS TO AIRCONOMICS
By Melanie Phillips
Not since Nostradamus penned his obscure 16th-century verses prophesying the end of the world has a publishing event had the anticipated impact of today's report by Sir Nicholas Stern, about the threat to the planet posed by man-made global warming.
If the leaks are correct, Sir Nicholas is saying that unless the world takes immediate drastic action, we are all doomed. Floods and other natural disasters caused by global warming will trigger an economic catastrophe worse than the 1929 Wall Street crash. Far from green policies putting prosperity at risk, it is only such policies, he says, that will keep our consumer societies from global economic catastrophe.
Even before his actual words were published, the political game of greener than-thou had begun in earnest. First past the post was the Environment Minister David Miliband, after a leak from his department of proposals aimed at addressing global warming which would simply end modern life as we know it.
If these were implemented, drivers would be forced off the roads by swingeing increases in taxes and fuel duties. Cheap air flights would become as distant a memory as Concorde. Household goods, from washing machines to lightbulbs, would be priced off the shelves. In other words, we would be taxed back to an earlier, less prosperous age, and those on modest incomes would be hit the hardest.
Mr Miliband was promptly fried to a carbonised crisp by Gordon Brown, doubtless for daring to steal the Treasury's own environmentally-friendly thunder. If Brown is to be the new green, the Chancellor wants to take the credit himself. Mr Miliband's greater crime, however, was surely that his outrageous proposals at least had the merit of honesty. Reducing carbon emissions must cause considerable pain to western consumer societies. But the deeper question is, for what gain?
After all, Britain accounts for a mere 2 per cent of the world's energy demand. If we garaged every car, grounded every plane and rationed families to one lightbulb apiece, it would make virtually no difference. China alone - which is opening a new power station every day - would make up our carbon emissions in 13 months. In short, whatever we do to curb our carbon emissions is all but irrelevant to the future of the planet.
Sir Nicholas is well aware of this fact. So his message is that the whole world has to co-operate in reducing carbon emissions. But the greatest flaw in his argument is that the science upon which he is basing his dire predictions is flaky.
Sir Nicholas, Mr Miliband, the Royal Society, the Government's chief scientific adviser Sir David King, and a host of other terrifically grand panjandrums all claim there is no longer any scientific debate about whether man-made global warming is happening. It's a settled fact. Argument over.
Phooey. They are all simply playing green politics. You have only to read the scientific assessments made by the ecological holy of holies itself, the International Panel on Climate Change, to see that the science that is used to support the theory actually stresses over and over again the uncertainties surrounding it, and the extreme unreliability of the computer models that produce the apocalyptic forecasts of huge rises in global temperature.
Such models bear about as much relation to reality as astrology. As the distinguished American meteorologist Professor Richard Lindzen observed last weekend, the computer modelling performed at the Hadley Centre, one of Britain's most vociferous proponents of man-made climate change, was seriously at odds with the actual warming that was taking place.
The facts are that the rise in temperature over the past century, 0.6C (plus or minus 0.2C), is unexceptional; and that clouds and water vapour are far more significant presences in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide.
Yet this is an issue where ideology is simply driving out evidence. Sir Nicholas will apparently highlight the threat of catastrophic rises in sea level. But according to the IPCC, the seas are not rising. Although they were higher in the last century than in the previous one, it says in its Third Scientific Report: 'No significant acceleration in the rate of sea-level rise during the 20th century has been detected.'
Yet people prefer to believe the absurdities propounded by former U.S. presidential candidate Al Gore in his eco-doomsday film An Inconvenient Truth. In the film he cites, for example, the Polynesian island of Tuvalu as a place where rising sea levels forced residents to evacuate their homes. But this isn't true. Sea levels at Tuvalu actually fell during the latter half of the 20th century. An inconvenient truth indeed. But who cares about the facts when there's money to be made out of human credulity?
