Monday, April 30, 2007
British Doctors call for health boss Hewitt to resign
Junior doctors have called for Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt and Health Minister Lord Hunt to resign over "shambolic" medical training reform. The British Medical Association's junior doctors conference called the Medical Training Application Service's problems "gross negligence". The online job application service was suspended amid fears personal details of applicants could be accessed online. The government says it is working hard to ensure the security of the system.
Earlier, the BMA called for Tony Blair to step in to avert more chaos over the online application system. BMA chairman James Johnson has written to Tony Blair warning doctors' anger will grow if the government does not address the problems with MTAS "with the level of urgency they deserve". He said the mistakes had the potential to damage patients' confidence in the proposed new database of individual health records.
The conference also criticised failures in the Modernising Medical Careers (MMC) scheme and demanded a review into the waste of public money it claims it has caused. The delegates also raised concerns that the implementation of MMC speciality training would have "grave consequences for patient care".
The issue is also mired in internal feuding, with some doctors calling on their own leadership to resign for participating in the government review. Delegate Dr Andrew Smith said there was "more anger and resentment than ever before". Despite this the BMA leadership had remained engaged in and endorsed the "fiasco that is MMC", he said.
Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt has already apologised for the "terrible anxiety" caused to junior doctors over the scheme. BMA junior doctors committee head Jo Hilborne told the conference that modernising medical careers should have brought an end to uncertainty for senior house officers. But instead, she said it had brought the fear of career stagnation, the danger of falling standards and loss of good doctors. She called the application system a "desperate failure". "The fault is with this government which has systematically ignored the people whose lives are being ruined by their ill-thought out, badly implemented policies," she said.
Conference delegates suggested the system should be scrapped and suggested two possible solutions to the MTAS problems. They said either all candidates starting posts in 2007 must be interviewed for all their choices, or all MMC training be postponed and a return made to the old system (SHO/specialist registrars) for a year while a new application process was devised. The MTAS computer system has previously been criticised for not allowing candidates to set out their experience, meaning the best candidates have not been selected for interview. But it has also been attacked for having too few jobs for the number of candidates.
Conference delegates also passed a motion calling for the National Audit Office to investigate how much public money had been spent on the computer system. And they sought guarantees that no junior doctor would be unemployed as a result of system failures.
The BMA estimates that 34,250 doctors are chasing 18,500 UK posts, due to start in August. But it has warned thousands of NHS doctors could go to work abroad because of their disgust at the process.
Lord Hunt insisted it was not a resignation issue and that all the medical organisations had called for the old system to be changed because it was not working. Earlier he told the BBC action was being taken to make the system more secure. "We have brought in over the weekend some independent experts from outside companies. They are clawing through it to make sure it is secure and we will only open it up again when we are satisfied about that."
Source
Brits getting tired of immigration problems
Having immigrants and the children of immigrants blowing up your buses and trains (among other things) is beginning to get to even the tolerant British -- and since the mainstream parties are trying to ignore the disquiet, a new party that does not ignore that is getting more and more votes
It is, at first sight, a vision of rural bliss - a cream-coloured cottage high in the hills of Mid Wales and two miles from the nearest road. The daffodils are out. Lambs gambol in the fields. Chickens peck around the yard. In the side garden, beyond the rabbit hutch and fishpond, two blonde girls are playing in the sun. Look closer, however, and you spot the incongruities: the two rottweilers in their caged kennel, security cameras, the burglar alarm. You begin to suspect that the owner has chosen this house precisely for its inaccessibility. He has reason to. Nick Griffin is leader of the whites-only British National Party and one of the most hated - and, to his many detractors, hateful - men in the country....
Griffin kisses Jackie goodbye, reminds her to water his newly planted aubretia, and we head off in his Ford Mondeo estate for the fertile BNP territory of West Yorkshire, with its immigrant populations of 10, 20 or even 30 per cent. In the back is a book recording the Scottish National Party's transformation from an extreme to a mainstream party. Griffin's inspiration, however, is Jean-Marie Le Pen, the leader of France's far-right National Front, who turned "a bunch of crazies into a serious political force"....
He tells me about a life spent mostly on the extreme right of British politics. His parents met while heckling a Communist Party meeting in North London in 1948. During the 1964 general election campaign, Griffin pedalled up and down the street outside his home in Barnet with Conservative posters on his tricycle. By 1974 his father, a Tory councillor and member of the right-wing Monday Club, was so dismayed by Britain's leftward drift that he took his family to a National Front meeting. Griffin, then 15, joined immediately.....
Griffin has earned his 1,800 pounds-a-month BNP salary. The party won three council seats in Burnley in 2002. It now has 49 nationwide, and on May 3 Griffin expects to win many more in what he sarcastically calls "enriched" areas such as inner Essex, the Black Country, West Yorkshire and Lancashire. The party will also be contesting seats in blue-rinse towns such as Harrogate, Bath, Windsor and Torbay. One recent poll suggested that 7 per cent of the electorate would consider voting for it.
Griffin says that membership has risen from 1,300 in 1999 to 10,500, boosted by home-grown Islamic terrorist plots, globalisation and his dramatic acquittal in last year's race-hate trials. Critics insist that the BNP's move towards respectability is purely cosmetic. Griffin retorts, as we join the motorway, that it is "deep and sincere". He admits "past stupidities", and says that he regrets the way that the BNP used to provoke confrontations or to discuss race in a way that was "frankly crude, or cruelly and inaccurately supremacist". He is not racist, he argues. He does not believe that whites are superior. He believes that races are different and that multiculturalism is a recipe for disaster. He opposes miscegenation "because most people want their grandchildren to look basically like them". If the liberal elite had its way, the world would become "a giant melting pot turning out coffee-coloured citizens by the million".
The BNP no longer demands the recriminalisation of homosexuality, but Griffin still expresses disgust at the idea of two men "snogging in public". His revised views on the Holocaust are striking, too. He says that he derided the Holocaust only because the Left used it as "a huge moral club" with which to beat opponents of multiculturalism. He now accepts that millions of Jews were killed, but claims that some historians (he cites David Irving) still question whether it was deliberate genocide.....
In pockets of Britain the BNP is almost a mainstream party now, with ever more people daring to run for office or to put posters in windows. But it still prints its newspaper in Eastern Europe because British plants refuse to, has trouble renting halls and cannot advertise its meetings because they would be picketed. Potential supporters are instead instructed to gather at "redirection points" and told where to go.
In Ripon the meeting point is the town square, where the local BBC radio station interviews Griffin. Ripon and Harrogate are "lovely English towns and we believe they should stay that way. They can't if there are high levels of immigration," he says. On our way to the meeting we pass a painting of a black inmate outside the Workhouse Museum. Griffin splutters. It was poor whites who suffered in workhouses, he says.
About 70 people are packed into a back room of the Golden Lion pub, with not a skinhead or pair of Doc Martens in sight and more tweeds than T-shirts. They are male and female, young and old, working class and middle class, ex-Labour and ex-Tory, several of them Daily Telegraph readers. They are mostly solid Yorkshire folk who have watched immigrants transform areas in which they grew up and believe - rightly or wrongly - that their way of life is under threat. They are bewildered more than hate-filled. They are fearful more than fear-inspiring, and feel gagged by political correctness. They do not come from sink estates. They are stakeholders, people with something to lose. "We're being overwhelmed," laments a retired Latin teacher. "I've nothing against other races. It's just that they keep flooding into the country to breaking point," says a lorry driver. "We can't invite the whole world to live in England," says a former merchant marine officer. Few will give their names.
Griffin and his fellow speakers do nothing to calm their fears. Quite the opposite. In a promotional video he decries the alleged banning of the cross of St George, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and even Piglet because the character offends Muslims. Against a background of soft music and beautiful scenery, a woman's voice decries the millions of foreigners of all races settling in Britain: "The one thing they have in common is there are too many of them."
Michelle Shrubb, a candidate who lived in South Africa, says that a black crimewave is coming to Britain. Nick Cass, the BNP's Yorkshire organiser, declares that "decent British people are fed up to the back teeth with seeing the country fall apart and being called racist when they want to do something about it". The merchandise table offers "It's Cool to be White" T-shirts and "I vote BNP because they look after me" bumper stickers. BNP candidates are presented with rosettes for daring to stand up and be counted. Griffin humorously coaxes about 500 pounds in donations from the audience, then answers questions for an hour. He puts on no airs and graces. He has a pint on the table beside him. He presents himself as an ordinary bloke, like his audience, who is fighting a corrupt elite that bleeds taxpayers for its disastrous social engineering projects and treats them with contempt. He is a shameless populist. He calls the rise of the BNP "a peasants' revolt". He talks of "our people", meaning whites. He mocks those who regard criminals as victims, advocates "damn good thrashings" for wayward teenagers, and says of drug-dealers: "Hang the bastards."
The audience loves it, but this is more than knockabout political rhetoric. Griffin firmly believes all this. Party policy - which he sets - is draconian and xenophobic. The BNP would deport all illegal immigrants, asylum-seekers and subversive foreigners, and offer existing immigrants money to return home. "It's clearly worth talking in terms of six-figure sums to persuade families to go," Griffin says. He would create civilian anti-crime patrols. Anyone who has done National Service would be allowed to keep guns to shoot burglars, and as "a last resort against a tyrannical government". He would restore hanging for the worst murderers, paedophiles, rapists and drug-dealers, and bring back the birch.
He would abolish affirmative action programmes and hate-crime legislation, ban the promotion of homosexuality, prevent the NHS from recruiting foreign workers and stop women soldiers serving on the front line. State schools would restore mandatory (nonhalal) lunches and morning assemblies with Christian worship (minorities should "either accept our ways or go somewhere else"). A BNP government would take Britain out of the EU and the European Convention on Human Rights. Remove the BNP label, Griffin claims, and most Brits would support these policies....
Between umpteen calls on his mobile phone - one is about ways to use Simone Clarke, the ballet dancer identified as a BNP member - I ask if Griffin sees any advantages to multiculturalism. Chicken tikka masala, he replies. And some good sportsmen, though he thinks that England's all-white 1966 World Cup footballers outperformed today's team because they had "common values and identity". Then he lists the downsides - a catastrophic loss of social cohesion, racial harassment and violence, spreading knife and gun cultures and old folk dying in nursing homes surrounded by staff who do not speak their language and feeling "totally alone, alienated and in a foreign place".
He warms to the theme, claiming that some Muslims deliberately use heroin - "Paki poison" - to undermine non-Muslim communities around them. "It's narco-terrorism." Even worse, he says, is the way that hardline Muslim males deliberately seduce and corrupt "thousands" of young white girls in a practice called "grooming" that the authorities downplay for fear of being labelled racist....
The 60 people at that night's BNP meeting in a Batley pub are not thinking in such apocalyptic terms. They have more immediate and prosaic fears about the consequences of immigration - their children being squeezed out of jobs and council housing, the emergence of no-go areas, the undermining of their rights and culture.
"We're frightened to be British," says Ann Nailor, who runs five Age Concern shops. "I feel alienated in my own community," says Neil Feeney, a water company employee. "People who read your paper have no idea about places like this," said Marjorie Shaw, a former policewoman now in a wheelchair. "The BNP are the only ones standing up for this country," adds Lynn Winfield, a pub dishwasher. Griffin fans the flames. He calls the English "one of the most oppressed peoples on earth". He says that when people like him try to speak out about real problems "they try to throw them in jail". He says that bad laws should be broken. He calls global warming "an excuse to say that we, the international elite, have to interfere with every sovereign state in the world, and if we don't you will sink by Thursday".
Source
British courts over-rule deportation of Jihadists
Two of Britain’s most dangerous terror suspects will be on our streets within days, after a hugely damaging defeat for the Government. A map marking routes under Birmingham airport’s flight path was found at the home of one of the men – described as a “global jihadist” – who has family links to two notorious terrorists. The second man is accused of being a former leader of a terror cell in Italy, that authorities feared was on the verge of an attack, probably in Europe.
But the pair, both Libyans, are expected to be bailed next week, after winning their appeals against deportation. The ruling leaves the Government’s anti-terror policy in chaos, after judges threw out much-heralded agreements between Britain and Libya that the men would not be tortured if they returned.
Special Immigration Appeals Commission chairman Mr Justice Ouseley said there remained a real risk that the European Convention on Human Rights would be breached if the two men were returned.
The so-called memoranda of understanding are a key part of the promise by Tony Blair and John Reid to return terror suspects to countries known for human rights abuses.
Yesterday’s decision leaves the planned deportation of at least eight Libyan suspects, including the two who are to be bailed, in disarray, and casts grave doubts over similar agreements with other nations.
The Tories’ terrorism expert, MP Patrick Mercer said: “I find it extraordinary that we have imposed these people on our society. “It will be extremely difficult to keep these men to their bail conditions, particularly with this level of oversight. “They will not be on bail forever and I am very interested to know what the Government will do.”
The two Libyans, granted bail in principle, have been held in the maximum-security prison at Long Lartin, Worcs, under immigration detention. But Mr Justice Mitting said keeping them in after they had won their appeal would be on the “cusp of legality”. Instead they were bailed with strict conditions, including a 12-hour curfew and no access to mobile phones or the internet. They will still be allowed out for 12 hours a day. The two Libyans are accused of travelling on false passports. Both claimed asylum after they got into Britain. One, who can be identified only as DD, had an AtoZ street map in a car parked near his house, marking footpaths under the flight path to Birmingham International Airport. The appeals commission ruled that DD is a “real and direct threat to the national security of the UK” and a “global jihadist with links to the Taliban and Al Qaeda”. The second terror suspect, AS, was also ruled a “clear danger to national security”.
The Government wants to deport eight suspects to Libya. Moves against another four have been put off while they face terror prosecutions here. A Home Office spokesman said: “We are very disappointed with the decision that it is not safe to deport these individuals. “We believe that the assurances given to us by the Libyans do provide effective safeguards for the proper treatment of individuals being returned and do ensure that their rights will be respected. We intend, therefore, to appeal.”
Source
Deadly black gang brawling in London: "A churchgoing teenager who who was also the head of a South London gang was sentenced to life imprisonment yesterday for the murder of a schoolboy rival. Adu Sarpong had been to a Bible class with friends hours before a bloody street battle with a rival gang in which he stabbed Alex Kamondo, 15, with a kitchen knife. Sarpong, 18, who was convicted at the Old Bailey, was the leader of K Town Crew, which clashed with Kamondo's gang, Man Dem Crew, in Kennington in June. Up to 30 youths fought with knives, hammers, metal bars, bottles and a samurai-style sword... Sarpong plunged the knife into Kamondo's chest with so much force that it broke a rib and the handle snapped off. Kamondo, who lived on the nearby Kennington Park estate, suffered a single 20cm stab wound that pierced his left lung and heart. Sarpong fled but was arrested shortly afterwards. He told the Old Bailey that he had been "pumped up with adrenaline" and heard someone cry out that he had been stabbed behind him, but did not see the stabbing. However, his finger-prints were found on the murder weapon and he was picked out at a series of identity parades by members of the opposing gang."
Junior doctors have called for Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt and Health Minister Lord Hunt to resign over "shambolic" medical training reform. The British Medical Association's junior doctors conference called the Medical Training Application Service's problems "gross negligence". The online job application service was suspended amid fears personal details of applicants could be accessed online. The government says it is working hard to ensure the security of the system.
Earlier, the BMA called for Tony Blair to step in to avert more chaos over the online application system. BMA chairman James Johnson has written to Tony Blair warning doctors' anger will grow if the government does not address the problems with MTAS "with the level of urgency they deserve". He said the mistakes had the potential to damage patients' confidence in the proposed new database of individual health records.
The conference also criticised failures in the Modernising Medical Careers (MMC) scheme and demanded a review into the waste of public money it claims it has caused. The delegates also raised concerns that the implementation of MMC speciality training would have "grave consequences for patient care".
The issue is also mired in internal feuding, with some doctors calling on their own leadership to resign for participating in the government review. Delegate Dr Andrew Smith said there was "more anger and resentment than ever before". Despite this the BMA leadership had remained engaged in and endorsed the "fiasco that is MMC", he said.
Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt has already apologised for the "terrible anxiety" caused to junior doctors over the scheme. BMA junior doctors committee head Jo Hilborne told the conference that modernising medical careers should have brought an end to uncertainty for senior house officers. But instead, she said it had brought the fear of career stagnation, the danger of falling standards and loss of good doctors. She called the application system a "desperate failure". "The fault is with this government which has systematically ignored the people whose lives are being ruined by their ill-thought out, badly implemented policies," she said.
Conference delegates suggested the system should be scrapped and suggested two possible solutions to the MTAS problems. They said either all candidates starting posts in 2007 must be interviewed for all their choices, or all MMC training be postponed and a return made to the old system (SHO/specialist registrars) for a year while a new application process was devised. The MTAS computer system has previously been criticised for not allowing candidates to set out their experience, meaning the best candidates have not been selected for interview. But it has also been attacked for having too few jobs for the number of candidates.
Conference delegates also passed a motion calling for the National Audit Office to investigate how much public money had been spent on the computer system. And they sought guarantees that no junior doctor would be unemployed as a result of system failures.
The BMA estimates that 34,250 doctors are chasing 18,500 UK posts, due to start in August. But it has warned thousands of NHS doctors could go to work abroad because of their disgust at the process.
Lord Hunt insisted it was not a resignation issue and that all the medical organisations had called for the old system to be changed because it was not working. Earlier he told the BBC action was being taken to make the system more secure. "We have brought in over the weekend some independent experts from outside companies. They are clawing through it to make sure it is secure and we will only open it up again when we are satisfied about that."
Source
Brits getting tired of immigration problems
Having immigrants and the children of immigrants blowing up your buses and trains (among other things) is beginning to get to even the tolerant British -- and since the mainstream parties are trying to ignore the disquiet, a new party that does not ignore that is getting more and more votes
It is, at first sight, a vision of rural bliss - a cream-coloured cottage high in the hills of Mid Wales and two miles from the nearest road. The daffodils are out. Lambs gambol in the fields. Chickens peck around the yard. In the side garden, beyond the rabbit hutch and fishpond, two blonde girls are playing in the sun. Look closer, however, and you spot the incongruities: the two rottweilers in their caged kennel, security cameras, the burglar alarm. You begin to suspect that the owner has chosen this house precisely for its inaccessibility. He has reason to. Nick Griffin is leader of the whites-only British National Party and one of the most hated - and, to his many detractors, hateful - men in the country....
Griffin kisses Jackie goodbye, reminds her to water his newly planted aubretia, and we head off in his Ford Mondeo estate for the fertile BNP territory of West Yorkshire, with its immigrant populations of 10, 20 or even 30 per cent. In the back is a book recording the Scottish National Party's transformation from an extreme to a mainstream party. Griffin's inspiration, however, is Jean-Marie Le Pen, the leader of France's far-right National Front, who turned "a bunch of crazies into a serious political force"....
He tells me about a life spent mostly on the extreme right of British politics. His parents met while heckling a Communist Party meeting in North London in 1948. During the 1964 general election campaign, Griffin pedalled up and down the street outside his home in Barnet with Conservative posters on his tricycle. By 1974 his father, a Tory councillor and member of the right-wing Monday Club, was so dismayed by Britain's leftward drift that he took his family to a National Front meeting. Griffin, then 15, joined immediately.....
Griffin has earned his 1,800 pounds-a-month BNP salary. The party won three council seats in Burnley in 2002. It now has 49 nationwide, and on May 3 Griffin expects to win many more in what he sarcastically calls "enriched" areas such as inner Essex, the Black Country, West Yorkshire and Lancashire. The party will also be contesting seats in blue-rinse towns such as Harrogate, Bath, Windsor and Torbay. One recent poll suggested that 7 per cent of the electorate would consider voting for it.
Griffin says that membership has risen from 1,300 in 1999 to 10,500, boosted by home-grown Islamic terrorist plots, globalisation and his dramatic acquittal in last year's race-hate trials. Critics insist that the BNP's move towards respectability is purely cosmetic. Griffin retorts, as we join the motorway, that it is "deep and sincere". He admits "past stupidities", and says that he regrets the way that the BNP used to provoke confrontations or to discuss race in a way that was "frankly crude, or cruelly and inaccurately supremacist". He is not racist, he argues. He does not believe that whites are superior. He believes that races are different and that multiculturalism is a recipe for disaster. He opposes miscegenation "because most people want their grandchildren to look basically like them". If the liberal elite had its way, the world would become "a giant melting pot turning out coffee-coloured citizens by the million".
The BNP no longer demands the recriminalisation of homosexuality, but Griffin still expresses disgust at the idea of two men "snogging in public". His revised views on the Holocaust are striking, too. He says that he derided the Holocaust only because the Left used it as "a huge moral club" with which to beat opponents of multiculturalism. He now accepts that millions of Jews were killed, but claims that some historians (he cites David Irving) still question whether it was deliberate genocide.....
In pockets of Britain the BNP is almost a mainstream party now, with ever more people daring to run for office or to put posters in windows. But it still prints its newspaper in Eastern Europe because British plants refuse to, has trouble renting halls and cannot advertise its meetings because they would be picketed. Potential supporters are instead instructed to gather at "redirection points" and told where to go.
In Ripon the meeting point is the town square, where the local BBC radio station interviews Griffin. Ripon and Harrogate are "lovely English towns and we believe they should stay that way. They can't if there are high levels of immigration," he says. On our way to the meeting we pass a painting of a black inmate outside the Workhouse Museum. Griffin splutters. It was poor whites who suffered in workhouses, he says.
About 70 people are packed into a back room of the Golden Lion pub, with not a skinhead or pair of Doc Martens in sight and more tweeds than T-shirts. They are male and female, young and old, working class and middle class, ex-Labour and ex-Tory, several of them Daily Telegraph readers. They are mostly solid Yorkshire folk who have watched immigrants transform areas in which they grew up and believe - rightly or wrongly - that their way of life is under threat. They are bewildered more than hate-filled. They are fearful more than fear-inspiring, and feel gagged by political correctness. They do not come from sink estates. They are stakeholders, people with something to lose. "We're being overwhelmed," laments a retired Latin teacher. "I've nothing against other races. It's just that they keep flooding into the country to breaking point," says a lorry driver. "We can't invite the whole world to live in England," says a former merchant marine officer. Few will give their names.
Griffin and his fellow speakers do nothing to calm their fears. Quite the opposite. In a promotional video he decries the alleged banning of the cross of St George, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and even Piglet because the character offends Muslims. Against a background of soft music and beautiful scenery, a woman's voice decries the millions of foreigners of all races settling in Britain: "The one thing they have in common is there are too many of them."
Michelle Shrubb, a candidate who lived in South Africa, says that a black crimewave is coming to Britain. Nick Cass, the BNP's Yorkshire organiser, declares that "decent British people are fed up to the back teeth with seeing the country fall apart and being called racist when they want to do something about it". The merchandise table offers "It's Cool to be White" T-shirts and "I vote BNP because they look after me" bumper stickers. BNP candidates are presented with rosettes for daring to stand up and be counted. Griffin humorously coaxes about 500 pounds in donations from the audience, then answers questions for an hour. He puts on no airs and graces. He has a pint on the table beside him. He presents himself as an ordinary bloke, like his audience, who is fighting a corrupt elite that bleeds taxpayers for its disastrous social engineering projects and treats them with contempt. He is a shameless populist. He calls the rise of the BNP "a peasants' revolt". He talks of "our people", meaning whites. He mocks those who regard criminals as victims, advocates "damn good thrashings" for wayward teenagers, and says of drug-dealers: "Hang the bastards."
The audience loves it, but this is more than knockabout political rhetoric. Griffin firmly believes all this. Party policy - which he sets - is draconian and xenophobic. The BNP would deport all illegal immigrants, asylum-seekers and subversive foreigners, and offer existing immigrants money to return home. "It's clearly worth talking in terms of six-figure sums to persuade families to go," Griffin says. He would create civilian anti-crime patrols. Anyone who has done National Service would be allowed to keep guns to shoot burglars, and as "a last resort against a tyrannical government". He would restore hanging for the worst murderers, paedophiles, rapists and drug-dealers, and bring back the birch.
He would abolish affirmative action programmes and hate-crime legislation, ban the promotion of homosexuality, prevent the NHS from recruiting foreign workers and stop women soldiers serving on the front line. State schools would restore mandatory (nonhalal) lunches and morning assemblies with Christian worship (minorities should "either accept our ways or go somewhere else"). A BNP government would take Britain out of the EU and the European Convention on Human Rights. Remove the BNP label, Griffin claims, and most Brits would support these policies....
Between umpteen calls on his mobile phone - one is about ways to use Simone Clarke, the ballet dancer identified as a BNP member - I ask if Griffin sees any advantages to multiculturalism. Chicken tikka masala, he replies. And some good sportsmen, though he thinks that England's all-white 1966 World Cup footballers outperformed today's team because they had "common values and identity". Then he lists the downsides - a catastrophic loss of social cohesion, racial harassment and violence, spreading knife and gun cultures and old folk dying in nursing homes surrounded by staff who do not speak their language and feeling "totally alone, alienated and in a foreign place".
He warms to the theme, claiming that some Muslims deliberately use heroin - "Paki poison" - to undermine non-Muslim communities around them. "It's narco-terrorism." Even worse, he says, is the way that hardline Muslim males deliberately seduce and corrupt "thousands" of young white girls in a practice called "grooming" that the authorities downplay for fear of being labelled racist....
The 60 people at that night's BNP meeting in a Batley pub are not thinking in such apocalyptic terms. They have more immediate and prosaic fears about the consequences of immigration - their children being squeezed out of jobs and council housing, the emergence of no-go areas, the undermining of their rights and culture.
"We're frightened to be British," says Ann Nailor, who runs five Age Concern shops. "I feel alienated in my own community," says Neil Feeney, a water company employee. "People who read your paper have no idea about places like this," said Marjorie Shaw, a former policewoman now in a wheelchair. "The BNP are the only ones standing up for this country," adds Lynn Winfield, a pub dishwasher. Griffin fans the flames. He calls the English "one of the most oppressed peoples on earth". He says that when people like him try to speak out about real problems "they try to throw them in jail". He says that bad laws should be broken. He calls global warming "an excuse to say that we, the international elite, have to interfere with every sovereign state in the world, and if we don't you will sink by Thursday".
Source
British courts over-rule deportation of Jihadists
Two of Britain’s most dangerous terror suspects will be on our streets within days, after a hugely damaging defeat for the Government. A map marking routes under Birmingham airport’s flight path was found at the home of one of the men – described as a “global jihadist” – who has family links to two notorious terrorists. The second man is accused of being a former leader of a terror cell in Italy, that authorities feared was on the verge of an attack, probably in Europe.
But the pair, both Libyans, are expected to be bailed next week, after winning their appeals against deportation. The ruling leaves the Government’s anti-terror policy in chaos, after judges threw out much-heralded agreements between Britain and Libya that the men would not be tortured if they returned.
Special Immigration Appeals Commission chairman Mr Justice Ouseley said there remained a real risk that the European Convention on Human Rights would be breached if the two men were returned.
The so-called memoranda of understanding are a key part of the promise by Tony Blair and John Reid to return terror suspects to countries known for human rights abuses.
Yesterday’s decision leaves the planned deportation of at least eight Libyan suspects, including the two who are to be bailed, in disarray, and casts grave doubts over similar agreements with other nations.
The Tories’ terrorism expert, MP Patrick Mercer said: “I find it extraordinary that we have imposed these people on our society. “It will be extremely difficult to keep these men to their bail conditions, particularly with this level of oversight. “They will not be on bail forever and I am very interested to know what the Government will do.”
The two Libyans, granted bail in principle, have been held in the maximum-security prison at Long Lartin, Worcs, under immigration detention. But Mr Justice Mitting said keeping them in after they had won their appeal would be on the “cusp of legality”. Instead they were bailed with strict conditions, including a 12-hour curfew and no access to mobile phones or the internet. They will still be allowed out for 12 hours a day. The two Libyans are accused of travelling on false passports. Both claimed asylum after they got into Britain. One, who can be identified only as DD, had an AtoZ street map in a car parked near his house, marking footpaths under the flight path to Birmingham International Airport. The appeals commission ruled that DD is a “real and direct threat to the national security of the UK” and a “global jihadist with links to the Taliban and Al Qaeda”. The second terror suspect, AS, was also ruled a “clear danger to national security”.
The Government wants to deport eight suspects to Libya. Moves against another four have been put off while they face terror prosecutions here. A Home Office spokesman said: “We are very disappointed with the decision that it is not safe to deport these individuals. “We believe that the assurances given to us by the Libyans do provide effective safeguards for the proper treatment of individuals being returned and do ensure that their rights will be respected. We intend, therefore, to appeal.”
Source
Deadly black gang brawling in London: "A churchgoing teenager who who was also the head of a South London gang was sentenced to life imprisonment yesterday for the murder of a schoolboy rival. Adu Sarpong had been to a Bible class with friends hours before a bloody street battle with a rival gang in which he stabbed Alex Kamondo, 15, with a kitchen knife. Sarpong, 18, who was convicted at the Old Bailey, was the leader of K Town Crew, which clashed with Kamondo's gang, Man Dem Crew, in Kennington in June. Up to 30 youths fought with knives, hammers, metal bars, bottles and a samurai-style sword... Sarpong plunged the knife into Kamondo's chest with so much force that it broke a rib and the handle snapped off. Kamondo, who lived on the nearby Kennington Park estate, suffered a single 20cm stab wound that pierced his left lung and heart. Sarpong fled but was arrested shortly afterwards. He told the Old Bailey that he had been "pumped up with adrenaline" and heard someone cry out that he had been stabbed behind him, but did not see the stabbing. However, his finger-prints were found on the murder weapon and he was picked out at a series of identity parades by members of the opposing gang."
Sunday, April 29, 2007
Britain: Prison terms LESS likely for violent offenders
Like Leftists everywhere, Left-dominated Britain is always ready to excuse its violent criminals -- probably because of the hate and violence in their own hearts (which shows when, as Communists, they gain absolute power)
Violent criminals are less likely to be sent to prison than non-violent offenders, a shocking Home Office report has revealed. In the latest blow to public confidence in the criminal justice system, a report seen by the Yorkshire Post reveals that just 32 per cent of criminals responsible for violent offences - categorised as everything from murder to assault to obstructing a police officer - are sent to prison. But custodial sentences are handed down to more than 36 per cent of offenders convicted of non-violent offences, such as fraud, theft, burglary, criminal damage, drink-driving and public order offences.
The Home Office study on sentencing and re-offending was met with incredulity and outrage last night by Shadow Home Secretary David Davis and other MPs - but Prisons Minister Gerry Sutcliffe insisted the Government had been calling on the independent judiciary to be tougher with dangerous violent offenders. In addition to the sentencing of violent offenders, the report revealed that a widely used alternative punishment to custody, the drug treatment order, has a re-offending rate of 82 per cent.
Another section appeared to contradict Ministers' claims about the dubious long-term effectiveness of prison by stating that "longer custodial sentences are associated with lower proven re-offending rates".
The conclusions emerged yesterday as the Home Office's latest British Crime Survey found public confidence in Britain's criminal justice system was falling. The survey, which questioned tens of thousands of people during 2006 about their experiences of crime, showed that just 42 per cent of people had confidence in the system's ability to bring criminals to justice, down two points from 2005. Only 37 per cent of people believed the system was effective at reducing crime, while 34 per cent thought it met the needs of victims of crime. Both were one point lower than the 2005 responses.
The Home Office "statistical bulletin" on offending, stated: "Violent offenders are less likely to receive a custodial sentence than other offenders." But it sought to lessen the impact of the statement by adding: "'Violence' incorporates a wide range of offences of varying severity." It noted the two most frequent violent offences were common assault and battery, and assault causing actual bodily harm.
On drug treatment orders, the report said they "had the highest actual proven re-offending rate" of any form of punishment in 2004. On the link between the length of custodial sentences and re-offending, the data showed that the longer the sentence, the lower the rate of repeat offending. It also revealed a rise between 2000 and 2004 in re-offending by people imprisoned for less than a year.
David Davis, the Tory MP for Haltemprice and Howden, said: "It beggars belief that under this Government, violent offenders are actually less likely to receive a custodial sentence than other offenders. "It is precisely these types of serious offenders, representing the greatest risk to the public, who should receive a custodial sentence to protect the public." Shipley Tory MP Philip Davies, who led a Parliamentary debate earlier this month calling for more and longer custodial sentences, said people would be "astonished" by the report's revelations. He said: "The fact is that the system is soft on violent crime, that drug orders don't work and that, contrary to what the liberal do-gooders say, prison works."
Defending the Home Office, Prison Minister Mr Sutcliffe, the Bradford West MP, told the Yorkshire Post: "We've introduced harsher sentences and made sure there are places in prison for dangerous and violent people, who should be treated more severely. But sentences are for the judges to decide, not for politicians." On drug treatment orders and the effectiveness of prison, he added: "Drug-related offenders are harder to deal with and we recognise they are a problem which is why we've increased funding for drug treatment by 974 per cent since 1997. "But we've got to remember that not everyone should go to prison. We need to tackle and break the re-offending process by offering people a holistic solution involving education and jobs."
Source
British police protect Green saboteurs
What a sick country!
The operation to sabotage the government's GM potato trial was planned with care and under conditions of great secrecy. Two hundred and fifty protesters swooped on the 16-hectare site outside Hull, armed with shovels and filled with indignation. In less than an hour they had moved to invalidate the trial, planting thousands of organic potatoes. Mission accomplished. If only they had got the right field. Activists from Mutatoes.org yesterday apologised to farmer David Buckton after it emerged that they wrongly identified his land as the site of the GM trial. The field they planted was sown with beans.
By the time Mr Buckton was alerted to the protesters on his land, it was too late to stop the direct action. The protesters were determined to move quickly on the basis that the land would be rendered unsuitable for the GM trials once other root crops were in the ground.
In a statement Mutatoes.org said: "With the information that we had and the short timescale available to us ... we sincerely believed this to be the correct field. The public were not given sufficient information by the government, who supplied only a four-figure grid reference for the location of the trial." The group said they conducted extensive investigations within the area specified by the environment department and outside. "While it is regrettable that the wrong site and farmer were targeted, we would also like to make it clear ... that people will continue to disrupt the planting of GM crops despite the difficulties faced by this lack of full disclosure," the group added.
Yesterday Mr Buckton, 54, said the mix-up was the strangest event to have befallen his family in four generations of farming. He said the protesters were accompanied by two police officers on horseback. "I told the police officers that it was a bean field but they said the protest seemed peaceful so we'd better let them get on with it. The beans are just about peeping through. The protesters should have been able to see that," he said.
Mr Buckton said he had no great enthusiasm for GM crops. "I certainly wouldn't have been giving up my land to test them, he said." The company BASF plans trials of GM potatoes at two sites: Cambridge, which already has government approval, and in the East Riding of Yorkshire.
Source
New drug of abuse
Worm medicine!
A new recreational drug is sending patients to the hospital with life-threatening symptoms! The case of an 18-year-old girl who collapsed in a nightclub last May after taking a tablet containing 1-benzylpiperazine is highlighting the dangers of this new drug. The teenager who was rushed to a London hospital emergency room was one of seven patients admitted with similar symptoms, including high blood pressure and a low body temperature.
Piperazines were developed to control worms in animals in the 1950s. They are chemically similar to amphetamine and are marketed in the United Kingdom in stores and online as the legal alternative to other recreational drugs such as ecstasy. The manufacturers of the drugs claim they are safe, citing that 20 million pills containing piperazines have been consumed in New Zealand with no deaths or significant long-term injuries. But a prospective study in New Zealand shows 80 cases of patients who went to the emergency room with symptoms similar to those from taking amphetamines, such as nausea, vomiting, rapid heartbeat, anxiety and agitation. Fifteen of these patients had seizures after eight hours -- three had potentially life threatening incidents.
The authors conclude, "Clinicians should be aware of the potential presenting features of piperazine toxicity, particularly because commercially available urine toxicological screen kits for drugs of abuse may not detect piperazines."
Source. (Original report in "The Lancet" - Vol. 369, Issue 9571, 28 April 2007, Pages 1411-1413)
Like Leftists everywhere, Left-dominated Britain is always ready to excuse its violent criminals -- probably because of the hate and violence in their own hearts (which shows when, as Communists, they gain absolute power)
Violent criminals are less likely to be sent to prison than non-violent offenders, a shocking Home Office report has revealed. In the latest blow to public confidence in the criminal justice system, a report seen by the Yorkshire Post reveals that just 32 per cent of criminals responsible for violent offences - categorised as everything from murder to assault to obstructing a police officer - are sent to prison. But custodial sentences are handed down to more than 36 per cent of offenders convicted of non-violent offences, such as fraud, theft, burglary, criminal damage, drink-driving and public order offences.
The Home Office study on sentencing and re-offending was met with incredulity and outrage last night by Shadow Home Secretary David Davis and other MPs - but Prisons Minister Gerry Sutcliffe insisted the Government had been calling on the independent judiciary to be tougher with dangerous violent offenders. In addition to the sentencing of violent offenders, the report revealed that a widely used alternative punishment to custody, the drug treatment order, has a re-offending rate of 82 per cent.
Another section appeared to contradict Ministers' claims about the dubious long-term effectiveness of prison by stating that "longer custodial sentences are associated with lower proven re-offending rates".
The conclusions emerged yesterday as the Home Office's latest British Crime Survey found public confidence in Britain's criminal justice system was falling. The survey, which questioned tens of thousands of people during 2006 about their experiences of crime, showed that just 42 per cent of people had confidence in the system's ability to bring criminals to justice, down two points from 2005. Only 37 per cent of people believed the system was effective at reducing crime, while 34 per cent thought it met the needs of victims of crime. Both were one point lower than the 2005 responses.
The Home Office "statistical bulletin" on offending, stated: "Violent offenders are less likely to receive a custodial sentence than other offenders." But it sought to lessen the impact of the statement by adding: "'Violence' incorporates a wide range of offences of varying severity." It noted the two most frequent violent offences were common assault and battery, and assault causing actual bodily harm.
On drug treatment orders, the report said they "had the highest actual proven re-offending rate" of any form of punishment in 2004. On the link between the length of custodial sentences and re-offending, the data showed that the longer the sentence, the lower the rate of repeat offending. It also revealed a rise between 2000 and 2004 in re-offending by people imprisoned for less than a year.
David Davis, the Tory MP for Haltemprice and Howden, said: "It beggars belief that under this Government, violent offenders are actually less likely to receive a custodial sentence than other offenders. "It is precisely these types of serious offenders, representing the greatest risk to the public, who should receive a custodial sentence to protect the public." Shipley Tory MP Philip Davies, who led a Parliamentary debate earlier this month calling for more and longer custodial sentences, said people would be "astonished" by the report's revelations. He said: "The fact is that the system is soft on violent crime, that drug orders don't work and that, contrary to what the liberal do-gooders say, prison works."
Defending the Home Office, Prison Minister Mr Sutcliffe, the Bradford West MP, told the Yorkshire Post: "We've introduced harsher sentences and made sure there are places in prison for dangerous and violent people, who should be treated more severely. But sentences are for the judges to decide, not for politicians." On drug treatment orders and the effectiveness of prison, he added: "Drug-related offenders are harder to deal with and we recognise they are a problem which is why we've increased funding for drug treatment by 974 per cent since 1997. "But we've got to remember that not everyone should go to prison. We need to tackle and break the re-offending process by offering people a holistic solution involving education and jobs."
Source
British police protect Green saboteurs
What a sick country!
The operation to sabotage the government's GM potato trial was planned with care and under conditions of great secrecy. Two hundred and fifty protesters swooped on the 16-hectare site outside Hull, armed with shovels and filled with indignation. In less than an hour they had moved to invalidate the trial, planting thousands of organic potatoes. Mission accomplished. If only they had got the right field. Activists from Mutatoes.org yesterday apologised to farmer David Buckton after it emerged that they wrongly identified his land as the site of the GM trial. The field they planted was sown with beans.
By the time Mr Buckton was alerted to the protesters on his land, it was too late to stop the direct action. The protesters were determined to move quickly on the basis that the land would be rendered unsuitable for the GM trials once other root crops were in the ground.
In a statement Mutatoes.org said: "With the information that we had and the short timescale available to us ... we sincerely believed this to be the correct field. The public were not given sufficient information by the government, who supplied only a four-figure grid reference for the location of the trial." The group said they conducted extensive investigations within the area specified by the environment department and outside. "While it is regrettable that the wrong site and farmer were targeted, we would also like to make it clear ... that people will continue to disrupt the planting of GM crops despite the difficulties faced by this lack of full disclosure," the group added.
Yesterday Mr Buckton, 54, said the mix-up was the strangest event to have befallen his family in four generations of farming. He said the protesters were accompanied by two police officers on horseback. "I told the police officers that it was a bean field but they said the protest seemed peaceful so we'd better let them get on with it. The beans are just about peeping through. The protesters should have been able to see that," he said.
Mr Buckton said he had no great enthusiasm for GM crops. "I certainly wouldn't have been giving up my land to test them, he said." The company BASF plans trials of GM potatoes at two sites: Cambridge, which already has government approval, and in the East Riding of Yorkshire.
Source
New drug of abuse
Worm medicine!
A new recreational drug is sending patients to the hospital with life-threatening symptoms! The case of an 18-year-old girl who collapsed in a nightclub last May after taking a tablet containing 1-benzylpiperazine is highlighting the dangers of this new drug. The teenager who was rushed to a London hospital emergency room was one of seven patients admitted with similar symptoms, including high blood pressure and a low body temperature.
Piperazines were developed to control worms in animals in the 1950s. They are chemically similar to amphetamine and are marketed in the United Kingdom in stores and online as the legal alternative to other recreational drugs such as ecstasy. The manufacturers of the drugs claim they are safe, citing that 20 million pills containing piperazines have been consumed in New Zealand with no deaths or significant long-term injuries. But a prospective study in New Zealand shows 80 cases of patients who went to the emergency room with symptoms similar to those from taking amphetamines, such as nausea, vomiting, rapid heartbeat, anxiety and agitation. Fifteen of these patients had seizures after eight hours -- three had potentially life threatening incidents.
The authors conclude, "Clinicians should be aware of the potential presenting features of piperazine toxicity, particularly because commercially available urine toxicological screen kits for drugs of abuse may not detect piperazines."
Source. (Original report in "The Lancet" - Vol. 369, Issue 9571, 28 April 2007, Pages 1411-1413)
Saturday, April 28, 2007
Corrupt "social gospel" church hid the secret of the choirmaster who abused boys
The church's infatuation with homosexuals wouldn't have anything to do with it, of course
The Church of England was accused of a cover-up after a choirmaster who systematically abused children in his care was allowed to become a school governor. Peter Halliday admitted sexually molesting boys as young as nine, nearly 20 years ago. But Church authorities did not tell the police. Instead, they allowed him to quietly leave - on the promise he would change his ways.
As Halliday finally began a jail sentence for his crimes, it was revealed he was only caught after one of his victims saw a TV programme on sexual abuse in the Church. When he checked on the Internet and discovered his former tormentor was still working with children, he called police.
Child safety campaigners yesterday criticised the Church's "serious mishandling" of the case. Halliday, 61, was sentenced to two and half years in prison after he admitted ten counts of sexual abuse between 1986 and 1990. Winchester Crown Court heard the former choirmaster at St Peter's Church in Farnborough, Hampshire, was so trusted by his victims' families that the boys were allowed to stay at his home.
Described in court as "a bully and a revolting character", he attacked the boys at his home, during swimming lessons and on camping trips. Now in their twenties and thirties, the victims, one of whom is head of music at a private school, are still coming to terms with what they went through.
The court heard Halliday could have been stopped in 1990 when the rector of St Peter's, the Reverend Alan Boddington, was informed about the abuse. Yet Mr Boddington and the then Bishop of Dorking, David Wilcox, told Halliday he could leave quietly as long as he had no more contact with children. The court heard Halliday was on the board of governors of a secondary school in Farnborough from 1988 to 2000 but had no unsupervised contact with children. When he was seen at a choir concert in 1993, the victim who had already complained to the Church again expressed his concerns. But nothing was done.
Halliday, a married father, would have escaped justice had one of his victims not researched him on the Internet and found he was a school governor and working with a children's choir. After the hearing the Church insisted it had done nothing wrong, saying officials "acted in good faith".
Child protection workers said it had failed, however. David Pearson, of the Churches' Child Protection Advisory Service, said: "Had we been contacted by the Church authorities then we would have had no hesitation in telling them to go straight to the police."
Halliday was also ordered to pay 2,000 pounds compensation to each victim. One recalled his horror at meeting Halliday in 1993 on a course. He said: "I was just aghast. Younger brothers of friends were there. I was scared for myself, but also terrified for them."
Source
A church that has forgotten how to repent its sins
More proof that its gospel is a secular rather than a Christian one these days
Turn on the Today programme, and most days you will hear some stonewalling corporate affairs sap, who has undergone "media training" and been told to stick to his script no matter what. It always makes me splutter into my coffee. Asked to defend the leaking of an oil pipeline, he will say: "The important thing is that best-practice policies are in place to ensure that clean-up procedures are strictly adhered to, and we at Polluting Petroleum want to assure you that we have the best interests of local people at heart." Translation: they're covered in oil and their crops are ruined, but I don't suppose many of them have shares in PP or will make a fuss at the AGM. As long as we get through today, we'll be OK.
You might expect such flannelling from business people and politicians. But from the Church of England? Surely not. Yet yesterday produced the worst splutterfest ever. The hapless spokeswoman was the Rev Pearl Luxon. She had been put up by the Church to talk about its role in failing to prevent a paedophile choirmaster, Peter Halliday, from abusing children. As one of the victims said: "When your first sexual experience is of a 40-year-old man forcing himself on you, it's pretty horrific." But the Church told neither the police nor social services and simply asked Halliday to leave.
Was Mrs Luxon, who is in charge of child protection at the C of E, contrite? Not a bit of it. Her first sin was to say that she could not comment on the case at all. "Why?" asked John Humphrys. "This is not a live case. The man has admitted his guilt and will be sentenced today. It is incumbent upon you to comment on this case, surely?"
"No, I cannot comment on this particular case," intoned the robot again. No reason. All she would say, time and time again, was that the Church had "robust policies in place" to deal with child abuse. When Humphrys tried to make her acknowledge that things had gone very badly wrong over Halliday, her answer was so unsatisfactory that it deserves printing in full: "These matters are always reviewed after they occur and we learn from our mistakes and our good practice is improved at all stages when these matters are looked at. Robust policies are improved through learning from the past and from following the guidance and good practice that happens now." Aaargh!
Does this woman have no shame? Has she stopped to think about the consequences of the Church's actions, or rather inactions? Presumably not, as she displayed not a shred of regret, let alone apology. If I were offering her media training, I would advise her to say: "We are desperately sorry that this occurred. We got it badly wrong. We apologise to the victims and will make sure that it never happens again." It's not that hard, is it?
Source
This is definitely a Green religion
Environmentalism may not be saving the planet, but to judge by the news it seems to be conquering the world. Some of us have long thought that it is assuming pseudo-religious status, with its self-righteous claims to absolute truth and demands for sinners to repent. Now comes confirmation that, just as old Labour genuflected to new Labour, so our old state religion has converted to the new one.
The Church of England this week launched a booklet of "green tips" for the faithful entitled How Many Christians Does it Take to Change a Lightbulb? (only 4.99, if you still have that fiver). Its eco-commandments include: thou shalt share cars on the road to church, use virtuous green lightbulbs but cast off the Devil's junk mail, and not flush the loo three times before the cock crows.
This is more than a stunt. The C of E is serious about embracing the new orthodoxy. When it launched its Shrinking the Footprint crusade last year, the Archbishop of Canterbury complained that "early modern religion contributed to the idea that the fate of nature is for it to be bossed around by a detached sovereign will, whether divine or human". Possibly those misguided early modern religionists got that idea from the bit in the Book of Genesis about God giving Man dominion "over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth". Yet now the Archbishop condemns notions of nature being "bossed around" not only by Man, but even by God. Creepy.
As with Labour, it is not the power of the new religion that explains this craven conversion but the feebleness of the old. Such is the lack of confidence within the traditional Establishment today, everybody from politicians to church leaders wants to hug environmentalism as a new form of unquestioned authority. Scientists have become the equivalent of high priests in white coats, summoned to condemn heretics; a group of them now demand that the Channel 4 documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle be amended to reflect the one true faith before the DVD goes on sale. Perhaps they would like to burn it, if not for the CO2.
When there is only one recycled hymn sheet in town and you can believe in any shade of politics or religion just as long as it's green, those of us who put our faith in humanity should surely worry more about the new dogma than the old. They all now buy into the same non-plastic bag of fashionable prejudices: that people are the problem rather than the solution, and we must be saved from ourselves. Sackcloth and ashes is the new black. As a wise man once said, kick against the pricks. Or as we might say today, give them a human footprint up the carbon emissions.
Source
Net influx of 185,000 per annum into the UK
In 2005, an estimated 565,000 migrants arrived to live in the UK for at least a year. This was lower than the 2004 estimate, but higher than all other years since the method to estimate Total International Migration began in 1991. In the same period, 380,000 people emigrated from the UK for a year or more; over half of these were British citizens. Australia was the most popular destination for British emigrants followed by Spain and France. Net migration, the difference between immigration and emigration, was 185,000. This was equivalent to adding just over 500 people a day to the UK population.
In 2005, 80,000 citizens from the group of eight central and eastern European countries that acceded to the EU on 1 May 2004 (known as the A8) immigrated to the UK for a year or more. This was 54 per cent higher than the 52,000 estimate for 2004. This can be explained by 2005 being the first calendar year following EU accession, and A8 citizens having increased freedom to live and work in the UK. Over 70 per cent of A8 migrants arriving in 2005 were Polish citizens.
Almost 85 per cent of those A8 citizens migrating to the UK came for work reasons, that is, they were 'looking for work' or had a 'definite job' to go to. Overall, nearly half of all citizens migrating to the UK gave work-related reasons.
'Formal study' is another important reason for people migrating to the UK accounting for almost a quarter of all immigration in 2005.
There are notable differences in the routes that migrants of different citizenships use to enter the UK. In 2004 and 2005, nearly 90 per cent of A8 migrants entered via routes other than the main UK airports (such as via sea ports, the Channel Tunnel, or Stansted and Luton and other local airports).
In contrast, nearly 75 per cent of citizens from Commonwealth and Other foreign countries entered the UK via Heathrow airport. Over 60 per cent of British migrants entered the UK via Heathrow, Gatwick and Manchester airports.
Source
Non-English Britain
Immigration correctness is having huge effects
One in five schoolchildren is from an ethnic minority - almost double the figure a decade ago. The annual school census reveals a Britain where one in eight pupils speaks a language other than English at home. The record figures include more than 40,000 children from Eastern Europe who have enrolled at schools since the enlargement of the European Union in 2004.
The statistics emerged as the race relations watchdog warned that Britain's segregated schools are a "ticking timebomb". The Commission for Racial Equality's director of policy said parents must stop sending their children to schools where most pupils come from similar religious or racial backgrounds. Nick Johnson also suggested schools should be given more money to admit a racially mixed intake. He said: "We're in fear of turning into a mini-America with racially determined schools. "Schools are where our children first learn how to get along with people from other cultures and backgrounds. Racially segregated schools prevent this from happening. This is a ticking timebomb."
His comments came as figures published by the Department for Education and Skills showed the biggest year- on-year increase in ethnic minority pupils for a decade. They account for just under a fifth (19.8 per cent) of England's 6.5 million primary and secondary pupils, up from 11 per cent when Labour came to power. Meanwhile, the number of primary pupils alone who do not speak English as their first language increased by seven per cent from last year to 448,000 - or about one child in seven. Overall, it is around one in eight.
But the Commission for Racial Equality is concerned that there are not enough resources to integrate pupils from such diverse backgrounds. Mr Johnson said he was particularly worried about Tony Blair's controversial city academies and trust schools. He added that some of these are using their extra freedoms to "cream off pupils from certain ethnic backgrounds or religions, thus ... increasing racial tensions".
The Conservatives said ministers had been caught off-guard by the increase in non-native English speakers in schools. Tory education spokesman David Willetts said: "The Government has completely failed to keep up with the rate of change in our school population." A DfES spokesman said: "The Education and Inspections Act 2006 placed a new duty on the governing bodies of all maintained schools, including faith schools, to promote community cohesion."
Source
Pensioner is refused sight drugs – until he goes blind
Socialist "compassion" at work. Elderly people can go blind for all they care
A RETIRED policeman is going blind – because a Yorkshire health trust will not pay for treatment that could save his sight. Leslie Howard, also an ex-Royal Military policeman and former prison officer, suffers from a degenerative eye condition. The drugs needed to save his sight are available on the NHS in other parts of the country. But Mr Howard, 76, has been told by health chiefs not to expect a penny of NHS treatment until he goes blind in one eye and starts losing sight in the other. He fears that after a lifetime of public service the decision by North Yorkshire and York Primary Care Trust could plunge him into total blindness and leave him and his invalid wife Mary Ann, 70, housebound.
As his case led to a new row over NHS "health rationing", Mr Howard, of Acomb, York, said: "The problem is we have lived too long and are just pieces of meat now – a nuisance. "I was advised to go private but was quoted 1,000 pounds an injection for who knows how many injections. I can't afford that kind of money. I've paid tens of thousands of pounds in taxes and to know that I will now lose my sight because I can't afford private treatment is diabolical."
Mr Howard was diagnosed with wet age-related macular degeneration (AMD) in his right eye in November. It can cause sight loss in three months. He says he was advised by the North Yorkshire and York PCT that it would only consider funding once he had gone blind in one eye and developed a similar condition in his second eye. He added: "It is more than three months since I was diagnosed and it is getting worse by the day. Has the Government lost all sense of compassion as well as economics?"
The head of campaigns at the Royal National Institute of the Blind, Steve Winyard, said: "This is a desperate situation for Mr Howard. His care trust is leaving him to go blind in one eye even though sight-saving treatments are available on the NHS. "We hear of more and more patients being forced to use retirement funds or life-savings to pay for sight-saving treatments that should be available readily on the NHS. "In cases like Mr Howard's, where people can't afford private treatment, patients face the prospect of going blind unnecessarily."
The chief executive of the Macular Disease Society, Tom Bremridge, added: "The so-called 'second-eye' policy is wholly unacceptable on ethical and practical grounds." Losing sight in one eye could affect a person's co-ordination and increase the risk of falls, while not treating the condition meant patients had a high risk of developing the problem in the second eye. Unsuccessful treatment in the second eye could then mean total blindness, Mr Bremridge said. He added: "It also makes no economic sense to deny treatment. The cost of supporting people with sight loss far outweighs the cost of treatment."
AMD sufferer and former Halifax Labour MP Alice Mahon, who took legal action against her PCT and forced a U-turn over its refusal to provide similar injections on the NHS, said: "It is an obscene policy. It's outrageous. "The whole fault is handing over all this funding to the PCTs, so it's a postcode lottery and not a national health service. I am particularly concerned there seems to be discrimination against older people who have paid into the NHS all their lives."
The North Yorkshire and York PCT said yesterday Department of Health guidelines were that, until the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NIHCE) published final guidance on new treatments, NHS bodies should continue local arrangements to manage their introduction.
There was no NIHCE guidance yet for the drugs Mr Howard wanted. So in agreement with other PCTs in the region, the trust was funding such treatments only in cases where there was evidence they would work. If any patient felt they should be considered for treatment the PCT would examine their circumstances, a spokesman added.
Source
And he's not alone:
A WIDOWED grandmother who devoted 30 years of her life to the NHS and twice fought off cancer has become the latest patient in Yorkshire to be warned she faces being denied vital treatment for a condition which causes blindness. Retired midwife Doreen Kenworthy was last week given the devastating diagnosis that she was suffering from the eye condition age-related macular degeneration.
But her shock was compounded when doctors told her the NHS would not pay for treatment until she lost the sight in her affected eye and began to lose it in the other – although further loss of sight could be prevented if she paid out thousands of pounds for private care. Her plight is similar to that of York pensioner Leslie Howard who was refused immediate NHS treatment, although a private hospital group has now stepped in to give him the care he needs. Dr Kenworthy, 56, of Stanley, Wakefield, has vowed to fight to get sight-saving treatment.
"I am not prepared to die of cancer, neither am I prepared to go blind whilst fighting it," she said. "I have never been a supporter of the private sector in my professional life. I believe in Aneurin Bevan's philosophy of free healthcare access for all at all levels. "I understand there are cutbacks, although I don't agree with the way the Labour Government has handled the NHS, but to be told 'Sorry you have to go almost blind before you get help' is dreadful."
Dr Kenworthy, who worked as a midwife and later trained midwives before retiring last year from Bradford University, said she was diagnosed with breast cancer two years ago, undergoing a year of treatment before the condition recurred in January. The eye complaint was unrelated but she had already lost some central vision in her right eye which began deteriorating a month ago. She was urgently called for tests at St James's Hospital in Leeds where specialists told her she had the eye complaint and further deterioration could be prevented only by drug injections.
She was told these were only provided by the NHS after she lost her sight in one eye and began to lose it in the other – although they were available privately at a cost of up to 1,000 each over 12-24 months. "I did not expect to be told that I couldn't be treated on the NHS but if I went into the private sector I could be treated tomorrow," she said.
Dr Kenworthy, who has twins aged 31 and four grandchildren, said the only option she had to fund the treatment was by remortgaging her home. "To have to tell your children twice you've got cancer, then to say by the way you're going blind in your right eye and can't have any treatment until it affects your other eye is very hard," she said. "It's been devastating to have cancer twice in two years, to fight it, to retire after 30 years in the NHS and then get this on top."
Source
THE NEW INQUISITION: "FREE SPEECH DOES NOT EXTEND TO INACCURATE STATEMENTS"
A group of British climate scientists is demanding changes to a skeptical documentary about global warming, saying there are grave errors in the program billed as a response to Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth." "The Great Global Warming Swindle" aired on British television in March and is coming out soon on DVD. It argues that man-made emissions have a marginal impact on the world's climate and warming can better be explained by changing patterns of solar activity.
An open letter sent Tuesday by 38 scientists, including the former heads of Britain's academy of sciences and Britain's weather office, called on producer Wag TV to remove what it called "major misrepresentations" from the film before the DVD release -- a demand its director said was tantamount to censorship.
Bob Ward, the former spokesman for the Royal Society, Britain's academy of science, and one of the letter's signatories, said director Mark Durkin made a "long catalogue of fundamental and profound mistakes" -- including the claim that volcanoes produce more carbon dioxide than humans, and that the Earth's atmosphere was warmer during the Middle Ages than it is today. "Free speech does not extend to misleading the public by making factually inaccurate statements,'' he said. "Somebody has to stand up for the public interest here."
Durkin called the letter "loathsome." "This is a contemptible, weasel-worded attempt to gag scientific criticism, and it won't work," he said. "I don't believe they're interested in quality control when it comes to the reporting of science -- so long as it's on their side." Durkin acknowledged two of the errors highlighted by the scientists -- including the claim about volcanic emissions -- but he described those changes as minor and said they would be corrected in the expanded DVD release.
But the scientists do not want the DVD released without edits to completely remove the material they object to -- something Ward said would fatally weaken the film's argument. "The fact is that it's a very convincing program, and if you're not very aware of the science you wouldn't necessarily see what the errors are," Ward said. "But the errors are huge. ... Without those errors in, he doesn't have a story."
Ward has also complained to Britain's media regulator, which said it was investigating the matter. British broadcast law demands impartiality on matters of major political and industrial controversy -- and penalties can be imposed for misrepresentations of fact.
The decision to broadcast Durkin's documentary on Channel 4 was an unusual move in a country where the role of man-made carbon emissions in heating the globe is largely taken for granted and politicians regularly spar over which party has the greenest environmental policy. As for the former vice president, Gore has been hired as an adviser to the British government, which plans to send copies of his film to schools around England.
Source
EU EMISSIONS TRADING SCHEME MAY LEAD TO END OF BRITISH STEEL PRODUCTION
A FLAGSHIP EU scheme to cut pollution is "counter-productive" and could damage the Welsh steel industry, the chief executive of Corus warned yesterday. Philippe Varin, pictured right, said the EU Emissions Trading Scheme, first introduced in 2005, was a major contributor to rising electricity prices, one of the firm's big headaches. A 6.2bn pound takeover of Corus by Indian firm Tata steel was finalised earlier this month, and some fear the move will have serious implications for its Port Talbot plant, which employs more than 3,000.
Around 90% of new capacity in the steel industry is being developed in the 70% of the world not covered by the Kyoto agreement on cutting greenhouse gases. The current system involves EU Governments setting an emission cap for all manufacturing plants covered by the scheme. Each firm is then given an allowance, and can sell on any surplus if it cuts its pollution.
But there are many anomalies, including the inclusion of steel but not aluminium, and the lack of a similar scheme outside the EU. Asked by MPs about the impact on the firm if the scheme were not changed, Mr Varin said, "The consequence would be we wouldn't expand at all, then shrink production. We would import steel, we would continue to produce as much CO2 and it would be worse. "Production would be relocated to other countries."
FULL STORY here
Another triumph of British bureaucracy: "The Government's bungling over farm subsidy payments is clearly far from resolved after it emerged one Yorkshire claimant due more than 20,000 pounds has received just 89 pounds. Susan Maudsley, 60, from near Settle, who had expected subsidies in excess of 10,000 in 2005 and 2006, is a striking example of continuing chaos at the Rural Payments Agency (RPA). The RPA admitted last summer that it was at fault in her case - and yet officials are even refusing to pay out her 2006 subsidy until the previous year has been resolved. Shadow Agriculture Minister Jim Paice called the case "an outrage" that showed Ministers at the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) were still failing to get a grip on the RPA which has come under fierce fire over the late payment of subsidies to thousands of farmers."
The church's infatuation with homosexuals wouldn't have anything to do with it, of course
The Church of England was accused of a cover-up after a choirmaster who systematically abused children in his care was allowed to become a school governor. Peter Halliday admitted sexually molesting boys as young as nine, nearly 20 years ago. But Church authorities did not tell the police. Instead, they allowed him to quietly leave - on the promise he would change his ways.
As Halliday finally began a jail sentence for his crimes, it was revealed he was only caught after one of his victims saw a TV programme on sexual abuse in the Church. When he checked on the Internet and discovered his former tormentor was still working with children, he called police.
Child safety campaigners yesterday criticised the Church's "serious mishandling" of the case. Halliday, 61, was sentenced to two and half years in prison after he admitted ten counts of sexual abuse between 1986 and 1990. Winchester Crown Court heard the former choirmaster at St Peter's Church in Farnborough, Hampshire, was so trusted by his victims' families that the boys were allowed to stay at his home.
Described in court as "a bully and a revolting character", he attacked the boys at his home, during swimming lessons and on camping trips. Now in their twenties and thirties, the victims, one of whom is head of music at a private school, are still coming to terms with what they went through.
The court heard Halliday could have been stopped in 1990 when the rector of St Peter's, the Reverend Alan Boddington, was informed about the abuse. Yet Mr Boddington and the then Bishop of Dorking, David Wilcox, told Halliday he could leave quietly as long as he had no more contact with children. The court heard Halliday was on the board of governors of a secondary school in Farnborough from 1988 to 2000 but had no unsupervised contact with children. When he was seen at a choir concert in 1993, the victim who had already complained to the Church again expressed his concerns. But nothing was done.
Halliday, a married father, would have escaped justice had one of his victims not researched him on the Internet and found he was a school governor and working with a children's choir. After the hearing the Church insisted it had done nothing wrong, saying officials "acted in good faith".
Child protection workers said it had failed, however. David Pearson, of the Churches' Child Protection Advisory Service, said: "Had we been contacted by the Church authorities then we would have had no hesitation in telling them to go straight to the police."
Halliday was also ordered to pay 2,000 pounds compensation to each victim. One recalled his horror at meeting Halliday in 1993 on a course. He said: "I was just aghast. Younger brothers of friends were there. I was scared for myself, but also terrified for them."
Source
A church that has forgotten how to repent its sins
More proof that its gospel is a secular rather than a Christian one these days
Turn on the Today programme, and most days you will hear some stonewalling corporate affairs sap, who has undergone "media training" and been told to stick to his script no matter what. It always makes me splutter into my coffee. Asked to defend the leaking of an oil pipeline, he will say: "The important thing is that best-practice policies are in place to ensure that clean-up procedures are strictly adhered to, and we at Polluting Petroleum want to assure you that we have the best interests of local people at heart." Translation: they're covered in oil and their crops are ruined, but I don't suppose many of them have shares in PP or will make a fuss at the AGM. As long as we get through today, we'll be OK.
You might expect such flannelling from business people and politicians. But from the Church of England? Surely not. Yet yesterday produced the worst splutterfest ever. The hapless spokeswoman was the Rev Pearl Luxon. She had been put up by the Church to talk about its role in failing to prevent a paedophile choirmaster, Peter Halliday, from abusing children. As one of the victims said: "When your first sexual experience is of a 40-year-old man forcing himself on you, it's pretty horrific." But the Church told neither the police nor social services and simply asked Halliday to leave.
Was Mrs Luxon, who is in charge of child protection at the C of E, contrite? Not a bit of it. Her first sin was to say that she could not comment on the case at all. "Why?" asked John Humphrys. "This is not a live case. The man has admitted his guilt and will be sentenced today. It is incumbent upon you to comment on this case, surely?"
"No, I cannot comment on this particular case," intoned the robot again. No reason. All she would say, time and time again, was that the Church had "robust policies in place" to deal with child abuse. When Humphrys tried to make her acknowledge that things had gone very badly wrong over Halliday, her answer was so unsatisfactory that it deserves printing in full: "These matters are always reviewed after they occur and we learn from our mistakes and our good practice is improved at all stages when these matters are looked at. Robust policies are improved through learning from the past and from following the guidance and good practice that happens now." Aaargh!
Does this woman have no shame? Has she stopped to think about the consequences of the Church's actions, or rather inactions? Presumably not, as she displayed not a shred of regret, let alone apology. If I were offering her media training, I would advise her to say: "We are desperately sorry that this occurred. We got it badly wrong. We apologise to the victims and will make sure that it never happens again." It's not that hard, is it?
Source
This is definitely a Green religion
Environmentalism may not be saving the planet, but to judge by the news it seems to be conquering the world. Some of us have long thought that it is assuming pseudo-religious status, with its self-righteous claims to absolute truth and demands for sinners to repent. Now comes confirmation that, just as old Labour genuflected to new Labour, so our old state religion has converted to the new one.
The Church of England this week launched a booklet of "green tips" for the faithful entitled How Many Christians Does it Take to Change a Lightbulb? (only 4.99, if you still have that fiver). Its eco-commandments include: thou shalt share cars on the road to church, use virtuous green lightbulbs but cast off the Devil's junk mail, and not flush the loo three times before the cock crows.
This is more than a stunt. The C of E is serious about embracing the new orthodoxy. When it launched its Shrinking the Footprint crusade last year, the Archbishop of Canterbury complained that "early modern religion contributed to the idea that the fate of nature is for it to be bossed around by a detached sovereign will, whether divine or human". Possibly those misguided early modern religionists got that idea from the bit in the Book of Genesis about God giving Man dominion "over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth". Yet now the Archbishop condemns notions of nature being "bossed around" not only by Man, but even by God. Creepy.
As with Labour, it is not the power of the new religion that explains this craven conversion but the feebleness of the old. Such is the lack of confidence within the traditional Establishment today, everybody from politicians to church leaders wants to hug environmentalism as a new form of unquestioned authority. Scientists have become the equivalent of high priests in white coats, summoned to condemn heretics; a group of them now demand that the Channel 4 documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle be amended to reflect the one true faith before the DVD goes on sale. Perhaps they would like to burn it, if not for the CO2.
When there is only one recycled hymn sheet in town and you can believe in any shade of politics or religion just as long as it's green, those of us who put our faith in humanity should surely worry more about the new dogma than the old. They all now buy into the same non-plastic bag of fashionable prejudices: that people are the problem rather than the solution, and we must be saved from ourselves. Sackcloth and ashes is the new black. As a wise man once said, kick against the pricks. Or as we might say today, give them a human footprint up the carbon emissions.
Source
Net influx of 185,000 per annum into the UK
In 2005, an estimated 565,000 migrants arrived to live in the UK for at least a year. This was lower than the 2004 estimate, but higher than all other years since the method to estimate Total International Migration began in 1991. In the same period, 380,000 people emigrated from the UK for a year or more; over half of these were British citizens. Australia was the most popular destination for British emigrants followed by Spain and France. Net migration, the difference between immigration and emigration, was 185,000. This was equivalent to adding just over 500 people a day to the UK population.
In 2005, 80,000 citizens from the group of eight central and eastern European countries that acceded to the EU on 1 May 2004 (known as the A8) immigrated to the UK for a year or more. This was 54 per cent higher than the 52,000 estimate for 2004. This can be explained by 2005 being the first calendar year following EU accession, and A8 citizens having increased freedom to live and work in the UK. Over 70 per cent of A8 migrants arriving in 2005 were Polish citizens.
Almost 85 per cent of those A8 citizens migrating to the UK came for work reasons, that is, they were 'looking for work' or had a 'definite job' to go to. Overall, nearly half of all citizens migrating to the UK gave work-related reasons.
'Formal study' is another important reason for people migrating to the UK accounting for almost a quarter of all immigration in 2005.
There are notable differences in the routes that migrants of different citizenships use to enter the UK. In 2004 and 2005, nearly 90 per cent of A8 migrants entered via routes other than the main UK airports (such as via sea ports, the Channel Tunnel, or Stansted and Luton and other local airports).
In contrast, nearly 75 per cent of citizens from Commonwealth and Other foreign countries entered the UK via Heathrow airport. Over 60 per cent of British migrants entered the UK via Heathrow, Gatwick and Manchester airports.
Source
Non-English Britain
Immigration correctness is having huge effects
One in five schoolchildren is from an ethnic minority - almost double the figure a decade ago. The annual school census reveals a Britain where one in eight pupils speaks a language other than English at home. The record figures include more than 40,000 children from Eastern Europe who have enrolled at schools since the enlargement of the European Union in 2004.
The statistics emerged as the race relations watchdog warned that Britain's segregated schools are a "ticking timebomb". The Commission for Racial Equality's director of policy said parents must stop sending their children to schools where most pupils come from similar religious or racial backgrounds. Nick Johnson also suggested schools should be given more money to admit a racially mixed intake. He said: "We're in fear of turning into a mini-America with racially determined schools. "Schools are where our children first learn how to get along with people from other cultures and backgrounds. Racially segregated schools prevent this from happening. This is a ticking timebomb."
His comments came as figures published by the Department for Education and Skills showed the biggest year- on-year increase in ethnic minority pupils for a decade. They account for just under a fifth (19.8 per cent) of England's 6.5 million primary and secondary pupils, up from 11 per cent when Labour came to power. Meanwhile, the number of primary pupils alone who do not speak English as their first language increased by seven per cent from last year to 448,000 - or about one child in seven. Overall, it is around one in eight.
But the Commission for Racial Equality is concerned that there are not enough resources to integrate pupils from such diverse backgrounds. Mr Johnson said he was particularly worried about Tony Blair's controversial city academies and trust schools. He added that some of these are using their extra freedoms to "cream off pupils from certain ethnic backgrounds or religions, thus ... increasing racial tensions".
The Conservatives said ministers had been caught off-guard by the increase in non-native English speakers in schools. Tory education spokesman David Willetts said: "The Government has completely failed to keep up with the rate of change in our school population." A DfES spokesman said: "The Education and Inspections Act 2006 placed a new duty on the governing bodies of all maintained schools, including faith schools, to promote community cohesion."
Source
Pensioner is refused sight drugs – until he goes blind
Socialist "compassion" at work. Elderly people can go blind for all they care
A RETIRED policeman is going blind – because a Yorkshire health trust will not pay for treatment that could save his sight. Leslie Howard, also an ex-Royal Military policeman and former prison officer, suffers from a degenerative eye condition. The drugs needed to save his sight are available on the NHS in other parts of the country. But Mr Howard, 76, has been told by health chiefs not to expect a penny of NHS treatment until he goes blind in one eye and starts losing sight in the other. He fears that after a lifetime of public service the decision by North Yorkshire and York Primary Care Trust could plunge him into total blindness and leave him and his invalid wife Mary Ann, 70, housebound.
As his case led to a new row over NHS "health rationing", Mr Howard, of Acomb, York, said: "The problem is we have lived too long and are just pieces of meat now – a nuisance. "I was advised to go private but was quoted 1,000 pounds an injection for who knows how many injections. I can't afford that kind of money. I've paid tens of thousands of pounds in taxes and to know that I will now lose my sight because I can't afford private treatment is diabolical."
Mr Howard was diagnosed with wet age-related macular degeneration (AMD) in his right eye in November. It can cause sight loss in three months. He says he was advised by the North Yorkshire and York PCT that it would only consider funding once he had gone blind in one eye and developed a similar condition in his second eye. He added: "It is more than three months since I was diagnosed and it is getting worse by the day. Has the Government lost all sense of compassion as well as economics?"
The head of campaigns at the Royal National Institute of the Blind, Steve Winyard, said: "This is a desperate situation for Mr Howard. His care trust is leaving him to go blind in one eye even though sight-saving treatments are available on the NHS. "We hear of more and more patients being forced to use retirement funds or life-savings to pay for sight-saving treatments that should be available readily on the NHS. "In cases like Mr Howard's, where people can't afford private treatment, patients face the prospect of going blind unnecessarily."
The chief executive of the Macular Disease Society, Tom Bremridge, added: "The so-called 'second-eye' policy is wholly unacceptable on ethical and practical grounds." Losing sight in one eye could affect a person's co-ordination and increase the risk of falls, while not treating the condition meant patients had a high risk of developing the problem in the second eye. Unsuccessful treatment in the second eye could then mean total blindness, Mr Bremridge said. He added: "It also makes no economic sense to deny treatment. The cost of supporting people with sight loss far outweighs the cost of treatment."
AMD sufferer and former Halifax Labour MP Alice Mahon, who took legal action against her PCT and forced a U-turn over its refusal to provide similar injections on the NHS, said: "It is an obscene policy. It's outrageous. "The whole fault is handing over all this funding to the PCTs, so it's a postcode lottery and not a national health service. I am particularly concerned there seems to be discrimination against older people who have paid into the NHS all their lives."
The North Yorkshire and York PCT said yesterday Department of Health guidelines were that, until the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NIHCE) published final guidance on new treatments, NHS bodies should continue local arrangements to manage their introduction.
There was no NIHCE guidance yet for the drugs Mr Howard wanted. So in agreement with other PCTs in the region, the trust was funding such treatments only in cases where there was evidence they would work. If any patient felt they should be considered for treatment the PCT would examine their circumstances, a spokesman added.
Source
And he's not alone:
A WIDOWED grandmother who devoted 30 years of her life to the NHS and twice fought off cancer has become the latest patient in Yorkshire to be warned she faces being denied vital treatment for a condition which causes blindness. Retired midwife Doreen Kenworthy was last week given the devastating diagnosis that she was suffering from the eye condition age-related macular degeneration.
But her shock was compounded when doctors told her the NHS would not pay for treatment until she lost the sight in her affected eye and began to lose it in the other – although further loss of sight could be prevented if she paid out thousands of pounds for private care. Her plight is similar to that of York pensioner Leslie Howard who was refused immediate NHS treatment, although a private hospital group has now stepped in to give him the care he needs. Dr Kenworthy, 56, of Stanley, Wakefield, has vowed to fight to get sight-saving treatment.
"I am not prepared to die of cancer, neither am I prepared to go blind whilst fighting it," she said. "I have never been a supporter of the private sector in my professional life. I believe in Aneurin Bevan's philosophy of free healthcare access for all at all levels. "I understand there are cutbacks, although I don't agree with the way the Labour Government has handled the NHS, but to be told 'Sorry you have to go almost blind before you get help' is dreadful."
Dr Kenworthy, who worked as a midwife and later trained midwives before retiring last year from Bradford University, said she was diagnosed with breast cancer two years ago, undergoing a year of treatment before the condition recurred in January. The eye complaint was unrelated but she had already lost some central vision in her right eye which began deteriorating a month ago. She was urgently called for tests at St James's Hospital in Leeds where specialists told her she had the eye complaint and further deterioration could be prevented only by drug injections.
She was told these were only provided by the NHS after she lost her sight in one eye and began to lose it in the other – although they were available privately at a cost of up to 1,000 each over 12-24 months. "I did not expect to be told that I couldn't be treated on the NHS but if I went into the private sector I could be treated tomorrow," she said.
Dr Kenworthy, who has twins aged 31 and four grandchildren, said the only option she had to fund the treatment was by remortgaging her home. "To have to tell your children twice you've got cancer, then to say by the way you're going blind in your right eye and can't have any treatment until it affects your other eye is very hard," she said. "It's been devastating to have cancer twice in two years, to fight it, to retire after 30 years in the NHS and then get this on top."
Source
THE NEW INQUISITION: "FREE SPEECH DOES NOT EXTEND TO INACCURATE STATEMENTS"
A group of British climate scientists is demanding changes to a skeptical documentary about global warming, saying there are grave errors in the program billed as a response to Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth." "The Great Global Warming Swindle" aired on British television in March and is coming out soon on DVD. It argues that man-made emissions have a marginal impact on the world's climate and warming can better be explained by changing patterns of solar activity.
An open letter sent Tuesday by 38 scientists, including the former heads of Britain's academy of sciences and Britain's weather office, called on producer Wag TV to remove what it called "major misrepresentations" from the film before the DVD release -- a demand its director said was tantamount to censorship.
Bob Ward, the former spokesman for the Royal Society, Britain's academy of science, and one of the letter's signatories, said director Mark Durkin made a "long catalogue of fundamental and profound mistakes" -- including the claim that volcanoes produce more carbon dioxide than humans, and that the Earth's atmosphere was warmer during the Middle Ages than it is today. "Free speech does not extend to misleading the public by making factually inaccurate statements,'' he said. "Somebody has to stand up for the public interest here."
Durkin called the letter "loathsome." "This is a contemptible, weasel-worded attempt to gag scientific criticism, and it won't work," he said. "I don't believe they're interested in quality control when it comes to the reporting of science -- so long as it's on their side." Durkin acknowledged two of the errors highlighted by the scientists -- including the claim about volcanic emissions -- but he described those changes as minor and said they would be corrected in the expanded DVD release.
But the scientists do not want the DVD released without edits to completely remove the material they object to -- something Ward said would fatally weaken the film's argument. "The fact is that it's a very convincing program, and if you're not very aware of the science you wouldn't necessarily see what the errors are," Ward said. "But the errors are huge. ... Without those errors in, he doesn't have a story."
Ward has also complained to Britain's media regulator, which said it was investigating the matter. British broadcast law demands impartiality on matters of major political and industrial controversy -- and penalties can be imposed for misrepresentations of fact.
The decision to broadcast Durkin's documentary on Channel 4 was an unusual move in a country where the role of man-made carbon emissions in heating the globe is largely taken for granted and politicians regularly spar over which party has the greenest environmental policy. As for the former vice president, Gore has been hired as an adviser to the British government, which plans to send copies of his film to schools around England.
Source
EU EMISSIONS TRADING SCHEME MAY LEAD TO END OF BRITISH STEEL PRODUCTION
A FLAGSHIP EU scheme to cut pollution is "counter-productive" and could damage the Welsh steel industry, the chief executive of Corus warned yesterday. Philippe Varin, pictured right, said the EU Emissions Trading Scheme, first introduced in 2005, was a major contributor to rising electricity prices, one of the firm's big headaches. A 6.2bn pound takeover of Corus by Indian firm Tata steel was finalised earlier this month, and some fear the move will have serious implications for its Port Talbot plant, which employs more than 3,000.
Around 90% of new capacity in the steel industry is being developed in the 70% of the world not covered by the Kyoto agreement on cutting greenhouse gases. The current system involves EU Governments setting an emission cap for all manufacturing plants covered by the scheme. Each firm is then given an allowance, and can sell on any surplus if it cuts its pollution.
But there are many anomalies, including the inclusion of steel but not aluminium, and the lack of a similar scheme outside the EU. Asked by MPs about the impact on the firm if the scheme were not changed, Mr Varin said, "The consequence would be we wouldn't expand at all, then shrink production. We would import steel, we would continue to produce as much CO2 and it would be worse. "Production would be relocated to other countries."
FULL STORY here
Another triumph of British bureaucracy: "The Government's bungling over farm subsidy payments is clearly far from resolved after it emerged one Yorkshire claimant due more than 20,000 pounds has received just 89 pounds. Susan Maudsley, 60, from near Settle, who had expected subsidies in excess of 10,000 in 2005 and 2006, is a striking example of continuing chaos at the Rural Payments Agency (RPA). The RPA admitted last summer that it was at fault in her case - and yet officials are even refusing to pay out her 2006 subsidy until the previous year has been resolved. Shadow Agriculture Minister Jim Paice called the case "an outrage" that showed Ministers at the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) were still failing to get a grip on the RPA which has come under fierce fire over the late payment of subsidies to thousands of farmers."
Friday, April 27, 2007
"Green" garbage collection bad for your health
At the behest of the EU, most of Britain has reduced garbage collection from weekly to fortnightly -- to "encourage" people to recycle!
HANDLING rubbish that has been left out for a fortnight before being collected can increase the risk of health problems including asthma and nausea, a study has found. Researchers found that the level of bacteria and fungal spores in the air above bins that had not been emptied for two weeks was more than 10 times that in locations where there was a weekly collection.
The findings come amid concerns about the public health risks of cutting collections. More than 140 councils in England have moved to fortnightly emptying to encourage recycling and cut costs, despite warnings of an increase in rat and insect infestation.
The spread of fortnightly collections has also raised fears about fly-tipping [illegal dumping]. Government figures show incidents rose by over 10% last year. In 2005/6 there were 1,034,518 cases, up from 926,534 in 2004/5. Caroline Spelman, the shadow local government secretary, said: "Fortnightly collections, designed to be a green initiative, could result in more people driving to the countryside to dump waste." But Ben Bradshaw, the environment minister, said: "There is absolutely no evidence of any connection between alternate weekly collections and fly-tipping."
The new report, published in the journal Science of the Total Environment, found rubbish left out for longer periods produced tens of thousands more spores. Dr Tom Kosatsky, a medical epidemiologist at McGill University in Montreal, said: "If rubbish is decaying for two weeks and is heated by warm weather, it provides a fertile breeding ground for spores. "Exposure to fungi on this level can trigger sore throats, respiratory symptoms, faintness, weakness and depression, asthma and other allergic reactions."
Dr Toni Gladding, a lecturer in environmental engineering at the Open University, said: "Councils introduced the change without recognising there may be a risk to occupational health."
Source
STENCH!
Prof. Brignell comments on the British garbage nonsense -- nonsense that is as destructive as almost all current Greenie ideas are. See the original post for links
For the first time since the Great Stench of London in 1858, the steady improvement in Britain 's hygiene has gone into reverse. There are so many reasons why this further disaster is a typical product of modern British politics:
1. It was dreamt up by unelected Brussels bureaucrats
2. The British Government is desperately trying to cover up its lack of authority by pretending that it is defending its own policies, however dim-witted.
3. It is facilitated by the total lack of effective opposition in Parliament.
4. It is being done in obeisance to the new eco-religion.
5. It involves the diversion of control away from elected authorities to unmovable officials.
6. It is justified by the global warming myth (but an even more bizarre version based on methane).
7. It defies all the basic sciences of human hygiene, such as bacteriology and mycology.
8. It involves ordinary citizens in elaborate rituals, with draconian fines it they get them wrong.
9. It exposes ordinary people, but especially those occupationally involved, to greatly magnified risk of serious disease.
10. It is being done in total defiance of mounting anger among the victims.
11. It is being done against the advice of the Government's own expensive consultants.
12. It will lead to a substantial increase in illegal activity that is distressing and dangerous to the general populace.
It is the abandonment of weekly refuse collection, one of the staples of health protection law since the great Public Health Act of 1875. The enfeebled British Government is obliged to enact this gross and murderous folly or be fined by the EU Commissars for failing to reduce the burial of rubbish. It is self evident to anyone with a modicum of general scientific education that this is a route to human disaster, but if people must have "modern" research, see this in the Times.
The bacterial generation time can be as short as twenty minutes. You don't need a calculator to know that after a week one cell can turn into a figure with rather a large number of noughts behind it. After a fortnight the number of noughts is more than somewhat bigger. Then there are the rodents and insects. One common housefly, musca domestica, can convey millions of bacteria on its feet. Houseflies can transmit intestinal worms, or their eggs, and are potential vectors of many serious diseases such as dysentery, gastroenteritis, typhoid, cholera and tuberculosis. In the nutritive warmth of a putrid dustbin, the total reproductive cycle can be as short as a week. Dustbins now contain human excreta, particularly of babies, so houseflies complete the closed loop by settling on food. Rats spread several serious diseases. Overflowing dustbins are rodent heaven. The inevitable increase in illegal fly-tipping [illegal dumping in parks and by roadsides etc.] will distribute uncontrolled, festering sources of pestilence all over the country.
Can any sane person of moderate intelligence believe that this is anything but one of the most insane and dangerous policies ever devised by man?
Hope for autism
It would help to know more about which categories of autism were helped by which aspect of the treatment but the evidence that SOME treatment works for some children is encouraging
Toddlers found to have autism who undergo intensive teaching programmes from the age of 3 can raise their IQ by as much as 40 points, according to a three-year study. The research found that intensive, early education, which costs about 30,000 pounds a year per child, also led to “significant positive changes” in language, daily living skills, motor ability and social skills.
The study, conducted by the University of Southampton, will put pressure on the Government to help to fund early intervention for autistic children. It often costs households more than 30,000 pounds a year as one parent is forced to give up work completely to oversee about 40 hours of tuition a week. Most of the money is spent on hiring tutors and a course supervisor who shapes the programme for the child and assesses its progress.
It is the first major study of its kind in Britain, although thousands of families are known to be using the programme, the best known of which is applied behaviour analysis (ABA). It breaks down learning into tiny chunks, using imitation and reinforcement to encourage autistic children to communicate, then speak and follow commands, before moving on to more advanced skills.
Half the 44 autistic children had the treatment for two years, significantly starting at the age of 30-42 months. That is usually the time at which families who suspect their child may be autistic are struggling to get a formal diagnosis.
