Eye on Britain
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
More BBC censorship
"Separatist" and "moderate" are apparently bad words:
As the BBC is compulsorily supported by the taxpayer (and even some non-taxpayers are made to cough up), one would hope it had some obligation to speak the truth rather than cover it up. Silly of me to think that, I guess.
Supermarkets must accept being libelled?
The British literary luvvies are venting their hatred of big business:
Tesco is a bit like a British Wal-Mart -- that friend of the poor that all good Leftists hate! It seems to me that Tesco are in fact being moderate about this.
Hatred of Technology
But it's all theory. Who cares about silly old facts?
Susan Greenfield's lower lip pouts as if to blow a raspberry. Then, in soothsaying mode, the solemn utterance: "The global cyber world promises a more reassuring, safer option than the messy world of in-your-face three-dimensional life. But the IT technologies are already blurring the cyber world and reality." The hooded eyes readjust from Delphic oracle to larky chick as she flashes a face-splitting grin. "There are people," she chortles, "who can't believe, eh! that the planes crashing into the twin towers were actually real, eh!" The punctuating "eh!" prompts you to agree.
Professor Greenfield, promoter extraordinaire of science, has written a book that makes routine auguries - global warming, economic downturns - look like mere gloomy hand-wringing. A specialist in brain degeneration, Greenfield is predicting that our teen generation is headed for a sort of mass loss of personal identity. She calls it the Nobody Scenario. By spending inordinate quantities of time in the interactive, virtual, two-dimensional, cyberspace realms of the screen, she believes that the brains of the youth of today are headed for a drastic alteration. It's as if all that young grey cortical matter is being scalded and defoliated by a kind of cognitive Agent Orange, depriving them of moral agency, imagination and awareness of consequences.
"They are destined to lose an awareness of who and what they are: not someones, or anyones, but nobodies, eh!" That expressive mouth widens again, the lower lip ripens. "The time is well nigh," she says, "to explore the impact of these technologies." ....
Greenfield has elaborated a theory about the influence of IT on young brains. Given the time young people spend gazing into screens, small and large - reckoned to be from six to nine hours daily - she believes the minds of the younger generation are developing differently from those of previous generations. "The brain," she says, "has plasticity: it is exquisitely malleable, and a significant alteration in our environment and behaviour has consequences."
She sets out a catalogue of repercussions: the substitution of virtual experience for real encounters; the impact of spoon-fed menu options as opposed to free-ranging inquiry; a decline in linguistic and visual imagination; an atrophy of creativity; contracted, brutalised text-messaging, lacking the verbs and conditional structures essential for complex thinking. Her principal concern is how computer games could be emphasising what she calls "process" over "content" - method over meaning - in mental activity.
Her theory goes like this. The more we play games, the less time there is for learning specific facts and working out how those facts relate to each other. This can result, she maintains, in a failure to build highly personalised individual conceptual frameworks - the whole point of education and the basis of individual identity. If the purpose of a game, for instance, is to free the princess from the tower, it is the thrill of attaining the goal, the process, that counts. What does not count is the content - the personality of the princess and the narrative as to why and how she is there, as in a storybook. Greenfield avers that emphasis on process in isolation becomes addictive and profoundly mind-changing.
Here is her hypothesis. A natural brain chemical called dopamine is involved in all forms of addiction. Dopamine contributes to feelings of wellbeing on attaining a goal, especially when gratification repeatedly deferred is finally delivered. Falling levels of dopamine accompany the opposite situations, when gratification has been frustrated (for example, waiting for a phone call that never comes).
The area of the brain crucial to the dopamine hits is called the nucleus accumbens, which is associated with the prefrontal cortex, an area at the front of the brain. An under-functioning prefrontal cortex is linked with types of behaviour marked by total absorption in the here and now, and an inability to consider past and future implications. According to Greenfield, excessive dopamine can reduce the activity of brain cells in the prefrontal cortex, leading to its partial shutdown. She is speculating that the intense subjective "here and now" feeling, prompted and accompanied by dopamine "rewards" in computer play, creates a euphoric, self-centred ego boost, the pleasure of which can lead to craving and addiction.
What lasting effect does this repeated neglect in the prefrontal cortex have on the brain, and hence the mind? "Excessive dopamine hits might reduce activation in the prefrontal cortex, and in so doing tip the balance away from awareness of the significance, the meaning, of our actions," she says. So playing games in which I slaughter scores of all-comers with my trusty sword, as in the Tarantino movie Kill Bill, deals not with the significance of beheading and disembowelling of hordes of Japanese villains, but with the process - the action separated from meaning and consequences. "When those teenagers kicked that goth girl to death in the park recently," she says, "was it like a computer game for them? The buzz of the moment? Were they thinking of her as a person with feelings, with parents and siblings? Were they thinking of the implications for themselves the next day?"
For the mind to operate fully, Greenfield asserts, the prefrontal cortex must be active, and content must be a high priority. The world and oneself are then redolent with meaning. How do the young attain unique and enriched identities? "Through the world of focused conversation, nursery rhyme repetition, recitation and rote learning, of reading and writing interspersed with bouts of physical activity in the real world, where there are first-hand and unique adventures to provide a personal narrative, personalised neuronal connections. This is education as we have known it."
And what if "education as we have known it" fails? It will lead, she predicts, to the ultimate triumph of process over content: the Nobody Scenario. "For the first time in human history, individuality could be obliterated in favour of a passive state, reacting to a flood of incoming sensations - a `yuck' and `wow' mentality characterised by a premium on momentary experience as the landscape of the brain shifts into one where personalised brain connectivity is either not functional or absent altogether." .....
Greenfield tells me that she has friends who have faith and she quizzes them endlessly - Ed Stourton, the broadcaster, Jack Valero, Opus Dei's spokesperson in Britain, and a neighbour whose faith is helping him and his family overcome a serious illness. She pauses outside New College. This is the college of Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion and professional antagonist of religion.
That Delphic lower lip is active again. "I'm not at all saying that all religious believers are fundamentalists; but what distinguishes the believing brain of the extreme kind - I mean the fundamentalist and the totalitarian - from the non-fundamentalist brains," she ventures, "is the emotion of disgust, eh. "The anti-Semitic imagery of the Nazis was associated with a virus, a stealthy and elusive infection [What complete and utter nonsense! The Nazis just applied German thoroughness to a belief that had been normal in Europe for centuries]. So combating such a difficult enemy in the struggle for community hygiene isn't just a punch-for-punch slugging it out. The enemy is a sickness. You've got to be on constant guard. You don't just get angry with disease - you destroy it, exterminate it." She nods towards New College. "The invisible viral foe could invade your body and, most importantly, your brain. That's the language used by Dawkins, who's developed non-belief into a belief system all of its own, and who constantly refers to religion as a virus." ....
For people in midlife, she asserts, the identity problem is affluence. "The reason we crave more clothes, cars, goods, brands, is that they'll say something about us, symbolise our distinct, preferably superior identity." [Typical Leftist boilerplate]
Source
The packed-lunch police
How four British schools are waging war on home-produced forbidden food
Hmm, what's it to be? A lentil korma with brown rice and salad, then fruit and a yoghurt for afters, or a High School Musical bag stuffed with crisps and a couple of bars of chocolate? It sounds absurd but in some schools children sitting next to eat other could be eating such contrasting lunches.
While school dinners have come on nutritionally in leaps and bounds, and thanks to more money for ingredients and training for the dinner ladies, they taste a whole lot better too, there's nothing to stop pupils in many schools bringing in junk from home. A survey last year lifted the lid on lunchboxes to reveal the unappetising truth: what's inside them contains too much saturated fat and up to half the daily allowance of of salt. [Kids under 7 should have no more than 3g of salt a day.] Salads are scarce and only half the children brought in a portion of fruit and vegetables.
Children who aren't eating school dinners are losing out - that's about 60 per cent of primary school kids. And this is why, as part of the Government's attempt to tackle obesity, Alan Johnson, the Health Minister, has suggested that schools should check lunchbox contents.
The School Food Trust, the body set up by the Government to turn round school dinners, suggest drawing up a policy for packed lunches - a few basic rules to bring them in line with a healthier school environment - and make sticking to it part of a code that parents have to agree to. Others say it is impossible for schools to police what children bring in to eat. Margaret Morrissey, of the National Confederation of Parent Teacher Associations, says: "Many parents in this country will feel that it is their decision what they feed their children."
Joe Harvey, of the Health Education Trust, a charity involved in the Better School Food campaign, agrees. "You can't search kids for Kit Kats," he says. So what can schools do about it? "There has to be a process of education and consultation or they'll get the burgers-through-the-fence brigade. It should be part of a whole school food policy." He advises schools to build food rules into any contract the school makes with new parents; do everything possible to make sure children know what's going on in the school kitchen; and make the meal service as attractive as possible.
More here
The free market beats the tyrants -- as ever
The tyrants call it a "black market" but it is their arrogance and ignorance that is black
Students are operating a black-market trade in food banned in schools, including burgers and chocolate, in a backlash against healthier canteen menus such as those espoused by the celebrity chef Jamie Oliver. Newly installed healthy menus in school canteens and the removal of junk food from vending machines have created a gap in the market that students have been quick to fill. Some of the most sophisticated operations are taking place at business and enterprise schools.
The move to healthier meals in schools was prompted by Oliver's crusade in 2005 against Turkey Twizzlers and other unhealthy foods. The following year the Government published a report setting definitive nutritional standards for school lunches. One young smuggling mastermind, when finally caught, said to his school's headmaster unapologetically: "But we were only doing what you taught us in business studies, Sir."
After a tip from a head teacher at a Dorset secondary who broke up a "seriously big smuggling operation" run by a schoolboy, The Times has uncovered several similar contraband schemes. The head, who did not want to identify his school, was convinced that the switch to a healthy menu and the policy of keeping pupils on the premises at lunchtime had created an opening for entrepreneurs. He became suspicious when he noticed two 14-year-old boys approaching the school weighed down with Lidl carrier bags. "The thin wiry creatures, in full uniform but with shortened ties, shirts hanging out, were walking a heavily laden bicycle. The bags were dripping off the bike's handlebars, crossbars and saddle like a scene from some desperate endeavour on foot and mule to reach a lost city in the Peruvian mountains," he said.
A teacher nicknamed Columbo tracked down the boys and their illicit cargo: 60 cans of fizzy drinks and piles of milk chocolate. "We discovered they were just the buyers. Someone else had funded the purchase, a player who in turn was funded by unknowns, who were taking the lion's share. "Getting to the core of the operation was like peeling an onion, there appeared to be no centre," the head added. He suspects that similar operations are happening to a greater or lesser extent in most schools.
Sure enough, when The Times appealed to head teachers for similar tales, the response was rapid and clear. "It has happened to us. Kids with motorbikes buying McDonald's burgers in bulk and flogging them in the playground. We are a business and enterprise school in Essex so I guess I should not be surprised," one said. "When challenged, the boy at the centre said he was just being enterprising."
Another, this time from Wales, said: "The `McDonald's run', where sixth-formers with cars take orders for the lower school who are locked in at lunchtimes is one of the best bits of student enterprise I have seen for a long time."
It is not just business studies teachers who have been giving children ideas; it is also the parents. Two mothers from Rotherham gained publicity for feeding burgers to their children through the school railings after the introduction of a healthy new menu.
Brian Lightman, president of the Association of School and College Leaders and head teacher at St Cyres School in Penarth, Vale of Glamorgan, said that the healthy eating initiative would only succeed if students were allowed a say. "Because these changes have been imposed without allowing time for them to gain a sense of ownership, schools are reporting cases of students finding innovative ways around the new regulations," he said. Of course, if today's teenager crisp smugglers really want a good excuse when caught, they might be well advised to point to Jamie Oliver himself. As an enterprising 11-year-old he used to lease school-lockers from fellow pupils, from where he would sell sweets he had bought at the cash-and-carry. Alternatively, students could also point to the teachers who regularly sneak out at lunch time for burgers and chips, now that they are no longer on the menu.
Source
UK: Elections "vulnerable to fraud": "Elections in the UK fall short of international standards with the system vulnerable to fraud, a report by the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust claims.Measures to improve choice for voters -- such as postal and electronic voting -- are actually risking the integrity of the electoral process, it said."
The lazy British police: "A family who dialled 999 when eight men wearing balaclavas burst into their home at 11.15pm were told by the police that they were too busy to come. Mathew Sims, 24, his partner Sarah Barham, also 24, and their two children, aged 6 and 5, ran upstairs when the men, one brandishing an axe, smashed the glass in a door that Mr Sims was trying to keep closed. Eventually the burglars left in two cars after stripping the downstairs rooms of electrical items. Three hours later the police turned up at the house - barely a mile from a police station - in Arnold, Nottinghamshire. Mr Sims said: "The minute we knew these people were in the house we rang the police, but they said it would be at least half an hour before they could come out. "No one from the police had turned up half an hour later, and when we rang again they said there was no one they could send." In a letter to the couple, Chief Inspector Andy Burton said that they deserved an apology and confirmed that an inquiry was under way." [If he had said that somebody had called him a queer, they would have been right out]
"Separatist" and "moderate" are apparently bad words:
"The BBC is facing a High Court challenge over its decision to censor a party political broadcast in the run-up to Thursday's local elections. A Christian party has begun legal action after the corporation insisted on changes to a short film in which the party voiced opposition to the building of Europe's biggest mosque next to the site of the 2012 Olympics.
Tablighi Jamaat, the Islamic missionary group behind the 75 million pound Abbey Mills mosque, opposes inter-faith dialogue and preaches that non-Muslims are an evil and corrupting influence. One of its British advocates has said that it aims to rescue Muslims from the culture and civilisation of Jews and Christians by creating "such hatred for their ways as human beings have for urine and excreta".
The Christian Choice election broadcast would have described Tablighi Jamaat as "a separatist Islamic group" before welcoming that some "moderate Muslims" were opposed to the mosque complex.
Alan Craig, the party's candidate in the London mayoral election, also on Thursday, said that he was forced to change the wording at the insistence of lawyers at the BBC and ITV, which will also feature in the court action.
The BBC refused to accept "separatist" - the corporation asked for "controversial" instead - and barred the use of "moderate Muslims" because the phrase implied that Tablighi Jamaat was less than moderate.
Source
As the BBC is compulsorily supported by the taxpayer (and even some non-taxpayers are made to cough up), one would hope it had some obligation to speak the truth rather than cover it up. Silly of me to think that, I guess.
Supermarkets must accept being libelled?
The British literary luvvies are venting their hatred of big business:
"A group of Britain's leading authors has accused Tesco of using "deeply chilling" tactics to silence its critics. Nick Hornby and Mark Haddon are among the writers who have signed a letter in The Times today condemning the supermarket for prosecuting a Thai business leader for making a speech that decried Tesco's expansion. If the supermarket is successful Jit Siratranont could be jailed.
Hornby and Haddon - together with Marina Lewycka, the author of A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, and Deborah Moggach, who wrote Tulip Fever - have also put their names to a longer open letter arguing that a criminal libel prosecution and two civil actions against journalists represent a breach of their human rights....
A spokesman for the supermarket said that Tesco stood by its Thai subsidiary, which would have informed its superiors in Britain of its actions. "All three of these actions follow a sustained period of attack on Tesco Lotus in Thailand. It is our fervent wish to reach agreement. We are seeking a public apology. It is very regrettable that we have had to take legal action in Thailand. We had hoped that the individuals concerned would apologise for the false and highly damaging allegations they had made about our business over a sustained period of time but despite numerous attempts to get them to set the record straight, this has not happened.
Source
Tesco is a bit like a British Wal-Mart -- that friend of the poor that all good Leftists hate! It seems to me that Tesco are in fact being moderate about this.
Hatred of Technology
But it's all theory. Who cares about silly old facts?
Susan Greenfield's lower lip pouts as if to blow a raspberry. Then, in soothsaying mode, the solemn utterance: "The global cyber world promises a more reassuring, safer option than the messy world of in-your-face three-dimensional life. But the IT technologies are already blurring the cyber world and reality." The hooded eyes readjust from Delphic oracle to larky chick as she flashes a face-splitting grin. "There are people," she chortles, "who can't believe, eh! that the planes crashing into the twin towers were actually real, eh!" The punctuating "eh!" prompts you to agree.
Professor Greenfield, promoter extraordinaire of science, has written a book that makes routine auguries - global warming, economic downturns - look like mere gloomy hand-wringing. A specialist in brain degeneration, Greenfield is predicting that our teen generation is headed for a sort of mass loss of personal identity. She calls it the Nobody Scenario. By spending inordinate quantities of time in the interactive, virtual, two-dimensional, cyberspace realms of the screen, she believes that the brains of the youth of today are headed for a drastic alteration. It's as if all that young grey cortical matter is being scalded and defoliated by a kind of cognitive Agent Orange, depriving them of moral agency, imagination and awareness of consequences.
"They are destined to lose an awareness of who and what they are: not someones, or anyones, but nobodies, eh!" That expressive mouth widens again, the lower lip ripens. "The time is well nigh," she says, "to explore the impact of these technologies." ....
Greenfield has elaborated a theory about the influence of IT on young brains. Given the time young people spend gazing into screens, small and large - reckoned to be from six to nine hours daily - she believes the minds of the younger generation are developing differently from those of previous generations. "The brain," she says, "has plasticity: it is exquisitely malleable, and a significant alteration in our environment and behaviour has consequences."
She sets out a catalogue of repercussions: the substitution of virtual experience for real encounters; the impact of spoon-fed menu options as opposed to free-ranging inquiry; a decline in linguistic and visual imagination; an atrophy of creativity; contracted, brutalised text-messaging, lacking the verbs and conditional structures essential for complex thinking. Her principal concern is how computer games could be emphasising what she calls "process" over "content" - method over meaning - in mental activity.
Her theory goes like this. The more we play games, the less time there is for learning specific facts and working out how those facts relate to each other. This can result, she maintains, in a failure to build highly personalised individual conceptual frameworks - the whole point of education and the basis of individual identity. If the purpose of a game, for instance, is to free the princess from the tower, it is the thrill of attaining the goal, the process, that counts. What does not count is the content - the personality of the princess and the narrative as to why and how she is there, as in a storybook. Greenfield avers that emphasis on process in isolation becomes addictive and profoundly mind-changing.
Here is her hypothesis. A natural brain chemical called dopamine is involved in all forms of addiction. Dopamine contributes to feelings of wellbeing on attaining a goal, especially when gratification repeatedly deferred is finally delivered. Falling levels of dopamine accompany the opposite situations, when gratification has been frustrated (for example, waiting for a phone call that never comes).
The area of the brain crucial to the dopamine hits is called the nucleus accumbens, which is associated with the prefrontal cortex, an area at the front of the brain. An under-functioning prefrontal cortex is linked with types of behaviour marked by total absorption in the here and now, and an inability to consider past and future implications. According to Greenfield, excessive dopamine can reduce the activity of brain cells in the prefrontal cortex, leading to its partial shutdown. She is speculating that the intense subjective "here and now" feeling, prompted and accompanied by dopamine "rewards" in computer play, creates a euphoric, self-centred ego boost, the pleasure of which can lead to craving and addiction.
What lasting effect does this repeated neglect in the prefrontal cortex have on the brain, and hence the mind? "Excessive dopamine hits might reduce activation in the prefrontal cortex, and in so doing tip the balance away from awareness of the significance, the meaning, of our actions," she says. So playing games in which I slaughter scores of all-comers with my trusty sword, as in the Tarantino movie Kill Bill, deals not with the significance of beheading and disembowelling of hordes of Japanese villains, but with the process - the action separated from meaning and consequences. "When those teenagers kicked that goth girl to death in the park recently," she says, "was it like a computer game for them? The buzz of the moment? Were they thinking of her as a person with feelings, with parents and siblings? Were they thinking of the implications for themselves the next day?"
For the mind to operate fully, Greenfield asserts, the prefrontal cortex must be active, and content must be a high priority. The world and oneself are then redolent with meaning. How do the young attain unique and enriched identities? "Through the world of focused conversation, nursery rhyme repetition, recitation and rote learning, of reading and writing interspersed with bouts of physical activity in the real world, where there are first-hand and unique adventures to provide a personal narrative, personalised neuronal connections. This is education as we have known it."
And what if "education as we have known it" fails? It will lead, she predicts, to the ultimate triumph of process over content: the Nobody Scenario. "For the first time in human history, individuality could be obliterated in favour of a passive state, reacting to a flood of incoming sensations - a `yuck' and `wow' mentality characterised by a premium on momentary experience as the landscape of the brain shifts into one where personalised brain connectivity is either not functional or absent altogether." .....
Greenfield tells me that she has friends who have faith and she quizzes them endlessly - Ed Stourton, the broadcaster, Jack Valero, Opus Dei's spokesperson in Britain, and a neighbour whose faith is helping him and his family overcome a serious illness. She pauses outside New College. This is the college of Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion and professional antagonist of religion.
That Delphic lower lip is active again. "I'm not at all saying that all religious believers are fundamentalists; but what distinguishes the believing brain of the extreme kind - I mean the fundamentalist and the totalitarian - from the non-fundamentalist brains," she ventures, "is the emotion of disgust, eh. "The anti-Semitic imagery of the Nazis was associated with a virus, a stealthy and elusive infection [What complete and utter nonsense! The Nazis just applied German thoroughness to a belief that had been normal in Europe for centuries]. So combating such a difficult enemy in the struggle for community hygiene isn't just a punch-for-punch slugging it out. The enemy is a sickness. You've got to be on constant guard. You don't just get angry with disease - you destroy it, exterminate it." She nods towards New College. "The invisible viral foe could invade your body and, most importantly, your brain. That's the language used by Dawkins, who's developed non-belief into a belief system all of its own, and who constantly refers to religion as a virus." ....