For the Treasury, whose speciality has been to devise ever more fiendish stealth taxes, the hysteria over climate change has presented it with a bonanza plucked from the air (literally). It doubtless thinks it can impose eye-watering new taxes by proclaiming that this is the only way to save the planet. Since Sir Nicholas is a senior Treasury official, it might be assumed that the Chancellor intends to tax modern life until the electoral pipsqueaks turn green.
But this isn't the only pound sign now flashing emerald at the Treasury. A lot of people are making a fortune out of climate change doomsday scenarios. Carbon trading, in particular, is now an enormous global business.
This is how it works. Governments set limits on carbon emissions and then permit companies to trade in the credits they stack up for meeting these targets. If companies want to emit more, they must buy more credits from companies with a carbon surplus. The aim is to give firms an incentive to reduce their carbon emissions.
The credits, however, are given for a virtual commodity - tonnes of carbon dioxide which have not been put into the atmosphere. The system can easily be abused - by setting the targets too high, or by rewarding countries such as Russia or the Ukraine where emissions have fallen because their economies are failing.
Nevertheless, this virtual market is producing vast profits. Thus the bank Morgan Stanley recently unveiled a o1.6bn investment in carbon trading; and the World Bank, where Sir Nicholas previously worked as chief economist, is heavily involved in the trade. Is it any surprise, therefore, that his report is expected to give carbon trading an enormous boost?
And the Chancellor is already there before him. In a speech delivered last April, Mr Brown said: 'Our ultimate goal must be a global carbon market,' which he saw as a driver of future economic growth. In other words, on the back of an alleged global catastrophe, Mr Brown sees an unrivalled national business opportunity. Sir Nicholas, it would appear, was brought in to make the argument for a policy that had already been decided.
This is literally making money out of thin air. Surreal, or what? Our Chancellor is taking us from economics to airconomics. The biggest business opportunity of the century may make the South Sea Bubble look like the acme of prudence.
The great satirist Jonathan Swift mocked scientists by inventing a scheme by which they made sunbeams out of cucumbers. Making money out of the air, on the back of a scientifically unproven panic, would surely defy even the powers of a Swift to invent a more preposterous fiction.
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GREEN TAXES ARE NOT THE SOLUTION TO A BETTER WORLD
Green taxes are not the solution to a better world. Having exhausted stealth taxes, the Government is reaching for green taxes: levies on flying, driving and household appliances. The beauty of eco-taxes, from Gordon Brown's point of view, is that people won't want to be seen to be against them. Those who dispute their efficacy - including this newspaper - will be dismissed as having fallen for tendentious science, or being in the pay of the oil companies, or simply not caring about the viability of the planet. A few seconds' thought should reveal how asinine these accusations are. Surely we can take it as read that everyone is in favour of life on Earth.
The Daily Telegraph accepts that the planet is getting warmer, and that human activity is probably contributing to this. (Some scientists maintain that the change is due chiefly to the cyclical warming of the sun; but, given the stakes, we ought to err on the side of caution.) Although global warming might bring some benefits - warmer winters, wetter deserts and faster-growing plants - these are likely to be outweighed by its deleterious consequences, especially in equatorial regions.
Our objection to the Kyoto process has to do with proportionality, not objectives. For a fraction of what we are being asked to spend on compliance, we might eliminate malaria and all other water-borne diseases. In any case, Kyoto is mainly aimed at the industrialised world, when the surge in greenhouse emissions is coming from fast-developing countries such as China and India. If the United Kingdom were to eliminate its pollutants altogether, it would make almost no difference: Britain accounts for only two per cent of greenhouse gases.
Indeed, it is hard to avoid the suspicion that, for many on the Left, Kyoto is a handy way of advancing an agenda that has little to do with the environment: one that seeks always to blame the West, that is hostile to free trade, and that looks instinctively to state intervention. The trouble is that governments tend to be inefficient. There is no reason to expect the state to be any better at protecting the environment than it was at making cars or running the Millennium Dome.