The children in the study ranged from the high-functioning, with better communication skills and higher IQs, to the low-functioning with poor speech and few social skills. All had a formal diagnosis of autism.
The researchers found that early intervention was more effective with the higher-functioning children who had a higher mental age and better social skills, although all benefited to some degree. [A possible "fudge" there. Overgeneralized results probable]
The first group of children in the study were given 25 hours of one-to-one treatment a week from between three and five tutors, and also from their parents, all using the principles of ABA. This is fewer hours than the 40 a week most parents sign up to. The control group had received the basic speech or language therapy normally offered by local education authorities.
As well as improved communication and social skills, more than a quarter of the children showed “very substantial improvements” in their IQ. In one case IQ increased from 30 to 70, in another, from 72 to 115. Most of the population has an IQ of between 85 and 115. “This form of teaching can, in many cases, lead to major change,” said Professor Bob Remington, deputy head of the University of Southampton School of Psychology. “In practice, the positive changes we see in IQ, language and daily living skills can make a real difference to the future lives of children with autism.”
With one in a hundred children thought to be suffering from some form of autism, the costs are potentially very high. However, John Wylie, chief executive of TreeHouse Trust, a school for autistic children, said: “It has to be compared with the cost of looking after someone with autism which conservative estimates put at 3 million pounds over their lifetime. Spending the money at a time when it can make a difference is surely better than pouring it about when it can make little difference.”
Source
The misleading attack on boys in Britain
The apparent underachievement by boys in school tests is a distortion caused by a feminised examination system and a higher number of boys suffering behavioural problems, according to research. Academics from Durham University have found that the real average difference in ability between girls and boys from 11 years old to A level is less than half a grade.
Alarm over the academic performance of boys has been mounting. Last year almost 57 per cent of boys failed to get good GCSE grades in English and maths. At A level, 25.3 per cent of girls achieved at least one grade A, compared with 22.7 per cent of boys. Last year 43 per cent of first-degree graduates were men, while 59 per cent of 2:1 degrees and firsts were awarded to women. However, Peter Tymms, the director of the Curriculum, Evaluation and Management Centre at Durham University, and Dr Christine Merrell say that in academic terms boys are not falling further behind.
Professor Tymms said: “The real difference is that boys have a far wider spread — in maths, there are more gifted and talented boys, but also more with special needs.” He added: “If you want boys to do well, you give them a speedy multiple choice. If you want girls to do better, get them to write an essay.” The information was presented at a Royal Society of Medicine conference Boys: Their Nurture and Education.
Source
Foolish British education frenzies
What have been the defining moments of Tony Blair's prime ministership? Last Sunday, the Observer assessed Blair's impact on British society over the past 10 years (1). While the ill-fated farrago of the Iraq war in 2003, the unprecedented `emotional' outburst at the death of Princess Diana in 1997 and the ban on foxhunting were correctly identified as `key moments' of his reign, Blair's insistence - before he was elected to government - that New Labour would be primarily about `education, education, education' was oddly absent from the list.
As the Blair years have rolled on, it seems education really has become a laboratory for trying out `big ideas' that will magically provide internal coherence for the government and outward cohesion in society at large. Indeed, over the past week there has been a veritable `scramble for education', wherein union leaders, policymakers and cabinet ministers have shown that they can only relate to society through the prism of the classroom.
One consequence of today's blinkered obsession with schooling is that it encourages a rather myopic dissection of its every facet. Last year, it was the fat content of Turkey Twizzlers that was of prime concern. Now it's whether schools will become `pressure cookers' as a consequence of `climate change'. Teachers have been demanding this week `the right to walk out of hot classrooms during soaring temperatures' (2). It seems the National Union of Teachers (NUT) can predict future weather conditions with an accuracy that would shame the Met Office. Apparently, in future summers there will be frequent heatwaves and thus `schools should close during the summer'. In the past, the old left mistakenly argued that `education is a right'. Now NUT leaders believe that at the first sight of sunshine, there should be a `right' to forget about education altogether. As one teacher put it, `if temperatures soar then it may be necessary to disrupt children's schooling' (3).
Still, this made a brief respite from stories about children disrupting schooling. Normal service was resumed on Wednesday when the education secretary Alan Johnson said that website providers had a `moral obligation' to stop pupils posting offensive school videos that demean their teachers or other children. He said: `The online harassment of teachers is causing some to consider leaving the profession because of the defamation and humiliation they are forced to suffer.' (4) Now, unwittingly appearing on some jokey YouTube clip would hardly be the highlight of anyone's teaching career. But surely this is simply a more hi-tech version of `defamatory' graffiti or cartoon caricatures of teachers that schoolchildren have long enjoyed executing. The difference today is that New Labour launches a campaign against kids acting like, well, kids - with website providers, rather than teachers or government, forced to be the moral guardians.
The seeming inability of ministers to use words and values to socialise children was also in evidence with Johnson's latest initiative: to reward school pupils financially if they don't play truant or misbehave at school. Incredibly, this was accurately satirised in the inaugural episode of the BBC drama, Party Animals, wherein a junior Home Office minister proposed giving delinquents a `good behaviour bond' (ie, a bribe) to entice them to behave (5). Now life is imitating art.
Improving classroom behaviour, we are told, is vital if we're to tackle anti-social behaviour in wider society. The spate of tragic and needless killings of black teenagers in London this year has inevitably been connected with poor educational attainment. And once again, if only poorly disciplined students (and their parents) learned to love their homework assignments, they'd be less open to the nefarious temptations of `street culture'. Steve Sinnott of the NUT called `for a national investigation into the impact of street culture, amid rising concerns over murders and stabbings'. `There should also be better monitoring of black boys' performance', he said (6).
In a roundabout way, Tony Blair (and Trevor Phillips of the Commission for Racial Equality before him) echoed this view, citing an anti-learning subculture as being responsible for black boys' underachievement and, by implication, for stabbings and murders. It seems neither the government nor the teaching unions bother to read the latest Ofsted statistics. While it is true that black pupils obtain fewer GCSE passes than pupils from other ethnic backgrounds, their attainment rate has increased rather than decreased over the past 10 years (a reflection, perhaps, of the fact that black adults are more integrated into the economy than would have been the case previously) (7). If sections of the British student body are under-performing, those responsible for promoting an `anti-learning culture' are the government and the education authorities themselves.
Increasingly, the UK education system resembles a smorgasbord of anti-aspiration propaganda. If black and other schoolchildren come through the education system believing that the society they live in is both destructive and inherently oppressive, it's little wonder that some students may become fatalistic about their life chances. Bombarded with similar messages in the wider world, too, this will have a more powerfully negative influence on a black student's outlook than the collected works of rappers like the late Tupac Shakur, who are frequently blamed for violence. In fact, many black students I've taught either laugh off the ludicrous excesses of gangsta rap or feel uncomfortable with its decidedly low-rent connotations. The high-profile (but still extremely rare) incidences of teen murders in the capital are born out of social factors rather than songs. Have sociologists and commentators ever blamed Glasgow's gangs-and-knife incidents on the influence of bagpipes or the city's jangly indie bands?
Today, blaming everything on cultural influences means that banal suppositions on gangsta rap somehow influencing teenagers can be taken as good coin. Nevertheless, it's precisely this official belief in cultural determinism that means the education system becomes loaded with ever more demands for `responsibility' (and grounds for meddling) than ever before.
All of these developments have little to do with providing a decent, liberal education system for all. As we've seen over the past week, the classroom becomes both the cause of problems (teacher stress, bullying, even heatstroke) and the solution (namely, getting everyone to behave). For all the current digressions on Blair's 10 years in power, it seems mediating governmental decisions through `education, education, education' has stood the test of time and still largely goes unquestioned. Who needs 10 more years of that?
Source
At the behest of the EU, most of Britain has reduced garbage collection from weekly to fortnightly -- to "encourage" people to recycle!
HANDLING rubbish that has been left out for a fortnight before being collected can increase the risk of health problems including asthma and nausea, a study has found. Researchers found that the level of bacteria and fungal spores in the air above bins that had not been emptied for two weeks was more than 10 times that in locations where there was a weekly collection.
The findings come amid concerns about the public health risks of cutting collections. More than 140 councils in England have moved to fortnightly emptying to encourage recycling and cut costs, despite warnings of an increase in rat and insect infestation.
The spread of fortnightly collections has also raised fears about fly-tipping [illegal dumping]. Government figures show incidents rose by over 10% last year. In 2005/6 there were 1,034,518 cases, up from 926,534 in 2004/5. Caroline Spelman, the shadow local government secretary, said: "Fortnightly collections, designed to be a green initiative, could result in more people driving to the countryside to dump waste." But Ben Bradshaw, the environment minister, said: "There is absolutely no evidence of any connection between alternate weekly collections and fly-tipping."
The new report, published in the journal Science of the Total Environment, found rubbish left out for longer periods produced tens of thousands more spores. Dr Tom Kosatsky, a medical epidemiologist at McGill University in Montreal, said: "If rubbish is decaying for two weeks and is heated by warm weather, it provides a fertile breeding ground for spores. "Exposure to fungi on this level can trigger sore throats, respiratory symptoms, faintness, weakness and depression, asthma and other allergic reactions."
Dr Toni Gladding, a lecturer in environmental engineering at the Open University, said: "Councils introduced the change without recognising there may be a risk to occupational health."
Source
STENCH!
Prof. Brignell comments on the British garbage nonsense -- nonsense that is as destructive as almost all current Greenie ideas are. See the original post for links
For the first time since the Great Stench of London in 1858, the steady improvement in Britain 's hygiene has gone into reverse. There are so many reasons why this further disaster is a typical product of modern British politics:
1. It was dreamt up by unelected Brussels bureaucrats
2. The British Government is desperately trying to cover up its lack of authority by pretending that it is defending its own policies, however dim-witted.
3. It is facilitated by the total lack of effective opposition in Parliament.
4. It is being done in obeisance to the new eco-religion.
5. It involves the diversion of control away from elected authorities to unmovable officials.
6. It is justified by the global warming myth (but an even more bizarre version based on methane).
7. It defies all the basic sciences of human hygiene, such as bacteriology and mycology.
8. It involves ordinary citizens in elaborate rituals, with draconian fines it they get them wrong.
9. It exposes ordinary people, but especially those occupationally involved, to greatly magnified risk of serious disease.
10. It is being done in total defiance of mounting anger among the victims.
11. It is being done against the advice of the Government's own expensive consultants.
12. It will lead to a substantial increase in illegal activity that is distressing and dangerous to the general populace.
It is the abandonment of weekly refuse collection, one of the staples of health protection law since the great Public Health Act of 1875. The enfeebled British Government is obliged to enact this gross and murderous folly or be fined by the EU Commissars for failing to reduce the burial of rubbish. It is self evident to anyone with a modicum of general scientific education that this is a route to human disaster, but if people must have "modern" research, see this in the Times.
The bacterial generation time can be as short as twenty minutes. You don't need a calculator to know that after a week one cell can turn into a figure with rather a large number of noughts behind it. After a fortnight the number of noughts is more than somewhat bigger. Then there are the rodents and insects. One common housefly, musca domestica, can convey millions of bacteria on its feet. Houseflies can transmit intestinal worms, or their eggs, and are potential vectors of many serious diseases such as dysentery, gastroenteritis, typhoid, cholera and tuberculosis. In the nutritive warmth of a putrid dustbin, the total reproductive cycle can be as short as a week. Dustbins now contain human excreta, particularly of babies, so houseflies complete the closed loop by settling on food. Rats spread several serious diseases. Overflowing dustbins are rodent heaven. The inevitable increase in illegal fly-tipping [illegal dumping in parks and by roadsides etc.] will distribute uncontrolled, festering sources of pestilence all over the country.
Can any sane person of moderate intelligence believe that this is anything but one of the most insane and dangerous policies ever devised by man?
Hope for autism
It would help to know more about which categories of autism were helped by which aspect of the treatment but the evidence that SOME treatment works for some children is encouraging
Toddlers found to have autism who undergo intensive teaching programmes from the age of 3 can raise their IQ by as much as 40 points, according to a three-year study. The research found that intensive, early education, which costs about 30,000 pounds a year per child, also led to “significant positive changes” in language, daily living skills, motor ability and social skills.
The study, conducted by the University of Southampton, will put pressure on the Government to help to fund early intervention for autistic children. It often costs households more than 30,000 pounds a year as one parent is forced to give up work completely to oversee about 40 hours of tuition a week. Most of the money is spent on hiring tutors and a course supervisor who shapes the programme for the child and assesses its progress.
It is the first major study of its kind in Britain, although thousands of families are known to be using the programme, the best known of which is applied behaviour analysis (ABA). It breaks down learning into tiny chunks, using imitation and reinforcement to encourage autistic children to communicate, then speak and follow commands, before moving on to more advanced skills.
Half the 44 autistic children had the treatment for two years, significantly starting at the age of 30-42 months. That is usually the time at which families who suspect their child may be autistic are struggling to get a formal diagnosis.
The children in the study ranged from the high-functioning, with better communication skills and higher IQs, to the low-functioning with poor speech and few social skills. All had a formal diagnosis of autism.
The researchers found that early intervention was more effective with the higher-functioning children who had a higher mental age and better social skills, although all benefited to some degree. [A possible "fudge" there. Overgeneralized results probable]
The first group of children in the study were given 25 hours of one-to-one treatment a week from between three and five tutors, and also from their parents, all using the principles of ABA. This is fewer hours than the 40 a week most parents sign up to. The control group had received the basic speech or language therapy normally offered by local education authorities.
As well as improved communication and social skills, more than a quarter of the children showed “very substantial improvements” in their IQ. In one case IQ increased from 30 to 70, in another, from 72 to 115. Most of the population has an IQ of between 85 and 115. “This form of teaching can, in many cases, lead to major change,” said Professor Bob Remington, deputy head of the University of Southampton School of Psychology. “In practice, the positive changes we see in IQ, language and daily living skills can make a real difference to the future lives of children with autism.”
With one in a hundred children thought to be suffering from some form of autism, the costs are potentially very high. However, John Wylie, chief executive of TreeHouse Trust, a school for autistic children, said: “It has to be compared with the cost of looking after someone with autism which conservative estimates put at 3 million pounds over their lifetime. Spending the money at a time when it can make a difference is surely better than pouring it about when it can make little difference.”
Source
The misleading attack on boys in Britain
The apparent underachievement by boys in school tests is a distortion caused by a feminised examination system and a higher number of boys suffering behavioural problems, according to research. Academics from Durham University have found that the real average difference in ability between girls and boys from 11 years old to A level is less than half a grade.
Alarm over the academic performance of boys has been mounting. Last year almost 57 per cent of boys failed to get good GCSE grades in English and maths. At A level, 25.3 per cent of girls achieved at least one grade A, compared with 22.7 per cent of boys. Last year 43 per cent of first-degree graduates were men, while 59 per cent of 2:1 degrees and firsts were awarded to women. However, Peter Tymms, the director of the Curriculum, Evaluation and Management Centre at Durham University, and Dr Christine Merrell say that in academic terms boys are not falling further behind.
Professor Tymms said: “The real difference is that boys have a far wider spread — in maths, there are more gifted and talented boys, but also more with special needs.” He added: “If you want boys to do well, you give them a speedy multiple choice. If you want girls to do better, get them to write an essay.” The information was presented at a Royal Society of Medicine conference Boys: Their Nurture and Education.
Source
Foolish British education frenzies
What have been the defining moments of Tony Blair's prime ministership? Last Sunday, the Observer assessed Blair's impact on British society over the past 10 years (1). While the ill-fated farrago of the Iraq war in 2003, the unprecedented `emotional' outburst at the death of Princess Diana in 1997 and the ban on foxhunting were correctly identified as `key moments' of his reign, Blair's insistence - before he was elected to government - that New Labour would be primarily about `education, education, education' was oddly absent from the list.
As the Blair years have rolled on, it seems education really has become a laboratory for trying out `big ideas' that will magically provide internal coherence for the government and outward cohesion in society at large. Indeed, over the past week there has been a veritable `scramble for education', wherein union leaders, policymakers and cabinet ministers have shown that they can only relate to society through the prism of the classroom.
One consequence of today's blinkered obsession with schooling is that it encourages a rather myopic dissection of its every facet. Last year, it was the fat content of Turkey Twizzlers that was of prime concern. Now it's whether schools will become `pressure cookers' as a consequence of `climate change'. Teachers have been demanding this week `the right to walk out of hot classrooms during soaring temperatures' (2). It seems the National Union of Teachers (NUT) can predict future weather conditions with an accuracy that would shame the Met Office. Apparently, in future summers there will be frequent heatwaves and thus `schools should close during the summer'. In the past, the old left mistakenly argued that `education is a right'. Now NUT leaders believe that at the first sight of sunshine, there should be a `right' to forget about education altogether. As one teacher put it, `if temperatures soar then it may be necessary to disrupt children's schooling' (3).
Still, this made a brief respite from stories about children disrupting schooling. Normal service was resumed on Wednesday when the education secretary Alan Johnson said that website providers had a `moral obligation' to stop pupils posting offensive school videos that demean their teachers or other children. He said: `The online harassment of teachers is causing some to consider leaving the profession because of the defamation and humiliation they are forced to suffer.' (4) Now, unwittingly appearing on some jokey YouTube clip would hardly be the highlight of anyone's teaching career. But surely this is simply a more hi-tech version of `defamatory' graffiti or cartoon caricatures of teachers that schoolchildren have long enjoyed executing. The difference today is that New Labour launches a campaign against kids acting like, well, kids - with website providers, rather than teachers or government, forced to be the moral guardians.
The seeming inability of ministers to use words and values to socialise children was also in evidence with Johnson's latest initiative: to reward school pupils financially if they don't play truant or misbehave at school. Incredibly, this was accurately satirised in the inaugural episode of the BBC drama, Party Animals, wherein a junior Home Office minister proposed giving delinquents a `good behaviour bond' (ie, a bribe) to entice them to behave (5). Now life is imitating art.
Improving classroom behaviour, we are told, is vital if we're to tackle anti-social behaviour in wider society. The spate of tragic and needless killings of black teenagers in London this year has inevitably been connected with poor educational attainment. And once again, if only poorly disciplined students (and their parents) learned to love their homework assignments, they'd be less open to the nefarious temptations of `street culture'. Steve Sinnott of the NUT called `for a national investigation into the impact of street culture, amid rising concerns over murders and stabbings'. `There should also be better monitoring of black boys' performance', he said (6).
In a roundabout way, Tony Blair (and Trevor Phillips of the Commission for Racial Equality before him) echoed this view, citing an anti-learning subculture as being responsible for black boys' underachievement and, by implication, for stabbings and murders. It seems neither the government nor the teaching unions bother to read the latest Ofsted statistics. While it is true that black pupils obtain fewer GCSE passes than pupils from other ethnic backgrounds, their attainment rate has increased rather than decreased over the past 10 years (a reflection, perhaps, of the fact that black adults are more integrated into the economy than would have been the case previously) (7). If sections of the British student body are under-performing, those responsible for promoting an `anti-learning culture' are the government and the education authorities themselves.
Increasingly, the UK education system resembles a smorgasbord of anti-aspiration propaganda. If black and other schoolchildren come through the education system believing that the society they live in is both destructive and inherently oppressive, it's little wonder that some students may become fatalistic about their life chances. Bombarded with similar messages in the wider world, too, this will have a more powerfully negative influence on a black student's outlook than the collected works of rappers like the late Tupac Shakur, who are frequently blamed for violence. In fact, many black students I've taught either laugh off the ludicrous excesses of gangsta rap or feel uncomfortable with its decidedly low-rent connotations. The high-profile (but still extremely rare) incidences of teen murders in the capital are born out of social factors rather than songs. Have sociologists and commentators ever blamed Glasgow's gangs-and-knife incidents on the influence of bagpipes or the city's jangly indie bands?
Today, blaming everything on cultural influences means that banal suppositions on gangsta rap somehow influencing teenagers can be taken as good coin. Nevertheless, it's precisely this official belief in cultural determinism that means the education system becomes loaded with ever more demands for `responsibility' (and grounds for meddling) than ever before.
All of these developments have little to do with providing a decent, liberal education system for all. As we've seen over the past week, the classroom becomes both the cause of problems (teacher stress, bullying, even heatstroke) and the solution (namely, getting everyone to behave). For all the current digressions on Blair's 10 years in power, it seems mediating governmental decisions through `education, education, education' has stood the test of time and still largely goes unquestioned. Who needs 10 more years of that?
Source
Thursday, April 26, 2007
Wi Fi scare
The evils of radio-waves have been combed over exhaustively for many years but no amount of evidence will ever convince some nature freaks that cellphones are safe -- and now the same performance is revving up over WiFi -- which uses similar radio waves
Being "wired-up" used to be shorthand for being at the cutting edge, connected to all that is cool. No longer. Wireless is now the only thing to be. Go into a Starbucks, a hotel bar or an airport departure lounge and you are bound to see people tapping away at their laptops, invisibly connected to the internet. Visit friends, and you are likely to be shown their newly installed system. Lecture at a university and you'll find the students in your audience tapping away, checking your assertions on the world wide web almost as soon as you make them. And now the technology is spreading like a Wi-Fi wildfire throughout Britain's primary and secondary schools.
The technological explosion is even bigger than the mobile phone explosion that preceded it. And, as with mobiles, it is being followed by fears about its effect on health - particularly the health of children. Recent research, which suggests that the worst fears about mobiles are proving to be justified, only heightens concern about the electronic soup in which we are increasingly spending our lives.
Now, as we report today, Sir William Stewart, the man who has issued the most authoritative British warnings about the hazards of mobiles, is becoming worried about the spread of Wi-Fi. The chairman of the Health Protection Agency - and a former chief scientific adviser to the Government - is privately pressing for an official investigation of the risks it may pose. Health concerns show no sign of slowing the wireless expansion. One in five of all adult Britons now own a wireless-enabled laptop. There are 35,000 public hotspots where they can use them, usually at a price....
So far only a few, faint warnings have been raised, mainly by people who are so sensitised to the electromagnetic radiation emitted by mobiles, their masts and Wi-Fi that they become ill in its presence. The World Health Organisation estimates that up to three out of every hundred people are "electrosensitive" to some extent. But scientists and doctors - and some European governments - are adding their voices to the alarm as it becomes clear that the almost universal use of mobile phones may be storing up medical catastrophe for the future.
Professor Lawrie Challis, who heads the Government's official mobile safety research, this year said that the mobile could turn out to be "the cigarette of the 21st century".
There has been less concern about masts, as they emit very much less radiation than mobile phones. But people living - or attending schools - near them are consistently exposed and studies reveal a worrying incidence of symptoms such as headaches, fatigue, nausea, dizziness and memory problems. There is also some suggestion that there may be an increase in cancers and heart disease.
Wi-Fi systems essentially take small versions of these masts into the home and classroom - they emit much the same kind of radiation. Though virtually no research has been carried out, campaigners and some scientists expect them to have similar ill-effects. They say that we are all now living in a soup of electromagnetic radiation one billion times stronger than the natural fields in which living cells have developed over the last 3.8 billion years. This, they add, is bound to cause trouble
More here
Attitudes to autism
The following review of Unstrange Minds: Remapping the World of Autism by Roy Richard Grinker, Basic Books, 2007; Constructing Autism: Unravelling the `Truth' and Understanding the Social by Majia Holmer Nadesan, Routledge, 2005; Send in the Idiots: Stories From the Other Side of Autism by Kamran Nazeer, Bloomsbury, 2006 finds that strange attitudes towards autism have arisen in the absence of much real understanding of it. My own view is that there is no such thing as autism -- merely a range of quite different disorders that happen to have communication problems in common. And the different accounts of autism summarized below do rather bear that out.
Like Roy Richard Grinker, whose daughter was diagnosed as autistic at around the same time as my son in the early 1990s, at the time I `knew little about the condition and knew no-one else who had it'. Autism was then regarded as a rare disorder affecting three children in 10,000. A decade later, the increasing numbers of children with autism are widely described as a crisis and an epidemic, with cases occurring at a rate of 60 per 10,000 births. Grinker, a social anthropologist as well as a parent, observes that the term epidemic `implies danger and incites fear' and wisely cautions that we should `step back and take a closer look at our fears about autism'.
Through a comprehensive review of the history and epidemiology of autism, Grinker shows how a greater awareness of autism among parents and professionals, together with a widening concept of autism, have led to a dramatic increase in the recognition of cases, rather than a true increase in numbers. He challenges the conviction among many parents that an epidemic of autism can be readily attributed to toxins and vaccines and regards the search for environmental causes (and cures) as misconceived: `If there is no real epidemic, we might just have to admit that no-one is to blame.' He insists that `we cannot find real solutions if we're basing our ideas on false premises and bad science'.
For Grinker, the increased recognition of autism in Western society is a welcome sign `that we are finally seeing and appreciating a kind of human difference that we once turned away from'. With insights derived from his studies in India, South Korea and South Africa (as well as in Europe), he shows how in other cultures autism is only beginning to emerge from being hidden, stigmatised and denigrated. While Grinker describes the familiar parental struggle to secure appropriate schooling for his daughter even in the USA of today, he readily acknowledges that `autism is a terrible, life-long disorder, but it's a better time than ever to be autistic'. However, when he claims that `the prevalence of autism today is a virtue, maybe even a prize', he never asks whether the current popularity of autism reflects a perverse celebration of themes of alienation and atomisation in contemporary society - for that we need to turn to a sociologist.
Majia Holmer Nadesan, who also has a child with autism, brings a welcome sociological and historical perspective to her thoughtful and thought-provoking survey of current controversies. For her, autism is not so much a discovery of the 1940s that became an epidemic in the 1990s, as a product of the social and cultural circumstances of the late twentieth century. She argues that the `classical' autism described by US psychiatrist Leo Kanner in his landmark 1943 paper emerged as a result of the development of distinctive concepts and institutions of childhood and child psychology over the preceding half-century. In contrast with the current vogue for identifying autistic personalities in history and literature, she insists that autism was `unthinkable' within the diagnostic categories of nineteenth-century psychiatry, at a time when any child presenting such behaviours would have been `abandoned, neglected or institutionalised'.
Nadesan considers that the expanding range of autism diagnoses in recent years - with a particular emphasis on cases of `higher functioning' autism or Asperger's syndrome - can be attributed to the more intensive parental and professional focus on child development fostered by cognitive psychology and to the scope offered to the more able autistic individuals within the wider culture of information technology. (Though Hans Asperger first described cases of his syndrome in Austria in the 1940s, his work did not become widely known in the English-speaking world before the 1980s.) In a perceptive discussion of `Asperger's as cyborgs', Nadesan notes the way this syndrome has been constructed as `the sublimation of humanity by technology, cloaked in the guise of human genius'. She attributes the impact of popular accounts of `autistic intelligence' to `the public's simultaneous fascination and repulsion with a stereotyped and reified form of "autistic genius"'.
Whereas Grinker uncritically welcomes the wider recognition of autism, Nadesan is alert to the danger that, in technically advanced countries in the late twentieth century, `we have pathologised people' who would formerly have been regarded as merely eccentric.
Nadesan develops philosopher Ian Hacking's theory of autism as a `niche disorder' arising from the interaction of biological and cultural factors in modern society. She challenges the one-sided emphasis on the biological determination of autism evident in both mainstream research and in popular `biomedical' alternative approaches. Emphasising the dynamic interaction of biological and social aspects, Nadesan insists that people with autism cannot be reduced to defective genetic and neurological states. Indeed, it is the recognition that genes, brain and mind are loosely coupled rather than mechanistically determined that offers scope for therapeutic intervention.
Kamran Nazeer, who was diagnosed with autism as a child, is well aware of the difficulties facing even higher functioning adults with autism. Twenty years after leaving his elementary school in New York, he has traced some of his former classmates and now tells their stories.
Craig, whose echolalic childhood phrase provides the title, was a speechwriter for the Democratic Party who became unemployed after George W Bush's 2004 election victory. After a spell in a juvenile detention centre for a serious assault, Andre lives with his sister, works in computers and uses hand puppets to facilitate social interaction. Randall works as a bicycle courier in Chicago and is now back with his parents after separating from his former partner Mike, a writer. Though Elizabeth committed suicide in 2002 at the age of 26, we hear her story from her parents, Henry and Sheila.
The most enigmatic case is that of the author. Born to Pakistani parents, he has lived in Jeddah, Islamabad and Glasgow, studied philosophy and legal theory and is now a policy adviser in Whitehall. Nazeer writes with intelligence and wit, providing finely observed and deeply sympathetic profiles of each of his former classmates, together with thoughtful reflections on matters such as the art of conversation, the question of genius and the challenges facing the families of people with autism. His account of the cruelty to psychologists of adolescents with high-functioning autism is hilarious. He concludes with a discussion of autism controversies with two of his former teachers, Ira and Rebecca, who are both still engaged in autism education, though his old school has now closed.
Nazeer observes that, with the decline of psychogenic theories and the rise of genetics, there is now `a different sense of shame about autism'. He attributes the influence of vaccine theories of causation to a `lingering, perhaps renewed, sense of shame about having a child with a developmental disorder'. He finds the quest for environmental explanations `terribly sad' as parents `throbbing with guilt and shame' have pursued `whatever external cause they could identify, to exculpate themselves'.
When Ira and Rebecca suggest to Nazeer that he is no longer autistic, his rejoinder is that `we all got better, to say it that way'. He insists that it is not `simply that we're all less idiotic than before' but that `we became that way through exposure to the world that lay beyond the horizon of our own selves'. He rejects the `notion perpetrated on' himself and his classmates, `that our minds are singular, glowing, remarkable and untouched by others' - and expectations that people with autism will be socially inept but brilliant with computers. For him, all these preconceptions derive from the same belief - `that autistic people are themselves only, self-enclosed and sealed off to the world'. He dismisses the view that people with autism `can't be reached, or shouldn't be, that self-enclosure is or ought to be permanent'.
In the course of his study Nazeer found `something rather different': `Our autism eased, in each case, because of other people, our parents, friends, and our teachers, of course.' He rejects both `credulity and cretinhood', both the notions that an alienated autistic identity should be celebrated and that autistic children are doomed, without prospect of improvement. He affirms the humanity of people with autism as participants in the networks of human society. `This realisation sometimes expands inside me until I feel as if my organs are going to bruise one another.' Let's hope that writing this book has reduced his risk of internal injury. As he truly writes, his approach `marks a big change compared to how autism is typically thought about'.
For anybody in a quandary over which books to select from the recent profusion of autism-lit titles, here are three excellent choices. If you only have time for one, choose Nazeer's. It will make you laugh, it will make you cry; above all it will make you think about autism.
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British eco-imperialism
The UN Security Council this week held its first ever debate on climate change and the potential threat that global warming poses to international security. British foreign secretary Margaret Beckett, who chaired the meeting, organised the open session to highlight what she called the `security imperative' to tackle climate change. According to Beckett, climate change can exacerbate problems that cause conflicts and threaten the entire planet. She was clearly very pleased with the UK-led initiative, stating that: `This is a groundbreaking day in the history of the Security Council, the first time ever that we will debate climate change as a matter of international peace and security.' (1)
Not all the Council members agreed with her. The UK, currently holding the rotating council presidency, had to undertake a lot of `behind closed doors' lobbying to even get the Council to agree to hold the open session (2). Even so, the discussion was marked by strong disagreements over whether the Security Council had the authority to deal with the issue of global warming and, as expected beforehand, no resolution was reached.
China's deputy ambassador, Liu Zhenmin, was blunt in rejecting the session: `The developing countries believe the Security Council has neither the professional competence in handling climate change - nor is it the right decision-making place for extensive participation leading up to widely acceptable proposals.' Russia also warned that the Council, whose mandate is only peace and security, was not the place to take concrete action on climate change (3).
The main argument raised against Beckett's proposal was that the Security Council was stepping on to the territory of more democratic bodies, such as the UN General Assembly. The two major groups representing developing countries - the Nonaligned Movement and the Group of 77 - wrote separate letters accusing the Security Council of `ever-increasing encroachment' on the role and responsibility of other UN bodies such as the 192-member General Assembly (4).
However, none of the participants in the debate challenged the substance of Beckett's argument that climate change posed a major risk to international peace and security. The opposition from some of the Security Council's permanent members and from many other states was posed in terms of the Security Council's authority and mandate to deal with such an extensive issue. It would seem that even those states which spoke in favour of Beckett's position, including the EU members and Japan, were less concerned with the substance of the argument than the desire to prioritise the issue of climate change itself. This was also clearly the case for UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon, who hopes that the higher profile given to the relationship between climate change and global conflict will lead the member states to support his initiative to create a new UN Environmental Organisation, in an effort to coordinate action on climate change (5).
Even in the case of the UK, which has been so keen to push the link between climate change and global security, the substance of the argument appears to be of little importance. It is as if any important issue must be, of its very nature, a security risk in our globalised and interconnected world; it seems that every threat is so great that only the concerted action of the world's governments can deal with it. The UK has been keen to situate itself in the forefront of campaigning on climate change and Margaret Beckett argued some weeks ago that she hoped that the UN Security Council discussion would `foster a shared understanding of the way in which climate stress is likely to amplify other drivers of conflict and tension. This can only strengthen the commitment of the international community to the collective action that we urgently need.' (6)
It would appear that the substantive evidence for linking climate change with conflict is secondary to the concern that urgent collective action is taken. Beckett hinted as much in her speech to business organisations in New York the day before the UN Security Council debate: `[T]he, perhaps rather sad, truth is that the international community will not move with the necessary urgency or the necessary resolve if climate change is seen as primarily something that affects insects, animals and plants. To steal a slogan from Amnesty International, we need to show that tackling climate change is about saving the human.' (7)
For Beckett, the key issue is not so much the link between climate change and global conflict but the government's desire to take the international moral high ground in stressing the urgency of action in relation to climate change. It is this that has driven Beckett to engage in presenting climate change as a global security threat. She says: `Particularly over the past year, I have discussed the link between climate and security with many people. Some of them are sceptical. They respond that we can't prove that climate change will lead to this or that particular event - still less that it will cause any one outbreak of violence or hostilities. But that is to misunderstand the issue and the argument. If you are looking for a simple, linear connection between climate change and a particular flashpoint, you are only picking up a glimpse of a much wider picture. The implications of climate change for our security are more fundamental and comprehensive than any single conflict.' (8)
Beckett is clearly not, in fact, arguing that climate change causes conflict in any direct or straightforward way open to evidence-based debate. As the Guardian notes, `Britain refuses to site [sic] examples of global warming-related conflicts' (9). The reason for this obvious: it is not possible to substantiate a linkage between global warming and conflict. Even the alarmist CNA Corporation report, National Security and the Threat of Climate Change - released the day before the UN Security Council meeting, in which 11 former senior US generals, including Anthony Zinni, retired chief of Central Command, and Gordon Sullivan, formerly the US army's most senior general, called on the Bush administration to do more to tackle climate change - does not make any clear or direct links, despite arguing that `climate change is a threat multiplier for instability in some of the most volatile regions of the world' (10).
The generals' report links climate change to conflict only in the most non-specific and indirect terms: `Projected climate change will seriously exacerbate already marginal living standards in many Asian, African and Middle Eastern nations, causing widespread political instability and the likelihood of failed states.' (11) From the generalised nature of the report and its focus on poor and marginal societies, it is clear that the problem it highlights is not climate change as such, but rather the political, economic and social context upon which climate change may have an impact. To see climate change or resource shortages as a cause of conflict would involve depoliticising conflict and naturalising social and economic conditions in the countries under analysis (12).
Even given that there can be no direct link between climate change and conflict, the report gives very little concrete evidence of conflicts in which climate change can be held to have played a major role. It admits that, despite its importance, `no recent wars have been waged solely over water resources' and that `even tense disputes and resource crises can be peacefully overcome' (13). When the report does venture a few cursory attempts to claim examples where resource scarcity is held to be a contributing factor - Rwanda, `furthered by violence over agricultural resources', `the situation in Darfur, which has land resources at its root', the 1970s overthrow of Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie `through his government's inability to deal with food shortages', and the 1974 Nigerian coup `that resulted largely from an insufficient response to famine' (14) - it is clear that the meaning and consequences of resource scarcity are social and political questions, not ones of environmental science, and certainly not ones liable to be ameliorated by any reductions in carbon dioxide emissions.
Beckett follows a similar approach to that of the CNA report in grouping a wide-range of problems together, including those of resource scarcity, land erosion, energy supplies and food production and distribution. Once these social, economic and political problems are reframed in terms of natural resources then she is able to proclaim that we should: `Think of the world today, then, as a dangerously simmering pot. An unstable climate risks that pot boiling over. And we ignore that risk - literally - at our peril.' (15) Of course, if the risks are so great, the cause is ever more vital and heroic: `Now it is time for us to rise to our newest and biggest challenge: to fight the first great war of interdependence, the struggle for climate security.' (16)
Underneath the Churchillian rhetoric that Beckett uses to declare that climate change is a `gathering storm', comparable to the threat posed by Nazi Germany in an earlier era, lies an attempt to re-establish the UK's moral and political standing in the world - not through old-fashioned militarism but through what the government clearly believes to be the UK's strongest card: the power of rhetoric.
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Britain's trains -- what the Greenies are wishing on us all
And you thought wobbly old Amtrak was bad!
A week ago a return Virgin Train ticket for the 85 minute journey from Euston station, London, to Birmingham New Street cost me more than œ70 ($168). For the outward journey that bought a seat on a window side of the carriage; but rather than a window, the seat was up close and personal with a beige plastic wall. A pale yellow light allowed me to read, just. The seat-back table was stickier than a poodle dipped in custard. Across the PA came an announcement that at any time we "customers" could move into a first-class carriage, where we could pay an extra œ10 for the upgrade. Halfway through the journey a Virgin employee scuttled through the carriages with a plastic bag the size of a small piggery, into which we could chuck the remains of our snacks.
But Virgin is luxury compared with First Great Western. One journey from Oxford to London Waterloo was plastic-rubbish-bag-free. Customers stepped carefully over floor puddles of food and drink remains, or kicked them aside.
Now for the stations. London Euston, a destination for 55 million passengers a year, is to be demolished and redeveloped at a cost of œ250 million. Early publicity promises a "light and airy thoroughfare" to replace the grey floors and grey-block ceilings that match the grey, dive-bombing pigeons. A tribute to the Brutalist architectural philosophy of the 1960s when it was built, Euston was demolished this month in print by the columnist Richard Morrison, who wrote: "The design should never have left the drawing board - if, indeed, it was ever on a drawing board. It gives the impression of having been scribbled on the back of a soiled paper bag by a thuggish android with a grudge against humanity and a vampiric loathing of sunlight."
Euston is so depressed that even its lavatories have gone on strike. After my trip from Birmingham New Street - a grotesquely ugly station itself - customers were forced to hop and shuffle in line to enter the Euston ladies and gents. Two of the three gates, demanding 20 pence each, were out of order.
Ealing Broadway, west London - there's another wrist slasher of a station. Late last month I booked online for a journey to Oxford, with plans to pick up the ticket at a Fast Ticket machine at the station. With 15 minutes to spare, I discovered every Fast Ticket machine at Ealing Broadway carried an "out of order" sign, strangely reminiscent of those black felt-tip pens on brown cardboard pleas: "Help, down on my luck." The queue to buy tickets was 30 people long. With my train due in less than five minutes, one extra ticket counter was s-l-o-w-l-y opened and my ticket handed over.
Finally, the entirely lift-free Stratford-on-Avon. To board a train to London, customers must carry their bags from one platform up a flight of steps, across a bridge, and down another flight to reach the right platform.
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Britain's Anti-education education
In recent years, there has been concern over the underachievement of black boys in UK schools. Compared to a national average of 59 per cent, only 34 per cent of African-Caribbean boys attain five or more GCSE passes. Trevor Phillips, chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE), seems to think that black boys' cultural outlook is partly to blame. `There is an anti-learning culture whereby learning isn't seen to be cool.' (1) For Phillips, black kids just don't want to learn.
Phillips is right to blame `an anti-learning culture'. But this has little to do with hip-hop `playas' and everything to do with the government and the cultural elites. Blaming the gormless bravado of street culture for hostility to education suggests that Phillips is more in awe of 50 Cent and Eminem than the black kids I teach. Urban entertainers may loom large in the popular imagination, but they're hardly able to dictate the agenda on education, learning and culture. After all, it wasn't Jay-Z who grabbed headlines by declaring that `learning history is a bit dodgy'. That was the former education secretary, Charles Clarke.
Yet this wasn't just a rash comment by Clarke. Instead, hostility to learning for learning's sake currently informs every aspect of the education system. For example, the government has long attempted to put vocational learning `on a parity of esteem' with academic subjects. The drive to vocationalise education won't necessarily bolster the status of NVQ's in Hair & Beauty, but it has cast academic courses in a negative light. When Clarke suggests that academic subjects are dodgy, he really means that they are not `accessible' enough. Middle managers in further education colleges are following suit. At one inner London college at which I have taught, the Sixth Form Centre was constantly threatened with closure by the management, which deemed teaching A-levels as elitist.
Such an anti-learning culture is also prevalent in today's classrooms. Teachers are discouraged from extended their students' vocabulary in case it `alienates' them. And if students are having trouble participating in classroom discussion, teachers are recommended to introduce kindergarten-style games to pass the time. In the past, educationalists would seek to overcome the barriers to learning. Today learning is seen as a barrier to developing that all-important self-esteem. Indeed, the current teaching adverts suggest that learning is an alien concept for most schools. Classrooms are represented as similar to `crazy' youth centres where teachers simply turn up, arrange the chairs and distribute soft drinks. The apparent upside is that adults `get to hang out with Raj' and, in a spectacular reversal of roles, get to learn a `new language'.
This isn't merely the outcome of a daft advertising agency. In PGCE courses, student teachers are encouraged to incorporate as many hip-hop tracks and videos into lessons as possible. But such tricks are more likely to irritate students than bring them onside. Nothing is more grating for clued-up students than teachers getting down with `the kids'. My authority would be seriously undermined if I scribbled `blood, this is the shiznit!' on their work, or delivered sociology in a series of raps. Compared to Trevor Phillips, most of the black students I teach don't take hip-hop's ludicrous postures seriously.
The underachievement of black boys is a concern for educationalists and wider society. But the causes of the problem are varied and complex, and can't just be reduced to students' listening habits. Because there is an obsession with interpreting social groups purely in cultural terms, it is rarely acknowledged that African-Caribbean students are predominately from poorer working-class backgrounds. This isn't to suggest that social class is the only factor in determining their educational performance. But it is an important explanation for why a significant proportion of white and Bangladeshi boys also fall behind the national average.
Nevertheless, softening the education system can't compensate for the negative effects of social and racial inequalities. In fact, the government's measures are likely to make them worse. If learning appears alien and `uncool' to some African-Caribbean students, Trevor Phillips should look less at `the street' and a lot closer to home.
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Must not expose the chaos of Britain's schools
A whistleblower who should get a medal is being prosecuted by a rotten system
A supply teacher who covertly filmed her pupils swearing, fighting and attempting to access pornography on the internet was misusing her professional position, a tribunal was told yesterday. Angela Mason recorded footage in late 2004 and early 2005 at 18 schools in London and the North of England for Classroom Chaos, a documentary shown on channel Five. She arrived at classrooms with a miniature camera disguised as a button that allowed her to record pupils smashing furniture and making false accusations that teachers had touched them.
Mrs Mason, from London, was accused of unacceptable professional conduct yesterday at a hearing in Birmingham of the General Teaching Council, the professional body that regulates teachers. She faces a second charge of failing to promote the education and welfare of the children by failing to manage their behaviour properly. Five concealed the identity of all the pupils and schools caught on film before the programme was broadcast.
Bradley Albuery, the presenting officer outlining the case against Mrs Mason, said that by filming teachers and pupils without their knowledge or consent she created a conflict of interest. “She was there not as a broadcaster but as a teacher,” he said. “All of her attention should have been directed at the education of the children. That she took a camera into the classroom shows that her agenda was not . . . focused wholly on the needs of the children.” Mr Albuery said that teachers and students had reacted with anger to the programme. Pupils from one school were “angry and upset”, he said. Another student, who said he could be identified from the footage, felt “embarrassed and humiliated”, the tribunal heard.
During the documentary, which was shown to the tribunal, one boy tells Mrs Mason to “take a nap” when she attempts to restore order to the class. Another is shown using a school computer to look for “anal sex” on an internet search engine.
Mrs Mason admits the secret filming, but denies that it amounted to unacceptable professional conduct, claiming that she acted in the public interest. Mrs Mason, who is married with two children, originally left teaching in the 1970s to work in educational broadcasting but enrolled with two supply teaching companies — Brent Supply Service and Teaching Personnel — to take part in the documentary. If the case against Mrs Mason is proved, she could be banned from teaching.
Clive Rawlings, appearing for Mrs Mason, said that she had embarked upon a “responsible and reasonable” piece of journalism, and that her actions had contributed to the public debate on classroom behaviour. “Angela Mason’s actions were in the public interest in its broadest sense,” he said. “She is merely the messenger, and we submit that you should not shoot the messenger.”
Outside the hearing Mrs Mason said: “It’s not my profession — I left it 30 years ago — but I still feel strongly about it. I believe there is a major public policy issue to do with pupils in classrooms and poor behaviour. I’m standing up for the supply teachers and other teachers who have to endure this every day.”
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Al Qaeda regrouping: "British authorities arrest six suspected terrorists. As discussed on yesterday's show with Melanie Phillips and Gerard Baker, and as will be discussed with Lawrence Wright today, the evidence of efforts by al Qaeda to strike in the west is growing, and the indifference of the public to the threat is astonishing. Al Qaeda is regrouping in some strange places like Mali, and while its forces in Iraq are repeatedly defeated and its leadership there killed or captured, the network's propagandists continue to push out messages claiming success there and encouraging jihadists to come to Iraq to join in the war. In the U.S., despite efforts by some serious journalists like Wright and Michael Barone to keep some focus on the threat from al Qaeda in Iraq and elsewhere across the globe, the public is repeatedly told by the Democrats and the MSM that the U.S. can withdraw from Iraq and fight terrorism effectively in Afghanistan. This is delusional and dangerous, but so seductive that it will probably take another spectacularly lethal attack for the west to confront the menace with renewed resolve". [More on the British arrests here].
The evils of radio-waves have been combed over exhaustively for many years but no amount of evidence will ever convince some nature freaks that cellphones are safe -- and now the same performance is revving up over WiFi -- which uses similar radio waves
Being "wired-up" used to be shorthand for being at the cutting edge, connected to all that is cool. No longer. Wireless is now the only thing to be. Go into a Starbucks, a hotel bar or an airport departure lounge and you are bound to see people tapping away at their laptops, invisibly connected to the internet. Visit friends, and you are likely to be shown their newly installed system. Lecture at a university and you'll find the students in your audience tapping away, checking your assertions on the world wide web almost as soon as you make them. And now the technology is spreading like a Wi-Fi wildfire throughout Britain's primary and secondary schools.
The technological explosion is even bigger than the mobile phone explosion that preceded it. And, as with mobiles, it is being followed by fears about its effect on health - particularly the health of children. Recent research, which suggests that the worst fears about mobiles are proving to be justified, only heightens concern about the electronic soup in which we are increasingly spending our lives.
Now, as we report today, Sir William Stewart, the man who has issued the most authoritative British warnings about the hazards of mobiles, is becoming worried about the spread of Wi-Fi. The chairman of the Health Protection Agency - and a former chief scientific adviser to the Government - is privately pressing for an official investigation of the risks it may pose. Health concerns show no sign of slowing the wireless expansion. One in five of all adult Britons now own a wireless-enabled laptop. There are 35,000 public hotspots where they can use them, usually at a price....
So far only a few, faint warnings have been raised, mainly by people who are so sensitised to the electromagnetic radiation emitted by mobiles, their masts and Wi-Fi that they become ill in its presence. The World Health Organisation estimates that up to three out of every hundred people are "electrosensitive" to some extent. But scientists and doctors - and some European governments - are adding their voices to the alarm as it becomes clear that the almost universal use of mobile phones may be storing up medical catastrophe for the future.
Professor Lawrie Challis, who heads the Government's official mobile safety research, this year said that the mobile could turn out to be "the cigarette of the 21st century".
There has been less concern about masts, as they emit very much less radiation than mobile phones. But people living - or attending schools - near them are consistently exposed and studies reveal a worrying incidence of symptoms such as headaches, fatigue, nausea, dizziness and memory problems. There is also some suggestion that there may be an increase in cancers and heart disease.
Wi-Fi systems essentially take small versions of these masts into the home and classroom - they emit much the same kind of radiation. Though virtually no research has been carried out, campaigners and some scientists expect them to have similar ill-effects. They say that we are all now living in a soup of electromagnetic radiation one billion times stronger than the natural fields in which living cells have developed over the last 3.8 billion years. This, they add, is bound to cause trouble
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Attitudes to autism
The following review of Unstrange Minds: Remapping the World of Autism by Roy Richard Grinker, Basic Books, 2007; Constructing Autism: Unravelling the `Truth' and Understanding the Social by Majia Holmer Nadesan, Routledge, 2005; Send in the Idiots: Stories From the Other Side of Autism by Kamran Nazeer, Bloomsbury, 2006 finds that strange attitudes towards autism have arisen in the absence of much real understanding of it. My own view is that there is no such thing as autism -- merely a range of quite different disorders that happen to have communication problems in common. And the different accounts of autism summarized below do rather bear that out.
Like Roy Richard Grinker, whose daughter was diagnosed as autistic at around the same time as my son in the early 1990s, at the time I `knew little about the condition and knew no-one else who had it'. Autism was then regarded as a rare disorder affecting three children in 10,000. A decade later, the increasing numbers of children with autism are widely described as a crisis and an epidemic, with cases occurring at a rate of 60 per 10,000 births. Grinker, a social anthropologist as well as a parent, observes that the term epidemic `implies danger and incites fear' and wisely cautions that we should `step back and take a closer look at our fears about autism'.
Through a comprehensive review of the history and epidemiology of autism, Grinker shows how a greater awareness of autism among parents and professionals, together with a widening concept of autism, have led to a dramatic increase in the recognition of cases, rather than a true increase in numbers. He challenges the conviction among many parents that an epidemic of autism can be readily attributed to toxins and vaccines and regards the search for environmental causes (and cures) as misconceived: `If there is no real epidemic, we might just have to admit that no-one is to blame.' He insists that `we cannot find real solutions if we're basing our ideas on false premises and bad science'.
For Grinker, the increased recognition of autism in Western society is a welcome sign `that we are finally seeing and appreciating a kind of human difference that we once turned away from'. With insights derived from his studies in India, South Korea and South Africa (as well as in Europe), he shows how in other cultures autism is only beginning to emerge from being hidden, stigmatised and denigrated. While Grinker describes the familiar parental struggle to secure appropriate schooling for his daughter even in the USA of today, he readily acknowledges that `autism is a terrible, life-long disorder, but it's a better time than ever to be autistic'. However, when he claims that `the prevalence of autism today is a virtue, maybe even a prize', he never asks whether the current popularity of autism reflects a perverse celebration of themes of alienation and atomisation in contemporary society - for that we need to turn to a sociologist.
Majia Holmer Nadesan, who also has a child with autism, brings a welcome sociological and historical perspective to her thoughtful and thought-provoking survey of current controversies. For her, autism is not so much a discovery of the 1940s that became an epidemic in the 1990s, as a product of the social and cultural circumstances of the late twentieth century. She argues that the `classical' autism described by US psychiatrist Leo Kanner in his landmark 1943 paper emerged as a result of the development of distinctive concepts and institutions of childhood and child psychology over the preceding half-century. In contrast with the current vogue for identifying autistic personalities in history and literature, she insists that autism was `unthinkable' within the diagnostic categories of nineteenth-century psychiatry, at a time when any child presenting such behaviours would have been `abandoned, neglected or institutionalised'.
Nadesan considers that the expanding range of autism diagnoses in recent years - with a particular emphasis on cases of `higher functioning' autism or Asperger's syndrome - can be attributed to the more intensive parental and professional focus on child development fostered by cognitive psychology and to the scope offered to the more able autistic individuals within the wider culture of information technology. (Though Hans Asperger first described cases of his syndrome in Austria in the 1940s, his work did not become widely known in the English-speaking world before the 1980s.) In a perceptive discussion of `Asperger's as cyborgs', Nadesan notes the way this syndrome has been constructed as `the sublimation of humanity by technology, cloaked in the guise of human genius'. She attributes the impact of popular accounts of `autistic intelligence' to `the public's simultaneous fascination and repulsion with a stereotyped and reified form of "autistic genius"'.
Whereas Grinker uncritically welcomes the wider recognition of autism, Nadesan is alert to the danger that, in technically advanced countries in the late twentieth century, `we have pathologised people' who would formerly have been regarded as merely eccentric.
Nadesan develops philosopher Ian Hacking's theory of autism as a `niche disorder' arising from the interaction of biological and cultural factors in modern society. She challenges the one-sided emphasis on the biological determination of autism evident in both mainstream research and in popular `biomedical' alternative approaches. Emphasising the dynamic interaction of biological and social aspects, Nadesan insists that people with autism cannot be reduced to defective genetic and neurological states. Indeed, it is the recognition that genes, brain and mind are loosely coupled rather than mechanistically determined that offers scope for therapeutic intervention.
Kamran Nazeer, who was diagnosed with autism as a child, is well aware of the difficulties facing even higher functioning adults with autism. Twenty years after leaving his elementary school in New York, he has traced some of his former classmates and now tells their stories.
Craig, whose echolalic childhood phrase provides the title, was a speechwriter for the Democratic Party who became unemployed after George W Bush's 2004 election victory. After a spell in a juvenile detention centre for a serious assault, Andre lives with his sister, works in computers and uses hand puppets to facilitate social interaction. Randall works as a bicycle courier in Chicago and is now back with his parents after separating from his former partner Mike, a writer. Though Elizabeth committed suicide in 2002 at the age of 26, we hear her story from her parents, Henry and Sheila.
The most enigmatic case is that of the author. Born to Pakistani parents, he has lived in Jeddah, Islamabad and Glasgow, studied philosophy and legal theory and is now a policy adviser in Whitehall. Nazeer writes with intelligence and wit, providing finely observed and deeply sympathetic profiles of each of his former classmates, together with thoughtful reflections on matters such as the art of conversation, the question of genius and the challenges facing the families of people with autism. His account of the cruelty to psychologists of adolescents with high-functioning autism is hilarious. He concludes with a discussion of autism controversies with two of his former teachers, Ira and Rebecca, who are both still engaged in autism education, though his old school has now closed.
Nazeer observes that, with the decline of psychogenic theories and the rise of genetics, there is now `a different sense of shame about autism'. He attributes the influence of vaccine theories of causation to a `lingering, perhaps renewed, sense of shame about having a child with a developmental disorder'. He finds the quest for environmental explanations `terribly sad' as parents `throbbing with guilt and shame' have pursued `whatever external cause they could identify, to exculpate themselves'.
When Ira and Rebecca suggest to Nazeer that he is no longer autistic, his rejoinder is that `we all got better, to say it that way'. He insists that it is not `simply that we're all less idiotic than before' but that `we became that way through exposure to the world that lay beyond the horizon of our own selves'. He rejects the `notion perpetrated on' himself and his classmates, `that our minds are singular, glowing, remarkable and untouched by others' - and expectations that people with autism will be socially inept but brilliant with computers. For him, all these preconceptions derive from the same belief - `that autistic people are themselves only, self-enclosed and sealed off to the world'. He dismisses the view that people with autism `can't be reached, or shouldn't be, that self-enclosure is or ought to be permanent'.
In the course of his study Nazeer found `something rather different': `Our autism eased, in each case, because of other people, our parents, friends, and our teachers, of course.' He rejects both `credulity and cretinhood', both the notions that an alienated autistic identity should be celebrated and that autistic children are doomed, without prospect of improvement. He affirms the humanity of people with autism as participants in the networks of human society. `This realisation sometimes expands inside me until I feel as if my organs are going to bruise one another.' Let's hope that writing this book has reduced his risk of internal injury. As he truly writes, his approach `marks a big change compared to how autism is typically thought about'.
For anybody in a quandary over which books to select from the recent profusion of autism-lit titles, here are three excellent choices. If you only have time for one, choose Nazeer's. It will make you laugh, it will make you cry; above all it will make you think about autism.
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British eco-imperialism
The UN Security Council this week held its first ever debate on climate change and the potential threat that global warming poses to international security. British foreign secretary Margaret Beckett, who chaired the meeting, organised the open session to highlight what she called the `security imperative' to tackle climate change. According to Beckett, climate change can exacerbate problems that cause conflicts and threaten the entire planet. She was clearly very pleased with the UK-led initiative, stating that: `This is a groundbreaking day in the history of the Security Council, the first time ever that we will debate climate change as a matter of international peace and security.' (1)
Not all the Council members agreed with her. The UK, currently holding the rotating council presidency, had to undertake a lot of `behind closed doors' lobbying to even get the Council to agree to hold the open session (2). Even so, the discussion was marked by strong disagreements over whether the Security Council had the authority to deal with the issue of global warming and, as expected beforehand, no resolution was reached.
China's deputy ambassador, Liu Zhenmin, was blunt in rejecting the session: `The developing countries believe the Security Council has neither the professional competence in handling climate change - nor is it the right decision-making place for extensive participation leading up to widely acceptable proposals.' Russia also warned that the Council, whose mandate is only peace and security, was not the place to take concrete action on climate change (3).
The main argument raised against Beckett's proposal was that the Security Council was stepping on to the territory of more democratic bodies, such as the UN General Assembly. The two major groups representing developing countries - the Nonaligned Movement and the Group of 77 - wrote separate letters accusing the Security Council of `ever-increasing encroachment' on the role and responsibility of other UN bodies such as the 192-member General Assembly (4).
However, none of the participants in the debate challenged the substance of Beckett's argument that climate change posed a major risk to international peace and security. The opposition from some of the Security Council's permanent members and from many other states was posed in terms of the Security Council's authority and mandate to deal with such an extensive issue. It would seem that even those states which spoke in favour of Beckett's position, including the EU members and Japan, were less concerned with the substance of the argument than the desire to prioritise the issue of climate change itself. This was also clearly the case for UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon, who hopes that the higher profile given to the relationship between climate change and global conflict will lead the member states to support his initiative to create a new UN Environmental Organisation, in an effort to coordinate action on climate change (5).
Even in the case of the UK, which has been so keen to push the link between climate change and global security, the substance of the argument appears to be of little importance. It is as if any important issue must be, of its very nature, a security risk in our globalised and interconnected world; it seems that every threat is so great that only the concerted action of the world's governments can deal with it. The UK has been keen to situate itself in the forefront of campaigning on climate change and Margaret Beckett argued some weeks ago that she hoped that the UN Security Council discussion would `foster a shared understanding of the way in which climate stress is likely to amplify other drivers of conflict and tension. This can only strengthen the commitment of the international community to the collective action that we urgently need.' (6)
It would appear that the substantive evidence for linking climate change with conflict is secondary to the concern that urgent collective action is taken. Beckett hinted as much in her speech to business organisations in New York the day before the UN Security Council debate: `[T]he, perhaps rather sad, truth is that the international community will not move with the necessary urgency or the necessary resolve if climate change is seen as primarily something that affects insects, animals and plants. To steal a slogan from Amnesty International, we need to show that tackling climate change is about saving the human.' (7)
For Beckett, the key issue is not so much the link between climate change and global conflict but the government's desire to take the international moral high ground in stressing the urgency of action in relation to climate change. It is this that has driven Beckett to engage in presenting climate change as a global security threat. She says: `Particularly over the past year, I have discussed the link between climate and security with many people. Some of them are sceptical. They respond that we can't prove that climate change will lead to this or that particular event - still less that it will cause any one outbreak of violence or hostilities. But that is to misunderstand the issue and the argument. If you are looking for a simple, linear connection between climate change and a particular flashpoint, you are only picking up a glimpse of a much wider picture. The implications of climate change for our security are more fundamental and comprehensive than any single conflict.' (8)
Beckett is clearly not, in fact, arguing that climate change causes conflict in any direct or straightforward way open to evidence-based debate. As the Guardian notes, `Britain refuses to site [sic] examples of global warming-related conflicts' (9). The reason for this obvious: it is not possible to substantiate a linkage between global warming and conflict. Even the alarmist CNA Corporation report, National Security and the Threat of Climate Change - released the day before the UN Security Council meeting, in which 11 former senior US generals, including Anthony Zinni, retired chief of Central Command, and Gordon Sullivan, formerly the US army's most senior general, called on the Bush administration to do more to tackle climate change - does not make any clear or direct links, despite arguing that `climate change is a threat multiplier for instability in some of the most volatile regions of the world' (10).
The generals' report links climate change to conflict only in the most non-specific and indirect terms: `Projected climate change will seriously exacerbate already marginal living standards in many Asian, African and Middle Eastern nations, causing widespread political instability and the likelihood of failed states.' (11) From the generalised nature of the report and its focus on poor and marginal societies, it is clear that the problem it highlights is not climate change as such, but rather the political, economic and social context upon which climate change may have an impact. To see climate change or resource shortages as a cause of conflict would involve depoliticising conflict and naturalising social and economic conditions in the countries under analysis (12).
Even given that there can be no direct link between climate change and conflict, the report gives very little concrete evidence of conflicts in which climate change can be held to have played a major role. It admits that, despite its importance, `no recent wars have been waged solely over water resources' and that `even tense disputes and resource crises can be peacefully overcome' (13). When the report does venture a few cursory attempts to claim examples where resource scarcity is held to be a contributing factor - Rwanda, `furthered by violence over agricultural resources', `the situation in Darfur, which has land resources at its root', the 1970s overthrow of Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie `through his government's inability to deal with food shortages', and the 1974 Nigerian coup `that resulted largely from an insufficient response to famine' (14) - it is clear that the meaning and consequences of resource scarcity are social and political questions, not ones of environmental science, and certainly not ones liable to be ameliorated by any reductions in carbon dioxide emissions.
Beckett follows a similar approach to that of the CNA report in grouping a wide-range of problems together, including those of resource scarcity, land erosion, energy supplies and food production and distribution. Once these social, economic and political problems are reframed in terms of natural resources then she is able to proclaim that we should: `Think of the world today, then, as a dangerously simmering pot. An unstable climate risks that pot boiling over. And we ignore that risk - literally - at our peril.' (15) Of course, if the risks are so great, the cause is ever more vital and heroic: `Now it is time for us to rise to our newest and biggest challenge: to fight the first great war of interdependence, the struggle for climate security.' (16)
Underneath the Churchillian rhetoric that Beckett uses to declare that climate change is a `gathering storm', comparable to the threat posed by Nazi Germany in an earlier era, lies an attempt to re-establish the UK's moral and political standing in the world - not through old-fashioned militarism but through what the government clearly believes to be the UK's strongest card: the power of rhetoric.
Source
Britain's trains -- what the Greenies are wishing on us all
And you thought wobbly old Amtrak was bad!
A week ago a return Virgin Train ticket for the 85 minute journey from Euston station, London, to Birmingham New Street cost me more than œ70 ($168). For the outward journey that bought a seat on a window side of the carriage; but rather than a window, the seat was up close and personal with a beige plastic wall. A pale yellow light allowed me to read, just. The seat-back table was stickier than a poodle dipped in custard. Across the PA came an announcement that at any time we "customers" could move into a first-class carriage, where we could pay an extra œ10 for the upgrade. Halfway through the journey a Virgin employee scuttled through the carriages with a plastic bag the size of a small piggery, into which we could chuck the remains of our snacks.
But Virgin is luxury compared with First Great Western. One journey from Oxford to London Waterloo was plastic-rubbish-bag-free. Customers stepped carefully over floor puddles of food and drink remains, or kicked them aside.
Now for the stations. London Euston, a destination for 55 million passengers a year, is to be demolished and redeveloped at a cost of œ250 million. Early publicity promises a "light and airy thoroughfare" to replace the grey floors and grey-block ceilings that match the grey, dive-bombing pigeons. A tribute to the Brutalist architectural philosophy of the 1960s when it was built, Euston was demolished this month in print by the columnist Richard Morrison, who wrote: "The design should never have left the drawing board - if, indeed, it was ever on a drawing board. It gives the impression of having been scribbled on the back of a soiled paper bag by a thuggish android with a grudge against humanity and a vampiric loathing of sunlight."
Euston is so depressed that even its lavatories have gone on strike. After my trip from Birmingham New Street - a grotesquely ugly station itself - customers were forced to hop and shuffle in line to enter the Euston ladies and gents. Two of the three gates, demanding 20 pence each, were out of order.
Ealing Broadway, west London - there's another wrist slasher of a station. Late last month I booked online for a journey to Oxford, with plans to pick up the ticket at a Fast Ticket machine at the station. With 15 minutes to spare, I discovered every Fast Ticket machine at Ealing Broadway carried an "out of order" sign, strangely reminiscent of those black felt-tip pens on brown cardboard pleas: "Help, down on my luck." The queue to buy tickets was 30 people long. With my train due in less than five minutes, one extra ticket counter was s-l-o-w-l-y opened and my ticket handed over.
Finally, the entirely lift-free Stratford-on-Avon. To board a train to London, customers must carry their bags from one platform up a flight of steps, across a bridge, and down another flight to reach the right platform.
More here
Britain's Anti-education education
In recent years, there has been concern over the underachievement of black boys in UK schools. Compared to a national average of 59 per cent, only 34 per cent of African-Caribbean boys attain five or more GCSE passes. Trevor Phillips, chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE), seems to think that black boys' cultural outlook is partly to blame. `There is an anti-learning culture whereby learning isn't seen to be cool.' (1) For Phillips, black kids just don't want to learn.
Phillips is right to blame `an anti-learning culture'. But this has little to do with hip-hop `playas' and everything to do with the government and the cultural elites. Blaming the gormless bravado of street culture for hostility to education suggests that Phillips is more in awe of 50 Cent and Eminem than the black kids I teach. Urban entertainers may loom large in the popular imagination, but they're hardly able to dictate the agenda on education, learning and culture. After all, it wasn't Jay-Z who grabbed headlines by declaring that `learning history is a bit dodgy'. That was the former education secretary, Charles Clarke.
Yet this wasn't just a rash comment by Clarke. Instead, hostility to learning for learning's sake currently informs every aspect of the education system. For example, the government has long attempted to put vocational learning `on a parity of esteem' with academic subjects. The drive to vocationalise education won't necessarily bolster the status of NVQ's in Hair & Beauty, but it has cast academic courses in a negative light. When Clarke suggests that academic subjects are dodgy, he really means that they are not `accessible' enough. Middle managers in further education colleges are following suit. At one inner London college at which I have taught, the Sixth Form Centre was constantly threatened with closure by the management, which deemed teaching A-levels as elitist.
Such an anti-learning culture is also prevalent in today's classrooms. Teachers are discouraged from extended their students' vocabulary in case it `alienates' them. And if students are having trouble participating in classroom discussion, teachers are recommended to introduce kindergarten-style games to pass the time. In the past, educationalists would seek to overcome the barriers to learning. Today learning is seen as a barrier to developing that all-important self-esteem. Indeed, the current teaching adverts suggest that learning is an alien concept for most schools. Classrooms are represented as similar to `crazy' youth centres where teachers simply turn up, arrange the chairs and distribute soft drinks. The apparent upside is that adults `get to hang out with Raj' and, in a spectacular reversal of roles, get to learn a `new language'.
This isn't merely the outcome of a daft advertising agency. In PGCE courses, student teachers are encouraged to incorporate as many hip-hop tracks and videos into lessons as possible. But such tricks are more likely to irritate students than bring them onside. Nothing is more grating for clued-up students than teachers getting down with `the kids'. My authority would be seriously undermined if I scribbled `blood, this is the shiznit!' on their work, or delivered sociology in a series of raps. Compared to Trevor Phillips, most of the black students I teach don't take hip-hop's ludicrous postures seriously.
The underachievement of black boys is a concern for educationalists and wider society. But the causes of the problem are varied and complex, and can't just be reduced to students' listening habits. Because there is an obsession with interpreting social groups purely in cultural terms, it is rarely acknowledged that African-Caribbean students are predominately from poorer working-class backgrounds. This isn't to suggest that social class is the only factor in determining their educational performance. But it is an important explanation for why a significant proportion of white and Bangladeshi boys also fall behind the national average.
Nevertheless, softening the education system can't compensate for the negative effects of social and racial inequalities. In fact, the government's measures are likely to make them worse. If learning appears alien and `uncool' to some African-Caribbean students, Trevor Phillips should look less at `the street' and a lot closer to home.
Source
Must not expose the chaos of Britain's schools
A whistleblower who should get a medal is being prosecuted by a rotten system
A supply teacher who covertly filmed her pupils swearing, fighting and attempting to access pornography on the internet was misusing her professional position, a tribunal was told yesterday. Angela Mason recorded footage in late 2004 and early 2005 at 18 schools in London and the North of England for Classroom Chaos, a documentary shown on channel Five. She arrived at classrooms with a miniature camera disguised as a button that allowed her to record pupils smashing furniture and making false accusations that teachers had touched them.
Mrs Mason, from London, was accused of unacceptable professional conduct yesterday at a hearing in Birmingham of the General Teaching Council, the professional body that regulates teachers. She faces a second charge of failing to promote the education and welfare of the children by failing to manage their behaviour properly. Five concealed the identity of all the pupils and schools caught on film before the programme was broadcast.
Bradley Albuery, the presenting officer outlining the case against Mrs Mason, said that by filming teachers and pupils without their knowledge or consent she created a conflict of interest. “She was there not as a broadcaster but as a teacher,” he said. “All of her attention should have been directed at the education of the children. That she took a camera into the classroom shows that her agenda was not . . . focused wholly on the needs of the children.” Mr Albuery said that teachers and students had reacted with anger to the programme. Pupils from one school were “angry and upset”, he said. Another student, who said he could be identified from the footage, felt “embarrassed and humiliated”, the tribunal heard.
During the documentary, which was shown to the tribunal, one boy tells Mrs Mason to “take a nap” when she attempts to restore order to the class. Another is shown using a school computer to look for “anal sex” on an internet search engine.
Mrs Mason admits the secret filming, but denies that it amounted to unacceptable professional conduct, claiming that she acted in the public interest. Mrs Mason, who is married with two children, originally left teaching in the 1970s to work in educational broadcasting but enrolled with two supply teaching companies — Brent Supply Service and Teaching Personnel — to take part in the documentary. If the case against Mrs Mason is proved, she could be banned from teaching.
Clive Rawlings, appearing for Mrs Mason, said that she had embarked upon a “responsible and reasonable” piece of journalism, and that her actions had contributed to the public debate on classroom behaviour. “Angela Mason’s actions were in the public interest in its broadest sense,” he said. “She is merely the messenger, and we submit that you should not shoot the messenger.”
Outside the hearing Mrs Mason said: “It’s not my profession — I left it 30 years ago — but I still feel strongly about it. I believe there is a major public policy issue to do with pupils in classrooms and poor behaviour. I’m standing up for the supply teachers and other teachers who have to endure this every day.”
Source
Al Qaeda regrouping: "British authorities arrest six suspected terrorists. As discussed on yesterday's show with Melanie Phillips and Gerard Baker, and as will be discussed with Lawrence Wright today, the evidence of efforts by al Qaeda to strike in the west is growing, and the indifference of the public to the threat is astonishing. Al Qaeda is regrouping in some strange places like Mali, and while its forces in Iraq are repeatedly defeated and its leadership there killed or captured, the network's propagandists continue to push out messages claiming success there and encouraging jihadists to come to Iraq to join in the war. In the U.S., despite efforts by some serious journalists like Wright and Michael Barone to keep some focus on the threat from al Qaeda in Iraq and elsewhere across the globe, the public is repeatedly told by the Democrats and the MSM that the U.S. can withdraw from Iraq and fight terrorism effectively in Afghanistan. This is delusional and dangerous, but so seductive that it will probably take another spectacularly lethal attack for the west to confront the menace with renewed resolve". [More on the British arrests here].
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
Jogger dies of salt deficiency
They call it a "sodium" deficiency below to pull the wool over your eyes. But it is ordinary table salt they are talking about -- the stuff that has recently been heavily (and fraudulently) demonized. It's just too embarassing to mention what it really is. Chemically, common salt is sodium chloride (NaCl)
A man who died after completing the hottest London Marathon was named last night as a 22-year-old fitness instructor. David Rogers became the ninth person to die in the race's 27-year history after suffering from hyponatraemia, where high water intake results in a sodium deficiency. Mr Rogers, of Milton Keynes, was one of 70 runners taken to hospital in sweltering temperatures. Running his first marathon, he collapsed after completing the race in 3 hours and 50 minutes.
On the website justgiving.com he said that he was raising money for the Motor Neurone Disease Association, in memory of his grandfather. Donations on the website had reached more than 1,300 pounds. He wrote: "My Grandad was 78 when he passed away and although I was only young when he died, I can still remember many happy memories spent with him."
Mr Rogers' father, Chris, and mother, Sarah had travelled to London to watch their son race. Chris Rogers, 52, of Westoning, near Bedford, told The Daily Telegraph that his son was "a happy-go-lucky lad who brought happiness to everyone". He said: "We saw him coming across Tower Bridge. He was ecstatic. He saw us and waved and then leapt in the air in a star jump. He was doing what he wanted to do." The next time he saw his son there was less than a mile of the race to go. His son was "labouring a bit but only like everyone else at that stage because it was a very hot day".
It was only when Mr Rogers failed to meet his family at the end of the race that they learnt he had been admitted to Charing Cross Hospital, where he died yesterday morning.
Race organisers offered their "deepest sympathy and condolences to his family and friends". They added that warnings had been issued to runners not to drink too much water: "The medical advice was not to drink excessive levels. That advice was on the website, in the magazine and in the runners' information packs." Another runner who had also been in a critical condition was transferred out of intensive care and was said to be recovering well.
The death of one runner and the fact that thousands of others had to be treated in the intense heat led to calls for the London Marathon to be staged earlier in the year. Gordon Trevett, lecturer at the department of exercise and health sciences at Bristol University, thought it would be sensible "so competitors can run in lower temperatures". He said: "The organisers could be worried that they might lose sponsorship if less people are running, if it's a bit colder, but because it is such a popular event and raises so much money, I think that people would still run if it was brought forward to March."
Nick Bitel, chief executive of the Flora London Marathon, was opposed to the idea. He said: "Some people think the marathon should be later in the year so they can train in warmer weather. Some like to train in summer and think a winter marathon would be best. We think we are at the right time of year."
More runners than ever began the race on Sunday, but as temperatures soared to 23.5C (74F) [Which would be cool in most of Australia!], 721 dropped out before the finish line. Among them was the athlete widely tipped to win the men's race, Haile Gebrselassie, of Ethiopia, who stopped after about 19 miles. Matt Dawson, the England rugby player, described seeing runners pass out in front of him, while Gordon Ramsay, the celebrity chef, who was running his eighth marathon, said: "It was like running in a desert. People were dropping like flies." St John Ambulance said that it treated 5,054 people.
Source
Tomorrow's iatrogenic disaster coming up?
An iatrogenic illness is one caused by medication (In Greek "Iatros" = "medical practitioner"). There have been many such illnesses. I suffer from one myself. There is a saying that "Today's miracle cure is tomorrow's iatrogenic disaster". Anybody who medicates a perfectly healthy baby would have to be insane.
A hormone-like substance could be added to babies' milk or given to their mothers during pregnancy to stop them becoming obese as adults. Scientists gave pregnant and lactating rats food laced with leptin and found that their offspring did not put on weight no matter what they ate. The theory is that leptin given at this crucial stage in life "hard-wires" the body's energy-balance settings. The more leptin they are given the more inefficient the infant rats' bodies are at turning calories into fat. Instead, they burn it up metabolically.
Leptin was greeted as the cure for obesity when it was discovered a decade ago. Produced by fat, it tells the brain when fat deposits are adequate, and thus discourages eating. However, leptin injections benefit very few obese people. Dr Mike Cawthorne of the University of Buckingham said that breast milk contained leptin but formula feed did not, and foods fortified with leptin should be available soon.
But Professor Steve O'Rahilly, a leptin expert from Cambridge, said: "There is no evidence that this `early life' imprinting effect of leptin is at all relevant for humans."
Source
They call it a "sodium" deficiency below to pull the wool over your eyes. But it is ordinary table salt they are talking about -- the stuff that has recently been heavily (and fraudulently) demonized. It's just too embarassing to mention what it really is. Chemically, common salt is sodium chloride (NaCl)
A man who died after completing the hottest London Marathon was named last night as a 22-year-old fitness instructor. David Rogers became the ninth person to die in the race's 27-year history after suffering from hyponatraemia, where high water intake results in a sodium deficiency. Mr Rogers, of Milton Keynes, was one of 70 runners taken to hospital in sweltering temperatures. Running his first marathon, he collapsed after completing the race in 3 hours and 50 minutes.
On the website justgiving.com he said that he was raising money for the Motor Neurone Disease Association, in memory of his grandfather. Donations on the website had reached more than 1,300 pounds. He wrote: "My Grandad was 78 when he passed away and although I was only young when he died, I can still remember many happy memories spent with him."
Mr Rogers' father, Chris, and mother, Sarah had travelled to London to watch their son race. Chris Rogers, 52, of Westoning, near Bedford, told The Daily Telegraph that his son was "a happy-go-lucky lad who brought happiness to everyone". He said: "We saw him coming across Tower Bridge. He was ecstatic. He saw us and waved and then leapt in the air in a star jump. He was doing what he wanted to do." The next time he saw his son there was less than a mile of the race to go. His son was "labouring a bit but only like everyone else at that stage because it was a very hot day".
It was only when Mr Rogers failed to meet his family at the end of the race that they learnt he had been admitted to Charing Cross Hospital, where he died yesterday morning.
Race organisers offered their "deepest sympathy and condolences to his family and friends". They added that warnings had been issued to runners not to drink too much water: "The medical advice was not to drink excessive levels. That advice was on the website, in the magazine and in the runners' information packs." Another runner who had also been in a critical condition was transferred out of intensive care and was said to be recovering well.
The death of one runner and the fact that thousands of others had to be treated in the intense heat led to calls for the London Marathon to be staged earlier in the year. Gordon Trevett, lecturer at the department of exercise and health sciences at Bristol University, thought it would be sensible "so competitors can run in lower temperatures". He said: "The organisers could be worried that they might lose sponsorship if less people are running, if it's a bit colder, but because it is such a popular event and raises so much money, I think that people would still run if it was brought forward to March."
Nick Bitel, chief executive of the Flora London Marathon, was opposed to the idea. He said: "Some people think the marathon should be later in the year so they can train in warmer weather. Some like to train in summer and think a winter marathon would be best. We think we are at the right time of year."
More runners than ever began the race on Sunday, but as temperatures soared to 23.5C (74F) [Which would be cool in most of Australia!], 721 dropped out before the finish line. Among them was the athlete widely tipped to win the men's race, Haile Gebrselassie, of Ethiopia, who stopped after about 19 miles. Matt Dawson, the England rugby player, described seeing runners pass out in front of him, while Gordon Ramsay, the celebrity chef, who was running his eighth marathon, said: "It was like running in a desert. People were dropping like flies." St John Ambulance said that it treated 5,054 people.
Source
Tomorrow's iatrogenic disaster coming up?
An iatrogenic illness is one caused by medication (In Greek "Iatros" = "medical practitioner"). There have been many such illnesses. I suffer from one myself. There is a saying that "Today's miracle cure is tomorrow's iatrogenic disaster". Anybody who medicates a perfectly healthy baby would have to be insane.
A hormone-like substance could be added to babies' milk or given to their mothers during pregnancy to stop them becoming obese as adults. Scientists gave pregnant and lactating rats food laced with leptin and found that their offspring did not put on weight no matter what they ate. The theory is that leptin given at this crucial stage in life "hard-wires" the body's energy-balance settings. The more leptin they are given the more inefficient the infant rats' bodies are at turning calories into fat. Instead, they burn it up metabolically.
Leptin was greeted as the cure for obesity when it was discovered a decade ago. Produced by fat, it tells the brain when fat deposits are adequate, and thus discourages eating. However, leptin injections benefit very few obese people. Dr Mike Cawthorne of the University of Buckingham said that breast milk contained leptin but formula feed did not, and foods fortified with leptin should be available soon.
But Professor Steve O'Rahilly, a leptin expert from Cambridge, said: "There is no evidence that this `early life' imprinting effect of leptin is at all relevant for humans."
Source
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
Pesky genes again: This time for exercise
The Government may be wasting its time encouraging children to spend more time on sport and exercise in an effort to reduce obesity. Research at Peninsula Medical School in Plymouth, reported in today’s times2, suggests that a child’s propensity to be active is genetically determined. Children are said to find their own activity level, regardless of how many opportunities are offered. If the naturally inactive are forced to be more active at school, they do less at home, while the naturally active need no encouragement.
Professor Terence Wilkin, who has carried out trials with young people, says that his research shows that Government programmes to increase levels of activity do not reduce obesity. There are 1.8 million overweight children and 700,000 obese young people in Britain. Rates of obesity more generally have trebled since the 1980s, and the condition is estimated to cost the nation 7 billion in health expenditure. But while active children may be healthier, it remains unproven that inactive ones can be persuaded to do more, Professor Wilkin says. “So far, the evidence is bleak,” he adds.
The claim follows US research last week suggesting that a fat gene can decide whether some people have a propensity to put on weight. Some research has suggested that activity does help. In one study, children who tried a nine-week programme with their parents, which involved a combination of exercise, healthy eating, motivation and positive thinking strategies, were still benefiting from the scheme 12 months later.
The researchers found improvements in the overweight children’s body mass index, waist circumference, fitness, lifestyle and self-esteem following the programme and these were “largely sustained” after a year. “Thirty per cent of UK children are now considered to be obese or overweight — it is an immense public health issue in both immediate and long-term health,” said Professor Alan Lucas, director of the Medical Research Council childhood nutrition research centre at University College London Institute of Child Health.
His “Mend” approach — “mind, exercise, nutrition, do it!” — was adopted by 107 families during the trial but it is now being rolled out across the country. More specifically, a study in Bristol found a link between increased activity alone and obesity, suggesting that an extra quarter of an hour vigorous exercise a day was enough to make a difference. But the problem with these studies is that they do not show if fat children are fat because they are inactive, or inactive because they are fat. If Professor Wilkin is right, efforts to expand school sports may make children fitter, but no thinner.
Source
Systematic corruption of British High-school examinations
Examination bodies are making thousands of pounds selling tips to schools on how to beat the A-level and GCSE systems. Senior examiners offer advice on a freelance basis and at least two boards provide courses to help teachers to improve pupils' grades.
A government adviser condemned the practice as disgraceful, saying that it preyed on schools' fears about their position in the league tables. Head teachers gave warning that there would be a "major moral issue" if boards were giving unfair advantage to some pupils over others.
Many pupils spend the Easter holidays doing intensive tuition courses. Parents often hire former teachers to help them to prepare for exams.
Teachers, too, are under growing pressure to succeed. Senior examiners allegedly give seminars for up to 200 pounds a time, offering tips on what pupils should write in coursework. Now examining bodies are also cashing in. This year, the OCR board is offering teachers hundreds of courses at up to 120 each. It offers a full-day course in GCSE English literature titled "Get ahead - improving candidate performance". The board says that the course offers "guidance and practical support" for teachers preparing pupils for this summer's exams, to "exemplify standards for the externally assessed components" and "suggest teaching and learning approaches for each component" of the GCSE.
The Assessment and Qualifications Alliance also offers courses, most of them free. A spokeswoman said that they were about raising standards and intended to "support teachers in developing qualifications". Senior markers also earn thousands privately by advising staff on how to "control" what pupils write for coursework and script foreign language oral exams so that pupils know in advance what will turn up.
Warwick Mansell describes two seminars in his book Education by Numbers, published next month. In one, French teachers were told to be "realistically generous" when marking coursework and that teaching less able pupils grammar was not worth the effort because it was allocated few marks. History teachers were advised against aiming for top-quality work because pupils could gain an A* GCSE without it. Instead, they should concentrate on areas where little historical knowledge was required - such as using historical sources. Examining bodies already brief schools on syllabus changes, give feedback on exams and make the previous year's papers available.
Yesterday heads gave warning that expensive advice sessions risked giving some pupils an unfair advantage. Malcolm Trobe, president of the Association of School and College Leaders, said: "There is a dividing line between giving appropriate information to teachers to prepare children adequately for exams and giving or selling tips which would directly influence their grades. If it gives some students an advantage, there would be a major moral issue there."
Since 1997 the Government has focused increasingly on league tables and targets in education. If results are not up to scratch schools can be closed, heads can lose their jobs and, from September, teachers face losing out on pay awards.
Alan Smithers, a government adviser and director of education and employment research at the University of Buckingham, said that this approach was key in creating the "disgraceful" new market. He said: "Finding ways of helping students to do their best has always been part of teaching, but the big difference here is that the people on the inside are giving hints on coursework and areas where students are more likely to get A* grades. "Education has become distorted by the over-emphasis on scores. But schools are playing the game to maximise the scores and, as businesses, the exam boards are jumping on the bandwagon. "What follows is that the scores are further removed from the children's ability and what they can achieve." Professor Smithers said that the boards should stop offering such sessions and that examiners should not be allowed to enter into a private enterprise.
A spokesman for the Joint Council for Qualifications, the umbrella body for the examination boards, said that it took "complaints or evidence" which raise questions about the probity of the assessment process seriously. He said that the code of practice set out the roles and responsibilities of examiners and that the regulators would pursue cases where conduct related to malpractice.
Source
POLITICAL CORRECTNESS IS MIDDLE CLASS
Or so a noted commentator on British upper class manners says:
But it all goes to show that class isn’t dead. It reminds me of the true story about the aristocrat being treated for depression by the psychoanalyst. The sessions were going nowhere and in exasperation the psychoanalyst said: “Tell me exactly what you’re thinking about right now.” And the aristocrat replied: “I was just thinking what a vulgar little man you are.” And the sessions collapsed because the psychoanalyst felt he’d lost all ascendancy.
Dame Barbara Cartland famously replied, when the television journalist Sandra Harris asked her in the 1960s whether class barriers had broken down: “Well, of course they have, otherwise I wouldn’t be sitting here talking to someone like you.”