For people in midlife, she asserts, the identity problem is affluence. "The reason we crave more clothes, cars, goods, brands, is that they'll say something about us, symbolise our distinct, preferably superior identity." [Typical Leftist boilerplate]
Source
The packed-lunch police
How four British schools are waging war on home-produced forbidden food
Hmm, what's it to be? A lentil korma with brown rice and salad, then fruit and a yoghurt for afters, or a High School Musical bag stuffed with crisps and a couple of bars of chocolate? It sounds absurd but in some schools children sitting next to eat other could be eating such contrasting lunches.
While school dinners have come on nutritionally in leaps and bounds, and thanks to more money for ingredients and training for the dinner ladies, they taste a whole lot better too, there's nothing to stop pupils in many schools bringing in junk from home. A survey last year lifted the lid on lunchboxes to reveal the unappetising truth: what's inside them contains too much saturated fat and up to half the daily allowance of of salt. [Kids under 7 should have no more than 3g of salt a day.] Salads are scarce and only half the children brought in a portion of fruit and vegetables.
Children who aren't eating school dinners are losing out - that's about 60 per cent of primary school kids. And this is why, as part of the Government's attempt to tackle obesity, Alan Johnson, the Health Minister, has suggested that schools should check lunchbox contents.
The School Food Trust, the body set up by the Government to turn round school dinners, suggest drawing up a policy for packed lunches - a few basic rules to bring them in line with a healthier school environment - and make sticking to it part of a code that parents have to agree to. Others say it is impossible for schools to police what children bring in to eat. Margaret Morrissey, of the National Confederation of Parent Teacher Associations, says: "Many parents in this country will feel that it is their decision what they feed their children."
Joe Harvey, of the Health Education Trust, a charity involved in the Better School Food campaign, agrees. "You can't search kids for Kit Kats," he says. So what can schools do about it? "There has to be a process of education and consultation or they'll get the burgers-through-the-fence brigade. It should be part of a whole school food policy." He advises schools to build food rules into any contract the school makes with new parents; do everything possible to make sure children know what's going on in the school kitchen; and make the meal service as attractive as possible.
More here
The free market beats the tyrants -- as ever
The tyrants call it a "black market" but it is their arrogance and ignorance that is black
Students are operating a black-market trade in food banned in schools, including burgers and chocolate, in a backlash against healthier canteen menus such as those espoused by the celebrity chef Jamie Oliver. Newly installed healthy menus in school canteens and the removal of junk food from vending machines have created a gap in the market that students have been quick to fill. Some of the most sophisticated operations are taking place at business and enterprise schools.
The move to healthier meals in schools was prompted by Oliver's crusade in 2005 against Turkey Twizzlers and other unhealthy foods. The following year the Government published a report setting definitive nutritional standards for school lunches. One young smuggling mastermind, when finally caught, said to his school's headmaster unapologetically: "But we were only doing what you taught us in business studies, Sir."
After a tip from a head teacher at a Dorset secondary who broke up a "seriously big smuggling operation" run by a schoolboy, The Times has uncovered several similar contraband schemes. The head, who did not want to identify his school, was convinced that the switch to a healthy menu and the policy of keeping pupils on the premises at lunchtime had created an opening for entrepreneurs. He became suspicious when he noticed two 14-year-old boys approaching the school weighed down with Lidl carrier bags. "The thin wiry creatures, in full uniform but with shortened ties, shirts hanging out, were walking a heavily laden bicycle. The bags were dripping off the bike's handlebars, crossbars and saddle like a scene from some desperate endeavour on foot and mule to reach a lost city in the Peruvian mountains," he said.
A teacher nicknamed Columbo tracked down the boys and their illicit cargo: 60 cans of fizzy drinks and piles of milk chocolate. "We discovered they were just the buyers. Someone else had funded the purchase, a player who in turn was funded by unknowns, who were taking the lion's share. "Getting to the core of the operation was like peeling an onion, there appeared to be no centre," the head added. He suspects that similar operations are happening to a greater or lesser extent in most schools.
Sure enough, when The Times appealed to head teachers for similar tales, the response was rapid and clear. "It has happened to us. Kids with motorbikes buying McDonald's burgers in bulk and flogging them in the playground. We are a business and enterprise school in Essex so I guess I should not be surprised," one said. "When challenged, the boy at the centre said he was just being enterprising."
Another, this time from Wales, said: "The `McDonald's run', where sixth-formers with cars take orders for the lower school who are locked in at lunchtimes is one of the best bits of student enterprise I have seen for a long time."
It is not just business studies teachers who have been giving children ideas; it is also the parents. Two mothers from Rotherham gained publicity for feeding burgers to their children through the school railings after the introduction of a healthy new menu.
Brian Lightman, president of the Association of School and College Leaders and head teacher at St Cyres School in Penarth, Vale of Glamorgan, said that the healthy eating initiative would only succeed if students were allowed a say. "Because these changes have been imposed without allowing time for them to gain a sense of ownership, schools are reporting cases of students finding innovative ways around the new regulations," he said. Of course, if today's teenager crisp smugglers really want a good excuse when caught, they might be well advised to point to Jamie Oliver himself. As an enterprising 11-year-old he used to lease school-lockers from fellow pupils, from where he would sell sweets he had bought at the cash-and-carry. Alternatively, students could also point to the teachers who regularly sneak out at lunch time for burgers and chips, now that they are no longer on the menu.
Source
UK: Elections "vulnerable to fraud": "Elections in the UK fall short of international standards with the system vulnerable to fraud, a report by the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust claims.Measures to improve choice for voters -- such as postal and electronic voting -- are actually risking the integrity of the electoral process, it said."
The lazy British police: "A family who dialled 999 when eight men wearing balaclavas burst into their home at 11.15pm were told by the police that they were too busy to come. Mathew Sims, 24, his partner Sarah Barham, also 24, and their two children, aged 6 and 5, ran upstairs when the men, one brandishing an axe, smashed the glass in a door that Mr Sims was trying to keep closed. Eventually the burglars left in two cars after stripping the downstairs rooms of electrical items. Three hours later the police turned up at the house - barely a mile from a police station - in Arnold, Nottinghamshire. Mr Sims said: "The minute we knew these people were in the house we rang the police, but they said it would be at least half an hour before they could come out. "No one from the police had turned up half an hour later, and when we rang again they said there was no one they could send." In a letter to the couple, Chief Inspector Andy Burton said that they deserved an apology and confirmed that an inquiry was under way." [If he had said that somebody had called him a queer, they would have been right out]
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
British Muslim 'bullied' for converting to Christianity
British police no help, of course. Muslims are a protected class
A British citizen who converted to Christianity from Islam and then complained to police when locals threatened to burn his house down was told by officers to "stop being a crusader", according to a new report.
Nissar Hussein, 43, from Bradford, West Yorkshire, who was born and raised in Britain, converted from Islam to Christianity with his wife, Qubra, in 1996. The report says that he was subjected to a number of attacks and, after being told that his house would be burnt down if he did not repent and return to Islam, reported the threat to the police. It says he was told that such threats were rarely carried out and the police officer told him to "stop being a crusader and move to another place". A few days later the unoccupied house next door was set on fire.
Christian Solidarity Worldwide, a British human rights organisation whose president is the former Cabinet minister Jonathan Aitken, is calling on the UN and the international community to take action against nations and communities that punish apostasy.
Its report, No Place to Call Home, claims that apostates from Islam are subject to "gross and wideranging human rights abuses". It adds that in countries such as Britain, with large Muslim populations in a Westernised culture, the demand to maintain a Muslim identity is intense. "When identities are precarious, their enforcement will take an aggressive form."
Source
British nurses are engulfed by a tide of NHS paperwork
Ass-covering via paperwork trumps patient care in a socialized system
Nurses spend more than a million hours a week on non-essential paperwork, according to the Royal College of Nursing. A survey found that of the 1,700 nurses questioned, 88 per cent believed that the time needed for such paperwork had increased in recent years. Only one in five had seen a corresponding rise in administrative support. One in four said they had no access to clerical support.
The union called on NHS trusts to employ administrative staff to relieve the burden on nurses. Peter Carter, the general secretary said: “The danger is that this is undermining their ability to care for patients and support relatives.” The poll was published as nurses gathered in Bournemouth for the union’s annual conference.
Nurses working in the community and in out-patient departments were most burdened, two-fifths saying they had to do all their own clerical tasks.
A separate poll suggested that 80 per cent of nurses had felt distress at being unable to treat patients with due dignity. In particular, hospitals could not guarantee patients single-sex accommodation.
Source
British bureaucratic tyranny tightens
Post below recycled from Prof. Brignell. See the original for links
To get the following into context it is important to remember that it refers to a time when violent crime is worse than ever. Children are shooting and stabbing each other in the streets and burglaries, theft and shoplifting are carried out with impunity in the almost total absence of police on the streets. We are governed not by elected representatives, but by officials.
In the Democratic Socialist Republic of Hull a mother was fined œ75 for dropping a piece of sausage roll when feeding her toddler. It was immediately gobble up by pigeons.
Draconian laws that were forced through Parliament as being absolutely necessary to track criminals and terrorists have been used for a variety of quite different purposes. A couple and their three children were put under surveillance without their knowledge by Poole Borough Council for more than two weeks. Their crime (of which they were innocent) was to be suspected of the grievous middle class sin of trying to do their best for the children in defiance of rules of socialist equality.
The common characteristic of these tawdry tales is the employment of enormous numbers of people at the taxpayers' expense, a non-productive army who are dragging down the already precarious economy. They have no connection with police or judiciary, yet are empowered to act as judge and jury in the imposition of fines on a scale that is out of all proportion to those imposed for what were once real crimes.
For this is Envirocrime, Orwellian Newspeak for a whole new raft of offences, mostly inspired by EU directives (but don't let the public know that, because our leaders like to maintain the pretence that they are still in charge) which have given rise to an era of surveillance and oppression that realises Orwell's nightmare. This leads us to:
A father of four in Cumbria now has a criminal record. His crime is to overfill his refuse bin so that the lid was ajar by all of four inches. The prosecution claim that this was in fact seven inches (clearly a hanging offence). Perhaps his offence would have been mitigated if it were for ten centimetres.
Here in West Wiltshire we received a full colour leaflet with the mind-numbing headline Exciting developments in recycling. One of the pleasures of moving here had been to find that the binmen were so helpful; nothing was too much trouble. Then recently, they were accompanied by a man with a clipboard, clearly teaching them how to be intractable. We are not only to have two different bins, but we are provided with plastic crates for recyclables. How is anyone who walks with a stick supposed to carry a crate? A separate large refuse vehicle, fully manned and spouting dreaded pollution, collects cardboard only. One poor old lady was seen this week struggling down to the community recycling bins with a large plastic bag in one hand, because she could not carry a crate through her house. In some areas people who leave for work before 7 am are faced with fines for putting out their rubbish too early.
Elderly people live in fear of breaking complicated rules that they do not understand and do not seem to make any sense. They do not realise that the whole purpose is to force them into ritualistic behaviour for reasons of religion. Madness, or what?
Immigration undermines education
And it is the leader of Britain's wishy washy party that says so!
Rising immigration is putting pressure on schools and undermining education standards, Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader, warns today. Mr Clegg says an influx of children who do not speak English is hampering the work of teachers and proves that ministers failed to plan for current levels of migration. We must acknowledge that rising migration is putting pressure on schools at all levels," he will say.
Mr Clegg's comments mark his party's strongest criticism of Labour's open-door immigration policy, and may spark speculation that he is moving to the Right. In a speech to the 4Children conference in London today, Mr Clegg will reveal figures showing that nearly 800,000 pupils - 12 per cent of the total - are registered as having a first language other than English. That marks a 60 per cent rise since Labour came to power in 1997. The Daily Telegraph revealed in December that children with English as their first language were now in the minority in more than 1,300 schools.
"The latest wave of migration has brought large numbers - of Eastern Europeans in particular - to parts of the country that have little experience of dealing with speakers of other languages in schools," Mr Clegg will say. "Even a few children in a class can be a real challenge for a teacher used to strong English language skills, especially if children are arriving in the middle of a school year - and in unpredictable numbers. "It's a challenge for native English speakers, as well - because their learning suffers too when a class can't move forward together, learn together and share experiences fully."
Mr Clegg's aides say he has chosen to raise the issue of immigration and education after receiving complaints from head teachers who say their biggest challenge is coping with the number of languages spoken at their school. He will insist that his party will never support calls to end mass immigration, saying: "The problems stem from our failure to plan for population changes, not from the existence of migrants."
However, his speech could still raise suspicions among Lib Dem activists that Mr Clegg is trying to shift to the Right to counter a resurgent Conservative Party. Some analysts say the third party will be badly squeezed in Thursday's local government elections, perhaps losing as many as 200 seats as the Tories advance. Although the Lib Dems' poll ratings are steady at about 17 per cent, the party has reaped no clear benefit from Gordon Brown's recent troubles.
Mr Clegg has been testing the waters for a shift to the Right, even hinting that the Lib Dems could fight the next general election on a promise of cutting the tax burden
Source
British police no help, of course. Muslims are a protected class
A British citizen who converted to Christianity from Islam and then complained to police when locals threatened to burn his house down was told by officers to "stop being a crusader", according to a new report.
Nissar Hussein, 43, from Bradford, West Yorkshire, who was born and raised in Britain, converted from Islam to Christianity with his wife, Qubra, in 1996. The report says that he was subjected to a number of attacks and, after being told that his house would be burnt down if he did not repent and return to Islam, reported the threat to the police. It says he was told that such threats were rarely carried out and the police officer told him to "stop being a crusader and move to another place". A few days later the unoccupied house next door was set on fire.
Christian Solidarity Worldwide, a British human rights organisation whose president is the former Cabinet minister Jonathan Aitken, is calling on the UN and the international community to take action against nations and communities that punish apostasy.
Its report, No Place to Call Home, claims that apostates from Islam are subject to "gross and wideranging human rights abuses". It adds that in countries such as Britain, with large Muslim populations in a Westernised culture, the demand to maintain a Muslim identity is intense. "When identities are precarious, their enforcement will take an aggressive form."
Source
British nurses are engulfed by a tide of NHS paperwork
Ass-covering via paperwork trumps patient care in a socialized system
Nurses spend more than a million hours a week on non-essential paperwork, according to the Royal College of Nursing. A survey found that of the 1,700 nurses questioned, 88 per cent believed that the time needed for such paperwork had increased in recent years. Only one in five had seen a corresponding rise in administrative support. One in four said they had no access to clerical support.
The union called on NHS trusts to employ administrative staff to relieve the burden on nurses. Peter Carter, the general secretary said: “The danger is that this is undermining their ability to care for patients and support relatives.” The poll was published as nurses gathered in Bournemouth for the union’s annual conference.
Nurses working in the community and in out-patient departments were most burdened, two-fifths saying they had to do all their own clerical tasks.
A separate poll suggested that 80 per cent of nurses had felt distress at being unable to treat patients with due dignity. In particular, hospitals could not guarantee patients single-sex accommodation.
Source
British bureaucratic tyranny tightens
Post below recycled from Prof. Brignell. See the original for links
To get the following into context it is important to remember that it refers to a time when violent crime is worse than ever. Children are shooting and stabbing each other in the streets and burglaries, theft and shoplifting are carried out with impunity in the almost total absence of police on the streets. We are governed not by elected representatives, but by officials.
In the Democratic Socialist Republic of Hull a mother was fined œ75 for dropping a piece of sausage roll when feeding her toddler. It was immediately gobble up by pigeons.
Draconian laws that were forced through Parliament as being absolutely necessary to track criminals and terrorists have been used for a variety of quite different purposes. A couple and their three children were put under surveillance without their knowledge by Poole Borough Council for more than two weeks. Their crime (of which they were innocent) was to be suspected of the grievous middle class sin of trying to do their best for the children in defiance of rules of socialist equality.
The common characteristic of these tawdry tales is the employment of enormous numbers of people at the taxpayers' expense, a non-productive army who are dragging down the already precarious economy. They have no connection with police or judiciary, yet are empowered to act as judge and jury in the imposition of fines on a scale that is out of all proportion to those imposed for what were once real crimes.
For this is Envirocrime, Orwellian Newspeak for a whole new raft of offences, mostly inspired by EU directives (but don't let the public know that, because our leaders like to maintain the pretence that they are still in charge) which have given rise to an era of surveillance and oppression that realises Orwell's nightmare. This leads us to:
A father of four in Cumbria now has a criminal record. His crime is to overfill his refuse bin so that the lid was ajar by all of four inches. The prosecution claim that this was in fact seven inches (clearly a hanging offence). Perhaps his offence would have been mitigated if it were for ten centimetres.
Here in West Wiltshire we received a full colour leaflet with the mind-numbing headline Exciting developments in recycling. One of the pleasures of moving here had been to find that the binmen were so helpful; nothing was too much trouble. Then recently, they were accompanied by a man with a clipboard, clearly teaching them how to be intractable. We are not only to have two different bins, but we are provided with plastic crates for recyclables. How is anyone who walks with a stick supposed to carry a crate? A separate large refuse vehicle, fully manned and spouting dreaded pollution, collects cardboard only. One poor old lady was seen this week struggling down to the community recycling bins with a large plastic bag in one hand, because she could not carry a crate through her house. In some areas people who leave for work before 7 am are faced with fines for putting out their rubbish too early.
Elderly people live in fear of breaking complicated rules that they do not understand and do not seem to make any sense. They do not realise that the whole purpose is to force them into ritualistic behaviour for reasons of religion. Madness, or what?
Immigration undermines education
And it is the leader of Britain's wishy washy party that says so!
Rising immigration is putting pressure on schools and undermining education standards, Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader, warns today. Mr Clegg says an influx of children who do not speak English is hampering the work of teachers and proves that ministers failed to plan for current levels of migration. We must acknowledge that rising migration is putting pressure on schools at all levels," he will say.
Mr Clegg's comments mark his party's strongest criticism of Labour's open-door immigration policy, and may spark speculation that he is moving to the Right. In a speech to the 4Children conference in London today, Mr Clegg will reveal figures showing that nearly 800,000 pupils - 12 per cent of the total - are registered as having a first language other than English. That marks a 60 per cent rise since Labour came to power in 1997. The Daily Telegraph revealed in December that children with English as their first language were now in the minority in more than 1,300 schools.
"The latest wave of migration has brought large numbers - of Eastern Europeans in particular - to parts of the country that have little experience of dealing with speakers of other languages in schools," Mr Clegg will say. "Even a few children in a class can be a real challenge for a teacher used to strong English language skills, especially if children are arriving in the middle of a school year - and in unpredictable numbers. "It's a challenge for native English speakers, as well - because their learning suffers too when a class can't move forward together, learn together and share experiences fully."
Mr Clegg's aides say he has chosen to raise the issue of immigration and education after receiving complaints from head teachers who say their biggest challenge is coping with the number of languages spoken at their school. He will insist that his party will never support calls to end mass immigration, saying: "The problems stem from our failure to plan for population changes, not from the existence of migrants."
However, his speech could still raise suspicions among Lib Dem activists that Mr Clegg is trying to shift to the Right to counter a resurgent Conservative Party. Some analysts say the third party will be badly squeezed in Thursday's local government elections, perhaps losing as many as 200 seats as the Tories advance. Although the Lib Dems' poll ratings are steady at about 17 per cent, the party has reaped no clear benefit from Gordon Brown's recent troubles.
Mr Clegg has been testing the waters for a shift to the Right, even hinting that the Lib Dems could fight the next general election on a promise of cutting the tax burden
Source
Monday, April 28, 2008
Superbug fears hit British playgrounds
Panton and Valentine associated the toxin with soft tissue infections in 1932 so the NHS has had time to think of something to do about it
A superbug to which children are particularly vulnerable is spreading in Britain and specialists say the government is failing to take action to stop it. A Sunday Times investigation has found at least 10 youngsters aged between six and 13 have been left fighting for their lives after contracting the infection. Doctors are concerned because they appear to have caught the bug in playgrounds and parks.
The children were all hit by Panton-Valentine leukocidin (PVL), a toxin that combines with MRSA, the bacteria that cause thousands of infections, sometimes lethal, in hospitals. Mark Enright, professor of molecular epidemiology at Imperial College London, said: “This infection can kill healthy children in one to two days, but the authorities are continuing to treat MRSA as purely a hospital problem and trying to assuage public opinion.”
Other specialists accuse the government of ignoring warnings about the seriousness of PVL-MRSA, failing to mount adequate infection surveillance and blocking the use of a treatment to tackle it. Professor Richard Wise, a leading microbiologist, says that he warned a government health minister three years ago of the threat, but little has been done.
The phenomenon of PVL-MRSA was identified in America several years ago. British doctors have now reported cases from the south coast to the Midlands. They include a six-year-old girl left brain-damaged after she fell off her scooter and contracted the infection in her shin bone, from where it spread throughout her body, and a nine-year-old boy who was crippled after a graze playing football.
The mother of a 10-year-old boy in London who caught the bug said: “One day he was playing happily and the next day he couldn’t see, speak or move. The doctors didn’t know what was happening. It was terrifying.” Official figures show that the number of recorded PVL infections rose from 224 in 2005 to 496 in 2006.
Source
Poor white boys are victims too
By Trevor Phillips (The black chairman of Britain's Equality and Human Rights Commission)
To be sure, the problems of racial discrimination against minorities haven't gone away - black and Asian young men are still up to seven times more likely to be arrested by the police; Pakistani men will earn more than a quarter of million pounds less than their white equivalents over a lifetime; and young Bangladeshi women are having to settle for jobs for which they are overqualified. But we are also confronting for the first time in my lifetime an equality deficit not much talked about at Westminster. I am referring to the growing underclass of poor white boys - a forgotten group who also face a kind of institutional racism. I am deeply worried that they will grow into poor, disillusioned, alienated white men.
Why should the Equality and Human Rights Commission care? Many people, including our friends, think that it exists largely to shout the odds for anybody who is not male, white, straight and able-bodied. But that is wrong on every count. We aren't a minorities' pressure group. We work for the whole of society, not just those at the margins - though those who suffer most disadvantage have a right to come first in the queue for our support. (And let's remember that some of those who face systematic inequality aren't small minorities - women are a majority, most of us will become parents and virtually all of us will get old.)