It is a pity that all three main parties have bought into the idea that state regulation is the answer. Market mechanisms have proved highly effective at delivering green goals. Extending property rights to cover air and water quality, and allowing citizens to sue polluters, is a surer way of securing a clean environment than relying on government inspectors. Privatising rainforests gives owners an immediate stake in their protection. Treating endangered species as the property of those on whose land they roam encourages locals to treat them as a renewable resource.
This is not to say that green taxes are always and everywhere wrong. Where they can deliver an identifiable goal - as when Ireland introduced a small charge on supermarket bags - they have a place. But taxes should be used soberly, judiciously and reluctantly; never as a way of flaunting one's green credentials.
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BAN SPORT AND SAVE THE PLANET!
The latest brainwave from the original moonbat below:
One of the reasons why so little has been done to stop climate change is that everyone makes an exception for themselves. We can all agree, for example, that there are too many cars on the roads, while insisting that we cannot possibly leave ours at home. The same problem applies to businesses: the people who run them might agree that collective action urgently needs to be taken, but unfortunately their sector is just too important and its requirements too demanding. This seems to be the prevailing ethos at the moment in sport.
I don't want to be a killjoy and I recognise that many sports are considered a matter of life and death by their fans. But climate change really is a matter of life and death. However important the next fixture might seem, it doesn't compare to the drying out of sub-Saharan Africa or the flooding of some of the world's major cities. Almost all climate scientists now agree that two degrees of global warming would trigger off catastrophic climate change, with the potential to displace hundreds of millions of people. To avert it, the latest figures suggest, we need a 90 per cent cut in carbon emissions from every economic sector in the rich world by 2030. And that, I am sorry to say, includes sport.
Some sports are simply incompatible with any likely solution to the problem. The most obvious example is motor racing. There is a direct relationship between an engine's performance and the amount of greenhouse gases it produces: the faster the car, the quicker it cooks the planet. At the moment, there is no foreseeable means by which a racing car's emissions can be brought down by 90 per cent within the necessary time frame. Biodiesel currently causes more harm to people and the environment than good, as it pushes up food prices and encourages the felling of tropical forests. One day - perhaps in 20 or 30 years - racing cars might run on hydrogen or electricity. Unfortunately, that's too late: the major cuts have to be made right now.
Even sports such as football and athletics that are inherently harmless cause major environmental effects, thanks to the transport of spectators. The organisers of the Sydney Olympics did more or less all they could to make the Games as green as possible: they ran the buildings in the Olympic Village on solar power, used recycled materials and cleaned up contaminated sites. Even Greenpeace gave them a score of six out of 10. But Sydney is on the other side of the world. Just one return journey from the UK to Australia uses twice a person's sustainable emission of carbon dioxide for an entire year. Beijing is expecting
1.5 million visitors to the 2008 Games, a third of whom will come from overseas. Like most Olympic hosts, China hopes the new airport and tourist facilities it is building will attract custom for years. It is hard to think of a better formula than a global sporting event for causing maximum environmental damage.
Building these facilities also exerts a tremendous environmental cost. Because it has to be heated to 1,450oC, and because the chemical process itself releases carbon dioxide, every tonne of cement produces one tonne of climate-changing gas. Steel is even more polluting. Arsenal's recent move to the Emirates Stadium produced tens of thousands of tonnes of greenhouse gases. The impacts are even greater when a sport has to create an artificial environment. The exemplar is SkiDubai, a huge man-made mountain, which remains below freezing just a steel skin away from desert temperatures.
In August, the Evening Standard reported that most of the eco-features that were supposed to have made the London Olympics the 'greenest Games ever' have been quietly dropped. Instead of using 100 per cent renewable energy to power the Olympic Village, the real figure will now be more like 10 per cent.
Perhaps it's time to consider a fixed site for the Olympics and to encourage spectators to stay at home and watch international events on the telly. Perhaps we should recognise that some sports are simply too wasteful to be sustained. It is, after all, just entertainment. Can we really live with the idea that we might destroy the planet for fun?
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