Most of the outward signs have gone. When we arrived here 25 years ago I was told it was irredeemably common to have red flowers in a Cotswold garden. Now nobody cares about anything as long as you pay your local bills and don’t hurtle down the village in your shining Chelsea tractor, scraping the paint off parked cars.
But one thing likely to give you away as non-U these days is political correctness because it’s so euphemistic. The aristocrat tends not to be politically correct. In fact he’s generally a randy old sod whose family has spent 700 years fornicating and shooting things. If a girl’s got a pretty face, he won’t care what class she’s from.
But if you start referring to your “partner”, or “lone parents”, or people being “vertically challenged”, you will be instantly marked out as non-U. The papers said Prince William had telephoned Kate during all the furore and been very “supportive” — another dreadfully non-U word. Soon they’ll be rabbiting on about them “achieving closure”, another horror.
There’s a lot of confusion about class. Most of the Labour party thinks Tony Blair is terribly grand, but he isn’t. He’s charming, of course, but very, very middle class, not even upper middle class. And I’ve found out while researching Wicked!, which is set in schools, that among young people the word “posh” often isn’t used to denote class, but to accuse someone of being irritatingly clever. Perhaps people who are “posh” are destined to do well in exams and make it to the top.
Class has given us great comic characters, from Mrs Bennet and Hyacinth Bouquet to Tim Nice-But-Dim and Vicky Pollard, the archetypal working-class girl, mouthy, inarticulate and terribly funny.
It’s much more fun to have a class system than not, as long as everyone can go on gently laughing about it. The thing that’s horrid is when people feel hurt by it. But you should remember that the royal family isn’t nearly as old as half the aristocracy — so a lot of people look down on them, too!
Source
The British hospital experience
Notes from a patient -- Prof. Brignell. He got prompt treatment only because he had private insurance but even then the NHS did not make it easy
Kafkaesque! That is the word. If you don't know what it means, make an appointment as an outpatient with the British National Health Service. An hour or two in the waiting room is enough to induce that feeling of hopelessness endured by Joseph K. In my case they had taken the trouble to write, bringing the appointment forward by half an hour, but I was still there in suspended animation an hour later than the original appointed time. About fifty assorted human beings sat glum and dispirited, some occasionally whispering to each other with a librarian reverence. In the background, people in various shades of uniform bustled through unseeing, intent on their business. Behind the reception desk women rattled computer keyboards with intense determination.
Suddenly my name was called and I found myself whisked from the large waiting room to a small waiting room. There was no silence here. A very large Irish woman was regaling the reluctant company with an account of her recent experiences as an inmate, including details of biological functions we would rather not know about. After another half hour, a woman approached me and said "The registrar has looked at your notes and has decided to let you see the consultant." Perhaps welcome news, except that it was the consultant who had asked me to come back and see him ten weeks after the first examination. People came and went. I waited.
It was quite different once I penetrated the inner sanctum. The consultant was urbane and gentlemanly, radiating that cultivated assurance that we used to expect of our medical advisors. He recommended that I have a course of intravenous antibiotics, but we would have to wait for a hospital appointment, as it should commence under observation in case there were any reactions. I mentioned that I had managed to retain sufficient medical insurance to cover hospital admission, so he left it with me to make the appointment. When I phoned BUPA there were no problems and a bed was found for me for the following weekend.
The difference! When you approach the NHS hospital, the first thing you see is a large yellow notice with ominous black capitals announcing THIS IS A WHEEL-CLAMPING ZONE. Just the thing for people in distress and pain, who have to grope around to see if they have the coins to feed the meter! It induces the same sort of anxiety as a notice I remember from almost forty years before YOU ARE NOW ENTERING THE GERMAN DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC. The notice at the entrance of the private hospital said "Welcome" and directed you to the car park. Inside, the atmosphere was calm and kindly. What was striking was the obsessive hygiene and asepsis, from another age. Inside and outside each patient's door were dispensers for alcoholic hand rubs, which visitors were encouraged to use. Despite the occasional puncturing it was actually a pleasurable experience.
My local GP practice had volunteered to carry on the injections, so the consultant had arranged that I would pick up the antibiotics at the town pharmacy and take them in. I received a phone call to say that the pharmacy had discovered that it was not licensed to handle those particular antibiotics and would I drive back to the hospital pharmacy (a three hour round trip) to pick them up? Five days of injections went smoothly, but hanging over me was that threat of the unknown - THE WEEKEND. Don't worry, I was told, just phone one of these numbers and arrange an appointment with the out-of -hours service and we will give you the kit of parts to take with you.
Hello, is that the out-of-hours service?
Yes.
I would like to make an appointment for some intravenous injections.
How did you get this number?
I was given two numbers and the first one did not work.
This is an administration number, you are not supposed to have it.
What would happen if I had used the other number?
It would come to the same place, but that is not the point.
I would like to make an appointment for some intravenous injections.
Well you can't. The system does not work like that. You will have to phone on the day.
I went back to the local surgery and the receptionist kindly arranged the appointments for the Saturday and Sunday. Fortunately, the appointments were in nearby Shaftesbury, at a local cottage hospital of the sort that the Government is trying to close. It was charming and, above all, clean, even having a hand-rub dispenser on the waiting room wall.
The professional staff were kindly and efficient, indeed magnificent. This is not just a ritual nod of politeness. These people, fully aware that they are working in a mad system, still manage to maintain and integrity and dedication that is a wonder to behold. As the intravenous injections are a slow business, there was an opportunity for conversation, during which I elicited some interesting remarks:
Reorganisation is the norm in the NHS.
The rules change so often that nobody actually knows what they are.
The trouble with the big hospitals is that the cleaners are no longer part of the team, as they were in matron's day, and anyway they can barely communicate in English.
It takes an intellectual to be really stupid: "A third of women graduates will never have children, research has concluded. The number of highly educated women who are starting families has plummeted in the past decade, according to findings that provide the most detailed insight yet into education and fertility. While some women are making a conscious decision not to have children, others are simply leaving it too late after taking years to build their careers, buy a home and find the right partner. Graduates who do become mothers are having fewer children, and later. If the low birth rate trend continues, then the eventual rate of childlessness among graduates now aged in their twenties is likely to be even higher than a third".
The Government may be wasting its time encouraging children to spend more time on sport and exercise in an effort to reduce obesity. Research at Peninsula Medical School in Plymouth, reported in today’s times2, suggests that a child’s propensity to be active is genetically determined. Children are said to find their own activity level, regardless of how many opportunities are offered. If the naturally inactive are forced to be more active at school, they do less at home, while the naturally active need no encouragement.
Professor Terence Wilkin, who has carried out trials with young people, says that his research shows that Government programmes to increase levels of activity do not reduce obesity. There are 1.8 million overweight children and 700,000 obese young people in Britain. Rates of obesity more generally have trebled since the 1980s, and the condition is estimated to cost the nation 7 billion in health expenditure. But while active children may be healthier, it remains unproven that inactive ones can be persuaded to do more, Professor Wilkin says. “So far, the evidence is bleak,” he adds.
The claim follows US research last week suggesting that a fat gene can decide whether some people have a propensity to put on weight. Some research has suggested that activity does help. In one study, children who tried a nine-week programme with their parents, which involved a combination of exercise, healthy eating, motivation and positive thinking strategies, were still benefiting from the scheme 12 months later.
The researchers found improvements in the overweight children’s body mass index, waist circumference, fitness, lifestyle and self-esteem following the programme and these were “largely sustained” after a year. “Thirty per cent of UK children are now considered to be obese or overweight — it is an immense public health issue in both immediate and long-term health,” said Professor Alan Lucas, director of the Medical Research Council childhood nutrition research centre at University College London Institute of Child Health.
His “Mend” approach — “mind, exercise, nutrition, do it!” — was adopted by 107 families during the trial but it is now being rolled out across the country. More specifically, a study in Bristol found a link between increased activity alone and obesity, suggesting that an extra quarter of an hour vigorous exercise a day was enough to make a difference. But the problem with these studies is that they do not show if fat children are fat because they are inactive, or inactive because they are fat. If Professor Wilkin is right, efforts to expand school sports may make children fitter, but no thinner.
Source
Systematic corruption of British High-school examinations
Examination bodies are making thousands of pounds selling tips to schools on how to beat the A-level and GCSE systems. Senior examiners offer advice on a freelance basis and at least two boards provide courses to help teachers to improve pupils' grades.
A government adviser condemned the practice as disgraceful, saying that it preyed on schools' fears about their position in the league tables. Head teachers gave warning that there would be a "major moral issue" if boards were giving unfair advantage to some pupils over others.
Many pupils spend the Easter holidays doing intensive tuition courses. Parents often hire former teachers to help them to prepare for exams.
Teachers, too, are under growing pressure to succeed. Senior examiners allegedly give seminars for up to 200 pounds a time, offering tips on what pupils should write in coursework. Now examining bodies are also cashing in. This year, the OCR board is offering teachers hundreds of courses at up to 120 each. It offers a full-day course in GCSE English literature titled "Get ahead - improving candidate performance". The board says that the course offers "guidance and practical support" for teachers preparing pupils for this summer's exams, to "exemplify standards for the externally assessed components" and "suggest teaching and learning approaches for each component" of the GCSE.
The Assessment and Qualifications Alliance also offers courses, most of them free. A spokeswoman said that they were about raising standards and intended to "support teachers in developing qualifications". Senior markers also earn thousands privately by advising staff on how to "control" what pupils write for coursework and script foreign language oral exams so that pupils know in advance what will turn up.
Warwick Mansell describes two seminars in his book Education by Numbers, published next month. In one, French teachers were told to be "realistically generous" when marking coursework and that teaching less able pupils grammar was not worth the effort because it was allocated few marks. History teachers were advised against aiming for top-quality work because pupils could gain an A* GCSE without it. Instead, they should concentrate on areas where little historical knowledge was required - such as using historical sources. Examining bodies already brief schools on syllabus changes, give feedback on exams and make the previous year's papers available.
Yesterday heads gave warning that expensive advice sessions risked giving some pupils an unfair advantage. Malcolm Trobe, president of the Association of School and College Leaders, said: "There is a dividing line between giving appropriate information to teachers to prepare children adequately for exams and giving or selling tips which would directly influence their grades. If it gives some students an advantage, there would be a major moral issue there."
Since 1997 the Government has focused increasingly on league tables and targets in education. If results are not up to scratch schools can be closed, heads can lose their jobs and, from September, teachers face losing out on pay awards.
Alan Smithers, a government adviser and director of education and employment research at the University of Buckingham, said that this approach was key in creating the "disgraceful" new market. He said: "Finding ways of helping students to do their best has always been part of teaching, but the big difference here is that the people on the inside are giving hints on coursework and areas where students are more likely to get A* grades. "Education has become distorted by the over-emphasis on scores. But schools are playing the game to maximise the scores and, as businesses, the exam boards are jumping on the bandwagon. "What follows is that the scores are further removed from the children's ability and what they can achieve." Professor Smithers said that the boards should stop offering such sessions and that examiners should not be allowed to enter into a private enterprise.
A spokesman for the Joint Council for Qualifications, the umbrella body for the examination boards, said that it took "complaints or evidence" which raise questions about the probity of the assessment process seriously. He said that the code of practice set out the roles and responsibilities of examiners and that the regulators would pursue cases where conduct related to malpractice.
Source
POLITICAL CORRECTNESS IS MIDDLE CLASS
Or so a noted commentator on British upper class manners says:
But it all goes to show that class isn’t dead. It reminds me of the true story about the aristocrat being treated for depression by the psychoanalyst. The sessions were going nowhere and in exasperation the psychoanalyst said: “Tell me exactly what you’re thinking about right now.” And the aristocrat replied: “I was just thinking what a vulgar little man you are.” And the sessions collapsed because the psychoanalyst felt he’d lost all ascendancy.
Dame Barbara Cartland famously replied, when the television journalist Sandra Harris asked her in the 1960s whether class barriers had broken down: “Well, of course they have, otherwise I wouldn’t be sitting here talking to someone like you.”
Most of the outward signs have gone. When we arrived here 25 years ago I was told it was irredeemably common to have red flowers in a Cotswold garden. Now nobody cares about anything as long as you pay your local bills and don’t hurtle down the village in your shining Chelsea tractor, scraping the paint off parked cars.
But one thing likely to give you away as non-U these days is political correctness because it’s so euphemistic. The aristocrat tends not to be politically correct. In fact he’s generally a randy old sod whose family has spent 700 years fornicating and shooting things. If a girl’s got a pretty face, he won’t care what class she’s from.
But if you start referring to your “partner”, or “lone parents”, or people being “vertically challenged”, you will be instantly marked out as non-U. The papers said Prince William had telephoned Kate during all the furore and been very “supportive” — another dreadfully non-U word. Soon they’ll be rabbiting on about them “achieving closure”, another horror.
There’s a lot of confusion about class. Most of the Labour party thinks Tony Blair is terribly grand, but he isn’t. He’s charming, of course, but very, very middle class, not even upper middle class. And I’ve found out while researching Wicked!, which is set in schools, that among young people the word “posh” often isn’t used to denote class, but to accuse someone of being irritatingly clever. Perhaps people who are “posh” are destined to do well in exams and make it to the top.
Class has given us great comic characters, from Mrs Bennet and Hyacinth Bouquet to Tim Nice-But-Dim and Vicky Pollard, the archetypal working-class girl, mouthy, inarticulate and terribly funny.
It’s much more fun to have a class system than not, as long as everyone can go on gently laughing about it. The thing that’s horrid is when people feel hurt by it. But you should remember that the royal family isn’t nearly as old as half the aristocracy — so a lot of people look down on them, too!
Source
The British hospital experience
Notes from a patient -- Prof. Brignell. He got prompt treatment only because he had private insurance but even then the NHS did not make it easy
Kafkaesque! That is the word. If you don't know what it means, make an appointment as an outpatient with the British National Health Service. An hour or two in the waiting room is enough to induce that feeling of hopelessness endured by Joseph K. In my case they had taken the trouble to write, bringing the appointment forward by half an hour, but I was still there in suspended animation an hour later than the original appointed time. About fifty assorted human beings sat glum and dispirited, some occasionally whispering to each other with a librarian reverence. In the background, people in various shades of uniform bustled through unseeing, intent on their business. Behind the reception desk women rattled computer keyboards with intense determination.
Suddenly my name was called and I found myself whisked from the large waiting room to a small waiting room. There was no silence here. A very large Irish woman was regaling the reluctant company with an account of her recent experiences as an inmate, including details of biological functions we would rather not know about. After another half hour, a woman approached me and said "The registrar has looked at your notes and has decided to let you see the consultant." Perhaps welcome news, except that it was the consultant who had asked me to come back and see him ten weeks after the first examination. People came and went. I waited.
It was quite different once I penetrated the inner sanctum. The consultant was urbane and gentlemanly, radiating that cultivated assurance that we used to expect of our medical advisors. He recommended that I have a course of intravenous antibiotics, but we would have to wait for a hospital appointment, as it should commence under observation in case there were any reactions. I mentioned that I had managed to retain sufficient medical insurance to cover hospital admission, so he left it with me to make the appointment. When I phoned BUPA there were no problems and a bed was found for me for the following weekend.
The difference! When you approach the NHS hospital, the first thing you see is a large yellow notice with ominous black capitals announcing THIS IS A WHEEL-CLAMPING ZONE. Just the thing for people in distress and pain, who have to grope around to see if they have the coins to feed the meter! It induces the same sort of anxiety as a notice I remember from almost forty years before YOU ARE NOW ENTERING THE GERMAN DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC. The notice at the entrance of the private hospital said "Welcome" and directed you to the car park. Inside, the atmosphere was calm and kindly. What was striking was the obsessive hygiene and asepsis, from another age. Inside and outside each patient's door were dispensers for alcoholic hand rubs, which visitors were encouraged to use. Despite the occasional puncturing it was actually a pleasurable experience.
My local GP practice had volunteered to carry on the injections, so the consultant had arranged that I would pick up the antibiotics at the town pharmacy and take them in. I received a phone call to say that the pharmacy had discovered that it was not licensed to handle those particular antibiotics and would I drive back to the hospital pharmacy (a three hour round trip) to pick them up? Five days of injections went smoothly, but hanging over me was that threat of the unknown - THE WEEKEND. Don't worry, I was told, just phone one of these numbers and arrange an appointment with the out-of -hours service and we will give you the kit of parts to take with you.
Hello, is that the out-of-hours service?
Yes.
I would like to make an appointment for some intravenous injections.
How did you get this number?
I was given two numbers and the first one did not work.
This is an administration number, you are not supposed to have it.
What would happen if I had used the other number?
It would come to the same place, but that is not the point.
I would like to make an appointment for some intravenous injections.
Well you can't. The system does not work like that. You will have to phone on the day.
I went back to the local surgery and the receptionist kindly arranged the appointments for the Saturday and Sunday. Fortunately, the appointments were in nearby Shaftesbury, at a local cottage hospital of the sort that the Government is trying to close. It was charming and, above all, clean, even having a hand-rub dispenser on the waiting room wall.
The professional staff were kindly and efficient, indeed magnificent. This is not just a ritual nod of politeness. These people, fully aware that they are working in a mad system, still manage to maintain and integrity and dedication that is a wonder to behold. As the intravenous injections are a slow business, there was an opportunity for conversation, during which I elicited some interesting remarks:
Reorganisation is the norm in the NHS.
The rules change so often that nobody actually knows what they are.
The trouble with the big hospitals is that the cleaners are no longer part of the team, as they were in matron's day, and anyway they can barely communicate in English.
It takes an intellectual to be really stupid: "A third of women graduates will never have children, research has concluded. The number of highly educated women who are starting families has plummeted in the past decade, according to findings that provide the most detailed insight yet into education and fertility. While some women are making a conscious decision not to have children, others are simply leaving it too late after taking years to build their careers, buy a home and find the right partner. Graduates who do become mothers are having fewer children, and later. If the low birth rate trend continues, then the eventual rate of childlessness among graduates now aged in their twenties is likely to be even higher than a third".
Monday, April 23, 2007
Victim obsession leading to MORE oppression, not less in modern Britain
On 30 March 2007, Aishah Azmi, the Muslim teaching assistant sacked over her refusal to stop wearing the veil in the classroom, lost her controversial appeal at an employment tribunal in Leeds, England. The 24-year-old from Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, courted media attention for almost a year since coming into dispute with Headfield Church of England Junior School, which said that it decided to sack her over concerns that the veil prevented children from being able to understand what she was saying.
Over the last few months, the veiled face of Aishah Azmi has served as a totemic reminder of the tensions emanating from new religious discrimination and religious hatred laws in Britain. While some media commentators have seen Azmi's case as a pressing reminder of the need for a law to protect vulnerable religious minorities, others have seen it as a sop to grievance culture, encouraging individuals to make unreasonable demands in court.
In his new book, Religious Discrimination and Hatred Law, Neil Addison provides the first comprehensive survey of legislation concerning religion in diverse areas such as criminal law, discrimination, employment and harassment, and charts the growing role of courts in regulating this messy dimension of society. A practising barrister for over 20 years, Addison is concerned about the expansion of the law into a complicated moral aspect of human life, and fears that a new generation of laws will remove people's powers to criticise, challenge or defend their religious (or non-religious) views. He campaigned vociferously against the law outlawing incitement to religious hatred (see Divided before the law, by Neil Addison ) and has also set up his own website offering free information and advice to the public.
Addison considers the first generation of anti-discrimination laws established in the 1970s (for example, the Race Relations Act 1976 and the Sex Discrimination Act 1975) to be largely benevolent, reasonable and narrow in their focus. However, he reserves serious criticism for the second generation of anti-discrimination laws, which have proliferated in the past 10 years culminating with the Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006 and the Equality Act 2006. These developments, Addison argues, significantly expand the reach of the law beyond areas of fixed identity, to areas such as religious belief and sexual orientation, which presume a level of choice and changeability. `Suddenly', he says, `religion is becoming a very political area'.
Addison sees the expansion of law into the terrain of religion as part of `a new type of philosophy': `We used to have laws because we considered them necessary, but now it seems we have laws because they are desirable.. If something is regarded as good or bad, we use the law to direct it. In effect, we're trying to legislate morality.' For Addison, the law has now become a tool for some groups to impose their moral positions on others, whether it is the ban on smoking or the ban on foxhunting or restrictions on what we can say about minority groups. `I have met a number of campaigners, for instance in the gay rights movement, who talk about using the law to "send a message". But the law is not the right way to send a message. Politics is.'
This heavy-handed use of the law to enforce a new morality is something Addison objects strongly to. In 2005, he represented Joe and Helen Roberts, an elderly Christian couple from Fleetwood, Lancashire, who were visited by two local police officers after they had telephoned their local council's diversity officer to complain about the council's pro-gay policies. The couple, who had never been in trouble with the law before, were subjected to an 80-minute lecture by the police officers about homophobia. Last year the couple sued the police and council using the Human Rights Act 1998 and eventually won an apology and damages.
Addison says that the most depressing part of the whole incident is that at no point during the initial telephone conversation with the couple did the council's diversity officer try to persuade them of his viewpoint. `Instead of taking the opportunity to argue with them, as should happen in a democracy, the diversity officer called the police in order to suppress views he disagreed with.'
The problem with using the iron standard of the law to enforce moral positions is that it does not always deliver morally satisfactory or consistent results. How can one determine through the law what is `hateful' speech, what causes great offence, and what is `reasonable'? If a woman wearing a hijab is attacked by someone who shouts `I hate you f*cking Muslims', then the defendant would be charged with religiously aggravated assault. But what would happen if a Muslim shopkeeper regarded Muslim women who did not wear the hijab to be bad Muslims and refused to serve them in his shop? Is that discrimination against a religion or an argument within a religion?
In terms of constituting the boundaries of acceptable religious belief, it seems inappropriate for judges to be left to decide. Addison spends the first chapter of his book teasing out the apparently simple question `What is religion?' - only to show that there is surprisingly little consistency on this question across different legislation. Addison demonstrates that courts rely inevitably on subjective instinct. In the words of the US Supreme Court Justice who was asked to define pornography: `I can't define it; but I know it when I see it.'
Consequently, the goalposts keep shifting on the issue of what constitutes a political or philosophical belief worthy of protection. In 2005, an individual lost his case at an employment tribunal for being refused a job interview because he was a member of the far-right British National Party (BNP). The tribunal decided that his membership of the BNP did not qualify for protection. However, the slightly different wording of the Equality Act 2006 means that such views, which are political, might now be protected as `philosophical beliefs'.
What has been the impact of these different laws in court? Although for any campaigner it is always tempting to sensationalise and extrapolate worst-case scenarios about new laws and policies, Addison, to his credit, examines the way in which judges and lawyers actually operate (mostly exercising a reasonable sense of proportion) and suggests the subtle ways in which the law will work on a day-to-day basis. He is cautious about offering a prediction about the effect of newer legislation. `It is quite early to tell.it may be that all these laws will be a damp squib.'
But, he says, the weight given to subjective factors such as how the victim feels may be a greater encouragement for people to bring claims. In discrimination cases, there is a reverse burden of proof, which means employers need to offer evidence to show they have not broken the law. In reality, judges still require significant persuasion before they will award a claimant damages, but this shift in the law means it is increasingly hard for the accused to be treated as innocent until proven guilty. `Once the accusation is made, it tends to stick', says Addison. Also, there is now a greater risk that the law will be used as a political tool. `Now this legislation is in place, it is possible that ideologically driven groups may go looking for cases to fight.'
The new Commission for Equality and Human Rights (CEHR) will start to operate in October, under the helm of Trevor Phillips. It will have significant new powers to investigate virtually any organisation, place orders on them and take legal action. Because this is under discrimination rather than criminal law, these organisations (which may include churches, charities and community centres) will not be entitled to legal aid. Whereas the original equalities bodies (such as the Commission for Racial Equality that preceded the CEHR) were expected to enforce the existing law, the CEHR has an added duty (Section 3, Equality Act 2006) to `encourage and support the development of a society' in which there is equality, respect for diversity and human rights. In other words, it is not merely a law enforcer, but a body with legal powers to enforce its view of the kind of society we ought to be. A practicing Catholic, Addison believes that by adopting a `Zero Tolerance' approach to any manifestation or expression of discrimination, the CEHR will repeat the mistakes of the Spanish Inquisition which famously said that `Heresy has no Rights'.
It may be hard to tell how the CEHR will operate, and how many cases will eventually be brought to court. But the chilling effect on how groups engage with wider society can already be guessed at. One of the negative consequences of the law, Addison suggests, will spring from its insistence on all religions treating other religions equally; a well-meaning idea which paradoxically could actually discourage mainstream religious cooperation. For instance, if a church lets a local Hindu community group use its premises for services then it may be in difficulties about refusing to let a Pagan group use the premises also. Perversely, the law builds in a disincentive for churches and other institutions to open themselves up to some groups, in case they are then forced to open their doors to other groups that they dislike. Although such examples may appear far-fetched, the law has an all too familiar effect of making people `watch their backs' and think twice before making decisions.
Also, because subjective factors are taken into account, different groups are given no incentive to `live and let live'; rather, the more hurt and offended they feel, the more onus there will be on the law to protect them. If a religious group shows tolerance and forbearance of its critics, it will receive far less protection from the courts than another group that protests loudly.
The driver behind the new legislation, Addison tells me, is a new culture of victimhood, in which lobby groups representing particular identities compete to receive the most protection. `Every time you legislate to prevent one type of discrimination, another group demands protection', he says. It is widely known that Muslim lobby groups (particularly the Muslim Council of Britain) were the most vociferous in pushing for the law against the incitement to religious hatred. Their argument rested on a claim for parity with Christianity, which was formally protected by the ancient law of blasphemy - though, as Addison points out, the blasphemy law is all but defunct. The last public prosecution was in 1922 and the last private prosecution was brought by Mary Whitehouse in 1977.
Though a practising Catholic himself, Addison believes that the blasphemy law should simply have been repealed rather than remaining as a perceived, but in reality meaningless, special protection to Christianity. In reality, people today can say pretty much anything they like about Christianity and the police will not lift a finger. However, the law against the incitement to religious hatred is more likely to be enforced, simply because it is new, and the Crown Prosecution Service must take this into account when making judgements on whether a prosecution is `in the public interest'. A law that many people thought was outdated and unnecessary has been used to justify the creation of a law that will be enforced more rigorously by prosecutors.
Addison says that in the competitive culture of victimhood, even mild-mannered Christians are beginning to play the discrimination card, following the example of Muslim lobby groups. More generally, the emphasis in the law on discrimination, Addison believes, is part of a broader emphasis on difference. People are encouraged to emphasise their differences and `insist on their rights', rather than being encouraged to find accommodation with others by negotiation and persuasion. `The danger is that instead of seeing ourselves as citizens in the same society, we are trying to create a hierarchy of victimhood with more and more groups defining themselves as victims and demanding special protection.'
Although many campaigners regard the new laws relating to religious discrimination as a sign of modernity, in some ways they mark a return to medieval thinking about freedom. Instead of deciding amongst ourselves through political argument and the give-and-take of debate, the law has become a way of closing down discussion and taking that decision out of our hands. Ironically, Aishah Azmi's `personal' decision to wear the veil was said to have been made as a result of a fatwa issued by a cleric at her mosque. The notion that the law should legitimise this kind of authority over the private sphere of belief is creeping into the fabric of our own legal system.
Source
Why are blacks madder?
The article below shows a realization that it is not all "racism" and realizes that social class is a major missing factor but overlooks the role of IQ. Low IQ people are much more likely to resort to aggression to get what they want and aggression is the major factor in whether someone gets locked up or not. So blacks tend to be both working class and of low IQ -- so they are characterized by two factors which lead to detention in any population
For all its claims to be a multicultural society, a form of apartheid is said to be looming in Britain. According to Lord Patel, chairman of the Mental Health Act Commission, within the British mental health system there is one form of care and treatment for whites and another, more coercive and less therapeutic, for blacks (1). But the truth may be far more complex.
Lord Patel was responding to a census report that found that black people were over-represented within psychiatric care. The Healthcare Commission survey, titled `Count Me In', looked at the ethnic background of the 32,023 psychiatric in-patients in England and Wales as of 31 March 2006. The census found that black people were three to four times more likely to be hospitalised than their white counterparts, accounting for 21 per cent of in-patients, even though only making up seven per cent of the general population. (If the ethnic category of `black other', is isolated, the differential rises to 18-to-one (2).)
Given such statistics, it is not surprising that the psychiatric services once again stand accused of institutional racism. The term `institutional racism' with regard to the mental health system came to prominence with the report of the inquiry into the death of David `Rocky' Bennett (pictured above). Bennett, a black patient, died while being physically restrained by nurses at a Norfolk psychiatric clinic. The subsequent inquiry report concluded that racist assumptions and practices had contributed to his death, and stated that institutional racism was `a festering abscess, a blot on the good name of the NHS' (3).
In response to the above, the government has pledged to `eradicate discrimination' in NHS mental health provision. Louis Appleby, the national director for mental health, stated that work was under way to win the trust and confidence of black minority ethnic communities. For him, this was necessary to `better understand the wider social factors that result in some communities experiencing a higher rate of mental illness' (4).
Kwame McKenzie, professor of mental health and society at the University of Central Lancashire, argues that being black in Britain is detrimental to your mental health, and that once your mental state has deteriorated to an acute level you will receive more coercive and discriminatory treatment than your white counterparts (5). Accusations of institutional racism would appear to be well founded. However, a closer look at the issue shows the reality to be more complex than is often reported, and also highlights the danger of pathologising whole communities under the guise of therapeutic aid.
It would be foolish to ignore the role of psychiatry in upholding dominant social mores. Like many professions it has a chequered history when it comes to issues of race, perhaps the most infamous example being the creation of a `disease' called `drapetomania' - a condition said to affect black people who tried to escape slavery. And the recent census merely confirms many similar findings into the over-representation of black people in the mental health system (6).
Nevertheless, it is naive, simplistic and problematic to blame institutional racism for such a situation. For example, the 21 per cent `non-white' group includes a variety of ethnic groups, including Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, White Irish and `Other White'. And whilst it is the case that Afro-Caribbeans are over-represented, other groups such as the Indian and Chinese communities are under-represented. Such discrepancies indicate that there is more to this than `race'.
Whilst the reasons for the differentials are complex, it is possible to highlight some relevant factors, including the marginalisation of social class; the fragmentation inherent within multiculturalism; and the rise of the therapeutic professional as the cure for society's problems.
For example, the fact that most sufferers are unemployed would indicate that social class is a factor in the onset of severe mental distress. Yet while the `Count Me In' census recorded such factors as ethnicity, age and even sexual orientation, social class was conspicuous by its absence. This is revealing in that it illustrates the way our understanding of social problems today tends to be viewed in ethnic or pathological terms rather than the class conflict of yesteryear.
In the process, there is a real danger that whole communities, especially black ones, are being portrayed as victims without agency, awaiting the arrival of mental health professionals to cure them of their ills. Kwame McKenzie notes that `psychotic illnesses are associated with poverty, poor education, racism, living in a city. family break up, and cannabis use'. If this is the case, and the associations are extremely complex, then the answer would appear to lie in the realm of the social, rather than the preventative therapy for children and adolescents advocated by McKenzie (7). Improving communities' access to jobs, education and welfare might be a better bet than treating them as ill and in need of special attention and care.
The other main strategy, and one recommended by the inquiry report into the death of Rocky Bennett, is to improve the `cultural awareness' of mental health staff. But this is to confuse the more minor failings in his care with the more tragic. As Errol Francis of the Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health, who gave evidence to the Bennett Inquiry, points out: `How much cultural awareness training does a nurse require before they realise that too much force will kill?' (8)
The experience of racism, poor housing and employment opportunities, and the pathologising of that experience, are nothing new for black people living in Britain. What is new is how such problems are articulated. In the 1980s, riots in Bristol, Manchester, Liverpool and London saw physical expression given to black marginalisation. Partly in response to this, the government accelerated the idea of multiculturalism, with funds and projects being set up on the basis of ethnic identity.
Could there be a link here? As identity became ever more fragmented around ethnicity, the way to secure funding was not by emphasising collective strength but particular vulnerability and hardship. In addition, the emphasis on difference implied that we had little in common with each other, our neighbours becoming threatening strangers rather than supportive allies. It is unlikely that such processes are conducive to a robust mental state.
Of course, when someone's mental state deteriorates to the point that professional help is necessary, they should receive appropriate and sensitive care. Awareness by staff of their needs is essential, but these will not always fit as neatly within the ethnic identity template that the authorities want to put us in. The categorisation of people as ethnic identities with certain cultural requirements implies a homogenous, timeless culture that can be as inaccurate as it can be patronising. The answer to most of these problems lies within and between communities. Improved social conditions and relationships of trust will improve the mental health of everyone - not just black people - far better than any `preventative' psychiatric intervention.
Source
Britain: Using environmentalism to make a buck (or a pound!)
Not many revolutions start with cheese and onion crisps, but this week they led the charge into carbon footprint labelling as Walkers tried out the Next Big Thing in the battle to drive the green agenda. Retailers are clamouring to demonstrate their green credentials and answer demands for more information about the energy involved in producing the weekly shop. Research by the Carbon Trust has found that two thirds of consumers say that they want to know the carbon footprint of the products they buy.
However, carbon labelling could be in danger of descending into the same farcical situation as nutritional labelling, with competing schemes run by rival retailers making it difficult for consumers to know which one to trust. Ian Cheshire, chief executive of B&Q, told a forum on ethical business at the World Retail Congress in Barcelona: "This is an issue on which retailers need to agree an industry standard but at the moment companies are working on a variety of separate schemes."
Tesco, the UK's largest retailer, announced plans with great fanfare in January to develop a "commonly understood measure" of the amount of carbon emissions related to every product sold. The supermarket said that it wanted to develop a Sustainable Consumption Institute to lead the project and commissioned the Environmental Change Institute (ECI) at Oxford University to help to devise a measurement scheme. Tesco insisted that it wanted to "collaborate with others around the world" on the project and convened a meeting with rival retailers J Sainsbury and Marks & Spencer, as well as its suppliers Unilever and PepsiCo to help to discuss how things might progress. A further meeting of about 20 stakeholders including rival retailers and suppliers is set for early next month at the ECI. Sir Terry Leahy, Tesco's chief executive, said this week that he expected to have some products labelled by January. "We are getting a favourable reaction from other retailers and from around the world. It is probably the most remarkable communication we have ever made," he said.
However, Sainsbury's, M&S, Boots and a number of other companies have already been working with the Carbon Trust, a government-backed body dedicated to helping businesses to cut their carbon emissions, on a labelling scheme. Boots, Walkers and Innocent drinks have committed themselves to testing the Carbon Trust-backed scheme and its logo will become increasingly apparent in stores over the next few months. Marks & Spencer also has just completed a project with the Carbon Trust to map the emissions generated by its food products, although the retailer believes that it is some years away from being able confidently to label goods.
The Carbon Trust's scheme attempts to calculate and represent the amount of carbon emissions generated in the production of an item and examines the supply chain behind a product. It includes a commitment to reduce the carbon footprint of the product over time. If the producer cannot demonstrate it has reduced carbon emissions over a two-year period, it will no longer be allowed to use the label. Euan Murray, strategy manager for the Carbon Trust, said that the organisation was working with other groups of companies and aimed to announce further trials in the next few months. He said that, although Tesco was carrying out its own research, "they see the world very much as we do and we are trying to create a single way of measuring carbon footprints of products which we think is critical to the success of the venture".
Sir Terry said that Tesco was "keen to work with everybody" and insisted that retailers were not headed for a re-enactment of the traffic light nutrional labelling debacle. However, he pointed out that the scheme he envisaged was slightly different from the Carbon Trust's proposed concept because it aimed to take into account the carbon used during consumption. "We are not trying to gain competitive advantage on the thing," Sir Terry said. "You have got to start the process. There is a danger if you went for a single standard that it would never get off the ground. "The danger of trying to be too prescriptive is that you lock flaws in. It is better to be a little more flexible until things are on track and people have more experience of them."
Source
Incompetent British ambulance service
Patients are less likely to be treated by a paramedic in London than in Wales, government figures show. Nationally, only half of front-line ambulance staff are fully trained paramedics, according to figures released under the Freedom of Information Act. London has the lowest percentage of paramedics, at 34 per cent, and Wales the best, at 61 per cent. There are also concerns that a preoccupation with meeting the Government's target of answering life-threatening calls within eight minutes is putting lives at danger.
The ambulance service will today tell Tonight with Trevor McDonald on ITV1 that meeting the target is a higher priority than sending the appropriate staff member. Most ambulances are staffed by emergency medical technicians, who carry less specialist equipment than a paramedic.
Source
Britain does NOT support its troops: "The defence secretary, Des Browne, is facing accusations that the government has put cost-cutting before the welfare of the services by failing to remedy safety faults that led to a Nimrod spy plane blowing up over Afghanistan. The Sunday Times has established that a fleet of refurbished Nimrods will contain the same ageing and leaking fuel systems that caused last year's disaster in which 14 crew died. The decision to keep the system, which will reduce the cost of the revamped jets, comes despite repetitions of the leaks that caused the explosion. A Nimrod returned to base recently with seven tons of fuel "sloshing around" after it leaked into its bomb bay. Andy Knight, whose brother Sergeant Ben Knight, 25, was one of the men killed, said: "The Ministry of Defence was prepared to risk the loss of a 70 million pound-plus jet and its crew, rather than spending the money needed to make the fleet safe. "I have seen nothing since the accident that suggests it has changed its stance."
Huge British voting fraud: "More than 1m "ghost" voters have been uncovered who threaten to undermine the result of next month's local council elections. An analysis by Britain's electoral watchdog has estimated that there are at least 1m and possibly up to 3.5m people whose names appear on the electoral roll even though they are ineligible to vote. The disclosure will fuel concerns over the extent of electoral fraud, which critics claim the government has down-played in order to extend postal voting, which benefits Labour candidates. The names include illegal immigrants, bogus voters, foreign residents and those who are registered at more than one address. Officials fear that in marginal areas, election results could be affected by abuse of "ghost" votes. The Electoral Commission is using pollster GfK NOP to interview thousands of voters to accurately quantify the level of fraudulent voting"
On 30 March 2007, Aishah Azmi, the Muslim teaching assistant sacked over her refusal to stop wearing the veil in the classroom, lost her controversial appeal at an employment tribunal in Leeds, England. The 24-year-old from Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, courted media attention for almost a year since coming into dispute with Headfield Church of England Junior School, which said that it decided to sack her over concerns that the veil prevented children from being able to understand what she was saying.
Over the last few months, the veiled face of Aishah Azmi has served as a totemic reminder of the tensions emanating from new religious discrimination and religious hatred laws in Britain. While some media commentators have seen Azmi's case as a pressing reminder of the need for a law to protect vulnerable religious minorities, others have seen it as a sop to grievance culture, encouraging individuals to make unreasonable demands in court.
In his new book, Religious Discrimination and Hatred Law, Neil Addison provides the first comprehensive survey of legislation concerning religion in diverse areas such as criminal law, discrimination, employment and harassment, and charts the growing role of courts in regulating this messy dimension of society. A practising barrister for over 20 years, Addison is concerned about the expansion of the law into a complicated moral aspect of human life, and fears that a new generation of laws will remove people's powers to criticise, challenge or defend their religious (or non-religious) views. He campaigned vociferously against the law outlawing incitement to religious hatred (see Divided before the law, by Neil Addison ) and has also set up his own website offering free information and advice to the public.
Addison considers the first generation of anti-discrimination laws established in the 1970s (for example, the Race Relations Act 1976 and the Sex Discrimination Act 1975) to be largely benevolent, reasonable and narrow in their focus. However, he reserves serious criticism for the second generation of anti-discrimination laws, which have proliferated in the past 10 years culminating with the Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006 and the Equality Act 2006. These developments, Addison argues, significantly expand the reach of the law beyond areas of fixed identity, to areas such as religious belief and sexual orientation, which presume a level of choice and changeability. `Suddenly', he says, `religion is becoming a very political area'.
Addison sees the expansion of law into the terrain of religion as part of `a new type of philosophy': `We used to have laws because we considered them necessary, but now it seems we have laws because they are desirable.. If something is regarded as good or bad, we use the law to direct it. In effect, we're trying to legislate morality.' For Addison, the law has now become a tool for some groups to impose their moral positions on others, whether it is the ban on smoking or the ban on foxhunting or restrictions on what we can say about minority groups. `I have met a number of campaigners, for instance in the gay rights movement, who talk about using the law to "send a message". But the law is not the right way to send a message. Politics is.'
This heavy-handed use of the law to enforce a new morality is something Addison objects strongly to. In 2005, he represented Joe and Helen Roberts, an elderly Christian couple from Fleetwood, Lancashire, who were visited by two local police officers after they had telephoned their local council's diversity officer to complain about the council's pro-gay policies. The couple, who had never been in trouble with the law before, were subjected to an 80-minute lecture by the police officers about homophobia. Last year the couple sued the police and council using the Human Rights Act 1998 and eventually won an apology and damages.
Addison says that the most depressing part of the whole incident is that at no point during the initial telephone conversation with the couple did the council's diversity officer try to persuade them of his viewpoint. `Instead of taking the opportunity to argue with them, as should happen in a democracy, the diversity officer called the police in order to suppress views he disagreed with.'
The problem with using the iron standard of the law to enforce moral positions is that it does not always deliver morally satisfactory or consistent results. How can one determine through the law what is `hateful' speech, what causes great offence, and what is `reasonable'? If a woman wearing a hijab is attacked by someone who shouts `I hate you f*cking Muslims', then the defendant would be charged with religiously aggravated assault. But what would happen if a Muslim shopkeeper regarded Muslim women who did not wear the hijab to be bad Muslims and refused to serve them in his shop? Is that discrimination against a religion or an argument within a religion?
In terms of constituting the boundaries of acceptable religious belief, it seems inappropriate for judges to be left to decide. Addison spends the first chapter of his book teasing out the apparently simple question `What is religion?' - only to show that there is surprisingly little consistency on this question across different legislation. Addison demonstrates that courts rely inevitably on subjective instinct. In the words of the US Supreme Court Justice who was asked to define pornography: `I can't define it; but I know it when I see it.'
Consequently, the goalposts keep shifting on the issue of what constitutes a political or philosophical belief worthy of protection. In 2005, an individual lost his case at an employment tribunal for being refused a job interview because he was a member of the far-right British National Party (BNP). The tribunal decided that his membership of the BNP did not qualify for protection. However, the slightly different wording of the Equality Act 2006 means that such views, which are political, might now be protected as `philosophical beliefs'.
What has been the impact of these different laws in court? Although for any campaigner it is always tempting to sensationalise and extrapolate worst-case scenarios about new laws and policies, Addison, to his credit, examines the way in which judges and lawyers actually operate (mostly exercising a reasonable sense of proportion) and suggests the subtle ways in which the law will work on a day-to-day basis. He is cautious about offering a prediction about the effect of newer legislation. `It is quite early to tell.it may be that all these laws will be a damp squib.'
But, he says, the weight given to subjective factors such as how the victim feels may be a greater encouragement for people to bring claims. In discrimination cases, there is a reverse burden of proof, which means employers need to offer evidence to show they have not broken the law. In reality, judges still require significant persuasion before they will award a claimant damages, but this shift in the law means it is increasingly hard for the accused to be treated as innocent until proven guilty. `Once the accusation is made, it tends to stick', says Addison. Also, there is now a greater risk that the law will be used as a political tool. `Now this legislation is in place, it is possible that ideologically driven groups may go looking for cases to fight.'
The new Commission for Equality and Human Rights (CEHR) will start to operate in October, under the helm of Trevor Phillips. It will have significant new powers to investigate virtually any organisation, place orders on them and take legal action. Because this is under discrimination rather than criminal law, these organisations (which may include churches, charities and community centres) will not be entitled to legal aid. Whereas the original equalities bodies (such as the Commission for Racial Equality that preceded the CEHR) were expected to enforce the existing law, the CEHR has an added duty (Section 3, Equality Act 2006) to `encourage and support the development of a society' in which there is equality, respect for diversity and human rights. In other words, it is not merely a law enforcer, but a body with legal powers to enforce its view of the kind of society we ought to be. A practicing Catholic, Addison believes that by adopting a `Zero Tolerance' approach to any manifestation or expression of discrimination, the CEHR will repeat the mistakes of the Spanish Inquisition which famously said that `Heresy has no Rights'.
It may be hard to tell how the CEHR will operate, and how many cases will eventually be brought to court. But the chilling effect on how groups engage with wider society can already be guessed at. One of the negative consequences of the law, Addison suggests, will spring from its insistence on all religions treating other religions equally; a well-meaning idea which paradoxically could actually discourage mainstream religious cooperation. For instance, if a church lets a local Hindu community group use its premises for services then it may be in difficulties about refusing to let a Pagan group use the premises also. Perversely, the law builds in a disincentive for churches and other institutions to open themselves up to some groups, in case they are then forced to open their doors to other groups that they dislike. Although such examples may appear far-fetched, the law has an all too familiar effect of making people `watch their backs' and think twice before making decisions.
Also, because subjective factors are taken into account, different groups are given no incentive to `live and let live'; rather, the more hurt and offended they feel, the more onus there will be on the law to protect them. If a religious group shows tolerance and forbearance of its critics, it will receive far less protection from the courts than another group that protests loudly.
The driver behind the new legislation, Addison tells me, is a new culture of victimhood, in which lobby groups representing particular identities compete to receive the most protection. `Every time you legislate to prevent one type of discrimination, another group demands protection', he says. It is widely known that Muslim lobby groups (particularly the Muslim Council of Britain) were the most vociferous in pushing for the law against the incitement to religious hatred. Their argument rested on a claim for parity with Christianity, which was formally protected by the ancient law of blasphemy - though, as Addison points out, the blasphemy law is all but defunct. The last public prosecution was in 1922 and the last private prosecution was brought by Mary Whitehouse in 1977.
Though a practising Catholic himself, Addison believes that the blasphemy law should simply have been repealed rather than remaining as a perceived, but in reality meaningless, special protection to Christianity. In reality, people today can say pretty much anything they like about Christianity and the police will not lift a finger. However, the law against the incitement to religious hatred is more likely to be enforced, simply because it is new, and the Crown Prosecution Service must take this into account when making judgements on whether a prosecution is `in the public interest'. A law that many people thought was outdated and unnecessary has been used to justify the creation of a law that will be enforced more rigorously by prosecutors.
Addison says that in the competitive culture of victimhood, even mild-mannered Christians are beginning to play the discrimination card, following the example of Muslim lobby groups. More generally, the emphasis in the law on discrimination, Addison believes, is part of a broader emphasis on difference. People are encouraged to emphasise their differences and `insist on their rights', rather than being encouraged to find accommodation with others by negotiation and persuasion. `The danger is that instead of seeing ourselves as citizens in the same society, we are trying to create a hierarchy of victimhood with more and more groups defining themselves as victims and demanding special protection.'
Although many campaigners regard the new laws relating to religious discrimination as a sign of modernity, in some ways they mark a return to medieval thinking about freedom. Instead of deciding amongst ourselves through political argument and the give-and-take of debate, the law has become a way of closing down discussion and taking that decision out of our hands. Ironically, Aishah Azmi's `personal' decision to wear the veil was said to have been made as a result of a fatwa issued by a cleric at her mosque. The notion that the law should legitimise this kind of authority over the private sphere of belief is creeping into the fabric of our own legal system.
Source
Why are blacks madder?
The article below shows a realization that it is not all "racism" and realizes that social class is a major missing factor but overlooks the role of IQ. Low IQ people are much more likely to resort to aggression to get what they want and aggression is the major factor in whether someone gets locked up or not. So blacks tend to be both working class and of low IQ -- so they are characterized by two factors which lead to detention in any population
For all its claims to be a multicultural society, a form of apartheid is said to be looming in Britain. According to Lord Patel, chairman of the Mental Health Act Commission, within the British mental health system there is one form of care and treatment for whites and another, more coercive and less therapeutic, for blacks (1). But the truth may be far more complex.
Lord Patel was responding to a census report that found that black people were over-represented within psychiatric care. The Healthcare Commission survey, titled `Count Me In', looked at the ethnic background of the 32,023 psychiatric in-patients in England and Wales as of 31 March 2006. The census found that black people were three to four times more likely to be hospitalised than their white counterparts, accounting for 21 per cent of in-patients, even though only making up seven per cent of the general population. (If the ethnic category of `black other', is isolated, the differential rises to 18-to-one (2).)
Given such statistics, it is not surprising that the psychiatric services once again stand accused of institutional racism. The term `institutional racism' with regard to the mental health system came to prominence with the report of the inquiry into the death of David `Rocky' Bennett (pictured above). Bennett, a black patient, died while being physically restrained by nurses at a Norfolk psychiatric clinic. The subsequent inquiry report concluded that racist assumptions and practices had contributed to his death, and stated that institutional racism was `a festering abscess, a blot on the good name of the NHS' (3).
In response to the above, the government has pledged to `eradicate discrimination' in NHS mental health provision. Louis Appleby, the national director for mental health, stated that work was under way to win the trust and confidence of black minority ethnic communities. For him, this was necessary to `better understand the wider social factors that result in some communities experiencing a higher rate of mental illness' (4).
Kwame McKenzie, professor of mental health and society at the University of Central Lancashire, argues that being black in Britain is detrimental to your mental health, and that once your mental state has deteriorated to an acute level you will receive more coercive and discriminatory treatment than your white counterparts (5). Accusations of institutional racism would appear to be well founded. However, a closer look at the issue shows the reality to be more complex than is often reported, and also highlights the danger of pathologising whole communities under the guise of therapeutic aid.
It would be foolish to ignore the role of psychiatry in upholding dominant social mores. Like many professions it has a chequered history when it comes to issues of race, perhaps the most infamous example being the creation of a `disease' called `drapetomania' - a condition said to affect black people who tried to escape slavery. And the recent census merely confirms many similar findings into the over-representation of black people in the mental health system (6).
Nevertheless, it is naive, simplistic and problematic to blame institutional racism for such a situation. For example, the 21 per cent `non-white' group includes a variety of ethnic groups, including Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, White Irish and `Other White'. And whilst it is the case that Afro-Caribbeans are over-represented, other groups such as the Indian and Chinese communities are under-represented. Such discrepancies indicate that there is more to this than `race'.
Whilst the reasons for the differentials are complex, it is possible to highlight some relevant factors, including the marginalisation of social class; the fragmentation inherent within multiculturalism; and the rise of the therapeutic professional as the cure for society's problems.
For example, the fact that most sufferers are unemployed would indicate that social class is a factor in the onset of severe mental distress. Yet while the `Count Me In' census recorded such factors as ethnicity, age and even sexual orientation, social class was conspicuous by its absence. This is revealing in that it illustrates the way our understanding of social problems today tends to be viewed in ethnic or pathological terms rather than the class conflict of yesteryear.
In the process, there is a real danger that whole communities, especially black ones, are being portrayed as victims without agency, awaiting the arrival of mental health professionals to cure them of their ills. Kwame McKenzie notes that `psychotic illnesses are associated with poverty, poor education, racism, living in a city. family break up, and cannabis use'. If this is the case, and the associations are extremely complex, then the answer would appear to lie in the realm of the social, rather than the preventative therapy for children and adolescents advocated by McKenzie (7). Improving communities' access to jobs, education and welfare might be a better bet than treating them as ill and in need of special attention and care.
The other main strategy, and one recommended by the inquiry report into the death of Rocky Bennett, is to improve the `cultural awareness' of mental health staff. But this is to confuse the more minor failings in his care with the more tragic. As Errol Francis of the Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health, who gave evidence to the Bennett Inquiry, points out: `How much cultural awareness training does a nurse require before they realise that too much force will kill?' (8)
The experience of racism, poor housing and employment opportunities, and the pathologising of that experience, are nothing new for black people living in Britain. What is new is how such problems are articulated. In the 1980s, riots in Bristol, Manchester, Liverpool and London saw physical expression given to black marginalisation. Partly in response to this, the government accelerated the idea of multiculturalism, with funds and projects being set up on the basis of ethnic identity.
Could there be a link here? As identity became ever more fragmented around ethnicity, the way to secure funding was not by emphasising collective strength but particular vulnerability and hardship. In addition, the emphasis on difference implied that we had little in common with each other, our neighbours becoming threatening strangers rather than supportive allies. It is unlikely that such processes are conducive to a robust mental state.
Of course, when someone's mental state deteriorates to the point that professional help is necessary, they should receive appropriate and sensitive care. Awareness by staff of their needs is essential, but these will not always fit as neatly within the ethnic identity template that the authorities want to put us in. The categorisation of people as ethnic identities with certain cultural requirements implies a homogenous, timeless culture that can be as inaccurate as it can be patronising. The answer to most of these problems lies within and between communities. Improved social conditions and relationships of trust will improve the mental health of everyone - not just black people - far better than any `preventative' psychiatric intervention.
Source
Britain: Using environmentalism to make a buck (or a pound!)
Not many revolutions start with cheese and onion crisps, but this week they led the charge into carbon footprint labelling as Walkers tried out the Next Big Thing in the battle to drive the green agenda. Retailers are clamouring to demonstrate their green credentials and answer demands for more information about the energy involved in producing the weekly shop. Research by the Carbon Trust has found that two thirds of consumers say that they want to know the carbon footprint of the products they buy.
However, carbon labelling could be in danger of descending into the same farcical situation as nutritional labelling, with competing schemes run by rival retailers making it difficult for consumers to know which one to trust. Ian Cheshire, chief executive of B&Q, told a forum on ethical business at the World Retail Congress in Barcelona: "This is an issue on which retailers need to agree an industry standard but at the moment companies are working on a variety of separate schemes."
Tesco, the UK's largest retailer, announced plans with great fanfare in January to develop a "commonly understood measure" of the amount of carbon emissions related to every product sold. The supermarket said that it wanted to develop a Sustainable Consumption Institute to lead the project and commissioned the Environmental Change Institute (ECI) at Oxford University to help to devise a measurement scheme. Tesco insisted that it wanted to "collaborate with others around the world" on the project and convened a meeting with rival retailers J Sainsbury and Marks & Spencer, as well as its suppliers Unilever and PepsiCo to help to discuss how things might progress. A further meeting of about 20 stakeholders including rival retailers and suppliers is set for early next month at the ECI. Sir Terry Leahy, Tesco's chief executive, said this week that he expected to have some products labelled by January. "We are getting a favourable reaction from other retailers and from around the world. It is probably the most remarkable communication we have ever made," he said.
However, Sainsbury's, M&S, Boots and a number of other companies have already been working with the Carbon Trust, a government-backed body dedicated to helping businesses to cut their carbon emissions, on a labelling scheme. Boots, Walkers and Innocent drinks have committed themselves to testing the Carbon Trust-backed scheme and its logo will become increasingly apparent in stores over the next few months. Marks & Spencer also has just completed a project with the Carbon Trust to map the emissions generated by its food products, although the retailer believes that it is some years away from being able confidently to label goods.
The Carbon Trust's scheme attempts to calculate and represent the amount of carbon emissions generated in the production of an item and examines the supply chain behind a product. It includes a commitment to reduce the carbon footprint of the product over time. If the producer cannot demonstrate it has reduced carbon emissions over a two-year period, it will no longer be allowed to use the label. Euan Murray, strategy manager for the Carbon Trust, said that the organisation was working with other groups of companies and aimed to announce further trials in the next few months. He said that, although Tesco was carrying out its own research, "they see the world very much as we do and we are trying to create a single way of measuring carbon footprints of products which we think is critical to the success of the venture".
Sir Terry said that Tesco was "keen to work with everybody" and insisted that retailers were not headed for a re-enactment of the traffic light nutrional labelling debacle. However, he pointed out that the scheme he envisaged was slightly different from the Carbon Trust's proposed concept because it aimed to take into account the carbon used during consumption. "We are not trying to gain competitive advantage on the thing," Sir Terry said. "You have got to start the process. There is a danger if you went for a single standard that it would never get off the ground. "The danger of trying to be too prescriptive is that you lock flaws in. It is better to be a little more flexible until things are on track and people have more experience of them."
Source
Incompetent British ambulance service
Patients are less likely to be treated by a paramedic in London than in Wales, government figures show. Nationally, only half of front-line ambulance staff are fully trained paramedics, according to figures released under the Freedom of Information Act. London has the lowest percentage of paramedics, at 34 per cent, and Wales the best, at 61 per cent. There are also concerns that a preoccupation with meeting the Government's target of answering life-threatening calls within eight minutes is putting lives at danger.
The ambulance service will today tell Tonight with Trevor McDonald on ITV1 that meeting the target is a higher priority than sending the appropriate staff member. Most ambulances are staffed by emergency medical technicians, who carry less specialist equipment than a paramedic.
Source
Britain does NOT support its troops: "The defence secretary, Des Browne, is facing accusations that the government has put cost-cutting before the welfare of the services by failing to remedy safety faults that led to a Nimrod spy plane blowing up over Afghanistan. The Sunday Times has established that a fleet of refurbished Nimrods will contain the same ageing and leaking fuel systems that caused last year's disaster in which 14 crew died. The decision to keep the system, which will reduce the cost of the revamped jets, comes despite repetitions of the leaks that caused the explosion. A Nimrod returned to base recently with seven tons of fuel "sloshing around" after it leaked into its bomb bay. Andy Knight, whose brother Sergeant Ben Knight, 25, was one of the men killed, said: "The Ministry of Defence was prepared to risk the loss of a 70 million pound-plus jet and its crew, rather than spending the money needed to make the fleet safe. "I have seen nothing since the accident that suggests it has changed its stance."
Huge British voting fraud: "More than 1m "ghost" voters have been uncovered who threaten to undermine the result of next month's local council elections. An analysis by Britain's electoral watchdog has estimated that there are at least 1m and possibly up to 3.5m people whose names appear on the electoral roll even though they are ineligible to vote. The disclosure will fuel concerns over the extent of electoral fraud, which critics claim the government has down-played in order to extend postal voting, which benefits Labour candidates. The names include illegal immigrants, bogus voters, foreign residents and those who are registered at more than one address. Officials fear that in marginal areas, election results could be affected by abuse of "ghost" votes. The Electoral Commission is using pollster GfK NOP to interview thousands of voters to accurately quantify the level of fraudulent voting"
Sunday, April 22, 2007
The anti-salt war jerks back into life
Another over-hyped finding of tiny differences -- and this time the differences are not even statistically significant. The article below appears to be a rewrite of a BMJ press release but at the time of writing this I could find no trace of the article in the current issue of BMJ -- which suggests extraordinary eagerness to publicize findings that are yet to be put up for detailed scrutiny -- not unexpected in the heavily politicized BMJ.
But working from the figures below we find that there were only 25 deaths out of a sample size totalling 769 and only a 25% difference between the two subgoups. Reconstructing from that information, it seems that around 10 controls died of heart attacks and 15 salt-eaters died of heart attacks. Given the differing subgroup sizes of 337 and 432, the expected frequencies would be 11 and 14 -- yielding a Chi-squared of 1.00! -- which is nowhere near statistical significance.
Note also that the findings concern hypertensives only. Among people in general those on salt-restricted diets die SOONER. And the Japanese eat heaps of salt -- soy sauce is VERY salty -- yet have exceptionally long lifespans. This is really crazy stuff below but the fact that it appeared in "The Times" of London will make it very influential nonetheless
Eating less salt reduces the chances of suffering a heart attack or stroke, the first long-term study of salt's impact on health confirms today. The findings, from a 15-year study, offer the clearest evidence yet that cutting salt consumption saves lives by reducing the risks of cardiovascular disease. People who ate less salty food were found to have a 25 per cent lower risk of cardiac arrest or stroke, and a 20 per cent lower risk of premature death. The results, published in the British Medical Journal, underline the need for population-wide salt reductions in the diet, the scientists conclude.
Despite campaigns to reduce salt intake, such as that run by the Food Standards Agency (FSA), actual evidence of any benefit has been limited. This has enabled the salt industry to contest vigorously the value of such campaigns. Both sides accept that cutting salt consumption reduces blood pressure, although not very dramatically. This ought to translate over the longer term into reductions in strokes and heart attacks, but no studies have been able to show this convincingly until now.
The new findings are the result of work by a US team led by Nancy Cook, of Harvard Medical School, which has followed up two trials originally conducted in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Both were designed to persuade people to cut their salt intake and to measure how far their blood pressure fell. By pursuing these trials, Dr Cook's team has shown that those who reduced their salt intake did have a lower risk of heart disease and stroke. "Our study provides unique evidence that sodium reduction might prevent cardiovascular disease and should dispel any residual concern that sodium reduction might be harmful," it concludes. The interventions had reduced sodium intake by about 25-35 per cent - roughly the same as is planned by the FSA, which is seeking to reduce daily intake in Britain from an average of 9.5g to 6g ( /3 oz to /5 oz) a day.
Ellen Mason, cardiac nurse at the British Heart Foundation, said: "Salt intake amongst many adults and children in Britain is way too high. Many people could lower the level of salt in their diet by reducing the amount of processed food they eat. Also, by simply checking the labels and switching to a lower salt option, you'll be doing your heart a favour."
But the Salt Manufacturers' Association questioned the quality and conclusions of the study. "The research only relates to subjects who already have high blood pressure. Most people have acknowledged for some time that such individuals may be advised to restrict their salt intake with their GP's advice. "What the evidence does not prove is that salt reduction will have any significant health benefits for the majority of us."
The original studies - called the trials of hypertension prevention (TOHP 1 and 2) - used counselling and advice to persuade participants to reduce intake. In the first trial, 327 healthy men and women aged 30-54 who took part in the intervention were compared with 417 controls who did not. Measurements of sodium in urine showed that a reduction of roughly one third in salt intake had been achieved in the 327 who took part- but blood pressure was found to fall only slightly.
The authors of the original study had no idea if this reduction would be sustained, but estimated that if it were it might reduce stroke deaths by 6 per cent, heart disease deaths by 4 per cent, and deaths from all causes by 3 per cent. However, the follow-up has shown much more marked health benefits. The actual numbers of heart attacks and strokes are small - 76 heart attacks, 19 strokes and 23 heart deaths without previous warning - in both TOPH 1 and 2. So it remains possible that chance, or incomplete follow-up, have distorted the findings.
Graham MacGregor, a professor at St George's University of London, said the size of the benefit was not surprising. "When there was a campaign in Finland to cut salt there was a very large reduction in stroke and heart attacks."
Exactly how salt increases blood pressure is still in dispute. The simplest explanation is that when salt intake is too high, the kidneys cannot pass it all into the urine and some ends up in the bloodstream. This then draws more water into the blood, increasing volume and pressure. But not everybody is equally sensitive to salt, and so not everybody will benefit equally from reducing intake.
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ANOTHER BRITISH MEDICAL JOURNAL IS HEAVILY POLITICIZED: "Lancet" meddles in Australian politics!
Though anybody who knows of their absurd "600,000 Iraqi deaths" claim will not be surprised. The BMJ has also of course long been known for its frantic Leftism. This politicization does of course explain the very low intellectual standards in both journals that I have repeatedly noted on FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC. With their openly avowed contempt for the truth ("There is no such thing as right and wrong") and their failure to consider ALL the facts of most matters, Leftists corrupt everything they touch
A leading international medical journal has denounced the Prime Minister and urged its Australian readers to vote against him in the election. In an editorial titled "Australia: the politics of fear and neglect", The Lancet said John Howard had jeopardised Australia's enviable reputation in medical science with his suggested ban on HIV-positive migrants. It also censured the Health Minister, Tony Abbott, for saying those who spoke up for indigenous health were "simply establishing politically and morally correct credentials", and criticised the Environment Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, for his stance on climate change. It said Australian politicians were scoring below par on health.
The journal said Australian clinical and health research was "an emblem of excellence" in the Asia-Pacific: "That enviable position is being put at risk by Prime Minister John Howard's indifference to the academic medical community and his profound intolerance to those less secure than himself and his administration."
The latest example was his comment last week that HIV migrants should not be allowed, says the journal, whose editor, Dr Richard Horton, spoke at a conference on global health in Sydney this month. "To any visitor, Australian culture feels progressive and inclusive," The Lancet says. "This attractive exterior belies a strong undercurrent of political conservatism, which Howard is ruthlessly tapping into." The Lancet has a significant readership throughout the world and regularly takes a stand on key medical issues.
Source
Any lingering doubts about the political motivation behind their "600,000 Iraqi deaths" claim should now be completely at rest. The editor makes clear that for him the term "conservative" is a term of abuse. Definitely the impartial scientist!
They're flooding into Britain
Record numbers of people are flowing into the UK after net immigration rocketed by 42 per cent in just a year. The gap between those arriving and staying for at least a year and those leaving is now at its highest because of Labour's open door on immigration. And the influx of Eastern Europeans since Tony Blair threw open our labour market has helped fuel the massive rise.
The revelation came after official figures revealed immigrants are flocking to Britain at a rate of 1,500 every day. With only 1,000 leaving per day, it means our population is soaring by 500 daily and almost half are coming to find work or have already landed jobs here. Immigration minister Liam Byrne confirmed a new points-based system for immigrants will start next year but there are no guarantees it will reduce the inflow.
Shadow Home Secretary David Davis said: "This number of people migrating into this country shows why a points-based immigration system without a limit is pointless. "Liam Byrne this week acknowledged that there are limited amounts of schools, hospitals and houses in the country, therefore he must accept that there should be a limit to the amount of people who can come here."
Between June 2004 and June 2005, 246,200 more people came to the UK than left. That was up 42 per cent on the 173,600 during the previous 12 months, according to the Office for National Statistics.
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NHS has billions for useless computer projects but not enough money for nurses
Nurses have voted overwhelmingly to take industrial action unless ministers improve a "miserly and insulting" pay deal for health workers. The Government has offered nurses in England, Wales and Northern Ireland a 1.5 per cent pay rise this month, with another 1 per cent to come in November, in defiance of the recommendations of an independent pay review board. But delegates at the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) annual conference rejected the offer yesterday, and called on the Government to agree the recommended full 2.5 per cent pay rise immediately - as it already has in Scotland - or face the consequences.
Thousands of ambulance workers, porters and other NHS staff who are members of the GMB union have said that they are also prepared to take industrial action over a similar staged pay deal. If industrial action were taken it would be the first on a national scale by nurses. In an angry and passionate debate at the conference in Harrogate, delegates said that a strike was unlikely but that they would be prepared to take action such as working to rule, which would mean nurses working their contracted hours and no more.
Such measures are designed to minimise any impact on patients, but could mean longer waiting times for nonessential operations. The union's council will now seek an emergency meeting with Gordon Brown, the Chancellor, and Patricia Hewitt, the Health Secretary, to discuss the issue before deciding whether to ballot members next month.
Peter Carter, the RCN's general secretary, said that the staged offer was equivalent to a 1.9 per cent pay rise, which was "unacceptable and miserly", but that he did not want to proceed in a "ramshackle way". He added: "Let's be clear, we want to avoid strike action. We are hoping that Gordon Brown and Patricia Hewitt will wake up and take this seriously. But we are prepared to find ways to hurt the Government while trying to protect patients. We mean business."
Ministers at the Scottish Assembly, with elections looming next month, have agreed to award nurses a 2.5 per cent pay rise from this month. Ann Taylor-Griffiths, of the RCN's Welsh board, told the conference: "We are one nursing body, we are one NHS and deserve one nationally implemented pay award." David Harding-Price, a nurse from Nottingham, was given a standing ovation as he said: "Stand up now and tell the Government: no more rhetoric. Action, action, action now. Unison, the public sector union, is also expected to support industrial action by nurses when it meets at its conference in Brighton next week.
Ministers have defended the staged offer as fair for nurses and affordable for the economy. A spokeswoman for the Department of Health said: "What we have suggested is a sensible increase that's fair for NHS staff and affordable for the economy. In fact we expect the overall average earnings of nurses to rise by 4.9 per cent next year, above the national average." Mothers and newborn babies are being put at risk because of a lack of specialist care for postnatal depression, the RCN says. The conference will be told today that suicide is the biggest killer of new mothers and that more resources are needed to support women who suffer mental illness during pregnancy or after childbirth. 6.5 hours of unpaid overtime worked on average by nurses every week Source: RCN estimate
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EDITORIAL BIAS AND THE PREDICTION OF CLIMATE DISASTER: THE CRISIS OF SCIENCE COMMUNICATION
The paper below was presented at the conference "Climate Change: Evaluating Appropriate Responses". Brussels, European Parliament, 18 April 2007 by Benny Peiser, Liverpool John Moores University, Faculty of Science, Liverpool L2 3ET, UK -- b.j.peiser@livjm.ac.uk
Two weeks ago, climate experts and government officials from 130 countries released the latest IPCC Summary for Policy Makers on the 'Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability of Climate Change'. The IPCC's predictions of the future were carefully scrutinised by governments and generally accepted. Despite attempts to tone down some of the more alarming language, the latest IPCC report predicts that unrestrained warming will cause mass extinctions, devastating floods, heatwaves, storms and droughts that may trigger economic disaster and social upheaval.
There can be little doubt that scientists, science organisations and the dominant science media have been instrumental in turning doom-laden computer models into an apocalyptic consensus. For the last 10 years or so, there has been a relentless outpouring of disaster predictions that have been published with little hesitation and rising alarm by the world's leading science journals. Any lingering reservation about looming catastrophe has been silenced by science editors and environmental journalists. Uncertainties have been conveniently disregarded and highly unlikely worst case scenarios exaggerated. Not since the apocalyptic consensus of the Middle Ages has the prognostication of impending doom and global catastrophe on the basis of mathematical modelling been as widely accepted as today. No question about it: The IPCC's disaster predictions have been converted into a general consensus among the world's political and academic elites.
Ironically, these apocalyptic predictions of the future are politically sanctioned at the same time as a growing number of scientists are recognising that environmental and economic computer modelling of an inherently unpredictable future is illogical and futile (see, O.H. Pilkey and L Pilkey-Jarvis: "Useless Arithmetic: Why environmental scientists can't predict the future", Columbia University Press, 2007). As the eminent mathematician David Orrell has pointed out persuasively: "The track record of any kind of long-distance prediction is really bad, but everyone's still really interested in it. It's sort of a way of picturing the future. But we can't make long-term predictions of the economy, and we can't make long-term predictions of the climate. Models will cheerfully boil away all the water in the oceans or cover the world in ice, even with pre-industrial levels of CO2 When models about the future climate are in agreement, it says more about the self-regulating group psychology of the modelling community than it does about global warming and the economy." (David Orrell, "Apollo's Arrow. The Science of Prediction and the Future of Everything", 2007)
Be that as it may, the reality of the IPCC consensus should not be underestimated. Its political weight and growing demands for drastic economic intervention is posing a serious political predicament for many governments, most of which find themselves unable to control let alone reduce CO2 emissions that are rising almost everywhere.
Paradigms, Consensus and Falsification
Science based on "consensus" is a tricky business. I am agnostic about it because the history of science tells us that today's consensus can, and quite frequently is, tomorrow's redundant theory. There are certain types of general agreements in science that are more compelling and more durable than others. In some areas of empirical science, like solar system astronomy, there is more agreement because the data is more robust and the methods less complex. The more complex the science and the less reliable the data, the more scientific controversy you should expect to find.
On the other hand we also know that science tends to produce - and in fact needs - scientific paradigms -- which is perhaps a better word than consensus. So I have really no problem with the fact of a majority consensus on climate change. But science would quickly come to a dead end without the constant and necessary attempts to falsify the leading paradigm of the day, particularly those that are weak and based on contentious data, dodgy methodologies and flawed computer models.
Indeed, some critics argue that climate science has almost reached such a cul-de-sac. The scientific endeavour involves both the protectors and challengers of each and every paradigm. Both are essential to the health and dynamic of a highly competitive enterprise that is science. No consensus is sacrosanct. And it is in the very nature of science and science communication that all reasonable positions and counter-arguments should be heard. The ongoing controversy about hurricanes and global warming is a perfect example of the predicaments of consensus science. It also demonstrates that advocates who exploit the consensus argument against climate sceptics are more than happy to oppose the consensus - if it helps to further an alarmist agenda.
For a long time, and until fairly recently, natural variability was the lead paradigm underlying the dynamic changes in hurricane frequency and intensity. In the last two years or so, a small number of papers published in the world's leading academic journals Science and Nature have cast doubt over this long-established paradigm. Climate campaigners and science journalists jumped to conclusions and claimed: "The old paradigm is dead - long live the new paradigm!" It is noteworthy, however, that both the recent consensus statements by the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) as well as the latest IPCC statements on hurricanes and global warming maintain rather than overturn the old paradigm. At the same time, they caution us about the weight of the new papers.
I believe this is an encouraging development because it would appear to raise the requirements for overthrowing old paradigms. Let me also remind you about the dodgy process that removed from the old IPCC consensus the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age and replaced it with the notorious Hockey Stick consensus. A few enthusiastically received papers were able to overturn the old consensus - mainly because they undermined the important argument by climate sceptics about the degree of Holocene climate variability. Science journalists bought into the new Hockey Stick "consensus" sink line, and hooker [Good one!]. However, their prejudice was evidently laid bare by the extraordinary reluctance to report or report impartially about its flaws and the controversy it generated.
Similar problems can be observed regarding the thorny issue of sea level rise: is it more or less steady (as the IPCC claims) or is it accelerating, as climate alarmists claim? The mainstream science media have no qualms in hyping up new papers that go against the IPCC consensus. At the same time, the same outlets ignore other studies that confirm an inconvenient consensus that climate alarmist regard as too conservative and thus pose an impediment for political action.
I could go on and on: while alarmist claims and predictions are routinely puffed up by the science media and environmental journalists, studies that come to more moderate and less alarmist conclusions are habitually ignored or discredited for being too cautious.
From editorial bias to confirmation bias
Over the last 10 years or so, the editors of the world's leading science journals such as Science and Nature as well as popular science magazines such as Scientific American and New Scientist have publicly advocated drastic policies to curb CO2 emissions. At the same time, they have publicly attacked scientists sceptical of the climate consensus. The key message science editors have thus been sending out is brazen and simple: "The science of climate change is settled. The scientific debate is over. It's time to take political action."
Instead of serving as an honest and open-minded broker of scientific controversy, science editors have opted to take a rigid stance on the science and politics of climate change. In so doing, they have in effect sealed the doors for any critical assessment of the prevailing consensus which their journals officially sponsor. Consequently, their public endorsement undoubtedly deters critics from submitting falsification attempts for publication. Such critiques, not surprisingly, are simply non-existing in the mainstream science media.
But there is more to the problem than just editorial promoting of the scientific consensus. After all, such behaviour is not restricted to the issue of climate change. Editorial bias is often found among other science journals on many other controversies. Much more problematic is the reality of a strong confirmation bias among science editors. While the phenomenon of confirmation bias is an intensely researched and well established form of selective thinking among medical and economic researchers, this methodological impediment is completely ignored in climate science.
Any careful examination of the publishing record of leading science journals will show that science editors too tend to favour the publication of papers that confirm their publicly stated beliefs rather than question them. That is why science editors habitually ignore or treat with contempt any evidence that contradicts their core beliefs. Many critical scientists can confirm that prominent science editors have turned down their papers and have become reluctant to the point of refusal to publish any evidence that attempts to refute their favoured theory.
Of course, climate scientist themselves are routinely accused of confirmation bias for running statistical models and framing their data in such a way that it predictably confirms their hypothesis. After all, research into confirmation and other biases has shown that the scientific method incorporates an inherent tension between hard data and their interpretation by scientists with deeply held convictions. Good science journals critically evaluated and peer review the quality of data and the likelihood of error.
This deceptively reliable process of scrutiny and quality control, however, is itself prone to confirmation bias: peer reviewers selected by biased editors are more likely to accept evidence that supports their own prior belief while rejecting arguments and data that may challenge these convictions (Kaptchuk, 2003). Any science medium that ignores or fail to appreciate these inherent pitfalls of climate science can no longer be regarded as trustworthy.
The end of fair and objective science journalism
For the last few years, a number of influential climate scientists and science writers have conducted a campaign against the principles of fair and balanced journalism that epitomize open and pluralistic societies. The main accusation against impartial reporting on climate change is quite simple: An article in the Boston Globe on climate change journalism sums up the key argument: "More and more environmentalists and climate scientists have been making the point that ''objective" journalists are doing as much as anyone (except maybe Hummer enthusiasts) to forestall action on global warming." (Christopher Shea, Boston Globe, 9 April 2006) Or, in the words of media analysts Boykoff and Boykoff: "A more subtle factor that helps explain US inaction (sic) also exists: journalists' faithful adherence to their professional norms (like objectivity, fairness, accuracy, balance)... (Boykoff and Boykoff, Geoforum 2007, in press)
In short, climate campaigners and science activists are concerned that any doubts or uncertainties expressed in the media may hinder the political objective for drastic action. No wonder then that science editors and campaigners have employed strategies to discourage or intimidate reporters from even asking climate sceptics about their assessment. Michael Mann (Penn State University), for instance, has warned science writers that even to quote a climate sceptic would be regarded as if they had granted ''the Flat Earth Society an equal say with NASA in the design of a new space satellite." (Boston Globe, 9 April 2006). The editor of Scientific American, John Rennie, publicly refers to dissenters as ''denialists" and said that "to give them even one paragraph in a 10-paragraph article would be to exaggerate their importance." (Boston Globe, 9 April 2006)
Occasionally, a probing science reporter dares to challenge these forms of coercion despite the threats of mockery and intimidation. In such cases, a whole army of climate campaigners and bloggers will rush to assail the insubordinate journalist, as science writers such as Bill Broad and John Tierney of the New York Times can attest.
In Britain, it has become routine for leading science organisations such as the Royal Society to press-gang the media against publishing critical reporting on climate change. Lord May, the former, president of the Royal Society publicly censured newspapers such as The Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail for publishing sceptical articles and comments. May also tried to silence respected writers such as David Bellamy, Melanie Phillips and Michael Hanlon by intimidating them personally. In 2005, the then vice-president of the Royal Society, Sir David Wallace, warned the British media not to publish anything that distorted the official view of climate science: "We are appealing to all parts of the UK media to be vigilant against attempts to present a distorted view of the scientific evidence about climate change and its potential effects on people and their environments around the world. I hope that we can count on your support." (The Daily Telegraph, 16 May 2005)
The attacks by science editors and campaigners on critical scientists are not only fuelled by political considerations. Sometimes they are due to blind faith in an apocalyptic future, as a recent editorial in New Scientist reveals: "One of the most corrosive contributions of climate sceptics has been to promote any uncertainty as an excuse for inaction. In truth, the remaining uncertainties should be making us redouble our efforts to mitigate climate change. It's a fair bet that much of what we do not yet know for sure will turn out to be scarier than most of us like to imagine." In other words, the editors of New Scientist are certain that what we do not know today will, upon knowing it in the future, prove to be even worse than they fear. Evidently, such hyperbole has nothing to do with science but belongs to the realm of superstitious divination.
While climate campaigners are trying to frame even the political and economic debate in the traditional fashion of a conflict between consensus and dissent, the political debate is no longer about action versus inaction. The real issue today is about the most cost-effective ways of dealing with climate change: revolutionary transformation of the global economy, as advocated by climate alarmists, or gradual adaptation and adjustment as proposed by climate moderates.
The role of the science media as the maid of government policy
Climate campaigners and environmental media analysts have become convinced that their crusade against impartial science reporting has been won comprehensively. According to this view, the neo-catastrophist framing of climate change has been generally accepted by most science journalists and is now consistently communicated by most news media outlets.
Yet campaigners worry that the political battle is far from won. Thus, in a recent article published by the British Journalism Review, media researchers Eleni Andreadis and Joe Smith warn that the next contest poses an ever greater challenge to science journalism: "We are entering a period when careful interpretation and communication of the economic, political and social dimensions of climate change will be vital. Failure to tell these aspects of the story could be of even greater significance than the painfully slow arrival at the basics of the science. The media will offer the context within which we decide the If, How and When of transforming energy-hungry lifestyles and economies... The open terrain of these questions presents media decision-makers with a new set of challenges, and the way they handle scepticism will again be central to their performance." (British Journalism Review, Vol. 18, No. 1, February 2007).
Andreadis and Smith underscore the role of journalists in framing the climate change debates and assisting governments to enforce drastic policies: "Their principal question should be: Will this help to reduce emissions dramatically, or is it a way of only denting the status quo?". Andreadis and Smith have delineated the science media's political role in no uncertain terms. In a illuminating paragraph, they outline new programme of salvationist campaign journalism: "In dealing with these [climate change] stories the media will also need to marry their critical faculties to a commitment to enable debate about action and change. You can barely fill a taxi with senior mainstream politicians from Western Europe who do not believe action to mitigate and adapt to climate change is necessary. But most are frightened of sticking their necks out. They need to be given the space to think and experiment and lead public debate on action." (British Journalism Review, Vol. 18, No. 1, 2007).
In other words, the role of science and environmental journalists is to provide governments with media support that will enable reluctant decision makers to enforce unpopular policies.
The crisis of science communication
Despite the majority consensus among climate scientists, science organisations and governments, there is a sizeable minority of researchers, economists and political observers who are concerned about the apocalyptic nature of climate hype and the potential risk it poses for political and economic stability. Sceptical researchers have and will continue to publish critical papers that question important parts of even some fundaments of the current climate consensus. Will the science media provide a platform for these critiques? Will they discuss the weight of their evidence and the validity of their arguments? Or will the science media continue to ignore challenges to the status quo?
The absurdity of the science media's handling of climate science is well illuminated in this week's issue of New Scientist. In an editorial, the editors try to square the principle of falsification (which they claim is vital for science to progress) with their belief that any such attempt would undermine political attempts to mitigate climate disaster: "Some scientists are challenging our ideas on climate change, which is vital if we are to progress. But to overturn present thinking will need very strong evidence because, as the IPCC states, confidence in the idea that anthropogenic warming is changing our world has never been higher." (New Scientist, 14 April 2007).
Yet, at the same time, the editor's zealous defence of the apocalyptic climate consensus and their fierce resistance to provide critical researchers a forum for rebuttals or falsification attempts undermines their own integrity.
Let me conclude: The integrity of the science media will depend on whether it will encourage critique and fault-finding analysis by consensus sceptics - or whether they will continue its course towards unbalanced campaign journalism. Given the well-documented reluctance of mainstream science media to accept submissions by critical scientists and the aversion to report on critical papers published elsewhere, I remain unconvinced that science journalism will moderate its blinkered attitudes in the near future.
The diverse groups of critical analysts and researchers will need to develop alternative infrastructures and media outlets if they wish to provide open-minded science writers with judicious evaluations of disaster predictions and a genuinely impartial assessment of evidence. Given the evident biases mainstream science media and environmental journalism has chosen to adopt, there is a growing demand for more balanced and even-handed coverage of climate change science and debates. Scientists and science writers who are concerned about the integrity and openness of the scientific process should turn the current crisis of science communication into an opportunity by setting up more critical, even-handed and reliable science media.
GOVERNMENTS AND CLIMATE CHANGE
By David Henderson of the Westminster Business School. The text that follows formed the basis for a presentation to a meeting in Brussels on 18 April 2007, organised by Roger Helmer MEP, on the subject of 'Climate Change: Evaluating Appropriate Responses'
Introduction
I am not a climate scientist. I am an economist, and I became involved with climate change issues, more by accident than design, some four and a half years ago. To start with, I was chiefly involved with some economic and statistical aspects. Over time my interests and concerns have broadened, though I do not at all claim to have become an all-round expert on this vast array of topics.
Increasingly, I have become critical of the way in which issues relating to climate change are viewed and treated by governments across the world. This is my theme today. I believe that governments, and with them the European Commission, need to think again. My concerns are of two kinds. They relate, first, to the basis for official thinking and policies in this area, and second, to the actual content of policies in many countries, including my own, and in the European Union. In my talk today I will focus almost entirely on the first concern, with only a few concluding words about the second. Under both headings, there is much more that could be said.
A tale of three documents
Climate change issues are especially topical right now, because of the publication of two weighty, officially-commissioned and potentially very influential reports. The larger of these two official publications, scheduled to appear in full in the course of this year, is the IPCC's AR4 - in other words, the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. All told, the whole set of documents making up AR4 may well run to 3,000 pages of text, and some 2,500 experts from around the world have been involved in its preparation.
The second report is already in the public domain. It is the Stern Review on The Economics of Climate Change. The Review was set in motion by the British Chancellor of the Exchequer in July 2005. A text was posted at the end of October last year, and this has now been published in book form, with some extra material added.
The Stern Review is not on the titanic scale of AR4. All the same, it is a weighty document. The main text comprises some 550 pages, and covers a very wide range of issues including both ethical and scientific aspects. Besides these two major officially-sponsored reports, a third contribution should also be noted. In July 2005, the month in which the Stern Review was commissioned, the House of Lords Select Committee on Economic Affairs issued a report on precisely the same subject as that of the Review: it too is entitled 'The Economics of Climate Change'. The Select Committee was a notably high-powered body, and its Special Adviser was the leading British environmental economist. Its report was unanimous.
The rest of my remarks fall under three headings:
* First, I comment on the Stern Review and the debate that it has given rise to.
* Second, I place these comments in the wider context of the IPCC's AR4. In doing so, I will raise questions about the role of the Panel and the professional credibility of the IPCC process.
* Third, I offer some brief conclusions and recommendations.
The Stern Review: debate has been joined
The Stern Review paints a dark and dramatic picture of the risks and threats that could arise, over the next two centuries and after, if anthropogenic emissions of (so-called) 'greenhouse gases' are not brought under control in the near future and then progressively and substantially reduced. The Executive Summary begins with the statement that 'The scientific evidence is now overwhelming: climate change presents very serious global risks and it demands an urgent global response'.
The Review has been widely hailed, across the world, as an authoritative guide to thinking and policy. At its launch in October, our Prime Minister asserted that:: '... what is not in doubt is that the scientific evidence of global warming caused by greenhouse gas emissions is now overwhelming... [and] ... that if the science is right, the consequences for our planet are literally disastrous... what the Stern Review shows is how the economic benefits of strong early action easily outweigh any costs.' Her Majesty's Opposition have reacted in precisely the same way, while the only comments on the Review from the British business world that I have seen have likewise been uncritically favourable.