What we are is a body that attacks unfairness wherever it sees it. That's why some of the wider trends that may be leading to greater inequality are right at the top of our agenda - economic change, the skills gap and, above all, migration.
Let me be unambiguous about this last issue. I am pro-immigration. The British people's experience is that managed migration has brought great advantages to the country, not the tide of hate that Powell prophesied. But immigration has also raised important issues - not least that if we aren't careful, the benefits from it will fall into the hands of employers, shareholders and middle-class professionals, while any burdens are left to be borne by the poorest in society.
So we have to ensure that the positive impact of migration is not offset by the costs - such as public services under increased pressure and an infrastructure that is struggling to cope. Let these issues languish in the tray marked "too difficult to talk about", and resentment will grow. We also need to be clear that worrying about the consequences of immigration does not make you antiforeigner. And we must tackle a vital question: why are some groups in society not getting the chances they deserve? Last week two reports highlighted again the issue of underachievement. A report by the Bow Group, the Conservative think tank, showed that in the past 10 years almost 4m pupils left school without gaining the basic qualifications of five good GCSEs.
The cost to the economy of low educational attainment - and low social mobility - is 32 billion pounds a year, or 1,300 to the average family, according to Reform, the independent think tank. Its report spoke of the "why bother?" generation - people who feel shut out by the system. If people feel shut out, they will try to find someone easy to blame: the outsider, the immigrant.
At the commission, we are doing research on educational underachievement and its link to ethnicity. Initial findings reveal that, for example, Bangladeshi and black African students at school outperform their white peers from comparable economic and social backgrounds. Statistics also show that black African, Bangladeshi and Pakistani students achieve higher GCSE scores than equivalent white students. We know that it is not only white children from poorer background who are struggling. Black Caribbean children are also underachieving.
In the autumn, after our research is published, we will host a conference on white working-class boys. We want to listen to the pupils themselves, the teachers and the parents. And we need to demonstrate that fairness is about equal treatment for all - black, white or Asian. It is only in tackling these issues that we take the toxicity out of debates on immigration, race and socio-economic underachievement. Fair treatment and equal chances are everyone's right. No one should feel the work of the commission is "not about me".
Source
British bureaucrats eat crow: "The Office of Fair Trading (OFT) has issued an unprecedented apology to Wm Morrison for wrongly suggesting that Britain's fourth-largest supermarket group was guilty of fixing prices for butter and cheese five years ago. The competition watchdog agreed today to pay 100,000 pounds to settle a defamation case brought by the retailer over "serious errors" published in a press release last September. The OFT has also agreed to pay Morrison's costs in relation to the defamation case and a judicial review the supermarket launched in the wake of the OFT's strongly worded press release, which accused supermarkets of ripping off shoppers to the tune of 270 million. The OFT said in a statement today that its September release incorrectly stated that Morrison was the subject of a provisional finding of infringement in relation to the supply of butter and cheese in 2002 and 2003."
The corrupt EU again: "A British whistleblower who exposed alleged corruption at a European aid agency faces the sack after he told EU fraud investigators that his boss was involved in the scam. Terry Battersby, 53, from Manchester, has been removed from his job as head of information technology at the Brussels-based Centre for the Development of Enterprise (CDE) and placed on a short-term contract. Battersby uncovered evidence that the agency's former director, Hamed Sow, who is now the energy minister of the west African country of Mali, approved the award of lucrative European Union contracts to a company in which he had a financial interest. Sow is alleged to have arranged for the CDE to back a loan of nearly 3m pounds to a textile company in Mali, without disclosing that he owned up to 20% of the company and was receiving payments from the firm. The CDE, set up to support the private sector in poor countries, receives more than 14m a year in taxpayers' money from the EU."
Panton and Valentine associated the toxin with soft tissue infections in 1932 so the NHS has had time to think of something to do about it
A superbug to which children are particularly vulnerable is spreading in Britain and specialists say the government is failing to take action to stop it. A Sunday Times investigation has found at least 10 youngsters aged between six and 13 have been left fighting for their lives after contracting the infection. Doctors are concerned because they appear to have caught the bug in playgrounds and parks.
The children were all hit by Panton-Valentine leukocidin (PVL), a toxin that combines with MRSA, the bacteria that cause thousands of infections, sometimes lethal, in hospitals. Mark Enright, professor of molecular epidemiology at Imperial College London, said: “This infection can kill healthy children in one to two days, but the authorities are continuing to treat MRSA as purely a hospital problem and trying to assuage public opinion.”
Other specialists accuse the government of ignoring warnings about the seriousness of PVL-MRSA, failing to mount adequate infection surveillance and blocking the use of a treatment to tackle it. Professor Richard Wise, a leading microbiologist, says that he warned a government health minister three years ago of the threat, but little has been done.
The phenomenon of PVL-MRSA was identified in America several years ago. British doctors have now reported cases from the south coast to the Midlands. They include a six-year-old girl left brain-damaged after she fell off her scooter and contracted the infection in her shin bone, from where it spread throughout her body, and a nine-year-old boy who was crippled after a graze playing football.
The mother of a 10-year-old boy in London who caught the bug said: “One day he was playing happily and the next day he couldn’t see, speak or move. The doctors didn’t know what was happening. It was terrifying.” Official figures show that the number of recorded PVL infections rose from 224 in 2005 to 496 in 2006.
Source
Poor white boys are victims too
By Trevor Phillips (The black chairman of Britain's Equality and Human Rights Commission)
To be sure, the problems of racial discrimination against minorities haven't gone away - black and Asian young men are still up to seven times more likely to be arrested by the police; Pakistani men will earn more than a quarter of million pounds less than their white equivalents over a lifetime; and young Bangladeshi women are having to settle for jobs for which they are overqualified. But we are also confronting for the first time in my lifetime an equality deficit not much talked about at Westminster. I am referring to the growing underclass of poor white boys - a forgotten group who also face a kind of institutional racism. I am deeply worried that they will grow into poor, disillusioned, alienated white men.
Why should the Equality and Human Rights Commission care? Many people, including our friends, think that it exists largely to shout the odds for anybody who is not male, white, straight and able-bodied. But that is wrong on every count. We aren't a minorities' pressure group. We work for the whole of society, not just those at the margins - though those who suffer most disadvantage have a right to come first in the queue for our support. (And let's remember that some of those who face systematic inequality aren't small minorities - women are a majority, most of us will become parents and virtually all of us will get old.)
What we are is a body that attacks unfairness wherever it sees it. That's why some of the wider trends that may be leading to greater inequality are right at the top of our agenda - economic change, the skills gap and, above all, migration.
Let me be unambiguous about this last issue. I am pro-immigration. The British people's experience is that managed migration has brought great advantages to the country, not the tide of hate that Powell prophesied. But immigration has also raised important issues - not least that if we aren't careful, the benefits from it will fall into the hands of employers, shareholders and middle-class professionals, while any burdens are left to be borne by the poorest in society.
So we have to ensure that the positive impact of migration is not offset by the costs - such as public services under increased pressure and an infrastructure that is struggling to cope. Let these issues languish in the tray marked "too difficult to talk about", and resentment will grow. We also need to be clear that worrying about the consequences of immigration does not make you antiforeigner. And we must tackle a vital question: why are some groups in society not getting the chances they deserve? Last week two reports highlighted again the issue of underachievement. A report by the Bow Group, the Conservative think tank, showed that in the past 10 years almost 4m pupils left school without gaining the basic qualifications of five good GCSEs.
The cost to the economy of low educational attainment - and low social mobility - is 32 billion pounds a year, or 1,300 to the average family, according to Reform, the independent think tank. Its report spoke of the "why bother?" generation - people who feel shut out by the system. If people feel shut out, they will try to find someone easy to blame: the outsider, the immigrant.
At the commission, we are doing research on educational underachievement and its link to ethnicity. Initial findings reveal that, for example, Bangladeshi and black African students at school outperform their white peers from comparable economic and social backgrounds. Statistics also show that black African, Bangladeshi and Pakistani students achieve higher GCSE scores than equivalent white students. We know that it is not only white children from poorer background who are struggling. Black Caribbean children are also underachieving.
In the autumn, after our research is published, we will host a conference on white working-class boys. We want to listen to the pupils themselves, the teachers and the parents. And we need to demonstrate that fairness is about equal treatment for all - black, white or Asian. It is only in tackling these issues that we take the toxicity out of debates on immigration, race and socio-economic underachievement. Fair treatment and equal chances are everyone's right. No one should feel the work of the commission is "not about me".
Source
British bureaucrats eat crow: "The Office of Fair Trading (OFT) has issued an unprecedented apology to Wm Morrison for wrongly suggesting that Britain's fourth-largest supermarket group was guilty of fixing prices for butter and cheese five years ago. The competition watchdog agreed today to pay 100,000 pounds to settle a defamation case brought by the retailer over "serious errors" published in a press release last September. The OFT has also agreed to pay Morrison's costs in relation to the defamation case and a judicial review the supermarket launched in the wake of the OFT's strongly worded press release, which accused supermarkets of ripping off shoppers to the tune of 270 million. The OFT said in a statement today that its September release incorrectly stated that Morrison was the subject of a provisional finding of infringement in relation to the supply of butter and cheese in 2002 and 2003."
The corrupt EU again: "A British whistleblower who exposed alleged corruption at a European aid agency faces the sack after he told EU fraud investigators that his boss was involved in the scam. Terry Battersby, 53, from Manchester, has been removed from his job as head of information technology at the Brussels-based Centre for the Development of Enterprise (CDE) and placed on a short-term contract. Battersby uncovered evidence that the agency's former director, Hamed Sow, who is now the energy minister of the west African country of Mali, approved the award of lucrative European Union contracts to a company in which he had a financial interest. Sow is alleged to have arranged for the CDE to back a loan of nearly 3m pounds to a textile company in Mali, without disclosing that he owned up to 20% of the company and was receiving payments from the firm. The CDE, set up to support the private sector in poor countries, receives more than 14m a year in taxpayers' money from the EU."
Sunday, April 27, 2008
More British Catholic Adoption Agencies to Close Doors instead of Bowing to Sexual Orientation Regulations
When the Labour government's Sexual Orientation Regulations were passed last year, the leadership of the Catholic Church in England and Wales warned that the new law would spell the end of Catholic involvement in social service, particularly adoption. Now the first of the UK's Catholic adoption agencies affected are announcing they will close their doors for good rather than betray religious principles and their guiding principle of the good of the child.
Bishop Malcolm McMahon said his diocese of Nottingham would be cutting ties with the their adoption agency, the Catholic Children's Society, because of the law that forces them to consider homosexual partners as equally qualified to adopt as people in natural heterosexual relationships. "We have been coerced into this, I am not happy about it at all," the bishop told Catholic News Service April 18. "The regulations have coerced the children's society into going against the church's teaching, and we don't wish to do that."
The Nottingham agency, together with that of the Northampton Catholic diocese, will become a secular institution "with a Christian character" by merging with the adoption agency of the Anglican Diocese of Southwell and Nottingham in October. The parish churches of the diocese will no longer solicit funds to support the agency. The Nottingham agency was founded in 1948 by the Congregation of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Peace and placed 25 children a year with adoptive families.
Contrary to common accusations that Catholics are trying to unjustly discriminate against homosexuals, the Catholic Church holds that its motivation is rather the desire to protect the best interests of children. The Church teaches, according to recent documents from the former Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, that allowing a child to be adopted by homosexual partners "would actually mean doing violence to these children" by placing them into a situation where their full social and spiritual development would be threatened.
Homosexual partners have had the legal right to adopt children in Britain since 2002. The new law, however, removes the right of Catholic and other Christian agencies to decline to consider homosexuals for adoption.
The move by the Nottingham diocese follows similar decisions made elsewhere in Britain. In the summer of 2007, shortly after the legislation was passed, the Leeds-based Catholic Care, which placed 20 children a year with adoptive families, voted to pull out of adoption services. Bishop Patrick O'Donohue of Lancaster announced at the same time that the Catholic Caring Services, an adoption agency working in Lancashire and Cumbria, will likely close rather than bow to the regulations.
When the legislation passed in 2007, Cormac Cardinal Murphy O'Connor, the head of the Catholic Church in England and Wales, attempted to find a compromise in which Catholic adoption agencies would be exempt. Tony Blair, later to be received into the Catholic Church by the same Cardinal, refused to consider an exemption. Instead Blair offered his own version of a compromise: Catholic agencies had a year to adjust to adopting children to gay partners or close. That deadline comes at the end of this month.
The conflict comes at the same time that local branches of government continue to discriminate against Christians who volunteer to take in foster children. In November 2007, Vincent and Pauline Matherick, a Christian couple who had fostered children for years, were told by their Somerset council that they would no longer be allowed to continue because of their religious objections to homosexuality. They were later reinstated but only after a media furor and notices to the council by a Christian lawyers' group.
In February this year, it was reported that a Christian couple in Derby, Eunice and Owen Johns, is suing the local council after their application to foster children was refused because of their religious objections to homosexuality. In addition, the Labour-controlled council adoption panel was said to be "upset" that the couple insisted that children in their care would be required to accompany the family to church on Sundays.
In September 2007, an independent investigation revealed that a local council's fear of being labelled homophobic had allowed a total of 19 boys to be placed with a pair of homosexual child molesters. Despite growing reservations by staff and complaints from the mother of two of the boys, the Wakefield council placed the children into the care of Ian Wathey and Craig Faunch who were convicted in May 2006 of molesting and filming eight-year-old twins and two 14 year-old boys.
Source
Greenies lose one
Plans for Britain's biggest land-based wind farm were turned down by the Scottish government yesterday, in a landmark decision with wide implications for the future development of renewable energy in the UK. The 181-turbine development on the Hebridean island of Lewis was vetoed by Scottish ministers because it was at odds with tough protection for wildlife sites afforded by European law. The site was designated as the Lewis Peatlands special protection area under the EU's birds directive to protect its rare breeding birds including the golden eagle, merlin, red-throated diver, black-throated diver, golden plover, dunlin and greenshank. As the wind farm would have "significant adverse impacts" on the wildlife site and its birds, it was in effect legally impossible to approve, said Jim Mather, the Scottish Energy Minister.
The decision sends a clear signal to developers seeking to take part in the "wind rush" expected as part of the massive expansion of renewable energy signalled by the EU earlier this year. It means their proposals will have to be in the right place, and they are likely to be refused if they conflict with the two EU wildlife laws - the birds directive and the habitats directive - which offer the strongest protection for wildlife sites in Britain.
But Mr Mather emphasised that the verdict on Lewis was not meant to block renewable energy expansion in the Hebrides and the rest of Scotland. "This decision does not mean there cannot be onshore wind farms in the Western Isles," he said. "I strongly believe the vast renewables potential needs to be exploited to ensure that the opportunities and benefits of new development can be shared across the country in an equitable fashion. That's why we will urgently carry out work on how to develop renewable energy in the Western Isles, in harmony with its outstanding natural heritage."
He added: "Nor does today's decision alter in any way this government's unwavering commitment to harness Scotland's vast array of potentially cheap, renewable energy sources. Even allowing for [planning] refusals, we are well on the way to meeting our ambitious target to generate 50 per cent of Scotland's electricity from renewables by 2020."
The o500m scheme rejected yesterday, put forward by Lewis Wind Power, a joint venture between the energy giants Amec and British Energy Renewables, was extremely controversial on the island. In outline the biggest land-based wind farm in Europe, it had been slimmed down from a proposal for 234 turbines.
Although in February last year the Council of the Western Isles voted by 18 to 8 for the project - leaving the Scottish government to take the final decision - many people in Lewis felt that even the slimmed-down development would damage the island, despite the community benefits and jobs it would have brought. The Scottish government received 98 support letters - and 10,924 objections.
It would have involved 88 miles of road, eight electrical substations, 19 miles of overhead cables, 137 pylons, 18.3 miles of underground cables, and five rock quarries. Two Labour politicians who supported it, the island's MP, Calum MacDonald, and MSP, Alasdair Morrison, lost their seats, and were ousted by Angus MacNeil and Alasdair Allan respectively, who are both Scottish Nationalists and opponents of the wind farm.
Source
Surge of illegals into Scotland
Police have caught more than 1,000 people later identified as illegal immigrants at ports in south west Scotland over the past four years. Numbers of foreign nationals detained at Stranraer and Cairnryan have more than doubled between 2004 and 2007. Crimes including people trafficking for the sex trade have also been detected.
A spokesman for Dumfries and Galloway Constabulary said the figures should deter people from trying to use the ports without the proper documents. Police say the ports are the fourth busiest points of entry to Scotland after airports in Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen. About 1.9m passengers and 900,000 vehicles pass through the facilities each year. People from 67 different countries have been stopped by police and subsequently identified as illegal immigrants. There were 117 such cases in 2004 but that rose to 259 last year. The total number detected over the four-year period is 1,007.
Among the nationalities without proper documents were people from Pakistan, Sudan, Iraq, Romania, Nigeria and Afghanistan. Det Ch Insp Steven Carr, who works at the ports unit, said it was always looking out for any immigration offences. "Our primary function is protection of UK security," he said. "But during the course of our work we come across other offences." These include drugs and motoring crime as well as immigration issues. "The staff here are multi-skilled because there is a multitude of offences," said DCI Carr.
The police effort is backed up by three officers seconded to the UK Border Agency (UKBA). "They have the power of immigration officers up to the point of sending somebody back to their own country," he explained. Police believe that thanks to that facility and a good working relationship with ferry operators in Dumfries and Galloway they have been able to foil organised crime. "We have reported a number of people to the fiscal for the facilitating of people into the UK," said DCI Carr. "It is a well-documented process that organised crime groups make a lot of money out of charging people extortionate amounts to come into the UK. "Organised crime groups are very proficient at it - in many ways it is safer than drugs or other forms of contraband."
The force has also been part of a number of national operations. "We were also involved in Operation Pentameter on the trafficking of people for use in the sex trade," said DCI Carr. At least a couple of young women who police believe were destined for prostitution were discovered by the Stranraer ports unit. Dumfries and Galloway Police believe it demonstrates that the region's ferry terminals are not a "soft touch" for illegal immigration. "The smallest force in the UK still gets to deal with the biggest issues," said DCI Carr. "If you come through the ports of Stranraer and Cairnryan you are taking a risk - we monitor the ports 24 hours a day. "You will be found out, detected and reported or handed over to the UKBA."
Source
British Leftist government Takes From the Poor: "This was another bad week for Gordon Brown. Not even a year in office, the Prime Minister has already been in the soup for mishandling a banking crisis and for chickening out on early elections and an EU Constitution referendum. Now the Tories are taunting the Labour leader - who had made fighting poverty his No. 1 issue - as a tax oppressor of the poor. The charge has stuck and stung. Mr. Brown was forced Wednesday by backbenchers in his own party to mollify more than five million low-wage earners and pensioners who have seen their income taxes double to 20% this month. Even worse for a Labour leader, the tax hikes, which he passed last year when he was still Chancellor of the Exchequer but which came into force only this month, coincided with tax cuts for the middle class."
When the Labour government's Sexual Orientation Regulations were passed last year, the leadership of the Catholic Church in England and Wales warned that the new law would spell the end of Catholic involvement in social service, particularly adoption. Now the first of the UK's Catholic adoption agencies affected are announcing they will close their doors for good rather than betray religious principles and their guiding principle of the good of the child.
Bishop Malcolm McMahon said his diocese of Nottingham would be cutting ties with the their adoption agency, the Catholic Children's Society, because of the law that forces them to consider homosexual partners as equally qualified to adopt as people in natural heterosexual relationships. "We have been coerced into this, I am not happy about it at all," the bishop told Catholic News Service April 18. "The regulations have coerced the children's society into going against the church's teaching, and we don't wish to do that."
The Nottingham agency, together with that of the Northampton Catholic diocese, will become a secular institution "with a Christian character" by merging with the adoption agency of the Anglican Diocese of Southwell and Nottingham in October. The parish churches of the diocese will no longer solicit funds to support the agency. The Nottingham agency was founded in 1948 by the Congregation of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Peace and placed 25 children a year with adoptive families.
Contrary to common accusations that Catholics are trying to unjustly discriminate against homosexuals, the Catholic Church holds that its motivation is rather the desire to protect the best interests of children. The Church teaches, according to recent documents from the former Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, that allowing a child to be adopted by homosexual partners "would actually mean doing violence to these children" by placing them into a situation where their full social and spiritual development would be threatened.
Homosexual partners have had the legal right to adopt children in Britain since 2002. The new law, however, removes the right of Catholic and other Christian agencies to decline to consider homosexuals for adoption.
The move by the Nottingham diocese follows similar decisions made elsewhere in Britain. In the summer of 2007, shortly after the legislation was passed, the Leeds-based Catholic Care, which placed 20 children a year with adoptive families, voted to pull out of adoption services. Bishop Patrick O'Donohue of Lancaster announced at the same time that the Catholic Caring Services, an adoption agency working in Lancashire and Cumbria, will likely close rather than bow to the regulations.
When the legislation passed in 2007, Cormac Cardinal Murphy O'Connor, the head of the Catholic Church in England and Wales, attempted to find a compromise in which Catholic adoption agencies would be exempt. Tony Blair, later to be received into the Catholic Church by the same Cardinal, refused to consider an exemption. Instead Blair offered his own version of a compromise: Catholic agencies had a year to adjust to adopting children to gay partners or close. That deadline comes at the end of this month.
The conflict comes at the same time that local branches of government continue to discriminate against Christians who volunteer to take in foster children. In November 2007, Vincent and Pauline Matherick, a Christian couple who had fostered children for years, were told by their Somerset council that they would no longer be allowed to continue because of their religious objections to homosexuality. They were later reinstated but only after a media furor and notices to the council by a Christian lawyers' group.
In February this year, it was reported that a Christian couple in Derby, Eunice and Owen Johns, is suing the local council after their application to foster children was refused because of their religious objections to homosexuality. In addition, the Labour-controlled council adoption panel was said to be "upset" that the couple insisted that children in their care would be required to accompany the family to church on Sundays.
In September 2007, an independent investigation revealed that a local council's fear of being labelled homophobic had allowed a total of 19 boys to be placed with a pair of homosexual child molesters. Despite growing reservations by staff and complaints from the mother of two of the boys, the Wakefield council placed the children into the care of Ian Wathey and Craig Faunch who were convicted in May 2006 of molesting and filming eight-year-old twins and two 14 year-old boys.
Source
Greenies lose one
Plans for Britain's biggest land-based wind farm were turned down by the Scottish government yesterday, in a landmark decision with wide implications for the future development of renewable energy in the UK. The 181-turbine development on the Hebridean island of Lewis was vetoed by Scottish ministers because it was at odds with tough protection for wildlife sites afforded by European law. The site was designated as the Lewis Peatlands special protection area under the EU's birds directive to protect its rare breeding birds including the golden eagle, merlin, red-throated diver, black-throated diver, golden plover, dunlin and greenshank. As the wind farm would have "significant adverse impacts" on the wildlife site and its birds, it was in effect legally impossible to approve, said Jim Mather, the Scottish Energy Minister.
The decision sends a clear signal to developers seeking to take part in the "wind rush" expected as part of the massive expansion of renewable energy signalled by the EU earlier this year. It means their proposals will have to be in the right place, and they are likely to be refused if they conflict with the two EU wildlife laws - the birds directive and the habitats directive - which offer the strongest protection for wildlife sites in Britain.
But Mr Mather emphasised that the verdict on Lewis was not meant to block renewable energy expansion in the Hebrides and the rest of Scotland. "This decision does not mean there cannot be onshore wind farms in the Western Isles," he said. "I strongly believe the vast renewables potential needs to be exploited to ensure that the opportunities and benefits of new development can be shared across the country in an equitable fashion. That's why we will urgently carry out work on how to develop renewable energy in the Western Isles, in harmony with its outstanding natural heritage."
He added: "Nor does today's decision alter in any way this government's unwavering commitment to harness Scotland's vast array of potentially cheap, renewable energy sources. Even allowing for [planning] refusals, we are well on the way to meeting our ambitious target to generate 50 per cent of Scotland's electricity from renewables by 2020."
The o500m scheme rejected yesterday, put forward by Lewis Wind Power, a joint venture between the energy giants Amec and British Energy Renewables, was extremely controversial on the island. In outline the biggest land-based wind farm in Europe, it had been slimmed down from a proposal for 234 turbines.
Although in February last year the Council of the Western Isles voted by 18 to 8 for the project - leaving the Scottish government to take the final decision - many people in Lewis felt that even the slimmed-down development would damage the island, despite the community benefits and jobs it would have brought. The Scottish government received 98 support letters - and 10,924 objections.
It would have involved 88 miles of road, eight electrical substations, 19 miles of overhead cables, 137 pylons, 18.3 miles of underground cables, and five rock quarries. Two Labour politicians who supported it, the island's MP, Calum MacDonald, and MSP, Alasdair Morrison, lost their seats, and were ousted by Angus MacNeil and Alasdair Allan respectively, who are both Scottish Nationalists and opponents of the wind farm.
Source
Surge of illegals into Scotland
Police have caught more than 1,000 people later identified as illegal immigrants at ports in south west Scotland over the past four years. Numbers of foreign nationals detained at Stranraer and Cairnryan have more than doubled between 2004 and 2007. Crimes including people trafficking for the sex trade have also been detected.
A spokesman for Dumfries and Galloway Constabulary said the figures should deter people from trying to use the ports without the proper documents. Police say the ports are the fourth busiest points of entry to Scotland after airports in Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen. About 1.9m passengers and 900,000 vehicles pass through the facilities each year. People from 67 different countries have been stopped by police and subsequently identified as illegal immigrants. There were 117 such cases in 2004 but that rose to 259 last year. The total number detected over the four-year period is 1,007.
Among the nationalities without proper documents were people from Pakistan, Sudan, Iraq, Romania, Nigeria and Afghanistan. Det Ch Insp Steven Carr, who works at the ports unit, said it was always looking out for any immigration offences. "Our primary function is protection of UK security," he said. "But during the course of our work we come across other offences." These include drugs and motoring crime as well as immigration issues. "The staff here are multi-skilled because there is a multitude of offences," said DCI Carr.
The police effort is backed up by three officers seconded to the UK Border Agency (UKBA). "They have the power of immigration officers up to the point of sending somebody back to their own country," he explained. Police believe that thanks to that facility and a good working relationship with ferry operators in Dumfries and Galloway they have been able to foil organised crime. "We have reported a number of people to the fiscal for the facilitating of people into the UK," said DCI Carr. "It is a well-documented process that organised crime groups make a lot of money out of charging people extortionate amounts to come into the UK. "Organised crime groups are very proficient at it - in many ways it is safer than drugs or other forms of contraband."
The force has also been part of a number of national operations. "We were also involved in Operation Pentameter on the trafficking of people for use in the sex trade," said DCI Carr. At least a couple of young women who police believe were destined for prostitution were discovered by the Stranraer ports unit. Dumfries and Galloway Police believe it demonstrates that the region's ferry terminals are not a "soft touch" for illegal immigration. "The smallest force in the UK still gets to deal with the biggest issues," said DCI Carr. "If you come through the ports of Stranraer and Cairnryan you are taking a risk - we monitor the ports 24 hours a day. "You will be found out, detected and reported or handed over to the UKBA."
Source
British Leftist government Takes From the Poor: "This was another bad week for Gordon Brown. Not even a year in office, the Prime Minister has already been in the soup for mishandling a banking crisis and for chickening out on early elections and an EU Constitution referendum. Now the Tories are taunting the Labour leader - who had made fighting poverty his No. 1 issue - as a tax oppressor of the poor. The charge has stuck and stung. Mr. Brown was forced Wednesday by backbenchers in his own party to mollify more than five million low-wage earners and pensioners who have seen their income taxes double to 20% this month. Even worse for a Labour leader, the tax hikes, which he passed last year when he was still Chancellor of the Exchequer but which came into force only this month, coincided with tax cuts for the middle class."
Saturday, April 26, 2008
Britain, Spain To Combat Illegal Immigration
Sounds like a lot of bull but maybe there is something to it
The British and Spanish governments agreed to enhance cooperation to combat illegal immigration from Africa into the European Union (EU). "Spain and the United Kingdom can work together to help the EU deal effectively with the human tragedy of illegal immigration, and we can stimulate the EU into becoming a model power and promoter of human and economic development across the globe," Britain's minister for Europe Jim Murphy said during his speech at a lunch at Spain's New Economic Forum.
According to Murphy, Britain and the other EU members can learn a lot from Spain's experience on the issue particularly in North Africa. Spain has signed deals with seven West African countries in a bid to control the flow of migrants.
Based on estimates of national statistics institute INE, the number of immigrants living in Spain soared from around half a million in 1996 to 4.5 million by the end of 2006 out of a total population of 45.12 million people.
Source
NHS fight against MRSA going nowhere
The government's drive to combat MRSA superbug infections in NHS hospitals faltered in the final quarter of last year, figures from the Health Protection Agency revealed yesterday. The number of infections in England had fallen sharply for three years, but increased slightly from 1,080 cases between July and September to 1,087 between October and December. John Reid, the former health secretary, promised in 2004 to halve the number of MRSA infections by the end of March 2008. When Gordon Brown became prime minister in June, he made hygiene a priority for the NHS. In September, he said every ward should be deep-cleaned by the end of March.
The agency said: "Over the last year cases of MRSA bloodstream infection have been steadily falling. We would obviously like to have seen the trend continued in this quarter." To achieve Reid's target, the NHS would have to reduce the number of cases from 642 a month in 2004 to 321 a month between April and June this year. In the final quarter of last year, there were 362 a month.
Ann Keen, the health minister, said: "The MRSA target remains within reach. However, one case of avoidable infection is one too many and I am challenging the NHS to make full use of the resources at their disposal to eradicate avoidable infections."
Source
FUEL POVERTY AND THE STAGGERING COST OF RENEWABLE ENERGY
By Dominic Lawson
When the political wind changes direction, it can leave a Prime Minister looking very silly - almost as if what mothers used to warn their children about not pulling faces was actually true. Thus Gordon Brown's last Budget, which removed the concession of a 10p in the pound tax rate for millions of the least well paid, was thought perfectly acceptable at the time, including by the vast majority of Labour MPs, who had cheered the then Chancellor in the House of Commons. Now - as its measures are just about to come into force - it is almost universally excoriated: how could Gordon have been so insensitive?
The reason for this near-180 degree shift in sentiment is not hard to find. Food prices have risen sharply since Brown's final Budget - and so, even more, has the price of heating a home. These are items which form a very significant percentage of the domestic budgets of the least well-off, so they now feel understandably furious to be faced with a government-imposed drop in take-home pay.
This bitter atmosphere lends particular piquancy to a long-arranged meeting later this week between the Business Secretary, John Hutton, and the country's six largest suppliers of energy - the so-called "fuel poverty summit". The Government is understandably concerned about further imminent increases in electricity bills, especially against the background of consumer groups such as energywatch loudly protesting that "an increase in utility bills of 25 per cent will consign another million households to fuel poverty".
Up until now, it has been possible to blame such increases in costs on the rise in the wholesale price of the main raw materials - oil and gas. Now, however, rather as in the style of Gordon Brown's tax changes, it is the Government which is becoming an active agent in the imposition of ever-higher costs on the consumer.
As part of an EU directive designed to combat climate change, Britain is committed to generating 20 per cent of its energy by 2020 through "renewables" - a tenfold increase in the current figure. Yet even the prevailing historically high prices of oil and gas provide domestic heating at between a half and a fifth of the cost of similar amounts of energy from renewables.
By chance, I spoke about this last week to the head of E.ON UK, the British arm of Europe's biggest supplier of wind power. Paul Golby explained to me that, because it was very hard to envisage much of a contribution from renewables for energy used by transport , this means that we would need to generate about 45 per cent of our domestic electricity bills from such sources - principally wind power - in order to conform with the EU directive known as the Renewables Obligation.
According to Mr Golby, meeting such a commitment will involve an increase in electricity generating costs of about 10 billion pounds per year; this is equivalent to almost 400 pounds per household - or, in the roughest terms, an increase of about 40 per cent in annual electricity bills. Try selling that to the British public; and, of course, the Government hasn't. As Mr Golby told me, with understandably diplomatic understatement: "The politicians have not been entirely honest about the cost of our renewables commitment, and so the public don't really know what's coming their way."
I told Mr Golby that I thought he was being somewhat naive if he genuinely expected any government to volunteer to the public that it was responsible for a swingeing increase in energy bills, especially if it thought it could get away with blaming the increase on anyone else - such as Mr Golby and his colleagues.
So far, the likes of E.ON - perhaps because they also stand to make what amount to large heavily-subsidised revenues from wind-power - have been very careful not to blame the Government. I forecast that this gentlemanly conduct will not last. Soon each side will be blaming the other, in a desperate attempt to avoid the full force of the public's anger.
The British public might become even more furious when it learns that one reason for the extra cost of wind power is that its inherent variability means that we will still need to retain our entire existing network of conventional power stations as back-up. That is because it is not a good idea for us to endure what happened two months ago in Texas, America's biggest wind-power producing state: a sudden drop in wind combined with a fall in temperatures led to what was described as "an electric emergency" - customers in west Texas were deprived of power for 90 minutes.
One thing is clear; the British public does need educating about this: even one of The Independent's most intelligent commentators wrote here last week that "The mini-windmill on David Cameron's new house is an economical way for an individual household to generate electricity, even contribute to the national grid". Well, that's if you consider it economical to spend thousands of pounds on a roof-top turbine that produces - even according to its supporters - no more than 1 megawatt hour per year, worth œ40 unsubsidised on the wholesale electricity market. As a contribution to reducing CO2 emissions it's about as cost-effective and meaningful as cycling to the House of Commons while having your chauffeur-driven car follow you with your briefcase, suit and black lace-up shoes.
If a serious economic downturn does hit this country, then such extravagant gestures, far from attracting praise, might begin to seem Nero-like in their irrelevance to an economy threatened by the flames of recession. Some Ipsos-Mori polling data published last week by the Financial Times showed that over the 12 months to January 2008, the proportion of those in Britain declaring "the environment" to be their biggest concern fell from almost 20 per cent to just 8 per cent.
On a more long-term sweep, it was fascinating - though perhaps not surprising - to see that concern about the environment rose and fell in direct inverse proportion to concern about the domestic economy. The headline on the FT's article was: "Greens fear voters will turn selfish in difficult times". That's one way of looking at it; but I don't think any mainstream politician will risk calling the electorate "selfish" if the public rise up against a state-imposed increase of up to 40 per cent in the cost of their domestic electricity bills.
In fact, after his taxing experience of the past few weeks, I imagine that Gordon Brown will be wondering just how to get out of the Government's commitment to do exactly that, as part of the EU Renewables Obligation. He'll be in company, of course - the company of every other European leader. The only uncertainty is whether they'll admit it - even to each other, in private.
Source
British prison absurdity: "Prisoners are passing up opportunities to escape because they are more comfortable inside jails where there is a plentiful supply of cheap drugs, according to a prison officers' union leader. Staff morale is at rock bottom and many jails are close to anarchy because of underfunding, said Glyn Travis, assistant general secretary of the Prison Officers Association. He gave warning yesterday that the drug problem was now "out of control" and said that even prostitutes were sometimes smuggled in. Mr Travis told of one institution in Yorkshire where members of the public were climbing over the prison walls to take drugs inside. "They put up ladders to climb over the walls, but prisoners were so comfortable in the environment they were living in that none tried to climb up the ladders and escape," he said, in a reference to Everthorpe Prison in East Yorkshire."
Sounds like a lot of bull but maybe there is something to it
The British and Spanish governments agreed to enhance cooperation to combat illegal immigration from Africa into the European Union (EU). "Spain and the United Kingdom can work together to help the EU deal effectively with the human tragedy of illegal immigration, and we can stimulate the EU into becoming a model power and promoter of human and economic development across the globe," Britain's minister for Europe Jim Murphy said during his speech at a lunch at Spain's New Economic Forum.
According to Murphy, Britain and the other EU members can learn a lot from Spain's experience on the issue particularly in North Africa. Spain has signed deals with seven West African countries in a bid to control the flow of migrants.
Based on estimates of national statistics institute INE, the number of immigrants living in Spain soared from around half a million in 1996 to 4.5 million by the end of 2006 out of a total population of 45.12 million people.
Source
NHS fight against MRSA going nowhere
The government's drive to combat MRSA superbug infections in NHS hospitals faltered in the final quarter of last year, figures from the Health Protection Agency revealed yesterday. The number of infections in England had fallen sharply for three years, but increased slightly from 1,080 cases between July and September to 1,087 between October and December. John Reid, the former health secretary, promised in 2004 to halve the number of MRSA infections by the end of March 2008. When Gordon Brown became prime minister in June, he made hygiene a priority for the NHS. In September, he said every ward should be deep-cleaned by the end of March.
The agency said: "Over the last year cases of MRSA bloodstream infection have been steadily falling. We would obviously like to have seen the trend continued in this quarter." To achieve Reid's target, the NHS would have to reduce the number of cases from 642 a month in 2004 to 321 a month between April and June this year. In the final quarter of last year, there were 362 a month.
Ann Keen, the health minister, said: "The MRSA target remains within reach. However, one case of avoidable infection is one too many and I am challenging the NHS to make full use of the resources at their disposal to eradicate avoidable infections."
Source
FUEL POVERTY AND THE STAGGERING COST OF RENEWABLE ENERGY
By Dominic Lawson
When the political wind changes direction, it can leave a Prime Minister looking very silly - almost as if what mothers used to warn their children about not pulling faces was actually true. Thus Gordon Brown's last Budget, which removed the concession of a 10p in the pound tax rate for millions of the least well paid, was thought perfectly acceptable at the time, including by the vast majority of Labour MPs, who had cheered the then Chancellor in the House of Commons. Now - as its measures are just about to come into force - it is almost universally excoriated: how could Gordon have been so insensitive?
The reason for this near-180 degree shift in sentiment is not hard to find. Food prices have risen sharply since Brown's final Budget - and so, even more, has the price of heating a home. These are items which form a very significant percentage of the domestic budgets of the least well-off, so they now feel understandably furious to be faced with a government-imposed drop in take-home pay.
This bitter atmosphere lends particular piquancy to a long-arranged meeting later this week between the Business Secretary, John Hutton, and the country's six largest suppliers of energy - the so-called "fuel poverty summit". The Government is understandably concerned about further imminent increases in electricity bills, especially against the background of consumer groups such as energywatch loudly protesting that "an increase in utility bills of 25 per cent will consign another million households to fuel poverty".
Up until now, it has been possible to blame such increases in costs on the rise in the wholesale price of the main raw materials - oil and gas. Now, however, rather as in the style of Gordon Brown's tax changes, it is the Government which is becoming an active agent in the imposition of ever-higher costs on the consumer.
As part of an EU directive designed to combat climate change, Britain is committed to generating 20 per cent of its energy by 2020 through "renewables" - a tenfold increase in the current figure. Yet even the prevailing historically high prices of oil and gas provide domestic heating at between a half and a fifth of the cost of similar amounts of energy from renewables.
By chance, I spoke about this last week to the head of E.ON UK, the British arm of Europe's biggest supplier of wind power. Paul Golby explained to me that, because it was very hard to envisage much of a contribution from renewables for energy used by transport , this means that we would need to generate about 45 per cent of our domestic electricity bills from such sources - principally wind power - in order to conform with the EU directive known as the Renewables Obligation.
According to Mr Golby, meeting such a commitment will involve an increase in electricity generating costs of about 10 billion pounds per year; this is equivalent to almost 400 pounds per household - or, in the roughest terms, an increase of about 40 per cent in annual electricity bills. Try selling that to the British public; and, of course, the Government hasn't. As Mr Golby told me, with understandably diplomatic understatement: "The politicians have not been entirely honest about the cost of our renewables commitment, and so the public don't really know what's coming their way."
I told Mr Golby that I thought he was being somewhat naive if he genuinely expected any government to volunteer to the public that it was responsible for a swingeing increase in energy bills, especially if it thought it could get away with blaming the increase on anyone else - such as Mr Golby and his colleagues.
So far, the likes of E.ON - perhaps because they also stand to make what amount to large heavily-subsidised revenues from wind-power - have been very careful not to blame the Government. I forecast that this gentlemanly conduct will not last. Soon each side will be blaming the other, in a desperate attempt to avoid the full force of the public's anger.
The British public might become even more furious when it learns that one reason for the extra cost of wind power is that its inherent variability means that we will still need to retain our entire existing network of conventional power stations as back-up. That is because it is not a good idea for us to endure what happened two months ago in Texas, America's biggest wind-power producing state: a sudden drop in wind combined with a fall in temperatures led to what was described as "an electric emergency" - customers in west Texas were deprived of power for 90 minutes.
One thing is clear; the British public does need educating about this: even one of The Independent's most intelligent commentators wrote here last week that "The mini-windmill on David Cameron's new house is an economical way for an individual household to generate electricity, even contribute to the national grid". Well, that's if you consider it economical to spend thousands of pounds on a roof-top turbine that produces - even according to its supporters - no more than 1 megawatt hour per year, worth œ40 unsubsidised on the wholesale electricity market. As a contribution to reducing CO2 emissions it's about as cost-effective and meaningful as cycling to the House of Commons while having your chauffeur-driven car follow you with your briefcase, suit and black lace-up shoes.
If a serious economic downturn does hit this country, then such extravagant gestures, far from attracting praise, might begin to seem Nero-like in their irrelevance to an economy threatened by the flames of recession. Some Ipsos-Mori polling data published last week by the Financial Times showed that over the 12 months to January 2008, the proportion of those in Britain declaring "the environment" to be their biggest concern fell from almost 20 per cent to just 8 per cent.
On a more long-term sweep, it was fascinating - though perhaps not surprising - to see that concern about the environment rose and fell in direct inverse proportion to concern about the domestic economy. The headline on the FT's article was: "Greens fear voters will turn selfish in difficult times". That's one way of looking at it; but I don't think any mainstream politician will risk calling the electorate "selfish" if the public rise up against a state-imposed increase of up to 40 per cent in the cost of their domestic electricity bills.
In fact, after his taxing experience of the past few weeks, I imagine that Gordon Brown will be wondering just how to get out of the Government's commitment to do exactly that, as part of the EU Renewables Obligation. He'll be in company, of course - the company of every other European leader. The only uncertainty is whether they'll admit it - even to each other, in private.
Source
British prison absurdity: "Prisoners are passing up opportunities to escape because they are more comfortable inside jails where there is a plentiful supply of cheap drugs, according to a prison officers' union leader. Staff morale is at rock bottom and many jails are close to anarchy because of underfunding, said Glyn Travis, assistant general secretary of the Prison Officers Association. He gave warning yesterday that the drug problem was now "out of control" and said that even prostitutes were sometimes smuggled in. Mr Travis told of one institution in Yorkshire where members of the public were climbing over the prison walls to take drugs inside. "They put up ladders to climb over the walls, but prisoners were so comfortable in the environment they were living in that none tried to climb up the ladders and escape," he said, in a reference to Everthorpe Prison in East Yorkshire."