A widely accepted view in Britain is that 'the science' was settled already, well before the appearance of the Stern Review, and that now, thanks to Stern, 'the economics' is also settled: the basis for immediate and far-reaching action has thus been firmly established. To quote the Chancellor of the Exchequer, in a recent speech, 'The Stern report [sic] has given us the economic evidence on which to act'
Unusually for a document prepared under official auspices, the Review incorporates in the text a number of high level outside endorsements. Among these, four come from Nobel prizewinners in economics, one from the Head of the International Energy Agency, and another from the President of the World Bank.
However, there are dissenting voices. I am one of an international group of dissenters, and we are by no means alone. Well before the Review saw the light of day, it seemed to a number of us, including both scientists and economists, that we would find much to query in its arguments and conclusions; and when the text appeared, our expectation was fully borne out.
I conceived the idea of a dual critique: we would combine to prepare twin review articles, one authored by a group of scientists (actually, in the event, two of them are engineers), and the other by a team of economists, each covering its own set of issues but linked together. I managed to sell this project to a journal editor, and the result was published in January. Volume 7 Number 4 of World Economics carries both of our texts.
Our main verdict on the Review, in a word, is that it is a biased, a heavily biased, exercise in speculative alarmism. Other commentators, including some leading environmental economists, have also voiced criticisms of the Review; and in the forthcoming issue of World Economics Sir Nicholas and others associated with the Review will be replying at length to us and other critics. Debate has been well and truly joined.
The shadow of AR4
A surprising feature of the Stern Review is that it seems to pay little attention to the argument and evidence presented in AR4 - even though successive complete draft texts of AR4 were made available to member governments and participants in the IPCC process from about the time that the Review was commissioned. Sharp-eyed journalists in Britain have noted that in some respects the Report is less tilted towards alarming possibilities than the Review. In the light of these apparent differences, an obvious question arises. How far does this latest IPCC report lend support to the Stern Review case for 'an urgent global response'?
Clear answers to that question have recently been given, in the context of the first volume of AR4, the report of the Panel's Working Group I, by high level official persons closely involved in, or connected with, the IPCC process.
* Dr Pachauri, the Chairman of the IPCC: 'I hope this report will shock people [and] governments into taking more serious action'.
* Achim Steiner, the Director-General of the UNEP: 'in the light of the report's findings, it would be "irresponsible" to resist or seek to delay actions on mandatory emissions cuts'.[1].
* Yvo de Boer, Secretary-General of the UNFCCC: 'the findings ... leave no doubt as to the dangers that mankind is facing and must be acted on without delay'.
* Stavros Dimas, the EU's Commissioner for the environment: 'a grim report'.
In interpreting such statements, it is worth bearing in mind that in none of them is the wording directly drawn from the Report. These eminent persons were not actually quoting AR4 text: they were putting their own personal gloss on it, and giving their own views as to its implications for policy, as they were fully entitled to do.
Even aside from such high-level pronouncements, however, it could be argued - I might have made the argument myself, had I not been drawn into these issues - that just how much weight should be placed on the Stern Review is a minor matter. It could be said that even if the Review represents an extreme position - which is of course debatable - and even if economists continue to wage their own inconclusive private wars, the case for immediate and far-reaching global action to contain emissions has been made, independently and authoritatively, in the past and current work of the IPCC. Let me tell you why I am personally not convinced by this very reasonable-sounding argument, because of the doubts that I have come to hold in relation to the IPCC process.
The wider context: the IPCC and the problem of unwarranted trust
Since its creation in 1988, the IPCC has come a long way, and has achieved a great deal. As a result, it has established itself, in the eyes of most if not all 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, including economic issues. It has acquired what is effectively a monopoly position.
While recognising its achievements, I believe that 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 effective monopoly that it now holds. To begin with, the very idea 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 virtually 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. Viewed in this light, 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. In my opinion, 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.
* Its treatment of economic issues has been flawed. Writings that feature in the 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 UNEP. In this area, the IPCC milieu is neither fully competent nor adequately representative.[2]
* The Panel's emphasis on peer-reviewed published work, though understandable, takes too much for granted. Standard peer-reviewing processes do not necessarily serve as a guarantee of quality, reliability and objectivity.
* In peer-reviewed work that the IPCC has drawn on, the authors concerned have failed to make due disclosure of data, sources and procedures, and the IPCC has not required them to do so.
* The response of the IPCC milieu to informed criticism has typically been inadequate or dismissive. A conspicuous example was the British government's official response to the report from the House of Lords Select Committee.[3]
* Both the Panel's directing circle and the IPCC milieu more generally have an endemic bias towards alarmist assessments and conclusions. Note that, in speaking of the Panel's 'directing circle' I refer, not to the 2,500 or so experts who have contributed to the preparation of AR4, but to a more restricted, higher-level and more influential set of participants. These are the people who run the show.
Let me bring in here the report of the House of Lords Select Committee on Economic Affairs. That report deals with many subjects, but for me its most striking feature, and a welcome one, was the concerns that it expressed about the IPCC. Given the credibility which the IPCC has acquired, it is truly remarkable that a group of eminent, experienced and responsible persons, drawn from a national legislative body and spanning the political spectrum, with the help of an internationally recognised expert adviser, and after taking and weighing evidence, should have published a considered and unanimous report in which the work and role of the Panel are put in question.
How (you may ask) has the Stern Review treated the questions raised about the IPCC process by various writers and by the Select Committee in particular? The answer is surprising. Although the Review is long and wide-ranging, the text makes no mention of any of the criticisms that have been directed towards the IPCC process. Moreover, although the lists of references in the Review extend to around 1,100 papers and studies, that inventory of 1,100 does not include the report from the Select Committee. There are other significant omissions, but this one is the most striking and the least excusable.
To sum up under this heading, I believe that there is a problem of unwarranted trust in the IPCC process and in the role of the Panel itself, a problem which the Stern Review shows no awareness of.
Policy aspects
Finally, a word on policy aspects. Here I offer two conclusions relating to the basis of policy, followed by a brief post-script on the content of policies to limit CO2 emissions. The first of my conclusions is simple. Policymakers, officials and commentators should not join our Prime Minister, Her Majesty's Opposition and leading British business firms and organisations, by endorsing, uncritically and without qualification, the arguments, findings and recommendations of the Stern Review. Contrary to what these and other eminent persons have presumed, the Review does not 'show' what is the case, and the debate on the economics of climate change remains open and unsettled.
My second conclusion, which is more fundamental, is this. In relation to climate change, a clear present need is to build up a sounder basis than now exists for reviewing and assessing the issues. Governments should think again. Rather than pursuing as a matter of urgency ambitious and costly targets for curbing CO2 emissions, they should take prompt steps to ensure that they and their citizens are more fully and more objectively informed and advised. A process of review and inquiry needs to be established, which is more impartial, more representative and more balanced than that which the IPCC and its controlling departments and agencies have built up and shown themselves unwilling to change. I have made specific proposals, so far to no effect, as to the kinds of action that might be taken to secure this result.
Last of all, a word on the choice of policies designed to limit and reduce emissions. Here the main point was well made last month by Martin Wolf in his Financial Times column, where he wrote that: '...any workable policy system must be global; it must create stable incentives; it must be administratively simple; it must include investment in creation and dissemination of new technologies; and, not least, it must allow people to get on with their lives with as much freedom as possible. Uniform prices on emissions - ideally, through taxation - will do most of this job. Almost everything else is unnecessary or counterproductive.'[4]
Current official policies, actual and prospective, have many features that come under the heading of 'unnecessary or counterproductive': Wolf's article refers, appropriately to 'a host of interventionist gimmickry' Not only is there good reason to query the officially approved basis for climate change policies, but many of the specific policy initiatives that have been taken are open to serious question. This is my second reason for believing that governments should think again.
[1] This and the following quotation are than from a report (3 February) in the Financial Times.
[2] Ian Castles and I have jointly put forward a critique of some leading aspects of the IPCC's economic work, while authors involved in that work have contested our criticisms. The debate was reviewed and carried further in a recent article of mine entitled 'SRES, IPCC, and the Treatment of Economic Issues: What Has Emerged?' (Energy and Environment, Volume 16 No. 3 & 4, 2005). It is too early to rate the treatment of economic issues in AR4, but we were critical of the decision to use the SRES - i.e., the Special Report on Emissions Scenarios, published in 2000 - as the point of departure for it.
[3] I commented on this document in an article entitled 'Report, Response and Review', published in Energy and Environment, Vol 17, No 1, 2006.
[4] Martin Wolf, 'Why emissions curbs must be simple', Financial Times, 16 March 2007.
Another over-hyped finding of tiny differences -- and this time the differences are not even statistically significant. The article below appears to be a rewrite of a BMJ press release but at the time of writing this I could find no trace of the article in the current issue of BMJ -- which suggests extraordinary eagerness to publicize findings that are yet to be put up for detailed scrutiny -- not unexpected in the heavily politicized BMJ.
But working from the figures below we find that there were only 25 deaths out of a sample size totalling 769 and only a 25% difference between the two subgoups. Reconstructing from that information, it seems that around 10 controls died of heart attacks and 15 salt-eaters died of heart attacks. Given the differing subgroup sizes of 337 and 432, the expected frequencies would be 11 and 14 -- yielding a Chi-squared of 1.00! -- which is nowhere near statistical significance.
Note also that the findings concern hypertensives only. Among people in general those on salt-restricted diets die SOONER. And the Japanese eat heaps of salt -- soy sauce is VERY salty -- yet have exceptionally long lifespans. This is really crazy stuff below but the fact that it appeared in "The Times" of London will make it very influential nonetheless
Eating less salt reduces the chances of suffering a heart attack or stroke, the first long-term study of salt's impact on health confirms today. The findings, from a 15-year study, offer the clearest evidence yet that cutting salt consumption saves lives by reducing the risks of cardiovascular disease. People who ate less salty food were found to have a 25 per cent lower risk of cardiac arrest or stroke, and a 20 per cent lower risk of premature death. The results, published in the British Medical Journal, underline the need for population-wide salt reductions in the diet, the scientists conclude.
Despite campaigns to reduce salt intake, such as that run by the Food Standards Agency (FSA), actual evidence of any benefit has been limited. This has enabled the salt industry to contest vigorously the value of such campaigns. Both sides accept that cutting salt consumption reduces blood pressure, although not very dramatically. This ought to translate over the longer term into reductions in strokes and heart attacks, but no studies have been able to show this convincingly until now.
The new findings are the result of work by a US team led by Nancy Cook, of Harvard Medical School, which has followed up two trials originally conducted in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Both were designed to persuade people to cut their salt intake and to measure how far their blood pressure fell. By pursuing these trials, Dr Cook's team has shown that those who reduced their salt intake did have a lower risk of heart disease and stroke. "Our study provides unique evidence that sodium reduction might prevent cardiovascular disease and should dispel any residual concern that sodium reduction might be harmful," it concludes. The interventions had reduced sodium intake by about 25-35 per cent - roughly the same as is planned by the FSA, which is seeking to reduce daily intake in Britain from an average of 9.5g to 6g ( /3 oz to /5 oz) a day.
Ellen Mason, cardiac nurse at the British Heart Foundation, said: "Salt intake amongst many adults and children in Britain is way too high. Many people could lower the level of salt in their diet by reducing the amount of processed food they eat. Also, by simply checking the labels and switching to a lower salt option, you'll be doing your heart a favour."
But the Salt Manufacturers' Association questioned the quality and conclusions of the study. "The research only relates to subjects who already have high blood pressure. Most people have acknowledged for some time that such individuals may be advised to restrict their salt intake with their GP's advice. "What the evidence does not prove is that salt reduction will have any significant health benefits for the majority of us."
The original studies - called the trials of hypertension prevention (TOHP 1 and 2) - used counselling and advice to persuade participants to reduce intake. In the first trial, 327 healthy men and women aged 30-54 who took part in the intervention were compared with 417 controls who did not. Measurements of sodium in urine showed that a reduction of roughly one third in salt intake had been achieved in the 327 who took part- but blood pressure was found to fall only slightly.
The authors of the original study had no idea if this reduction would be sustained, but estimated that if it were it might reduce stroke deaths by 6 per cent, heart disease deaths by 4 per cent, and deaths from all causes by 3 per cent. However, the follow-up has shown much more marked health benefits. The actual numbers of heart attacks and strokes are small - 76 heart attacks, 19 strokes and 23 heart deaths without previous warning - in both TOPH 1 and 2. So it remains possible that chance, or incomplete follow-up, have distorted the findings.
Graham MacGregor, a professor at St George's University of London, said the size of the benefit was not surprising. "When there was a campaign in Finland to cut salt there was a very large reduction in stroke and heart attacks."
Exactly how salt increases blood pressure is still in dispute. The simplest explanation is that when salt intake is too high, the kidneys cannot pass it all into the urine and some ends up in the bloodstream. This then draws more water into the blood, increasing volume and pressure. But not everybody is equally sensitive to salt, and so not everybody will benefit equally from reducing intake.
Source
ANOTHER BRITISH MEDICAL JOURNAL IS HEAVILY POLITICIZED: "Lancet" meddles in Australian politics!
Though anybody who knows of their absurd "600,000 Iraqi deaths" claim will not be surprised. The BMJ has also of course long been known for its frantic Leftism. This politicization does of course explain the very low intellectual standards in both journals that I have repeatedly noted on FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC. With their openly avowed contempt for the truth ("There is no such thing as right and wrong") and their failure to consider ALL the facts of most matters, Leftists corrupt everything they touch
A leading international medical journal has denounced the Prime Minister and urged its Australian readers to vote against him in the election. In an editorial titled "Australia: the politics of fear and neglect", The Lancet said John Howard had jeopardised Australia's enviable reputation in medical science with his suggested ban on HIV-positive migrants. It also censured the Health Minister, Tony Abbott, for saying those who spoke up for indigenous health were "simply establishing politically and morally correct credentials", and criticised the Environment Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, for his stance on climate change. It said Australian politicians were scoring below par on health.
The journal said Australian clinical and health research was "an emblem of excellence" in the Asia-Pacific: "That enviable position is being put at risk by Prime Minister John Howard's indifference to the academic medical community and his profound intolerance to those less secure than himself and his administration."
The latest example was his comment last week that HIV migrants should not be allowed, says the journal, whose editor, Dr Richard Horton, spoke at a conference on global health in Sydney this month. "To any visitor, Australian culture feels progressive and inclusive," The Lancet says. "This attractive exterior belies a strong undercurrent of political conservatism, which Howard is ruthlessly tapping into." The Lancet has a significant readership throughout the world and regularly takes a stand on key medical issues.
Source
Any lingering doubts about the political motivation behind their "600,000 Iraqi deaths" claim should now be completely at rest. The editor makes clear that for him the term "conservative" is a term of abuse. Definitely the impartial scientist!
They're flooding into Britain
Record numbers of people are flowing into the UK after net immigration rocketed by 42 per cent in just a year. The gap between those arriving and staying for at least a year and those leaving is now at its highest because of Labour's open door on immigration. And the influx of Eastern Europeans since Tony Blair threw open our labour market has helped fuel the massive rise.
The revelation came after official figures revealed immigrants are flocking to Britain at a rate of 1,500 every day. With only 1,000 leaving per day, it means our population is soaring by 500 daily and almost half are coming to find work or have already landed jobs here. Immigration minister Liam Byrne confirmed a new points-based system for immigrants will start next year but there are no guarantees it will reduce the inflow.
Shadow Home Secretary David Davis said: "This number of people migrating into this country shows why a points-based immigration system without a limit is pointless. "Liam Byrne this week acknowledged that there are limited amounts of schools, hospitals and houses in the country, therefore he must accept that there should be a limit to the amount of people who can come here."
Between June 2004 and June 2005, 246,200 more people came to the UK than left. That was up 42 per cent on the 173,600 during the previous 12 months, according to the Office for National Statistics.
Source
NHS has billions for useless computer projects but not enough money for nurses
Nurses have voted overwhelmingly to take industrial action unless ministers improve a "miserly and insulting" pay deal for health workers. The Government has offered nurses in England, Wales and Northern Ireland a 1.5 per cent pay rise this month, with another 1 per cent to come in November, in defiance of the recommendations of an independent pay review board. But delegates at the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) annual conference rejected the offer yesterday, and called on the Government to agree the recommended full 2.5 per cent pay rise immediately - as it already has in Scotland - or face the consequences.
Thousands of ambulance workers, porters and other NHS staff who are members of the GMB union have said that they are also prepared to take industrial action over a similar staged pay deal. If industrial action were taken it would be the first on a national scale by nurses. In an angry and passionate debate at the conference in Harrogate, delegates said that a strike was unlikely but that they would be prepared to take action such as working to rule, which would mean nurses working their contracted hours and no more.
Such measures are designed to minimise any impact on patients, but could mean longer waiting times for nonessential operations. The union's council will now seek an emergency meeting with Gordon Brown, the Chancellor, and Patricia Hewitt, the Health Secretary, to discuss the issue before deciding whether to ballot members next month.
Peter Carter, the RCN's general secretary, said that the staged offer was equivalent to a 1.9 per cent pay rise, which was "unacceptable and miserly", but that he did not want to proceed in a "ramshackle way". He added: "Let's be clear, we want to avoid strike action. We are hoping that Gordon Brown and Patricia Hewitt will wake up and take this seriously. But we are prepared to find ways to hurt the Government while trying to protect patients. We mean business."
Ministers at the Scottish Assembly, with elections looming next month, have agreed to award nurses a 2.5 per cent pay rise from this month. Ann Taylor-Griffiths, of the RCN's Welsh board, told the conference: "We are one nursing body, we are one NHS and deserve one nationally implemented pay award." David Harding-Price, a nurse from Nottingham, was given a standing ovation as he said: "Stand up now and tell the Government: no more rhetoric. Action, action, action now. Unison, the public sector union, is also expected to support industrial action by nurses when it meets at its conference in Brighton next week.
Ministers have defended the staged offer as fair for nurses and affordable for the economy. A spokeswoman for the Department of Health said: "What we have suggested is a sensible increase that's fair for NHS staff and affordable for the economy. In fact we expect the overall average earnings of nurses to rise by 4.9 per cent next year, above the national average." Mothers and newborn babies are being put at risk because of a lack of specialist care for postnatal depression, the RCN says. The conference will be told today that suicide is the biggest killer of new mothers and that more resources are needed to support women who suffer mental illness during pregnancy or after childbirth. 6.5 hours of unpaid overtime worked on average by nurses every week Source: RCN estimate
Source
EDITORIAL BIAS AND THE PREDICTION OF CLIMATE DISASTER: THE CRISIS OF SCIENCE COMMUNICATION
The paper below was presented at the conference "Climate Change: Evaluating Appropriate Responses". Brussels, European Parliament, 18 April 2007 by Benny Peiser, Liverpool John Moores University, Faculty of Science, Liverpool L2 3ET, UK -- b.j.peiser@livjm.ac.uk
Two weeks ago, climate experts and government officials from 130 countries released the latest IPCC Summary for Policy Makers on the 'Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability of Climate Change'. The IPCC's predictions of the future were carefully scrutinised by governments and generally accepted. Despite attempts to tone down some of the more alarming language, the latest IPCC report predicts that unrestrained warming will cause mass extinctions, devastating floods, heatwaves, storms and droughts that may trigger economic disaster and social upheaval.
There can be little doubt that scientists, science organisations and the dominant science media have been instrumental in turning doom-laden computer models into an apocalyptic consensus. For the last 10 years or so, there has been a relentless outpouring of disaster predictions that have been published with little hesitation and rising alarm by the world's leading science journals. Any lingering reservation about looming catastrophe has been silenced by science editors and environmental journalists. Uncertainties have been conveniently disregarded and highly unlikely worst case scenarios exaggerated. Not since the apocalyptic consensus of the Middle Ages has the prognostication of impending doom and global catastrophe on the basis of mathematical modelling been as widely accepted as today. No question about it: The IPCC's disaster predictions have been converted into a general consensus among the world's political and academic elites.
Ironically, these apocalyptic predictions of the future are politically sanctioned at the same time as a growing number of scientists are recognising that environmental and economic computer modelling of an inherently unpredictable future is illogical and futile (see, O.H. Pilkey and L Pilkey-Jarvis: "Useless Arithmetic: Why environmental scientists can't predict the future", Columbia University Press, 2007). As the eminent mathematician David Orrell has pointed out persuasively: "The track record of any kind of long-distance prediction is really bad, but everyone's still really interested in it. It's sort of a way of picturing the future. But we can't make long-term predictions of the economy, and we can't make long-term predictions of the climate. Models will cheerfully boil away all the water in the oceans or cover the world in ice, even with pre-industrial levels of CO2 When models about the future climate are in agreement, it says more about the self-regulating group psychology of the modelling community than it does about global warming and the economy." (David Orrell, "Apollo's Arrow. The Science of Prediction and the Future of Everything", 2007)
Be that as it may, the reality of the IPCC consensus should not be underestimated. Its political weight and growing demands for drastic economic intervention is posing a serious political predicament for many governments, most of which find themselves unable to control let alone reduce CO2 emissions that are rising almost everywhere.
Paradigms, Consensus and Falsification
Science based on "consensus" is a tricky business. I am agnostic about it because the history of science tells us that today's consensus can, and quite frequently is, tomorrow's redundant theory. There are certain types of general agreements in science that are more compelling and more durable than others. In some areas of empirical science, like solar system astronomy, there is more agreement because the data is more robust and the methods less complex. The more complex the science and the less reliable the data, the more scientific controversy you should expect to find.
On the other hand we also know that science tends to produce - and in fact needs - scientific paradigms -- which is perhaps a better word than consensus. So I have really no problem with the fact of a majority consensus on climate change. But science would quickly come to a dead end without the constant and necessary attempts to falsify the leading paradigm of the day, particularly those that are weak and based on contentious data, dodgy methodologies and flawed computer models.
Indeed, some critics argue that climate science has almost reached such a cul-de-sac. The scientific endeavour involves both the protectors and challengers of each and every paradigm. Both are essential to the health and dynamic of a highly competitive enterprise that is science. No consensus is sacrosanct. And it is in the very nature of science and science communication that all reasonable positions and counter-arguments should be heard. The ongoing controversy about hurricanes and global warming is a perfect example of the predicaments of consensus science. It also demonstrates that advocates who exploit the consensus argument against climate sceptics are more than happy to oppose the consensus - if it helps to further an alarmist agenda.
For a long time, and until fairly recently, natural variability was the lead paradigm underlying the dynamic changes in hurricane frequency and intensity. In the last two years or so, a small number of papers published in the world's leading academic journals Science and Nature have cast doubt over this long-established paradigm. Climate campaigners and science journalists jumped to conclusions and claimed: "The old paradigm is dead - long live the new paradigm!" It is noteworthy, however, that both the recent consensus statements by the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) as well as the latest IPCC statements on hurricanes and global warming maintain rather than overturn the old paradigm. At the same time, they caution us about the weight of the new papers.
I believe this is an encouraging development because it would appear to raise the requirements for overthrowing old paradigms. Let me also remind you about the dodgy process that removed from the old IPCC consensus the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age and replaced it with the notorious Hockey Stick consensus. A few enthusiastically received papers were able to overturn the old consensus - mainly because they undermined the important argument by climate sceptics about the degree of Holocene climate variability. Science journalists bought into the new Hockey Stick "consensus" sink line, and hooker [Good one!]. However, their prejudice was evidently laid bare by the extraordinary reluctance to report or report impartially about its flaws and the controversy it generated.
Similar problems can be observed regarding the thorny issue of sea level rise: is it more or less steady (as the IPCC claims) or is it accelerating, as climate alarmists claim? The mainstream science media have no qualms in hyping up new papers that go against the IPCC consensus. At the same time, the same outlets ignore other studies that confirm an inconvenient consensus that climate alarmist regard as too conservative and thus pose an impediment for political action.
I could go on and on: while alarmist claims and predictions are routinely puffed up by the science media and environmental journalists, studies that come to more moderate and less alarmist conclusions are habitually ignored or discredited for being too cautious.
From editorial bias to confirmation bias
Over the last 10 years or so, the editors of the world's leading science journals such as Science and Nature as well as popular science magazines such as Scientific American and New Scientist have publicly advocated drastic policies to curb CO2 emissions. At the same time, they have publicly attacked scientists sceptical of the climate consensus. The key message science editors have thus been sending out is brazen and simple: "The science of climate change is settled. The scientific debate is over. It's time to take political action."
Instead of serving as an honest and open-minded broker of scientific controversy, science editors have opted to take a rigid stance on the science and politics of climate change. In so doing, they have in effect sealed the doors for any critical assessment of the prevailing consensus which their journals officially sponsor. Consequently, their public endorsement undoubtedly deters critics from submitting falsification attempts for publication. Such critiques, not surprisingly, are simply non-existing in the mainstream science media.
But there is more to the problem than just editorial promoting of the scientific consensus. After all, such behaviour is not restricted to the issue of climate change. Editorial bias is often found among other science journals on many other controversies. Much more problematic is the reality of a strong confirmation bias among science editors. While the phenomenon of confirmation bias is an intensely researched and well established form of selective thinking among medical and economic researchers, this methodological impediment is completely ignored in climate science.
Any careful examination of the publishing record of leading science journals will show that science editors too tend to favour the publication of papers that confirm their publicly stated beliefs rather than question them. That is why science editors habitually ignore or treat with contempt any evidence that contradicts their core beliefs. Many critical scientists can confirm that prominent science editors have turned down their papers and have become reluctant to the point of refusal to publish any evidence that attempts to refute their favoured theory.
Of course, climate scientist themselves are routinely accused of confirmation bias for running statistical models and framing their data in such a way that it predictably confirms their hypothesis. After all, research into confirmation and other biases has shown that the scientific method incorporates an inherent tension between hard data and their interpretation by scientists with deeply held convictions. Good science journals critically evaluated and peer review the quality of data and the likelihood of error.
This deceptively reliable process of scrutiny and quality control, however, is itself prone to confirmation bias: peer reviewers selected by biased editors are more likely to accept evidence that supports their own prior belief while rejecting arguments and data that may challenge these convictions (Kaptchuk, 2003). Any science medium that ignores or fail to appreciate these inherent pitfalls of climate science can no longer be regarded as trustworthy.
The end of fair and objective science journalism
For the last few years, a number of influential climate scientists and science writers have conducted a campaign against the principles of fair and balanced journalism that epitomize open and pluralistic societies. The main accusation against impartial reporting on climate change is quite simple: An article in the Boston Globe on climate change journalism sums up the key argument: "More and more environmentalists and climate scientists have been making the point that ''objective" journalists are doing as much as anyone (except maybe Hummer enthusiasts) to forestall action on global warming." (Christopher Shea, Boston Globe, 9 April 2006) Or, in the words of media analysts Boykoff and Boykoff: "A more subtle factor that helps explain US inaction (sic) also exists: journalists' faithful adherence to their professional norms (like objectivity, fairness, accuracy, balance)... (Boykoff and Boykoff, Geoforum 2007, in press)
In short, climate campaigners and science activists are concerned that any doubts or uncertainties expressed in the media may hinder the political objective for drastic action. No wonder then that science editors and campaigners have employed strategies to discourage or intimidate reporters from even asking climate sceptics about their assessment. Michael Mann (Penn State University), for instance, has warned science writers that even to quote a climate sceptic would be regarded as if they had granted ''the Flat Earth Society an equal say with NASA in the design of a new space satellite." (Boston Globe, 9 April 2006). The editor of Scientific American, John Rennie, publicly refers to dissenters as ''denialists" and said that "to give them even one paragraph in a 10-paragraph article would be to exaggerate their importance." (Boston Globe, 9 April 2006)
Occasionally, a probing science reporter dares to challenge these forms of coercion despite the threats of mockery and intimidation. In such cases, a whole army of climate campaigners and bloggers will rush to assail the insubordinate journalist, as science writers such as Bill Broad and John Tierney of the New York Times can attest.
In Britain, it has become routine for leading science organisations such as the Royal Society to press-gang the media against publishing critical reporting on climate change. Lord May, the former, president of the Royal Society publicly censured newspapers such as The Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail for publishing sceptical articles and comments. May also tried to silence respected writers such as David Bellamy, Melanie Phillips and Michael Hanlon by intimidating them personally. In 2005, the then vice-president of the Royal Society, Sir David Wallace, warned the British media not to publish anything that distorted the official view of climate science: "We are appealing to all parts of the UK media to be vigilant against attempts to present a distorted view of the scientific evidence about climate change and its potential effects on people and their environments around the world. I hope that we can count on your support." (The Daily Telegraph, 16 May 2005)
The attacks by science editors and campaigners on critical scientists are not only fuelled by political considerations. Sometimes they are due to blind faith in an apocalyptic future, as a recent editorial in New Scientist reveals: "One of the most corrosive contributions of climate sceptics has been to promote any uncertainty as an excuse for inaction. In truth, the remaining uncertainties should be making us redouble our efforts to mitigate climate change. It's a fair bet that much of what we do not yet know for sure will turn out to be scarier than most of us like to imagine." In other words, the editors of New Scientist are certain that what we do not know today will, upon knowing it in the future, prove to be even worse than they fear. Evidently, such hyperbole has nothing to do with science but belongs to the realm of superstitious divination.
While climate campaigners are trying to frame even the political and economic debate in the traditional fashion of a conflict between consensus and dissent, the political debate is no longer about action versus inaction. The real issue today is about the most cost-effective ways of dealing with climate change: revolutionary transformation of the global economy, as advocated by climate alarmists, or gradual adaptation and adjustment as proposed by climate moderates.
The role of the science media as the maid of government policy
Climate campaigners and environmental media analysts have become convinced that their crusade against impartial science reporting has been won comprehensively. According to this view, the neo-catastrophist framing of climate change has been generally accepted by most science journalists and is now consistently communicated by most news media outlets.
Yet campaigners worry that the political battle is far from won. Thus, in a recent article published by the British Journalism Review, media researchers Eleni Andreadis and Joe Smith warn that the next contest poses an ever greater challenge to science journalism: "We are entering a period when careful interpretation and communication of the economic, political and social dimensions of climate change will be vital. Failure to tell these aspects of the story could be of even greater significance than the painfully slow arrival at the basics of the science. The media will offer the context within which we decide the If, How and When of transforming energy-hungry lifestyles and economies... The open terrain of these questions presents media decision-makers with a new set of challenges, and the way they handle scepticism will again be central to their performance." (British Journalism Review, Vol. 18, No. 1, February 2007).
Andreadis and Smith underscore the role of journalists in framing the climate change debates and assisting governments to enforce drastic policies: "Their principal question should be: Will this help to reduce emissions dramatically, or is it a way of only denting the status quo?". Andreadis and Smith have delineated the science media's political role in no uncertain terms. In a illuminating paragraph, they outline new programme of salvationist campaign journalism: "In dealing with these [climate change] stories the media will also need to marry their critical faculties to a commitment to enable debate about action and change. You can barely fill a taxi with senior mainstream politicians from Western Europe who do not believe action to mitigate and adapt to climate change is necessary. But most are frightened of sticking their necks out. They need to be given the space to think and experiment and lead public debate on action." (British Journalism Review, Vol. 18, No. 1, 2007).
In other words, the role of science and environmental journalists is to provide governments with media support that will enable reluctant decision makers to enforce unpopular policies.
The crisis of science communication
Despite the majority consensus among climate scientists, science organisations and governments, there is a sizeable minority of researchers, economists and political observers who are concerned about the apocalyptic nature of climate hype and the potential risk it poses for political and economic stability. Sceptical researchers have and will continue to publish critical papers that question important parts of even some fundaments of the current climate consensus. Will the science media provide a platform for these critiques? Will they discuss the weight of their evidence and the validity of their arguments? Or will the science media continue to ignore challenges to the status quo?
The absurdity of the science media's handling of climate science is well illuminated in this week's issue of New Scientist. In an editorial, the editors try to square the principle of falsification (which they claim is vital for science to progress) with their belief that any such attempt would undermine political attempts to mitigate climate disaster: "Some scientists are challenging our ideas on climate change, which is vital if we are to progress. But to overturn present thinking will need very strong evidence because, as the IPCC states, confidence in the idea that anthropogenic warming is changing our world has never been higher." (New Scientist, 14 April 2007).
Yet, at the same time, the editor's zealous defence of the apocalyptic climate consensus and their fierce resistance to provide critical researchers a forum for rebuttals or falsification attempts undermines their own integrity.
Let me conclude: The integrity of the science media will depend on whether it will encourage critique and fault-finding analysis by consensus sceptics - or whether they will continue its course towards unbalanced campaign journalism. Given the well-documented reluctance of mainstream science media to accept submissions by critical scientists and the aversion to report on critical papers published elsewhere, I remain unconvinced that science journalism will moderate its blinkered attitudes in the near future.
The diverse groups of critical analysts and researchers will need to develop alternative infrastructures and media outlets if they wish to provide open-minded science writers with judicious evaluations of disaster predictions and a genuinely impartial assessment of evidence. Given the evident biases mainstream science media and environmental journalism has chosen to adopt, there is a growing demand for more balanced and even-handed coverage of climate change science and debates. Scientists and science writers who are concerned about the integrity and openness of the scientific process should turn the current crisis of science communication into an opportunity by setting up more critical, even-handed and reliable science media.
GOVERNMENTS AND CLIMATE CHANGE
By David Henderson of the Westminster Business School. The text that follows formed the basis for a presentation to a meeting in Brussels on 18 April 2007, organised by Roger Helmer MEP, on the subject of 'Climate Change: Evaluating Appropriate Responses'
Introduction
I am not a climate scientist. I am an economist, and I became involved with climate change issues, more by accident than design, some four and a half years ago. To start with, I was chiefly involved with some economic and statistical aspects. Over time my interests and concerns have broadened, though I do not at all claim to have become an all-round expert on this vast array of topics.
Increasingly, I have become critical of the way in which issues relating to climate change are viewed and treated by governments across the world. This is my theme today. I believe that governments, and with them the European Commission, need to think again. My concerns are of two kinds. They relate, first, to the basis for official thinking and policies in this area, and second, to the actual content of policies in many countries, including my own, and in the European Union. In my talk today I will focus almost entirely on the first concern, with only a few concluding words about the second. Under both headings, there is much more that could be said.
A tale of three documents
Climate change issues are especially topical right now, because of the publication of two weighty, officially-commissioned and potentially very influential reports. The larger of these two official publications, scheduled to appear in full in the course of this year, is the IPCC's AR4 - in other words, the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. All told, the whole set of documents making up AR4 may well run to 3,000 pages of text, and some 2,500 experts from around the world have been involved in its preparation.
The second report is already in the public domain. It is the Stern Review on The Economics of Climate Change. The Review was set in motion by the British Chancellor of the Exchequer in July 2005. A text was posted at the end of October last year, and this has now been published in book form, with some extra material added.
The Stern Review is not on the titanic scale of AR4. All the same, it is a weighty document. The main text comprises some 550 pages, and covers a very wide range of issues including both ethical and scientific aspects. Besides these two major officially-sponsored reports, a third contribution should also be noted. In July 2005, the month in which the Stern Review was commissioned, the House of Lords Select Committee on Economic Affairs issued a report on precisely the same subject as that of the Review: it too is entitled 'The Economics of Climate Change'. The Select Committee was a notably high-powered body, and its Special Adviser was the leading British environmental economist. Its report was unanimous.
The rest of my remarks fall under three headings:
* First, I comment on the Stern Review and the debate that it has given rise to.
* Second, I place these comments in the wider context of the IPCC's AR4. In doing so, I will raise questions about the role of the Panel and the professional credibility of the IPCC process.
* Third, I offer some brief conclusions and recommendations.
The Stern Review: debate has been joined
The Stern Review paints a dark and dramatic picture of the risks and threats that could arise, over the next two centuries and after, if anthropogenic emissions of (so-called) 'greenhouse gases' are not brought under control in the near future and then progressively and substantially reduced. The Executive Summary begins with the statement that 'The scientific evidence is now overwhelming: climate change presents very serious global risks and it demands an urgent global response'.
The Review has been widely hailed, across the world, as an authoritative guide to thinking and policy. At its launch in October, our Prime Minister asserted that:: '... what is not in doubt is that the scientific evidence of global warming caused by greenhouse gas emissions is now overwhelming... [and] ... that if the science is right, the consequences for our planet are literally disastrous... what the Stern Review shows is how the economic benefits of strong early action easily outweigh any costs.' Her Majesty's Opposition have reacted in precisely the same way, while the only comments on the Review from the British business world that I have seen have likewise been uncritically favourable.
A widely accepted view in Britain is that 'the science' was settled already, well before the appearance of the Stern Review, and that now, thanks to Stern, 'the economics' is also settled: the basis for immediate and far-reaching action has thus been firmly established. To quote the Chancellor of the Exchequer, in a recent speech, 'The Stern report [sic] has given us the economic evidence on which to act'
Unusually for a document prepared under official auspices, the Review incorporates in the text a number of high level outside endorsements. Among these, four come from Nobel prizewinners in economics, one from the Head of the International Energy Agency, and another from the President of the World Bank.
However, there are dissenting voices. I am one of an international group of dissenters, and we are by no means alone. Well before the Review saw the light of day, it seemed to a number of us, including both scientists and economists, that we would find much to query in its arguments and conclusions; and when the text appeared, our expectation was fully borne out.
I conceived the idea of a dual critique: we would combine to prepare twin review articles, one authored by a group of scientists (actually, in the event, two of them are engineers), and the other by a team of economists, each covering its own set of issues but linked together. I managed to sell this project to a journal editor, and the result was published in January. Volume 7 Number 4 of World Economics carries both of our texts.
Our main verdict on the Review, in a word, is that it is a biased, a heavily biased, exercise in speculative alarmism. Other commentators, including some leading environmental economists, have also voiced criticisms of the Review; and in the forthcoming issue of World Economics Sir Nicholas and others associated with the Review will be replying at length to us and other critics. Debate has been well and truly joined.
The shadow of AR4
A surprising feature of the Stern Review is that it seems to pay little attention to the argument and evidence presented in AR4 - even though successive complete draft texts of AR4 were made available to member governments and participants in the IPCC process from about the time that the Review was commissioned. Sharp-eyed journalists in Britain have noted that in some respects the Report is less tilted towards alarming possibilities than the Review. In the light of these apparent differences, an obvious question arises. How far does this latest IPCC report lend support to the Stern Review case for 'an urgent global response'?
Clear answers to that question have recently been given, in the context of the first volume of AR4, the report of the Panel's Working Group I, by high level official persons closely involved in, or connected with, the IPCC process.
* Dr Pachauri, the Chairman of the IPCC: 'I hope this report will shock people [and] governments into taking more serious action'.
* Achim Steiner, the Director-General of the UNEP: 'in the light of the report's findings, it would be "irresponsible" to resist or seek to delay actions on mandatory emissions cuts'.[1].
* Yvo de Boer, Secretary-General of the UNFCCC: 'the findings ... leave no doubt as to the dangers that mankind is facing and must be acted on without delay'.
* Stavros Dimas, the EU's Commissioner for the environment: 'a grim report'.
In interpreting such statements, it is worth bearing in mind that in none of them is the wording directly drawn from the Report. These eminent persons were not actually quoting AR4 text: they were putting their own personal gloss on it, and giving their own views as to its implications for policy, as they were fully entitled to do.
Even aside from such high-level pronouncements, however, it could be argued - I might have made the argument myself, had I not been drawn into these issues - that just how much weight should be placed on the Stern Review is a minor matter. It could be said that even if the Review represents an extreme position - which is of course debatable - and even if economists continue to wage their own inconclusive private wars, the case for immediate and far-reaching global action to contain emissions has been made, independently and authoritatively, in the past and current work of the IPCC. Let me tell you why I am personally not convinced by this very reasonable-sounding argument, because of the doubts that I have come to hold in relation to the IPCC process.
The wider context: the IPCC and the problem of unwarranted trust
Since its creation in 1988, the IPCC has come a long way, and has achieved a great deal. As a result, it has established itself, in the eyes of most if not all 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, including economic issues. It has acquired what is effectively a monopoly position.
While recognising its achievements, I believe that 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 effective monopoly that it now holds. To begin with, the very idea 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 virtually 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. Viewed in this light, 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. In my opinion, 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.
* Its treatment of economic issues has been flawed. Writings that feature in the 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 UNEP. In this area, the IPCC milieu is neither fully competent nor adequately representative.[2]
* The Panel's emphasis on peer-reviewed published work, though understandable, takes too much for granted. Standard peer-reviewing processes do not necessarily serve as a guarantee of quality, reliability and objectivity.
* In peer-reviewed work that the IPCC has drawn on, the authors concerned have failed to make due disclosure of data, sources and procedures, and the IPCC has not required them to do so.
* The response of the IPCC milieu to informed criticism has typically been inadequate or dismissive. A conspicuous example was the British government's official response to the report from the House of Lords Select Committee.[3]
* Both the Panel's directing circle and the IPCC milieu more generally have an endemic bias towards alarmist assessments and conclusions. Note that, in speaking of the Panel's 'directing circle' I refer, not to the 2,500 or so experts who have contributed to the preparation of AR4, but to a more restricted, higher-level and more influential set of participants. These are the people who run the show.
Let me bring in here the report of the House of Lords Select Committee on Economic Affairs. That report deals with many subjects, but for me its most striking feature, and a welcome one, was the concerns that it expressed about the IPCC. Given the credibility which the IPCC has acquired, it is truly remarkable that a group of eminent, experienced and responsible persons, drawn from a national legislative body and spanning the political spectrum, with the help of an internationally recognised expert adviser, and after taking and weighing evidence, should have published a considered and unanimous report in which the work and role of the Panel are put in question.
How (you may ask) has the Stern Review treated the questions raised about the IPCC process by various writers and by the Select Committee in particular? The answer is surprising. Although the Review is long and wide-ranging, the text makes no mention of any of the criticisms that have been directed towards the IPCC process. Moreover, although the lists of references in the Review extend to around 1,100 papers and studies, that inventory of 1,100 does not include the report from the Select Committee. There are other significant omissions, but this one is the most striking and the least excusable.
To sum up under this heading, I believe that there is a problem of unwarranted trust in the IPCC process and in the role of the Panel itself, a problem which the Stern Review shows no awareness of.
Policy aspects
Finally, a word on policy aspects. Here I offer two conclusions relating to the basis of policy, followed by a brief post-script on the content of policies to limit CO2 emissions. The first of my conclusions is simple. Policymakers, officials and commentators should not join our Prime Minister, Her Majesty's Opposition and leading British business firms and organisations, by endorsing, uncritically and without qualification, the arguments, findings and recommendations of the Stern Review. Contrary to what these and other eminent persons have presumed, the Review does not 'show' what is the case, and the debate on the economics of climate change remains open and unsettled.
My second conclusion, which is more fundamental, is this. In relation to climate change, a clear present need is to build up a sounder basis than now exists for reviewing and assessing the issues. Governments should think again. Rather than pursuing as a matter of urgency ambitious and costly targets for curbing CO2 emissions, they should take prompt steps to ensure that they and their citizens are more fully and more objectively informed and advised. A process of review and inquiry needs to be established, which is more impartial, more representative and more balanced than that which the IPCC and its controlling departments and agencies have built up and shown themselves unwilling to change. I have made specific proposals, so far to no effect, as to the kinds of action that might be taken to secure this result.
Last of all, a word on the choice of policies designed to limit and reduce emissions. Here the main point was well made last month by Martin Wolf in his Financial Times column, where he wrote that: '...any workable policy system must be global; it must create stable incentives; it must be administratively simple; it must include investment in creation and dissemination of new technologies; and, not least, it must allow people to get on with their lives with as much freedom as possible. Uniform prices on emissions - ideally, through taxation - will do most of this job. Almost everything else is unnecessary or counterproductive.'[4]
Current official policies, actual and prospective, have many features that come under the heading of 'unnecessary or counterproductive': Wolf's article refers, appropriately to 'a host of interventionist gimmickry' Not only is there good reason to query the officially approved basis for climate change policies, but many of the specific policy initiatives that have been taken are open to serious question. This is my second reason for believing that governments should think again.
[1] This and the following quotation are than from a report (3 February) in the Financial Times.
[2] Ian Castles and I have jointly put forward a critique of some leading aspects of the IPCC's economic work, while authors involved in that work have contested our criticisms. The debate was reviewed and carried further in a recent article of mine entitled 'SRES, IPCC, and the Treatment of Economic Issues: What Has Emerged?' (Energy and Environment, Volume 16 No. 3 & 4, 2005). It is too early to rate the treatment of economic issues in AR4, but we were critical of the decision to use the SRES - i.e., the Special Report on Emissions Scenarios, published in 2000 - as the point of departure for it.
[3] I commented on this document in an article entitled 'Report, Response and Review', published in Energy and Environment, Vol 17, No 1, 2006.
[4] Martin Wolf, 'Why emissions curbs must be simple', Financial Times, 16 March 2007.
Saturday, April 21, 2007
HRT now linked to ovarian cancer!
The drumbeat of the anti-HRT war grows louder. Yesterday HRT was accused of causing breast cancer. Today it is accused of causing ovarian cancer -- on equally frivolous grounds. A PDF of the full journal article in "Lancet" is here. I reproduce a media report of it below. Rather than adding to my own comments of yesterday, I follow the media report with a reproduction of Prof. Brignell's comment on the nonsense. Prof. Brignell is a mathematician who campaigns against the ignorant and malicious misuse of statistics
HORMONE replacement therapy, a contested treatment for post-menopausal women that has already been linked to breast cancer, is also associated with ovarian cancer, a study in The Lancet said today.
Women who take HRT are on average 20 per cent likelier to develop and die from ovarian cancer compared to women who have never been on this treatment, according to the research. The evidence comes from a major British investigation into female health, the Million Women Study, covering 1.3 million British women from 1996-2001.
HRT entails taking substitutes for oestrogen or progesterone after natural levels of these key female hormones diminish after menopause. The idea behind it is to reduce symptoms such as hot flushes and vaginal dryness and boost protection against osteoporosis and heart disease.
The British researchers assessed data from 948,000 post-menopausal women, who had been questioned and later given a follow-up exam some three years later. Around 30 per cent were current HRT users; 20 per cent had previously received HRT; and the remaining 50 per cent had never taken it. Across all three groups, a total of 2273 women developed cancer, and 1591 died from it.
The increased risk of cancer, though, was shouldered by current HRT users, especially those who had been taking the hormones for at least five years. The risk was largely unchanged by such factors as a smoking habit or past use of oral contraceptives. Women who had stopped HRT had the same risk level as counterparts who had never taken the treatment.
In a commentary, Steven Narod of the Women's College Research Institute in Toronto, Canada, said the relative risk of 20 per cent might be thought of as small, "but enormous numbers of women have been exposed." In the Million Women Study alone, nearly 500,000 had taken HRT, he pointed out. Extrapolated across the British population, around 1000 extra women died from ovarian cancer between 1991 and 2005 because of HRT.
The HRT link with breast cancer surfaced in 2002 [See my post of 14th. for a comment on THAT crap study], prompting many women in the US to drop the treatment - a trend that notably coincided with a sharp fall in new breast cancer cases in the US. The authors of the new study are led by Valerie Beral of the Cancer Research UK Epidemiology Unit in Oxford, Britain. The paper appears in next Saturday's issue of The Lancet. Beral says HRT's effect should be seen in the context of breast and endometrial (uterine wall) cancer, as well as ovarian cancers. These three types of tumour account for 40 per cent of all cancers diagnosed in British women. "The total incidence of these three cancers in the (Million Women Study) population is 63 per cent higher in current users of HRT than never-users," the study notes.
Source
The empire strikes back
By John Brignell
Like the environmentalists, the epidemiologists do not like to have their hegemony over their corner of the media to be challenged. No sooner has their dangerous and destructive nonsense over breast cancer been thwarted than they come out with even more dangerous and destructive nonsense about ovarian cancer. Valerie Beral, a women noted for the size of her Trojan Numbers, has come out with a relative risk of 1.2.
There are at least two well known confounding factors to which such an observational study such as this are prey:
* If the therapy is successful then the patient will have a marked change of life style.
* The reasons for which the therapy was prescribed in the first place might well pose a risk factor.
The second of these can be eliminated in a properly conducted double-blind randomised trial, but the first cannot.
A personal anecdote will illustrate how this factor works. Last year your bending author was reduced to life as a housebound cripple by a marked increase in arthritic inflammation. Eventually, therapy with Diclofenac and Co-Codomol restored an element of normal living and the patient celebrated by going out and digging over a large allotment. In retrospect this was rather foolish, a such violent activity after a period of forced idleness would have exacerbated any incipient heart disease. Fortunately, survival indicates that there was none.
It seems, however, more likely that the second of these confounding factors would be more important in this case, but more haunting is the possibility of confounding factors we have not thought of.
Which words in the truism "Correlation is not Causation" do the epidemiologists not understand? There is no reason to suppose from these tacky observations that any women at all have been killed by HRT.
Is there anything more despicable than pinning your claim to fame on scaring millions of women out of using a hugely liberating therapy? As for Cancer UK, which we all know from the constant begging letters, it could put the product of its suppliance to better use by supporting science rather than nonsense.
Source
Prof. Brignell is too contemptuous of the study to comment at length on it above but he is making essentially the same point that I do: The very low percentage of women apparently affected makes it highly likely that the result is random noise. That some of the results are statistically significant rules out only one source of random fluctuation -- small sample size. A large enough sample will make ANY observed effect statistically significant. Statistical significance does not and cannot rule out other random (or non-random) events, effects and influences.
Prof. Brignell has some links in his article that I have not reproduced above. See the original for those links
This whole anti-HRT campaign is quite despicable. It aims to get women to take large risks (of osteoporosis etc.) in order to avoid tiny risks (of cancer)
Leftist politicians are making Britain's troops into wimps
During one of Britain's 19th century wars with China a British soldier in a force under Lord Elgin was captured by the Chinese and beheaded for refusing to Kow-Tow... The incident was in quite a contrast to the story of the British sailors and marines captured by Iran, admitting everything, and released flourishing gifts from Mr. Ahmadinejad. One of them told a press conference that he had cried himself to sleep after his captors cruelly called him "Mr. Bean" and took away the iPod which he had carried on a combat mission. The sailor said he also cried when he was reunited with the only female captive, Faye Turney. He further complained about the quality of the presents which the Iranians gave them when they were released.
I don't think that it's for me, who has never experienced such an ordeal, to blame him or any of them for being terrified. Possibly there were visions of years in an Iranian prison, lynching by fanatical mobs or videotaped beheadings in their minds. Further, we don't know what instructions they had been given on how to behave in such a situation -- possibly to co-operate with their captors and not provoke them or do anything to make the situation worse.
But to talk this way after release -- as well as two of them rushing to sell their stories to the media (the Ministry of Defense later changed its mind about permitting this, but that it was considered at all suggests the Government knows nothing about the ethos of the fighting services) -- seems a bit much to stomach. Surely even in a modern, politically correct Navy there is still dignity.
Anyway, one of Britain's most respected senior officers, General Sir Michael Rose, who led the UN force in Bosnia, is someone qualified by personal experience to comment. And he has claimed the incident has shown that the Royal Navy is no longer fit for modern warfare. The sailors failed to fight back, and behaved as though they were on a Mediterranean cruise, he said. The entire ethos of the military had been undermined:
"Nelson said that no captain could ever be criticized for laying his ship along the enemy and engaging him. We didn't quite get that here. There were junior soldiers in the Second World War who resisted heroically, in far worse circumstances, or in the Falkland Islands. What made young men in the Scots Guards or the Paras. charge with bayonets in the middle of the night when they had run out of ammunition, against enemy machine guns?"
General Rose appears to blame the Iraq war, and in this I disagree with him. Things started much earlier than that. Since before the Blair government took office -- and despite that government's willingness to commit the armed forces for war service -- there have been reports of a stream of initiatives forcing Political Correctness on the forces (combined with shortcomings in equipment, pay, housing and other support) that can only damage or destroy their traditions and morale. Here are a few examples: In 2004 it was reported that a Royal Navy ship, HMS Cumberland, in deference to the political correctness of Blair's Britain, had installed a Satanist chapel on board for the benefit of a Satanist crewman, a spokesman claiming: "The Royal Navy is an equal employer organization."
The Army set up a special school at Lichfield to teach drill-sergeants to be nicer to recruits. Shouting at recruits was banned, leading one 17-year-old to ask: "If Army recruits can't handle being shouted at by drill sergeants, how are they going to cope with the noise of gunfire or the screams of casualties?"
In 2001 women in the British armed forces were receiving breast implants at taxpayers' expense (costing about US $8,000 a pair) at make them "happier soldiers." If they were taken prisoner it might well make their captors happier soldiers too. Other service personnel had liposuction rather than route-marches to remove excess fat. Colonel Bob Stewart, DSO, former commander of the British forces in Bosnia, after pointing out that money needed to be spent on things like better guns and radios, said:
"Anyone who is so fixated about their breast size or so emotionally troubled about their gender has absolutely no place in a fighting army....The ideal soldier is physically tough and mentally balanced, so a serviceman who needs liposuction or a sex-change is in the wrong job. And, dare I ask, how a female soldier, who is so distressed by remarks about her appearance that she had to resort to implants, would cope under fire?"
At the Pirbright Depot, training-ground of the Guards Brigade and famous for producing some of the finest soldiers in the world, trainees were issued with red and yellow cards. Should they pull out a yellow card, it would show their drill sergeants they were upset and should be left alone for 15 minutes while their delicate nerves recovered from the shock of being shouted at. Should they be really upset and pull a red card, the drill sergeant would have to explain his behavior to a superior officer.
It was forecast that soldiers would be allowed to sue officers for giving the wrong orders, in accord with the European Convention on Human Rights. Eight other countries, from Russia to Liechtenstein, had asked for their armed forces to be exempt. General Sir Peter de la Billiere said that this was almost impossible to believe and that he could think of no decision that would do more to damage morale and discipline.
General Sir Charles Guthrie said the "creeping advance" of health and safety legislation in the armed forces might be creating a climate of "risk aversion" and future soldiers might be able to sue the army for putting them in risky situations.
A "task force" was reported to be investigating whether anti-discrimination legislation would mean disabled people would be taken into the forces -- leading to one cynical observation that blind paratroops would know to pull the ripcord when their guide dogs' leads went slack. One serviceman who quit the Royal Marines in disgust wrote:
"The government's obsession with political correctness has been applied to the military with such relish that at times it seems almost insane. I have lost count of the number of forms I have had to fill in giving details of my ethnic origin. These forms used to be anonymous, but the last one I had to complete carried my name, rank and service number. Perhaps this was a reaction to an earlier (anonymous) form, which had revealed that in our all-male unit there was a huge number of Bangladeshi single mothers. There was always a great reluctance to fill in these forms, the fear being that anonymity had been removed so that the government could check how many members of ethnic minorities were being promoted. In response, the military chain of command offered soldiers an inducement: if they did not complete the forms correctly, without jokes, on a Friday afternoon, they would remain in barracks for the weekend and fill them in at their leisure. No doubt that's what New Labour means when it talks about being 'investors in people'.... I would have felt a lot more 'invested in' had I been sent on operations with a gun that worked properly."
He continued, regarding the application of health-and-safety standards to training:
"The steep ravines worn into the slopes that recruits had to run up and down at various points on the seven-mile course were also contrary to all sorts of well-meaning legislation. The recommendation was for proper steps and handrails to be installed -- just like the ones you find in the mountains of Afghanistan or the wadis of Iraq."
Possibly the British sailors taken prisoner by Iran were simply following orders. It may have been just one of those things, and will be soon forgotten: all wars are full of SNAFUs and aberrant incidents. During World War II a British Admiral and former head of Naval Intelligence, Sir Barry Domville, was imprisoned as a security risk, but that did not mean the Royal Navy's traditions were crumbling. But the whole thing at present looks like political correctness coming home to roost. I doubt the sailors can be blamed: the fault is at a much higher level.
Source
British jailbirds treated better than retirees
Michael Sams, who murdered the teenage prostitute Julie Dart and kidnapped the estate agent Stephanie Slater before imprisoning her in a coffin, has boasted that he is better off in jail than living as a pensioner on the outside. Sams, 65, who is serving four life sentences at Whitemoor prison, Cambridgeshire, wrote to Inside Time, a newspaper for prisoners, in response to a campaign for inmates to be allowed their state pensions.
"How many pensioners in the community, who are totally dependent on the basic state pension and live in rented accommodation, are able to spend around œ20 per week on luxuries?" the former tool repairer asked. "Most struggle to keep warm in winter, afraid to put the heating on, barely eating, let alone getting three square (ready-made) meals per day. And three or four choices per course at that! "Free access to the gym each day to keep those joints supple and no bills except for 1 pound per week TV rental. "Have you ever seen an OAP inmate in tatty clothes or scruffy trainers? Not a hope! Materially, we OAPs in prison are far better off than those in the community."
He opposed the campaign to give inmates a pension, but was in favour of allowing retirement-age prisoners who are unable to work the same weekly amount as those who can. He also advised younger criminals to invest their "gains" in a private pension so that when they "retired" in prison they would have a steady income.
Sams was jailed for life after his wife recognised a recording of his voice played on the BBC Crimewatch programme. The killer, from Sutton on Trent, Nottinghamshire, pleaded guilty in 1993 at Nottingham Crown Court to kidnapping Miss Slater, 25, in January 1992, to false imprisonment and to demanding a 175,000 ransom for her. He denied kidnapping Miss Dart, 18, from Leeds, in July 1991. He also denied murdering her, making two demands for a 140,000 ransom and blackmailing British Rail for 200,000 by threatening to derail a train, but was convicted.
Mervyn Kohler, spokesman for Help the Aged, said yesterday: "In material terms, Mr Sams is probably absolutely right. But there's one small shortfall here. Given the choice, I'd much rather be outside than inside." Norman Brennan, founder of the Victims of Crime Trust, said that he was appalled by Sams's claims. "I think the whole country is sick to death of listening to the bleeding hearts and hearing about the human rights and civil liberties of those who have committed the most appalling crimes," he said. A spokesman for Inside Time said: "Michael Sams is of course fully entitled to his opinion but I have to tell him that . . . he is very much in a minority of one. "We remain firmly of the opinion that it is morally wrong to deny state pension benefits to serving prisoners."
Source
NHS care 'left to student nurses'
Lives are being put at risk because student nurses are being left on their own with patients, a study has claimed. A poll by the Royal College of Nursing of 1,500 student nurses found nearly half had been left unattended with patients without warning. Guidelines say student nurses should always be monitored except those in their final year and even that has to be prearranged. The government said patient safety was of "paramount importance".
The survey showed 44% of student nurses had been left unattended without warning and without a doctor or qualified nurse present. Eight in 10 of those said it had happened on at least three occasions. Of the 553 first-year students questioned, 42% said they had been left on their own. And 15% said they had witnessed adverse events while left unattended. But 84% said they did not report that they were left unsupervised.
Gill Robertson, the RCN's student nurses adviser, said there were reports of students just eight weeks into their training being left alone. She said this could happen on surgical wards and other areas of a hospital where patients were extremely ill. "That is like the average person being left with a patient. It should not be happening and is a risk to patient care."
She added nurses were being stretched because of the cuts being made - the RCN estimates over 22,000 health staff posts have been lost in the last 18 months. And another survey of nurses working in 173 hospital wards revealed a third of nurses thought patient care was being compromised on each shift because of reduced staffing.
RCN general secretary Peter Carter agreed the financial problems in the NHS were to blame for the problem. "Those registered nurses left have to do ever more with even fewer resources." Mr Carter also said he was concerned by the reports of student nurses not being able to get jobs once they had qualified. "I am hearing worrying stories from nurses who qualified last September who are still unable to get jobs because trusts are freezing entry levels posts to save money."
Health Minister Lord Hunt said: "Patient safety is of paramount importance to the government and NHS staff alike. "We would expect any nurse, whether in training or in practice, to report any incident they feel has an adverse effect on patient safety." Liberal Democrat health spokesman Norman Lamb said: "This is extremely worrying - patients' lives could be at risk. "The damaging deficits in the health service not only result in job losses but have a serious impact on the remaining workforce."
Source
NHS bungles pay deal -- more pay for less work
A pay deal that gave hospital consultants [senior doctors] a salary increase of 25 per cent left them working shorter hours and treating fewer patients, the National Audit Office has found. It says that the consultants deserved more money, but it was regrettable that the public and the NHS had not seen benefits in greater productivity and better services.
The contract, agreed in 2003, cost œ715 million in the first three years - œ150 million more than the Department of Health estimated. In that time the average consultant's pay rose to œ110,000 a year while the average number of hours worked fell from 51.6 a week to 50.2. Although there was an 11.3 per cent increase in the number of consultants working in the NHS in the two years after the agreement, the amount of consultant-led activity increased by only 4 per cent. "The bottom line is that the Department of Health has increased consultants' salaries without demonstrating any extra productivity in return," said Edward Leigh, MP, chairman of the Commons Public Accounts Committee, to which the audit office reports. "This is one more example of weak financial management by the Department of Health. It drove through the new pay deal with scant regard for proper evidence and solid financial forecasting."
Sir John Bourn, the Comptroller and Auditor-General and head of the National Audit Office, said: "Consultants deserve to be paid properly for the work that they do. However, the new contract was introduced to benefit not only consultants but patients and the health service in general. "Although a new contract was needed, it is regrettable that the costs are higher than expected and that we are not yet seeing any clear evidence of improvements in productivity or services for patients."
In negotiating the contract, the department used out-of-date information on the hours that consultants actually worked. In spite of evidence that the average was between 50 and 52 hours a week, the department worked on the assumption that it was 47 hours. It then agreed a contract with the British Medical Association that was based on an average of 43 hours a week. In fact, consultants continued to work much longer hours than these, and under the new contract were paid for them. As a result, the contract cost œ150 million more than the department expected.
Lord Hunt, the Health Minister, said: "The new arrangements reward and incentivise consultants who make the biggest contribution to service delivery and improving health services. This has helped us to recruit and retain highly skilled consultants, historically a challenge for the NHS. We now have low vacancy rates - fewer than 2 per cent - and more than 10,000 more consultants working in the NHS than when the Government came to power."
Andrew Lansley, the Shadow Health Secretary, said: "This confirms that the Government simply didn't understand what consultants were doing before they made assumptions about the new contract."
Source
Polygamous husbands settling in Britain with multiple wives can claim extra benefits: "Polygamous husbands settling in Britain with multiple wives can claim extra benefits for their "harems" even though bigamy is a crime in the UK, it has emerged. Opposition MPs are demanding an urgent change in the law, claiming that the Government is recognising and rewarding a custom which has no legal status and which is "alien" to this country's cultural traditions.... Officials said yesterday a review was now under way into whether the state should continue to pay out income support, jobseeker's allowance and housing and council tax benefits to 'extra' spouses."
The drumbeat of the anti-HRT war grows louder. Yesterday HRT was accused of causing breast cancer. Today it is accused of causing ovarian cancer -- on equally frivolous grounds. A PDF of the full journal article in "Lancet" is here. I reproduce a media report of it below. Rather than adding to my own comments of yesterday, I follow the media report with a reproduction of Prof. Brignell's comment on the nonsense. Prof. Brignell is a mathematician who campaigns against the ignorant and malicious misuse of statistics
HORMONE replacement therapy, a contested treatment for post-menopausal women that has already been linked to breast cancer, is also associated with ovarian cancer, a study in The Lancet said today.
Women who take HRT are on average 20 per cent likelier to develop and die from ovarian cancer compared to women who have never been on this treatment, according to the research. The evidence comes from a major British investigation into female health, the Million Women Study, covering 1.3 million British women from 1996-2001.
HRT entails taking substitutes for oestrogen or progesterone after natural levels of these key female hormones diminish after menopause. The idea behind it is to reduce symptoms such as hot flushes and vaginal dryness and boost protection against osteoporosis and heart disease.
The British researchers assessed data from 948,000 post-menopausal women, who had been questioned and later given a follow-up exam some three years later. Around 30 per cent were current HRT users; 20 per cent had previously received HRT; and the remaining 50 per cent had never taken it. Across all three groups, a total of 2273 women developed cancer, and 1591 died from it.
The increased risk of cancer, though, was shouldered by current HRT users, especially those who had been taking the hormones for at least five years. The risk was largely unchanged by such factors as a smoking habit or past use of oral contraceptives. Women who had stopped HRT had the same risk level as counterparts who had never taken the treatment.
In a commentary, Steven Narod of the Women's College Research Institute in Toronto, Canada, said the relative risk of 20 per cent might be thought of as small, "but enormous numbers of women have been exposed." In the Million Women Study alone, nearly 500,000 had taken HRT, he pointed out. Extrapolated across the British population, around 1000 extra women died from ovarian cancer between 1991 and 2005 because of HRT.
The HRT link with breast cancer surfaced in 2002 [See my post of 14th. for a comment on THAT crap study], prompting many women in the US to drop the treatment - a trend that notably coincided with a sharp fall in new breast cancer cases in the US. The authors of the new study are led by Valerie Beral of the Cancer Research UK Epidemiology Unit in Oxford, Britain. The paper appears in next Saturday's issue of The Lancet. Beral says HRT's effect should be seen in the context of breast and endometrial (uterine wall) cancer, as well as ovarian cancers. These three types of tumour account for 40 per cent of all cancers diagnosed in British women. "The total incidence of these three cancers in the (Million Women Study) population is 63 per cent higher in current users of HRT than never-users," the study notes.
Source
The empire strikes back
By John Brignell
Like the environmentalists, the epidemiologists do not like to have their hegemony over their corner of the media to be challenged. No sooner has their dangerous and destructive nonsense over breast cancer been thwarted than they come out with even more dangerous and destructive nonsense about ovarian cancer. Valerie Beral, a women noted for the size of her Trojan Numbers, has come out with a relative risk of 1.2.
There are at least two well known confounding factors to which such an observational study such as this are prey:
* If the therapy is successful then the patient will have a marked change of life style.
* The reasons for which the therapy was prescribed in the first place might well pose a risk factor.
The second of these can be eliminated in a properly conducted double-blind randomised trial, but the first cannot.
A personal anecdote will illustrate how this factor works. Last year your bending author was reduced to life as a housebound cripple by a marked increase in arthritic inflammation. Eventually, therapy with Diclofenac and Co-Codomol restored an element of normal living and the patient celebrated by going out and digging over a large allotment. In retrospect this was rather foolish, a such violent activity after a period of forced idleness would have exacerbated any incipient heart disease. Fortunately, survival indicates that there was none.
It seems, however, more likely that the second of these confounding factors would be more important in this case, but more haunting is the possibility of confounding factors we have not thought of.
Which words in the truism "Correlation is not Causation" do the epidemiologists not understand? There is no reason to suppose from these tacky observations that any women at all have been killed by HRT.
Is there anything more despicable than pinning your claim to fame on scaring millions of women out of using a hugely liberating therapy? As for Cancer UK, which we all know from the constant begging letters, it could put the product of its suppliance to better use by supporting science rather than nonsense.
Source
Prof. Brignell is too contemptuous of the study to comment at length on it above but he is making essentially the same point that I do: The very low percentage of women apparently affected makes it highly likely that the result is random noise. That some of the results are statistically significant rules out only one source of random fluctuation -- small sample size. A large enough sample will make ANY observed effect statistically significant. Statistical significance does not and cannot rule out other random (or non-random) events, effects and influences.
Prof. Brignell has some links in his article that I have not reproduced above. See the original for those links
This whole anti-HRT campaign is quite despicable. It aims to get women to take large risks (of osteoporosis etc.) in order to avoid tiny risks (of cancer)
Leftist politicians are making Britain's troops into wimps
During one of Britain's 19th century wars with China a British soldier in a force under Lord Elgin was captured by the Chinese and beheaded for refusing to Kow-Tow... The incident was in quite a contrast to the story of the British sailors and marines captured by Iran, admitting everything, and released flourishing gifts from Mr. Ahmadinejad. One of them told a press conference that he had cried himself to sleep after his captors cruelly called him "Mr. Bean" and took away the iPod which he had carried on a combat mission. The sailor said he also cried when he was reunited with the only female captive, Faye Turney. He further complained about the quality of the presents which the Iranians gave them when they were released.
I don't think that it's for me, who has never experienced such an ordeal, to blame him or any of them for being terrified. Possibly there were visions of years in an Iranian prison, lynching by fanatical mobs or videotaped beheadings in their minds. Further, we don't know what instructions they had been given on how to behave in such a situation -- possibly to co-operate with their captors and not provoke them or do anything to make the situation worse.
But to talk this way after release -- as well as two of them rushing to sell their stories to the media (the Ministry of Defense later changed its mind about permitting this, but that it was considered at all suggests the Government knows nothing about the ethos of the fighting services) -- seems a bit much to stomach. Surely even in a modern, politically correct Navy there is still dignity.
Anyway, one of Britain's most respected senior officers, General Sir Michael Rose, who led the UN force in Bosnia, is someone qualified by personal experience to comment. And he has claimed the incident has shown that the Royal Navy is no longer fit for modern warfare. The sailors failed to fight back, and behaved as though they were on a Mediterranean cruise, he said. The entire ethos of the military had been undermined:
"Nelson said that no captain could ever be criticized for laying his ship along the enemy and engaging him. We didn't quite get that here. There were junior soldiers in the Second World War who resisted heroically, in far worse circumstances, or in the Falkland Islands. What made young men in the Scots Guards or the Paras. charge with bayonets in the middle of the night when they had run out of ammunition, against enemy machine guns?"
General Rose appears to blame the Iraq war, and in this I disagree with him. Things started much earlier than that. Since before the Blair government took office -- and despite that government's willingness to commit the armed forces for war service -- there have been reports of a stream of initiatives forcing Political Correctness on the forces (combined with shortcomings in equipment, pay, housing and other support) that can only damage or destroy their traditions and morale. Here are a few examples: In 2004 it was reported that a Royal Navy ship, HMS Cumberland, in deference to the political correctness of Blair's Britain, had installed a Satanist chapel on board for the benefit of a Satanist crewman, a spokesman claiming: "The Royal Navy is an equal employer organization."
The Army set up a special school at Lichfield to teach drill-sergeants to be nicer to recruits. Shouting at recruits was banned, leading one 17-year-old to ask: "If Army recruits can't handle being shouted at by drill sergeants, how are they going to cope with the noise of gunfire or the screams of casualties?"
In 2001 women in the British armed forces were receiving breast implants at taxpayers' expense (costing about US $8,000 a pair) at make them "happier soldiers." If they were taken prisoner it might well make their captors happier soldiers too. Other service personnel had liposuction rather than route-marches to remove excess fat. Colonel Bob Stewart, DSO, former commander of the British forces in Bosnia, after pointing out that money needed to be spent on things like better guns and radios, said:
"Anyone who is so fixated about their breast size or so emotionally troubled about their gender has absolutely no place in a fighting army....The ideal soldier is physically tough and mentally balanced, so a serviceman who needs liposuction or a sex-change is in the wrong job. And, dare I ask, how a female soldier, who is so distressed by remarks about her appearance that she had to resort to implants, would cope under fire?"
At the Pirbright Depot, training-ground of the Guards Brigade and famous for producing some of the finest soldiers in the world, trainees were issued with red and yellow cards. Should they pull out a yellow card, it would show their drill sergeants they were upset and should be left alone for 15 minutes while their delicate nerves recovered from the shock of being shouted at. Should they be really upset and pull a red card, the drill sergeant would have to explain his behavior to a superior officer.
It was forecast that soldiers would be allowed to sue officers for giving the wrong orders, in accord with the European Convention on Human Rights. Eight other countries, from Russia to Liechtenstein, had asked for their armed forces to be exempt. General Sir Peter de la Billiere said that this was almost impossible to believe and that he could think of no decision that would do more to damage morale and discipline.
General Sir Charles Guthrie said the "creeping advance" of health and safety legislation in the armed forces might be creating a climate of "risk aversion" and future soldiers might be able to sue the army for putting them in risky situations.
A "task force" was reported to be investigating whether anti-discrimination legislation would mean disabled people would be taken into the forces -- leading to one cynical observation that blind paratroops would know to pull the ripcord when their guide dogs' leads went slack. One serviceman who quit the Royal Marines in disgust wrote:
"The government's obsession with political correctness has been applied to the military with such relish that at times it seems almost insane. I have lost count of the number of forms I have had to fill in giving details of my ethnic origin. These forms used to be anonymous, but the last one I had to complete carried my name, rank and service number. Perhaps this was a reaction to an earlier (anonymous) form, which had revealed that in our all-male unit there was a huge number of Bangladeshi single mothers. There was always a great reluctance to fill in these forms, the fear being that anonymity had been removed so that the government could check how many members of ethnic minorities were being promoted. In response, the military chain of command offered soldiers an inducement: if they did not complete the forms correctly, without jokes, on a Friday afternoon, they would remain in barracks for the weekend and fill them in at their leisure. No doubt that's what New Labour means when it talks about being 'investors in people'.... I would have felt a lot more 'invested in' had I been sent on operations with a gun that worked properly."
He continued, regarding the application of health-and-safety standards to training:
"The steep ravines worn into the slopes that recruits had to run up and down at various points on the seven-mile course were also contrary to all sorts of well-meaning legislation. The recommendation was for proper steps and handrails to be installed -- just like the ones you find in the mountains of Afghanistan or the wadis of Iraq."
Possibly the British sailors taken prisoner by Iran were simply following orders. It may have been just one of those things, and will be soon forgotten: all wars are full of SNAFUs and aberrant incidents. During World War II a British Admiral and former head of Naval Intelligence, Sir Barry Domville, was imprisoned as a security risk, but that did not mean the Royal Navy's traditions were crumbling. But the whole thing at present looks like political correctness coming home to roost. I doubt the sailors can be blamed: the fault is at a much higher level.
Source
British jailbirds treated better than retirees
Michael Sams, who murdered the teenage prostitute Julie Dart and kidnapped the estate agent Stephanie Slater before imprisoning her in a coffin, has boasted that he is better off in jail than living as a pensioner on the outside. Sams, 65, who is serving four life sentences at Whitemoor prison, Cambridgeshire, wrote to Inside Time, a newspaper for prisoners, in response to a campaign for inmates to be allowed their state pensions.
"How many pensioners in the community, who are totally dependent on the basic state pension and live in rented accommodation, are able to spend around œ20 per week on luxuries?" the former tool repairer asked. "Most struggle to keep warm in winter, afraid to put the heating on, barely eating, let alone getting three square (ready-made) meals per day. And three or four choices per course at that! "Free access to the gym each day to keep those joints supple and no bills except for 1 pound per week TV rental. "Have you ever seen an OAP inmate in tatty clothes or scruffy trainers? Not a hope! Materially, we OAPs in prison are far better off than those in the community."
He opposed the campaign to give inmates a pension, but was in favour of allowing retirement-age prisoners who are unable to work the same weekly amount as those who can. He also advised younger criminals to invest their "gains" in a private pension so that when they "retired" in prison they would have a steady income.
Sams was jailed for life after his wife recognised a recording of his voice played on the BBC Crimewatch programme. The killer, from Sutton on Trent, Nottinghamshire, pleaded guilty in 1993 at Nottingham Crown Court to kidnapping Miss Slater, 25, in January 1992, to false imprisonment and to demanding a 175,000 ransom for her. He denied kidnapping Miss Dart, 18, from Leeds, in July 1991. He also denied murdering her, making two demands for a 140,000 ransom and blackmailing British Rail for 200,000 by threatening to derail a train, but was convicted.
Mervyn Kohler, spokesman for Help the Aged, said yesterday: "In material terms, Mr Sams is probably absolutely right. But there's one small shortfall here. Given the choice, I'd much rather be outside than inside." Norman Brennan, founder of the Victims of Crime Trust, said that he was appalled by Sams's claims. "I think the whole country is sick to death of listening to the bleeding hearts and hearing about the human rights and civil liberties of those who have committed the most appalling crimes," he said. A spokesman for Inside Time said: "Michael Sams is of course fully entitled to his opinion but I have to tell him that . . . he is very much in a minority of one. "We remain firmly of the opinion that it is morally wrong to deny state pension benefits to serving prisoners."
Source
NHS care 'left to student nurses'
Lives are being put at risk because student nurses are being left on their own with patients, a study has claimed. A poll by the Royal College of Nursing of 1,500 student nurses found nearly half had been left unattended with patients without warning. Guidelines say student nurses should always be monitored except those in their final year and even that has to be prearranged. The government said patient safety was of "paramount importance".
The survey showed 44% of student nurses had been left unattended without warning and without a doctor or qualified nurse present. Eight in 10 of those said it had happened on at least three occasions. Of the 553 first-year students questioned, 42% said they had been left on their own. And 15% said they had witnessed adverse events while left unattended. But 84% said they did not report that they were left unsupervised.
Gill Robertson, the RCN's student nurses adviser, said there were reports of students just eight weeks into their training being left alone. She said this could happen on surgical wards and other areas of a hospital where patients were extremely ill. "That is like the average person being left with a patient. It should not be happening and is a risk to patient care."
She added nurses were being stretched because of the cuts being made - the RCN estimates over 22,000 health staff posts have been lost in the last 18 months. And another survey of nurses working in 173 hospital wards revealed a third of nurses thought patient care was being compromised on each shift because of reduced staffing.
RCN general secretary Peter Carter agreed the financial problems in the NHS were to blame for the problem. "Those registered nurses left have to do ever more with even fewer resources." Mr Carter also said he was concerned by the reports of student nurses not being able to get jobs once they had qualified. "I am hearing worrying stories from nurses who qualified last September who are still unable to get jobs because trusts are freezing entry levels posts to save money."
Health Minister Lord Hunt said: "Patient safety is of paramount importance to the government and NHS staff alike. "We would expect any nurse, whether in training or in practice, to report any incident they feel has an adverse effect on patient safety." Liberal Democrat health spokesman Norman Lamb said: "This is extremely worrying - patients' lives could be at risk. "The damaging deficits in the health service not only result in job losses but have a serious impact on the remaining workforce."
Source
NHS bungles pay deal -- more pay for less work
A pay deal that gave hospital consultants [senior doctors] a salary increase of 25 per cent left them working shorter hours and treating fewer patients, the National Audit Office has found. It says that the consultants deserved more money, but it was regrettable that the public and the NHS had not seen benefits in greater productivity and better services.
The contract, agreed in 2003, cost œ715 million in the first three years - œ150 million more than the Department of Health estimated. In that time the average consultant's pay rose to œ110,000 a year while the average number of hours worked fell from 51.6 a week to 50.2. Although there was an 11.3 per cent increase in the number of consultants working in the NHS in the two years after the agreement, the amount of consultant-led activity increased by only 4 per cent. "The bottom line is that the Department of Health has increased consultants' salaries without demonstrating any extra productivity in return," said Edward Leigh, MP, chairman of the Commons Public Accounts Committee, to which the audit office reports. "This is one more example of weak financial management by the Department of Health. It drove through the new pay deal with scant regard for proper evidence and solid financial forecasting."
Sir John Bourn, the Comptroller and Auditor-General and head of the National Audit Office, said: "Consultants deserve to be paid properly for the work that they do. However, the new contract was introduced to benefit not only consultants but patients and the health service in general. "Although a new contract was needed, it is regrettable that the costs are higher than expected and that we are not yet seeing any clear evidence of improvements in productivity or services for patients."
In negotiating the contract, the department used out-of-date information on the hours that consultants actually worked. In spite of evidence that the average was between 50 and 52 hours a week, the department worked on the assumption that it was 47 hours. It then agreed a contract with the British Medical Association that was based on an average of 43 hours a week. In fact, consultants continued to work much longer hours than these, and under the new contract were paid for them. As a result, the contract cost œ150 million more than the department expected.
Lord Hunt, the Health Minister, said: "The new arrangements reward and incentivise consultants who make the biggest contribution to service delivery and improving health services. This has helped us to recruit and retain highly skilled consultants, historically a challenge for the NHS. We now have low vacancy rates - fewer than 2 per cent - and more than 10,000 more consultants working in the NHS than when the Government came to power."
Andrew Lansley, the Shadow Health Secretary, said: "This confirms that the Government simply didn't understand what consultants were doing before they made assumptions about the new contract."
Source
Polygamous husbands settling in Britain with multiple wives can claim extra benefits: "Polygamous husbands settling in Britain with multiple wives can claim extra benefits for their "harems" even though bigamy is a crime in the UK, it has emerged. Opposition MPs are demanding an urgent change in the law, claiming that the Government is recognising and rewarding a custom which has no legal status and which is "alien" to this country's cultural traditions.... Officials said yesterday a review was now under way into whether the state should continue to pay out income support, jobseeker's allowance and housing and council tax benefits to 'extra' spouses."
Friday, April 20, 2007
NHS knowingly used contaminated blood
Victims of the contaminated blood scandal renewed their calls for compensation yesterday, as evidence emerged that the Government was told about the dangers of using "skid row" blood products as early as 1975. At an independent public inquiry into the supply of tainted blood to haemophiliacs during the 1970s and 1980s, survivors and relatives of those who died said that questions still needed to be answered about what successive governments knew.
At least 4,500 haemophiliacs were infected with HIV and hepatitis C from contaminated plasma. A total of 1,757 have died and thousands more are terminally ill.
One letter presented to the inquiry showed that in January 1975 the Wilson Government was warned that one of the US companies it bought plasma treatments from sourced all its blood from "skid row derelicts". The letter, written by Stanford University Medical Centre to the Blood Products Laboratory at the Lister Institute, said that these clotting products, known as Factor 8, had proven to be "extremely hazardous", with recipients having a 50 to 90 per cent chance of developing hepatitis.
The inquiry, chaired by Lord Archer of Sandwell, a former Solicitor-General, heard that other products were bought from companies that acquired blood from prisoners in America.
Those giving evidence yesterday spoke of their harrowing ordeals. Sue Threakall, whose husband died in 1991, aged 47, after contracting HIV following the use of Factor 8, told the inquiry: "This terrible tragedy should never have happened; it was wholly avoidable. Warnings were ignored, lessons were not learnt and our community was lied to by the people it should have trusted most."
The Government has not confirmed whether it will allow ministers or civil servants to give evidence to the inquiry, which is scheduled to report by late summer.
Source
Malnutrition in NHS patients
Patients are at risk of malnutrition because of a shortage of nursing staff to feed them properly, a survey suggests. Almost half of the 2,000 nurses questioned by the Royal College of Nursing said that they did not have enough time to make sure that patients got their meals and were able to eat them because they were too busy. The findings come six years after the Government spent 40 million to improve nutrition in hospitals.
Difficulties getting food for patients outside set mealtimes was cited as the main problem by 49 per cent of nurses. Almost as many (46 per cent) nurses blamed a lack of staff to assist those patients who needed help eating.
Campaigners from the charity Age Concern say that elderly patients in particular are regularly going without meals because they are placed out of their reach or because they are unable to eat without assistance. The survey was released at the annual congress of the college in Harrogate yesterday.
Source
NHS goes private to hit target
EMERGENCY funding totalling 160,000 pounds has been set aside so that more than 40 patients can be treated at a private hospital and waiting list targets can be achieved in East Lancashire. General surgery and orthopaedics cases being dealt with by East Lancashire Hospitals NHS Trust were in danger of exceeding 20-week in-patient treatment targets. The hospitals trust has undertaken a series of waiting list initiatives to meet the NHS goal and a number of patients had been transferred to the private sector Abbey Gisburne Park Hospital, near Clitheroe, for treatment.
But since an initial batch of patients were relocated to Gisburne Park in December, the transfer rate appears to have dried up, according to a Blackburn with Darwen Primary Care Trust report. The report adds: "East Lancashire Hospitals Trust has repeatedly been reminded, via performance meetings and e-mails, of the opportunity to transfer patients to the independent contract, if additional capacity was needed to meet the March targets. "They have however made, limited use of this, preferring to retain the patients at the hospital trust, and giving assurances that they could manage the lists internally."
Every patient on the 20-week waiting list should have been given an appointment date by February 16 and the hospital trust has been asked if any outstanding patients can still be moved to Gisburne Park. Some of the 40-plus outstanding cases, were not medically suitable for transfer to Gisburne Park, others refused to attend the hospital, and a proportion were reluctant to change their consultant mid- treatment. But in the meantime the primary care trust has also held talks with Beardwood Hospital, the privately-run facility in Preston New Road, Blackburn, about dealing with NHS patients there.
Source
ANOTHER FRAUDULENT HRT SCARE
This is completely desperate stuff. The minute elevation of risk reported below is way below the 100% increase normally considered necessary for a finding in a low-incidence area to be taken seriously. To sum up: It is just scare-mongering HOKUM. What the data really shows is that HRT is a NEGLIGIBLE risk. Yet again the once-reputable "Lancet" publishes garbage. They just KNOW what is good for you -- like the Leftists they generally are
Women were advised yesterday to think "very carefully" about taking hormone replacement therapy (HRT) after evidence was published showing that it has killed 1,000 women in Britain since 1991 by increasing their risk of ovarian cancer. HRT increases the risk of the disease by 20 per cent, the biggest investigation of links between HRT and cancer has found. Although the absolute risk is low, millions of women took HRT in the 1990s and so the total impact is large: an extra 1,300 cases of the disease and 1,000 deaths between 1991 and 2005, according to the Million Women Study.
Previous results from the same study have linked HRT with an increased risk of breast and womb cancer. The latest findings suggest that HRT raises the combined risk of all three diseases by more than 60 per cent, the researchers say. Despite a sharp decline in recent years in HRT use, there are believed to be about one million women in Britain still on it.
Valerie Beral, director of the Cancer Research UK epidemiology unit at the University of Oxford, said: "The results of this study show that not only does HRT increase the risk of getting ovarian cancer, it also increases a woman's risk of dying of ovarian cancer." Ovarian cancer is the fourth most common cancer in women in Britain. Each year about 6,700 women develop the disease and 4,600 die from it.
The findings come from a study of 948,576 post-menopausal women, or a quarter of all women aged 50 to 64 in the country. It was largely funded by Cancer Research UK. About a third of those in the study were taking HRT, and another fifth had taken it in the past. The women were followed for an average of more than five years for signs of ovarian cancer, and seven years for death. During the follow-up period a total of 2,273 women developed ovarian cancer and 1,591 died from it.