Friday, April 25, 2008
House of Lords blocks "hate speech" law
We read:
Mother's diet can influence baby's sex
This sounds pretty crazy. It is a gene on the Y chromosome contributed by the MALE that determines sex. I suppose the woman could do some sort of spontaneous selective abortion, though. Note: It is entirely possible that diet-type is a proxy for something else (such as social class) rather than itself being the causative agent for what do seem to be some rather interesting differences. So if you decide to eat up big on the basis of these findings, you could well be wasting your time
Oysters may excite the libido, but there is nothing like a hearty breakfast laced with sugar to boost a woman's chances of conceiving a son, according to a new study. Likewise, a low-energy diet that skimps on calories, minerals and nutrients is more likely to yield a female of the human species, says the study, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, Britain's de facto academy of sciences.
Fiona Mathews of the University of Exeter in Britain and colleagues wanted to find out if a woman's diet had an impact on the sex of her offspring. So they asked 740 first-time mothers who did not know if their unborn fetuses were male or female to provide detailed records of eating habits before and after they became pregnant. The women were split into three groups according to the number calories they consumed per day around the time of conception.
Fifty-six per cent of the women in the group with the highest energy intake had sons, compared to 45 percent in the least-well fed cohort. Beside racking up a higher calorie count, the group who produced more males were also more likely to have eaten a wider range of nutrients, including potassium, calcium and vitamins C, E and B12. The odds of an XY, or male outcome to a pregnancy also went up sharply "for women who consumed at least one bowl of breakfast cereal daily compared with those who ate less than or equal to one bowl of week", the study reported.
These surprising findings were consistent with a very gradual shift in favour of girls over the last four decades in the sex ratio of newborns, according to the researchers. Previous research had shown - despite the rising epidemic in obesity - a reduction in the average energy uptake in advanced economies. The number of adults who skipped breakfast had also increased substantially.
"This research may help to explain why in developed countries, where many young women choose low calorie diets, the proportion of boys is falling,'' Ms Mathews said. The study's findings could point to a "natural mechanism'' for sex selection. The link between a rich diet and male children might have an evolutionary explanation. For most species, the number of offspring a male can father exceeds the number a female can give birth to, but only if conditions are favourable.
Poor quality male specimens may fail to breed at all, whereas females reproduce more consistently. "If a mother has plentiful resources, then it can make sense to invest in producing a son because he is likely to produce more grandchildren than would a daughter,'' thus contributing to the survival of the species, Mathews said. "However, in leaner times having a daughter is a safer bet.''
While the mechanism is not yet understood, it is known from in vitro fertilisation research that higher levels of glucose, or sugar, encourage the growth and development of male embryos while inhibiting female embryos.
Source
Illegal immigrants sent on way by British police
Illegal immigrants are being released by police and given directions to the nearest immigration office, despite a government pledge that they would be detained, the Conservatives say today. Ten out of 27 police forces said that if the immigration service was unavailable, illegal immigrants who claimed asylum were released.
The figures were obtained by the Conservatives under freedom of information laws. The police forces who send illegal immigrants on their way are Dorset, Lincolnshire, Derbyshire, South Yorkshire, Northamptonshire, Hampshire, Hertfordshire, Thames Valley, Suffolk and Bedfordshire.
Liam Byrne, the Immigration Minister, said last month that illegal immigrants would be detained. But Damian Green, the Tory immigration spokesman, said: “He says the system has changed, but in many parts of the country there is the same old inability to enforce the law.”
Source
Five cases of lost personal data a week : "Five security breaches a week have been reported to the privacy watchdog since the loss last year of two government discs containing details of 25 million families. Richard Thomas, the Information Commissioner, said he had been notified of 94 data breaches over the past five months. Two thirds - 62 - were committed by government and other public sector bodies. The material included a wide range of personal details, including health records. The data was recovered in only three of the 94 cases. Mr Thomas described the scale of the incidents, which come after HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) mislaid discs carrying details of child benefit claimants in November, as "alarming".
We read:
" A bill to toughen Britain's hate speech law banning attacks on gays has been defeated in the House of Lords. The bill would have provided for jail sentences up to seven years for anyone convicted of using threatening language on the basis of sexual orientation. The legislation already had passed the House of Commons. The Lords voted 81 to 57 to strip prison sentences from the bill, leaving it toothless.
The vote leaves the Labor government with two choices: either let the bill die, or use a procedural vote in the Lower House to override the Lords. Even some gay rights advocates, including Peter Tatchell, opposed the bill, saying it would hamper free speech. Church leaders also fought the legislation claiming it could be used to silence any criticism of homosexuality from the pulpit.
Comedic actor Rowan Atkinson said that if the bill were enacted it would bar humorists and comedians from caricaturizing gays. The bill was put together with the help of LGBT rights group Stonewall.
Source
Mother's diet can influence baby's sex
This sounds pretty crazy. It is a gene on the Y chromosome contributed by the MALE that determines sex. I suppose the woman could do some sort of spontaneous selective abortion, though. Note: It is entirely possible that diet-type is a proxy for something else (such as social class) rather than itself being the causative agent for what do seem to be some rather interesting differences. So if you decide to eat up big on the basis of these findings, you could well be wasting your time
Oysters may excite the libido, but there is nothing like a hearty breakfast laced with sugar to boost a woman's chances of conceiving a son, according to a new study. Likewise, a low-energy diet that skimps on calories, minerals and nutrients is more likely to yield a female of the human species, says the study, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, Britain's de facto academy of sciences.
Fiona Mathews of the University of Exeter in Britain and colleagues wanted to find out if a woman's diet had an impact on the sex of her offspring. So they asked 740 first-time mothers who did not know if their unborn fetuses were male or female to provide detailed records of eating habits before and after they became pregnant. The women were split into three groups according to the number calories they consumed per day around the time of conception.
Fifty-six per cent of the women in the group with the highest energy intake had sons, compared to 45 percent in the least-well fed cohort. Beside racking up a higher calorie count, the group who produced more males were also more likely to have eaten a wider range of nutrients, including potassium, calcium and vitamins C, E and B12. The odds of an XY, or male outcome to a pregnancy also went up sharply "for women who consumed at least one bowl of breakfast cereal daily compared with those who ate less than or equal to one bowl of week", the study reported.
These surprising findings were consistent with a very gradual shift in favour of girls over the last four decades in the sex ratio of newborns, according to the researchers. Previous research had shown - despite the rising epidemic in obesity - a reduction in the average energy uptake in advanced economies. The number of adults who skipped breakfast had also increased substantially.
"This research may help to explain why in developed countries, where many young women choose low calorie diets, the proportion of boys is falling,'' Ms Mathews said. The study's findings could point to a "natural mechanism'' for sex selection. The link between a rich diet and male children might have an evolutionary explanation. For most species, the number of offspring a male can father exceeds the number a female can give birth to, but only if conditions are favourable.
Poor quality male specimens may fail to breed at all, whereas females reproduce more consistently. "If a mother has plentiful resources, then it can make sense to invest in producing a son because he is likely to produce more grandchildren than would a daughter,'' thus contributing to the survival of the species, Mathews said. "However, in leaner times having a daughter is a safer bet.''
While the mechanism is not yet understood, it is known from in vitro fertilisation research that higher levels of glucose, or sugar, encourage the growth and development of male embryos while inhibiting female embryos.
Source
Illegal immigrants sent on way by British police
Illegal immigrants are being released by police and given directions to the nearest immigration office, despite a government pledge that they would be detained, the Conservatives say today. Ten out of 27 police forces said that if the immigration service was unavailable, illegal immigrants who claimed asylum were released.
The figures were obtained by the Conservatives under freedom of information laws. The police forces who send illegal immigrants on their way are Dorset, Lincolnshire, Derbyshire, South Yorkshire, Northamptonshire, Hampshire, Hertfordshire, Thames Valley, Suffolk and Bedfordshire.
Liam Byrne, the Immigration Minister, said last month that illegal immigrants would be detained. But Damian Green, the Tory immigration spokesman, said: “He says the system has changed, but in many parts of the country there is the same old inability to enforce the law.”
Source
Five cases of lost personal data a week : "Five security breaches a week have been reported to the privacy watchdog since the loss last year of two government discs containing details of 25 million families. Richard Thomas, the Information Commissioner, said he had been notified of 94 data breaches over the past five months. Two thirds - 62 - were committed by government and other public sector bodies. The material included a wide range of personal details, including health records. The data was recovered in only three of the 94 cases. Mr Thomas described the scale of the incidents, which come after HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) mislaid discs carrying details of child benefit claimants in November, as "alarming".
Thursday, April 24, 2008
Greenie tyranny: British father of four taken to court and fined ... because he overfilled his wheelie-bin by just four inches
With his rubbish collected only once a fortnight, Gareth Corkhill's wheelie bin was so full the lid wouldn't shut. And for that, the father of four finds himself with a criminal record. Magistrates convicted the 26-year-old bus driver after hearing evidence that the lid was four inches ajar, which is against rules to stop bins overflowing. He was ordered to pay 210 pounds - a week's wages - after he declined to pay an on-the-spot fine imposed by the local council's bin police, who visited him wearing stab-proof vests and carrying photographic evidence of his crime. To add insult to injury he was told to pay a 15 pound victim surcharge to help victims of violence - despite there being no victim - and threatened with prison if he failed to pay. Rapists, murderers and other violent criminals who have earned a jail sentence rather than a fine are immune from the penalty.
Yesterday the council, Copeland in Cumbria, said that Mr Corkhill's family had caused problems for "the battle to reduce waste".
His penalty compares with the typical on-the-spot fine of 80 pounds given to shoplifters - even repeat offenders. For failing to pay his fine Mr Corkhill, from Whitehaven, will now have a criminal record which he will have to disclose if he applies for a job, credit or a mortgage over the next five years. Even after that he will have to reveal his crime if he applies for a job in the NHS, working with children, in a bank, or as a security guard. "I can't believe I now have a criminal record for simply putting rubbish in my bin," he said. "My only crime was to leave the lid slightly open. Now I might go for a job interview and be better than someone else but the employer will see that officially, I am a criminal. "They won't know the details of what I did. They won't know that I only put a little too much rubbish in the bin."
Source
Thalidomide returns
Thalidomide, the drug that blighted a generation of children half a century ago, is back on the market in Europe as a powerful cancer treatment. The European drug agency yesterday gave clearance for thalidomide to be sold on prescription for treating newly diagnosed multiple myeloma. It has been available, in a limited way, for some years since its powerful effects on cancer and leprosy were identified.
But campaigners, including those damaged by the drug when they were still in the womb, are anxious that its new-found popularity does not lead to more babies being harmed. Freddie Astbury, the president and founder of the campaign group Thalidomide UK, said that since the drug resurfaced, hundreds of damaged babies had been born in Brazil, where it has been used since 1985 to treat leprosy. There had been no such cases in the US or Europe, he said, but admitted that he was worried by the increased availability of the drug. “The trouble is that some hospitals in Europe have chosen to get the drug from Brazil, where it is cheaper,” he said.
Thalidomide UK and other patient groups had been working with the European Medicines Agency (EMEA) for more than five years on a plan to control access to the drug once it was licensed, Mr Astbury said. “We’re never fully going to know how the plan will work until the drug is used on a large number of patients,” he said. “I’d never say there will never be another thalidomide child in Europe, but I think they are the best guidelines we could have achieved.”
The approval given by the EMEA means that the US company Celgene will be the only licence-holder in Europe, and will be responsible for ensuring that the guidelines are observed. No other manufacturers and distributors of thalidomide can now supply the drug across the EU.
Thalidomide was originally marketed in the late 1950s as a treatment for morning sickness in pregnant women. It was only when babies began being born disabled that the dangers became apparent. The catastrophe was a landmark in the development of safer systems for approving drugs.
Source
"Gun free" Britain again: A 17-year-old was sentenced to three years in a secure institution after she admitted hiding a machine pistol under her bed at her family home. Police said that the case was part of a growing trend for criminals to use vulnerable teenage girls from respectable families to look after their weapons. Lindsay Shinkfield, of Huyton, Liverpool, was 16 when police found the Czech-made Scorpion gun in her bedroom in December. The weapon is favoured by drug gangs in Liverpool. She told officers that she was "minding" the weapon for another person whom she has refused to name. Detectives believe the gun was used in an incident in 2006 in which a person was injured. A police investigation is continuing. Detective Chief Inspector Michael Shaw, part of Merseyside Police's gun crime unit, said: "This was the perfect example of the type of young, vulnerable female of good character being targeted by criminals to assist them in the concealment of illegally held firearms." He added: "They [Scorpions] are as serious a weapon as one would expect to come across."
With his rubbish collected only once a fortnight, Gareth Corkhill's wheelie bin was so full the lid wouldn't shut. And for that, the father of four finds himself with a criminal record. Magistrates convicted the 26-year-old bus driver after hearing evidence that the lid was four inches ajar, which is against rules to stop bins overflowing. He was ordered to pay 210 pounds - a week's wages - after he declined to pay an on-the-spot fine imposed by the local council's bin police, who visited him wearing stab-proof vests and carrying photographic evidence of his crime. To add insult to injury he was told to pay a 15 pound victim surcharge to help victims of violence - despite there being no victim - and threatened with prison if he failed to pay. Rapists, murderers and other violent criminals who have earned a jail sentence rather than a fine are immune from the penalty.
Yesterday the council, Copeland in Cumbria, said that Mr Corkhill's family had caused problems for "the battle to reduce waste".
His penalty compares with the typical on-the-spot fine of 80 pounds given to shoplifters - even repeat offenders. For failing to pay his fine Mr Corkhill, from Whitehaven, will now have a criminal record which he will have to disclose if he applies for a job, credit or a mortgage over the next five years. Even after that he will have to reveal his crime if he applies for a job in the NHS, working with children, in a bank, or as a security guard. "I can't believe I now have a criminal record for simply putting rubbish in my bin," he said. "My only crime was to leave the lid slightly open. Now I might go for a job interview and be better than someone else but the employer will see that officially, I am a criminal. "They won't know the details of what I did. They won't know that I only put a little too much rubbish in the bin."
Source
Thalidomide returns
Thalidomide, the drug that blighted a generation of children half a century ago, is back on the market in Europe as a powerful cancer treatment. The European drug agency yesterday gave clearance for thalidomide to be sold on prescription for treating newly diagnosed multiple myeloma. It has been available, in a limited way, for some years since its powerful effects on cancer and leprosy were identified.
But campaigners, including those damaged by the drug when they were still in the womb, are anxious that its new-found popularity does not lead to more babies being harmed. Freddie Astbury, the president and founder of the campaign group Thalidomide UK, said that since the drug resurfaced, hundreds of damaged babies had been born in Brazil, where it has been used since 1985 to treat leprosy. There had been no such cases in the US or Europe, he said, but admitted that he was worried by the increased availability of the drug. “The trouble is that some hospitals in Europe have chosen to get the drug from Brazil, where it is cheaper,” he said.
Thalidomide UK and other patient groups had been working with the European Medicines Agency (EMEA) for more than five years on a plan to control access to the drug once it was licensed, Mr Astbury said. “We’re never fully going to know how the plan will work until the drug is used on a large number of patients,” he said. “I’d never say there will never be another thalidomide child in Europe, but I think they are the best guidelines we could have achieved.”
The approval given by the EMEA means that the US company Celgene will be the only licence-holder in Europe, and will be responsible for ensuring that the guidelines are observed. No other manufacturers and distributors of thalidomide can now supply the drug across the EU.
Thalidomide was originally marketed in the late 1950s as a treatment for morning sickness in pregnant women. It was only when babies began being born disabled that the dangers became apparent. The catastrophe was a landmark in the development of safer systems for approving drugs.
Source
"Gun free" Britain again: A 17-year-old was sentenced to three years in a secure institution after she admitted hiding a machine pistol under her bed at her family home. Police said that the case was part of a growing trend for criminals to use vulnerable teenage girls from respectable families to look after their weapons. Lindsay Shinkfield, of Huyton, Liverpool, was 16 when police found the Czech-made Scorpion gun in her bedroom in December. The weapon is favoured by drug gangs in Liverpool. She told officers that she was "minding" the weapon for another person whom she has refused to name. Detectives believe the gun was used in an incident in 2006 in which a person was injured. A police investigation is continuing. Detective Chief Inspector Michael Shaw, part of Merseyside Police's gun crime unit, said: "This was the perfect example of the type of young, vulnerable female of good character being targeted by criminals to assist them in the concealment of illegally held firearms." He added: "They [Scorpions] are as serious a weapon as one would expect to come across."
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Teenagers blame eating disorders on health messages
As usual, Leftist nuts hurt people under the pretext of helping. It should be noted that the very severe eating disorder known as anorexia is clearly just a type of OCD and, as such, the sufferer would have a substantial genetic susceptibility. Most psychoses do however need to be "triggered" by environmental factors and there is no doubt that the obesity war would have caused all incipient anorexia to become full-blown
SCHOOLGIRLS with eating disorders are blaming the fight against the obesity epidemic for their illnesses, researchers have found. Many teenage girls with eating disorders "strongly believed that their illness was nurtured, exacerbated or sometimes even caused by the well-meaning action in schools", UK newspaper The Daily Telegraph reported.
John Evans, a professor of Sociology of Education and Physical Education at Leicestershires Loughborough University, told the newspaper that many girls said the fight against obesity caused their illnesses. The tales they told were incredibly revealing about what schools were doing, in good faith, that was propelling these girls towards this damaging relationship with food and exercise, Professor Evans said.
One girl told how, in class, the PE teacher pointed to a broomstick and said, 'That's the shape we are aiming for. He said another girl had told him about a class weigh-in. The whole class got weighed and the teacher said, 'Oh, it's the big one,' and I was the heaviest in the year."
Prof Evans said some children were being given the wrong message by their teachers. But he also said those teachers may have formed their opinions on obesity from elsewhere. "I've heard prominent spokesmen compare obese people to the so-called freaks that used to appear in circuses in the 1920s and 1930s," he said. The message being passed down is that obese people can be legitimately laughed at, stigmatised and considered irresponsibly abnormal."
The results of the four-year study will be published in a book later this year.
Source
Immigration among top social evils in UK
Immigration and responses to the phenomenon are among the 10 social evils afflicting British society, a survey released on Sunday by a major think-tank said. According to a survey by Joseph Rowntree Foundation, the British people feel a deep sense of unease about some of the changes shaping British society. The 10 social evils pointed out by the respondents were: individualism, greed, decline of community, decline of values, drugs and alcohol, poverty and inequality, decline of the family, immigration and responses to immigration, crime and violence and young people as victims or perpetrators.
On the social evil of immigration and responses to immigration, some participants felt that local residents lost out to immigrants in competition for scarce resources. Others criticised negative attitudes to, and lack of support for immigrants and thought society should be more tolerant and inclusive. Besides, it was felt that the British society had become more greedy and selfish, at a cost to its sense of community.
Respondents to the consultation carried out by the foundation said that Britons no longer shared a set of common values and that they had lost their 'moral compass'. The four social evils which emerged as the cause for most worry among the respondents were individualism, greed, decline of community and decline of values.
The Joseph Rowntree Foundation is one of the largest social policy research and development charities in the UK. It supports a research and development programme that seeks to understand the causes of social difficulties and explore ways of overcoming them.
Source
As usual, Leftist nuts hurt people under the pretext of helping. It should be noted that the very severe eating disorder known as anorexia is clearly just a type of OCD and, as such, the sufferer would have a substantial genetic susceptibility. Most psychoses do however need to be "triggered" by environmental factors and there is no doubt that the obesity war would have caused all incipient anorexia to become full-blown
SCHOOLGIRLS with eating disorders are blaming the fight against the obesity epidemic for their illnesses, researchers have found. Many teenage girls with eating disorders "strongly believed that their illness was nurtured, exacerbated or sometimes even caused by the well-meaning action in schools", UK newspaper The Daily Telegraph reported.
John Evans, a professor of Sociology of Education and Physical Education at Leicestershires Loughborough University, told the newspaper that many girls said the fight against obesity caused their illnesses. The tales they told were incredibly revealing about what schools were doing, in good faith, that was propelling these girls towards this damaging relationship with food and exercise, Professor Evans said.
One girl told how, in class, the PE teacher pointed to a broomstick and said, 'That's the shape we are aiming for. He said another girl had told him about a class weigh-in. The whole class got weighed and the teacher said, 'Oh, it's the big one,' and I was the heaviest in the year."
Prof Evans said some children were being given the wrong message by their teachers. But he also said those teachers may have formed their opinions on obesity from elsewhere. "I've heard prominent spokesmen compare obese people to the so-called freaks that used to appear in circuses in the 1920s and 1930s," he said. The message being passed down is that obese people can be legitimately laughed at, stigmatised and considered irresponsibly abnormal."
The results of the four-year study will be published in a book later this year.
Source
Immigration among top social evils in UK
Immigration and responses to the phenomenon are among the 10 social evils afflicting British society, a survey released on Sunday by a major think-tank said. According to a survey by Joseph Rowntree Foundation, the British people feel a deep sense of unease about some of the changes shaping British society. The 10 social evils pointed out by the respondents were: individualism, greed, decline of community, decline of values, drugs and alcohol, poverty and inequality, decline of the family, immigration and responses to immigration, crime and violence and young people as victims or perpetrators.
On the social evil of immigration and responses to immigration, some participants felt that local residents lost out to immigrants in competition for scarce resources. Others criticised negative attitudes to, and lack of support for immigrants and thought society should be more tolerant and inclusive. Besides, it was felt that the British society had become more greedy and selfish, at a cost to its sense of community.
Respondents to the consultation carried out by the foundation said that Britons no longer shared a set of common values and that they had lost their 'moral compass'. The four social evils which emerged as the cause for most worry among the respondents were individualism, greed, decline of community and decline of values.
The Joseph Rowntree Foundation is one of the largest social policy research and development charities in the UK. It supports a research and development programme that seeks to understand the causes of social difficulties and explore ways of overcoming them.
Source
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
British government obliged to give prisoners heroin substitute
Taxpayers have footed a 1 million pound compensation bill after almost 200 drug-addicted prisoners sued the Government, claiming that denying them a heroin substitute breached their human rights. The prisoners claimed that their rights were infringed when they were deprived of methadone and had to go "cold turkey". A High Court test case involving six prisoners was going ahead two years ago but the Government agreed to settle out of court and pay 750,000 to 197 inmates in jails in England and Wales. The compensation payments averaged 3,807 pounds per prisoner, with four in Wymott jail in Lancashire receiving a total of 15,228 and three at Preston prison 11,421. The overall bill to the taxpayer of 1 million includes the compensation payments plus the estimated lawyers' fees.
The Government decided against fighting the compensation claims to minimise costs. It had been warned that if the case had gone to court the prisoners could have won even larger amounts of compensation. The prisoners had been using methadone paid for by the Government but it was decided that they should go through cold turkey detoxification instead. They claimed that their human rights had been breached under Articles 3 and 14 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which bans discrimination, or inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.
At the preliminary hearing in 2006 Richard Hermer, a human rights lawyer specialising in group actions against the Government, told the court: "Many of the prisoners were receiving methadone treatment before they entered prison and were upset at the short period of treatment using opiates they encountered in jail. Imposing the short, sharp detoxification is the issue." The addicts said that their treatment was handled "inappropriately" with the consequence that they "suffered injuries" and had "difficulties" with their withdrawal. They claimed that the treatment constituted trespass and accused the Prison Service of clinical negligence.
A Prison Service spokeswoman said that the payments made were in response to a minority of the claims. "We successfully defended the majority of claims. We make payments only when we are instructed to do so by the courts or where strong legal advice suggests that a settlement will save money," she added. Latest figures show that compensation payments to prisoners have fallen from a total of 4.4 million in 2005-06 to 2 million in 2006-07.
Source
A Leftist argues for English nationalism
Good to see in many ways -- as long as it does not go down the Fascist path. I tend to think that only conservatives can be trusted with nationalism. Leftists take to extremes anything that they adopt -- and we have already seen where one brand of national socialism ended up. Note: Wednesday is St George's Day, the day of England's patron Saint and the English flag (of St. George) is below. There is a discussion from a conservative viewpoint of the need for an English parliament here
There are certainly plenty of reasons to be suspicious of nationalism, and plenty of historic examples of its dark side. There are reasons, too, to be concerned about some of those who take on the mantle today, many of whom do come from a dark political place. But wait a minute: how have the Scottish managed to get themselves a government that is both nationalist and left-wing? How is it that the French are able to invoke '‚tat from the left as well as the right? Why do the Zapatistas in Mexico, who talk proudly of their Mexican as well as their indigenous identity while conducting armed insurrections against the state, attract the admiration of young English radicals? Why is nationalism good in Venezuela or Cuba but not here? And why is talk of identity and culture admired among our ethnic-minority communities, yet when the English as a whole discuss such ideas, the spectre of Enoch Powell and the British National Party is immediately conjured up?
It is customary at this point to invoke George Orwell, who wrote, nearly 70 years ago, that "England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality". The average English liberal, he observed, was so out of touch with popular culture that he considered it "a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse racing to suet puddings". Orwell is still worth the reference, because this attitude is one of the few things that doesn't seem to have changed much in England in seven decades.
Still, among some of the more regressive strands of the English left, the self-loathing continues. We will probably see it on 23 April, Shakespeare's birthday and St George's Day, as ageing liberals are wheeled out to instruct us that "English culture" does not even exist, that everyone is an immigrant anyway, that morris dancing was invented by the Victorians, that St George was Lebanese and that, besides, we're all "multicultural" now, so talking about it will probably offend somebody (though it will never be specified exactly who).
But decades of such cultural self-harm have had three dangerous consequences. The first is that the far right has been able to colonise Englishness for itself, conflate it with whiteness and make us all even more nervous about discussing it. The second is that the genuine political injustices under which England currently labours are not being addressed by the left. And the third is that the door has been flung wide open for global capitalism to gleefully tear up what remains of the English landscape, both physical and cultural, and replace it with strip malls, motorways, corporate farms and gated communities for the rich. England is losing its soul, and the left has had far too little to say about it.
I would argue that there are two strong cases for an English nationalism of the left: a political case and a cultural one. Since 1997, the political landscape within the UK has changed dramatically as a result of devolution to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. These devolutions were the right thing to do. They responded to a desire, particularly in Scotland, for increased self-governance, a desire which sprang both from a sense of national identity and a sense of injustice and which was articulated in Scotland by the Scottish National Party and in Wales by Plaid Cymru, both nationalist parties of the left.
Yet the devolution process was flawed because it confused Britain with England. The UK contains four nations. Three of them now have governments separate from, though answerable to, the British government. The fourth - England - does not. The English, as a result, have a problem.
Instead of our own elected parliament or assembly, England today is governed by eight unaccountable, undemocratic and largely unknown "regional assemblies", stuffed with corporate shills and political placemen, which make hugely important decisions on housing, spatial planning and transport. Meanwhile, at Westminster, Scottish and Welsh MPs are making decisions about the future of England for which they will never have to answer to their constituents - though English MPs cannot do the same in those countries.
This, the hoary old "West Lothian question", has already had a gravely undemocratic impact on the people of England. In 2003, for example, Tony Blair's controversial bill creating foundation hospitals, rejected by the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly, was imposed on the English despite the opposition to it from a majority of English MPs: new Labour drilled its Scottish and Welsh MPs into the lobbies to force upon the English something their own people had already rejected. The next year, university top-up fees (also rejected in Scotland and Wales) were forced down the throats of the English by just five votes - the votes of Scottish MPs.
England, the only British nation without any form of democratic devolution, is also, startlingly, the only nation in Europe without its own parliament or government. It receives less money from the Treasury per head of population than the other British nations (the poorest part of Britain, incidentally, is in England; it is Cornwall) and has fewer MPs per head of population, too. Despite devolution, the British government has ministers for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland - but no minister for England.
Growing numbers of English people are angry about this, and Gordon Brown's clumsy campaign to promote "Britishness" should be seen as a deliberate attempt to fend off growing English demands for political justice, which would torpedo new Labour's (largely Scottish) power base. Yet the point here is not to criticise the Celtic nations, to be "anti-Scottish" or anti-anyone. The point is to be pro-justice and pro-democracy.
Then there is the cultural case. In today's England we are losing what makes us who we are, at a frightening rate. Some of the world's most rapacious corporations, in a cosy alliance with an overcentralised government in love with the notion that business values are national values, are tearing meaning and character from the landscape. The independent, the historic and the diverse are everywhere being replaced by the corporate, the bland and the controlled.
Consider some of the casualties. The English pub, probably the best-known international symbol of our folk culture, is dying; 57 pubs shut up shop every month. Under new Labour we have lost 30,000 independent shops (including half of our independent bookshops), half of our orchards, a quarter of all our post offices (with many more to come) and 40 per cent of our dairy farms. The number of out-of-town shopping centres has increased fourfold in 20 years. We are seeing the streets of our major cities sold off to private corporations. Inner-city markets that serve poor communities are being cleared to make way for executive flats. Property prices have risen so sharply since 1997 - in some places by almost 400 per cent - that entire communities have simply shrivelled and died. This is a huge, and in some cases irreversible, cultural loss, a loss of the everyday culture of the people.
Political justice for England, then, and economic and cultural justice, too: this should be the rallying cry for a new breed of English nationalists. Most of us, Tory or Labour or anything else, would agree that the BNP should not be allowed to hijack our national identity (the BNP, as the name makes clear, is a British, not an English, nationalist party).
But if this is the case, why should we also allow the more respectable right-wingers to have it all to themselves? English folk culture belongs to all of us; the political injustices of the current constitutional settlement are injustices whoever you vote for. Why should those who consider themselves "left-wing", however they define that term, not be able to consider themselves English nationalists, too?
In truth, there is no good reason, other than fear and prejudice. It is time to reclaim both England and the proud tradition of radical nationalism, rooted but not chauvinistic, outward-looking but aware of our past, attached to place not race, geography not biology. The need to belong - the need for a sense of place and culture - is a basic human impulse. It should not be denied, and neither is it a bad thing unless it is perverted. If we don't want it to be perverted we need to see that it isn't, by claiming it for all of us.
More here
Powell has won: A view from India
As people from India were a major source of Enoch Powell's unease, one might expect him to be hated there. The following article from The Times of India actually defends him in some ways
The late Enoch Powell, controversial British politician, poet, linguist and once-aspiring Viceroy of India, would surely have laughed to see the kadhai and rice bowl protests in London on Sunday. Exactly 40 years ago, to the day, Powell made his infamous 'rivers of blood' speech in newly-multicultural Birmingham. Using his oratorical powers and vast knowledge of the classics, Powell predicted uncontrolled immigration would raise racial tensions in UK the same way the Roman poet Virgil described "the river Tiber foaming with much blood".
Four decades later, the streets of the capital of politically-correct Britain were foaming with an estimated 45,000 South Asian, Chinese and Turkish catering workers protesting against strict new immigration controls. The new measures for non-European workers effectively keep the curry, chow mein and kebab chef out of Britain unless he speaks good English and has educational qualifications of the sort you don't normally find in halwai or czar of the tandoor.
If anything, the caterers' public ferment shows that Powell's controversial, if divisive, views about British multi culturalism and open-door immigration policy had finally been dignified by officialdom. The immigration controls Powell wanted have finally come to pass.
Powell quoted the registrar-general's statistics to estimate Britain would have five to seven million 'coloureds', or one-tenth of the total population, by the year 2000. By any reckoning, that was magic maths. Britain's office of national statistics says that in 2001-2002, 7.6% of the UK's population consisted of non-white ethnic minorities, which is only a bit more than Powell's predicted one-tenth.
But it was not his number-crunching that made, in his own words, his speech "go up 'fizz' like a rocket; but whereas all rockets fall to the earth, this one is going to stay up". Powell gave voice to the deepest fears of the Mr and Mrs White Average when he declared, "We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependants, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant-descended population. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre".
The speech had severe political consequences for Powell. He was sacked from the shadow cabinet by a Conservative Party, which privately agreed with parts of his politically incorrect demagoguery even as it felt publicly unable to endorse it. And yet, just three days after the speech, 1,000 dockers went on strike to protest against Powell's dismissal. Their placards said 'Back Britain, not Black Britain'. By early May, Powell had received 43,000 letters and 700 telegrams supporting him. A Gallup poll found 74% of UK agreed with Powell's premise and 69% felt he should not have been dismissed.
Forty years on, the luxury of hindsight allows Britain to ruminate on the rights and wrongs of the strange saga of Enoch Powell's predicted rivers of blood. First and foremost, those rivers do not run and may be, never will.
Second, Powell was not an insular racialist. He loved India and worked hard to achieve fluency in two Indian languages. But he firmly believed it wrong to impose a mammoth immigrant community on a small island, with all the attendant perils for social cohesion.
The new immigration controls show that Britain agrees with Powell. It just doesn't have Powell's guts to say so, straight off.
Source
Scientists discover drops of truth in medieval belief in urine
Urine testing is not exactly new in modern medicine either -- but the idea that more information can be extracted from urine analysis does sound interesting. I doubt that it could give dietary information with a high degree of certainty, however. A background article is here
Medieval physicians believed that they could diagnose disease by holding up a flask of the patient's urine to the light and squinting at it. According to scientists at Imperial College London, they could have been on to something. A team there has completed the first worldwide study of the metabolites (breakdown products) that are found in urine, reflecting the diet, inheritance and the lifestyle of the people from whom it came. They call such studies "metabolomics" by analogy with genomics, which looks at all the genes that make up the human species, and proteomics, which does the same for proteins.
The study used nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy to compare racial and national groups by the composition of their urine. From Japan, Beijing, Corpus Christi, Belfast and West Bromwich, urine differs in subtle ways that could provide a powerful new way of linking diet and health. The metabolites they found come from microbes in the gut, from diet and from the metabolism of the host.
The team believes that the research may provide the basis for a "metabolome-wide association" approach to help to understand interactions between lifestyles, environment and genes and how they determine diseases. The metabolic fingerprints show that people in the US and Britain who share a tendency to high blood pressure and heart problems have similar patterns. Writing in the science journal Nature, the team identifies metabolites linked to high blood pressure, such as the amino acid alanine. Hippurate, another by-product of gut bacteria, is found in people with lower blood pressure who drink less and eat more fibre in their diet.
Scientists from Imperial College, the US, Belgium, Japan and China took samples from 4,630 volunteers aged between 40 and 59. Professor Jeremy Nicholson, from Imperial College, said: "Metabolic profiling can tell us how specific aspects of a person's diet and how much they drink are contributing to their risks for certain diseases, and these are things which we can't investigate by looking at a person's DNA. What is really important is that we can test out our new hypotheses directly, in a way that is not easy with genetic biomarkers."
Source
'Thousands of English patients go to Wales for free prescriptions'
More NHS weirdness
Tens of thousands of English patients could be registering with Welsh GPs and making day-trips to the country to obtain free prescriptions, it was claimed yesterday. Statistics show that three million people are registered with Welsh GPs, about 100,000 more than the official population. Wales is the only part of Britain not to have prescription charges. England has the highest at 7.10 pounds, followed by Northern Ireland at 6.85 and Scotland at 5 pounds.
The Conservative Party in Wales claimed that the figures pointed to patients from England travelling to Wales and called on the Welsh Assembly executive to stop "prescription tourism". Darren Millar, a Tory member of the assembly, said: "It has long been my suspicion that prescription tourism is rife in my constituency. We must tackle it sooner rather than later." The Tories suspect that English people could be using the addresses of friends and relatives in Wales to register.
However, David Bailey, the British Medical Association chairman in Wales, said: "The extra patients may be students or people who have come to Wales to work." An assembly spokesman said: "There is no evidence to suggest that patients are coming to Wales to benefit from free prescriptions. There has historically been a difference between the number of people registered with GPs and the population. "It is a long-standing problem across the UK and is mainly caused by people registering with a new practice before de-registering with their existing practice."
Source
Bureaucratic Brits keep denying an old lady her social security payments: "A blind and deaf woman has been forced to live off her savings for almost a year because the Post Office will not let her withdraw her pension as her signature does not match the one in its records. Joan Hopton, who is deaf and blind, has not been able to collect her pension for over a year Joan Hopton, 81, of Cheltenham, Glos, lost her pension card in May last year. However, when she applied for a new one she was told by the company that it could not be issued because the name on the bottom of the letter did not match her original signature. She used to collect a pension of 104 pounds a week and is now owed about 4,000 pounds since she lost her card. Despite repeated attempts by members of her family to come to some arrangement with Post Office Ltd the company will not let her access the money"
Taxpayers have footed a 1 million pound compensation bill after almost 200 drug-addicted prisoners sued the Government, claiming that denying them a heroin substitute breached their human rights. The prisoners claimed that their rights were infringed when they were deprived of methadone and had to go "cold turkey". A High Court test case involving six prisoners was going ahead two years ago but the Government agreed to settle out of court and pay 750,000 to 197 inmates in jails in England and Wales. The compensation payments averaged 3,807 pounds per prisoner, with four in Wymott jail in Lancashire receiving a total of 15,228 and three at Preston prison 11,421. The overall bill to the taxpayer of 1 million includes the compensation payments plus the estimated lawyers' fees.
The Government decided against fighting the compensation claims to minimise costs. It had been warned that if the case had gone to court the prisoners could have won even larger amounts of compensation. The prisoners had been using methadone paid for by the Government but it was decided that they should go through cold turkey detoxification instead. They claimed that their human rights had been breached under Articles 3 and 14 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which bans discrimination, or inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.
At the preliminary hearing in 2006 Richard Hermer, a human rights lawyer specialising in group actions against the Government, told the court: "Many of the prisoners were receiving methadone treatment before they entered prison and were upset at the short period of treatment using opiates they encountered in jail. Imposing the short, sharp detoxification is the issue." The addicts said that their treatment was handled "inappropriately" with the consequence that they "suffered injuries" and had "difficulties" with their withdrawal. They claimed that the treatment constituted trespass and accused the Prison Service of clinical negligence.
A Prison Service spokeswoman said that the payments made were in response to a minority of the claims. "We successfully defended the majority of claims. We make payments only when we are instructed to do so by the courts or where strong legal advice suggests that a settlement will save money," she added. Latest figures show that compensation payments to prisoners have fallen from a total of 4.4 million in 2005-06 to 2 million in 2006-07.
Source
A Leftist argues for English nationalism
Good to see in many ways -- as long as it does not go down the Fascist path. I tend to think that only conservatives can be trusted with nationalism. Leftists take to extremes anything that they adopt -- and we have already seen where one brand of national socialism ended up. Note: Wednesday is St George's Day, the day of England's patron Saint and the English flag (of St. George) is below. There is a discussion from a conservative viewpoint of the need for an English parliament here
There are certainly plenty of reasons to be suspicious of nationalism, and plenty of historic examples of its dark side. There are reasons, too, to be concerned about some of those who take on the mantle today, many of whom do come from a dark political place. But wait a minute: how have the Scottish managed to get themselves a government that is both nationalist and left-wing? How is it that the French are able to invoke '‚tat from the left as well as the right? Why do the Zapatistas in Mexico, who talk proudly of their Mexican as well as their indigenous identity while conducting armed insurrections against the state, attract the admiration of young English radicals? Why is nationalism good in Venezuela or Cuba but not here? And why is talk of identity and culture admired among our ethnic-minority communities, yet when the English as a whole discuss such ideas, the spectre of Enoch Powell and the British National Party is immediately conjured up?
It is customary at this point to invoke George Orwell, who wrote, nearly 70 years ago, that "England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality". The average English liberal, he observed, was so out of touch with popular culture that he considered it "a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse racing to suet puddings". Orwell is still worth the reference, because this attitude is one of the few things that doesn't seem to have changed much in England in seven decades.
Still, among some of the more regressive strands of the English left, the self-loathing continues. We will probably see it on 23 April, Shakespeare's birthday and St George's Day, as ageing liberals are wheeled out to instruct us that "English culture" does not even exist, that everyone is an immigrant anyway, that morris dancing was invented by the Victorians, that St George was Lebanese and that, besides, we're all "multicultural" now, so talking about it will probably offend somebody (though it will never be specified exactly who).
But decades of such cultural self-harm have had three dangerous consequences. The first is that the far right has been able to colonise Englishness for itself, conflate it with whiteness and make us all even more nervous about discussing it. The second is that the genuine political injustices under which England currently labours are not being addressed by the left. And the third is that the door has been flung wide open for global capitalism to gleefully tear up what remains of the English landscape, both physical and cultural, and replace it with strip malls, motorways, corporate farms and gated communities for the rich. England is losing its soul, and the left has had far too little to say about it.
I would argue that there are two strong cases for an English nationalism of the left: a political case and a cultural one. Since 1997, the political landscape within the UK has changed dramatically as a result of devolution to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. These devolutions were the right thing to do. They responded to a desire, particularly in Scotland, for increased self-governance, a desire which sprang both from a sense of national identity and a sense of injustice and which was articulated in Scotland by the Scottish National Party and in Wales by Plaid Cymru, both nationalist parties of the left.
Yet the devolution process was flawed because it confused Britain with England. The UK contains four nations. Three of them now have governments separate from, though answerable to, the British government. The fourth - England - does not. The English, as a result, have a problem.
Instead of our own elected parliament or assembly, England today is governed by eight unaccountable, undemocratic and largely unknown "regional assemblies", stuffed with corporate shills and political placemen, which make hugely important decisions on housing, spatial planning and transport. Meanwhile, at Westminster, Scottish and Welsh MPs are making decisions about the future of England for which they will never have to answer to their constituents - though English MPs cannot do the same in those countries.
This, the hoary old "West Lothian question", has already had a gravely undemocratic impact on the people of England. In 2003, for example, Tony Blair's controversial bill creating foundation hospitals, rejected by the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly, was imposed on the English despite the opposition to it from a majority of English MPs: new Labour drilled its Scottish and Welsh MPs into the lobbies to force upon the English something their own people had already rejected. The next year, university top-up fees (also rejected in Scotland and Wales) were forced down the throats of the English by just five votes - the votes of Scottish MPs.
England, the only British nation without any form of democratic devolution, is also, startlingly, the only nation in Europe without its own parliament or government. It receives less money from the Treasury per head of population than the other British nations (the poorest part of Britain, incidentally, is in England; it is Cornwall) and has fewer MPs per head of population, too. Despite devolution, the British government has ministers for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland - but no minister for England.
Growing numbers of English people are angry about this, and Gordon Brown's clumsy campaign to promote "Britishness" should be seen as a deliberate attempt to fend off growing English demands for political justice, which would torpedo new Labour's (largely Scottish) power base. Yet the point here is not to criticise the Celtic nations, to be "anti-Scottish" or anti-anyone. The point is to be pro-justice and pro-democracy.
Then there is the cultural case. In today's England we are losing what makes us who we are, at a frightening rate. Some of the world's most rapacious corporations, in a cosy alliance with an overcentralised government in love with the notion that business values are national values, are tearing meaning and character from the landscape. The independent, the historic and the diverse are everywhere being replaced by the corporate, the bland and the controlled.
Consider some of the casualties. The English pub, probably the best-known international symbol of our folk culture, is dying; 57 pubs shut up shop every month. Under new Labour we have lost 30,000 independent shops (including half of our independent bookshops), half of our orchards, a quarter of all our post offices (with many more to come) and 40 per cent of our dairy farms. The number of out-of-town shopping centres has increased fourfold in 20 years. We are seeing the streets of our major cities sold off to private corporations. Inner-city markets that serve poor communities are being cleared to make way for executive flats. Property prices have risen so sharply since 1997 - in some places by almost 400 per cent - that entire communities have simply shrivelled and died. This is a huge, and in some cases irreversible, cultural loss, a loss of the everyday culture of the people.
Political justice for England, then, and economic and cultural justice, too: this should be the rallying cry for a new breed of English nationalists. Most of us, Tory or Labour or anything else, would agree that the BNP should not be allowed to hijack our national identity (the BNP, as the name makes clear, is a British, not an English, nationalist party).