These results imply that the use of HRT - of whatever sort - increased the risk of developing and dying from ovarian cancer by 20 per cent, the team reports in the online version of The Lancet. To put the findings in perspective, they mean that over a period of five years there is likely to be one extra case of ovarian cancer among every 2,500 women receiving HRT, and one additional death for every 3,300 women on the therapy.
HRT is used to combat unpleasant symptoms of the menopause, including hot flushes, vaginal dryness and night sweats. It was promoted strongly by doctors in the 1970s, and many women claimed that it had transformed their lives. But in recent years numbers have plummeted after a series of health scares. According to the GP Research Database, the number of women in Britain on HRT fell from two million in 2002 to one million in 2005. John Toy, the medical director of Cancer Research UK, said: "Considering this alongside the increases in risk for breast and endometrial cancer, women should think very carefully about taking HRT. Women who choose to take HRT should aim do so for clear medical need and for the shortest possible time."
The findings were challenged by John Stevenson, of the Royal Brompton Hospital in London and the chairman of the charity Women's Health Concern. "The study grossly overestimates the breast cancer risk, and now we have findings from a five-year study that have to be extended to a 14-year time frame to make them more sensational," he said. "This is not science, and the findings themselves fly in the face of cancer biology."
Breast, ovarian and endo- metrial cancer, which affects the womb lining, account for almost 40 per cent of cancers in women in Britain, and a quarter of female cancer deaths. HRT appears to raise the combined risk of all three diseases by 63 per cent, according to the Million Women Study. "When ovarian, endometrial and breast cancer are taken together, use of HRT results in a material increase in these common cancers," the study authors wrote.
Journal abstract below:
Breast cancer and hormone-replacement therapy in the Million Women Study
Background: Current use of hormone-replacement therapy (HRT) increases the incidence of breast cancer. The Million Women Study was set up to investigate the effects of specific types of HRT on incident and fatal breast cancer.
Methods: 1084110 UK women aged 50-64 years were recruited into the Million Women Study between 1996 and 2001, provided information about their use of HRT and other personal details, and were followed up for cancer incidence and death.
Findings: Half the women had used HRT; 9364 incident invasive breast cancers and 637 breast cancer deaths were registered after an average of 2·6 and 4·1 years of follow-up, respectively. Current users of HRT at recruitment were more likely than never users to develop breast cancer (adjusted relative risk 1·66 [95% CI 1·58–1·75], p<0·0001) and die from it (1·22 [1·00–1·48], p=0·05). Past users of HRT were, however, not at an increased risk of incident or fatal disease (1·01 [0·94–1·09] and 1·05 [0·82–1·34], respectively). Incidence was significantly increased for current users of preparations containing oestrogen only (1·30 [1·21–1·40], p<0·0001), oestrogen-progestagen (2·00 [1·88–2·12], p<0·0001), and tibolone (1·45 [1·25–1·68], p<0·0001), but the magnitude of the associated risk was substantially greater for oestrogen-progestagen than for other types of HRT (p<0·0001). Results varied little between specific oestrogens and progestagens or their doses; or between continuous and sequential regimens. The relative risks were significantly increased separately for oral, transdermal, and implanted oestrogen-only formulations (1·32 [1·21–1·45]; 1·24 [1·11–1·39]; and 1·65 [1·26–2·16], respectively; all p<0·0001). In current users of each type of HRT the risk of breast cancer increased with increasing total duration of use. 10 years' use of HRT is estimated to result in five (95% CI 3–7) additional breast cancers per 1000 users of oestrogen-only preparations and 19 (15–23) additional cancers per 1000 users of oestrogen-progestagen combinations. Use of HRT by women aged 50–64 years in the UK over the past decade has resulted in an estimated 20000 extra breast cancers, 15000 associated with oestrogen-progestagen; the extra deaths cannot yet be reliably estimated.
Interpretation: Current use of HRT is associated with an increased risk of incident and fatal breast cancer; the effect is substantially greater for oestrogen-progestagen combinations than for other types of HRT.
Correspondence to: Prof Valerie Beral, Cancer Research UK Epidemiology Unit, Gibson Building, Radcliffe Infirmary, Woodstock Road, OxfordOX2 6HE, UK
More "Big Brother" in Britain
CCTV cameras with children shouting rap lyrics at anti-social yobs are to be introduced in Reading. The town has been given a 25,000 pound grant to develop talking cameras which will use children's voices to warn litter louts and hooligans to think again. Four-line recorded verses will embarrass culprits in public places, before reminding them of their civic responsibility to keep the town clean and safe. A competition will be organised among the town's schoolchildren to come up with and record appropriate rap lyrics for the warnings - effectively meaning children will be telling off adults for their behaviour. CCTV operators will also be able to talk live to people thought to be causing a nuisance.
Some townsfolk have reacted angrily to the scheme, which they claim smacks of Big Brother and is an extension of the nanny state. But talking at the scheme's launch yesterday, both the police and Reading Borough Council insisted the talking cameras will prove an effective deterrent. Superintendent Steve Kirk, Reading's police chief, said: "I do understand the Big Brother tag but we are not watching people any more than we have been watching before. "Rather than have the Big Brother tag we want an environment where people feel safe." He added that the talking cameras would be invaluable if the town had to be evacuated for any reason.
Tony Page, lead councillor for community action, said: "Hopefully the presence of these will deter crime and actually encourage people to act more responsibly. "The cameras are there already. This is just an enhancement to existing technology. Law abiding people have nothing to fear from them."
Locations and the number of cameras to be fitted with voice technology are yet to be confirmed, but it is thought they will be mainly based in the town centre and will operate from towards the end of the year. The town already has more than 500 CCTV cameras, including 162 in The Oracle alone. Reading is one of 20 areas sharing a 463,574.50 pot for the cameras as part of the Government's Respect scheme. The move follows a trial scheme in Middlesborough, which organisers claim has been a "100 per cent success" in cleaning up the town.
Home Secretary John Reid said the cameras would make people feel less vulnerable and would promote good behaviour while tackling bad conduct. He denied we were living in a police society and added: "There is always a minority and this is a way of trying to embarrass them, short of taking people to court, short of getting the police involved, to make sure it is a better local society."
Source
UK Doctors Refusing to Commit Abortion Alarm Royal College
"Unprecedented numbers" are opting out - threatens British abortion industry
More and more doctors in Britain are refusing to commit abortions, according to a recent release by the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG). In "unprecedented numbers," British doctors are opting out, a development that threatens to undermine the British abortion industry which now stands at about 190,000 babies a year with four fifths of the deaths paid for by National Health. The RCOG cites "distaste" and ethical and religious convictions for the increase in "conscientious objectors" requesting exemption. A statement from the RCOG says the organization "believes that proper education and use of contraceptives are essential to prevent unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted infections."
Since the institution of widespread "sex education" programs in schools and the free availability of contraceptives, Britain's rate of pregnancy among teenagers has skyrocketed to become the highest in Europe.
Responding to an article in the Independent, the RCOG called abortion an "essential part of women's healthcare services." Recent statistics show Britain's abortion levels at an all time high and one in three women in Britain will have an abortion during her lifetime.
Kate Guthrie, an abortionist and spokesperson on family planning for the RCOG told the Independent, "There is an increasing number of young doctors who are not participating in the training. The college and the Department of Health are really worried."
Richard Warren, honorary secretary of the RCOG and a consultant obstetrician in Norfolk, said, "In the past, abortion was an accepted part of the workload. People did not like it but they accepted that it was in the best interests of the woman concerned." He added, "There is an ethos that people go into medicine to save lives and look after people. Usually, a decision for termination is taken reluctantly even though it is recognised that it is in the best interests of the woman. It is difficult and upsetting work and it is done with obvious reticence. We are seeing more doctors who are reluctant to be involved in the process and this is happening in the context of growing demand."
This is good news to the pro-life leadership of Britain who said, "We are pleased to hear that an increasing number of medical staff are refusing to perform abortions, but this situation is being talked up by those who want nurses or other non-doctors to perform abortion." John Smeaton, head of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children pointed to a recent examination by health experts of Britain's abortion law that showed it was legal for nurses and midwives to abort babies. "I do hope the profession is coming to realise the profound contradiction between its caring and life-preserving role, and the act of destruction of innocent human lives." Smeaton added, "Maybe after the six and a half million children who have died since legalisation 40 years ago, and countless mothers hurt by their abortion experience, we are finally seeing abortion for the social horror that it is."
Since the 1990s, the Faculty of Family Planning and the RCOG has included a conscientious objection clause for health staff who refuse abortion on religious or moral grounds. But Smeaton warns that doctors and nurses opting out still suffer "immense pressure to refer women and girls to colleagues who will perform terminations."
Source
The British Left gets nervous about immigration
Large-scale immigration has damaged the poorest communities and deeply unsettled the country, Liam Byrne, the Immigration Minister, says today. Mr Byrne says that inequality and child poverty are two of the main side-effects of migration, which has been running at record levels since Labour came to power. He also highlights the pressures caused by migration on schools and housing, and how they are affecting attempts to improve educational standards.
Mr Byrne makes his remarks before publication tomorrow of official figures showing net migration of 185,000 in 2005, four times the figure when Labour came to power in 1997. He tells his party that if Labour fails to address public concern about the level of immigration, and its effects on the country and public services, it could lose the next general election.
The scale of net migration has caused a marked change in public concern about immigration, Mr Byrne says. Globalisation and immigration have made Britain richer but have also "deeply unsettled the country", he writes in a pamphlet titled Rethinking Immigration and Integration, published by Policy Network, a centre-left think-tank. He says: "We also have to accept that laissez-faire migration runs the risk of damaging communities where parts of our antipoverty strategy come under pressure."
Mr Byrne says sudden increases in immigration into poor parts of Britain hit government attempts to improve life for the indigenous population. "When a junior school such as the school in Hodge Hill, my own constituency in Birmingham, sees its population of children with English as a second language rise from 5 per cent to 20 per cent in a year, then boosting standards in our poorest communities gets harder," he says.
Mr Byrne says existing communities were not sure that change arising from immigration had been fair. He says the speed of migration meant that public services in some communities had found it difficult to change as quickly as the communities around them are changing. "It is true that a small number of schools have struggled to cope, that some local authorities have reported problems of overcrowding in private housing and that there have been cost pressures on English language training, but the answer is in action that is simultaneously firm and fair."
Last month research published by the Home Office said that thousands of impoverished asylum-seekers had been dumped in socially deprived areas of the country under the Government's dispersal policy. The study found they were met with resistance from local people, racial harassment and racist attacks. Their arrival also had a significant impact on local health and education services. It said placing asylum-seekers in poorer areas of the country, such as Everton, Glasgow, Tyneside and parts of Manchester, had accentuated existing deprivation among the indigenous population.
The report, which was produced in 2002 but only released under freedom of information laws last month, highlighted some of the difficulties caused by the arrival of new migrants in poor areas. Fifty different languages had been introduced into Newcastle upon Tyne, and in other areas doctors dealing with new migrants experienced difficulties treating unfamiliar diseases such as malaria and TB. A health centre in Liverpool found that there were 24 different languages spoken by asylum-seeking patients.
In a separate article in today's pamphlet, Jon Cruddas, the Labour MP for Dagenham and a deputy leadership candidate, says that the communities undergoing the most rapid demographic change because of migration are the most poorly equipped to deal with it as they suffer high levels of poverty, social immobility and poor public services. John Reid, the Home Secretary, met the French Interior Minister yesterday and raised the issue of a centre being built offering showers, information and food to migrants gathering in Sangatte, northern France. The Conservatives fear that the building will act as a magnet for those seeking to enter Britain illegally.
Source
Britain to follow Australia's immigration example
Britain will next year adopt an Australian-style model for restricting immigration to those with skills in need. British Immigration Minister Liam Byrne unveiled the timetable for introducing the points-based system during a fact-finding visit to Australia, which uses a similar model to attract migrants with in-demand skills and reject those who would compete with local workers for unskilled jobs. "With the exception of an elite group of highly-skilled migrants, all other foreign workers or students will need a UK sponsor to vouch for them and help us make sure they are playing by the rules," Mr Byrne was quoted as saying in The Guardian newspaper. Under the system, would-be migrants would need to amass a certain number of points according to their skills and sector gaps in the UK.
It was first announced by Home Secretary John Reid last year and will replace more than 80 routes of entry to the UK with five tiers for workers with different skill levels. The first tier, for highly-skilled migrants such as scientists and entrepreneurs, will be launched at the beginning of next year. It will be followed later in 2008 by new tiers for skilled workers such as nurses, teachers and engineers with job offers, temporary workers and young people on working holidays. A further tier for students will begin at the start of 2009.
The announcement comes ahead of Thursday's publication of official statistics which The Times newspaper predicted would show net migration into Britain of 185,000 in 2005. The figure is down from the previous year's 222,600, but four times the level in 1997.
Writing in a pamphlet due out later this month and widely reported in British media on Wednesday, Mr Byrne warned uncontrolled migration could damage the poorest communities. He said while migration had made the UK richer, it had also "unsettled the country". Mr Byrne is attending an international conference on immigration issues in Sydney.
Source
UN rebuff for Britain on global warming
BRITAIN has run into a wall of reluctance spearheaded by China after telling the United Nations that there are few greater threats to global security than climate change. The British Foreign Secretary, Margaret Beckett, chaired the UN Security Council's first debate on global warming on Tuesday. Fifty-two countries lined up to speak in the debate, which Britain initiated as it holds the rotating presidency of the council. "This is an issue which threatens the peace and security of the whole planet - this has to be the right place to debate it," Mrs Beckett said.
But China's deputy ambassador to the UN, Liu Zhenmin, was blunt in rejecting the session. "The developing countries believe that [the] Security Council does not have the professional competence for handling climate change, nor is it the right decision-making place for extensive participation," Mr Liu said. China and Russia, among others, warned that the council's mandate was limited to peace and security. So did Pakistan, on behalf of 130 developing nations, which argued that the council was encroaching on more representative bodies, such as the 192-member General Assembly.
Inside the forum, Mrs Beckett said that recent scientific evidence reinforced, or even exceeded, the worst fears about climate change. She warned of migration on an unprecedented scale because of flooding, disease and famine. Drought and crop failure would also cause intensified competition for food, water and energy, and result in economic destruction comparable to World War II or the Great Depression. "Climate change is a security issue but it is not a matter of narrow national security - it has a new dimension," she said. "This is about our collective security in a fragile and increasingly interdependent world."
Mrs Beckett quoted a remark made by the President of Uganda, Yoweri Museveni, that global warming was "an act of aggression by the rich against the poor". She was supported by the UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon. "Projected changes in the Earth's climate are not only an environmental concern," Mr Ban said. "Issues of energy and climate change can have implications for peace and security."
British diplomats said the intention of Tuesday's session was to lift climate change to the top of the international agenda. Britain has pointed to the violence in the Darfur region of Sudan as an example of conflict partly caused by land degradation. The Maldives, Bangladesh and other low-lying countries more susceptible to flooding and climate change also pleaded with industrialised nations for action.
Last November, the Stern report suggested that 200 million people could be displaced by rising sea levels and drought by 2050. It said the global economy could shrink by one-fifth. Even Osama bin Laden accused the US in 2002 of harming nature "more than any nation in history". China has created artificial snow in Tibet after experts warned of melting glaciers in the Himalayas. The Tibetan meteorological station had created a fall of 2.2 millimetres, which accumulated to one centimetre, last week, about 4000 metres above sea level in northern Tibet, the Xinhua news agency said yesterday.
Source
Victims of the contaminated blood scandal renewed their calls for compensation yesterday, as evidence emerged that the Government was told about the dangers of using "skid row" blood products as early as 1975. At an independent public inquiry into the supply of tainted blood to haemophiliacs during the 1970s and 1980s, survivors and relatives of those who died said that questions still needed to be answered about what successive governments knew.
At least 4,500 haemophiliacs were infected with HIV and hepatitis C from contaminated plasma. A total of 1,757 have died and thousands more are terminally ill.
One letter presented to the inquiry showed that in January 1975 the Wilson Government was warned that one of the US companies it bought plasma treatments from sourced all its blood from "skid row derelicts". The letter, written by Stanford University Medical Centre to the Blood Products Laboratory at the Lister Institute, said that these clotting products, known as Factor 8, had proven to be "extremely hazardous", with recipients having a 50 to 90 per cent chance of developing hepatitis.
The inquiry, chaired by Lord Archer of Sandwell, a former Solicitor-General, heard that other products were bought from companies that acquired blood from prisoners in America.
Those giving evidence yesterday spoke of their harrowing ordeals. Sue Threakall, whose husband died in 1991, aged 47, after contracting HIV following the use of Factor 8, told the inquiry: "This terrible tragedy should never have happened; it was wholly avoidable. Warnings were ignored, lessons were not learnt and our community was lied to by the people it should have trusted most."
The Government has not confirmed whether it will allow ministers or civil servants to give evidence to the inquiry, which is scheduled to report by late summer.
Source
Malnutrition in NHS patients
Patients are at risk of malnutrition because of a shortage of nursing staff to feed them properly, a survey suggests. Almost half of the 2,000 nurses questioned by the Royal College of Nursing said that they did not have enough time to make sure that patients got their meals and were able to eat them because they were too busy. The findings come six years after the Government spent 40 million to improve nutrition in hospitals.
Difficulties getting food for patients outside set mealtimes was cited as the main problem by 49 per cent of nurses. Almost as many (46 per cent) nurses blamed a lack of staff to assist those patients who needed help eating.
Campaigners from the charity Age Concern say that elderly patients in particular are regularly going without meals because they are placed out of their reach or because they are unable to eat without assistance. The survey was released at the annual congress of the college in Harrogate yesterday.
Source
NHS goes private to hit target
EMERGENCY funding totalling 160,000 pounds has been set aside so that more than 40 patients can be treated at a private hospital and waiting list targets can be achieved in East Lancashire. General surgery and orthopaedics cases being dealt with by East Lancashire Hospitals NHS Trust were in danger of exceeding 20-week in-patient treatment targets. The hospitals trust has undertaken a series of waiting list initiatives to meet the NHS goal and a number of patients had been transferred to the private sector Abbey Gisburne Park Hospital, near Clitheroe, for treatment.
But since an initial batch of patients were relocated to Gisburne Park in December, the transfer rate appears to have dried up, according to a Blackburn with Darwen Primary Care Trust report. The report adds: "East Lancashire Hospitals Trust has repeatedly been reminded, via performance meetings and e-mails, of the opportunity to transfer patients to the independent contract, if additional capacity was needed to meet the March targets. "They have however made, limited use of this, preferring to retain the patients at the hospital trust, and giving assurances that they could manage the lists internally."
Every patient on the 20-week waiting list should have been given an appointment date by February 16 and the hospital trust has been asked if any outstanding patients can still be moved to Gisburne Park. Some of the 40-plus outstanding cases, were not medically suitable for transfer to Gisburne Park, others refused to attend the hospital, and a proportion were reluctant to change their consultant mid- treatment. But in the meantime the primary care trust has also held talks with Beardwood Hospital, the privately-run facility in Preston New Road, Blackburn, about dealing with NHS patients there.
Source
ANOTHER FRAUDULENT HRT SCARE
This is completely desperate stuff. The minute elevation of risk reported below is way below the 100% increase normally considered necessary for a finding in a low-incidence area to be taken seriously. To sum up: It is just scare-mongering HOKUM. What the data really shows is that HRT is a NEGLIGIBLE risk. Yet again the once-reputable "Lancet" publishes garbage. They just KNOW what is good for you -- like the Leftists they generally are
Women were advised yesterday to think "very carefully" about taking hormone replacement therapy (HRT) after evidence was published showing that it has killed 1,000 women in Britain since 1991 by increasing their risk of ovarian cancer. HRT increases the risk of the disease by 20 per cent, the biggest investigation of links between HRT and cancer has found. Although the absolute risk is low, millions of women took HRT in the 1990s and so the total impact is large: an extra 1,300 cases of the disease and 1,000 deaths between 1991 and 2005, according to the Million Women Study.
Previous results from the same study have linked HRT with an increased risk of breast and womb cancer. The latest findings suggest that HRT raises the combined risk of all three diseases by more than 60 per cent, the researchers say. Despite a sharp decline in recent years in HRT use, there are believed to be about one million women in Britain still on it.
Valerie Beral, director of the Cancer Research UK epidemiology unit at the University of Oxford, said: "The results of this study show that not only does HRT increase the risk of getting ovarian cancer, it also increases a woman's risk of dying of ovarian cancer." Ovarian cancer is the fourth most common cancer in women in Britain. Each year about 6,700 women develop the disease and 4,600 die from it.
The findings come from a study of 948,576 post-menopausal women, or a quarter of all women aged 50 to 64 in the country. It was largely funded by Cancer Research UK. About a third of those in the study were taking HRT, and another fifth had taken it in the past. The women were followed for an average of more than five years for signs of ovarian cancer, and seven years for death. During the follow-up period a total of 2,273 women developed ovarian cancer and 1,591 died from it.
These results imply that the use of HRT - of whatever sort - increased the risk of developing and dying from ovarian cancer by 20 per cent, the team reports in the online version of The Lancet. To put the findings in perspective, they mean that over a period of five years there is likely to be one extra case of ovarian cancer among every 2,500 women receiving HRT, and one additional death for every 3,300 women on the therapy.
HRT is used to combat unpleasant symptoms of the menopause, including hot flushes, vaginal dryness and night sweats. It was promoted strongly by doctors in the 1970s, and many women claimed that it had transformed their lives. But in recent years numbers have plummeted after a series of health scares. According to the GP Research Database, the number of women in Britain on HRT fell from two million in 2002 to one million in 2005. John Toy, the medical director of Cancer Research UK, said: "Considering this alongside the increases in risk for breast and endometrial cancer, women should think very carefully about taking HRT. Women who choose to take HRT should aim do so for clear medical need and for the shortest possible time."
The findings were challenged by John Stevenson, of the Royal Brompton Hospital in London and the chairman of the charity Women's Health Concern. "The study grossly overestimates the breast cancer risk, and now we have findings from a five-year study that have to be extended to a 14-year time frame to make them more sensational," he said. "This is not science, and the findings themselves fly in the face of cancer biology."
Breast, ovarian and endo- metrial cancer, which affects the womb lining, account for almost 40 per cent of cancers in women in Britain, and a quarter of female cancer deaths. HRT appears to raise the combined risk of all three diseases by 63 per cent, according to the Million Women Study. "When ovarian, endometrial and breast cancer are taken together, use of HRT results in a material increase in these common cancers," the study authors wrote.
Journal abstract below:
Breast cancer and hormone-replacement therapy in the Million Women Study
Background: Current use of hormone-replacement therapy (HRT) increases the incidence of breast cancer. The Million Women Study was set up to investigate the effects of specific types of HRT on incident and fatal breast cancer.
Methods: 1084110 UK women aged 50-64 years were recruited into the Million Women Study between 1996 and 2001, provided information about their use of HRT and other personal details, and were followed up for cancer incidence and death.
Findings: Half the women had used HRT; 9364 incident invasive breast cancers and 637 breast cancer deaths were registered after an average of 2·6 and 4·1 years of follow-up, respectively. Current users of HRT at recruitment were more likely than never users to develop breast cancer (adjusted relative risk 1·66 [95% CI 1·58–1·75], p<0·0001) and die from it (1·22 [1·00–1·48], p=0·05). Past users of HRT were, however, not at an increased risk of incident or fatal disease (1·01 [0·94–1·09] and 1·05 [0·82–1·34], respectively). Incidence was significantly increased for current users of preparations containing oestrogen only (1·30 [1·21–1·40], p<0·0001), oestrogen-progestagen (2·00 [1·88–2·12], p<0·0001), and tibolone (1·45 [1·25–1·68], p<0·0001), but the magnitude of the associated risk was substantially greater for oestrogen-progestagen than for other types of HRT (p<0·0001). Results varied little between specific oestrogens and progestagens or their doses; or between continuous and sequential regimens. The relative risks were significantly increased separately for oral, transdermal, and implanted oestrogen-only formulations (1·32 [1·21–1·45]; 1·24 [1·11–1·39]; and 1·65 [1·26–2·16], respectively; all p<0·0001). In current users of each type of HRT the risk of breast cancer increased with increasing total duration of use. 10 years' use of HRT is estimated to result in five (95% CI 3–7) additional breast cancers per 1000 users of oestrogen-only preparations and 19 (15–23) additional cancers per 1000 users of oestrogen-progestagen combinations. Use of HRT by women aged 50–64 years in the UK over the past decade has resulted in an estimated 20000 extra breast cancers, 15000 associated with oestrogen-progestagen; the extra deaths cannot yet be reliably estimated.
Interpretation: Current use of HRT is associated with an increased risk of incident and fatal breast cancer; the effect is substantially greater for oestrogen-progestagen combinations than for other types of HRT.
Correspondence to: Prof Valerie Beral, Cancer Research UK Epidemiology Unit, Gibson Building, Radcliffe Infirmary, Woodstock Road, OxfordOX2 6HE, UK
More "Big Brother" in Britain
CCTV cameras with children shouting rap lyrics at anti-social yobs are to be introduced in Reading. The town has been given a 25,000 pound grant to develop talking cameras which will use children's voices to warn litter louts and hooligans to think again. Four-line recorded verses will embarrass culprits in public places, before reminding them of their civic responsibility to keep the town clean and safe. A competition will be organised among the town's schoolchildren to come up with and record appropriate rap lyrics for the warnings - effectively meaning children will be telling off adults for their behaviour. CCTV operators will also be able to talk live to people thought to be causing a nuisance.
Some townsfolk have reacted angrily to the scheme, which they claim smacks of Big Brother and is an extension of the nanny state. But talking at the scheme's launch yesterday, both the police and Reading Borough Council insisted the talking cameras will prove an effective deterrent. Superintendent Steve Kirk, Reading's police chief, said: "I do understand the Big Brother tag but we are not watching people any more than we have been watching before. "Rather than have the Big Brother tag we want an environment where people feel safe." He added that the talking cameras would be invaluable if the town had to be evacuated for any reason.
Tony Page, lead councillor for community action, said: "Hopefully the presence of these will deter crime and actually encourage people to act more responsibly. "The cameras are there already. This is just an enhancement to existing technology. Law abiding people have nothing to fear from them."
Locations and the number of cameras to be fitted with voice technology are yet to be confirmed, but it is thought they will be mainly based in the town centre and will operate from towards the end of the year. The town already has more than 500 CCTV cameras, including 162 in The Oracle alone. Reading is one of 20 areas sharing a 463,574.50 pot for the cameras as part of the Government's Respect scheme. The move follows a trial scheme in Middlesborough, which organisers claim has been a "100 per cent success" in cleaning up the town.
Home Secretary John Reid said the cameras would make people feel less vulnerable and would promote good behaviour while tackling bad conduct. He denied we were living in a police society and added: "There is always a minority and this is a way of trying to embarrass them, short of taking people to court, short of getting the police involved, to make sure it is a better local society."
Source
UK Doctors Refusing to Commit Abortion Alarm Royal College
"Unprecedented numbers" are opting out - threatens British abortion industry
More and more doctors in Britain are refusing to commit abortions, according to a recent release by the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG). In "unprecedented numbers," British doctors are opting out, a development that threatens to undermine the British abortion industry which now stands at about 190,000 babies a year with four fifths of the deaths paid for by National Health. The RCOG cites "distaste" and ethical and religious convictions for the increase in "conscientious objectors" requesting exemption. A statement from the RCOG says the organization "believes that proper education and use of contraceptives are essential to prevent unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted infections."
Since the institution of widespread "sex education" programs in schools and the free availability of contraceptives, Britain's rate of pregnancy among teenagers has skyrocketed to become the highest in Europe.
Responding to an article in the Independent, the RCOG called abortion an "essential part of women's healthcare services." Recent statistics show Britain's abortion levels at an all time high and one in three women in Britain will have an abortion during her lifetime.
Kate Guthrie, an abortionist and spokesperson on family planning for the RCOG told the Independent, "There is an increasing number of young doctors who are not participating in the training. The college and the Department of Health are really worried."
Richard Warren, honorary secretary of the RCOG and a consultant obstetrician in Norfolk, said, "In the past, abortion was an accepted part of the workload. People did not like it but they accepted that it was in the best interests of the woman concerned." He added, "There is an ethos that people go into medicine to save lives and look after people. Usually, a decision for termination is taken reluctantly even though it is recognised that it is in the best interests of the woman. It is difficult and upsetting work and it is done with obvious reticence. We are seeing more doctors who are reluctant to be involved in the process and this is happening in the context of growing demand."
This is good news to the pro-life leadership of Britain who said, "We are pleased to hear that an increasing number of medical staff are refusing to perform abortions, but this situation is being talked up by those who want nurses or other non-doctors to perform abortion." John Smeaton, head of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children pointed to a recent examination by health experts of Britain's abortion law that showed it was legal for nurses and midwives to abort babies. "I do hope the profession is coming to realise the profound contradiction between its caring and life-preserving role, and the act of destruction of innocent human lives." Smeaton added, "Maybe after the six and a half million children who have died since legalisation 40 years ago, and countless mothers hurt by their abortion experience, we are finally seeing abortion for the social horror that it is."
Since the 1990s, the Faculty of Family Planning and the RCOG has included a conscientious objection clause for health staff who refuse abortion on religious or moral grounds. But Smeaton warns that doctors and nurses opting out still suffer "immense pressure to refer women and girls to colleagues who will perform terminations."
Source
The British Left gets nervous about immigration
Large-scale immigration has damaged the poorest communities and deeply unsettled the country, Liam Byrne, the Immigration Minister, says today. Mr Byrne says that inequality and child poverty are two of the main side-effects of migration, which has been running at record levels since Labour came to power. He also highlights the pressures caused by migration on schools and housing, and how they are affecting attempts to improve educational standards.
Mr Byrne makes his remarks before publication tomorrow of official figures showing net migration of 185,000 in 2005, four times the figure when Labour came to power in 1997. He tells his party that if Labour fails to address public concern about the level of immigration, and its effects on the country and public services, it could lose the next general election.
The scale of net migration has caused a marked change in public concern about immigration, Mr Byrne says. Globalisation and immigration have made Britain richer but have also "deeply unsettled the country", he writes in a pamphlet titled Rethinking Immigration and Integration, published by Policy Network, a centre-left think-tank. He says: "We also have to accept that laissez-faire migration runs the risk of damaging communities where parts of our antipoverty strategy come under pressure."
Mr Byrne says sudden increases in immigration into poor parts of Britain hit government attempts to improve life for the indigenous population. "When a junior school such as the school in Hodge Hill, my own constituency in Birmingham, sees its population of children with English as a second language rise from 5 per cent to 20 per cent in a year, then boosting standards in our poorest communities gets harder," he says.
Mr Byrne says existing communities were not sure that change arising from immigration had been fair. He says the speed of migration meant that public services in some communities had found it difficult to change as quickly as the communities around them are changing. "It is true that a small number of schools have struggled to cope, that some local authorities have reported problems of overcrowding in private housing and that there have been cost pressures on English language training, but the answer is in action that is simultaneously firm and fair."
Last month research published by the Home Office said that thousands of impoverished asylum-seekers had been dumped in socially deprived areas of the country under the Government's dispersal policy. The study found they were met with resistance from local people, racial harassment and racist attacks. Their arrival also had a significant impact on local health and education services. It said placing asylum-seekers in poorer areas of the country, such as Everton, Glasgow, Tyneside and parts of Manchester, had accentuated existing deprivation among the indigenous population.
The report, which was produced in 2002 but only released under freedom of information laws last month, highlighted some of the difficulties caused by the arrival of new migrants in poor areas. Fifty different languages had been introduced into Newcastle upon Tyne, and in other areas doctors dealing with new migrants experienced difficulties treating unfamiliar diseases such as malaria and TB. A health centre in Liverpool found that there were 24 different languages spoken by asylum-seeking patients.
In a separate article in today's pamphlet, Jon Cruddas, the Labour MP for Dagenham and a deputy leadership candidate, says that the communities undergoing the most rapid demographic change because of migration are the most poorly equipped to deal with it as they suffer high levels of poverty, social immobility and poor public services. John Reid, the Home Secretary, met the French Interior Minister yesterday and raised the issue of a centre being built offering showers, information and food to migrants gathering in Sangatte, northern France. The Conservatives fear that the building will act as a magnet for those seeking to enter Britain illegally.
Source
Britain to follow Australia's immigration example
Britain will next year adopt an Australian-style model for restricting immigration to those with skills in need. British Immigration Minister Liam Byrne unveiled the timetable for introducing the points-based system during a fact-finding visit to Australia, which uses a similar model to attract migrants with in-demand skills and reject those who would compete with local workers for unskilled jobs. "With the exception of an elite group of highly-skilled migrants, all other foreign workers or students will need a UK sponsor to vouch for them and help us make sure they are playing by the rules," Mr Byrne was quoted as saying in The Guardian newspaper. Under the system, would-be migrants would need to amass a certain number of points according to their skills and sector gaps in the UK.
It was first announced by Home Secretary John Reid last year and will replace more than 80 routes of entry to the UK with five tiers for workers with different skill levels. The first tier, for highly-skilled migrants such as scientists and entrepreneurs, will be launched at the beginning of next year. It will be followed later in 2008 by new tiers for skilled workers such as nurses, teachers and engineers with job offers, temporary workers and young people on working holidays. A further tier for students will begin at the start of 2009.
The announcement comes ahead of Thursday's publication of official statistics which The Times newspaper predicted would show net migration into Britain of 185,000 in 2005. The figure is down from the previous year's 222,600, but four times the level in 1997.
Writing in a pamphlet due out later this month and widely reported in British media on Wednesday, Mr Byrne warned uncontrolled migration could damage the poorest communities. He said while migration had made the UK richer, it had also "unsettled the country". Mr Byrne is attending an international conference on immigration issues in Sydney.
Source
UN rebuff for Britain on global warming
BRITAIN has run into a wall of reluctance spearheaded by China after telling the United Nations that there are few greater threats to global security than climate change. The British Foreign Secretary, Margaret Beckett, chaired the UN Security Council's first debate on global warming on Tuesday. Fifty-two countries lined up to speak in the debate, which Britain initiated as it holds the rotating presidency of the council. "This is an issue which threatens the peace and security of the whole planet - this has to be the right place to debate it," Mrs Beckett said.
But China's deputy ambassador to the UN, Liu Zhenmin, was blunt in rejecting the session. "The developing countries believe that [the] Security Council does not have the professional competence for handling climate change, nor is it the right decision-making place for extensive participation," Mr Liu said. China and Russia, among others, warned that the council's mandate was limited to peace and security. So did Pakistan, on behalf of 130 developing nations, which argued that the council was encroaching on more representative bodies, such as the 192-member General Assembly.
Inside the forum, Mrs Beckett said that recent scientific evidence reinforced, or even exceeded, the worst fears about climate change. She warned of migration on an unprecedented scale because of flooding, disease and famine. Drought and crop failure would also cause intensified competition for food, water and energy, and result in economic destruction comparable to World War II or the Great Depression. "Climate change is a security issue but it is not a matter of narrow national security - it has a new dimension," she said. "This is about our collective security in a fragile and increasingly interdependent world."
Mrs Beckett quoted a remark made by the President of Uganda, Yoweri Museveni, that global warming was "an act of aggression by the rich against the poor". She was supported by the UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon. "Projected changes in the Earth's climate are not only an environmental concern," Mr Ban said. "Issues of energy and climate change can have implications for peace and security."
British diplomats said the intention of Tuesday's session was to lift climate change to the top of the international agenda. Britain has pointed to the violence in the Darfur region of Sudan as an example of conflict partly caused by land degradation. The Maldives, Bangladesh and other low-lying countries more susceptible to flooding and climate change also pleaded with industrialised nations for action.
Last November, the Stern report suggested that 200 million people could be displaced by rising sea levels and drought by 2050. It said the global economy could shrink by one-fifth. Even Osama bin Laden accused the US in 2002 of harming nature "more than any nation in history". China has created artificial snow in Tibet after experts warned of melting glaciers in the Himalayas. The Tibetan meteorological station had created a fall of 2.2 millimetres, which accumulated to one centimetre, last week, about 4000 metres above sea level in northern Tibet, the Xinhua news agency said yesterday.
Source
Thursday, April 19, 2007
The NHS computer meltdown continues
What's a wasted few billion among friends? Hundreds of millions are often spent on government computer projects before they are abandoned but it takes the NHS to commit waste on this scale. Think how many more doctors and nurses they could have hired with 12 billion! Once again, Britain makes Kafka look unimaginative. The whole affair is beyond rational comprehension. The one thing it shows is how unbelievably wasteful a socialist government can be with the people's money in pursuing their dreams of control
Urgent action is needed to rescue the 12 billion pound programme for upgrading the NHS computer system, the Public Accounts Committee of the House of Commons has said. Over budget and behind schedule, the National Programme for IT is "not looking good", according to a report from the committee.
Edward Leigh, the Conservative MP who chairs the committee, said: "Urgent remedial action is needed if the long-term interests of NHS patients and taxpayers are to be protected. "The electronic patient clinical record, which is central to the project, is already running two years late; the suppliers are struggling to deliver; and, four years down the line, the costs and benefits for the local NHS are unclear."
Ministers said that the criticisms were out of date and that the costs of the programme had not escalated.
Source
NHS model crumbling
The NHS is unlikely to be free at the point of use within 10 years, say doctors. A British Medical Association poll of 964 young GPs and hospital doctors found 61% thought patients would have to pay for some treatment by 2017. Nearly half of all young doctors also expect to leave the NHS within 10 years, according to the survey. All three main political parties have ruled out bringing in a form of charging in the short-term.
The doctors questioned were members of the BMA's Junior Members Forum, which effectively represents the top doctors of the future as it includes those who have graduated within the last 12 years and students. The poll also revealed 94% thought the role of the private sector would continue to grow. A total of 48% of those questioned said they envisaged they would have left the NHS within 10 years, with only a third (35%) of those saying that would be through choice.
Forum chairman Dr Andrew Thomson said it was time to have a debate about the future of the NHS because of pressures from the ageing population and new, ever-more expensive drugs. "Doctors fear that current reforms are damaging the NHS beyond repair. "We seem to be selling off the service to the highest bidder without considering the legacy for future generations of patients. "Government reforms are having negative effects on both services and the morale of doctors. We need to find ways of moving the NHS towards a period of stability. At the moment it is under serious threat. "We will be the ones making the decisions in the future and implementing changes so we want to know what the public, profession and political parties think."
Various options have been put forward, including asking patients to contribute towards the cost of some minor treatments, such as varicose veins, or excluding them from NHS care altogether. There has also been suggestions that an NHS tax could be introduced to help pay for the extra demands on the health service. Dr Thomson said his members were not expressing a favour for any one option, but he suggested patients may well be ready for a change in the system.
BMA policy is still that the NHS should be free at the point of need, although the issue is likely to be discussed at the doctors' annual conference, which sets policy, later this year. But a spokeswoman for the Patients Association said: "I think it is an important principle that where care is needed it is free. "We would not be in favour of patients paying for care where doctors say it is necessary."
The Department of Health has defended NHS reforms, saying it is committed to creating "a truly patient-led service". "What will not change is our commitment to a universal, tax-funded service, with equal access for all," said a spokesman.
Source
Brit "journalists" shaft Israel: "The British reporters union just voted to boycott Israel. The boycott is intended to de-legitimize Israel's right to exist in peace and freedom. It is an endorsement of the Arab-Iranian war against Jerusalem, based on the South African model where the white minority gave up power after an international boycott. But as usual, the Left has its head where the sun shineth not. Contrary to the malevolent Jimmy Carter, Israel is at least as far from an "apartheid nation" as Norway or America. But facts don't count when ideology (and oil dollars to the Jimmy Carter's Center) are at stake. Nobody who follows the British media, like BBC and the Guardian, can be surprised. Today anti-Israel hatred is the disease of the Left, making common cause with Islamofascism. Well, National Socialism was also a kind of Socialism. That's why they called it that. The neo-Fascist Left is not new, but its return to power is very disturbing."
What's a wasted few billion among friends? Hundreds of millions are often spent on government computer projects before they are abandoned but it takes the NHS to commit waste on this scale. Think how many more doctors and nurses they could have hired with 12 billion! Once again, Britain makes Kafka look unimaginative. The whole affair is beyond rational comprehension. The one thing it shows is how unbelievably wasteful a socialist government can be with the people's money in pursuing their dreams of control
Urgent action is needed to rescue the 12 billion pound programme for upgrading the NHS computer system, the Public Accounts Committee of the House of Commons has said. Over budget and behind schedule, the National Programme for IT is "not looking good", according to a report from the committee.
Edward Leigh, the Conservative MP who chairs the committee, said: "Urgent remedial action is needed if the long-term interests of NHS patients and taxpayers are to be protected. "The electronic patient clinical record, which is central to the project, is already running two years late; the suppliers are struggling to deliver; and, four years down the line, the costs and benefits for the local NHS are unclear."
Ministers said that the criticisms were out of date and that the costs of the programme had not escalated.
Source
NHS model crumbling
The NHS is unlikely to be free at the point of use within 10 years, say doctors. A British Medical Association poll of 964 young GPs and hospital doctors found 61% thought patients would have to pay for some treatment by 2017. Nearly half of all young doctors also expect to leave the NHS within 10 years, according to the survey. All three main political parties have ruled out bringing in a form of charging in the short-term.
The doctors questioned were members of the BMA's Junior Members Forum, which effectively represents the top doctors of the future as it includes those who have graduated within the last 12 years and students. The poll also revealed 94% thought the role of the private sector would continue to grow. A total of 48% of those questioned said they envisaged they would have left the NHS within 10 years, with only a third (35%) of those saying that would be through choice.
Forum chairman Dr Andrew Thomson said it was time to have a debate about the future of the NHS because of pressures from the ageing population and new, ever-more expensive drugs. "Doctors fear that current reforms are damaging the NHS beyond repair. "We seem to be selling off the service to the highest bidder without considering the legacy for future generations of patients. "Government reforms are having negative effects on both services and the morale of doctors. We need to find ways of moving the NHS towards a period of stability. At the moment it is under serious threat. "We will be the ones making the decisions in the future and implementing changes so we want to know what the public, profession and political parties think."
Various options have been put forward, including asking patients to contribute towards the cost of some minor treatments, such as varicose veins, or excluding them from NHS care altogether. There has also been suggestions that an NHS tax could be introduced to help pay for the extra demands on the health service. Dr Thomson said his members were not expressing a favour for any one option, but he suggested patients may well be ready for a change in the system.
BMA policy is still that the NHS should be free at the point of need, although the issue is likely to be discussed at the doctors' annual conference, which sets policy, later this year. But a spokeswoman for the Patients Association said: "I think it is an important principle that where care is needed it is free. "We would not be in favour of patients paying for care where doctors say it is necessary."
The Department of Health has defended NHS reforms, saying it is committed to creating "a truly patient-led service". "What will not change is our commitment to a universal, tax-funded service, with equal access for all," said a spokesman.
Source
Brit "journalists" shaft Israel: "The British reporters union just voted to boycott Israel. The boycott is intended to de-legitimize Israel's right to exist in peace and freedom. It is an endorsement of the Arab-Iranian war against Jerusalem, based on the South African model where the white minority gave up power after an international boycott. But as usual, the Left has its head where the sun shineth not. Contrary to the malevolent Jimmy Carter, Israel is at least as far from an "apartheid nation" as Norway or America. But facts don't count when ideology (and oil dollars to the Jimmy Carter's Center) are at stake. Nobody who follows the British media, like BBC and the Guardian, can be surprised. Today anti-Israel hatred is the disease of the Left, making common cause with Islamofascism. Well, National Socialism was also a kind of Socialism. That's why they called it that. The neo-Fascist Left is not new, but its return to power is very disturbing."
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
Fury as crooner sings praises of Third Reich
We read:
There is an old Latin proverb: "De gustibus non disputandum est" -- "concerning taste there must be no dispute". But Hitler was an artist and there is no doubt that Nazi aesthetics appealed (and still appeal) to many. It seems to me "insensitive" for anybody not to realize that. Denying the appeal of Nazism runs the risk of facilitating its return, it seems to me.
JEFFREY SACHS IS WRONG ONCE AGAIN
Rising population isn't going to destroy the planet
The BBC's Reith Lectures are not known for their humorous content, but the opening words of the 2007 series had me rocking with laughter. Professor Jeffrey D Sachs [pic above] told his audience that "It is with profound humility that I speak to you". Jeffrey Sachs is a man with many positive attributes, but humility is certainly not one of them. This can be seen in his new book, The End of Poverty, which might well have been subtitled "My plan to save the world". It has an introduction by Bono, which, as one reviewer pointed out, is appropriate: the economist as rock star meets the rock star as economist. Such an alliance must surely have titillated the BBC.
I suppose it will also have been aware of MTV's series The Diary of Angelina Jolie and Dr Jeffrey Sachs in Africa. Alas, Angelina was not among Sachs' audience at the Royal Society, an audience he described (with all humility) as "a unique gathering of leaders of action and thought" - but Geri Halliwell showed up, which was nice. So Professor Sachs is cool.
This is a relatively new phenomenon for the man described by himself as "internationally renowned for his work as an economic advisor to governments in Latin America, Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, Asia and Africa". He is indeed renowned for all that, but not, it must be said, universally admired for it. In the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe he and a handful of other Harvard economists introduced so-called "shock therapy", characterised chiefly by instant and massive privatisation and the simultaneous removal of all price controls.
In Russia this was hardly a great success, and not just because of the traumatic consequences in the short term. Sachs insists that Yeltsin, rather than his American advisors, was responsible for the fact that the privatisation policy amounted in practice to the theft by a handful of favoured apparatchiks of the industries previously ran - in its own inimitably corrupt fashion - by the state. The former World Bank economist David Ellerman counters that it was the rapidity of the privatisation which made such an outcome inevitable, declaring that "Only the mixture of American triumphalism and academic arrogance could have produced such a lethal dose of gall."
Not surprisingly, those on the left with long memories are somewhat cynical about Sachs' new plans to solve poverty in Africa, although they warmly endorse his appeal to America to devote more money to international aid and less to international warfare: "I hope he gets what he wants, but that he doesn't get any credit for it", commented David Ellerman, in a somewhat sour jibe at Sachs' elemental ego.
In one respect there is a consistency between Sachs' Russian debacle and what he now demands for Africa. He wanted the US to provide much more in aid to the new Russia, and was openly critical when it failed to come up with the sums he thought necessary. It seems incredible to me that such an intelligent man couldn't see that the same corrupt elites who stole entire industries would appropriate aid dollars with exactly the same attention to detail.
His main academic critic in the US, Professor William Easterly of New York University, is similarly dismissive of Sachs' view that the solution to Africa's problems lies principally in an enormous expansion of aid budgets. Easterly, a former development economist at the World Bank, is the author of The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good, cataloguing the corrupt practices which have ensured that almost two-and-a-half trillion dollars of aid have achieved nothing but economic stagnation in Africa.
Sachs' retort is that the aid had been spent in the wrong way - and, of course, he knows the right way. Even supposing that he does, there is still the matter of transmitting the money. Perhaps because Sachs is now a special advisor to the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, he proposes that this task be allocated to various UN agencies. These, I take it, would be the same bureaucratic geniuses who managed the Iraq Oil-for-Food Programme.
This is not an argument for ignoring the wretched of the world: Sachs is obviously right that we have a moral duty to do the best that we can, but that will involve learning from those countries which have transformed their prospects over the past quarter century. In Fighting the Diseases of Poverty (International PolicyPress) Indur Goklany points out that, while Sub-Saharan Africa has a higher food supply per capita than it did 25 years ago, its growth in that most basic measurement of individual well-being has been vastly outstripped by China. The world's most populous nation has achieved this by the same means which brought prosperity to the developed world: industrialisation. Aid had nothing to do with it.
Unfortunately, however, Professor Sachs seems to subscribe to the fashionable view that this is a bad thing because it is killing the planet. In his first Reith lecture, he denounced something called "The anthropocy, in Beijing, which soon will be the country (sic) that is the largest emitter of carbon dioxide on the planet". He linked this to the claim that we - the anthropocy, presumably - are "over-hunting, over-fishing and over-gathering just about anything that grows slowly or moves slowly".
The Malthusian myth is an unconscionable time a-dying. Sachs' first lecture was entitled "Bursting at the seams". Yet humanity has consistently demonstrated that there is no causal link between population growth and increasing poverty. Our numbers are higher than they have ever been - and the average member of our species has never been further from starvation. As Indur Goklany points out, "Since 1950 the global population has increased by 150 per cent, but at the same time the real price of food commodities has declined 75 per cent... average daily food supplies per person in developing countries increased by 38 per cent."
Yet on BBC's Newsnight the same day as Sachs' lecture, the Secretary of State for the Environment, David Miliband, declared that it was impossible for the rest of humanity to aspire to the level of consumption that we currently enjoy: "If the world were to have the same living standards as we have in the UK, then we'd need three planets to support us." In the studio the environment spokesmen of the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats nodded sagely.
Possibly Jeffrey Sachs and David Miliband are right that the planet is doomed if we carry on as we are. Yet for 200 years since Thomas Malthus wrote his Essay on the Principle of Population, economists and politicians have continued to make fools of themselves by writing books and delivering lectures prophesying famines and planetary apocalypse, unless we take their advice. It's one way to make a living, I suppose.
Source
NHS DANGEROUS FOR SICK BABIES
Care for premature or seriously ill babies has fallen even farther below acceptable standards, the baby charity Bliss has found. In a report prepared for it by two researchers at the National Perinatal Epidemiology Unit, it finds that units are understaffed, often have to close to new admissions, and that babies often need to be driven hundreds of miles to the nearest empty intensive care cot.
The report shows that, on average, baby units are understaffed by a third and suitably qualified nurses are in particularly short supply. Two thirds of units, not wishing to turn babies away, admitted more than they could care for properly. Many babies needing the highest levels of intensive care had to be treated in units capable of providing only lower levels. Ideally, said Bliss, there should be one nurse for every baby in intensive care, a staffing figure agreed by ministers. The research for its report shows that if this target were achieved infant deaths could be reduced by 48 per cent. At present less than 4 per cent of units achieve this staffing ratio.
Andy Cole, the chief executive of Bliss, said: "The first few days after birth are absolutely critical for babies born premature or sick, and the care they receive during this period shapes not only their chances of survival but also their future health. "Bliss is concerned that the Government gives less priority to intensive care for babies than for adults and children and that it is only thanks to the goodwill and commitment of doctors and nurses that babies are being cared for in some cases. "We are calling on the Government to make one-to-one nursing care mandatory for intensive care babies, and to commit the necessary resources to get this essential service back on track."
The new report, Special Delivery or Second Class, was based on data provided by almost 80 per cent of the 224 units in hospitals for the care of newborn babies. Demand for such services is increasing. Last year 80,000 babies were admitted to the units, which are classifed into three categories: intensive-care units, high-dependency units, and special-care units. The babies needing care were born prematurely (less than 37 weeks of gestation), of low birth weight (less than 5.5lb) or had other medical problems. The number of babies who survive such an unpromising start in life is increasing, so the demand for the units is increasing.
Between 60 and 70 per cent of units said that demand for cots exceeded capacity last year across all three levels of care. As a result, some babies were being given care in inappropriate units: 1,233 were given breathing support in special-care units, for example, which are equipped to deliver such care only in the short-term.
Some transfers of babies between units are inevitable and can be justified if, for example, they need surgery. Transfers simply because units are full (called inappropriate transfers) should not exceed 10 per cent. Last year the figure was 22.6 per cent. In one in four cases twins or triplets were separated and sent to units that may be hundreds of miles apart, a traumatic experience for mothers. "It is hard to imagine having the stress of one child in an intensive care unit," Mr Cole said. "Imagine having two, split by 150 miles."
Three years ago the Department of Health committed 70 million pounds to improving the service but the money has now almost run out, and Bliss believes that at least 20 million of it disappeared into other budgets because it was not ring-fenced. It calculates that to meet the full requirement of one-to-one nursing, the present numbers need to rise from 5,863 whole-time equivalents to 8,147, an increase of almost 2,300 nurses, which would cost 75 million a year.
Source
Politically correct British police force hiring officers 'who can't do the job'
One of the country's most senior policemen has admitted his force is recruiting unsuitable officers in its drive to be politically correct. Dyslexics, the physically disabled and those with religious beliefs which affect their work are apparently being given jobs - even though they are unable to fulfil their role. Steve Roberts, a deputy assistant commissioner at Scotland Yard, said there was a 'whole cohort' of inadequate officers coming into the London force because the force had 'shied away' from tackling the issue.
His comments in the magazine Police Review follow a series of embarrassments for the Metropolitan Police in recent months. PC Alexander Omar Basha, a Muslim officer, provoked a political storm last year when he was excused from guarding the Israeli embassy on 'moral grounds' after he expressed concerns over the bombing of Lebanon. In another incident, a female Muslim officer refused to shake the hand of Commissioner Sir Ian Blair at her passing out ceremony. Other cases include a Seventh Day Adventist officer who wanted to take the Sabbath off, an orthodox Jewish officer who wanted Fridays off and a number of men or women with severe dyslexia.
Mr Roberts said the Met was 'letting its managers down' by failing to issue clear policy on recruitment. He said: "What is really comes down to is that it does not matter what it is that causes you to be incapable of fulfilling the full duties of an ordinary officer. "It does not matter if it is because you have a physical disability, dyslexia or a particular requirement which means you have to have every Sunday off - unless you are able to fulfil the duties of a constable, we should not be allowing you to think you can join in the first place. "And we should not, if that arises after joining, be saying you can make a good and efficient officer at the end of the probationary stage. "We have let our managers down in not making it as clear as we should do what our attitude to difference is and what we expect of them [in order to] give them the confidence to deal with people genuinely fairly."
Mr Roberts said that the force was still able to adapt to an officer's specialist requirements. He added: "For example, there was never actually a problem with the young female officer who did not want to shake the commissioner's hand. "She simply said, quite reasonably, 'Actually, I would prefer not to'. "Supposing it had been the case that normally the Commissioner kissed on the cheek every new recruit who came up to meet him and someone said 'I would rather he did not do that to me', we would not think that was a big deal. "We can adapt on those things that do fit in with being a constable and fulfilling the full range of duties but certain factors are not a condition of someone becoming a police officer, it is simply what a good employer does."
Mr Roberts, who is deputy head of human resources at the Met continued: "This is not moving away from diversity and saying it does not matter any more. "But it is about setting proper limits to make sure we do manage it properly, without ever losing sight of the main point of delivering the right service. "Getting a diverse workforce is not a nice, optional thing. It is what we have got to do in order to be properly representative of London."
Source
Brit police tracking young Muslims
MI5 is adopting tactics used by the police to keep tabs on paedophiles and other sex offenders to monitor the activities of known or suspected Islamic extremists, The Times has learnt. The threat from radicalised young Muslims is growing at such a rate that MI5 has realised that it needs the help of police officers on the streets to help it keep a check on extremists in their areas.
The police keep track of known paedophiles by collating sightings of them and noting whom they meet and which areas they frequent - a tactic that MI5 sees as ideal for keeping track of the movements of Islamic extremists. Thousands of police officers on the beat in areas with large Pakistani communities - such as Birmingham, Leeds and London - will be expected to keep a lookout for young Muslims known to have become radicals.
The information gathered from day-to-day observations will be used to compile a comprehensive database of lower-level extremism. This register will help both MI5 and the police. However, there are thousands of other radicalised young Muslims from countries such as Pakistan, North Africa and Somalia about whom there is no intelligence linking them to terrorist groups. Because of limited resources, they are not regarded as a priority for MI5 when there are so many others who are known to be affiliated to terrorist networks in Britain and, in many cases, actually to be plotting attacks. The fear is that young Muslims who are being radicalised may be persuaded to support the cause of the terrorists.
MI5 has built up an extensive archive of extremist activities, according to security sources. But its surveillance officers have time to focus only on those posing a terrorist threat. Security sources say that monitoring extremists is only part of the drive to deal with the growing challenge of a younger generation of Muslims, most of them of Pakistani origin, being suborned into supporting terrorism.
The security and intelligence services are relying on the Government to come up with policies and funds that will help Muslim communities, providing jobs, decent homes and social welfare support to dissuade the young from becoming extremists. The threat from home-grown Islamic extremism and terrorism, largely emanating from British Pakistanis, is a relatively recent phenomenon. The terrorist threat in Britain before the 9/11 attacks in the US was principally viewed as coming from Algerians, Moroccans and other North Africans.
Since 2001, and particularly since the July 7 suicide bombings in 2005, MI5 has been collecting as much information as possible about Muslim radicalisation in this country. However, security sources emphasised that the new approach - contributing towards the police's existing "Rich Picture" project, which is aimed at uncovering young Muslims being groomed for terrorism - did not mean that MI5 was targeting the Muslim communities in Britain. This is a highly sensitive issue, especially as Muslim leaders have accused MI5 and the police of using all their resources to spy on their communities.
Both MI5 and the police insist they want clerics and other Muslim leaders to help them to stamp out extremism and actively seek their cooperation. The security sources said that it was a matter for individual police forces to decide how to prioritise their resources in keeping track of Islamic extremists. But the aim was to enable the police in their areas to know of the whereabouts of extremists. "This is a new approach and we hope that police officers will understand that the job of countering terrorism and extremism is not just for MI5 and the police special branch but can be carried out by traditional police methods," one security source said.
Sensitive intelligence about terrorist suspects is shared with Special Branch and with regional intelligence cells. This level of cooperation has improved in recent months, with the setting up of eight regional MI5 offices, sharing Special Branch premises, in Scotland, the North East, North West, the East and West Midlands, South West, Wales and South East
Source
We read:
"Ageing crooner Bryan Ferry has outraged Jewish groups after an astounding interview during which he spoke of his admiration for the Nazis.
In the interview with German journalists, Ferry described Nazi rallies as "just amazing" and admitted calling his recording studio the "Fuhrerbunker", a title associated with Adolf Hitler's headquarters.
"My dear gentlemen, the Nazis knew how to put themselves in the limelight and present themselves," Ferry, who is about to embark on a UK tour, told the German newspaper Welt am Sonntag.
"Leni Riefenstahl's movies and Albert Speer's buildings and the mass parades and the flags - just amazing. Really beautiful." ...
Ferry's manager Steven Howard defended the outburst, saying: "To suggest a certain appreciation of art and architecture that happens to be associated with the Nazi regime means condoning the action of that regime is illogical."
Overnight, Ferry apologised for his remarks. In a statement, the singer said he was "deeply upset" about the negative publicity the interview triggered, and added: "I apologise unreservedly for any offence caused by my comments on Nazi iconography, which were solely made from an art history perspective.
Source
There is an old Latin proverb: "De gustibus non disputandum est" -- "concerning taste there must be no dispute". But Hitler was an artist and there is no doubt that Nazi aesthetics appealed (and still appeal) to many. It seems to me "insensitive" for anybody not to realize that. Denying the appeal of Nazism runs the risk of facilitating its return, it seems to me.
JEFFREY SACHS IS WRONG ONCE AGAIN
Rising population isn't going to destroy the planet
The BBC's Reith Lectures are not known for their humorous content, but the opening words of the 2007 series had me rocking with laughter. Professor Jeffrey D Sachs [pic above] told his audience that "It is with profound humility that I speak to you". Jeffrey Sachs is a man with many positive attributes, but humility is certainly not one of them. This can be seen in his new book, The End of Poverty, which might well have been subtitled "My plan to save the world". It has an introduction by Bono, which, as one reviewer pointed out, is appropriate: the economist as rock star meets the rock star as economist. Such an alliance must surely have titillated the BBC.
I suppose it will also have been aware of MTV's series The Diary of Angelina Jolie and Dr Jeffrey Sachs in Africa. Alas, Angelina was not among Sachs' audience at the Royal Society, an audience he described (with all humility) as "a unique gathering of leaders of action and thought" - but Geri Halliwell showed up, which was nice. So Professor Sachs is cool.
This is a relatively new phenomenon for the man described by himself as "internationally renowned for his work as an economic advisor to governments in Latin America, Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, Asia and Africa". He is indeed renowned for all that, but not, it must be said, universally admired for it. In the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe he and a handful of other Harvard economists introduced so-called "shock therapy", characterised chiefly by instant and massive privatisation and the simultaneous removal of all price controls.
In Russia this was hardly a great success, and not just because of the traumatic consequences in the short term. Sachs insists that Yeltsin, rather than his American advisors, was responsible for the fact that the privatisation policy amounted in practice to the theft by a handful of favoured apparatchiks of the industries previously ran - in its own inimitably corrupt fashion - by the state. The former World Bank economist David Ellerman counters that it was the rapidity of the privatisation which made such an outcome inevitable, declaring that "Only the mixture of American triumphalism and academic arrogance could have produced such a lethal dose of gall."
Not surprisingly, those on the left with long memories are somewhat cynical about Sachs' new plans to solve poverty in Africa, although they warmly endorse his appeal to America to devote more money to international aid and less to international warfare: "I hope he gets what he wants, but that he doesn't get any credit for it", commented David Ellerman, in a somewhat sour jibe at Sachs' elemental ego.
In one respect there is a consistency between Sachs' Russian debacle and what he now demands for Africa. He wanted the US to provide much more in aid to the new Russia, and was openly critical when it failed to come up with the sums he thought necessary. It seems incredible to me that such an intelligent man couldn't see that the same corrupt elites who stole entire industries would appropriate aid dollars with exactly the same attention to detail.
His main academic critic in the US, Professor William Easterly of New York University, is similarly dismissive of Sachs' view that the solution to Africa's problems lies principally in an enormous expansion of aid budgets. Easterly, a former development economist at the World Bank, is the author of The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good, cataloguing the corrupt practices which have ensured that almost two-and-a-half trillion dollars of aid have achieved nothing but economic stagnation in Africa.
Sachs' retort is that the aid had been spent in the wrong way - and, of course, he knows the right way. Even supposing that he does, there is still the matter of transmitting the money. Perhaps because Sachs is now a special advisor to the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, he proposes that this task be allocated to various UN agencies. These, I take it, would be the same bureaucratic geniuses who managed the Iraq Oil-for-Food Programme.
This is not an argument for ignoring the wretched of the world: Sachs is obviously right that we have a moral duty to do the best that we can, but that will involve learning from those countries which have transformed their prospects over the past quarter century. In Fighting the Diseases of Poverty (International PolicyPress) Indur Goklany points out that, while Sub-Saharan Africa has a higher food supply per capita than it did 25 years ago, its growth in that most basic measurement of individual well-being has been vastly outstripped by China. The world's most populous nation has achieved this by the same means which brought prosperity to the developed world: industrialisation. Aid had nothing to do with it.
Unfortunately, however, Professor Sachs seems to subscribe to the fashionable view that this is a bad thing because it is killing the planet. In his first Reith lecture, he denounced something called "The anthropocy, in Beijing, which soon will be the country (sic) that is the largest emitter of carbon dioxide on the planet". He linked this to the claim that we - the anthropocy, presumably - are "over-hunting, over-fishing and over-gathering just about anything that grows slowly or moves slowly".
The Malthusian myth is an unconscionable time a-dying. Sachs' first lecture was entitled "Bursting at the seams". Yet humanity has consistently demonstrated that there is no causal link between population growth and increasing poverty. Our numbers are higher than they have ever been - and the average member of our species has never been further from starvation. As Indur Goklany points out, "Since 1950 the global population has increased by 150 per cent, but at the same time the real price of food commodities has declined 75 per cent... average daily food supplies per person in developing countries increased by 38 per cent."
Yet on BBC's Newsnight the same day as Sachs' lecture, the Secretary of State for the Environment, David Miliband, declared that it was impossible for the rest of humanity to aspire to the level of consumption that we currently enjoy: "If the world were to have the same living standards as we have in the UK, then we'd need three planets to support us." In the studio the environment spokesmen of the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats nodded sagely.
Possibly Jeffrey Sachs and David Miliband are right that the planet is doomed if we carry on as we are. Yet for 200 years since Thomas Malthus wrote his Essay on the Principle of Population, economists and politicians have continued to make fools of themselves by writing books and delivering lectures prophesying famines and planetary apocalypse, unless we take their advice. It's one way to make a living, I suppose.
Source
NHS DANGEROUS FOR SICK BABIES
Care for premature or seriously ill babies has fallen even farther below acceptable standards, the baby charity Bliss has found. In a report prepared for it by two researchers at the National Perinatal Epidemiology Unit, it finds that units are understaffed, often have to close to new admissions, and that babies often need to be driven hundreds of miles to the nearest empty intensive care cot.
The report shows that, on average, baby units are understaffed by a third and suitably qualified nurses are in particularly short supply. Two thirds of units, not wishing to turn babies away, admitted more than they could care for properly. Many babies needing the highest levels of intensive care had to be treated in units capable of providing only lower levels. Ideally, said Bliss, there should be one nurse for every baby in intensive care, a staffing figure agreed by ministers. The research for its report shows that if this target were achieved infant deaths could be reduced by 48 per cent. At present less than 4 per cent of units achieve this staffing ratio.
Andy Cole, the chief executive of Bliss, said: "The first few days after birth are absolutely critical for babies born premature or sick, and the care they receive during this period shapes not only their chances of survival but also their future health. "Bliss is concerned that the Government gives less priority to intensive care for babies than for adults and children and that it is only thanks to the goodwill and commitment of doctors and nurses that babies are being cared for in some cases. "We are calling on the Government to make one-to-one nursing care mandatory for intensive care babies, and to commit the necessary resources to get this essential service back on track."
The new report, Special Delivery or Second Class, was based on data provided by almost 80 per cent of the 224 units in hospitals for the care of newborn babies. Demand for such services is increasing. Last year 80,000 babies were admitted to the units, which are classifed into three categories: intensive-care units, high-dependency units, and special-care units. The babies needing care were born prematurely (less than 37 weeks of gestation), of low birth weight (less than 5.5lb) or had other medical problems. The number of babies who survive such an unpromising start in life is increasing, so the demand for the units is increasing.
Between 60 and 70 per cent of units said that demand for cots exceeded capacity last year across all three levels of care. As a result, some babies were being given care in inappropriate units: 1,233 were given breathing support in special-care units, for example, which are equipped to deliver such care only in the short-term.
Some transfers of babies between units are inevitable and can be justified if, for example, they need surgery. Transfers simply because units are full (called inappropriate transfers) should not exceed 10 per cent. Last year the figure was 22.6 per cent. In one in four cases twins or triplets were separated and sent to units that may be hundreds of miles apart, a traumatic experience for mothers. "It is hard to imagine having the stress of one child in an intensive care unit," Mr Cole said. "Imagine having two, split by 150 miles."
Three years ago the Department of Health committed 70 million pounds to improving the service but the money has now almost run out, and Bliss believes that at least 20 million of it disappeared into other budgets because it was not ring-fenced. It calculates that to meet the full requirement of one-to-one nursing, the present numbers need to rise from 5,863 whole-time equivalents to 8,147, an increase of almost 2,300 nurses, which would cost 75 million a year.
Source
Politically correct British police force hiring officers 'who can't do the job'
One of the country's most senior policemen has admitted his force is recruiting unsuitable officers in its drive to be politically correct. Dyslexics, the physically disabled and those with religious beliefs which affect their work are apparently being given jobs - even though they are unable to fulfil their role. Steve Roberts, a deputy assistant commissioner at Scotland Yard, said there was a 'whole cohort' of inadequate officers coming into the London force because the force had 'shied away' from tackling the issue.
His comments in the magazine Police Review follow a series of embarrassments for the Metropolitan Police in recent months. PC Alexander Omar Basha, a Muslim officer, provoked a political storm last year when he was excused from guarding the Israeli embassy on 'moral grounds' after he expressed concerns over the bombing of Lebanon. In another incident, a female Muslim officer refused to shake the hand of Commissioner Sir Ian Blair at her passing out ceremony. Other cases include a Seventh Day Adventist officer who wanted to take the Sabbath off, an orthodox Jewish officer who wanted Fridays off and a number of men or women with severe dyslexia.
Mr Roberts said the Met was 'letting its managers down' by failing to issue clear policy on recruitment. He said: "What is really comes down to is that it does not matter what it is that causes you to be incapable of fulfilling the full duties of an ordinary officer. "It does not matter if it is because you have a physical disability, dyslexia or a particular requirement which means you have to have every Sunday off - unless you are able to fulfil the duties of a constable, we should not be allowing you to think you can join in the first place. "And we should not, if that arises after joining, be saying you can make a good and efficient officer at the end of the probationary stage. "We have let our managers down in not making it as clear as we should do what our attitude to difference is and what we expect of them [in order to] give them the confidence to deal with people genuinely fairly."
Mr Roberts said that the force was still able to adapt to an officer's specialist requirements. He added: "For example, there was never actually a problem with the young female officer who did not want to shake the commissioner's hand. "She simply said, quite reasonably, 'Actually, I would prefer not to'. "Supposing it had been the case that normally the Commissioner kissed on the cheek every new recruit who came up to meet him and someone said 'I would rather he did not do that to me', we would not think that was a big deal. "We can adapt on those things that do fit in with being a constable and fulfilling the full range of duties but certain factors are not a condition of someone becoming a police officer, it is simply what a good employer does."
Mr Roberts, who is deputy head of human resources at the Met continued: "This is not moving away from diversity and saying it does not matter any more. "But it is about setting proper limits to make sure we do manage it properly, without ever losing sight of the main point of delivering the right service. "Getting a diverse workforce is not a nice, optional thing. It is what we have got to do in order to be properly representative of London."
Source
Brit police tracking young Muslims
MI5 is adopting tactics used by the police to keep tabs on paedophiles and other sex offenders to monitor the activities of known or suspected Islamic extremists, The Times has learnt. The threat from radicalised young Muslims is growing at such a rate that MI5 has realised that it needs the help of police officers on the streets to help it keep a check on extremists in their areas.
The police keep track of known paedophiles by collating sightings of them and noting whom they meet and which areas they frequent - a tactic that MI5 sees as ideal for keeping track of the movements of Islamic extremists. Thousands of police officers on the beat in areas with large Pakistani communities - such as Birmingham, Leeds and London - will be expected to keep a lookout for young Muslims known to have become radicals.
The information gathered from day-to-day observations will be used to compile a comprehensive database of lower-level extremism. This register will help both MI5 and the police. However, there are thousands of other radicalised young Muslims from countries such as Pakistan, North Africa and Somalia about whom there is no intelligence linking them to terrorist groups. Because of limited resources, they are not regarded as a priority for MI5 when there are so many others who are known to be affiliated to terrorist networks in Britain and, in many cases, actually to be plotting attacks. The fear is that young Muslims who are being radicalised may be persuaded to support the cause of the terrorists.
MI5 has built up an extensive archive of extremist activities, according to security sources. But its surveillance officers have time to focus only on those posing a terrorist threat. Security sources say that monitoring extremists is only part of the drive to deal with the growing challenge of a younger generation of Muslims, most of them of Pakistani origin, being suborned into supporting terrorism.
The security and intelligence services are relying on the Government to come up with policies and funds that will help Muslim communities, providing jobs, decent homes and social welfare support to dissuade the young from becoming extremists. The threat from home-grown Islamic extremism and terrorism, largely emanating from British Pakistanis, is a relatively recent phenomenon. The terrorist threat in Britain before the 9/11 attacks in the US was principally viewed as coming from Algerians, Moroccans and other North Africans.
Since 2001, and particularly since the July 7 suicide bombings in 2005, MI5 has been collecting as much information as possible about Muslim radicalisation in this country. However, security sources emphasised that the new approach - contributing towards the police's existing "Rich Picture" project, which is aimed at uncovering young Muslims being groomed for terrorism - did not mean that MI5 was targeting the Muslim communities in Britain. This is a highly sensitive issue, especially as Muslim leaders have accused MI5 and the police of using all their resources to spy on their communities.
Both MI5 and the police insist they want clerics and other Muslim leaders to help them to stamp out extremism and actively seek their cooperation. The security sources said that it was a matter for individual police forces to decide how to prioritise their resources in keeping track of Islamic extremists. But the aim was to enable the police in their areas to know of the whereabouts of extremists. "This is a new approach and we hope that police officers will understand that the job of countering terrorism and extremism is not just for MI5 and the police special branch but can be carried out by traditional police methods," one security source said.
Sensitive intelligence about terrorist suspects is shared with Special Branch and with regional intelligence cells. This level of cooperation has improved in recent months, with the setting up of eight regional MI5 offices, sharing Special Branch premises, in Scotland, the North East, North West, the East and West Midlands, South West, Wales and South East
Source
Tuesday, April 17, 2007
More illegals for lucky old Britain
A planned welfare centre offering showers and soup to migrants near Calais threatens to encourage illegal immigration into Britain, the Conservatives claimed yesterday. The new centre will provide information on how to claim asylum to the hundreds of migrants sleeping in makeshift camps in an area known as "the jungle".
John Reid, the Home Secretary, will raise the issue when he holds long-arranged talks with Francois Baroin, the new French Interior Minister, in London on Tuesday. But the Home Office made clear that the primary item for discussion was counter-terrorism rather than the threat of illegal immigration.
Opponents of the Calais plan have already described the facilities as "Sangatte II" after the refugee camp shut down in 2002, but the new centre will not provide anywhere for migrants to sleep. It will offer food, showers and information and advice to the hundreds who are now sleeping rough.
Damian Green, the Tory immigration spokesman, said that the proposed centre would act as a magnet by encouraging people to congregate and attempt to enter Britain illegally. "It's clearly Sangatte II. I think it's hugely disappointing that the French Government is allowing this to happen," he said. "They made an agreement with the British Government a few years ago that they weren't going to have facilities in Calais which just encourage people to arrive there to try to come to this country illegally. "It's disappointing that our own Home Office doesn't seem to be doing anything about this. As I understand it, they are saying, `It's no Sangatte II, we shouldn't worry about it'."
Mr Green said that most of the refugees were being transported by commercial people-traffickers, whom he described as "some of the most evil people in the world". He accused the Home Office of being "appallingly complacent" over the issue.
No minister from the Home Office commented on the planned welfare centre yesterday. Instead Lin Homer, the director general of the Immigration and Nationality Directorate, and Brodie Clark, the head of UK border control, were put forward for media broadcasts.
David Davis, the Shadow Home Secretary, said: "This is a serious situation. It speaks volumes about Dr Reid's attitude to dealing with this situation that there is not a minister in sight. "Any Home Secretary should take responsibility for his or her brief and not hide behind officials."
Officers from Kent County Council have visited Calais on a fact-finding mission during which they discussed the plans with local officials. They hope that it will not become a "pull factor" encouraging other migrants to head towards Calais and then to try to enter Britain. But the officers admit that this will depend on how the French authorities police the centre.
Richard Ashworth, the Conservative MEP for the South East, said that the new centre had the "right intentions, but ultimately they are creating another hub for people wanting to enter the UK unlawfully".
A Home Office spokesperson said: "There have always been humanitarian services for migrants in the Calais area. We have had assurances from the French that they are opposed to any centre which will attract illegal immigrants and traffickers."
Official figures show that the number of illegal immigrants detected entering Kent from Calais fell 88 per cent from more than 10,000 in 2002 to 1,500 in 2006. The Red Cross-run Sangatte refugee camp in northern France closed in December 2002 after an agreement between Britain and France.
Source
Scotland: Don't stare at Muslims
PUPILS and teachers have been told by an official body not to stare at Muslims for fear of causing offence. A document intended to educate against religious intolerance and sectarianism urges teachers to "make pupils aware of the various forms of Islamophobia, ie stares, verbal abuse, physical abuse". But Learning Teaching Scotland (LTS), which issued the advice to schools north of the border, has been criticised by politicians and Muslim leaders for going "over the top".
The document states: "Some Muslims may choose to wear clothing or display their faith in a way that makes them visible. For example, women may be wearing a headscarf, and men might be wearing a skullcap. Staring or looking is a form of discrimination as it makes the other person feel uncomfortable, or as though they are not normal."
Osama Saeed, a spokesman for the Muslim Association of Britain, accused officials of going too far. "There are far more serious elements of Islamophobia. People look at all sorts of things - that can just be a glance. A glance and a stare are two different things - glances happen naturally when all sorts of things catch your eye whereas a stare is probably gawking at something. "Personally I have not encountered much of a problem with people staring. I don't know how you legislate for that."
Murdo Fraser, deputy leader of the Scottish Conservatives, said: "In a multicultural society like ours there are people with all different forms of dress and I don't think it's unreasonable to expect children in particular to look at those who are differently dressed from them. To describe this as a form of discrimination seems to go completely over the top."
Source
Non-teachers teach in Britain
Unqualified school helpers are being used as cheap labour to teach A-level and GCSE classes in subjects about which they know nothing when specialist subject teachers are on leave, a union claims. In the very worst cases, an untrained assistant was required to teach A-level English for an entire term, while another was put in charge of a GCSE maths group. Other instances include former dinner ladies and prison officers replacing qualified supply teachers.
The practice was condemned as an "absolute scandal" yesterday by members of the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers (NASUWT), who likened it to putting an enthusiastic member of the ground staff in charge of flying a plane because the pilot and co-pilot had not turned up. The likely result was a reduction in quality of education, a decline in classroom discipline and a danger that work will dry up for fully qualified supply teachers, the union's annual conference in Belfast heard.
Government reforms to teachers' working conditions in 2003, supported by the NASUWT, brought about a reduction in teachers' hours and specified that teachers would not have to cover each others' classes for longer than 38 hours a year - or an hour a week. Instead, classroom assistants and cover supervisors, who are not teachers and who are paid about 13,000 pounds a year, would be given a far greater role.
But Peter Wathan, a delegate from Bedfordshire, told the conference that unscrupulous head teachers were exploiting them as "cheap labour" by assigning them their own lessons. He cited the case of a popular school in his area that was using an unqualified cover supervisor to teach a GCSE maths group. "It happens to be a lower stream group - perhaps they don't deserve a qualified teacher in the head's opinion," he said.
Austin Murphy, a supply teacher from Leeds, said that the scale of the problem was far greater than people realised. "I do know of a school in south Leeds where a cover supervisor was asked to take on this role for maternity leave," he said. "They did GCSE and A-level classes. This person has no experience whatsoever in that subject. "Clearly this is an absolute scandal. It should be known that this is happening," he said.
Pat Lerew, the union's former president, who is now a supply teacher, said that putting cover supervisors or teaching assistants in charge of children while they complete worksheets prepared by an absent teacher could lead to a breakdown in discipline. "Pupils churning out reams of work with no feedback will rightly lose motivation and ask what is the point of this," she said.
John McCarthy, a fully qualified supply teacher from the union's Cannock and mid-Staffordshire branch, said that he was being deprived of work because lessons are covered by assistants, including, at one school, a former dinner lady and a former prison officer. Delegates backed a motion that replacing qualified teachers with cover supervisors will "lower the quality of children's education".
A spokesman for the Department for Education and Skills said that official guidance made it absolutely clear that cover supervisors do not teach. "We have record numbers of teachers in our schools with over 35,000 more than in 1997. We have also removed many administrative tasks from teachers and overseen a doubling in the number of support staff to help free up teachers' time to do what they do best - teach," he said.
Source
What's worse than Big Brother? Little Brother
The British government is recruiting children to spy on and `re-educate' the adult population
The revelation that Britain's New Labour government plans to install talking CCTV cameras across the land has rightly been greeted with shock and indignation. These new cameras will not only watch and record our movements, as Britain's already-existing five million CCTV cameras (that's one for every 12 citizens) currently do; they will also tell us off. Faceless operators in the CCTV bunkers will use microphones to tell the great unwashed to stop loitering, gathering in crowds, littering, spitting, vandalising and graffiting.
However, one aspect of the new talking CCTV regime went virtually uncommented on: the fact that the government is planning to recruit well-behaved and right-minded children to become the voice of the cameras in certain towns and cities. That's right - you can now look forward to the prospect of some self-righteous 12-year-old barking orders at you as you walk down the street.
John Reid, the home secretary, announced last week that the government will spend o500,000 on fitting loudspeakers on to CCTV cameras in 20 areas around Britain, including Southwark, Barking and Dagenham in London, and also Reading, Harlow, Norwich, Ipswich, Plymouth, Gloucester, Derby, Northampton, Mansfield, Nottingham, Coventry, Sandwell, Wirral, Blackpool, Salford, South Tyneside and Darlington.
Speaking cams were trialled in Middlesbrough, England, last year - and according to Reid they were a great success. `[The cameras] help counter things like litter and drunk or disorderly behaviour, gangs congregating', he told the morning news show GMTV last week. `They are the sorts of things that make people's lives a misery. Anything that tackles that is better.'
The number of CCTV cameras in Britain has risen exponentially over the past 10 to 15 years. Someone going about his or her daily business in London should expect to be picked up on around 300 cameras over the course of one day. New software breakthroughs mean there are now cameras that have `suspicious behaviour recognition' (they monitor the movement of clusters in the images recorded by CCTV) and even `gait recognition' (cams that judge whether someone is walking too fast, oddly or in some other suspicious fashion).
The rise of the cams speaks to a suspicious and fearful streak in New Labour's New Britain. And much of the `anti-social behaviour' they are designed to record looks to me less like seriously anti-social behaviour and more just a product of modern living. For example, we all consume more fast food than ever before, yet the decline in street bins (previous governments got rid of them in response to the IRA bombing campaign and the current government never bothered to replace them) means we don't have anywhere to put our cartons, McDonald's bags, cups and so on - hence littering. There are also a poverty of public benches, which have been removed by local authorities who feared that they would encourage drunks and gangs of young people to group together in city centres - and not surprisingly drunks and young people have tended to group together elsewhere, in parks, at bus stops, etc.
It is the government that is becoming increasingly anti-social by littering public space with spycams and now noisy megaphones that will embarrass people into changing their behaviour. Instead of providing us with enough bins, street cleaners and park benches, or creating public spaces that encourage free and easy interaction, the killjoy authorities plonk ugly cameras everywhere to monitor our antics.
Strangely, few of the news reports that covered the talking CCTV story mentioned the fact that the government plans to co-opt children to provide the stern voice of reason for some of the cams. This is odd considering that the government seems quite proud of this fact. The Home Office issued a press release headlined `Children Remind Adults To Act Responsibly On Our Streets'. It stated that: `Children from across the country will be very publicly calling upon the small minority of people who think it is acceptable to act anti-socially on our streets and in our towns to change their ways and take responsibility for their actions..'
The government's Respect Taskforce has launched a competition in schools around the country, where the top prize kids can win is to become the `voice' of certain CCTV cameras. In the 20 towns and cities that will soon install talking CCTV cameras, schoolchildren are being encouraged to design colourful posters that `challenge bad behaviour'. Explicitly, the government says it is `encouraging children to use their "pester power" in a positive way - reminding grown-ups how to behave'. Here, the government seems keen to harness the self-righteousness of some kids in an effort to shape and mould adults' behaviour. The winners of the poster competition will be `invited to become the voice of the Talking CCTV in their town or city's CCTV control room for one day - the day of the switch-on, later this year'. As Louise Casey, head of the Respect Taskforce, says, children will force adults to `face the shame of being publicly embarrassed'.
The introduction of talking CCTV cameras looks less like a case of `Big Brother gone mad' and more like `Little Brother gone mad'. The government is turning to children in an attempt to get its patronising good-behaviour message across to the adult population. According to Casey, `the vast majority (of children) know how to behave and recognise the bad behaviour of others, young and old alike'. The relationship between child and adult is reversed - instead of adults leading and guiding children, children are used to correct the `bad behaviour' of adults.
Worryingly this use of children to advance New Labour's moral message to adults is not a one-off initiative. The Respect Taskforce and the police have held numerous art competitions encouraging children to draw pictures that show the dangers of anti-social behaviour - the winners' pics have been used to illustrate safer community leaflets. A recent government report on energy proposed that schoolchildren be used to spread the word about eco-living. As James Woudhuysen pointed out on spiked, the report, titled Our Energy Challenge: Power from the People - Microgeneration Strategy, advances the view that: `Education of the next generations in a way that energy efficiency and the need for cleaner energy become an integral part of their mindset can help to influence their future behaviour (and maybe even that of their parents) and move us towards the desired cultural shift..With schools often being the focal point of communities, the installation of renewables could help to shape attitudes in the wider community.' In short, children can help to instil in adults the new `mindset' on green living. (See Windmills of the mind, by James Woudhuysen.)
Children have also been used in the Department of Health's adverts warning about the dangers of smoking and lung cancer. One ad featured a mother in the terminal stages of lung cancer. Her daughter was shown expressing her anger and grief at the fact that her mum will die shortly as a result of a disease caused by her own smoking. As spiked contributor Dr Michael Fitzpatrick argued, this was another case of the government using children to chastise adults: `This advert is clearly designed to make parents who smoke feel guilty - and to make children of parents who smoke feel angry. Its objective is to use children as an instrument of the campaign to deter adults from smoking.'
`At a time when a wide range of civil liberties are under threat it is alarming that the strategy of using children to police their parents' behaviour - reminiscent of totalitarian regimes - provokes so little public disquiet', wrote Dr Fitzpatrick (see The stigma of smoking, by Dr Michael Fitzpatrick).
And now, the recruitment of children to use their `pester power' in order to publicly `shame' adults has also provoked little controversy. The government seems to be turning to children because it cannot justify its petty moral and authoritarian campaigns on their own terms - instead it hopes that we will change our behaviour and become more green / responsible / better-behaved for the sake of the pleading kids. Also, children, as anyone who has come into contact with them will know, can be sanctimonious and self-righteous. Where adults disagree and argue over what counts as civilised behaviour, and what should be done about allegedly uncivilised behaviour, children tend to lap up fairly uncritically messages about what is right and wrong. The government seems keen to harness children's simplistic views of good and evil in order to whack the adult population over the head.
Using children as spies or educators is the mark of an authoritarian regime. In Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, children are co-opted by the authorities and tend to become the most vociferous promoters of the right way of thinking. In Chapter 9, Winston Smith finds himself surrounded by a huge crowd on the sixth day of `Hate Week': `It was night, and the white faces and the scarlet banners were luridly floodlit. The square was packed with several thousand people, including a block of about a thousand schoolchildren in the uniform of the spies.'
One character, Parsons, `proceeds to boast about the "achievements" of his horrible children': `They had tracked a man down and handed him over to the thought police as a traitor on the sole ground that he was wearing strange-looking shoes and had set fire to a woman's clothes because she wrapped a parcel in a poster of Big Brother. Finally, they had been eavesdropping at their parent's bedroom door with a listening device to see if any thoughtcrime remarks were made. All of these are presented by Parsons as exploits of which he is very proud!'. In Orwell's fictional world, adults become subservient to irresponsible, ill-informed, not-yet-developed, gullible and nasty children. Is New Labour in danger of creating similar kinds of kids in Britain 2007?
We need a more critical attitude to the government's installation of talking CCTV and its recruitment of children as part of its crackdowns on anti-social behaviour. Mike Fagan, community safety co-ordinator for Hastings Statutory Crime and Disorder Partnership, turned down the offer to have talking CCTVs. Why? `We didn't think that talking CCTVs would suit the context of Hastings, the environment here. It was perhaps more appropriate to a larger urban area. I personally don't think that talking CCTVs are a good thing and that they would achieve results in terms of regulating people's behaviour,' he told me.
We could all do with saying no to talking CCTV cameras - whether we live somewhere like Hastings or in `larger urban areas'. Yet while the children's talking CCTV initiative will last for one day only, the day of `switch on' later this year, the political philosophy behind it - that adults are untrustworthy and it is acceptable to get children to tell them off - looks set to stay in place for a lot longer.
Source
FUEL CELL UPDATE
Of Wooden Fuel Cell Cars...
I had no idea that people still built cars out of wood, but apparently Morgan in the UK does. It announced in Geneva that it would offer a hydrogen-fueled, zero-emission version that resembles the Aero 8, which features a wooden-framed body. To quote the Pocket-Lint web site, "It will be a very lightweight car with a fuel cell hybrid powerplant, which will give it a 200-mile range."
On reflection, the British have a heritage of doing some pretty remarkable things with wood, including one of my favorite aircraft of World War II, the all-plywood DeHavilland Mosquito, the fastest fighter-bomber of the war. So, it will be interesting to see how such a seemingly low-tech material performs in concert with such a high-tech propulsion system.
Source
Green colonialists
THE Tory party donor and environmental philanthropist Johan Eliasch has been accused of "green colonialism" after allegedly consigning 1,000 people to poverty in his attempts to preserve the Amazon jungle. The allegations against Eliasch, who last week was touring South America with his friend the Duke of York, come from the inhabitants of a region of the Brazilian rainforest the size of Greater London.
In 2005 the Swedish-born tycoon, who runs the Head sports goods empire, spent a reported 13.7 million pounds of his estimated 361m fortune buying 400,000 acres - about 625 square miles - of jungle from an American-owned timber company with the aim of protecting it from loggers. Eliasch has described the move as "my little bit towards saving the world". As a result of the deal, a lumber mill that employed as many as 1,000 people closed in the town of Itacoatiara in northwest Brazil, increasing hardship in an already economically depressed region.
The closure has pitched Eliasch into a debate about how rich countries can help preserve tropical rainforests while considering the livelihoods of people who live and work in them. Some local environmentalists have accused him of dabbling in "green colonialism". "What he is doing is valid in terms of preservation but you cannot let people go hungry," said Lelio Moreira, who works at the local radio station, Panorama Itacoatiara. "There has to be some kind of help for locals hurt by this. Now, with the lack of jobs, violence is increasing and because fathers cannot afford to look after their families we also have a growing problem with child prostitution."
Joao Manuel Figueira, a municipal employee, added: "The impact of the plant's closure has been harsh. The local shops are feeling the knock-on effects with a drop in sales. We know the environment is important and deforestation is a problem. But knocking all the forest down is one thing. Taking out mature wood is another." Moreira said most residents had no idea who Eliasch was or what his plans were for his purchase. But Eliasch said relations with local government and the wider population since he bought into the region had been "generally positive". He said all the workers he laid off were fully compensated and he planned to re-hire many of them as guards to protect his new wilderness sanctuary. But he admitted that for him, preserving the jungle was "the only option" and took priority over those living there. "The rainforest is more important to me at the moment," said Eliasch, who is the Tories' deputy treasurer. He has also lent the party 2.6m.
He rejected arguments that first world countries, which chopped down their own forests in the drive for industrialisation, had no right to try to prevent Brazilians doing the same. "I'd like to say a move like my purchase is more learning from our mistakes," he said. "People have made mistakes in the western world and [I am] trying to prevent it happening elsewhere."
Eliasch is not the only one caught up in the paradox that by trying to save the rainforest he is harming the people who earn their living there. The Brazilian government says it is living up to its commitments to preserve the forest and points to a steep drop in the rate of deforestation since a peak in 2002. But that effort has hit the economy of many jungle towns hard. Last year Eliasch came up with the idea of buying the whole rainforest to preserve it. The result was a diplomatic incident between Brazil and Britain when the idea was taken up by David Miliband, the environment secretary, who suggested setting up an international trust as the best way to preserve the Amazon
Source
A planned welfare centre offering showers and soup to migrants near Calais threatens to encourage illegal immigration into Britain, the Conservatives claimed yesterday. The new centre will provide information on how to claim asylum to the hundreds of migrants sleeping in makeshift camps in an area known as "the jungle".
John Reid, the Home Secretary, will raise the issue when he holds long-arranged talks with Francois Baroin, the new French Interior Minister, in London on Tuesday. But the Home Office made clear that the primary item for discussion was counter-terrorism rather than the threat of illegal immigration.
Opponents of the Calais plan have already described the facilities as "Sangatte II" after the refugee camp shut down in 2002, but the new centre will not provide anywhere for migrants to sleep. It will offer food, showers and information and advice to the hundreds who are now sleeping rough.
Damian Green, the Tory immigration spokesman, said that the proposed centre would act as a magnet by encouraging people to congregate and attempt to enter Britain illegally. "It's clearly Sangatte II. I think it's hugely disappointing that the French Government is allowing this to happen," he said. "They made an agreement with the British Government a few years ago that they weren't going to have facilities in Calais which just encourage people to arrive there to try to come to this country illegally. "It's disappointing that our own Home Office doesn't seem to be doing anything about this. As I understand it, they are saying, `It's no Sangatte II, we shouldn't worry about it'."
Mr Green said that most of the refugees were being transported by commercial people-traffickers, whom he described as "some of the most evil people in the world". He accused the Home Office of being "appallingly complacent" over the issue.
No minister from the Home Office commented on the planned welfare centre yesterday. Instead Lin Homer, the director general of the Immigration and Nationality Directorate, and Brodie Clark, the head of UK border control, were put forward for media broadcasts.
David Davis, the Shadow Home Secretary, said: "This is a serious situation. It speaks volumes about Dr Reid's attitude to dealing with this situation that there is not a minister in sight. "Any Home Secretary should take responsibility for his or her brief and not hide behind officials."
Officers from Kent County Council have visited Calais on a fact-finding mission during which they discussed the plans with local officials. They hope that it will not become a "pull factor" encouraging other migrants to head towards Calais and then to try to enter Britain. But the officers admit that this will depend on how the French authorities police the centre.
Richard Ashworth, the Conservative MEP for the South East, said that the new centre had the "right intentions, but ultimately they are creating another hub for people wanting to enter the UK unlawfully".
A Home Office spokesperson said: "There have always been humanitarian services for migrants in the Calais area. We have had assurances from the French that they are opposed to any centre which will attract illegal immigrants and traffickers."
Official figures show that the number of illegal immigrants detected entering Kent from Calais fell 88 per cent from more than 10,000 in 2002 to 1,500 in 2006. The Red Cross-run Sangatte refugee camp in northern France closed in December 2002 after an agreement between Britain and France.
Source
Scotland: Don't stare at Muslims
PUPILS and teachers have been told by an official body not to stare at Muslims for fear of causing offence. A document intended to educate against religious intolerance and sectarianism urges teachers to "make pupils aware of the various forms of Islamophobia, ie stares, verbal abuse, physical abuse". But Learning Teaching Scotland (LTS), which issued the advice to schools north of the border, has been criticised by politicians and Muslim leaders for going "over the top".
The document states: "Some Muslims may choose to wear clothing or display their faith in a way that makes them visible. For example, women may be wearing a headscarf, and men might be wearing a skullcap. Staring or looking is a form of discrimination as it makes the other person feel uncomfortable, or as though they are not normal."
Osama Saeed, a spokesman for the Muslim Association of Britain, accused officials of going too far. "There are far more serious elements of Islamophobia. People look at all sorts of things - that can just be a glance. A glance and a stare are two different things - glances happen naturally when all sorts of things catch your eye whereas a stare is probably gawking at something. "Personally I have not encountered much of a problem with people staring. I don't know how you legislate for that."
Murdo Fraser, deputy leader of the Scottish Conservatives, said: "In a multicultural society like ours there are people with all different forms of dress and I don't think it's unreasonable to expect children in particular to look at those who are differently dressed from them. To describe this as a form of discrimination seems to go completely over the top."
Source
Non-teachers teach in Britain
Unqualified school helpers are being used as cheap labour to teach A-level and GCSE classes in subjects about which they know nothing when specialist subject teachers are on leave, a union claims. In the very worst cases, an untrained assistant was required to teach A-level English for an entire term, while another was put in charge of a GCSE maths group. Other instances include former dinner ladies and prison officers replacing qualified supply teachers.
The practice was condemned as an "absolute scandal" yesterday by members of the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers (NASUWT), who likened it to putting an enthusiastic member of the ground staff in charge of flying a plane because the pilot and co-pilot had not turned up. The likely result was a reduction in quality of education, a decline in classroom discipline and a danger that work will dry up for fully qualified supply teachers, the union's annual conference in Belfast heard.
Government reforms to teachers' working conditions in 2003, supported by the NASUWT, brought about a reduction in teachers' hours and specified that teachers would not have to cover each others' classes for longer than 38 hours a year - or an hour a week. Instead, classroom assistants and cover supervisors, who are not teachers and who are paid about 13,000 pounds a year, would be given a far greater role.
But Peter Wathan, a delegate from Bedfordshire, told the conference that unscrupulous head teachers were exploiting them as "cheap labour" by assigning them their own lessons. He cited the case of a popular school in his area that was using an unqualified cover supervisor to teach a GCSE maths group. "It happens to be a lower stream group - perhaps they don't deserve a qualified teacher in the head's opinion," he said.
Austin Murphy, a supply teacher from Leeds, said that the scale of the problem was far greater than people realised. "I do know of a school in south Leeds where a cover supervisor was asked to take on this role for maternity leave," he said. "They did GCSE and A-level classes. This person has no experience whatsoever in that subject. "Clearly this is an absolute scandal. It should be known that this is happening," he said.
Pat Lerew, the union's former president, who is now a supply teacher, said that putting cover supervisors or teaching assistants in charge of children while they complete worksheets prepared by an absent teacher could lead to a breakdown in discipline. "Pupils churning out reams of work with no feedback will rightly lose motivation and ask what is the point of this," she said.
John McCarthy, a fully qualified supply teacher from the union's Cannock and mid-Staffordshire branch, said that he was being deprived of work because lessons are covered by assistants, including, at one school, a former dinner lady and a former prison officer. Delegates backed a motion that replacing qualified teachers with cover supervisors will "lower the quality of children's education".
A spokesman for the Department for Education and Skills said that official guidance made it absolutely clear that cover supervisors do not teach. "We have record numbers of teachers in our schools with over 35,000 more than in 1997. We have also removed many administrative tasks from teachers and overseen a doubling in the number of support staff to help free up teachers' time to do what they do best - teach," he said.
Source
What's worse than Big Brother? Little Brother
The British government is recruiting children to spy on and `re-educate' the adult population
The revelation that Britain's New Labour government plans to install talking CCTV cameras across the land has rightly been greeted with shock and indignation. These new cameras will not only watch and record our movements, as Britain's already-existing five million CCTV cameras (that's one for every 12 citizens) currently do; they will also tell us off. Faceless operators in the CCTV bunkers will use microphones to tell the great unwashed to stop loitering, gathering in crowds, littering, spitting, vandalising and graffiting.
However, one aspect of the new talking CCTV regime went virtually uncommented on: the fact that the government is planning to recruit well-behaved and right-minded children to become the voice of the cameras in certain towns and cities. That's right - you can now look forward to the prospect of some self-righteous 12-year-old barking orders at you as you walk down the street.
John Reid, the home secretary, announced last week that the government will spend o500,000 on fitting loudspeakers on to CCTV cameras in 20 areas around Britain, including Southwark, Barking and Dagenham in London, and also Reading, Harlow, Norwich, Ipswich, Plymouth, Gloucester, Derby, Northampton, Mansfield, Nottingham, Coventry, Sandwell, Wirral, Blackpool, Salford, South Tyneside and Darlington.
Speaking cams were trialled in Middlesbrough, England, last year - and according to Reid they were a great success. `[The cameras] help counter things like litter and drunk or disorderly behaviour, gangs congregating', he told the morning news show GMTV last week. `They are the sorts of things that make people's lives a misery. Anything that tackles that is better.'
The number of CCTV cameras in Britain has risen exponentially over the past 10 to 15 years. Someone going about his or her daily business in London should expect to be picked up on around 300 cameras over the course of one day. New software breakthroughs mean there are now cameras that have `suspicious behaviour recognition' (they monitor the movement of clusters in the images recorded by CCTV) and even `gait recognition' (cams that judge whether someone is walking too fast, oddly or in some other suspicious fashion).
The rise of the cams speaks to a suspicious and fearful streak in New Labour's New Britain. And much of the `anti-social behaviour' they are designed to record looks to me less like seriously anti-social behaviour and more just a product of modern living. For example, we all consume more fast food than ever before, yet the decline in street bins (previous governments got rid of them in response to the IRA bombing campaign and the current government never bothered to replace them) means we don't have anywhere to put our cartons, McDonald's bags, cups and so on - hence littering. There are also a poverty of public benches, which have been removed by local authorities who feared that they would encourage drunks and gangs of young people to group together in city centres - and not surprisingly drunks and young people have tended to group together elsewhere, in parks, at bus stops, etc.
It is the government that is becoming increasingly anti-social by littering public space with spycams and now noisy megaphones that will embarrass people into changing their behaviour. Instead of providing us with enough bins, street cleaners and park benches, or creating public spaces that encourage free and easy interaction, the killjoy authorities plonk ugly cameras everywhere to monitor our antics.
Strangely, few of the news reports that covered the talking CCTV story mentioned the fact that the government plans to co-opt children to provide the stern voice of reason for some of the cams. This is odd considering that the government seems quite proud of this fact. The Home Office issued a press release headlined `Children Remind Adults To Act Responsibly On Our Streets'. It stated that: `Children from across the country will be very publicly calling upon the small minority of people who think it is acceptable to act anti-socially on our streets and in our towns to change their ways and take responsibility for their actions..'
The government's Respect Taskforce has launched a competition in schools around the country, where the top prize kids can win is to become the `voice' of certain CCTV cameras. In the 20 towns and cities that will soon install talking CCTV cameras, schoolchildren are being encouraged to design colourful posters that `challenge bad behaviour'. Explicitly, the government says it is `encouraging children to use their "pester power" in a positive way - reminding grown-ups how to behave'. Here, the government seems keen to harness the self-righteousness of some kids in an effort to shape and mould adults' behaviour. The winners of the poster competition will be `invited to become the voice of the Talking CCTV in their town or city's CCTV control room for one day - the day of the switch-on, later this year'. As Louise Casey, head of the Respect Taskforce, says, children will force adults to `face the shame of being publicly embarrassed'.
The introduction of talking CCTV cameras looks less like a case of `Big Brother gone mad' and more like `Little Brother gone mad'. The government is turning to children in an attempt to get its patronising good-behaviour message across to the adult population. According to Casey, `the vast majority (of children) know how to behave and recognise the bad behaviour of others, young and old alike'. The relationship between child and adult is reversed - instead of adults leading and guiding children, children are used to correct the `bad behaviour' of adults.
Worryingly this use of children to advance New Labour's moral message to adults is not a one-off initiative. The Respect Taskforce and the police have held numerous art competitions encouraging children to draw pictures that show the dangers of anti-social behaviour - the winners' pics have been used to illustrate safer community leaflets. A recent government report on energy proposed that schoolchildren be used to spread the word about eco-living. As James Woudhuysen pointed out on spiked, the report, titled Our Energy Challenge: Power from the People - Microgeneration Strategy, advances the view that: `Education of the next generations in a way that energy efficiency and the need for cleaner energy become an integral part of their mindset can help to influence their future behaviour (and maybe even that of their parents) and move us towards the desired cultural shift..With schools often being the focal point of communities, the installation of renewables could help to shape attitudes in the wider community.' In short, children can help to instil in adults the new `mindset' on green living. (See Windmills of the mind, by James Woudhuysen.)
Children have also been used in the Department of Health's adverts warning about the dangers of smoking and lung cancer. One ad featured a mother in the terminal stages of lung cancer. Her daughter was shown expressing her anger and grief at the fact that her mum will die shortly as a result of a disease caused by her own smoking. As spiked contributor Dr Michael Fitzpatrick argued, this was another case of the government using children to chastise adults: `This advert is clearly designed to make parents who smoke feel guilty - and to make children of parents who smoke feel angry. Its objective is to use children as an instrument of the campaign to deter adults from smoking.'
`At a time when a wide range of civil liberties are under threat it is alarming that the strategy of using children to police their parents' behaviour - reminiscent of totalitarian regimes - provokes so little public disquiet', wrote Dr Fitzpatrick (see The stigma of smoking, by Dr Michael Fitzpatrick).
And now, the recruitment of children to use their `pester power' in order to publicly `shame' adults has also provoked little controversy. The government seems to be turning to children because it cannot justify its petty moral and authoritarian campaigns on their own terms - instead it hopes that we will change our behaviour and become more green / responsible / better-behaved for the sake of the pleading kids. Also, children, as anyone who has come into contact with them will know, can be sanctimonious and self-righteous. Where adults disagree and argue over what counts as civilised behaviour, and what should be done about allegedly uncivilised behaviour, children tend to lap up fairly uncritically messages about what is right and wrong. The government seems keen to harness children's simplistic views of good and evil in order to whack the adult population over the head.
Using children as spies or educators is the mark of an authoritarian regime. In Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, children are co-opted by the authorities and tend to become the most vociferous promoters of the right way of thinking. In Chapter 9, Winston Smith finds himself surrounded by a huge crowd on the sixth day of `Hate Week': `It was night, and the white faces and the scarlet banners were luridly floodlit. The square was packed with several thousand people, including a block of about a thousand schoolchildren in the uniform of the spies.'
One character, Parsons, `proceeds to boast about the "achievements" of his horrible children': `They had tracked a man down and handed him over to the thought police as a traitor on the sole ground that he was wearing strange-looking shoes and had set fire to a woman's clothes because she wrapped a parcel in a poster of Big Brother. Finally, they had been eavesdropping at their parent's bedroom door with a listening device to see if any thoughtcrime remarks were made. All of these are presented by Parsons as exploits of which he is very proud!'. In Orwell's fictional world, adults become subservient to irresponsible, ill-informed, not-yet-developed, gullible and nasty children. Is New Labour in danger of creating similar kinds of kids in Britain 2007?
We need a more critical attitude to the government's installation of talking CCTV and its recruitment of children as part of its crackdowns on anti-social behaviour. Mike Fagan, community safety co-ordinator for Hastings Statutory Crime and Disorder Partnership, turned down the offer to have talking CCTVs. Why? `We didn't think that talking CCTVs would suit the context of Hastings, the environment here. It was perhaps more appropriate to a larger urban area. I personally don't think that talking CCTVs are a good thing and that they would achieve results in terms of regulating people's behaviour,' he told me.
We could all do with saying no to talking CCTV cameras - whether we live somewhere like Hastings or in `larger urban areas'. Yet while the children's talking CCTV initiative will last for one day only, the day of `switch on' later this year, the political philosophy behind it - that adults are untrustworthy and it is acceptable to get children to tell them off - looks set to stay in place for a lot longer.
Source
FUEL CELL UPDATE
Of Wooden Fuel Cell Cars...
I had no idea that people still built cars out of wood, but apparently Morgan in the UK does. It announced in Geneva that it would offer a hydrogen-fueled, zero-emission version that resembles the Aero 8, which features a wooden-framed body. To quote the Pocket-Lint web site, "It will be a very lightweight car with a fuel cell hybrid powerplant, which will give it a 200-mile range."
On reflection, the British have a heritage of doing some pretty remarkable things with wood, including one of my favorite aircraft of World War II, the all-plywood DeHavilland Mosquito, the fastest fighter-bomber of the war. So, it will be interesting to see how such a seemingly low-tech material performs in concert with such a high-tech propulsion system.
Source
Green colonialists
THE Tory party donor and environmental philanthropist Johan Eliasch has been accused of "green colonialism" after allegedly consigning 1,000 people to poverty in his attempts to preserve the Amazon jungle. The allegations against Eliasch, who last week was touring South America with his friend the Duke of York, come from the inhabitants of a region of the Brazilian rainforest the size of Greater London.
In 2005 the Swedish-born tycoon, who runs the Head sports goods empire, spent a reported 13.7 million pounds of his estimated 361m fortune buying 400,000 acres - about 625 square miles - of jungle from an American-owned timber company with the aim of protecting it from loggers. Eliasch has described the move as "my little bit towards saving the world". As a result of the deal, a lumber mill that employed as many as 1,000 people closed in the town of Itacoatiara in northwest Brazil, increasing hardship in an already economically depressed region.
The closure has pitched Eliasch into a debate about how rich countries can help preserve tropical rainforests while considering the livelihoods of people who live and work in them. Some local environmentalists have accused him of dabbling in "green colonialism". "What he is doing is valid in terms of preservation but you cannot let people go hungry," said Lelio Moreira, who works at the local radio station, Panorama Itacoatiara. "There has to be some kind of help for locals hurt by this. Now, with the lack of jobs, violence is increasing and because fathers cannot afford to look after their families we also have a growing problem with child prostitution."
Joao Manuel Figueira, a municipal employee, added: "The impact of the plant's closure has been harsh. The local shops are feeling the knock-on effects with a drop in sales. We know the environment is important and deforestation is a problem. But knocking all the forest down is one thing. Taking out mature wood is another." Moreira said most residents had no idea who Eliasch was or what his plans were for his purchase. But Eliasch said relations with local government and the wider population since he bought into the region had been "generally positive". He said all the workers he laid off were fully compensated and he planned to re-hire many of them as guards to protect his new wilderness sanctuary. But he admitted that for him, preserving the jungle was "the only option" and took priority over those living there. "The rainforest is more important to me at the moment," said Eliasch, who is the Tories' deputy treasurer. He has also lent the party 2.6m.
He rejected arguments that first world countries, which chopped down their own forests in the drive for industrialisation, had no right to try to prevent Brazilians doing the same. "I'd like to say a move like my purchase is more learning from our mistakes," he said. "People have made mistakes in the western world and [I am] trying to prevent it happening elsewhere."
Eliasch is not the only one caught up in the paradox that by trying to save the rainforest he is harming the people who earn their living there. The Brazilian government says it is living up to its commitments to preserve the forest and points to a steep drop in the rate of deforestation since a peak in 2002. But that effort has hit the economy of many jungle towns hard. Last year Eliasch came up with the idea of buying the whole rainforest to preserve it. The result was a diplomatic incident between Brazil and Britain when the idea was taken up by David Miliband, the environment secretary, who suggested setting up an international trust as the best way to preserve the Amazon
Source
Monday, April 16, 2007
NHS negligence kills again
A mother of four died after a “gross failure” by NHS staff to provide basic medical attention on two separate occasions, an inquest has ruled. Alison Christian, 36, died in agony from a perforated duodenal ulcer after accident and emergency doctors and a nurse answering an out-of-hours phone line failed to detect the symptoms of peritonitis.
Had Ms Christian been correctly examined by the hospital doctor or been referred to a doctor by the out-of-hours service Primecare two days later, she would have survived, the inquest ruled. Instead, she was told to take laxatives.
Mitchell Bower, her partner of 21 years, with whom she had four sons, told the inquest that Ms Christian, of Sheffield, went to the city’s Northern General hospital, complaining of pains in her chest and shoulders, and was told that she had a chest infection. She returned the next day with abdominal pain but her abdomen was not examined, said Christopher Dorries, Coroner for South Yorkshire West. Her condition deteriorated and she called an out-of-hours NHS call centre. Mr Dorries said the outcome of the call should have been a visit by a doctor within the hour.
Ms Christian died after being admitted to hospital the next day. Mr Dorries found that her hospital discharge “without appropriate examination” and the failures of the deputising service “amounted to a gross failure to provide basic medical attention” to a person who obviously needed it. Ms Christian died from “natural causes contributed to by neglect”.
Source
Stop pandering to Muslims
UK government initiatives to 'deal with' younger Muslims only leave them feeling more alienated from political life
Ruth Kelly, the UK secretary of state for communities and local government, has announced yet another scheme to help tackle extremism in Britain's Muslim communities - a 600,000 pound faith unit within the Charity Commission to help `moderate Muslims' strengthen governance and leadership in mosques. Mandarins at her department seem to generate a new project to tackle extremism every few months, each one looking strikingly similar to the last. In July 2005 we had the `Preventing Extremism Together Taskforce'; then in October 2005, the government called for a new imam national advisory council to train religious leaders to engage with younger Muslims. In February this year, it was announced that œ5million will be spent on funding projects in areas around the UK, to...well, engage with young Muslims.
Although these schemes are announced with great fanfare, they seem to vanish soon afterwards, only to be followed by yet another one. Part of the problem is impatience - the government wants quick results and is disappointed when its favoured religious allies are not delivering overnight success in the battle for hearts and minds. There is clearly frustration that mosques are not living up to their promise to deal with their young.
Of course, they are deluding themselves if they believe that `moderate' imams, with their old-fashioned, largely apolitical sermons, will have any greater success just because they speak English. It is precisely the promise of an otherworldly `radical' (albeit nihilistic) vision that attracts young people to Islamic extremism, rather than a strong adherence to Islam itself. The leader of the London bombers, Mohammed Sidique Khan, did not go to his local mosque but to another - the Tablighi Jamaat mosque in West Dewsbury - where he could get his extremist fix. Whilst a lukewarm, anglicised version of Islam, sponsored by the government, might pull in some young people, it may well compound the cynicism of those who see traditional mosque elders as tools for colonial rule.
Even less convincing is the aim of this new unit to get more women into mosques in the hope that they will diffuse radical views. Surveys show that of the regular six to seven per cent of Muslims who express support for acts of terrorism, over half of these are usually women. If the government looked at the website of MPAC (Muslim Public Affairs Committee), the most vocal advocates of female prayer space in mosques, they will see that their views are not exactly simpatico. Some forms of contemporary Islamic feminism are perfectly compatible with radical views. That is certainly not an excuse to hold women back from mosques, just a caution to Ruth Kelly that Muslim girls are not necessarily the meek, mild-mannered types that will do her work for her.
Ultimately, the reliance on `the Muslim community' to manage the identity crisis amongst young Muslims is part of the problem. As long as mainstream political leaders view young Muslims as a troubled group outside of British society - to be outsourced to somebody else - the more they will find young people feel alienated from them. Like most people of their generation, young Muslims are confused about their identity and looking for a political vision to adhere to. Political parties need not fear this if they believe they have a political vision of their own to sell. But lacking confidence in their own ideas (if they have any at all), politicians have come to regard young Muslims as immovable; a group that is `at risk' and needs to be managed by carrots and sticks - give them jobs, give them youth centres, give them Arabic lessons. The message seems to be: `Let's send some nicer ones in to sort out the rotten few.'
Not only does this strategy usually backfire (the `nicer ones' turn out to whine just as much to the government, and struggle to guarantee their own grassroots support), it sends the message to young Muslims that `we can't deal with you'. In the eyes of mainstream politicians, places like West Dewsbury, Beeston and Keighley must seem like Mecca - only Muslims are allowed to enter. No wonder younger Muslims think that politicians are spineless and disinterested. They do not even dare to look them in the eye and tell them they have a better alternative in their own parties. Hysterical mullahs have managed to win some hearts and minds because there wasn't even a contest.
Paradoxically, being at the centre of attention with these endless schemes makes Muslims feel under even more pressure and scrutiny. Add to this the fears over counter-terrorism measures, and there is very little the government can do that will reverse the tide of distrust. Whilst the majority of Muslims will never be driven into the arms of extremists, they will be driven away from political life.
Although it seems counterintuitive, the way to `deal' with young Muslims may well be to stop `dealing' with them. The short-term, obsessive focus on them seems to be precisely the thing that alienates them even further. A long-term focus on politics elsewhere might at least remind them that Islamism is not the only game in town.
Source
British police scam: "Motorists whose cars are stolen are being told they must pay the police at least 105 pounds if they want them to recover their vehicle when it is found and check it for forensic clues. The scheme - being implemented by forces across the country - has been attacked by angry motorists. Only car owners who agree to pay the fee, which in theory is to cover storage, are assured their cars will be "forensicated" - which means dusted down for fingerprints or swabbed for DNA. A police letter approved by the Home Office warns motorists who recover their own vehicles that the cars will not be checked for clues. It states: "[The police force will accept] no further responsibility and will be unable to take further action to identify the person who took it." Opposition MPs this weekend attacked the charges, which often cannot be recovered under car insurance policies, for penalising the victims of car crime. David Davis, the shadow home secretary, said: "Taxpayers already pay twice for policing, through central taxation and council tax. "It's ludicrous to charge them a third time for the police to do their normal job when their cars have been stolen through no fault of their own."
A mother of four died after a “gross failure” by NHS staff to provide basic medical attention on two separate occasions, an inquest has ruled. Alison Christian, 36, died in agony from a perforated duodenal ulcer after accident and emergency doctors and a nurse answering an out-of-hours phone line failed to detect the symptoms of peritonitis.
Had Ms Christian been correctly examined by the hospital doctor or been referred to a doctor by the out-of-hours service Primecare two days later, she would have survived, the inquest ruled. Instead, she was told to take laxatives.
Mitchell Bower, her partner of 21 years, with whom she had four sons, told the inquest that Ms Christian, of Sheffield, went to the city’s Northern General hospital, complaining of pains in her chest and shoulders, and was told that she had a chest infection. She returned the next day with abdominal pain but her abdomen was not examined, said Christopher Dorries, Coroner for South Yorkshire West. Her condition deteriorated and she called an out-of-hours NHS call centre. Mr Dorries said the outcome of the call should have been a visit by a doctor within the hour.
Ms Christian died after being admitted to hospital the next day. Mr Dorries found that her hospital discharge “without appropriate examination” and the failures of the deputising service “amounted to a gross failure to provide basic medical attention” to a person who obviously needed it. Ms Christian died from “natural causes contributed to by neglect”.
Source
Stop pandering to Muslims
UK government initiatives to 'deal with' younger Muslims only leave them feeling more alienated from political life
Ruth Kelly, the UK secretary of state for communities and local government, has announced yet another scheme to help tackle extremism in Britain's Muslim communities - a 600,000 pound faith unit within the Charity Commission to help `moderate Muslims' strengthen governance and leadership in mosques. Mandarins at her department seem to generate a new project to tackle extremism every few months, each one looking strikingly similar to the last. In July 2005 we had the `Preventing Extremism Together Taskforce'; then in October 2005, the government called for a new imam national advisory council to train religious leaders to engage with younger Muslims. In February this year, it was announced that œ5million will be spent on funding projects in areas around the UK, to...well, engage with young Muslims.
Although these schemes are announced with great fanfare, they seem to vanish soon afterwards, only to be followed by yet another one. Part of the problem is impatience - the government wants quick results and is disappointed when its favoured religious allies are not delivering overnight success in the battle for hearts and minds. There is clearly frustration that mosques are not living up to their promise to deal with their young.
Of course, they are deluding themselves if they believe that `moderate' imams, with their old-fashioned, largely apolitical sermons, will have any greater success just because they speak English. It is precisely the promise of an otherworldly `radical' (albeit nihilistic) vision that attracts young people to Islamic extremism, rather than a strong adherence to Islam itself. The leader of the London bombers, Mohammed Sidique Khan, did not go to his local mosque but to another - the Tablighi Jamaat mosque in West Dewsbury - where he could get his extremist fix. Whilst a lukewarm, anglicised version of Islam, sponsored by the government, might pull in some young people, it may well compound the cynicism of those who see traditional mosque elders as tools for colonial rule.
Even less convincing is the aim of this new unit to get more women into mosques in the hope that they will diffuse radical views. Surveys show that of the regular six to seven per cent of Muslims who express support for acts of terrorism, over half of these are usually women. If the government looked at the website of MPAC (Muslim Public Affairs Committee), the most vocal advocates of female prayer space in mosques, they will see that their views are not exactly simpatico. Some forms of contemporary Islamic feminism are perfectly compatible with radical views. That is certainly not an excuse to hold women back from mosques, just a caution to Ruth Kelly that Muslim girls are not necessarily the meek, mild-mannered types that will do her work for her.
Ultimately, the reliance on `the Muslim community' to manage the identity crisis amongst young Muslims is part of the problem. As long as mainstream political leaders view young Muslims as a troubled group outside of British society - to be outsourced to somebody else - the more they will find young people feel alienated from them. Like most people of their generation, young Muslims are confused about their identity and looking for a political vision to adhere to. Political parties need not fear this if they believe they have a political vision of their own to sell. But lacking confidence in their own ideas (if they have any at all), politicians have come to regard young Muslims as immovable; a group that is `at risk' and needs to be managed by carrots and sticks - give them jobs, give them youth centres, give them Arabic lessons. The message seems to be: `Let's send some nicer ones in to sort out the rotten few.'
Not only does this strategy usually backfire (the `nicer ones' turn out to whine just as much to the government, and struggle to guarantee their own grassroots support), it sends the message to young Muslims that `we can't deal with you'. In the eyes of mainstream politicians, places like West Dewsbury, Beeston and Keighley must seem like Mecca - only Muslims are allowed to enter. No wonder younger Muslims think that politicians are spineless and disinterested. They do not even dare to look them in the eye and tell them they have a better alternative in their own parties. Hysterical mullahs have managed to win some hearts and minds because there wasn't even a contest.
Paradoxically, being at the centre of attention with these endless schemes makes Muslims feel under even more pressure and scrutiny. Add to this the fears over counter-terrorism measures, and there is very little the government can do that will reverse the tide of distrust. Whilst the majority of Muslims will never be driven into the arms of extremists, they will be driven away from political life.
Although it seems counterintuitive, the way to `deal' with young Muslims may well be to stop `dealing' with them. The short-term, obsessive focus on them seems to be precisely the thing that alienates them even further. A long-term focus on politics elsewhere might at least remind them that Islamism is not the only game in town.
Source
British police scam: "Motorists whose cars are stolen are being told they must pay the police at least 105 pounds if they want them to recover their vehicle when it is found and check it for forensic clues. The scheme - being implemented by forces across the country - has been attacked by angry motorists. Only car owners who agree to pay the fee, which in theory is to cover storage, are assured their cars will be "forensicated" - which means dusted down for fingerprints or swabbed for DNA. A police letter approved by the Home Office warns motorists who recover their own vehicles that the cars will not be checked for clues. It states: "[The police force will accept] no further responsibility and will be unable to take further action to identify the person who took it." Opposition MPs this weekend attacked the charges, which often cannot be recovered under car insurance policies, for penalising the victims of car crime. David Davis, the shadow home secretary, said: "Taxpayers already pay twice for policing, through central taxation and council tax. "It's ludicrous to charge them a third time for the police to do their normal job when their cars have been stolen through no fault of their own."
Sunday, April 15, 2007
'Fat' gene found by scientists
A GENE that contributes to obesity has been identified for the first time, promising to explain why some people easily put on weight while others with similar lifestyles stay slim. People who inherit one version of the gene rather than another are 70 per cent more likely to be obese, British scientists have discovered. One in six people has the most vulnerable genetic make-up and weighs an average 3kg more than those with the lowest risk. They also have 15 per cent more body fat.
The findings provide the first robust link between a common gene and obesity, and could eventually lead to new ways of tackling one of the most significant causes of ill health in the developed world. Obesity is a main cause of heart disease, cancer and type 2 diabetes. [Rubbish!]
If the biological function of the gene, known as FTO, can now be understood, it could become possible to design drugs that manipulate it to help people to control their weight. "Even though we have yet to fully understand the role played by the FTO gene in obesity, our findings are a source of great excitement," Mark McCarthy, of Britain's University of Oxford, who led the research, said. "By identifying this genetic link it should be possible to improve our understanding of why some people are more obese, with all the associated implications such as increased risk of diabetes and heart disease. New insights will hopefully pave the way for us to explore novel ways of treating this condition."
While it has long been understood from family studies that obesity is heavily influenced by genetics, scientists have struggled to pin down individual genes that are involved. A handful of serious genetic mutations that cause rare obesity disorders such as Prader-Willi Syndrome have been found, but the search for common genes that affect an ordinary person's risk of becoming obese or overweight has remained elusive.
The effect of FTO emerged from a key study of the genetic origins of disease funded by the Wellcome Trust known as the Case Control Consortium, in which 2,000 people with type 2 diabetes had their genomes compared to 3,000 healthy controls. Scientists from Oxford and the University of Exeter first found that certain versions of the FTO gene were more common among people with type 2 diabetes, but that the effect disappeared when the data were adjusted for obesity. This led them to wonder whether FTO really influenced obesity instead, and they followed up their theory in a further 37,000 people.
FTO comes in two varieties, and everyone inherits two copies of the gene. The team found that those who inherit two copies of one variant - 16 per cent of white Europeans - were 70 per cent more likely to be obese than those who inherited two copies of the other variant. The 50 per cent of subjects who inherited one copy of each FTO variant had a 30 per cent higher risk of obesity. Those in the highest risk group weighed an average of 3kg more and those at medium risk were an average of 1.2kg heavier. In each case the extra weight was entirely accounted for by more body fat, not greater muscle or extra height. The results, published in the journal Science, apply to men and women, and to children as young as 7.
FTO will not be the only gene that influences obesity, and inheriting a particular variant will not necessarily make anyone fat. "This is not a gene for obesity, it is a gene that contributes to risk," Professor McCarthy said. The research involved too many people to control for exercise and diet, so it is not yet known whether FTO affects how much people eat or how active they are. But it may explain how people with apparently similar lifestyles differ in propensity to put on weight. Independent experts called the discovery highly significant. Susan Jebb, of the MRC Human Nutrition Unit, said: "This research provides clear evidence of a biological mechanism which makes some people more susceptible to gaining weight in a world where food is plentiful and sedentary lifestyles the norm."
Source
UK: Govgoons to raid homes over parking tickets?: "The UK parliament is considering legislation that would authorize bailiffs to break into the homes of motorists accused of not paying parking tickets. Under legislation currently making its way through the House of Commons, bailiffs would seize items out of the home in order to pay off the amount owed in tickets, plus hefty fees. Any homeowner that attempting to stop the bailiff would face up to a year in prison."
A GENE that contributes to obesity has been identified for the first time, promising to explain why some people easily put on weight while others with similar lifestyles stay slim. People who inherit one version of the gene rather than another are 70 per cent more likely to be obese, British scientists have discovered. One in six people has the most vulnerable genetic make-up and weighs an average 3kg more than those with the lowest risk. They also have 15 per cent more body fat.
The findings provide the first robust link between a common gene and obesity, and could eventually lead to new ways of tackling one of the most significant causes of ill health in the developed world. Obesity is a main cause of heart disease, cancer and type 2 diabetes. [Rubbish!]
If the biological function of the gene, known as FTO, can now be understood, it could become possible to design drugs that manipulate it to help people to control their weight. "Even though we have yet to fully understand the role played by the FTO gene in obesity, our findings are a source of great excitement," Mark McCarthy, of Britain's University of Oxford, who led the research, said. "By identifying this genetic link it should be possible to improve our understanding of why some people are more obese, with all the associated implications such as increased risk of diabetes and heart disease. New insights will hopefully pave the way for us to explore novel ways of treating this condition."
While it has long been understood from family studies that obesity is heavily influenced by genetics, scientists have struggled to pin down individual genes that are involved. A handful of serious genetic mutations that cause rare obesity disorders such as Prader-Willi Syndrome have been found, but the search for common genes that affect an ordinary person's risk of becoming obese or overweight has remained elusive.
The effect of FTO emerged from a key study of the genetic origins of disease funded by the Wellcome Trust known as the Case Control Consortium, in which 2,000 people with type 2 diabetes had their genomes compared to 3,000 healthy controls. Scientists from Oxford and the University of Exeter first found that certain versions of the FTO gene were more common among people with type 2 diabetes, but that the effect disappeared when the data were adjusted for obesity. This led them to wonder whether FTO really influenced obesity instead, and they followed up their theory in a further 37,000 people.
FTO comes in two varieties, and everyone inherits two copies of the gene. The team found that those who inherit two copies of one variant - 16 per cent of white Europeans - were 70 per cent more likely to be obese than those who inherited two copies of the other variant. The 50 per cent of subjects who inherited one copy of each FTO variant had a 30 per cent higher risk of obesity. Those in the highest risk group weighed an average of 3kg more and those at medium risk were an average of 1.2kg heavier. In each case the extra weight was entirely accounted for by more body fat, not greater muscle or extra height. The results, published in the journal Science, apply to men and women, and to children as young as 7.
FTO will not be the only gene that influences obesity, and inheriting a particular variant will not necessarily make anyone fat. "This is not a gene for obesity, it is a gene that contributes to risk," Professor McCarthy said. The research involved too many people to control for exercise and diet, so it is not yet known whether FTO affects how much people eat or how active they are. But it may explain how people with apparently similar lifestyles differ in propensity to put on weight. Independent experts called the discovery highly significant. Susan Jebb, of the MRC Human Nutrition Unit, said: "This research provides clear evidence of a biological mechanism which makes some people more susceptible to gaining weight in a world where food is plentiful and sedentary lifestyles the norm."
Source
UK: Govgoons to raid homes over parking tickets?: "The UK parliament is considering legislation that would authorize bailiffs to break into the homes of motorists accused of not paying parking tickets. Under legislation currently making its way through the House of Commons, bailiffs would seize items out of the home in order to pay off the amount owed in tickets, plus hefty fees. Any homeowner that attempting to stop the bailiff would face up to a year in prison."
Saturday, April 14, 2007
NASTY BRITISH SCHOOL
Run by a tinpot Hitler with all the flexibility of a brick
A school has banned a grade A pupil from its end-of-year prom because her parents would not force her to attend extra revision classes. Kayleigh Baker, 16, a prefect at Hurworth School, in the Prime Minister's Sedgefield constituency, is a model student with a 100 per cent attendance record and a series of outstanding annual reports. Last year, she achieved A grades in two GCSE examinations that she had sat a year early and is expected to achieve top marks in nine subjects this summer.
Her invitation to next month's prom has been withrawn after a dispute between her parents and the school's senior management about its demand that Year 11 pupils should attend compulsory after-school revision sessions. The annual event, which will be held in an 18th century country manor house, is the highlight of the school's social calendar and for many pupils represents the climax of their school career.
Dean Judson, the head teacher, has also barred Kayleigh from the netball team and from going on any school trips. He allowed her to attend a recent achievement ceremony, at which she collected five awards.
Kay and Ellis Baker say that their daughter is a talented and diligent student who does not need the extra burden of two weekly, hour-long revision lessons at the end of the school day. They believe that they have the backing of the Department for Education and Skills, which told them in a letter: "All study support (out of school hours) activities are entirely voluntary and there should be no compulsion on young people to attend."
One of Hurworth's governors has resigned in protest at its "severe and extremely punitive" treatment of Kayleigh, who hopes to become a lawyer, but yesterday the school, near Darlington, Co Durham, showed no sign of backing down. Eamonn Farrar, its chief executive, said: "We know what's best for the children and that is why we make them go to these lessons." If one pupil were allowed to miss the sessions, others would soon follow suit, he said. "In life, if you don't do something you are asked to, then you can't expect anything in return. Children who don't conform to the school rules cannot expect to go to the school prom."
The 636-pupil school, for children aged 11-16, has won praise from Ofsted inspectors for its "very good leadership and teaching", which has led to a significant recent improvement in its GCSE results. The proportion of pupils achieving five or more A*-C grades rose from 39 per cent in 1998 to 93 per cent last year. Mr Farrar denied that the introduction of compulsory after-school lessons was prompted by an unhealthy obsession with school performance tables. "If I said I run these classes because of the league tables, that would be immoral. We don't play the league table game - we just celebrate when we top them."
Kayleigh, described in a recent school report as "an inspiration to others with impeccable behaviour and a totally focused attitude", said that she was deeply disappointed by the school's decision. Her dress, handmade for her in China last year, was inspired by the gown worn by Kate Hudson in the Hollywood film How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days. Kayleigh had a companion to go with and said that she had been "looking forward to the prom all year". Boys wear black tie and the girls full-length gowns, and many will be travelling to the Hardwick Hall Hotel, near Sedgefield, by limousine. "Everybody has been talking about it, getting excited. My friends are talking about their dresses and asking each other where they got their shoes from, and I can't join in," she said. "I've been excluded from everything fun at school, everything that I enjoy. It's cruel and I feel like I'm being punished when I haven't done anything wrong."
Kayleigh said that, by passing her religious studies GCSE a year early, she already had five free periods in her timeta-ble that were allocated for revision. As a result, she did not need the after-school sessions. Her father, a health and safety consultant, said: "All children that age need balance. Kayleigh is studious and conscientious. We made a decision about her welfare and the school has punished her for it." Mrs Baker said that her daughter had been so upset that she had lost a stone in weight.
Source
BRITISH BAN ON EXPENSIVE DRUG OVERTURNED
Health regulators have overturned a ban on two drugs that could benefit patients suffering from rare and life-threatening brain cancers. The revised guidance from the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) means that up to 800 patients a year will benefit from receiving the drugs, Temodal and Gliadel, on the NHS. Doctors and campaigners have been battling for two years to get NICE to reverse its decision to bar brain specialists from prescribing the drugs. The original guidance in 2005 rejected both therapies on the basis of cost effectiveness.
Temodal was originally approved for newly diagnosed cases of brain cancer in 2001 but NICE refused to approve its use for advanced cases of the disease despite compelling evidence from trials. The decision led to anger as the drug, a tablet that patients take as oral chemotherapy, was invented by British scientists funded by Cancer Research UK, yet neurologists in this country were unable to prescribe it to patients.
Gliadel is administered in a wafer that is left at the site where a brain tumour has been removed by surgery. Trials show that the drug is highly effective at mopping up remaining cancer cells and preventing the disease recurring.
Yesterday cancer charities called on health authorities to make the drugs available immediately and not wait until the decision comes into force in June. Ella Pybus, speaking on behalf of a consortium of charities, said: "Everyone is relieved that NICE has had this change of heart. There was solid evidence that these drugs work. "Now we are looking for primary care trusts to give these drugs to all those who qualify for treatment. It will be a cruel blow if treatments for one of the most lethal of all cancers were further delayed because of lack of sufficient funding."
Source
Britain building more jails for illegals
Security concerns about the kind of immigration centre which could come to RAF Coltishall have risen following news of spiralling escape figures at a similar complex in Cambridgeshire. A government decision on whether to locate an immigration removal centre at the now closed RAF site is still awaited. But the anxieties of local people have been fuelled by new figures which show that the Oakington centre had a major rise in attempted and actual escapes.
There were 19 escapes and seven attempts last year, compared to four of each in 2005. Last month, two detainees broke out after climbing over a fence, just weeks after the escape of four other detainees.
District councillor Alan Mallett said: "That sort of thing is obviously going to be of considerable concern to people in the village. The lack of security has always been a major concern should RAF Coltishall become an immigration centre." However, he added that an escapee would not "hang about" in the area. Coltishall parish council chairman John Harding added: "Security has always been the main concern of the people living in the area of the three parishes. It's a worrying trend for anybody who might be living nearby."
RAF Coltishall closed last year after an illustrious 60-year history stretching back to the second world war. Senior members of the Immigration and Nationality Directorate (IND), the arm of the Home Office responsible for immigration and asylum, travelled to Norfolk last month to answer questions from councillors, MPs and other parties about possible plans for a holding centre, with a final decision not expected until the end of May.
A Home Office spokesman last night said any centre at Coltishall would have "prison standard" perimeter fencing which was higher than that at Oakington, where "procedural and physical security improvements" had been implemented to reduce the number of escapes.
Source
Britain running around in circles again: "Trains and tracks could be reunited and put under public control for the first time since privatisation, under plans to make Scotland a test case for the rest of the rail industry, The Times has learnt. Network Rail, the not-for-profit company created by the Government to run Britain's tracks, has held secret talks with Scottish Labour politicians about taking control of trains north of the Border. The move would reverse the fragmentation of the industry after British Rail was broken up and sold off in the mid1990s."
Run by a tinpot Hitler with all the flexibility of a brick
A school has banned a grade A pupil from its end-of-year prom because her parents would not force her to attend extra revision classes. Kayleigh Baker, 16, a prefect at Hurworth School, in the Prime Minister's Sedgefield constituency, is a model student with a 100 per cent attendance record and a series of outstanding annual reports. Last year, she achieved A grades in two GCSE examinations that she had sat a year early and is expected to achieve top marks in nine subjects this summer.
Her invitation to next month's prom has been withrawn after a dispute between her parents and the school's senior management about its demand that Year 11 pupils should attend compulsory after-school revision sessions. The annual event, which will be held in an 18th century country manor house, is the highlight of the school's social calendar and for many pupils represents the climax of their school career.
Dean Judson, the head teacher, has also barred Kayleigh from the netball team and from going on any school trips. He allowed her to attend a recent achievement ceremony, at which she collected five awards.
Kay and Ellis Baker say that their daughter is a talented and diligent student who does not need the extra burden of two weekly, hour-long revision lessons at the end of the school day. They believe that they have the backing of the Department for Education and Skills, which told them in a letter: "All study support (out of school hours) activities are entirely voluntary and there should be no compulsion on young people to attend."
One of Hurworth's governors has resigned in protest at its "severe and extremely punitive" treatment of Kayleigh, who hopes to become a lawyer, but yesterday the school, near Darlington, Co Durham, showed no sign of backing down. Eamonn Farrar, its chief executive, said: "We know what's best for the children and that is why we make them go to these lessons." If one pupil were allowed to miss the sessions, others would soon follow suit, he said. "In life, if you don't do something you are asked to, then you can't expect anything in return. Children who don't conform to the school rules cannot expect to go to the school prom."
The 636-pupil school, for children aged 11-16, has won praise from Ofsted inspectors for its "very good leadership and teaching", which has led to a significant recent improvement in its GCSE results. The proportion of pupils achieving five or more A*-C grades rose from 39 per cent in 1998 to 93 per cent last year. Mr Farrar denied that the introduction of compulsory after-school lessons was prompted by an unhealthy obsession with school performance tables. "If I said I run these classes because of the league tables, that would be immoral. We don't play the league table game - we just celebrate when we top them."
Kayleigh, described in a recent school report as "an inspiration to others with impeccable behaviour and a totally focused attitude", said that she was deeply disappointed by the school's decision. Her dress, handmade for her in China last year, was inspired by the gown worn by Kate Hudson in the Hollywood film How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days. Kayleigh had a companion to go with and said that she had been "looking forward to the prom all year". Boys wear black tie and the girls full-length gowns, and many will be travelling to the Hardwick Hall Hotel, near Sedgefield, by limousine. "Everybody has been talking about it, getting excited. My friends are talking about their dresses and asking each other where they got their shoes from, and I can't join in," she said. "I've been excluded from everything fun at school, everything that I enjoy. It's cruel and I feel like I'm being punished when I haven't done anything wrong."
Kayleigh said that, by passing her religious studies GCSE a year early, she already had five free periods in her timeta-ble that were allocated for revision. As a result, she did not need the after-school sessions. Her father, a health and safety consultant, said: "All children that age need balance. Kayleigh is studious and conscientious. We made a decision about her welfare and the school has punished her for it." Mrs Baker said that her daughter had been so upset that she had lost a stone in weight.
Source
BRITISH BAN ON EXPENSIVE DRUG OVERTURNED
Health regulators have overturned a ban on two drugs that could benefit patients suffering from rare and life-threatening brain cancers. The revised guidance from the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) means that up to 800 patients a year will benefit from receiving the drugs, Temodal and Gliadel, on the NHS. Doctors and campaigners have been battling for two years to get NICE to reverse its decision to bar brain specialists from prescribing the drugs. The original guidance in 2005 rejected both therapies on the basis of cost effectiveness.
Temodal was originally approved for newly diagnosed cases of brain cancer in 2001 but NICE refused to approve its use for advanced cases of the disease despite compelling evidence from trials. The decision led to anger as the drug, a tablet that patients take as oral chemotherapy, was invented by British scientists funded by Cancer Research UK, yet neurologists in this country were unable to prescribe it to patients.
Gliadel is administered in a wafer that is left at the site where a brain tumour has been removed by surgery. Trials show that the drug is highly effective at mopping up remaining cancer cells and preventing the disease recurring.
Yesterday cancer charities called on health authorities to make the drugs available immediately and not wait until the decision comes into force in June. Ella Pybus, speaking on behalf of a consortium of charities, said: "Everyone is relieved that NICE has had this change of heart. There was solid evidence that these drugs work. "Now we are looking for primary care trusts to give these drugs to all those who qualify for treatment. It will be a cruel blow if treatments for one of the most lethal of all cancers were further delayed because of lack of sufficient funding."
Source
Britain building more jails for illegals
Security concerns about the kind of immigration centre which could come to RAF Coltishall have risen following news of spiralling escape figures at a similar complex in Cambridgeshire. A government decision on whether to locate an immigration removal centre at the now closed RAF site is still awaited. But the anxieties of local people have been fuelled by new figures which show that the Oakington centre had a major rise in attempted and actual escapes.
There were 19 escapes and seven attempts last year, compared to four of each in 2005. Last month, two detainees broke out after climbing over a fence, just weeks after the escape of four other detainees.
District councillor Alan Mallett said: "That sort of thing is obviously going to be of considerable concern to people in the village. The lack of security has always been a major concern should RAF Coltishall become an immigration centre." However, he added that an escapee would not "hang about" in the area. Coltishall parish council chairman John Harding added: "Security has always been the main concern of the people living in the area of the three parishes. It's a worrying trend for anybody who might be living nearby."
RAF Coltishall closed last year after an illustrious 60-year history stretching back to the second world war. Senior members of the Immigration and Nationality Directorate (IND), the arm of the Home Office responsible for immigration and asylum, travelled to Norfolk last month to answer questions from councillors, MPs and other parties about possible plans for a holding centre, with a final decision not expected until the end of May.
A Home Office spokesman last night said any centre at Coltishall would have "prison standard" perimeter fencing which was higher than that at Oakington, where "procedural and physical security improvements" had been implemented to reduce the number of escapes.
Source
Britain running around in circles again: "Trains and tracks could be reunited and put under public control for the first time since privatisation, under plans to make Scotland a test case for the rest of the rail industry, The Times has learnt. Network Rail, the not-for-profit company created by the Government to run Britain's tracks, has held secret talks with Scottish Labour politicians about taking control of trains north of the Border. The move would reverse the fragmentation of the industry after British Rail was broken up and sold off in the mid1990s."
Friday, April 13, 2007
The Prime Minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is a Racist!
Or he would be if he were a conservative. Conservatives are not allowed to notice any differences between blacks and whites:
British hospital banned hot cross buns to avoid offending non-Christians
Hospital staff claim they were banned from handing out hot cross buns this Easter in case they upset non-Christians. The decision disappointed patients at Poole Hospital in Dorset and angered catering staff. In an email to their local paper, sent on Good Friday, catering staff said: 'We the kitchen staff of Poole Hospital were disgusted to find that the patients were not getting hot cross buns this morning. "The manager of the catering department said he was worried about the ethnic minorities that work here." The workers, who did not want to be named, said they had been inundated with calls from nurses on the wards asking why there were no buns this year.
Eventually hospital bosses relented and they were distributed on Easter Monday. A spokesman for Poole Hospital NHS Trust denied, however, that the absence of hot cross buns on Good Friday was anything to do with political correctness. She claimed: "We do apologise to patients who missed out on their hot cross buns on Good Friday. "This was due to an oversight by the catering manager who forgot to order them in time. It was nothing to do with religious beliefs. "The buns were handed out on Easter Monday instead."
Hot cross buns have been eaten on Good Friday for centuries. They are believed by some historians to pre- date Christianity, although they were not called "hot cross buns" until the late 18th century. They should contain no eggs or dairy products so those who are observing Lent in the traditional way are able to eat them.
This is not the first time they have been the source of controversy. After the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century the English monarchy saw the buns as a symbol of Catholicism because they were baked from the consecrated dough used to make communion wafers. But an attempt to ban them failed because they were so popular. Queen Elizabeth I eventually passed a law permitting bakeries to sell them, but only at Easter and Christmas.
Representatives of other religions in the Poole area did not see any problem with serving the buns in hospital. Rabbi Neil Amswych from the Bournemouth Reform Synagogue said: "I don't eat hot cross buns for two reasons. "One is that it is a Christian custom and the second reason is that I am on a diet. "But I don't see why they shouldn't be available. After all, we're in a Christian country and the state religion is Christianity. "They shouldn't be force-fed, but there is no reason why they shouldn't be available. "Perhaps they should offer other ethnic foods - that might be a nice gesture. They could offer latkes for the festival of Chanukah, which is in December. They are oily potato pancakes and very nice."
There have been many examples of official bodies attempting to remove the religious message from Christian festivals in the name of political correctness. Birmingham Council notoriously called its festive celebrations "Winterval" while Luton advertised its Christmas lights as "luminos". Christmas cards sent out by public bodies have, almost without exception, been stripped of any Christian references. Last year's Christmas stamps bore no trace of the Bible story.
Source
More on the British experience of immigrants
Traffic on the northbound M1 was forced to a halt on Easter Monday after all lanes were blocked by a gang of men armed with baseball bats, bottles and knives who attacked two people in another car, police said yesterday. Motorists watched as four cars that had been travelling in a convoy stopped across the northbound motorway near junction 15 in Northamptonshire, blocking it completely.
Up to 15 men got out and milled around on the road. Four or five of them descended on a Ford Focus they had forced to stop and then attacked the car, the driver and a front-seat passenger. Northamptonshire Police said that they believed that the attack, which took place at about 1.15pm, must have been planned, although the occupants of the Focus told officers that it was unprovoked and they had no idea why they had been singled out. The police are trying to discover if there was an earlier incident before the attack that could have provoked road rage, and are studying closed-circuit television footage from the motorway. A spokesman for Northamptonshire Police said that it was unlikely the attack had not been planned. "We are looking to see if there had been some sort of road-rage incident before this particular incident took place," he said.
The four Asian men in the Focus were travelling north when they noticed that they were being followed by a lime-green Rover 200. They were flashed and pelted with bottles, which bounced off the car, before the Rover cut them up and forced them to stop. The hard shoulder and the roadway itself were then blocked by three other vehicles - a black Audi A3, a black Toyota Prius and possibly a red Audi A3. A crowd of black men, aged between 20 and 30, and wearing black clothing, gold chains and bracelets, spilt on to the road as the attack began.
The driver and his passengers were not badly hurt and the attackers, who are thought to have been driving from London, got back into their cars and sped away.
Northamptonshire Police alerted other forces farther along the M1 but the convoy was not spotted again. Officers were examining film yesterday from motorway cameras and were carrying out checks on registration numbers yesterday. Northamptonshire Police said that other similar incidents may have happened elsewhere on the motorway.
Source
APPALLING BRITISH IDIOCY
Schools should not “over discipline” persistently unruly pupils for fear of alienating them and should instead hand out praise five times more often than punishments, the Government has said. New guidance on school discipline published yesterday cautions teachers against repeatedly praising only “the same good pupils”, suggesting that rewards also be given to persistent miscreants who show an improvement in behaviour, however small. It cites research recommending a “rewards/sanctions ratio of at least 5:1”. Rewards might include “good news” postcards sent home, “special privileges” or “prizes”. “Striking the right balance between rewarding pupils with consistently good behaviour and those achieving substantial improvement in their behaviour is important. This can help improve relations with parents who have become tired of receiving letters and phone calls when things go wrong,” the guidance states.
It also advises teachers to take account of pupils’ race and culture when telling them off, suggesting that they go easy on those insubordinate youngsters for whom being “loud” or “overfamiliar” may be a cultural norm or “social style”. Teachers should understand the importance of showing respect to children from racial or religious backgrounds for whom public humiliation is seen as particularly shameful. In these cases, staff should not use language that might humiliate youngsters in front of their friends.
In other areas the guidance advocates a tougher approach, encouraging teachers to give Saturday and after-school detention and to punish pupils who make false allegations against teachers. It has been published to accompany new legal powers enabling teachers to use “reasonable force” to restrain violent children, confiscate mobile phones and punish pupils for poor behaviour on their way to and from school.
But critics described the guidance as “soft”, stating that most teachers already knew how to use positive reinforcement techniques. The document coincided yesterday with a threat of strikes by the National Union of Teachers unless schools speed up the process for expelling violent or abusive pupils.
David Willetts, the Shadow Education Secretary, said that the new guidance could be resented by pupils if it implied that bad behaviour brought rewards. He said that if school children could see badly behaved pupils being praised “then the school’s policy would lose all credibility”.
Alan Smithers, Professor of Education at the University of Buckingham, said the move could encourage perverse behaviour. “Children and parents will be quick to pick up on false praise. That simply devalues the use of encouraging words. The key thing is that it has to be honest feedback. As a soft approach it won’t work because children and their parents will soon pick up that it’s false. “If you reward the children who have been poorly behaved for behaving well you might actually be getting children who have been perfectly happy behaving well to behave badly in order to pick up the rewards.”
Robert Whelan, deputy director of the thinktank Civitas, said: “The idea that teachers have to take account of a child’s ethnicity when disciplining them is racist. It’s telling teachers they have to treat children differently according to their skin colour.”
Source
Or he would be if he were a conservative. Conservatives are not allowed to notice any differences between blacks and whites:
"Tony Blair yesterday claimed the spate of knife and gun murders in London was not being caused by poverty, but a distinctive black culture. His remarks angered community leaders, who accused him of ignorance and failing to provide support for black-led efforts to tackle the problem. One accused him of misunderstanding the advice he had been given on the issue at a Downing Street summit.
Black community leaders reacted after Mr Blair said the recent violence should not be treated as part of a general crime wave, but as specific to black youth. He said people had to drop their political correctness and recognise that the violence would not be stopped "by pretending it is not young black kids doing it". It needed to be addressed by a tailored counter-attack in the same way as football hooliganism was reined in by producing measures aimed at the specific problem, rather than general lawlessness.
Mr Blair's remarks are at odds with those of the Home Office minister Lady Scotland, who told the home affairs select committee last month that the disproportionate number of black youths in the criminal justice system was a function of their disproportionate poverty, and not to do with a distinctive black culture.....
Source
British hospital banned hot cross buns to avoid offending non-Christians
Hospital staff claim they were banned from handing out hot cross buns this Easter in case they upset non-Christians. The decision disappointed patients at Poole Hospital in Dorset and angered catering staff. In an email to their local paper, sent on Good Friday, catering staff said: 'We the kitchen staff of Poole Hospital were disgusted to find that the patients were not getting hot cross buns this morning. "The manager of the catering department said he was worried about the ethnic minorities that work here." The workers, who did not want to be named, said they had been inundated with calls from nurses on the wards asking why there were no buns this year.
Eventually hospital bosses relented and they were distributed on Easter Monday. A spokesman for Poole Hospital NHS Trust denied, however, that the absence of hot cross buns on Good Friday was anything to do with political correctness. She claimed: "We do apologise to patients who missed out on their hot cross buns on Good Friday. "This was due to an oversight by the catering manager who forgot to order them in time. It was nothing to do with religious beliefs. "The buns were handed out on Easter Monday instead."
Hot cross buns have been eaten on Good Friday for centuries. They are believed by some historians to pre- date Christianity, although they were not called "hot cross buns" until the late 18th century. They should contain no eggs or dairy products so those who are observing Lent in the traditional way are able to eat them.
This is not the first time they have been the source of controversy. After the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century the English monarchy saw the buns as a symbol of Catholicism because they were baked from the consecrated dough used to make communion wafers. But an attempt to ban them failed because they were so popular. Queen Elizabeth I eventually passed a law permitting bakeries to sell them, but only at Easter and Christmas.
Representatives of other religions in the Poole area did not see any problem with serving the buns in hospital. Rabbi Neil Amswych from the Bournemouth Reform Synagogue said: "I don't eat hot cross buns for two reasons. "One is that it is a Christian custom and the second reason is that I am on a diet. "But I don't see why they shouldn't be available. After all, we're in a Christian country and the state religion is Christianity. "They shouldn't be force-fed, but there is no reason why they shouldn't be available. "Perhaps they should offer other ethnic foods - that might be a nice gesture. They could offer latkes for the festival of Chanukah, which is in December. They are oily potato pancakes and very nice."
There have been many examples of official bodies attempting to remove the religious message from Christian festivals in the name of political correctness. Birmingham Council notoriously called its festive celebrations "Winterval" while Luton advertised its Christmas lights as "luminos". Christmas cards sent out by public bodies have, almost without exception, been stripped of any Christian references. Last year's Christmas stamps bore no trace of the Bible story.
Source
More on the British experience of immigrants
Traffic on the northbound M1 was forced to a halt on Easter Monday after all lanes were blocked by a gang of men armed with baseball bats, bottles and knives who attacked two people in another car, police said yesterday. Motorists watched as four cars that had been travelling in a convoy stopped across the northbound motorway near junction 15 in Northamptonshire, blocking it completely.
Up to 15 men got out and milled around on the road. Four or five of them descended on a Ford Focus they had forced to stop and then attacked the car, the driver and a front-seat passenger. Northamptonshire Police said that they believed that the attack, which took place at about 1.15pm, must have been planned, although the occupants of the Focus told officers that it was unprovoked and they had no idea why they had been singled out. The police are trying to discover if there was an earlier incident before the attack that could have provoked road rage, and are studying closed-circuit television footage from the motorway. A spokesman for Northamptonshire Police said that it was unlikely the attack had not been planned. "We are looking to see if there had been some sort of road-rage incident before this particular incident took place," he said.
The four Asian men in the Focus were travelling north when they noticed that they were being followed by a lime-green Rover 200. They were flashed and pelted with bottles, which bounced off the car, before the Rover cut them up and forced them to stop. The hard shoulder and the roadway itself were then blocked by three other vehicles - a black Audi A3, a black Toyota Prius and possibly a red Audi A3. A crowd of black men, aged between 20 and 30, and wearing black clothing, gold chains and bracelets, spilt on to the road as the attack began.
The driver and his passengers were not badly hurt and the attackers, who are thought to have been driving from London, got back into their cars and sped away.
Northamptonshire Police alerted other forces farther along the M1 but the convoy was not spotted again. Officers were examining film yesterday from motorway cameras and were carrying out checks on registration numbers yesterday. Northamptonshire Police said that other similar incidents may have happened elsewhere on the motorway.
Source
APPALLING BRITISH IDIOCY
Schools should not “over discipline” persistently unruly pupils for fear of alienating them and should instead hand out praise five times more often than punishments, the Government has said. New guidance on school discipline published yesterday cautions teachers against repeatedly praising only “the same good pupils”, suggesting that rewards also be given to persistent miscreants who show an improvement in behaviour, however small. It cites research recommending a “rewards/sanctions ratio of at least 5:1”. Rewards might include “good news” postcards sent home, “special privileges” or “prizes”. “Striking the right balance between rewarding pupils with consistently good behaviour and those achieving substantial improvement in their behaviour is important. This can help improve relations with parents who have become tired of receiving letters and phone calls when things go wrong,” the guidance states.
It also advises teachers to take account of pupils’ race and culture when telling them off, suggesting that they go easy on those insubordinate youngsters for whom being “loud” or “overfamiliar” may be a cultural norm or “social style”. Teachers should understand the importance of showing respect to children from racial or religious backgrounds for whom public humiliation is seen as particularly shameful. In these cases, staff should not use language that might humiliate youngsters in front of their friends.
In other areas the guidance advocates a tougher approach, encouraging teachers to give Saturday and after-school detention and to punish pupils who make false allegations against teachers. It has been published to accompany new legal powers enabling teachers to use “reasonable force” to restrain violent children, confiscate mobile phones and punish pupils for poor behaviour on their way to and from school.
But critics described the guidance as “soft”, stating that most teachers already knew how to use positive reinforcement techniques. The document coincided yesterday with a threat of strikes by the National Union of Teachers unless schools speed up the process for expelling violent or abusive pupils.
David Willetts, the Shadow Education Secretary, said that the new guidance could be resented by pupils if it implied that bad behaviour brought rewards. He said that if school children could see badly behaved pupils being praised “then the school’s policy would lose all credibility”.
Alan Smithers, Professor of Education at the University of Buckingham, said the move could encourage perverse behaviour. “Children and parents will be quick to pick up on false praise. That simply devalues the use of encouraging words. The key thing is that it has to be honest feedback. As a soft approach it won’t work because children and their parents will soon pick up that it’s false. “If you reward the children who have been poorly behaved for behaving well you might actually be getting children who have been perfectly happy behaving well to behave badly in order to pick up the rewards.”
Robert Whelan, deputy director of the thinktank Civitas, said: “The idea that teachers have to take account of a child’s ethnicity when disciplining them is racist. It’s telling teachers they have to treat children differently according to their skin colour.”
Source
Thursday, April 12, 2007
Fatwa Against Conservative Bloggers?
Some Muslim blogger in England seems to be trying to get a fatwa issued against various conservative bloggers. Insofar as a fatwa is a death threat, it would of course be illegal under British hate speech laws so I hope the Muslim blogger concerned watches his step. The British police care more about hate-crimes than they do about things like rape and murder. Jawa Report has the details.
Smokers have daughters?
If true it is odd that it has not been picked up before
COUPLES who smoke when they conceive a child are almost twice as likely to have a girl, according to new research that suggests tobacco "kills" male foetuses. An Australian fertility expert has voiced concern that the startling results could encourage prospective parents to take up smoking to determine their baby's gender.
In an analysis of 9000 pregnancies between 1998 and 2003, researchers at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine in Britain found that mothers who smoked during pregnancy were a third less likely to have a boy than non-smokers. When the father also smoked, the chance of having a boy was almost halved. The researchers believe that chemicals in cigarettes, like nicotine, inhibit sperm carrying male, or Y, chromosomes from fertilising eggs. The study's leader, Professor Bernard Brabin, said the results raised serious questions about the impact of smoking on population balance. "The message is clear: if you want an increased chance of a male baby, don't smoke during pregnancy," Professor Brabin said.
Dr Anne Clark, of the Fertility Society of Australia, said it was already known that male embryos were less robust and more likely to miscarry than females. "More male are conceived than girls but about the same number are born, once this weakness is accounted for," Dr Clark said, "but we didn't know about this smoking connection." She said she was concerned they could motivate parents wanting a girl child to smoke. "If people think that smoking might get them what they want, they're wrong," Dr Clark said. "The mother is going to be three times more likely to have a fertility problem and twice as likely to have a miscarriage if she takes up [smoking] around . conception. The message is, don't smoke at all if you want a child."
Source
Discipline crumbles in large schools
A marked increase in the number of supersize secondary schools has led to an erosion of discipline, as teachers try to keep control of children they cannot identify even by year group, let alone by name, research suggests. Expulsions from the largest secondaries, with 1,500 or more pupils, have risen by 28 per cent since Labour came to power in 1997, leaving 730 pupils a year permanently excluded from school. Temporary exclusions are now running at nearly 10 per cent of pupils in schools with more than 1,000 children, compared with 3 per cent in schools with 1,000 or fewer pupils.
David Willetts, the Shadow Education Secretary, obtained the figures as the result of a parliamentary question. He said the problem was not to do with class size, but with the creation of giant, anonymous institutions. "Maintaining discipline is now becoming very difficult in the biggest schools. This is partly because the pupils and teachers in a large establishment are anonymous to each other, making it difficult for staff to tell pupils off and follow up with the appropriate action. If head teachers don't know who all their pupils are, it becomes difficult for them to identify the ones who may cause problems and to intervene early to stop these from escalating," he said.
His comments come after a report last year from the schools watchdog, Ofsted, which found that schools with the most discipline problems were the ones that were unable to detect and deal with potential troublemakers early. Ofsted also noted that schools where teachers did not get to know their individual pupils well, because of high staff turnover, tended to have the biggest problems tackling poor behaviour.
Mr Willetts said the emergence of a new breed of giant comprehensive had been achieved by stealth. Since 1997 the number of secondaries with more than 1,500 pupils has more than doubled to 315. The number of secondaries with 1,000 or fewer pupils has dropped by a fifth to 2,119. "Partly by accident and partly by design, we have created powerful incentives for schools to get bigger and bigger. Students now do a wider range of subjects and schools need to be bigger, with bigger staffs, if they are to offer the full range now expected of them. Also, the way capital is allocated to schools means that it often makes more sense for local authorities to sell off one school site and rebuild others," he said. The doctrine of parental choice had also led to the expansion of the most popular schools. A more considered approach towards school size was needed, Mr Willetts said, before discipline problems spiralled out of control.
Chris Keats, the general secretary of the National Association of Schoolmasters and Union of Women Teachers, said it was simplistic to equate large schools with poor discipline, but accepted that the biggest schools did face particular issues with behaviour. "If you have a large school, you have to put in smaller units, such as year groups, or upper and lower schools, to make sure that the teachers know the pupils they are dealing with."
A spokesman for the Department for Education said: "Large schools can of course face additional challenges, but with strong leadership and good staff they can also use their size to benefit their pupils and the wider community by offering out-of-hours clubs and community facilities." He added that the expansion of the most successful and popular schools was part of the Government's commitment to increasing choice and diversity.
Source
Some Muslim blogger in England seems to be trying to get a fatwa issued against various conservative bloggers. Insofar as a fatwa is a death threat, it would of course be illegal under British hate speech laws so I hope the Muslim blogger concerned watches his step. The British police care more about hate-crimes than they do about things like rape and murder. Jawa Report has the details.
Smokers have daughters?
If true it is odd that it has not been picked up before
COUPLES who smoke when they conceive a child are almost twice as likely to have a girl, according to new research that suggests tobacco "kills" male foetuses. An Australian fertility expert has voiced concern that the startling results could encourage prospective parents to take up smoking to determine their baby's gender.
In an analysis of 9000 pregnancies between 1998 and 2003, researchers at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine in Britain found that mothers who smoked during pregnancy were a third less likely to have a boy than non-smokers. When the father also smoked, the chance of having a boy was almost halved. The researchers believe that chemicals in cigarettes, like nicotine, inhibit sperm carrying male, or Y, chromosomes from fertilising eggs. The study's leader, Professor Bernard Brabin, said the results raised serious questions about the impact of smoking on population balance. "The message is clear: if you want an increased chance of a male baby, don't smoke during pregnancy," Professor Brabin said.
Dr Anne Clark, of the Fertility Society of Australia, said it was already known that male embryos were less robust and more likely to miscarry than females. "More male are conceived than girls but about the same number are born, once this weakness is accounted for," Dr Clark said, "but we didn't know about this smoking connection." She said she was concerned they could motivate parents wanting a girl child to smoke. "If people think that smoking might get them what they want, they're wrong," Dr Clark said. "The mother is going to be three times more likely to have a fertility problem and twice as likely to have a miscarriage if she takes up [smoking] around . conception. The message is, don't smoke at all if you want a child."
Source
Discipline crumbles in large schools
A marked increase in the number of supersize secondary schools has led to an erosion of discipline, as teachers try to keep control of children they cannot identify even by year group, let alone by name, research suggests. Expulsions from the largest secondaries, with 1,500 or more pupils, have risen by 28 per cent since Labour came to power in 1997, leaving 730 pupils a year permanently excluded from school. Temporary exclusions are now running at nearly 10 per cent of pupils in schools with more than 1,000 children, compared with 3 per cent in schools with 1,000 or fewer pupils.
David Willetts, the Shadow Education Secretary, obtained the figures as the result of a parliamentary question. He said the problem was not to do with class size, but with the creation of giant, anonymous institutions. "Maintaining discipline is now becoming very difficult in the biggest schools. This is partly because the pupils and teachers in a large establishment are anonymous to each other, making it difficult for staff to tell pupils off and follow up with the appropriate action. If head teachers don't know who all their pupils are, it becomes difficult for them to identify the ones who may cause problems and to intervene early to stop these from escalating," he said.
His comments come after a report last year from the schools watchdog, Ofsted, which found that schools with the most discipline problems were the ones that were unable to detect and deal with potential troublemakers early. Ofsted also noted that schools where teachers did not get to know their individual pupils well, because of high staff turnover, tended to have the biggest problems tackling poor behaviour.
Mr Willetts said the emergence of a new breed of giant comprehensive had been achieved by stealth. Since 1997 the number of secondaries with more than 1,500 pupils has more than doubled to 315. The number of secondaries with 1,000 or fewer pupils has dropped by a fifth to 2,119. "Partly by accident and partly by design, we have created powerful incentives for schools to get bigger and bigger. Students now do a wider range of subjects and schools need to be bigger, with bigger staffs, if they are to offer the full range now expected of them. Also, the way capital is allocated to schools means that it often makes more sense for local authorities to sell off one school site and rebuild others," he said. The doctrine of parental choice had also led to the expansion of the most popular schools. A more considered approach towards school size was needed, Mr Willetts said, before discipline problems spiralled out of control.
Chris Keats, the general secretary of the National Association of Schoolmasters and Union of Women Teachers, said it was simplistic to equate large schools with poor discipline, but accepted that the biggest schools did face particular issues with behaviour. "If you have a large school, you have to put in smaller units, such as year groups, or upper and lower schools, to make sure that the teachers know the pupils they are dealing with."
A spokesman for the Department for Education said: "Large schools can of course face additional challenges, but with strong leadership and good staff they can also use their size to benefit their pupils and the wider community by offering out-of-hours clubs and community facilities." He added that the expansion of the most successful and popular schools was part of the Government's commitment to increasing choice and diversity.
Source
Wednesday, April 11, 2007
Busting modern medical myths
In the early days of medicine, physicians might diagnose patients using bumps on their head, or dispense a couple of leeches to draw off "ill humours". Yet a medieval doctor might give a more confident response than his modern equivalent if a patient asked for the evidence to support their treatment. These days, it seems many of our "tried and tested" approaches to disease are nothing of the kind.
Researchers writing recently in the British Journal of Surgery concluded the practice of daubing patients with a disinfectant skin gel prior to operations made little or no difference to the rate of infections they suffered afterwards. Simple soap and water was just as effective. However, despite this, it's more than likely that, in future, waking up after your operation in many British hospitals, you'll have that tell-tale orange stain around your wound. You'll have been given a treatment that doesn't work.
This isn't a single example. Many techniques in common use today don't have cast-iron evidence that they do any good. In some cases, firm evidence suggests the opposite is true. Andrew Booth, from the School of Health and Related Research (ScHARR) in Sheffield, is assessing the proportion of modern treatments that are "evidence-based" - supported by "randomised controlled trials", which, if run correctly, give the best view on the value of a drug or device.
In the UK, researchers have assessed this in a variety of different parts of the health service, from busy GP surgeries to specialist hospital haematology units. In many units, between 15% and 20% of the treatments offered did not have a shred of worthwhile evidence to support their use. Andrew Booth said the medical establishment was well aware of this. "The public might be surprised at the low number of treatments which have evidence that they work - but doctors might be surprised that it is so high," he said. He added that frequently, even when new research suggested clearly that doctors should stop using a particular treatment, nothing changed.
Michael Summers, chairman of The Patients Association, said patients would be "really surprised" to learn how little of what doctors did had been proven to work. "We need to improve medical training, to make sure that doctors do know more about the effectiveness of the drugs they are prescribing," he said.
One of those doing this is Professor Paul Glasziou, director of the Centre for Evidence Based Medicine at Oxford University. "I try to change the way individual doctors work," he says, "but really, the main thing we can hope to do is change the next generation of medical practitioners." He can list dozens of examples where treatments are still widely used despite it being clear that all they give patients is side-effects. "An example is PSA [prostate specific antigen] screening for prostate cancer. What the best studies tell us is that patients who have the test are equally likely to die from prostate cancer compared with those who don't," he says. "This actually does harm, because patients who test positive may undergo unnecessary prostate surgery. But the test is still being carried out."
Even a simple antibiotic eye-drop prescription for a child's minor infection is likely to make no difference, and may help make the bacteria involved more resistant to treatment, he says.
Part of the problem for doctors is the sheer quantity of research emerging from hospitals, universities and laboratories across the globe. "There are 90 new randomised controlled trials published every single day - this flood of information makes it very difficult for any doctor to stay up to date." And when the evidence is disregarded, Prof Glasziou says, patients can be harmed. When doctors measure blood pressure for the first time in a patient they should check both arms, as the readings may differ significantly. But Prof Glasziou says this guideline isn't followed everywhere. "I know of one case where a patient was being taken on and off his medication every couple of months simply because every time he visited the doctor, the reading was taken from a different arm. "There are a lot of good things out there, but an awful lot of myths as well."
Source
The unfortunate British migration experience
The UK is in the grip of a serious 'brain drain', a leading academic has warned. Well-educated professionals and managers are leaving the country in droves, according to John Salt, an expert on migration from University College London. In their place, low-skilled workers from Eastern Europe are flooding in - leading to a 'de-skilling' of the workforce.
Professor Salt's findings will fuel concerns over Labour's opendoor immigration policies. According to official figures, between 2000 and 2005 a net total of 272,000 Britons emigrated, while a net total of 639,000 non-Britons moved here. But experts warn that in the past two years, up to 700,000 workers have actually arrived from the former Eastern Bloc. The majority are taking low-skilled jobs.
Professor Salt said that in 2005, 29 per of those arriving were in low-grade jobs and 37 per cent were not in work. Only a third were professionals. Of those leaving the UK, almost half - 42 per cent - were professionals or managers. They are heading mainly for New Zealand, Australia, the U.S., and Canada. In his report for the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Professor Salt said: "Migration flows are tending towards a de-skilling of the UK labour market."
A Home Office spokesman said it was introducing a points-based immigration scheme from 2009 which will make it harder for lowskilled migrants to gain work visas.
Organised gangs are offering to smuggle thousands of illegal immigrants into Britain for as little as 200 pounds from a new base near the closed Sangatte welfare centre, it has emerged. Up to 500 migrants at a time are sleeping in the French camps being run by Afghan gangs. The flow of arrivals is so constant that authorities in Calais are planning to open a new welfare centre, dubbed Sangatte Two.
Source
British conservatives not allowed to criticize immigration
The future of a Conservative candidate was hanging in the balance last night after he became embroiled in a race row over his campaign literature, The Times can reveal. Luke Mackenzie, a Tory candidate in a British National Party (BNP) target ward in Basildon, was accused of peddling scare stories by suggesting that people who wanted to stop asylum-seekers being given council houses should vote Conservative. David Cameron faced calls to disown the candidate last night, but the Conservative Party avoided immediate action, saying that it would examine the election leaflet this week. This contrasted with the swift action last month to dismiss Patrick Mercer from the Tory front-bench after he referred to “black bastards” in the Army. A Tory spokesman said: “We encourage all councillors to confront the BNP and not to pander to them.”
Mr Mackenzie, who is standing against the local council’s only ethnic minority councillor, told The Times that he did not believe that his remarks would inflame racial tensions because “people were aware of this anyway”. The leaflet, headed “Conservatives: We’re on your side”, refers to being on the “front line” in a “battle”, talking about local people “getting organised” and “fighting back”. It says: “I support Conservative policy of giving council housing to Basildon residents and not [of it] being used to house asylum seekers. There is a shortage of homes, but at the same time the Labour Government is encouraging record levels of immigration.”
Opposition politicians said that the remarks were highly inflammatory and echoed the message used by the BNP in other parts of the country.
Mr Mackenzie, a 21-year-old politics student at Westminster University, is standing in the local elections against Labour’s Swatantra Nandanwar in a ward where the BNP took 22.7 per cent of the vote in 2004. The party’s record for the area is 25.3 per cent in the Fryerns ward last year. This year the BNP is contesting 11 of the 14 seats up for election in Basildon, part of a remarkable surge of activity across the country. It is to field 655 candidates, double the number who stood last time. It currently has 49 council seats.
Mr Mackenzie denied accusations he was stoking up racism. “At the end of the day it’s [the main parties] not saying things like this that is encouraging racism tension because the only place people can turn to is the British National Party.” He said that there was strong feeling among residents that people from outside the area were causing a housing shortage. “They blame the influx of immigration [as one reason for this], because there isn’t enough housing in the UK and you’ve got thousands of people coming from abroad.”
Asked what he thought Basildon residents felt about immigration, he said: “They think it’s entirely out of control.” He said that it was a view that he shared, adding: “The cause of this is that there is no real control over who is here.” It is already virtually impossible for asylum seekers to get housing in Basildon after the council changed the system to give preference to people who have been in the area a long time.
Jon Cruddas, a Labour MP and deputy leadership contender who campaigns against the BNP, said: “This dangerous exploitation of people’s fears is a gift to extremist organisations such as the BNP. Peddling myths about immigrants pouring into a town or about asylum seekers supposedly being given council housing ahead of other residents is incredibly unhelpful. If David Cameron is serious about fighting racism he should disown this candidate straight away.”
Source
Britain's Leftist government shafts retirees and the poor: "To the great anger of the millions who have seen their retirements ruined as a result of his infamous tax raid on pension funds in his first Budget in 1997, official documents released under the Freedom of Information Act last Friday revealed that he had been well advised by Treasury officials of the disastrous consequence of his actions but chose to pursue them regardless. Now there is another great betrayal to expose: how Mr Brown’s policies have hindered, rather than helped, the poorest and most vulnerable in society, the very people he professes to champion. The Business has discovered the smoking gun and, as with the pensions scandal, the facts make for grim reading. Statistics from the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) unearthed by The Business reveal that the income of the bottom 10% of the population fell from £91 a week in 2004-2005 to £89 a week in 2005-2006, a 2.2% drop. In stark contrast, the top 10% saw their income rise from £820 to £840 a week; those in the fifth (or middle) decile saw their income rise from £283 to £286.