But if this is the case, why should we also allow the more respectable right-wingers to have it all to themselves? English folk culture belongs to all of us; the political injustices of the current constitutional settlement are injustices whoever you vote for. Why should those who consider themselves "left-wing", however they define that term, not be able to consider themselves English nationalists, too?
In truth, there is no good reason, other than fear and prejudice. It is time to reclaim both England and the proud tradition of radical nationalism, rooted but not chauvinistic, outward-looking but aware of our past, attached to place not race, geography not biology. The need to belong - the need for a sense of place and culture - is a basic human impulse. It should not be denied, and neither is it a bad thing unless it is perverted. If we don't want it to be perverted we need to see that it isn't, by claiming it for all of us.
More here
Powell has won: A view from India
As people from India were a major source of Enoch Powell's unease, one might expect him to be hated there. The following article from The Times of India actually defends him in some ways
The late Enoch Powell, controversial British politician, poet, linguist and once-aspiring Viceroy of India, would surely have laughed to see the kadhai and rice bowl protests in London on Sunday. Exactly 40 years ago, to the day, Powell made his infamous 'rivers of blood' speech in newly-multicultural Birmingham. Using his oratorical powers and vast knowledge of the classics, Powell predicted uncontrolled immigration would raise racial tensions in UK the same way the Roman poet Virgil described "the river Tiber foaming with much blood".
Four decades later, the streets of the capital of politically-correct Britain were foaming with an estimated 45,000 South Asian, Chinese and Turkish catering workers protesting against strict new immigration controls. The new measures for non-European workers effectively keep the curry, chow mein and kebab chef out of Britain unless he speaks good English and has educational qualifications of the sort you don't normally find in halwai or czar of the tandoor.
If anything, the caterers' public ferment shows that Powell's controversial, if divisive, views about British multi culturalism and open-door immigration policy had finally been dignified by officialdom. The immigration controls Powell wanted have finally come to pass.
Powell quoted the registrar-general's statistics to estimate Britain would have five to seven million 'coloureds', or one-tenth of the total population, by the year 2000. By any reckoning, that was magic maths. Britain's office of national statistics says that in 2001-2002, 7.6% of the UK's population consisted of non-white ethnic minorities, which is only a bit more than Powell's predicted one-tenth.
But it was not his number-crunching that made, in his own words, his speech "go up 'fizz' like a rocket; but whereas all rockets fall to the earth, this one is going to stay up". Powell gave voice to the deepest fears of the Mr and Mrs White Average when he declared, "We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependants, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant-descended population. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre".
The speech had severe political consequences for Powell. He was sacked from the shadow cabinet by a Conservative Party, which privately agreed with parts of his politically incorrect demagoguery even as it felt publicly unable to endorse it. And yet, just three days after the speech, 1,000 dockers went on strike to protest against Powell's dismissal. Their placards said 'Back Britain, not Black Britain'. By early May, Powell had received 43,000 letters and 700 telegrams supporting him. A Gallup poll found 74% of UK agreed with Powell's premise and 69% felt he should not have been dismissed.
Forty years on, the luxury of hindsight allows Britain to ruminate on the rights and wrongs of the strange saga of Enoch Powell's predicted rivers of blood. First and foremost, those rivers do not run and may be, never will.
Second, Powell was not an insular racialist. He loved India and worked hard to achieve fluency in two Indian languages. But he firmly believed it wrong to impose a mammoth immigrant community on a small island, with all the attendant perils for social cohesion.
The new immigration controls show that Britain agrees with Powell. It just doesn't have Powell's guts to say so, straight off.
Source
Scientists discover drops of truth in medieval belief in urine
Urine testing is not exactly new in modern medicine either -- but the idea that more information can be extracted from urine analysis does sound interesting. I doubt that it could give dietary information with a high degree of certainty, however. A background article is here
Medieval physicians believed that they could diagnose disease by holding up a flask of the patient's urine to the light and squinting at it. According to scientists at Imperial College London, they could have been on to something. A team there has completed the first worldwide study of the metabolites (breakdown products) that are found in urine, reflecting the diet, inheritance and the lifestyle of the people from whom it came. They call such studies "metabolomics" by analogy with genomics, which looks at all the genes that make up the human species, and proteomics, which does the same for proteins.
The study used nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy to compare racial and national groups by the composition of their urine. From Japan, Beijing, Corpus Christi, Belfast and West Bromwich, urine differs in subtle ways that could provide a powerful new way of linking diet and health. The metabolites they found come from microbes in the gut, from diet and from the metabolism of the host.
The team believes that the research may provide the basis for a "metabolome-wide association" approach to help to understand interactions between lifestyles, environment and genes and how they determine diseases. The metabolic fingerprints show that people in the US and Britain who share a tendency to high blood pressure and heart problems have similar patterns. Writing in the science journal Nature, the team identifies metabolites linked to high blood pressure, such as the amino acid alanine. Hippurate, another by-product of gut bacteria, is found in people with lower blood pressure who drink less and eat more fibre in their diet.
Scientists from Imperial College, the US, Belgium, Japan and China took samples from 4,630 volunteers aged between 40 and 59. Professor Jeremy Nicholson, from Imperial College, said: "Metabolic profiling can tell us how specific aspects of a person's diet and how much they drink are contributing to their risks for certain diseases, and these are things which we can't investigate by looking at a person's DNA. What is really important is that we can test out our new hypotheses directly, in a way that is not easy with genetic biomarkers."
Source
'Thousands of English patients go to Wales for free prescriptions'
More NHS weirdness
Tens of thousands of English patients could be registering with Welsh GPs and making day-trips to the country to obtain free prescriptions, it was claimed yesterday. Statistics show that three million people are registered with Welsh GPs, about 100,000 more than the official population. Wales is the only part of Britain not to have prescription charges. England has the highest at 7.10 pounds, followed by Northern Ireland at 6.85 and Scotland at 5 pounds.
The Conservative Party in Wales claimed that the figures pointed to patients from England travelling to Wales and called on the Welsh Assembly executive to stop "prescription tourism". Darren Millar, a Tory member of the assembly, said: "It has long been my suspicion that prescription tourism is rife in my constituency. We must tackle it sooner rather than later." The Tories suspect that English people could be using the addresses of friends and relatives in Wales to register.
However, David Bailey, the British Medical Association chairman in Wales, said: "The extra patients may be students or people who have come to Wales to work." An assembly spokesman said: "There is no evidence to suggest that patients are coming to Wales to benefit from free prescriptions. There has historically been a difference between the number of people registered with GPs and the population. "It is a long-standing problem across the UK and is mainly caused by people registering with a new practice before de-registering with their existing practice."
Source
Bureaucratic Brits keep denying an old lady her social security payments: "A blind and deaf woman has been forced to live off her savings for almost a year because the Post Office will not let her withdraw her pension as her signature does not match the one in its records. Joan Hopton, who is deaf and blind, has not been able to collect her pension for over a year Joan Hopton, 81, of Cheltenham, Glos, lost her pension card in May last year. However, when she applied for a new one she was told by the company that it could not be issued because the name on the bottom of the letter did not match her original signature. She used to collect a pension of 104 pounds a week and is now owed about 4,000 pounds since she lost her card. Despite repeated attempts by members of her family to come to some arrangement with Post Office Ltd the company will not let her access the money"
Monday, April 21, 2008
'Cold war' fear of Britain's race watchdog chief
Uncontrolled immigration has led to a "cold war" between ethnic communities, according to the head of Britain's race watchdog. Trevor Phillips, chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), believes the policy failures risk engendering racism among millions of educated professionals.
Mr Phillips will set out his concerns in an address to mark the 40th anniversary of Enoch Powell's notorious "rivers of blood" speech - in which the Tory frontbencher warned of disastrous social consequences if immigration levels were not reduced. While Mr Phillips is expected to stress that the dire predictions have not come true and immigration has not been too high, he will say the influx has had worrying effects. "Powell predicted 'hot' conflict and violence. However, we have seen the emergence of a kind of cold war in some parts of the country, where very separate communities exist side by side... with poor communication across racial or religious lines," Mr Phillips will say. "In essence, Powell so discredited any talk of planning or control that it gave rise to a migration policy in which government knew too little about what was going on. Ironically, Powellism and the weakening of control it engendered may have led Britain to admitting more immigrants rather than fewer."
Mr Phillips is expected to warn ministers that they are boosting anti-immigration parties such as the BNP by failing to respond to reasonable concerns from large sections of the "settled" population. He will say: "For every professional woman who is able to go out to work because she has a Polish nanny, there is a young mother who watches her child struggle in a classroom where a harassed teacher faces too many children with too many languages between them."
Shadow home secretary David Davis said: "Mr Phillips raises a brave and timely warning and points out the consequences of a disastrous loss of immigration controls. "It has had adverse consequences for public services, housing and community relations. Whilst managed immigration is for the benefit of the country, uncontrolled immigration can lead to serious problems for the whole nation."
Source
'Moral panic' and 'policy hysteria' harming British primary schools
Schoolchildren are reduced to the status of 'targets'
Primary school education has been damaged by "prescriptive state nationalisation", which has taken all the fun out of children's learning, the biggest review of primary education in 40 years has concluded. A mixture of "moral panic", "policy hysteria" and "fad theory" has had a devastating effect on primary schools in England, according to the latest reports of the Cambridge University-led Primary Review. The three reports published today examining teacher professionalism, training and leadership followed 22 earlier reports that have delivered a damning indictment of the Government's record on primary education.
Children had been reduced to the status of "targets and outputs" in a school system ruled by political "whim", researchers from Manchester Metropolitan University said. Their report, part of the ongoing Primary Review, warned that teachers had been de-skilled and demoralised by the constant Government interference and that the relentless focus on targets had created an "impersonal" system. The study, by Liz Jones, Andy Pickard and Ian Stronach at Manchester Metropolitan University, concluded that many older teachers felt demoralised by lack of freedom to run their own lessons in the face of government "micro-management of their work".
Centralised control over primary education has increased in the past 15 years as ministers introduced new targets, more testing and league tables. Initiative overload, hysterical response to media scares and scapegoating of schools and teachers had become "a permanent feature of contemporary modernisation by New Labour", the study warned.
A second study, on teacher training, for the Primary Review warned that ministers' strict control of training courses had created a "culture of compliance" among teachers and pupils. The report, by Olwen McNamara and Rosemary Webb at Manchester University and Mark Brundrett from Liverpool John Moores University, warned that successive governments had "progressively increased prescription and control", which had left schools subject to "political whim".
The third report, by Hilary Burgess, from the Open University, examining staffing reforms, warned that children with special needs were missing out on time with their class teacher because they were being left in the care of classroom assistants.
The Liberal Democrats accused the Government of treating teachers like robots. David Laws, their education spokesman, said: "There is a danger of the Government squeezing the life out of education and preparing teachers in a robotic way to deliver a very prescriptive curriculum." Andrew Adonis, the Schools minister, defended the Government's record. He said: "We make no apology for policies which are delivering the highest standards ever."
The problem areas
* A narrowing of the curriculum - primary schools are increasingly focusing on literacy and numeracy to boost their league table positions but at the expense of children's wider education. "The remorseless pursuit of grades had unhealthy effects on other educational goals."
* Loss of self esteem of pupils and teachers - pupils are being demoralised by the "impersonal" education system with its excessive focus on targets and tests. Teachers, particularly older staff, feel deskilled by government "micromanagement" of their lessons. "The reconstruction of the child in terms of targets and outputs... has impersonalised education in ways that are now being recognised."
* A reduction in creative pedagogy - government interference in teacher training has led to increased focus on preparing teachers to deliver government strategies rather than developing them as thinking professionals. Teachers are under increasing pressure from politicians and the public to be more accountable and raise standards. "There is evidence teachers are being deskilled and their work intensified."
Source
Exodus from UK shows little sign of slowing: "Any idea that the exodus from Britain of those settling abroad might be waning appears wildly premature. The latest survey predicts 1.8 million Britons retiring abroad by 2025 and 3.3 million by 2050. The survey, on behalf of NatWest International, provides further evidence that the majority of those making the lifestyle change do not look back. Nine in 10 expats said they enjoyed better quality of life and six in 10 said they did not intend to return to the UK."
Uncontrolled immigration has led to a "cold war" between ethnic communities, according to the head of Britain's race watchdog. Trevor Phillips, chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), believes the policy failures risk engendering racism among millions of educated professionals.
Mr Phillips will set out his concerns in an address to mark the 40th anniversary of Enoch Powell's notorious "rivers of blood" speech - in which the Tory frontbencher warned of disastrous social consequences if immigration levels were not reduced. While Mr Phillips is expected to stress that the dire predictions have not come true and immigration has not been too high, he will say the influx has had worrying effects. "Powell predicted 'hot' conflict and violence. However, we have seen the emergence of a kind of cold war in some parts of the country, where very separate communities exist side by side... with poor communication across racial or religious lines," Mr Phillips will say. "In essence, Powell so discredited any talk of planning or control that it gave rise to a migration policy in which government knew too little about what was going on. Ironically, Powellism and the weakening of control it engendered may have led Britain to admitting more immigrants rather than fewer."
Mr Phillips is expected to warn ministers that they are boosting anti-immigration parties such as the BNP by failing to respond to reasonable concerns from large sections of the "settled" population. He will say: "For every professional woman who is able to go out to work because she has a Polish nanny, there is a young mother who watches her child struggle in a classroom where a harassed teacher faces too many children with too many languages between them."
Shadow home secretary David Davis said: "Mr Phillips raises a brave and timely warning and points out the consequences of a disastrous loss of immigration controls. "It has had adverse consequences for public services, housing and community relations. Whilst managed immigration is for the benefit of the country, uncontrolled immigration can lead to serious problems for the whole nation."
Source
'Moral panic' and 'policy hysteria' harming British primary schools
Schoolchildren are reduced to the status of 'targets'
Primary school education has been damaged by "prescriptive state nationalisation", which has taken all the fun out of children's learning, the biggest review of primary education in 40 years has concluded. A mixture of "moral panic", "policy hysteria" and "fad theory" has had a devastating effect on primary schools in England, according to the latest reports of the Cambridge University-led Primary Review. The three reports published today examining teacher professionalism, training and leadership followed 22 earlier reports that have delivered a damning indictment of the Government's record on primary education.
Children had been reduced to the status of "targets and outputs" in a school system ruled by political "whim", researchers from Manchester Metropolitan University said. Their report, part of the ongoing Primary Review, warned that teachers had been de-skilled and demoralised by the constant Government interference and that the relentless focus on targets had created an "impersonal" system. The study, by Liz Jones, Andy Pickard and Ian Stronach at Manchester Metropolitan University, concluded that many older teachers felt demoralised by lack of freedom to run their own lessons in the face of government "micro-management of their work".
Centralised control over primary education has increased in the past 15 years as ministers introduced new targets, more testing and league tables. Initiative overload, hysterical response to media scares and scapegoating of schools and teachers had become "a permanent feature of contemporary modernisation by New Labour", the study warned.
A second study, on teacher training, for the Primary Review warned that ministers' strict control of training courses had created a "culture of compliance" among teachers and pupils. The report, by Olwen McNamara and Rosemary Webb at Manchester University and Mark Brundrett from Liverpool John Moores University, warned that successive governments had "progressively increased prescription and control", which had left schools subject to "political whim".
The third report, by Hilary Burgess, from the Open University, examining staffing reforms, warned that children with special needs were missing out on time with their class teacher because they were being left in the care of classroom assistants.
The Liberal Democrats accused the Government of treating teachers like robots. David Laws, their education spokesman, said: "There is a danger of the Government squeezing the life out of education and preparing teachers in a robotic way to deliver a very prescriptive curriculum." Andrew Adonis, the Schools minister, defended the Government's record. He said: "We make no apology for policies which are delivering the highest standards ever."
The problem areas
* A narrowing of the curriculum - primary schools are increasingly focusing on literacy and numeracy to boost their league table positions but at the expense of children's wider education. "The remorseless pursuit of grades had unhealthy effects on other educational goals."
* Loss of self esteem of pupils and teachers - pupils are being demoralised by the "impersonal" education system with its excessive focus on targets and tests. Teachers, particularly older staff, feel deskilled by government "micromanagement" of their lessons. "The reconstruction of the child in terms of targets and outputs... has impersonalised education in ways that are now being recognised."
* A reduction in creative pedagogy - government interference in teacher training has led to increased focus on preparing teachers to deliver government strategies rather than developing them as thinking professionals. Teachers are under increasing pressure from politicians and the public to be more accountable and raise standards. "There is evidence teachers are being deskilled and their work intensified."
Source
Exodus from UK shows little sign of slowing: "Any idea that the exodus from Britain of those settling abroad might be waning appears wildly premature. The latest survey predicts 1.8 million Britons retiring abroad by 2025 and 3.3 million by 2050. The survey, on behalf of NatWest International, provides further evidence that the majority of those making the lifestyle change do not look back. Nine in 10 expats said they enjoyed better quality of life and six in 10 said they did not intend to return to the UK."
Sunday, April 20, 2008
British swimming pool bars father and son from its 'Muslim-only' swimming session
This was put down to a "misunderstanding" and there was no action taken against the "misunderstanders" -- but imagine the retribution if a Muslim had been banned
A father and his five-year-old son were turned away from their local swimming pool because they were the wrong religion. David Toube, 39, and his son Harry were told that the Sunday morning session was reserved for Muslim men only. Hackney Council, which runs the Clissold Leisure Centre in Stoke Newington, north London, claimed staff there had made a mistake. However, the Muslim-only session was advertised on its website.
Mr Toube, a corporate lawyer, described his experiences on a blog. "I arrived at the pool to discover that they were holding what staff described to me as "Muslim men only swimming"," he wrote. "I asked whether my son and I could go as we were both male. I was told that the session was for Muslims only and that we could not be admitted. I asked what would happen if I turned up and insisted I was Muslim. "The manager suggested that they might ask the Muslims swimming if they minded my son and I swimming with them. If they didn't object, we might be allowed in."
A few days later, Mr Toube, who lives with his wife, 38-year-old barrister Samantha, and their two sons in Stoke Newington, North London, spoke to another leisure centre employee. "He gave me an identical story. His explanation was that it was a requirement of the Muslim religion that Muslims could not swim with non-Muslims." Mr Toube joked: "I asked him whether Clissold Leisure Centre would institute Whites Only swimming for racists. His answer was that they would if there was sufficient demand."
He added: "I spoke to a number of Muslim friends, and none of them had heard of a religious prohibition on swimming with non-Muslims. "One friend was so disgusted with Hackney for trying to segregate Muslims and non Muslims that he suggested that he take his little daughter swimming with us, just to prove the point."
However, Dr Taj Hargey, chair of the Muslim Education Centre of Oxford, said it was not true that Muslims could not swim with non-Muslims. "There is no Koranic verse or any statement from the sources of Islam that says different religions should be segregated," he said. "The only requirement is that when women swim they should be modestly clad." The Prophet Mohammed is recorded as saying that it is a Muslim's duty to learn to swim as it could save his or her life.
The swimming sessions for male Muslims were advertised as taking place every Sunday from 8am to 9.30am. Leaflets stipulated: "It is compulsory for the body to be covered between the navel and the knees. "Anyone not adhering to the dress code or rules within the pool will not be allowed to swim. All brothers welcome.'
A leisure centre spokesman said staff were wrong to refuse entry to Mr Toube. He added: "The member of staff the user spoke with at the time was mistaken when referring to the session as Muslim-only. "The men's modesty session is not a private hire and is, therefore, open to the public. "Staff cannot ask your religion on entrance and you won't be refused entry if you don't appear to be Muslim."
A spokesman for the Equality and Human Rights Commission said: "Segregating services may amount to unlawful discrimination and could create a sense of unfairness, inadvertently increasing community tension."
Source
UK Muslim Airport Porters Refuse to Handle Israeli Luggage
This outrageous story from e-mailer Beryl Dean has been verified and is absolutely true:
She is writing British Air about this incident, asking why they tolerate, and what they are doing about, this unacceptable situation. I urge my readers to write, particularly to British Air and Heathrow Ariport. But I have another solution, as well: DON'T GO TO BRITAIN.
It's essentially a Muslim Nation--Dar Al-Islam. Let them have halal bangers and mash all they want, but not our dollars. This situation is in place, because--as with all things--the Brits kowtow to Islam and have allowed this intolerable behavior
Source
Global warming? Scotland sees its best snow in a decade
The restaurant at the top of the mountain is packed, though the queues are not for tartiflette or omelette savoyarde but for the distinctly un-haute cuisine of haggis and neeps and tatties. In the shop by the funicular railway, Loch Ness Monster books and goat’s- milk soap from a local crofter are on sale next to ski goggles and thermal leggings. The weather forecast — “Some buffeting on higher slopes” — sounds particularly Scottish, while the signs for the “Cairngorm Poo Project”, an initiative to cut human waste left by walkers, would be hard to imagine in Courchevel or Val d’Isere.
Only a year after experiencing its worst season, the CairnGorm Mountain resort near Aviemore is defying the doomsayers of global warming and predictions of its demise. The car park is full and the slopes busy. When the sun comes out, it is almost warm. After several weeks of decent snowfalls, the spring skiing conditions are, according to everyone who knows, the best in living memory. The resort has even run out of up-to-date piste maps, and has had to advertise for extra staff because many of its seasonal workers have already left.
The snow in Scotland is so good that at least two of its five resorts are expecting to extend the season into May. It may be just temporary, but for the moment the Great British Ski Resort is back in business. “Yesterday I had a business appointment at the bank in the morning, but after work I was ski touring until 8 in the evening,” says Bob Kinnair, 54, chief executive of CairnGorm and a former head of the British Association of Ski Instructors. “It was just me and a mountain hare. I’ve been skiing here for 30 years but these are the best spring conditions I can remember.” He adds: “It’s an extraordinary position for Scottish skiing to be in heading for the end of April in this century. We were open for skiing on December 1 and we’re expecting to be open on May 1, which will take us into our sixth month.”