In the early days of medicine, physicians might diagnose patients using bumps on their head, or dispense a couple of leeches to draw off "ill humours". Yet a medieval doctor might give a more confident response than his modern equivalent if a patient asked for the evidence to support their treatment. These days, it seems many of our "tried and tested" approaches to disease are nothing of the kind.
Researchers writing recently in the British Journal of Surgery concluded the practice of daubing patients with a disinfectant skin gel prior to operations made little or no difference to the rate of infections they suffered afterwards. Simple soap and water was just as effective. However, despite this, it's more than likely that, in future, waking up after your operation in many British hospitals, you'll have that tell-tale orange stain around your wound. You'll have been given a treatment that doesn't work.
This isn't a single example. Many techniques in common use today don't have cast-iron evidence that they do any good. In some cases, firm evidence suggests the opposite is true. Andrew Booth, from the School of Health and Related Research (ScHARR) in Sheffield, is assessing the proportion of modern treatments that are "evidence-based" - supported by "randomised controlled trials", which, if run correctly, give the best view on the value of a drug or device.
In the UK, researchers have assessed this in a variety of different parts of the health service, from busy GP surgeries to specialist hospital haematology units. In many units, between 15% and 20% of the treatments offered did not have a shred of worthwhile evidence to support their use. Andrew Booth said the medical establishment was well aware of this. "The public might be surprised at the low number of treatments which have evidence that they work - but doctors might be surprised that it is so high," he said. He added that frequently, even when new research suggested clearly that doctors should stop using a particular treatment, nothing changed.
Michael Summers, chairman of The Patients Association, said patients would be "really surprised" to learn how little of what doctors did had been proven to work. "We need to improve medical training, to make sure that doctors do know more about the effectiveness of the drugs they are prescribing," he said.
One of those doing this is Professor Paul Glasziou, director of the Centre for Evidence Based Medicine at Oxford University. "I try to change the way individual doctors work," he says, "but really, the main thing we can hope to do is change the next generation of medical practitioners." He can list dozens of examples where treatments are still widely used despite it being clear that all they give patients is side-effects. "An example is PSA [prostate specific antigen] screening for prostate cancer. What the best studies tell us is that patients who have the test are equally likely to die from prostate cancer compared with those who don't," he says. "This actually does harm, because patients who test positive may undergo unnecessary prostate surgery. But the test is still being carried out."
Even a simple antibiotic eye-drop prescription for a child's minor infection is likely to make no difference, and may help make the bacteria involved more resistant to treatment, he says.
Part of the problem for doctors is the sheer quantity of research emerging from hospitals, universities and laboratories across the globe. "There are 90 new randomised controlled trials published every single day - this flood of information makes it very difficult for any doctor to stay up to date." And when the evidence is disregarded, Prof Glasziou says, patients can be harmed. When doctors measure blood pressure for the first time in a patient they should check both arms, as the readings may differ significantly. But Prof Glasziou says this guideline isn't followed everywhere. "I know of one case where a patient was being taken on and off his medication every couple of months simply because every time he visited the doctor, the reading was taken from a different arm. "There are a lot of good things out there, but an awful lot of myths as well."
Source
The unfortunate British migration experience
The UK is in the grip of a serious 'brain drain', a leading academic has warned. Well-educated professionals and managers are leaving the country in droves, according to John Salt, an expert on migration from University College London. In their place, low-skilled workers from Eastern Europe are flooding in - leading to a 'de-skilling' of the workforce.
Professor Salt's findings will fuel concerns over Labour's opendoor immigration policies. According to official figures, between 2000 and 2005 a net total of 272,000 Britons emigrated, while a net total of 639,000 non-Britons moved here. But experts warn that in the past two years, up to 700,000 workers have actually arrived from the former Eastern Bloc. The majority are taking low-skilled jobs.
Professor Salt said that in 2005, 29 per of those arriving were in low-grade jobs and 37 per cent were not in work. Only a third were professionals. Of those leaving the UK, almost half - 42 per cent - were professionals or managers. They are heading mainly for New Zealand, Australia, the U.S., and Canada. In his report for the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Professor Salt said: "Migration flows are tending towards a de-skilling of the UK labour market."
A Home Office spokesman said it was introducing a points-based immigration scheme from 2009 which will make it harder for lowskilled migrants to gain work visas.
Organised gangs are offering to smuggle thousands of illegal immigrants into Britain for as little as 200 pounds from a new base near the closed Sangatte welfare centre, it has emerged. Up to 500 migrants at a time are sleeping in the French camps being run by Afghan gangs. The flow of arrivals is so constant that authorities in Calais are planning to open a new welfare centre, dubbed Sangatte Two.
Source
British conservatives not allowed to criticize immigration
The future of a Conservative candidate was hanging in the balance last night after he became embroiled in a race row over his campaign literature, The Times can reveal. Luke Mackenzie, a Tory candidate in a British National Party (BNP) target ward in Basildon, was accused of peddling scare stories by suggesting that people who wanted to stop asylum-seekers being given council houses should vote Conservative. David Cameron faced calls to disown the candidate last night, but the Conservative Party avoided immediate action, saying that it would examine the election leaflet this week. This contrasted with the swift action last month to dismiss Patrick Mercer from the Tory front-bench after he referred to “black bastards” in the Army. A Tory spokesman said: “We encourage all councillors to confront the BNP and not to pander to them.”
Mr Mackenzie, who is standing against the local council’s only ethnic minority councillor, told The Times that he did not believe that his remarks would inflame racial tensions because “people were aware of this anyway”. The leaflet, headed “Conservatives: We’re on your side”, refers to being on the “front line” in a “battle”, talking about local people “getting organised” and “fighting back”. It says: “I support Conservative policy of giving council housing to Basildon residents and not [of it] being used to house asylum seekers. There is a shortage of homes, but at the same time the Labour Government is encouraging record levels of immigration.”
Opposition politicians said that the remarks were highly inflammatory and echoed the message used by the BNP in other parts of the country.
Mr Mackenzie, a 21-year-old politics student at Westminster University, is standing in the local elections against Labour’s Swatantra Nandanwar in a ward where the BNP took 22.7 per cent of the vote in 2004. The party’s record for the area is 25.3 per cent in the Fryerns ward last year. This year the BNP is contesting 11 of the 14 seats up for election in Basildon, part of a remarkable surge of activity across the country. It is to field 655 candidates, double the number who stood last time. It currently has 49 council seats.
Mr Mackenzie denied accusations he was stoking up racism. “At the end of the day it’s [the main parties] not saying things like this that is encouraging racism tension because the only place people can turn to is the British National Party.” He said that there was strong feeling among residents that people from outside the area were causing a housing shortage. “They blame the influx of immigration [as one reason for this], because there isn’t enough housing in the UK and you’ve got thousands of people coming from abroad.”
Asked what he thought Basildon residents felt about immigration, he said: “They think it’s entirely out of control.” He said that it was a view that he shared, adding: “The cause of this is that there is no real control over who is here.” It is already virtually impossible for asylum seekers to get housing in Basildon after the council changed the system to give preference to people who have been in the area a long time.
Jon Cruddas, a Labour MP and deputy leadership contender who campaigns against the BNP, said: “This dangerous exploitation of people’s fears is a gift to extremist organisations such as the BNP. Peddling myths about immigrants pouring into a town or about asylum seekers supposedly being given council housing ahead of other residents is incredibly unhelpful. If David Cameron is serious about fighting racism he should disown this candidate straight away.”
Source
Britain's Leftist government shafts retirees and the poor: "To the great anger of the millions who have seen their retirements ruined as a result of his infamous tax raid on pension funds in his first Budget in 1997, official documents released under the Freedom of Information Act last Friday revealed that he had been well advised by Treasury officials of the disastrous consequence of his actions but chose to pursue them regardless. Now there is another great betrayal to expose: how Mr Brown’s policies have hindered, rather than helped, the poorest and most vulnerable in society, the very people he professes to champion. The Business has discovered the smoking gun and, as with the pensions scandal, the facts make for grim reading. Statistics from the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) unearthed by The Business reveal that the income of the bottom 10% of the population fell from £91 a week in 2004-2005 to £89 a week in 2005-2006, a 2.2% drop. In stark contrast, the top 10% saw their income rise from £820 to £840 a week; those in the fifth (or middle) decile saw their income rise from £283 to £286.
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
NHS radiotherapy machines 'lie idle'
State of the art radiotherapy machines are lying idle in NHS hospitals, a BBC investigation has found. A report by the Royal College of Radiologists, commissioned by Five Live, found 10% of machines in the 60 UK centres were not being used. The total cost of the machines is £150m, with some of the funding coming from lottery money. The college said the survey findings were "no surprise". The government acknowledged there were problems.
The survey found Maidstone Hospital had two brand new machines that did not work for a year. The manufacturer, Varian, said this was happening across the country, with some hospitals taking 18 months to switch their machines on. This delay is vital as the machines only have a 10-year life. It also found that over 60% of the machines were not using new software that allows doctors to focus on the tumours and not damage healthy tissue. Ipswich Hospital uses this new software IMRT on all its head and neck cancer cases.
Dot West, has been treated using IMRT and says it had a dramatic effect. She said: "I feel very lucky to have this treatment and I think it should be more widespread." "If I have this treatment there is far less chance of me losing my right eye and also further brain damage."
The findings of the investigation came as no surprise to the Royal College of Radiologists. The college's vice president Michael Williams said services have improved, but that they still are not up to scratch. "The present radiotherapy service is inadequate. People are reluctant to admit how bad the situation is because they say it's a lot better than it was," he said.
The Department of Health acknowledges there are problems with radiotherapy waiting times and ministers are currently studying recommendations from the national radiotherapy advisory group on the future development of radiotherapy.
Source
Britishness lessons 'fuel racism'
As one of the many Indian refugees from Africa, one might have thought that the lady below would see Britain as different in important ways but she does not appear to. Perhaps she should relocate to Africa or India to check her impressions. She did however get a standing ovation for her speech so it would appear that she is just a typical teacher -- with the blind Leftism that so often implies
The first ethnic minority president of the National Union of Teachers has said ministers fuel racism by ordering schools to teach "British values". London assistant head teacher Baljeet Ghale told the union's annual conference Britain did not have a monopoly on free speech and tolerance. The move only fuelled the "shadow of racism" behind some notions of Britishness, she said. A government spokesman dismissed her claims as "nonsense".
Ms Ghale, who came to England from Kenya at the age of eight, also criticised Labour's record on other education issues.
In January, the government published a report it had commissioned from Sir Keith Ajegbo in the wake of the London bombings, into how "citizenship" and "diversity" were being taught in schools. It said more could be done to ensure children "explore, discuss and debate their identities".
At the NUT conference, in Harrogate, Ms Ghale said Education Secretary Alan Johnson had described the "values we hold very dear in Britain" as "free speech, tolerance, respect for the rule of law". "Well, in what way, I'd like to know, are these values that are not held by the peoples of other countries?" she said. [Judging by what they DO, many countries do NOT follow such values]
It was another example of government making policy without talking to those it would most affect. She wanted an education system that valued diversity and accepted her right to support Tottenham Hotspur - but France in the European Cup, Brazil in the World Cup, Kenya in the Olympics and India in cricket but England in the Ashes. She went on: "I certainly don't pass Tebbit's cricket test but none of my affiliations make me a less valuable person or less committed to being part of this society, but they do make me a global citizen."
For some people, racism lay behind notions of what it meant to be British, she said. The government's move was not about integration, participation or national pride but failure to assimilate or who should be here in the first place. "To demand that people conform to an imposed view of Britishness only fuels that racism," Ms Ghale said.
A spokesman for the Department of Education and Skills said: "It is nonsense to suggest that learning British values in citizenship classes - based on a major independent review by respected former headteacher Sir Keith Ajegbo - has anything to do with racism. "On the contrary, teenagers learning about shared British history is one of the essential building blocks of community cohesion. "Sir Keith's report in January concluded that all children should be taught core British values such as tolerance, freedom of speech and justice and included a series of recommendations aimed at improving community cohesion and helping children understand both diversity and identity."
In her wider attack on Labour's record, the NUT president gave examples of failures in the school rebuilding programme, such as a new roof on part of a school being removed because the supplier had not been paid. She said the money being spent on academies should be spread more widely around the system and she highlighted the smaller class sizes enjoyed by pupils in Cuba.
She called for the end of national testing and league tables and accused the government of having a negative and low expectation of pupils. "If the current government was marked with an Ofsted grading it would be given a notice to improve," she said. Its leadership and management was inadequate and change was required.
Source
Illegal immigration into Britain via France
Do-gooders are once again the main facilitators
The leader of the people smuggling gang waved dismissively at the charred wreckage of his woodland camp, torched during a raid by the Calais border police. Sher, a tubby Afghan in his late twenties and one of the most notorious of the gangsters who smuggle stowaways into Britain, told an undercover reporter: "We were raided by the police and they burnt the camp down. But we set up a new one the following day." He and his helpers had already handed out blankets, quilts and pillows to the 70 or so young Afghans who had paid him the going rate of 300 to 1,000 euros. Makeshift tents, lashed together from bin-liners, were once again standing in the woodland.
Thanks to Secours Catholique (Catholic Aid), a charity, there had not even been an interruption to the free food supplies. Stacks of tinned rice, tuna, meat, fresh bread, cakes, tea, milk and sugar were waiting for collection as usual at 7pm at the edge of the forest.
The police, said Sher, are "ferocious". He added: "They hassle us too much." But although he resents their interference in his lucrative trade, it is a distraction that he and his fellow gang leaders have learnt to cope with. Within minutes of the reporter entering the camp, he and four others were chased by the police. As the group sat by the metal fence that borders the motorway, a police car arrived on the hard shoulder and chased the group back into the scrub-land. This was the second time the reporter had been chased by police in a week.
Sher's camp, or "the jungle" as he and his fellow Afghans call it, lies about nine miles south of Calais in woodland near the picturesque village of Nielles-las-Ardres. Half a dozen or so similar camps house about 500 illegal immigrants - or "clandestines", as the locals call them - on the periphery of Calais. They are all within striking distance of the A26 motorway, L'Autoroute des Anglais. It ends at the Calais ferry port, carrying an endless flow of juggernauts towards Britain.
The present-day images are a worrying echo of the old Sangatte refugee camp, when immigrants swarmed over wire fencing to clamber aboard UK-bound freight trains. The welfare facilities on the Calais dockside, near the railway station, act as a magnet for the new wave. Up to 200 gather there for lunch and dinner, and tea and croissants are provided in the morning. Most are Afghans but some are from Eritrea and Sudan, and there are a few Iranians and Palestinians.
Secours Catholique, the main charity helping the migrants, also provides clothes and blankets and gives people lifts to nearby facilities where they can shower and shave. Although the French police arrest immigrants who they see on the streets of Calais, the charities and the government have brokered a deal whereby the dockside has become a "tolerance zone" during the day, with no arrests. The smugglers take full advantage of this to tout for business.
Things look as if they can only get better for the smuggling gangs. A new welfare centre, dubbed Sangatte Two, is to be built conveniently close to the Calais ferry port in a disused football stadium. It will offer food, clothing, toilet facilities, immigration advice and medical care for about 300 migrants at a time.
Talk to the Home Office in Britain and it paints a very different picture. John Reid's aides say that since the closure of Sangatte, the number of people caught trying to enter Britain through Kent has dropped from 10,000 in 2002 to 1,526 in 2006. However, the Sunday Times investigation suggests that the Home Office, which three years ago spectacularly underestimated how many legal migrants would come here from Poland, has again miscalculated. The 500 illegal immigrants reckon to spend between two to three weeks at Calais, implying that up to 200 get to Britain every week. With the addition of those stowing away at Dunkirk, St Omer and Brussels, an estimate of 10,000 arrivals in the UK looks cautious.
Sher runs his gang with the help of three fellow Afghans, each of whom is an illegal immigrant. They have associates in British cities who can collect money in advance from the relatives of would-be immigrants to Britain. The undercover reporter, posing as an illegal immigrant from Bangladesh desperate to go to London, was told the tariff by Jameel Asmol, a member of the gang. If the money is paid in the UK, then the rate is 1,000 euros. If the would-be immigrant gives cash in hand to the gang, he can pay as little as 300. If the would-be immigrant wants a guaranteed entry into Britain, he has to pay the smugglers 4,400. In this case, the immigrant would be smuggled into the UK with the connivance of a truck driver, said Asmol.
The camp is close to a motorway truck-stop where some drivers stop to sleep. As night approached, the reporter watched five people being taken by the gang to be hidden inside lorries. All except one headed to the motorway empty-handed; the last one to leave took a carrier bag full of clothes. The bravest stowaways get into Britain by holding onto one of the axles of the truck. Bosh, one of the gang, explained: "In a long lorry, there are three axles at the back but one of them is not used and is pulled up. We get you to cling on throughout the whole journey."
The gang plays a wary game of cat-and-mouse with the police. Sher told the reporter that the previous night, police suddenly stormed the truck stop as five immigrants were about to clamber into the lorries. The five were arrested but the gang leaders managed to get away.
The reporter watched as the migrants lit a fire at their makeshift camp, heating metal bars until they became red hot before rubbing their thumbs and index fingers over the metal. One explained that this was to thwart the police who take the finger-prints of every illegal immigrant they arrest.
Those stowaways who do get into the trucks are often caught in Calais. Gamma ray detectors spot movements inside the container and there are also heart beat detectors and CO2 probes for human breath. As part of the tariff charged by the gangs, they promise the would-be immigrants that no matter how many times they get caught, they will be put back in lorries until they reach Britain....
Asmol explained that it was common for relatives in Britain to pay for immigrants in Calais. Within minutes he gave a mobile phone number for his associate Rahulla, who was based in Birmingham....
The charities refuse to accept that their assistance may contribute to the build-up of migrants. Jacky Verhaegen, head of migrant welfare for Secours Catholique, said: "These migrants don't leave Afghanistan because they heard that the soup we provide is good. They come here to go to England. We have to help these people because they are poor."
The new welfare centre, to be paid for by the French authorities, will open this autumn. Critics of "Sangatte Two" accuse the French of reneging on the spirit of the deal struck in 2002 between Nicolas Sarkozy, now a candidate for the French presidency, and David Blunkett, then home secretary. This made it clear that no such centre would be built again in Calais.
Blunkett said this weekend: "Given the much tougher border controls and surveillance put in place since closure, it is amazing that local, as well as national, French politicians do not appear to have sufficiently recognised the danger of conflict that sucha centre will present."
Unlike the original Sangatte facility, the new centre will have no overnight accommodation, say its creators. A spokesman for Jacky Henin, mayor of Calais, said: "For three years we have asked the French, the European and British governments to do something but no one has done anything." He blamed Britain for the presence of illegal immigrants. "Why do the British government give work to migrants? Why is it possible to get jobs in Britain without identity cards?" he said.
More here
SCOTTISH GREENS: WE'LL AXE CATHOLIC SCHOOLS
No respect for freedom of choice there: Green Fascism
THE Greens have called for the abolition of Catholic schools in Scotland. The party, who hope to win at least 10 seats at Holyrood, have included moves for Catholic schools to be integrated into a secular state system in their manifesto. Green leader Robin Harper claimed that having separate schools "tends to divide communities". He said: "Catholic children, for most of their time in primary and secondary, do not mix with other children. "And children who are non-Catholics do not, because the Catholics are educated separately, tend to mix so much with them. "Why have this totally artificial divide, that one group of children, simply because of their religion, should be brought up in different schools to everybody else? "They will get their religious upbringing at home, reinforced by their parents. They will get their religious upbringing in their churches, reinforced by the churches. "State education should be secular."
A spokesman for the Catholic Church said: "It is unfortunate that the Greens want to trample on the rights of Catholic parents and the thousands of other parents who aren't Catholics but choose a Catholic education for their kids. "This is an outrageous proposal."
Source
State of the art radiotherapy machines are lying idle in NHS hospitals, a BBC investigation has found. A report by the Royal College of Radiologists, commissioned by Five Live, found 10% of machines in the 60 UK centres were not being used. The total cost of the machines is £150m, with some of the funding coming from lottery money. The college said the survey findings were "no surprise". The government acknowledged there were problems.
The survey found Maidstone Hospital had two brand new machines that did not work for a year. The manufacturer, Varian, said this was happening across the country, with some hospitals taking 18 months to switch their machines on. This delay is vital as the machines only have a 10-year life. It also found that over 60% of the machines were not using new software that allows doctors to focus on the tumours and not damage healthy tissue. Ipswich Hospital uses this new software IMRT on all its head and neck cancer cases.
Dot West, has been treated using IMRT and says it had a dramatic effect. She said: "I feel very lucky to have this treatment and I think it should be more widespread." "If I have this treatment there is far less chance of me losing my right eye and also further brain damage."
The findings of the investigation came as no surprise to the Royal College of Radiologists. The college's vice president Michael Williams said services have improved, but that they still are not up to scratch. "The present radiotherapy service is inadequate. People are reluctant to admit how bad the situation is because they say it's a lot better than it was," he said.
The Department of Health acknowledges there are problems with radiotherapy waiting times and ministers are currently studying recommendations from the national radiotherapy advisory group on the future development of radiotherapy.
Source
Britishness lessons 'fuel racism'
As one of the many Indian refugees from Africa, one might have thought that the lady below would see Britain as different in important ways but she does not appear to. Perhaps she should relocate to Africa or India to check her impressions. She did however get a standing ovation for her speech so it would appear that she is just a typical teacher -- with the blind Leftism that so often implies
The first ethnic minority president of the National Union of Teachers has said ministers fuel racism by ordering schools to teach "British values". London assistant head teacher Baljeet Ghale told the union's annual conference Britain did not have a monopoly on free speech and tolerance. The move only fuelled the "shadow of racism" behind some notions of Britishness, she said. A government spokesman dismissed her claims as "nonsense".
Ms Ghale, who came to England from Kenya at the age of eight, also criticised Labour's record on other education issues.
In January, the government published a report it had commissioned from Sir Keith Ajegbo in the wake of the London bombings, into how "citizenship" and "diversity" were being taught in schools. It said more could be done to ensure children "explore, discuss and debate their identities".
At the NUT conference, in Harrogate, Ms Ghale said Education Secretary Alan Johnson had described the "values we hold very dear in Britain" as "free speech, tolerance, respect for the rule of law". "Well, in what way, I'd like to know, are these values that are not held by the peoples of other countries?" she said. [Judging by what they DO, many countries do NOT follow such values]
It was another example of government making policy without talking to those it would most affect. She wanted an education system that valued diversity and accepted her right to support Tottenham Hotspur - but France in the European Cup, Brazil in the World Cup, Kenya in the Olympics and India in cricket but England in the Ashes. She went on: "I certainly don't pass Tebbit's cricket test but none of my affiliations make me a less valuable person or less committed to being part of this society, but they do make me a global citizen."
For some people, racism lay behind notions of what it meant to be British, she said. The government's move was not about integration, participation or national pride but failure to assimilate or who should be here in the first place. "To demand that people conform to an imposed view of Britishness only fuels that racism," Ms Ghale said.
A spokesman for the Department of Education and Skills said: "It is nonsense to suggest that learning British values in citizenship classes - based on a major independent review by respected former headteacher Sir Keith Ajegbo - has anything to do with racism. "On the contrary, teenagers learning about shared British history is one of the essential building blocks of community cohesion. "Sir Keith's report in January concluded that all children should be taught core British values such as tolerance, freedom of speech and justice and included a series of recommendations aimed at improving community cohesion and helping children understand both diversity and identity."
In her wider attack on Labour's record, the NUT president gave examples of failures in the school rebuilding programme, such as a new roof on part of a school being removed because the supplier had not been paid. She said the money being spent on academies should be spread more widely around the system and she highlighted the smaller class sizes enjoyed by pupils in Cuba.
She called for the end of national testing and league tables and accused the government of having a negative and low expectation of pupils. "If the current government was marked with an Ofsted grading it would be given a notice to improve," she said. Its leadership and management was inadequate and change was required.
Source
Illegal immigration into Britain via France
Do-gooders are once again the main facilitators
The leader of the people smuggling gang waved dismissively at the charred wreckage of his woodland camp, torched during a raid by the Calais border police. Sher, a tubby Afghan in his late twenties and one of the most notorious of the gangsters who smuggle stowaways into Britain, told an undercover reporter: "We were raided by the police and they burnt the camp down. But we set up a new one the following day." He and his helpers had already handed out blankets, quilts and pillows to the 70 or so young Afghans who had paid him the going rate of 300 to 1,000 euros. Makeshift tents, lashed together from bin-liners, were once again standing in the woodland.
Thanks to Secours Catholique (Catholic Aid), a charity, there had not even been an interruption to the free food supplies. Stacks of tinned rice, tuna, meat, fresh bread, cakes, tea, milk and sugar were waiting for collection as usual at 7pm at the edge of the forest.
The police, said Sher, are "ferocious". He added: "They hassle us too much." But although he resents their interference in his lucrative trade, it is a distraction that he and his fellow gang leaders have learnt to cope with. Within minutes of the reporter entering the camp, he and four others were chased by the police. As the group sat by the metal fence that borders the motorway, a police car arrived on the hard shoulder and chased the group back into the scrub-land. This was the second time the reporter had been chased by police in a week.
Sher's camp, or "the jungle" as he and his fellow Afghans call it, lies about nine miles south of Calais in woodland near the picturesque village of Nielles-las-Ardres. Half a dozen or so similar camps house about 500 illegal immigrants - or "clandestines", as the locals call them - on the periphery of Calais. They are all within striking distance of the A26 motorway, L'Autoroute des Anglais. It ends at the Calais ferry port, carrying an endless flow of juggernauts towards Britain.
The present-day images are a worrying echo of the old Sangatte refugee camp, when immigrants swarmed over wire fencing to clamber aboard UK-bound freight trains. The welfare facilities on the Calais dockside, near the railway station, act as a magnet for the new wave. Up to 200 gather there for lunch and dinner, and tea and croissants are provided in the morning. Most are Afghans but some are from Eritrea and Sudan, and there are a few Iranians and Palestinians.
Secours Catholique, the main charity helping the migrants, also provides clothes and blankets and gives people lifts to nearby facilities where they can shower and shave. Although the French police arrest immigrants who they see on the streets of Calais, the charities and the government have brokered a deal whereby the dockside has become a "tolerance zone" during the day, with no arrests. The smugglers take full advantage of this to tout for business.
Things look as if they can only get better for the smuggling gangs. A new welfare centre, dubbed Sangatte Two, is to be built conveniently close to the Calais ferry port in a disused football stadium. It will offer food, clothing, toilet facilities, immigration advice and medical care for about 300 migrants at a time.
Talk to the Home Office in Britain and it paints a very different picture. John Reid's aides say that since the closure of Sangatte, the number of people caught trying to enter Britain through Kent has dropped from 10,000 in 2002 to 1,526 in 2006. However, the Sunday Times investigation suggests that the Home Office, which three years ago spectacularly underestimated how many legal migrants would come here from Poland, has again miscalculated. The 500 illegal immigrants reckon to spend between two to three weeks at Calais, implying that up to 200 get to Britain every week. With the addition of those stowing away at Dunkirk, St Omer and Brussels, an estimate of 10,000 arrivals in the UK looks cautious.
Sher runs his gang with the help of three fellow Afghans, each of whom is an illegal immigrant. They have associates in British cities who can collect money in advance from the relatives of would-be immigrants to Britain. The undercover reporter, posing as an illegal immigrant from Bangladesh desperate to go to London, was told the tariff by Jameel Asmol, a member of the gang. If the money is paid in the UK, then the rate is 1,000 euros. If the would-be immigrant gives cash in hand to the gang, he can pay as little as 300. If the would-be immigrant wants a guaranteed entry into Britain, he has to pay the smugglers 4,400. In this case, the immigrant would be smuggled into the UK with the connivance of a truck driver, said Asmol.
The camp is close to a motorway truck-stop where some drivers stop to sleep. As night approached, the reporter watched five people being taken by the gang to be hidden inside lorries. All except one headed to the motorway empty-handed; the last one to leave took a carrier bag full of clothes. The bravest stowaways get into Britain by holding onto one of the axles of the truck. Bosh, one of the gang, explained: "In a long lorry, there are three axles at the back but one of them is not used and is pulled up. We get you to cling on throughout the whole journey."
The gang plays a wary game of cat-and-mouse with the police. Sher told the reporter that the previous night, police suddenly stormed the truck stop as five immigrants were about to clamber into the lorries. The five were arrested but the gang leaders managed to get away.
The reporter watched as the migrants lit a fire at their makeshift camp, heating metal bars until they became red hot before rubbing their thumbs and index fingers over the metal. One explained that this was to thwart the police who take the finger-prints of every illegal immigrant they arrest.
Those stowaways who do get into the trucks are often caught in Calais. Gamma ray detectors spot movements inside the container and there are also heart beat detectors and CO2 probes for human breath. As part of the tariff charged by the gangs, they promise the would-be immigrants that no matter how many times they get caught, they will be put back in lorries until they reach Britain....
Asmol explained that it was common for relatives in Britain to pay for immigrants in Calais. Within minutes he gave a mobile phone number for his associate Rahulla, who was based in Birmingham....
The charities refuse to accept that their assistance may contribute to the build-up of migrants. Jacky Verhaegen, head of migrant welfare for Secours Catholique, said: "These migrants don't leave Afghanistan because they heard that the soup we provide is good. They come here to go to England. We have to help these people because they are poor."
The new welfare centre, to be paid for by the French authorities, will open this autumn. Critics of "Sangatte Two" accuse the French of reneging on the spirit of the deal struck in 2002 between Nicolas Sarkozy, now a candidate for the French presidency, and David Blunkett, then home secretary. This made it clear that no such centre would be built again in Calais.
Blunkett said this weekend: "Given the much tougher border controls and surveillance put in place since closure, it is amazing that local, as well as national, French politicians do not appear to have sufficiently recognised the danger of conflict that sucha centre will present."
Unlike the original Sangatte facility, the new centre will have no overnight accommodation, say its creators. A spokesman for Jacky Henin, mayor of Calais, said: "For three years we have asked the French, the European and British governments to do something but no one has done anything." He blamed Britain for the presence of illegal immigrants. "Why do the British government give work to migrants? Why is it possible to get jobs in Britain without identity cards?" he said.
More here
SCOTTISH GREENS: WE'LL AXE CATHOLIC SCHOOLS
No respect for freedom of choice there: Green Fascism
THE Greens have called for the abolition of Catholic schools in Scotland. The party, who hope to win at least 10 seats at Holyrood, have included moves for Catholic schools to be integrated into a secular state system in their manifesto. Green leader Robin Harper claimed that having separate schools "tends to divide communities". He said: "Catholic children, for most of their time in primary and secondary, do not mix with other children. "And children who are non-Catholics do not, because the Catholics are educated separately, tend to mix so much with them. "Why have this totally artificial divide, that one group of children, simply because of their religion, should be brought up in different schools to everybody else? "They will get their religious upbringing at home, reinforced by their parents. They will get their religious upbringing in their churches, reinforced by the churches. "State education should be secular."
A spokesman for the Catholic Church said: "It is unfortunate that the Greens want to trample on the rights of Catholic parents and the thousands of other parents who aren't Catholics but choose a Catholic education for their kids. "This is an outrageous proposal."
Source
Monday, April 09, 2007
More on Britain's maternity meltdown
Steadily regressing to the primitive where untrained family members have to deliver the baby
At first Annette Armstrong wasn't planning to have her mother present at her baby's birth. But she came round to the idea - after all it would be nice to hold her hand during the labour. It turned out to be the 'best decision' of Annette's life. For it was her mother who ended up having to deliver the baby - without her, says Annette, there is a chance her baby could have died.
Annette's ordeal began after her waters broke and she was admitted to a large maternity hospital near her home in Birmingham. When the 28-year-old went into labour, she experienced the alarming consequences of the chronic midwife shortages in Britain's maternity wards. "There were ten women, all at various stages of pregnancy and labour - five who had already given birth and one inconsolable woman who had just had a stillbirth - but only two midwives to look after us all. "The midwives were rushed off their feet and clearly couldn't meet the needs of all their patients. I got the feeling I was just a number, an item on a conveyor belt.
"After I was admitted I saw the midwife just once over the next three hours when she popped her head round the door to check on me." Three hours later, a different midwife started her shift. "After a quick check she told me I wasn't progressing that quickly and it could be a while yet," says Annette. "Before I could ask any questions she was gone."
With Annette screaming and the midwife absent, Annette's husband Daniel, 29, had to find an anaesthetist to give Annette an epidural - a form of pain relief that numbs the lower half of the body. But the injection was put in the wrong place, leaving Annette still able to feel every contraction. When the midwife finally reappeared, Annette told her she was ready to push the baby out. "But the midwife told me there was no way my baby was coming yet and I should try to stay calm. She didn't even check how dilated I was.
"I'll leave my assistant with you," she said, and a girl who looked no more than 20 appeared at the door. "She's a trainee, but she can come and get me if you really need me," the midwife said. "I'm just popping out, but I'll be straight back after that."" The trainee was unable to check how dilated Annette was because she wasn't sure if she'd enough experience to tell.
With Annette screaming that she was about to give birth, her mother had no choice but to roll up her sleeves and deliver the baby herself. "My mum is not a midwife and I couldn't believe she was about to deliver my baby. Daniel shouted at the trainee to get help, but she just stood in the corner looking petrified. "Twenty minutes after the midwife had left, the baby was crowning - the top of its head had appeared. My mum said: "This is your little girl and we have to get her out safely. There is no one else here to do this, so you have to trust me. Now start pushing." "When the head was out, she told me not to push so hard till each shoulder was out so that I didn't tear - she remembered being told this when she she was having me and my siblings." Minutes later, Harriet was born weighing 8lb 9oz and in good health.
"My mum and I burst into tears. She had helped me at a time when I needed her most, but I couldn't believe the NHS staff had put us in that position. "Were it not for my mum's advice and calm attitude, my child could have been starved of oxygen or had a whole host of other complications from not being delivered in time - she might even have died."
Annette is one of thousands of women each year whose care during childbirth is being put at risk by the current crisis in NHS maternity services. A shortage of midwives, coupled with budget cuts, means that overstretched units are struggling to cope, let alone provide the personal care pregnant women want and need. It makes the Government's promise that all women will have continuous care by 2009 seem, at best, wildly optimistic.
Only last week a study revealed that thousands of women find themselves isolated and frightened during labour because they do not get the care they need. Over half were left alone at times during labour. Just 19 per cent had one midwife providing continuity of care during their labour and while giving birth, with over half of firsttime mums having a stream of three or more midwives see them through the experience. The poll - funded by the Department of Health - also uncovered complaints about unsympathetic staff, who were too busy to give women the care they need.
Campaigners say that poor care during childbirth is leaving 30 per cent of women traumatised - that's around 200,000 women a year, says Maureen Treadwell of the Birth Trauma Association. She describes one alarming case where a woman who arrived on a maternity ward was asked to remove her underwear for an internal examination in the corridor - in front of cleaners. In another, cleaners were sent to clean up a room where a woman had been left naked.
More worryingly, there is the potential risk to health. Experts warned that many of the 60,000 reported maternity ward errors between 2003 and 2006 were due to staff shortages, inadequate experience, lack of consultant involvement and equipment problems. While deaths linked to pregnancy are rare, the latest figures show the number or women dying from pregnancy-related problems is rising, despite advances in medicine.
Two thirds of the 261 women who died from pregnancy complications between 200 and 2002 (the latest figures available) had 'some form of sub-optimal clinical care'. (In the previous three years, 242 were reported). Medical experts are concerned that the next report on maternal and child health, released at the end of the year, will show a further increase in maternal deaths.
Maureen Treadwell said: "Women's experiences on maternity wards vary from utterly superb to appalling and unacceptable. The appalling end is leaving hundreds of thousands of women suffering from some kind of trauma."
At the heart of this national problem is a severe shortage of midwives. According to the Royal College of Midwives, 10,000 more are required to ensure women get the care they need throughout childbirth. The shortage is due to an increasing number of midwives reaching retirement age and cuts in government funding for maternity units, meaning that newly-qualified midwives find it harder to get jobs. At present midwives have to work longer hours under greater stress, causing more of them to leave the profession.
Melanie Every, of the Royal College of Midwives, said: "Maternity care has become more involved, more invasive and the expectations of mothers are much greater than they were ten or 20 years ago. We have also seen a rise in the birth rate by around 50,000. "Women should have one-to-one care during labour." She added that one midwife should have a caseload of 28 to 35 mothers, depending on the kind of care the woman needs. However, there are hospital trusts where there is just one midwife for every 41 mothers. She says: "Shortages could jeopardise the standard of care in some services, but that doesn't mean every maternity unit is a dangerous place to be. The UK is still a very safe place to have a baby."
The crisis in maternity care is being exacerbated by falling numbers of experienced senior doctors, again due to funding cuts. The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists estimates there needs to be a 5 per cent annual increase in the number of consultant obstetricians to meet the demands of maternity units. Yet since 2004, there has been a 17 per cent fall in the number of consultants being employed. This means that maternity units are routinely left without a senior doctor on the wards in the evenings and at weekends to deal with complications. Some 64 per cent of average-sized maternity units (ones where 3,000 to 4,000 babies are born a year) have a consultant on the wards only between 9am and 5pm, Monday to Friday. At other times, units are forced to rely on senior doctors who are on call from home.
The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists has set a target that all units of this size should have consultant cover from 9am to 9pm on weekdays by 2009. Professor Shaughn O'Brien, vicepresident of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, said: "Maternity care is very safe but it could be safer if there was one-to-one midwifery care available and there was consultant presence on the labour ward. "But the Government has never provided the funding for significant numbers of consultants to give this level of round-the-clock care on maternity wards, as there is in Europe. "If we could prevent one medical legal case for brain damage - which would receive a payout of around 3.5 million pounds - it would pay for one consultant obstetrician for the whole of his obstetric career."
Ministers desperate to limit the political furore sparked by the maternity crisis insist that services will improve. By 2009, they are promising that all women will be able to choose whether they want to give birth at home, in a midwife-led unit or in hospital, and will have access to continuous care during childbirth. To achieve this, the Government is planning to 'reconfigure' maternity services, merging some hospitals to make 'super-units', while opening a number of smaller midwifery-led units. However, critics claim the restructuring process means 43 existing maternity units have closed or are under threat - a move which they say will restrict women's choices. They also point out that continuity of care is less likely in big regional birth centres as opposed to smaller local centres.
Any improvements in maternity care will come too late for Annette, who has been left to reflect on her ordeal last April. She feels the NHS failed her and her baby because there weren't enough staff on the maternity ward and the midwives who were assigned to her didn't give her enough attention. "Were it not for my mother, I dread to think what would have happened," she says. "Harriet is a happy, healthy little girl, but it could have been so different. "What worries me is that many women won't be lucky enough to have their mums by their sides and will be left at the mercy of medical professionals who don't have the time or the inclination to look after them properly. "The Government needs to increase funding for midwives or I will certainly not be the last woman to have a terrible experience of birth."
Source
TOO LITTLE TOO LATE: TIMES EDITORS WORRY ABOUT CLIMATE HYSTERIA
Editorial from "The Times" below
Facts, not emotion, should inform discussion of climate change. Few scientists or rational politicians doubt that global warming is a serious issue that poses long-term dangers to the planet. The scientific evidence that the world's climate has changed and that this change is accelerating is convincing. But it is also beyond doubt that the world is in danger of being held captive by powerful lobby groups that have distorted data, made unjustified extrapolations and attempted to stifle debate on one of the most important issues of our time.
The warnings issued by the Intergov-ernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in Brussels yesterday are a collection of worst-case scenarios. The report, approved by 130 governments and endorsed by 2,500 scientists (few of whom probably had any hand in writing it), makes scary reading. It predicts a catastrophic future for millions of humans and other species. Global warning will bring hunger, floods and water shortages. Greenhouse gases will change rainfall patterns, intensify tropical storms, accelerate the melting of Arctic ice and mountain glaciers. Africa faces starvation, coastal cities will be swamped and China will see the rapid advance of the desert.
Some of these dangers may well be real. But many are deliberate exaggerations, as the IPCC's mandate was to highlight the dangers if global temperatures were to rise by up to 4C (7.2F). That assumption is far from proven. But it is enough for some environmental groups to speak of "an apocalyptic future", a "nightmare vision" and a "humanitarian catastrophe".
Every group is entitled to lobby hard for its cause. But to jump on a band-wagon and blame everything on climate change is neither good science nor sound lobbying. China's deserts have been threatening its cities for hundreds of years. Africa cannot be simultaneously threatened by endless droughts and by a rapid increase in malaria. Children are threatened by global warming, but they have also been helped by the economic development that some lobbyists seem to regard as a criminal activity. Tens of millions of children in India and China who would have died 30 years ago are not dying because increased wealth has brought better food, cleaner water and improved access to healthcare.
Companies and individuals have a responsibility to examine their behaviour and reduce their impact on the planet. But that self-examination should be rational and real and not debased by left-leaning fear-mongers, whose social agendas are recipes for impoverishment and hardship.
The real danger of the zealots is that they brook no argument. This does not mean that scientists should take a myopic view of figures that point to danger, such as the rise in carbon dioxide levels to about 380 parts per million, far exceeding the "natural" range for the past 650,000 years. But even to ask what is the natural range is regarded as some sort of heresy, and to ask questions about the precise contribution of anthropogenic influences is to commit a thought crime.
There have already been examples of environmental scientists hounded out of their jobs for daring to question the prevailing orthodoxy. The IPCC summary is inevitably a political narrative, one in which each word and phrase will be endlessly and selectively parsed by the likes of Greenpeace and friends.
The planet deserves the benefit of the doubt. Climate change is serious and must be a political priority. But the arguments must be subject to free and rigorous debate and the facts separated from fanciful predictions - the environment is too important to be bequeathed to the hysterical.
Source
Revolting Brits?: "The government is predicting that some 15m people will revolt against Tony Blair’s controversial ID card scheme by refusing to produce the new cards or provide personal data on demand. The forecast is made in documents released by the Home Office under the Freedom of Information Act. The papers show ministers expect national protests similar to the poll tax rebellions of the Thatcher era, with millions prepared to risk criminal prosecution. Opposition MPs said the new documents proved their case that the programme would never work. David Davis, the shadow home secretary, said: “This will cripple the system. Fifteen million is a massive number. What the Home Office is accepting in private, but refuses to accept in public, is that a massive number of ordinary law-abiding citizens simply will not go along with their scheme.” Davis, whose party’s policy is to scrap the cards, added: “This will render it completely useless as a security or check mechanism of any sort.” The documents, quietly released during parliament’s Easter break, also show that the government is planning to make ID cards compulsory in 2014, despite the expected revolt."
Steadily regressing to the primitive where untrained family members have to deliver the baby
At first Annette Armstrong wasn't planning to have her mother present at her baby's birth. But she came round to the idea - after all it would be nice to hold her hand during the labour. It turned out to be the 'best decision' of Annette's life. For it was her mother who ended up having to deliver the baby - without her, says Annette, there is a chance her baby could have died.
Annette's ordeal began after her waters broke and she was admitted to a large maternity hospital near her home in Birmingham. When the 28-year-old went into labour, she experienced the alarming consequences of the chronic midwife shortages in Britain's maternity wards. "There were ten women, all at various stages of pregnancy and labour - five who had already given birth and one inconsolable woman who had just had a stillbirth - but only two midwives to look after us all. "The midwives were rushed off their feet and clearly couldn't meet the needs of all their patients. I got the feeling I was just a number, an item on a conveyor belt.
"After I was admitted I saw the midwife just once over the next three hours when she popped her head round the door to check on me." Three hours later, a different midwife started her shift. "After a quick check she told me I wasn't progressing that quickly and it could be a while yet," says Annette. "Before I could ask any questions she was gone."
With Annette screaming and the midwife absent, Annette's husband Daniel, 29, had to find an anaesthetist to give Annette an epidural - a form of pain relief that numbs the lower half of the body. But the injection was put in the wrong place, leaving Annette still able to feel every contraction. When the midwife finally reappeared, Annette told her she was ready to push the baby out. "But the midwife told me there was no way my baby was coming yet and I should try to stay calm. She didn't even check how dilated I was.
"I'll leave my assistant with you," she said, and a girl who looked no more than 20 appeared at the door. "She's a trainee, but she can come and get me if you really need me," the midwife said. "I'm just popping out, but I'll be straight back after that."" The trainee was unable to check how dilated Annette was because she wasn't sure if she'd enough experience to tell.
With Annette screaming that she was about to give birth, her mother had no choice but to roll up her sleeves and deliver the baby herself. "My mum is not a midwife and I couldn't believe she was about to deliver my baby. Daniel shouted at the trainee to get help, but she just stood in the corner looking petrified. "Twenty minutes after the midwife had left, the baby was crowning - the top of its head had appeared. My mum said: "This is your little girl and we have to get her out safely. There is no one else here to do this, so you have to trust me. Now start pushing." "When the head was out, she told me not to push so hard till each shoulder was out so that I didn't tear - she remembered being told this when she she was having me and my siblings." Minutes later, Harriet was born weighing 8lb 9oz and in good health.
"My mum and I burst into tears. She had helped me at a time when I needed her most, but I couldn't believe the NHS staff had put us in that position. "Were it not for my mum's advice and calm attitude, my child could have been starved of oxygen or had a whole host of other complications from not being delivered in time - she might even have died."
Annette is one of thousands of women each year whose care during childbirth is being put at risk by the current crisis in NHS maternity services. A shortage of midwives, coupled with budget cuts, means that overstretched units are struggling to cope, let alone provide the personal care pregnant women want and need. It makes the Government's promise that all women will have continuous care by 2009 seem, at best, wildly optimistic.
Only last week a study revealed that thousands of women find themselves isolated and frightened during labour because they do not get the care they need. Over half were left alone at times during labour. Just 19 per cent had one midwife providing continuity of care during their labour and while giving birth, with over half of firsttime mums having a stream of three or more midwives see them through the experience. The poll - funded by the Department of Health - also uncovered complaints about unsympathetic staff, who were too busy to give women the care they need.
Campaigners say that poor care during childbirth is leaving 30 per cent of women traumatised - that's around 200,000 women a year, says Maureen Treadwell of the Birth Trauma Association. She describes one alarming case where a woman who arrived on a maternity ward was asked to remove her underwear for an internal examination in the corridor - in front of cleaners. In another, cleaners were sent to clean up a room where a woman had been left naked.
More worryingly, there is the potential risk to health. Experts warned that many of the 60,000 reported maternity ward errors between 2003 and 2006 were due to staff shortages, inadequate experience, lack of consultant involvement and equipment problems. While deaths linked to pregnancy are rare, the latest figures show the number or women dying from pregnancy-related problems is rising, despite advances in medicine.
Two thirds of the 261 women who died from pregnancy complications between 200 and 2002 (the latest figures available) had 'some form of sub-optimal clinical care'. (In the previous three years, 242 were reported). Medical experts are concerned that the next report on maternal and child health, released at the end of the year, will show a further increase in maternal deaths.
Maureen Treadwell said: "Women's experiences on maternity wards vary from utterly superb to appalling and unacceptable. The appalling end is leaving hundreds of thousands of women suffering from some kind of trauma."
At the heart of this national problem is a severe shortage of midwives. According to the Royal College of Midwives, 10,000 more are required to ensure women get the care they need throughout childbirth. The shortage is due to an increasing number of midwives reaching retirement age and cuts in government funding for maternity units, meaning that newly-qualified midwives find it harder to get jobs. At present midwives have to work longer hours under greater stress, causing more of them to leave the profession.
Melanie Every, of the Royal College of Midwives, said: "Maternity care has become more involved, more invasive and the expectations of mothers are much greater than they were ten or 20 years ago. We have also seen a rise in the birth rate by around 50,000. "Women should have one-to-one care during labour." She added that one midwife should have a caseload of 28 to 35 mothers, depending on the kind of care the woman needs. However, there are hospital trusts where there is just one midwife for every 41 mothers. She says: "Shortages could jeopardise the standard of care in some services, but that doesn't mean every maternity unit is a dangerous place to be. The UK is still a very safe place to have a baby."
The crisis in maternity care is being exacerbated by falling numbers of experienced senior doctors, again due to funding cuts. The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists estimates there needs to be a 5 per cent annual increase in the number of consultant obstetricians to meet the demands of maternity units. Yet since 2004, there has been a 17 per cent fall in the number of consultants being employed. This means that maternity units are routinely left without a senior doctor on the wards in the evenings and at weekends to deal with complications. Some 64 per cent of average-sized maternity units (ones where 3,000 to 4,000 babies are born a year) have a consultant on the wards only between 9am and 5pm, Monday to Friday. At other times, units are forced to rely on senior doctors who are on call from home.
The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists has set a target that all units of this size should have consultant cover from 9am to 9pm on weekdays by 2009. Professor Shaughn O'Brien, vicepresident of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, said: "Maternity care is very safe but it could be safer if there was one-to-one midwifery care available and there was consultant presence on the labour ward. "But the Government has never provided the funding for significant numbers of consultants to give this level of round-the-clock care on maternity wards, as there is in Europe. "If we could prevent one medical legal case for brain damage - which would receive a payout of around 3.5 million pounds - it would pay for one consultant obstetrician for the whole of his obstetric career."
Ministers desperate to limit the political furore sparked by the maternity crisis insist that services will improve. By 2009, they are promising that all women will be able to choose whether they want to give birth at home, in a midwife-led unit or in hospital, and will have access to continuous care during childbirth. To achieve this, the Government is planning to 'reconfigure' maternity services, merging some hospitals to make 'super-units', while opening a number of smaller midwifery-led units. However, critics claim the restructuring process means 43 existing maternity units have closed or are under threat - a move which they say will restrict women's choices. They also point out that continuity of care is less likely in big regional birth centres as opposed to smaller local centres.
Any improvements in maternity care will come too late for Annette, who has been left to reflect on her ordeal last April. She feels the NHS failed her and her baby because there weren't enough staff on the maternity ward and the midwives who were assigned to her didn't give her enough attention. "Were it not for my mother, I dread to think what would have happened," she says. "Harriet is a happy, healthy little girl, but it could have been so different. "What worries me is that many women won't be lucky enough to have their mums by their sides and will be left at the mercy of medical professionals who don't have the time or the inclination to look after them properly. "The Government needs to increase funding for midwives or I will certainly not be the last woman to have a terrible experience of birth."
Source
TOO LITTLE TOO LATE: TIMES EDITORS WORRY ABOUT CLIMATE HYSTERIA
Editorial from "The Times" below
Facts, not emotion, should inform discussion of climate change. Few scientists or rational politicians doubt that global warming is a serious issue that poses long-term dangers to the planet. The scientific evidence that the world's climate has changed and that this change is accelerating is convincing. But it is also beyond doubt that the world is in danger of being held captive by powerful lobby groups that have distorted data, made unjustified extrapolations and attempted to stifle debate on one of the most important issues of our time.
The warnings issued by the Intergov-ernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in Brussels yesterday are a collection of worst-case scenarios. The report, approved by 130 governments and endorsed by 2,500 scientists (few of whom probably had any hand in writing it), makes scary reading. It predicts a catastrophic future for millions of humans and other species. Global warning will bring hunger, floods and water shortages. Greenhouse gases will change rainfall patterns, intensify tropical storms, accelerate the melting of Arctic ice and mountain glaciers. Africa faces starvation, coastal cities will be swamped and China will see the rapid advance of the desert.
Some of these dangers may well be real. But many are deliberate exaggerations, as the IPCC's mandate was to highlight the dangers if global temperatures were to rise by up to 4C (7.2F). That assumption is far from proven. But it is enough for some environmental groups to speak of "an apocalyptic future", a "nightmare vision" and a "humanitarian catastrophe".
Every group is entitled to lobby hard for its cause. But to jump on a band-wagon and blame everything on climate change is neither good science nor sound lobbying. China's deserts have been threatening its cities for hundreds of years. Africa cannot be simultaneously threatened by endless droughts and by a rapid increase in malaria. Children are threatened by global warming, but they have also been helped by the economic development that some lobbyists seem to regard as a criminal activity. Tens of millions of children in India and China who would have died 30 years ago are not dying because increased wealth has brought better food, cleaner water and improved access to healthcare.
Companies and individuals have a responsibility to examine their behaviour and reduce their impact on the planet. But that self-examination should be rational and real and not debased by left-leaning fear-mongers, whose social agendas are recipes for impoverishment and hardship.
The real danger of the zealots is that they brook no argument. This does not mean that scientists should take a myopic view of figures that point to danger, such as the rise in carbon dioxide levels to about 380 parts per million, far exceeding the "natural" range for the past 650,000 years. But even to ask what is the natural range is regarded as some sort of heresy, and to ask questions about the precise contribution of anthropogenic influences is to commit a thought crime.
There have already been examples of environmental scientists hounded out of their jobs for daring to question the prevailing orthodoxy. The IPCC summary is inevitably a political narrative, one in which each word and phrase will be endlessly and selectively parsed by the likes of Greenpeace and friends.
The planet deserves the benefit of the doubt. Climate change is serious and must be a political priority. But the arguments must be subject to free and rigorous debate and the facts separated from fanciful predictions - the environment is too important to be bequeathed to the hysterical.
Source
Revolting Brits?: "The government is predicting that some 15m people will revolt against Tony Blair’s controversial ID card scheme by refusing to produce the new cards or provide personal data on demand. The forecast is made in documents released by the Home Office under the Freedom of Information Act. The papers show ministers expect national protests similar to the poll tax rebellions of the Thatcher era, with millions prepared to risk criminal prosecution. Opposition MPs said the new documents proved their case that the programme would never work. David Davis, the shadow home secretary, said: “This will cripple the system. Fifteen million is a massive number. What the Home Office is accepting in private, but refuses to accept in public, is that a massive number of ordinary law-abiding citizens simply will not go along with their scheme.” Davis, whose party’s policy is to scrap the cards, added: “This will render it completely useless as a security or check mechanism of any sort.” The documents, quietly released during parliament’s Easter break, also show that the government is planning to make ID cards compulsory in 2014, despite the expected revolt."
Sunday, April 08, 2007
NHS encouraging midwives rather than obstetricians because they are cheaper?
A full range of birthing choices, huh? If only one could simply giggle and chuck the glossy Maternity Matters document in the bin along with Patricia Hewitt. We know the NHS will never be able to provide every mother with her own named midwife to hold her hand throughout what James Naughtie hilariously referred to on the Today programme yesterday as her "confinement" (where do they find these male presenters born so many, many generations ago?).
We know it, because we know about NHS rotas and staff attitudes and the way the patients are made to fit around them. We know pregnant women are not all going to have their own midwife on call, unless that means call back after 9.30am and speak to the answerphone.
Yet we must do more than chuckle, for Maternity Matters is no joke. It is the next stage in a midwife-led campaign to limit the choice available to women giving birth. You only need to read the introduction to see this. "It also emphasises the need for all women to be supported and encouraged to have as normal a pregnancy and birth as possible," writes Ms Hewitt. Her junior "Minister for Care Services", Ivan Lewis, adds: "I believe individualised care offered by a midwife, specialist support provided to those most at risk and normal birth without medical intervention will become a more realistic option for every parent."
A "normal" birth . . . birth without medical intervention: why? Why should we? This is an extraordinary conspiracy against women, a sort of quasi-religious belief in the virtue of pain, which Ms Hewitt is bafflingly encouraging. The more that modern medicine offers, in terms of pain relief and convenience, the more urgent the insistence of this weird sorority that a woman has to give birth "naturally".
Again, why? We are no longer expected these days to die naturally, without the operation that would remove the cancer or the pain relief to help us on our way. We are not expected to have our hips fixed naturally. We are not even expected to endure a mild headache without a paracetamol. Yet somehow the deeply painful and, for some, traumatic experience of giving birth is forced upon woman after woman in the name of some Earth Mother concept.
As a woman interviewed on the radio yesterday said, the worst part of her otherwise excellent treatment on the labour ward was the moment when the midwife gave her "quite a lot of grief" because she chose to have an epidural. She only had the strength to insist upon it because her father, sister and husband were all doctors and she trusted their advice. These midwives trained to help women give birth are for some reason trained only to help them give birth naturally. They are the chief conspirators against us. Please, let us have fewer of them, not more, Ms Hewitt.
I remember when I told my very nice and until then helpful midwife that I was going to have a Caesarean (I, fortunately, had a choice). I might as well have said that after careful thought I had decided I would feed my baby heroin. When she had recovered sufficiently from the shock, Maureen, a large, broad-hipped woman and mother of about eight, suggested I might have been swayed by Posh Spice: "A lot of women want to follow their favourite celebrity." Then she asked whether I was doing it at my husband's request to keep myself perfect for him "down there". There was no way she was going to understand that for me a predictable, pain-free birth (yes, I wanted it in the diary; anything wrong with that?) with a surgeon I had met and trusted, accompanied by lots and lots of drugs, was my choice.
Too many women in their late thirties have too many horror stories of agonising labours followed by emergency Caesareans under general anaesthetic so that, after all that, they miss the actual birth. For the rest of their lives they must live with terrible scars from being slashed wildly across the stomach by the cack-handed doctor on call, and remember the first weeks of their child's life in only a blur of exhausted depression and trauma. Does maternity not "matter" for them, too? Ask a woman who has had a planned Caesarean: awake, calm, pain-free. And no risk of the "down there" issues that Maureen referred to, either.
Yet the whole thrust of government policy is towards making that - the best choice for many - less and less available. They are closing smaller consultant-led maternity units and encouraging women towards natural home births or midwife-led units (no Caesareans), while hoping to use the specialist consultant-led birth centres only for the few expecting complicated births; minimal medical intervention, maximum embrace of the "natural". Ouch!
Perhaps the most insidious effect of these official attitudes is the guilt they can engender in the poor woman who tries and feels she has "failed" to have a "normal" birth as eulogised by NHS midwifery and the equally messianic National Childbirth Trust, progenitors of so many doomed "birth plans". One writer in The Times has been describing the feelings of disappointment and failure she felt after an emergency Caesarean: "Right from the start I felt I had let [the baby, Charlotte] down, not to mention me and my family." So irritated were many "pull yourself together, girl" readers, that she felt compelled to respond, this time less traumatised, a year after the birth (you can see the whole debate on the Alphamummy blog): "In the months leading up to the birth of Charlotte, like any very excited first-time mum, I read lots of books and attended a `natural birthing yoga' class on a weekly basis. In all my teachings I was told over and over again that the best way is the natural drug-free way. I was told that drugs slowed down the labour and could affect the baby. Nowhere was I told the benefits of drugs. I was brainwashed into thinking that natural is right and drugs were wrong."
Quite. It is shocking that a feminist Secretary of State for Health in the 21st century should be colluding with the pious missionaries campaigning to keep women's birth experiences in the 19th. We are modern now. And we are not in the Third World. We do not need to get behind a bush and squat. Let those who want to go natural, choose natural. But let those who don't, choose drugs. Choose a Caesarean. Choose life - any way they want it.
Source
NHS might not even be able to supply a midwife!
Fury at Hewitt's plan to water down promise of one-to-one midwife care for pregnant women
A government pledge to give every mother the right of one-to-one care from a midwife during labour has been watered down to allow hospitals to use lower-paid attendants with fewer skills. Midwives' leaders call the move 'scandalous', arguing that it will increase the risks for those women and babies not supported by a qualified midwife.
The policy shift will be in the government's maternity strategy, due to be announced by Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt this week. The government has come under increasing pressure over the state of maternity wards due to a recent spate of reports showing that standards in Britain are falling, with thousands of women not receiving good antenatal care or enough support during the birth. In its election manifesto in May 2005, Labour promised that by 2009 women would be cared for by a named midwife throughout pregnancy and would receive continuous care throughout the delivery. Instead they could now find themselves in the care of a maternity support worker, a new category of staff without a nursing or midwifery degree who may not be able to deliver a baby safely.
However, Health Minister Ivan Lewis is adamant they would not jeopardise safety. He told The Observer: 'By the end of 2009, we want to see trusts at least giving a commitment to the fact that a skilled professional is present throughout the birth. That could be a midwife or it could be a maternity support worker.' He defended the use of lower-skilled staff: 'What matters is that the mother feels confident that she is well cared for. There are many maternity support workers who are providing an excellent service.'
Lewis also criticised the 'rhetoric and scare-mongering' of recent media reports that have highlighted problems on maternity wards. 'A lot of the media reporting has been very irresponsible because it scares women. There have been two million births over the past three years, and 50 women died in that time due to obstetric complications that could have been dealt with better. One death is too many - but that number doesn't suggest a crisis in terms of safety.'
The Royal College of Midwives is furious that hospital trusts will be able to claim they offer continuous care during labour when they have replaced trained midwives with maternity care assistants, who are paid around 12,000 pounds a year and are not subject to the same regulation. They were originally introduced to help with lighter duties on maternity wards, such as feeding and washing, but many believe hospital trusts see them as a cheap workforce.
RCM adviser Sue Jacob said: 'This change has been quietly slipped in and is nothing short of scandalous. Do we really see childbirth as so unimportant that you de-skill the very people who will be delivering children? Women want nothing less than a midwife by their side when they are in labour. We know from all the research that's been done that continuous care from an experienced professional makes a huge difference to the safety of both the mother and the child.'
Belinda Phipps, chief executive of the National Childbirth Trust, said: 'We would like to see the gold standard being met, which is a qualified midwife being with a woman throughout labour. We know that 10 per cent of women are being left alone during labour, and they don't like it. It's just down to not having enough staff, and the financial situation in the NHS has made that worse.' Phipps pointed out that in Scotland the target of offering continuous care from a midwife is already being met. 'It has to be asked why the rest of the country can't achieve this goal, given that it is so very important for women when they go into labour,' she said.
Under the new strategy, called 'Maternity Matters', from 2009 women will also be offered a choice of whether to receive their antenatal care from a midwife or a GP. They will be able to choose whether to give birth at home, in a midwife-led unit or in a hospital.
Source
Britain: Teacher dangers
The dangers resulting from indiscipline are played down below but the last paragraph lets the cat out of the bag
Teachers were awarded up to 25 million pounds in compensation last year for stress, accidents and violent attacks by parents and pupils. The highest award, of 330,000, was paid to a teacher in Birmingham who was assaulted by an intruder on school premises after hours. A female teacher in her thirties who was raped by a 12-year-old boy with severe learning difficulties received just 11,000. She was attacked in November 2004 while giving a one-to-one tutorial in English and IT at a special needs centre. The boy, who was sexually abused and is one of Britain's youngest convicted rapists, stole her car and crashed it 40 miles away.
The National Association of Schoolmasters and Union of Women Teachers (NASUWT) secured nearly 6.9 million in compensation. The Association of Teachers and Lecturers won nearly 6 million for its members. The National Union of Teachers estimated its overall compensation figure last year at up to 12 million. In 2005, NUT members were awarded 7 million, but these only involved cases pursued by the union's lawyers. Steve Sinnott, general secretary of the NUT, said: "The injuries and injustices suffered by teachers can destroy their careers. It is imperative that employers recognise the positions that they can put teachers into. Teachers have a right to be treated fairly and to be protected from the dangers that can be inherent in the job."
Most of the personal injury cases involved teachers slipping up on wet surfaces, tripping over furniture or suffering other accidents on school property. Several listed involved road accidents. A teacher who was beaten up by two parents at her school received compensation for criminal injuries. Some of the payouts were more controversial. A lesbian teacher in East London, who was dismissed by a Roman Catholic school after asking for paternity leave to assist at the birth of her partner's baby, won 20,000 in compensation. Another teacher in London received 3,000 for unfair dismissal and race discrimination, although the discrimination claim was "extremely weak", according to the NUT. Graham Clayton, the NUT's senior solicitor, said that the compensation it sought was always fair. However, when he was questioned over the award to the rape victim he said that the union was often unhappy with the awards by the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority. "The criminal justice tariff scheme doesn't always produce justice that it should," he said.
At the National Association of Schoolmasters and Union of Women Teachers, lawyers secured 6,877,197 in compensation for members, which included 330,000 for the assault on the teacher in Birmingham. Chris Keates, general secretary of the NASUWT, said that there had been a steady increase in the number of claims. Stress was a major factor, but she admitted that the cases were often difficult to prove. "My greatest concern is the large amounts of public money being wasted, which could be avoided if schools had proper management issues in place," she said.
Last November the Education and Inspections Act gave schools a statutory right to impose discipline on pupils, ending decades of confusion about teachers' powers. Teachers can use physical restraint, confiscate mobile phones and march an unruly child out of a classroom. An amendment to the Violent Crime Reductions Act also enables them to search children for weapons.
Source
A blunt British bishop
On Wednesday afternoon in Birmingham a young Muslim woman found herself in the wrong place at the wrong time. The doors of St Chad's Cathedral opened and hundreds of men surged out, their yellow robes flapping in the sunshine. She, in black robes, glanced back, alarmed, and broke into a run. She had better keep running. Last out was the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Birmingham, the Most Rev Vincent Nichols, agitator-in-chief and hot tip to be the Church's next leader in Britain. He had just blessed the priests of his diocese, urging them to fight a culture that he said was becoming "aggressively antireligious".
Name a controversy where politics and religion meet and invariably the Archbishop's name pops up. Faith schools? It was he who forced the Government to back down on admissions quotas. Gay adoption? His views made him the liberals' punchbag. So why, we asked as we met after the service, did he think that Britain had become so antireligious? He thought for a moment and his gentle Liverpudlian accent at first beguiled us to the strength of his opinions. It turns out that it is the Muslims' fault, because the unease the West has with them gives other faiths a bad name. "The acts of terrorism have shaken people's perception of the presence of faiths in this country and around the world and I just wish there was a bit more differentiation in the reflection about the role of faiths in society."
Some politicians jumbled all faiths into one. "Sometimes the anxieties that are expressed around faith schools are actually to do with Islamic schools. And when you press a politician they say, `Well of course we don't mean Catholic schools and we don't mean Church of England schools', but they still hesitate to move away from the umbrella phrase of faith schools. "Then there are others who relish this opportunity to say, with aggression, religious faith is a corruption of human nature and we would be better off without it."
The Archbishop thinks that Islamic schools must integrate into the state system. He explains with a provocative thesis on life in Britain today. "The deep roots of our contemporary secular culture lie in Christianity and there is, in Christianity, an instinctive understanding about the notion of the rights of the human person. "There is now a clear understanding that politically democracy is the best way of organising the use of power in this society. There is, devolved from Christianity, a notion of justice and courts, of the police and supervision of society, of hospitals and of education. "All of these things come, if you like, from the root of the Christian heritage of Europe and of this country. But Islam is a newcomer and therefore the whole process of welcoming and integrating and understanding needs to be far more explicit and far more open and far more measured. At the same time, society without its roots will lose some of those qualities."
Did he believe that Islam threatened those deep roots? "I think it remains to be seen." Phew! This bishop is not afraid of controversy, and in Birmingham, too, with its large Muslim population. "There are real signs, I believe, certainly through the central mosque [in Birmingham], of Islam trying to understand what it means to live out of an Islamic society and in a secular, multi-faith society. That is a long process."
Put in the context of the riots provoked when the Pope cited a Byzantine emperor's belief that Islam was evil, it is hard to gauge his intentions. Is he naive? Or braver than politicians who preach the benefits of multiculturalism without admitting its problems?
He is no stranger to politics. He was one of the bishops behind a Catholic preelection manifesto in 1996 that, with its emphasis on social justice and minimum wage, was interpreted as backing Tony Blair. So did Labour deliver? The Church had no political allegiance, the Archbishop said. But ". . . it seems to me it is very difficult to hold together an agenda which is based on a coalition of special interest groups. There is a need in political life to dig deeper and find the foundations, aspirations and values. My sense is that broad fundamental platform, with its moral values, had been neglected." That sounded like a "no" to us, but he had not finished. "To me, one of the most remarkable features of the last ten years is the number of new criminal offences that have been created. I read somewhere that we are talking over 700 new offences. Now that speaks to me of a moral vacuum. "If you're trying to replace some shared moral values, a sense of conscience is something that pulls us together. If you try to replace that with legislation, you run the risk of not building on a strong foundation."
He elegantly declined our invitation to back David Cameron, but suggested that the Tory leader might be on the right track. "Some of the Conservative Party's thinking about the family, about the responsibility of parents, about how we build a community and all the pressures that a family is under have to be responded to."
When he was a boy he wanted to be a long-distance lorry driver, but as a teenager he started to have private, unwanted, urges to become a priest. "I'd gone to watch Liverpool and stand on the Kop at Anfield, and say to God, `Why don't you just leave me alone? Why can't I just be one of a crowd?' " We asked if this gave him any insight into the isolation felt by teenagers wondering whether they were gay. He didn't take offence. "I think there must be some similarities, yeah." But he added that when he confided in a priest he was told that he had a choice. "It's my understanding that somebody who grows into an awareness of their sexual orientation doesn't have a choice," he said.
This idea of gay men being born not made is refreshingly modern, especially after he struggles through a tortuous defence of the Church's position on gay adoption: that if, in extraordinary circumstances, it is better for a child to be in a single-sex household, it would prefer the child to be brought up by a single parent, gay or not, rather than a gay couple.
He said that he had no regrets about the celibate life. Yet he sells God - and there is no other way of putting this - by making him hot. As he had told the congregation that day: "The Almightly awaits our `Yes' just as much as a young bridegroom awaits the yes of his bride . . . He longs to draw us to Himself." They should "be filled" by God, "with the recklessness of lovers". Steamy stuff. The Archbishop insists that faith should be physically passionate. "Why not? The crucifix is pretty physical, a physical expression of love. In that sense religion is not so abstract. It's maybe not physical in a genital way, but sex is more than intercourse, it's the whole thing that says we two belong to each other."
He worked with Cardinal Basil Hume for many years. "He was actually a very good politician. He knew when to keep quiet. I'm not always sure I've learnt that yet." Would he like to be Pope? He laughed. "No thank you!" Would he like to follow Cardinal Hume to become Archbishop of Westminster? "No thank you!" But what if he were asked? "That's a different question. I do what I'm asked." Heaven may not be stuffed with politicians, but Cardinal Hume, looking down, would be proud.
Source
A full range of birthing choices, huh? If only one could simply giggle and chuck the glossy Maternity Matters document in the bin along with Patricia Hewitt. We know the NHS will never be able to provide every mother with her own named midwife to hold her hand throughout what James Naughtie hilariously referred to on the Today programme yesterday as her "confinement" (where do they find these male presenters born so many, many generations ago?).
We know it, because we know about NHS rotas and staff attitudes and the way the patients are made to fit around them. We know pregnant women are not all going to have their own midwife on call, unless that means call back after 9.30am and speak to the answerphone.
Yet we must do more than chuckle, for Maternity Matters is no joke. It is the next stage in a midwife-led campaign to limit the choice available to women giving birth. You only need to read the introduction to see this. "It also emphasises the need for all women to be supported and encouraged to have as normal a pregnancy and birth as possible," writes Ms Hewitt. Her junior "Minister for Care Services", Ivan Lewis, adds: "I believe individualised care offered by a midwife, specialist support provided to those most at risk and normal birth without medical intervention will become a more realistic option for every parent."
A "normal" birth . . . birth without medical intervention: why? Why should we? This is an extraordinary conspiracy against women, a sort of quasi-religious belief in the virtue of pain, which Ms Hewitt is bafflingly encouraging. The more that modern medicine offers, in terms of pain relief and convenience, the more urgent the insistence of this weird sorority that a woman has to give birth "naturally".
Again, why? We are no longer expected these days to die naturally, without the operation that would remove the cancer or the pain relief to help us on our way. We are not expected to have our hips fixed naturally. We are not even expected to endure a mild headache without a paracetamol. Yet somehow the deeply painful and, for some, traumatic experience of giving birth is forced upon woman after woman in the name of some Earth Mother concept.
As a woman interviewed on the radio yesterday said, the worst part of her otherwise excellent treatment on the labour ward was the moment when the midwife gave her "quite a lot of grief" because she chose to have an epidural. She only had the strength to insist upon it because her father, sister and husband were all doctors and she trusted their advice. These midwives trained to help women give birth are for some reason trained only to help them give birth naturally. They are the chief conspirators against us. Please, let us have fewer of them, not more, Ms Hewitt.
I remember when I told my very nice and until then helpful midwife that I was going to have a Caesarean (I, fortunately, had a choice). I might as well have said that after careful thought I had decided I would feed my baby heroin. When she had recovered sufficiently from the shock, Maureen, a large, broad-hipped woman and mother of about eight, suggested I might have been swayed by Posh Spice: "A lot of women want to follow their favourite celebrity." Then she asked whether I was doing it at my husband's request to keep myself perfect for him "down there". There was no way she was going to understand that for me a predictable, pain-free birth (yes, I wanted it in the diary; anything wrong with that?) with a surgeon I had met and trusted, accompanied by lots and lots of drugs, was my choice.
Too many women in their late thirties have too many horror stories of agonising labours followed by emergency Caesareans under general anaesthetic so that, after all that, they miss the actual birth. For the rest of their lives they must live with terrible scars from being slashed wildly across the stomach by the cack-handed doctor on call, and remember the first weeks of their child's life in only a blur of exhausted depression and trauma. Does maternity not "matter" for them, too? Ask a woman who has had a planned Caesarean: awake, calm, pain-free. And no risk of the "down there" issues that Maureen referred to, either.
Yet the whole thrust of government policy is towards making that - the best choice for many - less and less available. They are closing smaller consultant-led maternity units and encouraging women towards natural home births or midwife-led units (no Caesareans), while hoping to use the specialist consultant-led birth centres only for the few expecting complicated births; minimal medical intervention, maximum embrace of the "natural". Ouch!
Perhaps the most insidious effect of these official attitudes is the guilt they can engender in the poor woman who tries and feels she has "failed" to have a "normal" birth as eulogised by NHS midwifery and the equally messianic National Childbirth Trust, progenitors of so many doomed "birth plans". One writer in The Times has been describing the feelings of disappointment and failure she felt after an emergency Caesarean: "Right from the start I felt I had let [the baby, Charlotte] down, not to mention me and my family." So irritated were many "pull yourself together, girl" readers, that she felt compelled to respond, this time less traumatised, a year after the birth (you can see the whole debate on the Alphamummy blog): "In the months leading up to the birth of Charlotte, like any very excited first-time mum, I read lots of books and attended a `natural birthing yoga' class on a weekly basis. In all my teachings I was told over and over again that the best way is the natural drug-free way. I was told that drugs slowed down the labour and could affect the baby. Nowhere was I told the benefits of drugs. I was brainwashed into thinking that natural is right and drugs were wrong."
Quite. It is shocking that a feminist Secretary of State for Health in the 21st century should be colluding with the pious missionaries campaigning to keep women's birth experiences in the 19th. We are modern now. And we are not in the Third World. We do not need to get behind a bush and squat. Let those who want to go natural, choose natural. But let those who don't, choose drugs. Choose a Caesarean. Choose life - any way they want it.
Source
NHS might not even be able to supply a midwife!
Fury at Hewitt's plan to water down promise of one-to-one midwife care for pregnant women
A government pledge to give every mother the right of one-to-one care from a midwife during labour has been watered down to allow hospitals to use lower-paid attendants with fewer skills. Midwives' leaders call the move 'scandalous', arguing that it will increase the risks for those women and babies not supported by a qualified midwife.
The policy shift will be in the government's maternity strategy, due to be announced by Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt this week. The government has come under increasing pressure over the state of maternity wards due to a recent spate of reports showing that standards in Britain are falling, with thousands of women not receiving good antenatal care or enough support during the birth. In its election manifesto in May 2005, Labour promised that by 2009 women would be cared for by a named midwife throughout pregnancy and would receive continuous care throughout the delivery. Instead they could now find themselves in the care of a maternity support worker, a new category of staff without a nursing or midwifery degree who may not be able to deliver a baby safely.
However, Health Minister Ivan Lewis is adamant they would not jeopardise safety. He told The Observer: 'By the end of 2009, we want to see trusts at least giving a commitment to the fact that a skilled professional is present throughout the birth. That could be a midwife or it could be a maternity support worker.' He defended the use of lower-skilled staff: 'What matters is that the mother feels confident that she is well cared for. There are many maternity support workers who are providing an excellent service.'
Lewis also criticised the 'rhetoric and scare-mongering' of recent media reports that have highlighted problems on maternity wards. 'A lot of the media reporting has been very irresponsible because it scares women. There have been two million births over the past three years, and 50 women died in that time due to obstetric complications that could have been dealt with better. One death is too many - but that number doesn't suggest a crisis in terms of safety.'
The Royal College of Midwives is furious that hospital trusts will be able to claim they offer continuous care during labour when they have replaced trained midwives with maternity care assistants, who are paid around 12,000 pounds a year and are not subject to the same regulation. They were originally introduced to help with lighter duties on maternity wards, such as feeding and washing, but many believe hospital trusts see them as a cheap workforce.
RCM adviser Sue Jacob said: 'This change has been quietly slipped in and is nothing short of scandalous. Do we really see childbirth as so unimportant that you de-skill the very people who will be delivering children? Women want nothing less than a midwife by their side when they are in labour. We know from all the research that's been done that continuous care from an experienced professional makes a huge difference to the safety of both the mother and the child.'
Belinda Phipps, chief executive of the National Childbirth Trust, said: 'We would like to see the gold standard being met, which is a qualified midwife being with a woman throughout labour. We know that 10 per cent of women are being left alone during labour, and they don't like it. It's just down to not having enough staff, and the financial situation in the NHS has made that worse.' Phipps pointed out that in Scotland the target of offering continuous care from a midwife is already being met. 'It has to be asked why the rest of the country can't achieve this goal, given that it is so very important for women when they go into labour,' she said.
Under the new strategy, called 'Maternity Matters', from 2009 women will also be offered a choice of whether to receive their antenatal care from a midwife or a GP. They will be able to choose whether to give birth at home, in a midwife-led unit or in a hospital.
Source
Britain: Teacher dangers
The dangers resulting from indiscipline are played down below but the last paragraph lets the cat out of the bag
Teachers were awarded up to 25 million pounds in compensation last year for stress, accidents and violent attacks by parents and pupils. The highest award, of 330,000, was paid to a teacher in Birmingham who was assaulted by an intruder on school premises after hours. A female teacher in her thirties who was raped by a 12-year-old boy with severe learning difficulties received just 11,000. She was attacked in November 2004 while giving a one-to-one tutorial in English and IT at a special needs centre. The boy, who was sexually abused and is one of Britain's youngest convicted rapists, stole her car and crashed it 40 miles away.
The National Association of Schoolmasters and Union of Women Teachers (NASUWT) secured nearly 6.9 million in compensation. The Association of Teachers and Lecturers won nearly 6 million for its members. The National Union of Teachers estimated its overall compensation figure last year at up to 12 million. In 2005, NUT members were awarded 7 million, but these only involved cases pursued by the union's lawyers. Steve Sinnott, general secretary of the NUT, said: "The injuries and injustices suffered by teachers can destroy their careers. It is imperative that employers recognise the positions that they can put teachers into. Teachers have a right to be treated fairly and to be protected from the dangers that can be inherent in the job."
Most of the personal injury cases involved teachers slipping up on wet surfaces, tripping over furniture or suffering other accidents on school property. Several listed involved road accidents. A teacher who was beaten up by two parents at her school received compensation for criminal injuries. Some of the payouts were more controversial. A lesbian teacher in East London, who was dismissed by a Roman Catholic school after asking for paternity leave to assist at the birth of her partner's baby, won 20,000 in compensation. Another teacher in London received 3,000 for unfair dismissal and race discrimination, although the discrimination claim was "extremely weak", according to the NUT. Graham Clayton, the NUT's senior solicitor, said that the compensation it sought was always fair. However, when he was questioned over the award to the rape victim he said that the union was often unhappy with the awards by the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority. "The criminal justice tariff scheme doesn't always produce justice that it should," he said.
At the National Association of Schoolmasters and Union of Women Teachers, lawyers secured 6,877,197 in compensation for members, which included 330,000 for the assault on the teacher in Birmingham. Chris Keates, general secretary of the NASUWT, said that there had been a steady increase in the number of claims. Stress was a major factor, but she admitted that the cases were often difficult to prove. "My greatest concern is the large amounts of public money being wasted, which could be avoided if schools had proper management issues in place," she said.
Last November the Education and Inspections Act gave schools a statutory right to impose discipline on pupils, ending decades of confusion about teachers' powers. Teachers can use physical restraint, confiscate mobile phones and march an unruly child out of a classroom. An amendment to the Violent Crime Reductions Act also enables them to search children for weapons.
Source
A blunt British bishop
On Wednesday afternoon in Birmingham a young Muslim woman found herself in the wrong place at the wrong time. The doors of St Chad's Cathedral opened and hundreds of men surged out, their yellow robes flapping in the sunshine. She, in black robes, glanced back, alarmed, and broke into a run. She had better keep running. Last out was the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Birmingham, the Most Rev Vincent Nichols, agitator-in-chief and hot tip to be the Church's next leader in Britain. He had just blessed the priests of his diocese, urging them to fight a culture that he said was becoming "aggressively antireligious".
Name a controversy where politics and religion meet and invariably the Archbishop's name pops up. Faith schools? It was he who forced the Government to back down on admissions quotas. Gay adoption? His views made him the liberals' punchbag. So why, we asked as we met after the service, did he think that Britain had become so antireligious? He thought for a moment and his gentle Liverpudlian accent at first beguiled us to the strength of his opinions. It turns out that it is the Muslims' fault, because the unease the West has with them gives other faiths a bad name. "The acts of terrorism have shaken people's perception of the presence of faiths in this country and around the world and I just wish there was a bit more differentiation in the reflection about the role of faiths in society."
Some politicians jumbled all faiths into one. "Sometimes the anxieties that are expressed around faith schools are actually to do with Islamic schools. And when you press a politician they say, `Well of course we don't mean Catholic schools and we don't mean Church of England schools', but they still hesitate to move away from the umbrella phrase of faith schools. "Then there are others who relish this opportunity to say, with aggression, religious faith is a corruption of human nature and we would be better off without it."
The Archbishop thinks that Islamic schools must integrate into the state system. He explains with a provocative thesis on life in Britain today. "The deep roots of our contemporary secular culture lie in Christianity and there is, in Christianity, an instinctive understanding about the notion of the rights of the human person. "There is now a clear understanding that politically democracy is the best way of organising the use of power in this society. There is, devolved from Christianity, a notion of justice and courts, of the police and supervision of society, of hospitals and of education. "All of these things come, if you like, from the root of the Christian heritage of Europe and of this country. But Islam is a newcomer and therefore the whole process of welcoming and integrating and understanding needs to be far more explicit and far more open and far more measured. At the same time, society without its roots will lose some of those qualities."
Did he believe that Islam threatened those deep roots? "I think it remains to be seen." Phew! This bishop is not afraid of controversy, and in Birmingham, too, with its large Muslim population. "There are real signs, I believe, certainly through the central mosque [in Birmingham], of Islam trying to understand what it means to live out of an Islamic society and in a secular, multi-faith society. That is a long process."
Put in the context of the riots provoked when the Pope cited a Byzantine emperor's belief that Islam was evil, it is hard to gauge his intentions. Is he naive? Or braver than politicians who preach the benefits of multiculturalism without admitting its problems?
He is no stranger to politics. He was one of the bishops behind a Catholic preelection manifesto in 1996 that, with its emphasis on social justice and minimum wage, was interpreted as backing Tony Blair. So did Labour deliver? The Church had no political allegiance, the Archbishop said. But ". . . it seems to me it is very difficult to hold together an agenda which is based on a coalition of special interest groups. There is a need in political life to dig deeper and find the foundations, aspirations and values. My sense is that broad fundamental platform, with its moral values, had been neglected." That sounded like a "no" to us, but he had not finished. "To me, one of the most remarkable features of the last ten years is the number of new criminal offences that have been created. I read somewhere that we are talking over 700 new offences. Now that speaks to me of a moral vacuum. "If you're trying to replace some shared moral values, a sense of conscience is something that pulls us together. If you try to replace that with legislation, you run the risk of not building on a strong foundation."
He elegantly declined our invitation to back David Cameron, but suggested that the Tory leader might be on the right track. "Some of the Conservative Party's thinking about the family, about the responsibility of parents, about how we build a community and all the pressures that a family is under have to be responded to."
When he was a boy he wanted to be a long-distance lorry driver, but as a teenager he started to have private, unwanted, urges to become a priest. "I'd gone to watch Liverpool and stand on the Kop at Anfield, and say to God, `Why don't you just leave me alone? Why can't I just be one of a crowd?' " We asked if this gave him any insight into the isolation felt by teenagers wondering whether they were gay. He didn't take offence. "I think there must be some similarities, yeah." But he added that when he confided in a priest he was told that he had a choice. "It's my understanding that somebody who grows into an awareness of their sexual orientation doesn't have a choice," he said.
This idea of gay men being born not made is refreshingly modern, especially after he struggles through a tortuous defence of the Church's position on gay adoption: that if, in extraordinary circumstances, it is better for a child to be in a single-sex household, it would prefer the child to be brought up by a single parent, gay or not, rather than a gay couple.
He said that he had no regrets about the celibate life. Yet he sells God - and there is no other way of putting this - by making him hot. As he had told the congregation that day: "The Almightly awaits our `Yes' just as much as a young bridegroom awaits the yes of his bride . . . He longs to draw us to Himself." They should "be filled" by God, "with the recklessness of lovers". Steamy stuff. The Archbishop insists that faith should be physically passionate. "Why not? The crucifix is pretty physical, a physical expression of love. In that sense religion is not so abstract. It's maybe not physical in a genital way, but sex is more than intercourse, it's the whole thing that says we two belong to each other."
He worked with Cardinal Basil Hume for many years. "He was actually a very good politician. He knew when to keep quiet. I'm not always sure I've learnt that yet." Would he like to be Pope? He laughed. "No thank you!" Would he like to follow Cardinal Hume to become Archbishop of Westminster? "No thank you!" But what if he were asked? "That's a different question. I do what I'm asked." Heaven may not be stuffed with politicians, but Cardinal Hume, looking down, would be proud.
Source
Saturday, April 07, 2007
A last dying twitch of standards in the Church of England?
A gay man was rejected for a post as a youth worker because of his sexual lifestyle, not his sexual orientation, a Church of England bishop told an employment tribunal yesterday. The Right Rev Anthony Priddis, the Bishop of Hereford, said that John Reaney did not get the job because he had admitted having had sex outside marriage. The Bishop denied unlawfully discriminating against Mr Reaney, saying that he had been complying with the teachings of the Church.
He said that he told Mr Reaney that any person in a sexual relationship outside marriage, whether they were heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual or transgender, would have been rejected for the post. "Such sexuality in itself was not an issue, but Mr Reaney's lifestyle had the potential to impact on the spiritual, moral and ethical leadership within the diocese," he said yesterday. He added that his views on sex outside marriage were backed by the Archbishop of Canterbury, the General Synod, the national assembly of the Church of England, and the Lambeth Conference.
Mr Reaney, 41, from Llandudno, North Wales, claims that being openly gay cost him the job. His claim for unlawful discrimination against the Hereford Diocesan Board of Finance is being backed by the gay rights group Stonewall. Under equality legislation introduced in 2003, it is illegal to discriminate against people because of their sexual orientation, although organised religions were given exemptions. The hearing is believed to be the first test case of how it applies to the Church of England.
The tribunal in Cardiff was told that Mr Reaney had been offered the job last July after an interview before a panel of eight. The Bishop, 59, was told that he had indicated on his form that he was homosexual. Mr Reaney was called in for a discussion, during which it emerged that he had recently ended a five-year homosexual relationship. The Bishop said that, although Mr Reaney undertook not to start a new gay relationship, he felt that he was not emotionally in a position to be making such a promise.
He told the tribunal: "The end of a five-year relationship leads to a lot of grieving and it can take much time for someone to recover. It would not have been right for me to take an undertaking of his head that his heart could not keep. It remains my judgment that Mr Reaney had not met the standards required. It was not a risk I was prepared to take." He said that Mr Reaney did not seem overwrought, humiliated or distressed when he was told that his application was being turned down.
The tribunal was told that the job was not offered to anyone else. Bishop Priddis said that, because of the diocese's limited finances, even if Mr Reaney had been appointed he might have been made redundant "sooner rather than later". The Bishop denied that he had breached the diocese's equal opportunities policy. He said: "The Church's teaching draws distinction between sexual orientation and practice and lifestyle. We didn't discriminate against Mr Reaney on the grounds of sexuality. Had we done so we wouldn't have called him for an interview. "What is at issue is the lifestyle, practice and sexual behaviour, whether the applicant is homosexual, heterosexual or transsexual." The Bishop added that his diocese had ordained a transsexual woman as a priest. In September 2005 Sarah Jones, who was a man for 29 years, was described by Bishop Priddis as a "superb candidate" for the post.
Source
The results of politically correct policing in Britain
A neighbour in our new street came round to ask for a cheque towards a private security patrol. "Wouldn't that undermine the police?" I asked, sensing a threat to my bank balance. "What police?" he replied. It's true. There are police boards sprouting all over our area ("Did you see? Incident, stabbing, assault"), but no police. London is becoming a city of vigilantes. The well-off are hiring uniformed guards, and the teenagers down the road are arming themselves with knives - because no one else is going to defend them. We have seen the results of that: five teenagers stabbed to death in the past four weeks.
We are giving up on the police because they seem to have given up themselves. The sheer quantity of blogging by disillusioned bobbies is a sign of just how blue parts of the thin blue line are feeling. PC David Copperfield drily documents the daily grind in his book Wasting Police Time. DC Johnno Hills, who quit the Brighton force this weekend after complaining in the Sunday Express about bureaucracy, has started a petition for police reform.
The latest Home Office figures show that a fifth of officer time is spent on paperwork. This week Sir Alastair McWhirter, retiring as Chief Constable of Suffolk, complained that it can take 56 people and 128 different bits of paper to bring one assault case to court. Well, thank you, Sir Alastair. Now you can go gentle into that index-linked retirement. But where were you in April 2005, when the Government introduced stop and account (as opposed to stop and search) forms? These require an officer asking anyone to account for themselves to fill in 40 questions. Yes, 40. The consequences should have been obvious. I'm not surprised that the cops I do pass refuse to make eye contact. They're probably petrified of becoming a party to my personal information.
The police and the public are still on the same side. But it doesn't always feel like it. A recent ICM poll found that trust in the police is sliding. The official insistence that crime is falling does not help, when people feel it is not. Criminologists say that the most reliable measure of the true rate of violence in society is stranger murder - and killings by strangers have increased by a third between 1997 and 2005.
The police have more money than ever before, and more officers - 140,000 at the last count. But they are not having a commensurate impact. This has stoked a dangerous defeatism among criminologists and within the Home Office: the belief that rising crime is a fact of life that the justice system can do little about. The extraordinary decline of crime in big American cities in the 1990s should be a reason for optimism about policing. But many criminologists there have tried to explain it largely as a function of demographic shifts that produced fewer young men. Others credit schemes to overcome the "moral poverty" of fatherless homes and tough neighbourhoods.
Yet a powerful analysis by Franklin Zimring, Professor of Law at Berkeley, finds both theories to be overdone. His new book, The Great American Crime Decline, finds that neither demographics nor poverty alleviation get anywhere near to explaining the three-quarters drop in lethal youth violence, for example, that took place in New York after 1990. Professor Zimring's message is positive: that policing can reduce crime and that crime, as he says, "is not hardwired into the ecology of modern life or the cultural values of high-risk youth". Within a generation, the behaviour of young men has completely changed - because of better policing.
We know this is true. We have seen it in Manchester, where zero-tolerance policing reduced stranger killings from 37 in 1999 to 5 in 2005. Last week's government crime and policing review made some of the right noises, promising to reorganise the force and cut red tape. But the breathless repetition of old ideas gave little hope of any real change from a Government whose latest wheeze has been to make officers agree every single charge they make with the Crown Prosecution Service. This has helped the CPS to meet its targets for successful prosecutions, but created mindboggling delays that leave citizens bereft of protection.
How do we return pride and power to the police? A Conservative police reform task force this week published an excellent analysis of the problems, with a sensible range of solutions. The most fundamental of these is to roll back the dead hand of central control by directly electing police commissioners. In the past, this idea has been met with defeatism: it wouldn't "take" in the UK, or it would politicise the force. But the police are already politicised. It is time to consider direct accountability, not simply because there is a gulf with citizens, but also because a radical change in management is needed.
New York's police commissioner was, notoriously, as tough on his officers as he was on criminals. Every week the most senior officers detailed the crime in their precincts and told him how they were tackling it. Once almost half of them had been fired, there was no confusion about the objective. The NYPD was not about printing customer satisfaction surveys, but about keeping people safe.
That kind of reform will not be welcomed by a unionised, cosy and conservative service. Even the bloggers who are quick to moan about paperwork may be less keen to acquire public accountability. But the Tories must stick to their guns. There are many brave, talented police officers who work tirelessly. But they should be doing so on behalf of the public, not as the claims department of the insurance industry or the administrative arm of the CPS
Source
British hospital phone-call ripoff
Patientline, the company that provides telephones at hospital bedsides, is to increase its prices by up to 160 per cent. Charges for outgoing calls will rise from 10p a minute to 26p. This compares with about 3p a minute for the basic BT rate. Incoming calls to patients cost 39p per minute off-peak and 49p a minute at peak times.
Yesterday the company said that it was not wholly responsible for the hike in charges; delays to the Health Service IT project were also to blame. Patientline told The Times that it had invested 160 million pounds in installing 75,000 bedside consoles in more than 150 hospitals. In 2005, Patientline was investigated by regulators over its high charges, but was cleared of any wrongdoing.
Seven years ago the company won contracts with NHS hospitals to provide the consoles, which, at the Government’s recommendation, provided for doctors to access the proposed electronic patient record system and for electronic prescribing and ordering of X-rays, as well as telephone and entertainment services. The additional services were intended to be integrated into the National Programme for IT, with Patientline being paid for electronic record and prescribing schemes as NHS trusts used them. After years of delays to the 6.2 billion project, such systems are not yet online, and Patientline and other companies say that they have been forced to recoup their costs through charging patients to make calls.
Patientline has admitted that it is 80 million in debt and that it currently has money left to operate only for the next 12 months. The NHS does not subsidise or receive money from calls. Colin Printer, the company’s marketing manager, said “As a private sector company, we’ve put millions of pounds worth of equipment into these hospitals and that’s a massive investment for us. Each bedside system cost 1,700 pounds to install, and across the country they were maintained and supervised by 800 staff, Mr Printer said. “They are significant pieces of kit, designed not only to provide phone, television and radio services but also the internet, and electronic medical care. “It is not possible to attach a specific figure to revenues that may have been anticipated from delivering other services for which Patientline equipment is designed, such as electronic patient records and electronic meal-ordering, but it is fair to say Patientline anticipated a greater rollout of these services. “It looks like the patient’s being asked to pay for the cost of everything, which was not the original intention.”
To date, only one hospital has implemented the electronic patient record system and only a few have adopted meal-ordering, according to Patientline. It says that while call charges will increase, the cost of the complete bedside “package” will fall from 3.50 a day to 2.90. Charlotte Brown, the company’s commercial director said: “We’ve realigned our prices to bring the price of TV, which the majority of people watch, to a much lower level.” The price of packages for people staying for longer than a few days would fall, and such patients would be able to get free games and internet services, she added.
The Government has maintained that these services are a luxury and should not be funded by taxpayers. However, the Patients Association says that patients often have no choice but to use Patientline because many hospitals no longer have public pay phones. Mobile phone use has previously been restricted or banned, although some hospitals are relaxing the rules in accordance with recent government guidancesubject to the discretion of ward managers.
Michael Summers, of the association, said that the cost of incoming calls was already high and that the latest increase would lead to more complaints. “These people are ill, often recovering from operations, and the hike from 10p to 26p to phone out is really too much. People are going to be really upset with this,” he said. The Department of Health said: “Arrangements with providers of bedside entertainment systems are agreed locally, and Patientline should be discussing any proposed pricing restructuring with NHS trusts.”
Source
A gay man was rejected for a post as a youth worker because of his sexual lifestyle, not his sexual orientation, a Church of England bishop told an employment tribunal yesterday. The Right Rev Anthony Priddis, the Bishop of Hereford, said that John Reaney did not get the job because he had admitted having had sex outside marriage. The Bishop denied unlawfully discriminating against Mr Reaney, saying that he had been complying with the teachings of the Church.
He said that he told Mr Reaney that any person in a sexual relationship outside marriage, whether they were heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual or transgender, would have been rejected for the post. "Such sexuality in itself was not an issue, but Mr Reaney's lifestyle had the potential to impact on the spiritual, moral and ethical leadership within the diocese," he said yesterday. He added that his views on sex outside marriage were backed by the Archbishop of Canterbury, the General Synod, the national assembly of the Church of England, and the Lambeth Conference.
Mr Reaney, 41, from Llandudno, North Wales, claims that being openly gay cost him the job. His claim for unlawful discrimination against the Hereford Diocesan Board of Finance is being backed by the gay rights group Stonewall. Under equality legislation introduced in 2003, it is illegal to discriminate against people because of their sexual orientation, although organised religions were given exemptions. The hearing is believed to be the first test case of how it applies to the Church of England.
The tribunal in Cardiff was told that Mr Reaney had been offered the job last July after an interview before a panel of eight. The Bishop, 59, was told that he had indicated on his form that he was homosexual. Mr Reaney was called in for a discussion, during which it emerged that he had recently ended a five-year homosexual relationship. The Bishop said that, although Mr Reaney undertook not to start a new gay relationship, he felt that he was not emotionally in a position to be making such a promise.
He told the tribunal: "The end of a five-year relationship leads to a lot of grieving and it can take much time for someone to recover. It would not have been right for me to take an undertaking of his head that his heart could not keep. It remains my judgment that Mr Reaney had not met the standards required. It was not a risk I was prepared to take." He said that Mr Reaney did not seem overwrought, humiliated or distressed when he was told that his application was being turned down.
The tribunal was told that the job was not offered to anyone else. Bishop Priddis said that, because of the diocese's limited finances, even if Mr Reaney had been appointed he might have been made redundant "sooner rather than later". The Bishop denied that he had breached the diocese's equal opportunities policy. He said: "The Church's teaching draws distinction between sexual orientation and practice and lifestyle. We didn't discriminate against Mr Reaney on the grounds of sexuality. Had we done so we wouldn't have called him for an interview. "What is at issue is the lifestyle, practice and sexual behaviour, whether the applicant is homosexual, heterosexual or transsexual." The Bishop added that his diocese had ordained a transsexual woman as a priest. In September 2005 Sarah Jones, who was a man for 29 years, was described by Bishop Priddis as a "superb candidate" for the post.
Source
The results of politically correct policing in Britain
A neighbour in our new street came round to ask for a cheque towards a private security patrol. "Wouldn't that undermine the police?" I asked, sensing a threat to my bank balance. "What police?" he replied. It's true. There are police boards sprouting all over our area ("Did you see? Incident, stabbing, assault"), but no police. London is becoming a city of vigilantes. The well-off are hiring uniformed guards, and the teenagers down the road are arming themselves with knives - because no one else is going to defend them. We have seen the results of that: five teenagers stabbed to death in the past four weeks.
We are giving up on the police because they seem to have given up themselves. The sheer quantity of blogging by disillusioned bobbies is a sign of just how blue parts of the thin blue line are feeling. PC David Copperfield drily documents the daily grind in his book Wasting Police Time. DC Johnno Hills, who quit the Brighton force this weekend after complaining in the Sunday Express about bureaucracy, has started a petition for police reform.
The latest Home Office figures show that a fifth of officer time is spent on paperwork. This week Sir Alastair McWhirter, retiring as Chief Constable of Suffolk, complained that it can take 56 people and 128 different bits of paper to bring one assault case to court. Well, thank you, Sir Alastair. Now you can go gentle into that index-linked retirement. But where were you in April 2005, when the Government introduced stop and account (as opposed to stop and search) forms? These require an officer asking anyone to account for themselves to fill in 40 questions. Yes, 40. The consequences should have been obvious. I'm not surprised that the cops I do pass refuse to make eye contact. They're probably petrified of becoming a party to my personal information.
The police and the public are still on the same side. But it doesn't always feel like it. A recent ICM poll found that trust in the police is sliding. The official insistence that crime is falling does not help, when people feel it is not. Criminologists say that the most reliable measure of the true rate of violence in society is stranger murder - and killings by strangers have increased by a third between 1997 and 2005.
The police have more money than ever before, and more officers - 140,000 at the last count. But they are not having a commensurate impact. This has stoked a dangerous defeatism among criminologists and within the Home Office: the belief that rising crime is a fact of life that the justice system can do little about. The extraordinary decline of crime in big American cities in the 1990s should be a reason for optimism about policing. But many criminologists there have tried to explain it largely as a function of demographic shifts that produced fewer young men. Others credit schemes to overcome the "moral poverty" of fatherless homes and tough neighbourhoods.
Yet a powerful analysis by Franklin Zimring, Professor of Law at Berkeley, finds both theories to be overdone. His new book, The Great American Crime Decline, finds that neither demographics nor poverty alleviation get anywhere near to explaining the three-quarters drop in lethal youth violence, for example, that took place in New York after 1990. Professor Zimring's message is positive: that policing can reduce crime and that crime, as he says, "is not hardwired into the ecology of modern life or the cultural values of high-risk youth". Within a generation, the behaviour of young men has completely changed - because of better policing.
We know this is true. We have seen it in Manchester, where zero-tolerance policing reduced stranger killings from 37 in 1999 to 5 in 2005. Last week's government crime and policing review made some of the right noises, promising to reorganise the force and cut red tape. But the breathless repetition of old ideas gave little hope of any real change from a Government whose latest wheeze has been to make officers agree every single charge they make with the Crown Prosecution Service. This has helped the CPS to meet its targets for successful prosecutions, but created mindboggling delays that leave citizens bereft of protection.
How do we return pride and power to the police? A Conservative police reform task force this week published an excellent analysis of the problems, with a sensible range of solutions. The most fundamental of these is to roll back the dead hand of central control by directly electing police commissioners. In the past, this idea has been met with defeatism: it wouldn't "take" in the UK, or it would politicise the force. But the police are already politicised. It is time to consider direct accountability, not simply because there is a gulf with citizens, but also because a radical change in management is needed.
New York's police commissioner was, notoriously, as tough on his officers as he was on criminals. Every week the most senior officers detailed the crime in their precincts and told him how they were tackling it. Once almost half of them had been fired, there was no confusion about the objective. The NYPD was not about printing customer satisfaction surveys, but about keeping people safe.
That kind of reform will not be welcomed by a unionised, cosy and conservative service. Even the bloggers who are quick to moan about paperwork may be less keen to acquire public accountability. But the Tories must stick to their guns. There are many brave, talented police officers who work tirelessly. But they should be doing so on behalf of the public, not as the claims department of the insurance industry or the administrative arm of the CPS
Source
British hospital phone-call ripoff
Patientline, the company that provides telephones at hospital bedsides, is to increase its prices by up to 160 per cent. Charges for outgoing calls will rise from 10p a minute to 26p. This compares with about 3p a minute for the basic BT rate. Incoming calls to patients cost 39p per minute off-peak and 49p a minute at peak times.
Yesterday the company said that it was not wholly responsible for the hike in charges; delays to the Health Service IT project were also to blame. Patientline told The Times that it had invested 160 million pounds in installing 75,000 bedside consoles in more than 150 hospitals. In 2005, Patientline was investigated by regulators over its high charges, but was cleared of any wrongdoing.
Seven years ago the company won contracts with NHS hospitals to provide the consoles, which, at the Government’s recommendation, provided for doctors to access the proposed electronic patient record system and for electronic prescribing and ordering of X-rays, as well as telephone and entertainment services. The additional services were intended to be integrated into the National Programme for IT, with Patientline being paid for electronic record and prescribing schemes as NHS trusts used them. After years of delays to the 6.2 billion project, such systems are not yet online, and Patientline and other companies say that they have been forced to recoup their costs through charging patients to make calls.
Patientline has admitted that it is 80 million in debt and that it currently has money left to operate only for the next 12 months. The NHS does not subsidise or receive money from calls. Colin Printer, the company’s marketing manager, said “As a private sector company, we’ve put millions of pounds worth of equipment into these hospitals and that’s a massive investment for us. Each bedside system cost 1,700 pounds to install, and across the country they were maintained and supervised by 800 staff, Mr Printer said. “They are significant pieces of kit, designed not only to provide phone, television and radio services but also the internet, and electronic medical care. “It is not possible to attach a specific figure to revenues that may have been anticipated from delivering other services for which Patientline equipment is designed, such as electronic patient records and electronic meal-ordering, but it is fair to say Patientline anticipated a greater rollout of these services. “It looks like the patient’s being asked to pay for the cost of everything, which was not the original intention.”
To date, only one hospital has implemented the electronic patient record system and only a few have adopted meal-ordering, according to Patientline. It says that while call charges will increase, the cost of the complete bedside “package” will fall from 3.50 a day to 2.90. Charlotte Brown, the company’s commercial director said: “We’ve realigned our prices to bring the price of TV, which the majority of people watch, to a much lower level.” The price of packages for people staying for longer than a few days would fall, and such patients would be able to get free games and internet services, she added.
The Government has maintained that these services are a luxury and should not be funded by taxpayers. However, the Patients Association says that patients often have no choice but to use Patientline because many hospitals no longer have public pay phones. Mobile phone use has previously been restricted or banned, although some hospitals are relaxing the rules in accordance with recent government guidancesubject to the discretion of ward managers.
Michael Summers, of the association, said that the cost of incoming calls was already high and that the latest increase would lead to more complaints. “These people are ill, often recovering from operations, and the hike from 10p to 26p to phone out is really too much. People are going to be really upset with this,” he said. The Department of Health said: “Arrangements with providers of bedside entertainment systems are agreed locally, and Patientline should be discussing any proposed pricing restructuring with NHS trusts.”
Source
Friday, April 06, 2007
U.K.: Prolonged daycare harms young kids
Children in full-time nursery care are more likely to display antisocial tendencies and anxiety than those who stay at home or attend part-time, a government study has found. An evaluation of a 370 million pound government neighbourhood nurseries scheme found that toddlers spending more than seven hours a day in daycare were more prone to be bossy, tease other children, stamp their feet, obstruct other playmates and get anxious when toys or refreshments were being handed round. The research, from the University of Oxford and the Institute for Fiscal Studies, has reignited the debate on whether overexposure to formal childcare is bad for children, and is likely to spark fresh concerns over whether government pressure on new parents to return to work is eroding family life.
The results coincided yesterday with a warning from teachers that children were in danger of becoming institutionalised as a result of government plans to offer "wraparound" daycare that would allow pupils to spend 50 hours a week in school. Under the Government's "extended services" agenda, all schools will have to open from 8am to 6pm to give state school pupils the same opportunities as those in the private sector.
Cecily Hanlon, a nursery level teacher from Leeds, questioned whether the policy was alienating children from their families. "It is possible to access full daycare from the age of three months and then spend most of childhood there," she told the annual conference of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers in Bournemouth. "Will the extended schools agenda and the increasing provision of holiday pay schemes further erode family ties? Are parents being led to believe that the best thing for their children is to be in peer groups looked after by other people?"
Richard Martin, of Invicta Grammar School in Leeds, said the debate was not about criticising working parents. He supported a motion passed by the conference calling for more research on the effects of the Government's extended services policies. "It does worry me when you hear stories of infants of only a few months being cared for in a nursery for ten hours a day, five days a week, 48 weeks a year," he said. Shirley Crowther, of Sowerby village Church of England primary school in Calderdale, West Yorkshire, was concerned about the pressure on parents to use wraparound childcare. "It's the parents who should be wrapping their children in their loving arms and not expect other people to do it for them," she said.
But Alan Johnson, the Education Secretary, said that it was "ludicrous" to suggest that mothers were harming their children by going to work. Expanding childcare provision and subsidies was a way of ensuring that children from deprived backgrounds got the best start in life, he said. He did not accept that all mothers should stay at home to look after their children and said that two years of good early care could boost development by up to six months at the age of 5. "What we are trying to do is to ensure that parents, mothers in particular, have a choice . . . and have an opportunity to combine their professional life with other commitments," he said.
There has been a long line of reports suggesting that children who spend a long time in daycare are more likely to show behavioural problems. The latest study, led by Kathy Sylva and Sandra Mathers at the University of Oxford, examined 810 children in 100 neighbourhood nurseries and identified a "tipping point" in time spent at daycare for behavioural issues. Children who attended for 30 hours or more a week were rated as more antisocial, while children who attended for 35 hours or more displayed more worried and upset behaviour.
The report said that putting toddlers in mixed age groups was upsetting for the emotional adjustment of those aged under 3®. Teresa Smith, one of the report's principal researchers, said that parents should not be too anxious about the findings as there were some positives. Children who spent a long time in daycare tended to be more confident and sociable.
Source
British "safety" fanaticism hurting kids
Hobby clubs have become victims of "heavy-handed" child protection rules, according to a report that has found that many are now closing their doors to young people. Some of the most popular clubs in Britain, which teach adults and children to fly model aeroplanes or climb mountains, routinely tell all under18s that they must be accompanied by a parent if they want to attend. They are also running out of volunteers prepared to coach younger people because of the mountain of checks and paper-work that are now required.
The research was conducted by the Manifesto Club, a group that campaigns against red tape, which examined how Britain's 780 model-aircraft clubs were coping with new child protection laws. Josie Appleton, author of the report, said that most of the clubs would not now allow children to attend without a parent in tow, and that this had led to a collapse in attendance among under-18s. "Clubs reported that the number of under18s attending has plummeted from about ten or twenty to one or two, or even none, following their decision to require parents to come too," Ms Appleton said. She said that the Government could not possibly achieve its ambition of getting more teenagers to join sports and hobby clubs unless it changed child protection laws.
The Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Act, which comes into force next year, requires hobby clubs to conduct Criminal Records Bureau checks on all coaches and volunteers, or face a fine of 5,000 pounds. They must also appoint a child welfare officer, who must be trained for the role. Coaches must complete forms on why they wish to work with children and provide two written references from "persons of responsibility" that must then be checked.
John Bridgett, a member of the Retford Model Flying Club in Nottinghamshire, said that almost all the under-18s had left his club. "Due to the ridiculous situation now, not only must parents remain with their children but they too must join as a member of our flying club," he said. "The net result is that junior membership has declined from fifteen down to one over a two-year period." Stuart McFarlane, the chairman of a flying club in Shropshire, said that no one was prepared to allow criminal-record checks, "hardly surprising when we discovered that the CRB had made a few mistakes and wrongly labelled people". He also said that no one was prepared to become a child welfare officer.
Ms Appleton said that although her research concentrated on model-aircraft clubs, other clubs were complaining bitterly. Young mountaineers, for example, were finding it difficult to find adults to accompany them on expeditions. Cameron McNeish, editor of The Great Outdoors magazine, said that it was virtually impossible to find volunteers to take young people mountaineering. "How do young people get experience of winter routes to-day? When I was a kid you joined a club and there was always someone who was willing to take young people out. Clubs don't do that any more as they are scared of the litigation and paedophilia angle."
The Manifesto Club started to examine the impact that the laws were having on hobby clubs after it was contacted by a number of model-aircraft flyers. "Over two or three years child protection policies have meant that flying clubs have closed their doors to children," the report concluded. "As clubs keep children out, and adults become wary of helping them, young people are deprived of experiences that would help them develop into adults."
Source
NHS dentistry
Reforms to NHS dentistry are failing, the British Dental Association said yesterday as thousands of would-be patients besieged a practice near Portsmouth offering NHS care. In scenes more typical of the January sales, patients arrived at first light at a new practice in Titchfield Common, Hampshire. Before the doors had opened, 2,000 people had registered online and over the phone. Hundreds more arrived in an attempt to grab the 1,000 remaining places. By the time the surgery opened at 10am, the queue stretched around the block. Manori Ambrose, who set up the surgery, said: “There are a lot of people who need a dentist who are not even on the waiting list.”
The British Dental Association (BDA) wrote to Barry Cockroft, the Chief Dental Officer of England, yesterday and called for changes to the dental contract, which has been in force for a year. The letter, from Lester Ellman, chairman of the BDA general dental practice committee, said: “The strength of the evidence means I must now write to you to urge you to reconsider the current dental contract. Our concerns go beyond the significant transitional difficulties experienced over the past year and we can now demonstrate that the new system is in need of fundamental reform.”
He called for three key changes: the abandonment of units of dental activity as the only way of measuring performance; more money to be paid directly to primary care trusts for dental services; and for dentists to be given the option to transfer their NHS contracts to new owners. Dr Ellman called on the Government to look again at an alternative model, called personal dental services, which was piloted over a seven-year period.
Near the front of the queue in Titchfield Common was Chris Rills, 49, who said: “I have been without an NHS dentist for three years.”
Last year the Government introduced a new contract to attract dentists back to the NHS. It claims that the move is succeeding, but a BDA survey has found that 85 per cent of dentists thought that it had not improved access to NHS care.
An NHS dentist took her own life after succumbing to the pressures of work, an inquest in Pickering was told. Ingrid Gill, 46, of Thornton Dale, North Yorkshire, took an overdose of antidepressants and whisky after taking on a huge list as the only NHS dentist at the practice, and then being asked by one of the owners to resign from the NHS list because of ill health. She also later had breast cancer diagnosed. Verdict: suicide.
Source
The children of the light love the light and the children of the darkness love the darkness (John 3: 19-20)
Almost by itself, the withholding of their raw data by climate "scientists" tells us that they are not scientists. Scientific co-operation in such matters should normally be absolute and any persistent withholding will normally draw a rebuke in the literature (e.g. here) and make the "findings" suspect. What have the Warmist "scientists" got to fear? From the Mann "hockeystick" debacle I think we KNOW what they have to fear. That's why they fight tooth and nail to keep their "data" secret. The email below from D.J. Keenan [doug.keenan@informath.org] of http://www.informath.org details how hard it can be to prise examinable data from Warmists:
One of the big problems in global warming studies, and in science generally, is that research data is often not available to outsiders. Instead, researchers tend to hoard the data for themselves and their friends (who are reluctant to be critical).
Last month, Steve McIntyre (of Hockey Stick fame) began a battle against this by filing an FOI Act request for data used in an important global warming study. The study was done by Phil Jones (a leading researcher), at the University of East Anglia. McIntyre's request was initially refused in toto by the university. McIntyre then filed an appeal with the university.
Separately, I filed a request for a portion of the same data. At first, the university said they were going to process my request in they same way that they had processed McIntyre's, which I believe to be improper. So I drafted a letter of complaint to the UK Information Commissioner's Office, sent the draft to the university, and asked them to let me know if they believed the letter to be inaccurate.
Yesterday, April 3rd, McIntyre and I received notices that the university would supply the information that we requested. More details are posted on McIntyre's blog: http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=1323
This could change the way that research is conducted in the UK. The result should be both (i) higher quality, as researchers realize that their analyses will be scrutinized far more closely than has been done in the past, and (ii) much improved cross-fertilization of science. In other words, the potential change for UK science is truly huge.
For what it's worth, I have had some small involvement with one other FOI request for scientific data. This was with the infamous "Gillberg affair" in Sweden. There the researchers fought the request hard and, before the data could be examined, they destroyed it: 100,000 pages covering 15 years of research was lost.
[The Gillberg affair concerned controversial claims made by a prominent Swedish professor. He absolutely refused to let others look at the data which he claimed supported his contentions. He was successfully prosecuted in Sweden for his actions. He was just another puffed-up crook out to make a name for himself by fraud. Some of the Warmists would appear to be near relatives of his -- JR]
UK JEWISH LEADERS CONCERNED OVER UNIVERSITY APPOINTMENT
British Jewish leaders have spoken of their concern after a Haifa University lecturer who has called for a boycott of Israeli academics, was made Chair of History at Exeter University in the south of England. Ilan Pappe has published numerous books and essays accusing Israel of "ethnically cleansing" the Palestinians. "Zionism is far more dangerous to the safety of the Middle East than Islam," Pappe said in one interview recently and two years ago he was a major supporter of the Association of University Teachers' proposals for an academic boycott of Israel.
The Union of Jewish Students is one of a number of organisations who have said they are concerned about the appointment. Mitch Simmons of UJS told The Jewish Telegraph: We're concerned that his anti-Zionist views will spread to other British universities. If an Israel academic has been appointed with more balanced opinions, then that would be fine."
Jon Benjamin, Chief Executive of the Board of Deputies, said he was concerned that impressionable students may be "exposed to his biased views." Benjamin told TotallyJewish.com: "After taking full advantage of all the freedoms accorded to him in Israel, a country he has so shamelessly attacked, Pappe has decided to set up shop here. "Whilst this provides the opportunity for academics here to challenge him on his revisionist agenda, the uncomfortable fact is that in the lecture theatres and seminar rooms at Exeter, many impressionable young minds will be exposed to his partial and biased views."
Source
There is an amusing comment here on Pappe: "In both books Pappe in effect tells his readers: "This is what happened." This is strange, because it directly conflicts with a second major element in his historiographical outlook. Pappe is a proud postmodernist. He believes that there is no such thing as historical truth, only a collection of narratives as numerous as the participants in any given event or process; and each narrative, each perspective, is as valid and legitimate, as true, as the next. Moreover, every narrative is inherently political and, consciously or not, serves political ends. Each historian is justified in shaping his narrative to promote particular political purposes. Shlomo Aronson, an Israeli political scientist, years ago confronted Pappe with the ultimate problem regarding historical relativism: if all narratives are equally legitimate and there is no historical truth, then the narrative of Holocaust deniers is as valid as that of Holocaust affirmers. Pappe did not offer a persuasive answer, beyond asserting lamely that there exists a large body of indisputable oral testimony affirming that the Holocaust took place."
It would be interesting to know what threats against Iran were made behind the scenes: "Iran released 15 British sailors today as a "gift" to the people of Britain in a dramatic end to a two-week ordeal that had triggered a new diplomatic crisis between Tehran and the West. As relatives and friends popped champagne corks in Britain, the naval personnel were seen on state television chatting with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad after his surprise announcement of their release. British Prime Minister Tony Blair hailed their release and thanked "our friends and allies in the region who played their part" amid unconfirmed reports that Syria and Qatar had helped bring about a peaceful resolution. He said Britain, which took the issue to the UN Security Council last week, had taken a "firm but calm" approach, "not negotiating but not confronting either". However, Iran's hardline president - who saved his dramatic announcement until nearly the end of the press conference - still lashed out at Britain over its handling of the crisis and decorated a Revolutionary Guards officer who commanded the operation in which the Britons were seized. The overnight development followed the release in Baghdad of an Iranian diplomat kidnapped in Iraq in February in an abduction Tehran had blamed on US forces."
Children in full-time nursery care are more likely to display antisocial tendencies and anxiety than those who stay at home or attend part-time, a government study has found. An evaluation of a 370 million pound government neighbourhood nurseries scheme found that toddlers spending more than seven hours a day in daycare were more prone to be bossy, tease other children, stamp their feet, obstruct other playmates and get anxious when toys or refreshments were being handed round. The research, from the University of Oxford and the Institute for Fiscal Studies, has reignited the debate on whether overexposure to formal childcare is bad for children, and is likely to spark fresh concerns over whether government pressure on new parents to return to work is eroding family life.
The results coincided yesterday with a warning from teachers that children were in danger of becoming institutionalised as a result of government plans to offer "wraparound" daycare that would allow pupils to spend 50 hours a week in school. Under the Government's "extended services" agenda, all schools will have to open from 8am to 6pm to give state school pupils the same opportunities as those in the private sector.
Cecily Hanlon, a nursery level teacher from Leeds, questioned whether the policy was alienating children from their families. "It is possible to access full daycare from the age of three months and then spend most of childhood there," she told the annual conference of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers in Bournemouth. "Will the extended schools agenda and the increasing provision of holiday pay schemes further erode family ties? Are parents being led to believe that the best thing for their children is to be in peer groups looked after by other people?"
Richard Martin, of Invicta Grammar School in Leeds, said the debate was not about criticising working parents. He supported a motion passed by the conference calling for more research on the effects of the Government's extended services policies. "It does worry me when you hear stories of infants of only a few months being cared for in a nursery for ten hours a day, five days a week, 48 weeks a year," he said. Shirley Crowther, of Sowerby village Church of England primary school in Calderdale, West Yorkshire, was concerned about the pressure on parents to use wraparound childcare. "It's the parents who should be wrapping their children in their loving arms and not expect other people to do it for them," she said.
But Alan Johnson, the Education Secretary, said that it was "ludicrous" to suggest that mothers were harming their children by going to work. Expanding childcare provision and subsidies was a way of ensuring that children from deprived backgrounds got the best start in life, he said. He did not accept that all mothers should stay at home to look after their children and said that two years of good early care could boost development by up to six months at the age of 5. "What we are trying to do is to ensure that parents, mothers in particular, have a choice . . . and have an opportunity to combine their professional life with other commitments," he said.
There has been a long line of reports suggesting that children who spend a long time in daycare are more likely to show behavioural problems. The latest study, led by Kathy Sylva and Sandra Mathers at the University of Oxford, examined 810 children in 100 neighbourhood nurseries and identified a "tipping point" in time spent at daycare for behavioural issues. Children who attended for 30 hours or more a week were rated as more antisocial, while children who attended for 35 hours or more displayed more worried and upset behaviour.
The report said that putting toddlers in mixed age groups was upsetting for the emotional adjustment of those aged under 3®. Teresa Smith, one of the report's principal researchers, said that parents should not be too anxious about the findings as there were some positives. Children who spent a long time in daycare tended to be more confident and sociable.
Source
British "safety" fanaticism hurting kids
Hobby clubs have become victims of "heavy-handed" child protection rules, according to a report that has found that many are now closing their doors to young people. Some of the most popular clubs in Britain, which teach adults and children to fly model aeroplanes or climb mountains, routinely tell all under18s that they must be accompanied by a parent if they want to attend. They are also running out of volunteers prepared to coach younger people because of the mountain of checks and paper-work that are now required.
The research was conducted by the Manifesto Club, a group that campaigns against red tape, which examined how Britain's 780 model-aircraft clubs were coping with new child protection laws. Josie Appleton, author of the report, said that most of the clubs would not now allow children to attend without a parent in tow, and that this had led to a collapse in attendance among under-18s. "Clubs reported that the number of under18s attending has plummeted from about ten or twenty to one or two, or even none, following their decision to require parents to come too," Ms Appleton said. She said that the Government could not possibly achieve its ambition of getting more teenagers to join sports and hobby clubs unless it changed child protection laws.
The Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Act, which comes into force next year, requires hobby clubs to conduct Criminal Records Bureau checks on all coaches and volunteers, or face a fine of 5,000 pounds. They must also appoint a child welfare officer, who must be trained for the role. Coaches must complete forms on why they wish to work with children and provide two written references from "persons of responsibility" that must then be checked.
John Bridgett, a member of the Retford Model Flying Club in Nottinghamshire, said that almost all the under-18s had left his club. "Due to the ridiculous situation now, not only must parents remain with their children but they too must join as a member of our flying club," he said. "The net result is that junior membership has declined from fifteen down to one over a two-year period." Stuart McFarlane, the chairman of a flying club in Shropshire, said that no one was prepared to allow criminal-record checks, "hardly surprising when we discovered that the CRB had made a few mistakes and wrongly labelled people". He also said that no one was prepared to become a child welfare officer.
Ms Appleton said that although her research concentrated on model-aircraft clubs, other clubs were complaining bitterly. Young mountaineers, for example, were finding it difficult to find adults to accompany them on expeditions. Cameron McNeish, editor of The Great Outdoors magazine, said that it was virtually impossible to find volunteers to take young people mountaineering. "How do young people get experience of winter routes to-day? When I was a kid you joined a club and there was always someone who was willing to take young people out. Clubs don't do that any more as they are scared of the litigation and paedophilia angle."
The Manifesto Club started to examine the impact that the laws were having on hobby clubs after it was contacted by a number of model-aircraft flyers. "Over two or three years child protection policies have meant that flying clubs have closed their doors to children," the report concluded. "As clubs keep children out, and adults become wary of helping them, young people are deprived of experiences that would help them develop into adults."
Source
NHS dentistry
Reforms to NHS dentistry are failing, the British Dental Association said yesterday as thousands of would-be patients besieged a practice near Portsmouth offering NHS care. In scenes more typical of the January sales, patients arrived at first light at a new practice in Titchfield Common, Hampshire. Before the doors had opened, 2,000 people had registered online and over the phone. Hundreds more arrived in an attempt to grab the 1,000 remaining places. By the time the surgery opened at 10am, the queue stretched around the block. Manori Ambrose, who set up the surgery, said: “There are a lot of people who need a dentist who are not even on the waiting list.”
The British Dental Association (BDA) wrote to Barry Cockroft, the Chief Dental Officer of England, yesterday and called for changes to the dental contract, which has been in force for a year. The letter, from Lester Ellman, chairman of the BDA general dental practice committee, said: “The strength of the evidence means I must now write to you to urge you to reconsider the current dental contract. Our concerns go beyond the significant transitional difficulties experienced over the past year and we can now demonstrate that the new system is in need of fundamental reform.”
He called for three key changes: the abandonment of units of dental activity as the only way of measuring performance; more money to be paid directly to primary care trusts for dental services; and for dentists to be given the option to transfer their NHS contracts to new owners. Dr Ellman called on the Government to look again at an alternative model, called personal dental services, which was piloted over a seven-year period.
Near the front of the queue in Titchfield Common was Chris Rills, 49, who said: “I have been without an NHS dentist for three years.”
Last year the Government introduced a new contract to attract dentists back to the NHS. It claims that the move is succeeding, but a BDA survey has found that 85 per cent of dentists thought that it had not improved access to NHS care.
An NHS dentist took her own life after succumbing to the pressures of work, an inquest in Pickering was told. Ingrid Gill, 46, of Thornton Dale, North Yorkshire, took an overdose of antidepressants and whisky after taking on a huge list as the only NHS dentist at the practice, and then being asked by one of the owners to resign from the NHS list because of ill health. She also later had breast cancer diagnosed. Verdict: suicide.
Source
The children of the light love the light and the children of the darkness love the darkness (John 3: 19-20)
Almost by itself, the withholding of their raw data by climate "scientists" tells us that they are not scientists. Scientific co-operation in such matters should normally be absolute and any persistent withholding will normally draw a rebuke in the literature (e.g. here) and make the "findings" suspect. What have the Warmist "scientists" got to fear? From the Mann "hockeystick" debacle I think we KNOW what they have to fear. That's why they fight tooth and nail to keep their "data" secret. The email below from D.J. Keenan [doug.keenan@informath.org] of http://www.informath.org details how hard it can be to prise examinable data from Warmists:
One of the big problems in global warming studies, and in science generally, is that research data is often not available to outsiders. Instead, researchers tend to hoard the data for themselves and their friends (who are reluctant to be critical).
Last month, Steve McIntyre (of Hockey Stick fame) began a battle against this by filing an FOI Act request for data used in an important global warming study. The study was done by Phil Jones (a leading researcher), at the University of East Anglia. McIntyre's request was initially refused in toto by the university. McIntyre then filed an appeal with the university.
Separately, I filed a request for a portion of the same data. At first, the university said they were going to process my request in they same way that they had processed McIntyre's, which I believe to be improper. So I drafted a letter of complaint to the UK Information Commissioner's Office, sent the draft to the university, and asked them to let me know if they believed the letter to be inaccurate.
Yesterday, April 3rd, McIntyre and I received notices that the university would supply the information that we requested. More details are posted on McIntyre's blog: http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=1323
This could change the way that research is conducted in the UK. The result should be both (i) higher quality, as researchers realize that their analyses will be scrutinized far more closely than has been done in the past, and (ii) much improved cross-fertilization of science. In other words, the potential change for UK science is truly huge.
For what it's worth, I have had some small involvement with one other FOI request for scientific data. This was with the infamous "Gillberg affair" in Sweden. There the researchers fought the request hard and, before the data could be examined, they destroyed it: 100,000 pages covering 15 years of research was lost.
[The Gillberg affair concerned controversial claims made by a prominent Swedish professor. He absolutely refused to let others look at the data which he claimed supported his contentions. He was successfully prosecuted in Sweden for his actions. He was just another puffed-up crook out to make a name for himself by fraud. Some of the Warmists would appear to be near relatives of his -- JR]
UK JEWISH LEADERS CONCERNED OVER UNIVERSITY APPOINTMENT
British Jewish leaders have spoken of their concern after a Haifa University lecturer who has called for a boycott of Israeli academics, was made Chair of History at Exeter University in the south of England. Ilan Pappe has published numerous books and essays accusing Israel of "ethnically cleansing" the Palestinians. "Zionism is far more dangerous to the safety of the Middle East than Islam," Pappe said in one interview recently and two years ago he was a major supporter of the Association of University Teachers' proposals for an academic boycott of Israel.
The Union of Jewish Students is one of a number of organisations who have said they are concerned about the appointment. Mitch Simmons of UJS told The Jewish Telegraph: We're concerned that his anti-Zionist views will spread to other British universities. If an Israel academic has been appointed with more balanced opinions, then that would be fine."
Jon Benjamin, Chief Executive of the Board of Deputies, said he was concerned that impressionable students may be "exposed to his biased views." Benjamin told TotallyJewish.com: "After taking full advantage of all the freedoms accorded to him in Israel, a country he has so shamelessly attacked, Pappe has decided to set up shop here. "Whilst this provides the opportunity for academics here to challenge him on his revisionist agenda, the uncomfortable fact is that in the lecture theatres and seminar rooms at Exeter, many impressionable young minds will be exposed to his partial and biased views."
Source
There is an amusing comment here on Pappe: "In both books Pappe in effect tells his readers: "This is what happened." This is strange, because it directly conflicts with a second major element in his historiographical outlook. Pappe is a proud postmodernist. He believes that there is no such thing as historical truth, only a collection of narratives as numerous as the participants in any given event or process; and each narrative, each perspective, is as valid and legitimate, as true, as the next. Moreover, every narrative is inherently political and, consciously or not, serves political ends. Each historian is justified in shaping his narrative to promote particular political purposes. Shlomo Aronson, an Israeli political scientist, years ago confronted Pappe with the ultimate problem regarding historical relativism: if all narratives are equally legitimate and there is no historical truth, then the narrative of Holocaust deniers is as valid as that of Holocaust affirmers. Pappe did not offer a persuasive answer, beyond asserting lamely that there exists a large body of indisputable oral testimony affirming that the Holocaust took place."
It would be interesting to know what threats against Iran were made behind the scenes: "Iran released 15 British sailors today as a "gift" to the people of Britain in a dramatic end to a two-week ordeal that had triggered a new diplomatic crisis between Tehran and the West. As relatives and friends popped champagne corks in Britain, the naval personnel were seen on state television chatting with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad after his surprise announcement of their release. British Prime Minister Tony Blair hailed their release and thanked "our friends and allies in the region who played their part" amid unconfirmed reports that Syria and Qatar had helped bring about a peaceful resolution. He said Britain, which took the issue to the UN Security Council last week, had taken a "firm but calm" approach, "not negotiating but not confronting either". However, Iran's hardline president - who saved his dramatic announcement until nearly the end of the press conference - still lashed out at Britain over its handling of the crisis and decorated a Revolutionary Guards officer who commanded the operation in which the Britons were seized. The overnight development followed the release in Baghdad of an Iranian diplomat kidnapped in Iraq in February in an abduction Tehran had blamed on US forces."
Thursday, April 05, 2007
Red meat seems to increase breast cancer risk -- but does it?
This seems to be a comparison of meat-eaters with vegetarians. That vegetarians suffer fewer adverse outcomes could be due to many factors -- reduced total calorie intake, greater care about lifestyle etc. Making meat consumption the cause rather than a marker goes beyond the evidence
EATING even small amounts of red meat can greatly increase a woman's risk of breast cancer, according to a study published today. Post-menopausal women who ate large amounts (more than 103 grams) of processed meat a day could be 64 per cent more likely to suffer the disease, while the researchers found as little as 57g of beef, pork or lamb a day showed an effect. Even younger women faced a slightly raised risk if they ate red meat every day, according to the study which appears in the British Journal of Cancer.
The study, led by Professor Janet Cade of the University of Leeds, involved studying the diets of 35,000 women aged between 35 and 69 for eight years. The research states: "Women, both pre and post-menopausal, who consumed the most meat had the highest risk of breast cancer. "Women generally consuming most total meat, red and processed meat were at the highest increased risk compared with non-meat consumers."
The women completed 217-item food questionnaires and were divided into three groups depending on whether they were low, medium or high meat-eaters. They were compared with women in the study who were vegetarian and researchers also took into account smoking, weight, fruit and vegetable intake, education, age and use of hormone replacement therapy.
Professor Cade told Britain's Daily Telegraph: "The findings are robust. Whatever we adjusted the data for we could find an association. "Really, these results could apply to all women. At home I have cut down on the amount of red meat we eat as a family a week. "I am not suggesting that everyone should become a vegetarian, that would be unrealistic, but the findings were strong and I think we should pay attention to them."
But the study was dismissed as "rubbish" by Sandy Crombie, chairman of the Scottish region of The Guild of Q Butchers, who pointed out that 56g of meat was roughly half a quarter-pound burger. He told the newspaper: "Two ounces (57g) is absolutely tiny. I have never heard such rubbish, it's a tiny amount. "This is ridiculous, it's silly, it's barely worth talking about."
Source
Abstract from the British Journal of Cancer (2007) 96, 1139-1146 follows:
Meat consumption and risk of breast cancer in the UK Women's Cohort Study
E F Taylor et al.
We performed a survival analysis to assess the effect of meat consumption and meat type on the risk of breast cancer in the UK Women's Cohort Study. Between 1995 and 1998 a cohort of 35 372 women was recruited, aged between 35 and 69 years with a wide range of dietary intakes, assessed by a 217-item food frequency questionnaire. Hazard ratios (HRs) were estimated using Cox regression adjusted for known confounders. High consumption of total meat compared with none was associated with premenopausal breast cancer, HR=1.20 (95% CI: 0.86-1.68), and high non-processed meat intake compared with none, HR=1.20 (95% CI: 0.86-1.68). Larger effect sizes were found in postmenopausal women for all meat types, with significant associations with total, processed and red meat consumption. Processed meat showed the strongest HR=1.64 (95% CI: 1.14-2.37) for high consumption compared with none. Women, both pre- and postmenopausal, who consumed the most meat had the highest risk of breast cancer.
BRITISH FARMERS TOLD: DON'T BELIEVE THE HYPE, BE SCEPTICAL
Worried about your carbon footprint? Maybe you shouldn't be. In the week the Government unveiled its Climate Change Bill seeking huge CO2 emissions cuts, the Tenant Farmers' Association annual meeting heard from a scientist who claims current climate change thinking is 'nonsense'. ALISTAIR DRIVER heard him go down a storm at the Farmers Club.
It was certainly a speech with a difference. Over the past 12 months, farmers have been bombarded with rhetoric about their frontline role in the fight against climate change and how their carbon footprint is now the only thing that really matters. So when a respected scientist told tenant farmers they were being conned and everything they had heard up to now on climate change was wrong, they sat up and took notice.
Philip Stott is rare thing in that he is a scientist who refuses to buy into the prevailing theory that human carbon dioxide emissions are the main driving force behind climate change. He ridicules the idea that politicians can control the earth's climate and says the current global drive to reduce CO2 emissions is not only futile but is diverting attention and resources away from issues that really matter.
During a charismatic speech at the TFA's annual meeting he pleaded with farmers to remain open-minded on the issue. "Everybody is trying to use global warming for their own ends and beware of politicians trying to bear gifts because they want to use you for their agenda. That could backfire badly for farmers on the ground."
Prof Stott, emeritus professor of biogeography at the University of London, stressed he was not saying climate change was not happening or even that humans were not playing a part. He argued, however, that the role played by CO2 emissions in creating a greenhouse effect that traps the sun's heat above the earth was relatively small.
Prof Stott, who is well known as a media commentator on the environment, featured in a groundbreaking programme on climate change on Channel 4 last Thursday, which brought together scientists who dispute the CO2 theory. They argued, for example, that while fossil records have shown a correlation between climate and CO2 over time, it is not CO2 that has made the earth hotter but the other way round. Warmer oceans, for example, have produced more CO2, they said.
They put forward the theory that linked climate change to the interaction between the sun's cosmic rays and water vapour and cloud cover, and produced convincing graphs to demonstrate their theory. Prof Stott said the planet's temperature had always fluctuated - in the 1970s the great scare story was the next ice age - and numerous factors together combined to create the variations. "Climate is governed by everything from the tilt of the earth, to volcanoes, ocean currents, sun spots, cosmic rays, solar sunspots, meteors and reflection from the land.
So to put it all down to one factor - human CO2 emissions - is just not credible and the idea that politicians can control the climate is nonsense. It's Alice in Wonderland stuff." Even if CO2 was a major factor in global warming, just 'tinkering' with emissions was going to make little difference, he said. It would take 'massive emission cuts' to make a real difference, as much as 90 per cent, according to one commentator, he said. Yet politicians and the media were fully signed up to what was now 'fundamentally a religion divorced from science' where opposition was 'simply not allowed'.
At the farm level, policy was being distorted by the obsession with reducing the industry's carbon footprint, which was shifting the focus and funds away from research in areas that really counted - including food production and mitigating the impact of climate change. "We need research into new forms of farming -- help farmers adapt to climate change -- but all that is seen as secondary," he said.
The vital debate about energy had also been skewed by the emphasis on CO2 emissions. While local farm renewable initiatives, whether it be biogas or biofuels, were important, large scale biofuel production had environmental downsides and would be divisive for the industry, he said. "Having ignored them for so long, the Government has decided farming is important because of the climate change rhetoric but it is not for you, it is for the image it gives the public about them," he said.
On a global level poorer countries were being lectured on energy use by western politicians who did not even live by their own rules, such as climate change campaigner Al Gore, recently exposed for using 12 times the average amount of energy in his own home.
He dismissed the Stern report's key finding that climate change would cause a 13.8 per cent loss in global income by 2020, claiming this would be compensated for many times over a general increase in wealth. "We are trying to benefit a rich future generation by taking from a poorer current generation and that does not make sense. We have four billion people in poverty, two billion with dirty water and two billion with no modern energy - we should be trying to solve those problems not a future problem that may never happen," he said.
Prof Stott remains in a very small minority - 2,500 scientists signed the global Inter-Government Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report backing the CO2 theory in February - and is often attacked for his views. He counters by saying most scientists are being 'dragged along by a great story' and the knowledge they can get funding easily for research in the area, while the media is making the mistake of believing science works by consensus. "It does not and never has done - remember Galileo. Science progresses by scepticism and paradigm shifts when new theories rise up and displace dominant ones. I think we are at the hysterical peak of the CO2 theory and this paradigm is bound to fail as it predicates it itself on one factor when climate change is a very, very complex thing. "So my message to you as farmers is to remain sceptical, don't get drawn in and fight your corner as practical land stewards of this earth."
Source
NHS to ration IVF?
False economy again
IVF treatment could be rationed under new rules to be considered by the fertility treatment regulator. The Human Fertility and Embryology Authority (HFEA) is set to start a public consultation about whether only one embryo, rather than two, should be implanted in patients. The authority believes that it will cut the number of multiple births and protect the health of mothers and babies.
Fertility specialists say that it will severely reduce the odds of successful conception. About 30,000 women each year in the UK turn to IVF after failing to conceive naturally. In most cases two embryos are implanted with each cycle of treatment to increase the chances of pregnancy. But a report by an independent group published last year suggested that the huge rise in multiple births put the health of mothers and babies at far greater risk.
One key proposal of the One Child at a Time report was to set criteria for selecting first-time IVF patients who would be offered single embryo transfers only. These would be the youngest, healthiest patients at highest risk of multiple pregnancies. Such pregnancies carry much higher risks of miscarriage, preeclampsia and birth complications, while twins, triplets and other babies who have shared a womb together are more likely to be born prematurely.
Unlike natural conception, where the chance of a multiple birth is relatively low (1 delivery in 80 is of twins), the latest figures suggest that almost a quarter of IVF pregnancies result in multiple births, accounting for half of the 10,000 such births each year in the UK. Women who undergo IVF treatment are currently limited to two embryos under rules introduced by the HFEA in 2003. Since then, the incidence of triplets is thought to have more than halved. But cutting the number of embryos implanted in each IVF patient also reduces the already low chances of the treatment working at all, meaning that a woman may need more or repeated cycles. Last year's report said research had found that implanting only one fresh embryo in the first IVF cycle for women under 34 cut pregnancy rates to 38 per cent from about 75 per cent when two were implanted at the same time.
It has been suggested that under the revised rules, doctors should still be able to use their clinical judgment to decide if a woman should get two embryos, but that clinics will be told to reduce the number of multiple births through IVF from 25 per cent to 5 to 10 per cent. This could be achieved only if half or more women were limited to one embryo. The HFEA said yesterday that a decision was not expected to be taken until the autumn
Source
More British hot air
Pious talk, talk, talk, but no action -- when existing policies have clearly failed to protect Jewish students and supporters of Israel from Muslim and Leftist harassment
The government today strongly urged university vice-chancellors to meet MPs to discuss what can be done to stamp out anti-semitism on campuses. At the same time the communities minister Phil Woolas "urgently" referred the issue to the government's cross-department hate crime taskforce "to look at possible ways forward". Although the government has again said that it "deplores" any attempts to target Jewish students at British universities, it stepped back from recommending any new hardline measures against student or academic activities deemed to be anti-semitic.
Instead ministers, responding to a report on anti-semitism published last year by the all-party parliamentary inquiry, have reiterated that universities should adopt existing guidance from both the government and Universities UK, the organisation that represents vice-chancellors, on how to tackle hate crime and incidents involving extremist groups. The government also reminded university governing bodies that under race relations legislation they have a statutory duty to produce a race equality policy, which sets out how they intend to prevent racial discrimination and promote good race relations on campus.
Speaking to members of the all-party committee of MPs, ahead of today's response document, Mr Woolas said: "Open and public debate is one thing, but rhetoric with an undercurrent of hate and racism is quite another. Perhaps this is most worrying on university campuses." Campuses should be places for constructive dialogue and exchange of views where "differences and diversity" should be welcomed, he said. But he added: "There is increasing evidence of activities well beyond what could be labelled freedom of speech or normal youthful behaviour. These cross the line into anti-semitism. "It is not acceptable for Jewish students to be attacked in this way, either verbally or physically. And it is not acceptable for people to incite this kind of behaviour among students."
The government said it supported the all-party group's comment that any moves for UK universities to boycott links with academics working in Israel would be an attack on "academic freedom and intellectual exchange". The government also backed MPs who were opposed to any moves to "de-legitimise Jewish societies on campus". The report also agreed with the party's conclusions that while the issue of anti-semitism is taken seriously by universities the "practice is not consistent across the sector."
But the government failed to endorse the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia's (EUMC) definition of anti-semitism on the grounds that it was a "work in progress." The EUMC, now the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, defines anti-semitism as the expression of hatred towards Jews, their property and Jewish community institutions and religious facilities. More contentiously, it adds "such manifestations could also target the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity".
The Union of Jewish Students' campaign director, Mitch Simmons, said the government report was a "major step and valuable". But he was disappointed that the government and MPs had failed to address the issue that some universities fail to take up incidents of anti-semitism raised by the student union because they believe the organisation is separate to the university. He said: "Some universities think that the student union is a separate body to the university and as such when something happens in the student union the university will say that it isn't covered by its guidelines. "The other problem which was not addressed is that student unions are not recognised as public organisations and as such are not included under the Race Relations Amendment Act." He added: "On a lot of campuses the university will work with the student union but really it's quite diverse and haphazard - in some places it works very well and in others it is dreadful. I can't say I'm disappointed with today's response but it's irritating that they haven't been thinking 'outside the box'."
The president of UUK, Prof Drummond Bone, said universities were already "playing an active part in strengthening community cohesion - this involves combating all forms of intolerance on campus, including anti-semitism". He added: "Universities have a legal obligation to ensure academic freedom. In the rare instances where this freedom is being abused to discriminate against one particular race or religion, our institutions take firm action. This will include working with police and other authorities where, and if, necessary." He said its guidance, Promoting Good Campus relations: dealing with hate crimes and intolerance, and advice published by the Department for Education and Skills provide universities with "practical and useful information", which was "robust" and had been widely circulated and used.
Source
A British ignoramus
And a privately educated one at that. The ignoramus was even more ill-informed than she seemed, however. Eggs and rabbits are associated with Easter because Easter is a Christian adoption of an old pagan fertility celebration. Eggs=Fertility; Rabbits=Fertility. Rather obvious, isn't it? Christ expected his followers to celebrate Passover, not Easter (1 Corinthians 11:25)
A supermarket chain got itself into a huge muddle over the meaning of Easter yesterday in its attempt to sell more chocolate eggs. “Brits are set to spend a massive 520 million pounds on Easter eggs this year — but many young people don’t even know what Easter’s all about,” said the press release from Somerfield after a survey. It then went on to claim that the tradition of giving Easter eggs was to celebrate the “birth” of Christ. An amended version changed this to the “rebirth” of Christ. Finally a third press release accepted Church teaching that Easter celebrated the resurrection of Christ.
The press release was written by Hayley Booth, 30, of the PR agency Brando. Ms Booth, who was privately educated, told The Times that she had corrected the release as soon as she became aware of the error. An explanatory note on her second release read: “Please find below the amended story revealing Britons’ mounting ignorance regarding Easter. Note the references to rebirth (not birth) as previously stated. Apologies for any confusion.” Hurried consultations with the Church of England followed and Brando finally issued a correct release.
Pete Williams, head of PR at Somerfield, said: “We spoke to the Church of England press office, who suggested we use the word resurrection, in keeping with the Church’s teaching. We were happy to do that.” Ben Wilson, in the Church of England press office, said: “It was a genuine mistake, if a rather unfortunate one. I clarified with them that it would probably be best to refer to Easter as a celebration of Christ’s resurrection rather than His birth.” It has been suggested that Easter eggs represent the stone rolled in front of Jesus’s tomb. But the tradition has pre-Christian roots: in ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome and Persia eggs were dyed for spring festivals.
Source
This seems to be a comparison of meat-eaters with vegetarians. That vegetarians suffer fewer adverse outcomes could be due to many factors -- reduced total calorie intake, greater care about lifestyle etc. Making meat consumption the cause rather than a marker goes beyond the evidence
EATING even small amounts of red meat can greatly increase a woman's risk of breast cancer, according to a study published today. Post-menopausal women who ate large amounts (more than 103 grams) of processed meat a day could be 64 per cent more likely to suffer the disease, while the researchers found as little as 57g of beef, pork or lamb a day showed an effect. Even younger women faced a slightly raised risk if they ate red meat every day, according to the study which appears in the British Journal of Cancer.
The study, led by Professor Janet Cade of the University of Leeds, involved studying the diets of 35,000 women aged between 35 and 69 for eight years. The research states: "Women, both pre and post-menopausal, who consumed the most meat had the highest risk of breast cancer. "Women generally consuming most total meat, red and processed meat were at the highest increased risk compared with non-meat consumers."
The women completed 217-item food questionnaires and were divided into three groups depending on whether they were low, medium or high meat-eaters. They were compared with women in the study who were vegetarian and researchers also took into account smoking, weight, fruit and vegetable intake, education, age and use of hormone replacement therapy.
Professor Cade told Britain's Daily Telegraph: "The findings are robust. Whatever we adjusted the data for we could find an association. "Really, these results could apply to all women. At home I have cut down on the amount of red meat we eat as a family a week. "I am not suggesting that everyone should become a vegetarian, that would be unrealistic, but the findings were strong and I think we should pay attention to them."
But the study was dismissed as "rubbish" by Sandy Crombie, chairman of the Scottish region of The Guild of Q Butchers, who pointed out that 56g of meat was roughly half a quarter-pound burger. He told the newspaper: "Two ounces (57g) is absolutely tiny. I have never heard such rubbish, it's a tiny amount. "This is ridiculous, it's silly, it's barely worth talking about."
Source
Abstract from the British Journal of Cancer (2007) 96, 1139-1146 follows:
Meat consumption and risk of breast cancer in the UK Women's Cohort Study
E F Taylor et al.
We performed a survival analysis to assess the effect of meat consumption and meat type on the risk of breast cancer in the UK Women's Cohort Study. Between 1995 and 1998 a cohort of 35 372 women was recruited, aged between 35 and 69 years with a wide range of dietary intakes, assessed by a 217-item food frequency questionnaire. Hazard ratios (HRs) were estimated using Cox regression adjusted for known confounders. High consumption of total meat compared with none was associated with premenopausal breast cancer, HR=1.20 (95% CI: 0.86-1.68), and high non-processed meat intake compared with none, HR=1.20 (95% CI: 0.86-1.68). Larger effect sizes were found in postmenopausal women for all meat types, with significant associations with total, processed and red meat consumption. Processed meat showed the strongest HR=1.64 (95% CI: 1.14-2.37) for high consumption compared with none. Women, both pre- and postmenopausal, who consumed the most meat had the highest risk of breast cancer.
BRITISH FARMERS TOLD: DON'T BELIEVE THE HYPE, BE SCEPTICAL
Worried about your carbon footprint? Maybe you shouldn't be. In the week the Government unveiled its Climate Change Bill seeking huge CO2 emissions cuts, the Tenant Farmers' Association annual meeting heard from a scientist who claims current climate change thinking is 'nonsense'. ALISTAIR DRIVER heard him go down a storm at the Farmers Club.
It was certainly a speech with a difference. Over the past 12 months, farmers have been bombarded with rhetoric about their frontline role in the fight against climate change and how their carbon footprint is now the only thing that really matters. So when a respected scientist told tenant farmers they were being conned and everything they had heard up to now on climate change was wrong, they sat up and took notice.
Philip Stott is rare thing in that he is a scientist who refuses to buy into the prevailing theory that human carbon dioxide emissions are the main driving force behind climate change. He ridicules the idea that politicians can control the earth's climate and says the current global drive to reduce CO2 emissions is not only futile but is diverting attention and resources away from issues that really matter.
During a charismatic speech at the TFA's annual meeting he pleaded with farmers to remain open-minded on the issue. "Everybody is trying to use global warming for their own ends and beware of politicians trying to bear gifts because they want to use you for their agenda. That could backfire badly for farmers on the ground."
Prof Stott, emeritus professor of biogeography at the University of London, stressed he was not saying climate change was not happening or even that humans were not playing a part. He argued, however, that the role played by CO2 emissions in creating a greenhouse effect that traps the sun's heat above the earth was relatively small.
Prof Stott, who is well known as a media commentator on the environment, featured in a groundbreaking programme on climate change on Channel 4 last Thursday, which brought together scientists who dispute the CO2 theory. They argued, for example, that while fossil records have shown a correlation between climate and CO2 over time, it is not CO2 that has made the earth hotter but the other way round. Warmer oceans, for example, have produced more CO2, they said.
They put forward the theory that linked climate change to the interaction between the sun's cosmic rays and water vapour and cloud cover, and produced convincing graphs to demonstrate their theory. Prof Stott said the planet's temperature had always fluctuated - in the 1970s the great scare story was the next ice age - and numerous factors together combined to create the variations. "Climate is governed by everything from the tilt of the earth, to volcanoes, ocean currents, sun spots, cosmic rays, solar sunspots, meteors and reflection from the land.
So to put it all down to one factor - human CO2 emissions - is just not credible and the idea that politicians can control the climate is nonsense. It's Alice in Wonderland stuff." Even if CO2 was a major factor in global warming, just 'tinkering' with emissions was going to make little difference, he said. It would take 'massive emission cuts' to make a real difference, as much as 90 per cent, according to one commentator, he said. Yet politicians and the media were fully signed up to what was now 'fundamentally a religion divorced from science' where opposition was 'simply not allowed'.
At the farm level, policy was being distorted by the obsession with reducing the industry's carbon footprint, which was shifting the focus and funds away from research in areas that really counted - including food production and mitigating the impact of climate change. "We need research into new forms of farming -- help farmers adapt to climate change -- but all that is seen as secondary," he said.
The vital debate about energy had also been skewed by the emphasis on CO2 emissions. While local farm renewable initiatives, whether it be biogas or biofuels, were important, large scale biofuel production had environmental downsides and would be divisive for the industry, he said. "Having ignored them for so long, the Government has decided farming is important because of the climate change rhetoric but it is not for you, it is for the image it gives the public about them," he said.
On a global level poorer countries were being lectured on energy use by western politicians who did not even live by their own rules, such as climate change campaigner Al Gore, recently exposed for using 12 times the average amount of energy in his own home.
He dismissed the Stern report's key finding that climate change would cause a 13.8 per cent loss in global income by 2020, claiming this would be compensated for many times over a general increase in wealth. "We are trying to benefit a rich future generation by taking from a poorer current generation and that does not make sense. We have four billion people in poverty, two billion with dirty water and two billion with no modern energy - we should be trying to solve those problems not a future problem that may never happen," he said.
Prof Stott remains in a very small minority - 2,500 scientists signed the global Inter-Government Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report backing the CO2 theory in February - and is often attacked for his views. He counters by saying most scientists are being 'dragged along by a great story' and the knowledge they can get funding easily for research in the area, while the media is making the mistake of believing science works by consensus. "It does not and never has done - remember Galileo. Science progresses by scepticism and paradigm shifts when new theories rise up and displace dominant ones. I think we are at the hysterical peak of the CO2 theory and this paradigm is bound to fail as it predicates it itself on one factor when climate change is a very, very complex thing. "So my message to you as farmers is to remain sceptical, don't get drawn in and fight your corner as practical land stewards of this earth."
Source
NHS to ration IVF?
False economy again
IVF treatment could be rationed under new rules to be considered by the fertility treatment regulator. The Human Fertility and Embryology Authority (HFEA) is set to start a public consultation about whether only one embryo, rather than two, should be implanted in patients. The authority believes that it will cut the number of multiple births and protect the health of mothers and babies.
Fertility specialists say that it will severely reduce the odds of successful conception. About 30,000 women each year in the UK turn to IVF after failing to conceive naturally. In most cases two embryos are implanted with each cycle of treatment to increase the chances of pregnancy. But a report by an independent group published last year suggested that the huge rise in multiple births put the health of mothers and babies at far greater risk.
One key proposal of the One Child at a Time report was to set criteria for selecting first-time IVF patients who would be offered single embryo transfers only. These would be the youngest, healthiest patients at highest risk of multiple pregnancies. Such pregnancies carry much higher risks of miscarriage, preeclampsia and birth complications, while twins, triplets and other babies who have shared a womb together are more likely to be born prematurely.
Unlike natural conception, where the chance of a multiple birth is relatively low (1 delivery in 80 is of twins), the latest figures suggest that almost a quarter of IVF pregnancies result in multiple births, accounting for half of the 10,000 such births each year in the UK. Women who undergo IVF treatment are currently limited to two embryos under rules introduced by the HFEA in 2003. Since then, the incidence of triplets is thought to have more than halved. But cutting the number of embryos implanted in each IVF patient also reduces the already low chances of the treatment working at all, meaning that a woman may need more or repeated cycles. Last year's report said research had found that implanting only one fresh embryo in the first IVF cycle for women under 34 cut pregnancy rates to 38 per cent from about 75 per cent when two were implanted at the same time.
It has been suggested that under the revised rules, doctors should still be able to use their clinical judgment to decide if a woman should get two embryos, but that clinics will be told to reduce the number of multiple births through IVF from 25 per cent to 5 to 10 per cent. This could be achieved only if half or more women were limited to one embryo. The HFEA said yesterday that a decision was not expected to be taken until the autumn
Source
More British hot air
Pious talk, talk, talk, but no action -- when existing policies have clearly failed to protect Jewish students and supporters of Israel from Muslim and Leftist harassment
The government today strongly urged university vice-chancellors to meet MPs to discuss what can be done to stamp out anti-semitism on campuses. At the same time the communities minister Phil Woolas "urgently" referred the issue to the government's cross-department hate crime taskforce "to look at possible ways forward". Although the government has again said that it "deplores" any attempts to target Jewish students at British universities, it stepped back from recommending any new hardline measures against student or academic activities deemed to be anti-semitic.
Instead ministers, responding to a report on anti-semitism published last year by the all-party parliamentary inquiry, have reiterated that universities should adopt existing guidance from both the government and Universities UK, the organisation that represents vice-chancellors, on how to tackle hate crime and incidents involving extremist groups. The government also reminded university governing bodies that under race relations legislation they have a statutory duty to produce a race equality policy, which sets out how they intend to prevent racial discrimination and promote good race relations on campus.
Speaking to members of the all-party committee of MPs, ahead of today's response document, Mr Woolas said: "Open and public debate is one thing, but rhetoric with an undercurrent of hate and racism is quite another. Perhaps this is most worrying on university campuses." Campuses should be places for constructive dialogue and exchange of views where "differences and diversity" should be welcomed, he said. But he added: "There is increasing evidence of activities well beyond what could be labelled freedom of speech or normal youthful behaviour. These cross the line into anti-semitism. "It is not acceptable for Jewish students to be attacked in this way, either verbally or physically. And it is not acceptable for people to incite this kind of behaviour among students."
The government said it supported the all-party group's comment that any moves for UK universities to boycott links with academics working in Israel would be an attack on "academic freedom and intellectual exchange". The government also backed MPs who were opposed to any moves to "de-legitimise Jewish societies on campus". The report also agreed with the party's conclusions that while the issue of anti-semitism is taken seriously by universities the "practice is not consistent across the sector."
But the government failed to endorse the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia's (EUMC) definition of anti-semitism on the grounds that it was a "work in progress." The EUMC, now the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, defines anti-semitism as the expression of hatred towards Jews, their property and Jewish community institutions and religious facilities. More contentiously, it adds "such manifestations could also target the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity".
The Union of Jewish Students' campaign director, Mitch Simmons, said the government report was a "major step and valuable". But he was disappointed that the government and MPs had failed to address the issue that some universities fail to take up incidents of anti-semitism raised by the student union because they believe the organisation is separate to the university. He said: "Some universities think that the student union is a separate body to the university and as such when something happens in the student union the university will say that it isn't covered by its guidelines. "The other problem which was not addressed is that student unions are not recognised as public organisations and as such are not included under the Race Relations Amendment Act." He added: "On a lot of campuses the university will work with the student union but really it's quite diverse and haphazard - in some places it works very well and in others it is dreadful. I can't say I'm disappointed with today's response but it's irritating that they haven't been thinking 'outside the box'."
The president of UUK, Prof Drummond Bone, said universities were already "playing an active part in strengthening community cohesion - this involves combating all forms of intolerance on campus, including anti-semitism". He added: "Universities have a legal obligation to ensure academic freedom. In the rare instances where this freedom is being abused to discriminate against one particular race or religion, our institutions take firm action. This will include working with police and other authorities where, and if, necessary." He said its guidance, Promoting Good Campus relations: dealing with hate crimes and intolerance, and advice published by the Department for Education and Skills provide universities with "practical and useful information", which was "robust" and had been widely circulated and used.
Source
A British ignoramus
And a privately educated one at that. The ignoramus was even more ill-informed than she seemed, however. Eggs and rabbits are associated with Easter because Easter is a Christian adoption of an old pagan fertility celebration. Eggs=Fertility; Rabbits=Fertility. Rather obvious, isn't it? Christ expected his followers to celebrate Passover, not Easter (1 Corinthians 11:25)
A supermarket chain got itself into a huge muddle over the meaning of Easter yesterday in its attempt to sell more chocolate eggs. “Brits are set to spend a massive 520 million pounds on Easter eggs this year — but many young people don’t even know what Easter’s all about,” said the press release from Somerfield after a survey. It then went on to claim that the tradition of giving Easter eggs was to celebrate the “birth” of Christ. An amended version changed this to the “rebirth” of Christ. Finally a third press release accepted Church teaching that Easter celebrated the resurrection of Christ.
The press release was written by Hayley Booth, 30, of the PR agency Brando. Ms Booth, who was privately educated, told The Times that she had corrected the release as soon as she became aware of the error. An explanatory note on her second release read: “Please find below the amended story revealing Britons’ mounting ignorance regarding Easter. Note the references to rebirth (not birth) as previously stated. Apologies for any confusion.” Hurried consultations with the Church of England followed and Brando finally issued a correct release.
Pete Williams, head of PR at Somerfield, said: “We spoke to the Church of England press office, who suggested we use the word resurrection, in keeping with the Church’s teaching. We were happy to do that.” Ben Wilson, in the Church of England press office, said: “It was a genuine mistake, if a rather unfortunate one. I clarified with them that it would probably be best to refer to Easter as a celebration of Christ’s resurrection rather than His birth.” It has been suggested that Easter eggs represent the stone rolled in front of Jesus’s tomb. But the tradition has pre-Christian roots: in ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome and Persia eggs were dyed for spring festivals.
Source
Wednesday, April 04, 2007
Are homosexuals gay or queer?
Once upon a time, in the slightly more rational past, the word "queer" was objected to by homosexuals as being highly derogatory. For a while homosexuals were "camp" instead but the word "gay" eventually became almost universally embraced as the "correct" term. Lots of Australians and Brits continued to call them "poofters" or "poofs" but that was wicked.
Now, however, we seem to have reversed gears. "Queer" seems to be OK now (as in the TV show "Queer eye for the straight guy"). But "gay" is so bad that even children will be pursued by the British police for using it:
Confusing, isn't it? What it DOES go to show is that the old Leftist obsession with changing the language is pointless. If something is disliked, ANY word used to describe it will become derogatory.
There was an interesting older instance of that in Australia. Just after the war, Australia got a lot of immigrants from war-torn Europe and Anglo-Australians were not at that time very impressed by them -- largely because the poor English of the immigrants created unaccustomed communication difficulties. Words like "dago", "wop", "wog" and "reffo" were commonly used to refer to the immigrants.
But the government decided that Australia needed the immigrants concerned and insisted that they be referred to as "New Australians". Very rapidly, however, the term "New Australians" came to be used disdainfully too.
And what I always think is the most amusing example of mealy-mouthed language is the way economically backward countries were once described. They started out "savage", then "backward", then "poor", then "underdeveloped" and then "developing".
At that point, people realized that "developing" was precisely what most of the countries concerned were NOT doing so we seem now to have settled on the term: "less developed". "Savage" would be a more informative description of many of them.
"Go back to where you came from" is racist?
It is in Britain:
Australians who encounter "whingeing Poms" (complaining Englishmen) among the people they meet are quite likely to tell the Pom concerned to "Go back to where you came from". While that remark is undoubtedly critical, it is hardly racist as the Australian concerned will himself most likely be of British descent.
But Muslims must not be criticized, of course.
Eco-warrior prefers a helicopter to get around
More evidence that Greenies regard others as inferiors who are fit only to be told what to do
It's one rule for them, and another for the rest of us. Trudie Styler, wife of Sting and self-styled eco-warrior, recently took a helicopter to travel 80 miles from Wiltshire to Devon, a journey that would have taken less than two hours by train. The actress and film producer is forever harping on about saving the environment, having set up the Rainforest Campaign in the late 1980s with her pop star husband. The Stings are known for eating only organic food, supposedly grown on their land, although one member of staff recently admitted to serving up nonorganic salad from the supermarket.
So what was Styler thinking as she clambered into her gas-guzzling chopper, off to stay with friend and fellow greenie Zac Goldsmith on his organic farm in Devon? Her own home, Lake House, a Jacobean manor in the Avon Valley, is conveniently located just six miles out of Salisbury, from where frequent trains run to the West Country. On Monday David Cameron announced plans to crackdown on domestic flights by slapping a green tax on them, so perhaps Styler is enjoying the luxury of a private helicopter while she can get away with it.
But this isn't the first time the Stings have been caught out. In 2000 the couple threatened the Ministry of Defence with legal action if a nearby airfield were to be expanded. It later emerged Sting had twice used the airfield in question from which to roar off in his private jet.
Source
The new politically correct British police force is actually an office-worker force
Only one in 40 police officers on duty in some forces is available to respond to 999 calls, according to a study published yesterday. The report, from HM Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC), found that only 2.5 per cent of uniformed officers in one area were allocated to "response duties". This meant that out of 800 officers at work only 20 were free for emergency response, which included patrolling alcohol-scarred towns and cities at night. In another force, which was also unnamed, 50 officers were on duty but only three - six per cent - were allocated to "incident management".
The HMIC findings, in a report entitled Beyond the Call, will reignite the debate over bureaucracy and station-bound duties which keep the vast majority of the record 140,000 officers in England and Wales off the streets. The inspectorate now plans a study of bureaucracy, including a look at concerns that not enough experienced constables and sergeants are available to supervise a front-line presence of probationers and newly-qualified officers.
Yesterday's report found that some patrol officers failed to make good use of their time on duty unless closely supervised by their sergeant. This was a "highly inefficient use of scarce resources", it said. It also found difficulties in the way forces handle the flood of 999 calls, which has risen steadily in recent years. It showed that police dispatchers routinely downgraded emergency calls. HM inspectors were told that patrol officers sometimes questioned why they were being sent on some calls. Some officers even failed to respond.
"In some cases, where patrols do not respond or make themselves unavailable, dispatch or control staff admit that they downgrade incidents in order to alleviate pressure on themselves," it said. "In other cases, they upgrade non-emergency incidents in the knowledge that only immediate and priority calls will have any chance of being resourced." The extent to which the police deal with callers only by telephone also emerged.
The report encouraged "telephone resolution" but warned that it has to be carried out in a way that does not leave the public dissatisfied. "A number of forces have developed strategies around telephone resolution, thereby releasing valuable resources to engage in emergency response or in longer-term, pro-active problem-solving initiatives," it said. "Some eight million incidents per year are being resolved without officer attendance."
The inspectors, who looked at 999 calls and other calls to police, amounting to 67 million a year, also criticised the way officers kept victims updated about progress on investigating crimes. Their report suggested continuing to use technology such as text messages and the internet to make improvements.
Police in England and Wales deal with 33 million incidents a year. Of those, 17 per cent are classed as emergencies requiring an immediate response, with 20 per cent as "priorities" requiring a response within the hour.
Yesterday's findings echo the conclusions of independent research for the Police Federation, and reported recently in The Daily Telegraph, that as few as three uniformed police officers were available to patrol the streets, respond to 999
Once upon a time, in the slightly more rational past, the word "queer" was objected to by homosexuals as being highly derogatory. For a while homosexuals were "camp" instead but the word "gay" eventually became almost universally embraced as the "correct" term. Lots of Australians and Brits continued to call them "poofters" or "poofs" but that was wicked.
Now, however, we seem to have reversed gears. "Queer" seems to be OK now (as in the TV show "Queer eye for the straight guy"). But "gay" is so bad that even children will be pursued by the British police for using it:
"A father launched a furious attack against the police yesterday for investigating claims that his 10-year-old son had called a schoolfriend "gay" in an email. Company director Alan Rawlinson said he was astounded after two police officers arrived at his home in Bold Heath, Cheshire, to speak to his son George. The officers were called after a complaint from the parent of another boy at his son's school in Widnes.
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Confusing, isn't it? What it DOES go to show is that the old Leftist obsession with changing the language is pointless. If something is disliked, ANY word used to describe it will become derogatory.
There was an interesting older instance of that in Australia. Just after the war, Australia got a lot of immigrants from war-torn Europe and Anglo-Australians were not at that time very impressed by them -- largely because the poor English of the immigrants created unaccustomed communication difficulties. Words like "dago", "wop", "wog" and "reffo" were commonly used to refer to the immigrants.
But the government decided that Australia needed the immigrants concerned and insisted that they be referred to as "New Australians". Very rapidly, however, the term "New Australians" came to be used disdainfully too.
And what I always think is the most amusing example of mealy-mouthed language is the way economically backward countries were once described. They started out "savage", then "backward", then "poor", then "underdeveloped" and then "developing".
At that point, people realized that "developing" was precisely what most of the countries concerned were NOT doing so we seem now to have settled on the term: "less developed". "Savage" would be a more informative description of many of them.
"Go back to where you came from" is racist?
It is in Britain:
"A man who shouted racist insults at Muslim worshippers outside a Cumbria mosque has been jailed for six months.
Bryan Cork shouted slurs including "proud to be British" and "go back to where you came from" outside Carlisle's Brook Street mosque.
He pleaded guilty to racially aggravated harassment on 30 November at the city's Crown Court on Tuesday. Judge Paul Batty, QC, told Cork, of Thompson Street, Carlisle, that racism in any form would not be tolerated.
Source
Australians who encounter "whingeing Poms" (complaining Englishmen) among the people they meet are quite likely to tell the Pom concerned to "Go back to where you came from". While that remark is undoubtedly critical, it is hardly racist as the Australian concerned will himself most likely be of British descent.
But Muslims must not be criticized, of course.
Eco-warrior prefers a helicopter to get around
More evidence that Greenies regard others as inferiors who are fit only to be told what to do
It's one rule for them, and another for the rest of us. Trudie Styler, wife of Sting and self-styled eco-warrior, recently took a helicopter to travel 80 miles from Wiltshire to Devon, a journey that would have taken less than two hours by train. The actress and film producer is forever harping on about saving the environment, having set up the Rainforest Campaign in the late 1980s with her pop star husband. The Stings are known for eating only organic food, supposedly grown on their land, although one member of staff recently admitted to serving up nonorganic salad from the supermarket.
So what was Styler thinking as she clambered into her gas-guzzling chopper, off to stay with friend and fellow greenie Zac Goldsmith on his organic farm in Devon? Her own home, Lake House, a Jacobean manor in the Avon Valley, is conveniently located just six miles out of Salisbury, from where frequent trains run to the West Country. On Monday David Cameron announced plans to crackdown on domestic flights by slapping a green tax on them, so perhaps Styler is enjoying the luxury of a private helicopter while she can get away with it.
But this isn't the first time the Stings have been caught out. In 2000 the couple threatened the Ministry of Defence with legal action if a nearby airfield were to be expanded. It later emerged Sting had twice used the airfield in question from which to roar off in his private jet.
Source
The new politically correct British police force is actually an office-worker force
Only one in 40 police officers on duty in some forces is available to respond to 999 calls, according to a study published yesterday. The report, from HM Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC), found that only 2.5 per cent of uniformed officers in one area were allocated to "response duties". This meant that out of 800 officers at work only 20 were free for emergency response, which included patrolling alcohol-scarred towns and cities at night. In another force, which was also unnamed, 50 officers were on duty but only three - six per cent - were allocated to "incident management".
The HMIC findings, in a report entitled Beyond the Call, will reignite the debate over bureaucracy and station-bound duties which keep the vast majority of the record 140,000 officers in England and Wales off the streets. The inspectorate now plans a study of bureaucracy, including a look at concerns that not enough experienced constables and sergeants are available to supervise a front-line presence of probationers and newly-qualified officers.
Yesterday's report found that some patrol officers failed to make good use of their time on duty unless closely supervised by their sergeant. This was a "highly inefficient use of scarce resources", it said. It also found difficulties in the way forces handle the flood of 999 calls, which has risen steadily in recent years. It showed that police dispatchers routinely downgraded emergency calls. HM inspectors were told that patrol officers sometimes questioned why they were being sent on some calls. Some officers even failed to respond.
"In some cases, where patrols do not respond or make themselves unavailable, dispatch or control staff admit that they downgrade incidents in order to alleviate pressure on themselves," it said. "In other cases, they upgrade non-emergency incidents in the knowledge that only immediate and priority calls will have any chance of being resourced." The extent to which the police deal with callers only by telephone also emerged.
The report encouraged "telephone resolution" but warned that it has to be carried out in a way that does not leave the public dissatisfied. "A number of forces have developed strategies around telephone resolution, thereby releasing valuable resources to engage in emergency response or in longer-term, pro-active problem-solving initiatives," it said. "Some eight million incidents per year are being resolved without officer attendance."
The inspectors, who looked at 999 calls and other calls to police, amounting to 67 million a year, also criticised the way officers kept victims updated about progress on investigating crimes. Their report suggested continuing to use technology such as text messages and the internet to make improvements.
Police in England and Wales deal with 33 million incidents a year. Of those, 17 per cent are classed as emergencies requiring an immediate response, with 20 per cent as "priorities" requiring a response within the hour.
Yesterday's findings echo the conclusions of independent research for the Police Federation, and reported recently in The Daily Telegraph, that as few as three uniformed police officers were available to patrol the streets, respond to 999