Despite the snow cover — at least a metre has fallen at the top (altitude 3,600ft, or 1,097m) — skiing in Scotland remains a unique experience. The piste names — Over Yonder, M2 and Side Slope — have a prosaic charm of their own. Bright orange signs highlight rocks and streams, while fences at the side of slopes prevent the snow from being blown too far by strong winds. This week, after a fresh dusting of snow on Tuesday, conditions remained surprisingly good. Despite a fair bit of “buffeting” (just 30mph when The Times visited — a good day) and sub-zero temperatures, there was fresh powder to be had in the bowls and gullies surrounding the 37km of groomed runs. Only a few weeks ago it was possible to ski all the way down to the lower car park, an event so rare that it was described as a “once-in-a- generation experience”.
CairnGorm’s target of 51,000 skier days was passed two weeks ago, and it should now comfortably exceed 60,000, with many travelling up from England. Although this is still nothing like the 150,000-200,000 skier days enjoyed by the resort in its prime 30 years ago, it represents a dramatic increase on last year’s 38,000. The improvement in conditions means that CairnGorm can expect to make a small profit this year, though most of that money will be reinvested in the resort infrastructure and used to service bank overdrafts. After just about breaking even for half a dozen years, the resort made a loss of £200,000 last year, raising serious questions about its future and the viability of Scottish skiing.
Scotland’s four other resorts have all enjoyed good conditions this year. Iain Hayes, 22, from Aviemore, who has been skiing in Scotland since he was 3, said yesterday: “These are the best conditions I can remember for ten years. The cover is incredible. It’s opened up the whole mountain.”
Source
Teacher accuses British Islamic school of racism
A former teacher at an Islamic school, who alleged that it taught an offensive and racist view of non-Muslims, has been awarded 70,000 pounds by an employment tribunal after winning his case for unfair dismissal. Colin Cook told the tribunal in Watford that pupils were taught from Arabic books that likened Jews and Christians to "monkeys" and "pigs" at The King Fahad Academy, which is funded and run by the Saudi Arabian Government. The tribunal ruled that Mr Cook, a British Muslim, was unfairly dismissed from his 36,000 pounds-a-year post at the school in Acton, West London, in December 2006 after blowing the whistle on systematic cheating at a GCSE exam.
The panel found that the school created a "smokescreen" to try to justify his dismissal after 18 years' unblemished service. It awarded Mr Cook 58,800 pounds in compensation for loss of earnings and 10,500 for injury to feelings. But it rejected his claim that the school discriminated against him on racial grounds.
Mr Cook told the hearing that after leaving the school another member of staff gave him extracts from an Arabic textbook, which encouraged students to believe that all religions other than Islam were worthless. The books referred to "the repugnant characteristics of the Jews". Another passage said: "Those whom God has cursed and with whom he is angry, he has turned into monkeys and pigs. They worship Satan." Mr Cook alleged that the books were spreading race hatred. "They should not be brought into this country and they should not be used in this country," he said.
The school denied ever teaching any form of racial hatred and insisted that the offending passages in the books were "misinterpreted" and were never used in class. But it later got rid of the books.
The school was established in 1985, with the aim of providing a high-quality education acceptable to the Saudi and British authorities for the children of Saudi diplomats and other Muslim families in London. Some of the children of the jailed extremist clerics Abu Hamza al-Masri and Abu Qatada are pupils at the school, which charges fees of up to 1,500 pounds per year for day students.
Mr Cook alleged that in June 2006 staff wrongly allowed pupils to refer to heavily annotated course books during an English language GCSE exam. The tribunal was told that when he suggested that the school might be trying to cover up his allegations, a senior colleague told him: "This is not England. It is Saudi Arabia." Mr Cook then took his complaints direct to the Edexcel exam board.
Mr Cook of Feltham, West London, taught English as a second language at the school. Giving evidence to the tribunal, he said that some pupils "talked as if they did not live in London at all". When he queried how Abu Hamza and Abu Qatada could be paying school fees when they were said to be on benefits, he was told to mind his own business. He also claimed the school was seen as an extension of the Saudi Embassy rather than part of Britain, with Saudi teachers even enjoying diplomatic immunity.
Mr Cook's solicitor, Lawrence Davies, said: "Safeguards under English law were thrown out of the window when Mr Cook was sacked. "This school must learn that it is not the Saudi way or the highway. The tribunal has upheld justice and protected the whistle-blower." The tribunal panel was not required to rule on Mr Cook's allegations about the school's curriculum. But in its judgment, it said it had considered Mr Cook to be a "truthful witness". As he was a respected teacher, with an 18-year unblemished record, it ruled that the impact of his dismissal had been "nothing short of life-changing" for Mr Cook. He had received a "harsh punishment for doing what he thought was the right thing to do", it concluded.
Mr Cook said last night: "I have been accused by people at the school and outside the school of lies and distortion. The school inferred that I had endangered pupils with my allegations. "The evidence speaks otherwise. I told the truth all along. Islam teaches peace and honesty. Hopefully, my accusers will now realise that I acted justly and for the good of the school."
Source
This was put down to a "misunderstanding" and there was no action taken against the "misunderstanders" -- but imagine the retribution if a Muslim had been banned
A father and his five-year-old son were turned away from their local swimming pool because they were the wrong religion. David Toube, 39, and his son Harry were told that the Sunday morning session was reserved for Muslim men only. Hackney Council, which runs the Clissold Leisure Centre in Stoke Newington, north London, claimed staff there had made a mistake. However, the Muslim-only session was advertised on its website.
Mr Toube, a corporate lawyer, described his experiences on a blog. "I arrived at the pool to discover that they were holding what staff described to me as "Muslim men only swimming"," he wrote. "I asked whether my son and I could go as we were both male. I was told that the session was for Muslims only and that we could not be admitted. I asked what would happen if I turned up and insisted I was Muslim. "The manager suggested that they might ask the Muslims swimming if they minded my son and I swimming with them. If they didn't object, we might be allowed in."
A few days later, Mr Toube, who lives with his wife, 38-year-old barrister Samantha, and their two sons in Stoke Newington, North London, spoke to another leisure centre employee. "He gave me an identical story. His explanation was that it was a requirement of the Muslim religion that Muslims could not swim with non-Muslims." Mr Toube joked: "I asked him whether Clissold Leisure Centre would institute Whites Only swimming for racists. His answer was that they would if there was sufficient demand."
He added: "I spoke to a number of Muslim friends, and none of them had heard of a religious prohibition on swimming with non-Muslims. "One friend was so disgusted with Hackney for trying to segregate Muslims and non Muslims that he suggested that he take his little daughter swimming with us, just to prove the point."
However, Dr Taj Hargey, chair of the Muslim Education Centre of Oxford, said it was not true that Muslims could not swim with non-Muslims. "There is no Koranic verse or any statement from the sources of Islam that says different religions should be segregated," he said. "The only requirement is that when women swim they should be modestly clad." The Prophet Mohammed is recorded as saying that it is a Muslim's duty to learn to swim as it could save his or her life.
The swimming sessions for male Muslims were advertised as taking place every Sunday from 8am to 9.30am. Leaflets stipulated: "It is compulsory for the body to be covered between the navel and the knees. "Anyone not adhering to the dress code or rules within the pool will not be allowed to swim. All brothers welcome.'
A leisure centre spokesman said staff were wrong to refuse entry to Mr Toube. He added: "The member of staff the user spoke with at the time was mistaken when referring to the session as Muslim-only. "The men's modesty session is not a private hire and is, therefore, open to the public. "Staff cannot ask your religion on entrance and you won't be refused entry if you don't appear to be Muslim."
A spokesman for the Equality and Human Rights Commission said: "Segregating services may amount to unlawful discrimination and could create a sense of unfairness, inadvertently increasing community tension."
Source
UK Muslim Airport Porters Refuse to Handle Israeli Luggage
This outrageous story from e-mailer Beryl Dean has been verified and is absolutely true:
My friend Miriam Bedein traveled to Britain early in April. She arrived on British Air from Israel, and as she arrived at the baggage claim, she observed that there were no porters at the site.
She asked what was happening of the gentleman who was taking her to the baggage carousel, and he said "Ooh, the porters are Muslim and they will not handle any luggage coming from Israel" (In Britain, the porters take the luggage off the carousels and take them to your cab, etc.) While it was not his job, the gentleman was kind enough to get her luggage for her.
She is writing British Air about this incident, asking why they tolerate, and what they are doing about, this unacceptable situation. I urge my readers to write, particularly to British Air and Heathrow Ariport. But I have another solution, as well: DON'T GO TO BRITAIN.
It's essentially a Muslim Nation--Dar Al-Islam. Let them have halal bangers and mash all they want, but not our dollars. This situation is in place, because--as with all things--the Brits kowtow to Islam and have allowed this intolerable behavior
Source
Global warming? Scotland sees its best snow in a decade
The restaurant at the top of the mountain is packed, though the queues are not for tartiflette or omelette savoyarde but for the distinctly un-haute cuisine of haggis and neeps and tatties. In the shop by the funicular railway, Loch Ness Monster books and goat’s- milk soap from a local crofter are on sale next to ski goggles and thermal leggings. The weather forecast — “Some buffeting on higher slopes” — sounds particularly Scottish, while the signs for the “Cairngorm Poo Project”, an initiative to cut human waste left by walkers, would be hard to imagine in Courchevel or Val d’Isere.
Only a year after experiencing its worst season, the CairnGorm Mountain resort near Aviemore is defying the doomsayers of global warming and predictions of its demise. The car park is full and the slopes busy. When the sun comes out, it is almost warm. After several weeks of decent snowfalls, the spring skiing conditions are, according to everyone who knows, the best in living memory. The resort has even run out of up-to-date piste maps, and has had to advertise for extra staff because many of its seasonal workers have already left.
The snow in Scotland is so good that at least two of its five resorts are expecting to extend the season into May. It may be just temporary, but for the moment the Great British Ski Resort is back in business. “Yesterday I had a business appointment at the bank in the morning, but after work I was ski touring until 8 in the evening,” says Bob Kinnair, 54, chief executive of CairnGorm and a former head of the British Association of Ski Instructors. “It was just me and a mountain hare. I’ve been skiing here for 30 years but these are the best spring conditions I can remember.” He adds: “It’s an extraordinary position for Scottish skiing to be in heading for the end of April in this century. We were open for skiing on December 1 and we’re expecting to be open on May 1, which will take us into our sixth month.”
Despite the snow cover — at least a metre has fallen at the top (altitude 3,600ft, or 1,097m) — skiing in Scotland remains a unique experience. The piste names — Over Yonder, M2 and Side Slope — have a prosaic charm of their own. Bright orange signs highlight rocks and streams, while fences at the side of slopes prevent the snow from being blown too far by strong winds. This week, after a fresh dusting of snow on Tuesday, conditions remained surprisingly good. Despite a fair bit of “buffeting” (just 30mph when The Times visited — a good day) and sub-zero temperatures, there was fresh powder to be had in the bowls and gullies surrounding the 37km of groomed runs. Only a few weeks ago it was possible to ski all the way down to the lower car park, an event so rare that it was described as a “once-in-a- generation experience”.
CairnGorm’s target of 51,000 skier days was passed two weeks ago, and it should now comfortably exceed 60,000, with many travelling up from England. Although this is still nothing like the 150,000-200,000 skier days enjoyed by the resort in its prime 30 years ago, it represents a dramatic increase on last year’s 38,000. The improvement in conditions means that CairnGorm can expect to make a small profit this year, though most of that money will be reinvested in the resort infrastructure and used to service bank overdrafts. After just about breaking even for half a dozen years, the resort made a loss of £200,000 last year, raising serious questions about its future and the viability of Scottish skiing.
Scotland’s four other resorts have all enjoyed good conditions this year. Iain Hayes, 22, from Aviemore, who has been skiing in Scotland since he was 3, said yesterday: “These are the best conditions I can remember for ten years. The cover is incredible. It’s opened up the whole mountain.”
Source
Teacher accuses British Islamic school of racism
A former teacher at an Islamic school, who alleged that it taught an offensive and racist view of non-Muslims, has been awarded 70,000 pounds by an employment tribunal after winning his case for unfair dismissal. Colin Cook told the tribunal in Watford that pupils were taught from Arabic books that likened Jews and Christians to "monkeys" and "pigs" at The King Fahad Academy, which is funded and run by the Saudi Arabian Government. The tribunal ruled that Mr Cook, a British Muslim, was unfairly dismissed from his 36,000 pounds-a-year post at the school in Acton, West London, in December 2006 after blowing the whistle on systematic cheating at a GCSE exam.
The panel found that the school created a "smokescreen" to try to justify his dismissal after 18 years' unblemished service. It awarded Mr Cook 58,800 pounds in compensation for loss of earnings and 10,500 for injury to feelings. But it rejected his claim that the school discriminated against him on racial grounds.
Mr Cook told the hearing that after leaving the school another member of staff gave him extracts from an Arabic textbook, which encouraged students to believe that all religions other than Islam were worthless. The books referred to "the repugnant characteristics of the Jews". Another passage said: "Those whom God has cursed and with whom he is angry, he has turned into monkeys and pigs. They worship Satan." Mr Cook alleged that the books were spreading race hatred. "They should not be brought into this country and they should not be used in this country," he said.
The school denied ever teaching any form of racial hatred and insisted that the offending passages in the books were "misinterpreted" and were never used in class. But it later got rid of the books.
The school was established in 1985, with the aim of providing a high-quality education acceptable to the Saudi and British authorities for the children of Saudi diplomats and other Muslim families in London. Some of the children of the jailed extremist clerics Abu Hamza al-Masri and Abu Qatada are pupils at the school, which charges fees of up to 1,500 pounds per year for day students.
Mr Cook alleged that in June 2006 staff wrongly allowed pupils to refer to heavily annotated course books during an English language GCSE exam. The tribunal was told that when he suggested that the school might be trying to cover up his allegations, a senior colleague told him: "This is not England. It is Saudi Arabia." Mr Cook then took his complaints direct to the Edexcel exam board.
Mr Cook of Feltham, West London, taught English as a second language at the school. Giving evidence to the tribunal, he said that some pupils "talked as if they did not live in London at all". When he queried how Abu Hamza and Abu Qatada could be paying school fees when they were said to be on benefits, he was told to mind his own business. He also claimed the school was seen as an extension of the Saudi Embassy rather than part of Britain, with Saudi teachers even enjoying diplomatic immunity.
Mr Cook's solicitor, Lawrence Davies, said: "Safeguards under English law were thrown out of the window when Mr Cook was sacked. "This school must learn that it is not the Saudi way or the highway. The tribunal has upheld justice and protected the whistle-blower." The tribunal panel was not required to rule on Mr Cook's allegations about the school's curriculum. But in its judgment, it said it had considered Mr Cook to be a "truthful witness". As he was a respected teacher, with an 18-year unblemished record, it ruled that the impact of his dismissal had been "nothing short of life-changing" for Mr Cook. He had received a "harsh punishment for doing what he thought was the right thing to do", it concluded.
Mr Cook said last night: "I have been accused by people at the school and outside the school of lies and distortion. The school inferred that I had endangered pupils with my allegations. "The evidence speaks otherwise. I told the truth all along. Islam teaches peace and honesty. Hopefully, my accusers will now realise that I acted justly and for the good of the school."
Source
Saturday, April 19, 2008
The Junk juggernaut rolls on
Post below lifted from Prof. Brignell. See the original for links
It is rather a depressing thought that the Telegraph is the nearest thing that Britain has to a serious newspaper. This week it has featured an outbreak of empty scares based on meta-studies, absurdly small studies and, of course, ridiculous relative risks (RR).
The first was a scare involving a popular vehicle for of self dosing, vitamins. While it is clear that people on a normal diet with a normal metabolism are wasting their money on these supplements, this is no excuse for spreading unnecessary alarm. With one possible exception, extra vitamins are simply useless. The exception is vitamin A. While a deficiency of this compound can cause serious diseases, including childhood blindness and death, an excess can suppress growth; stop menstruation; damage red blood corpuscles and cause skin rashes, headaches, nausea, and jaundice. Nevertheless, a meta-study yielding RRs of 1.16 or less adds nothing to the sum of human happiness and merely fuels pointless scare journalism.
Breast cancer has long been a favourite of the scare-mongers. For understandable reasons it roused fear in all women. It is frequently used to provide ammunition for the zealots, so the research tends to be directed towards their favourite targets. Now we are told that one glass of wine a day increases the risk of breast cancer (RR 1.07). Sandy tells about the provenance of this vital "research". In the very same week other “experts” picked on another favourite target, obesity. A small study (Trojan Number 547) indicated that fat women with breast cancer are more likely to die than their slim sisters (RR about 1.4). We are not told just how many were regarded as obese, but even if it were about a half of them, the number of excess deaths would be of the order of 12.
As we have observed before, small studies are not just useless, they are malign, as the phenomenon of funnel plots reveals.
Just in case you did not get the message from our sponsors, the risk of Alzheimer’s is increased for smokers, drinkers and those with raised cholesterol. The inclusion of tobacco is interesting, because before the Great Censorship, it was widely accepted that smokers were half as likely to get Alzheimer’s as non-smokers (likewise Parkinson’s to boot). Indeed, this promoted one of the first uses of the word paradox as a paranym. What a strange coincidence it is that the causes of these diseases all happen to be the favourite targets of various groups of zealots and not something else, such as lettuce.
Massive rise in unqualified foreign teachers in Britain
You would have to be desperate to teach in many of Britain's "sink" schools
The number of unqualified teachers taking classes in state schools has risen fivefold since Labour came to power, figures suggest. Two thirds of these teachers were hired from overseas, prompting fears that schools are being forced to look abroad to recruit staff as many British teachers quit the profession. Data released by ministers to the Conservatives yesterday shows that there were 16,710 staff teaching in England’s state schools without qualified teacher status (QTS) in 2007, up from 2,940 ten years earlier. This includes 10,970 teachers trained overseas, up from 2,480 in 1997. In addition 1,562 teachers from the European Economic Area are teaching in Britain after being awarded QTS last year, including 707 teachers from Poland.
Michael Gove, the Shadow Children’s Secretary, said that the fivefold rise in teachers without QTS was surprising as the Government’s advice was that everyone teaching in state schools “should have the official qualification”. He said that many qualified staff were “being put off teaching” by increasing problems with discipline and bureaucracy.
The figures follow data obtained by the Tories showing that there were more than 250,000 qualified teachers in England under 60 who are not currently teaching and 91,000 qualified teachers who have never taught.
A spokesman for the Department for Children, Schools and Families said that the vast majority of teachers from overseas were qualified in their home countries. And he said that all teachers from overseas had to convert their qualifications to QTS within four years of arriving. “We are clear that schools should only employ teachers from overseas if they can demonstrate they have the skills, experience and qualifications relevant to the post,” he added.
A spokeswoman for the Training and Development Agency for Schools said that there had been a small short-fall in the number of teacher training recruits this year. But she said: “It is worth noting that around 10,000 people return to teaching every year.”
Source
Innocent photographer or terrorist?
Misplaced fears about terror, privacy and child protection are preventing amateur photographers from enjoying their hobby, say campaigners.
Phil Smith thought ex-EastEnder Letitia Dean turning on the Christmas lights in Ipswich would make a good snap for his collection. The 49-year-old started by firing off a few shots of the warm-up act on stage. But before the main attraction showed up, Mr Smith was challenged by a police officer who asked if he had a licence for the camera. After explaining he didn't need one, he was taken down a side-street for a formal "stop and search", then asked to delete the photos and ordered not take any more. So he slunk home with his camera.
"People were still taking photos with mobile phones and pocket cameras, so maybe it was because mine looked like a professional camera with a flash on top," he says. "I wasn't very pleased because I was taken through the crowd and through the barriers at the front and people were probably thinking 'I wonder what he was doing.' "To be pulled out of a crowd is very daunting and I wasn't aware of my rights. "It's a sad state of affairs today if an amateur photographer can't stand in the street taking photographs."
But he's not the only snapper to fall foul of the authorities while innocently pursuing a hobby or working. Austin Mitchell MP has tabled a motion in the Commons that has drawn on cross-party support from 150 other MPs, calling on the Home Office and the police to educate officers about photographers' rights. Mr Mitchell, himself a keen photographer, was challenged twice, once by a lock-keeper while photographing a barge on the Leeds to Liverpool canal and once on the beach at Cleethorpes. "There's a general alarm about terrorism and about paedophiles, two heady cocktails, and police and PCSOs [police community support officers] and wardens and authorities generally seem to be worried about this."
Photographers have every right to take photos in a public place, he says, and it's crazy for officials to challenge them when there are so many security cameras around and so many people now have cameras on phones. But it's usually inexperienced officers responsible. "If a decision is made to crack down on photographers, it should be made at the top. It's a general officiousness and a desire to interfere with people going about their legitimate business."
Steve Carroll was another hapless victim of this growing suspicion. Police seized the film from his camera while he was out taking snaps in a Hull shopping centre. They later returned it but a police investigation found they had acted correctly because he appeared to be taking photographs covertly. And photography enthusiast Adam Jones has started an online petition on the Downing Street website urging the prime minister to clarify the law. It has gained hundreds of supporters. He says it has become increasingly difficult to take photos in public places because of terrorism fears.
Holidaymakers to some overseas destinations will be familiar with this sort of attitude - travel guides frequently caution readers that innocently posing for a snapshot outside a government building could lead to some stern questions from local law enforcers. But in Britain this sort of attitude is new. So what is the law?
"If you are a normal person going about your business and you see something you want to take a picture of, then you are fine unless you're taking picture of something inherently private," says Hanna Basha, partner at solicitors Carter-Ruck. "But if it's the London Marathon or something, you're fine." There are also restrictions around some public buildings, like those involved in national defence.
Child protection has been an issue for years, says Stewart Gibson of the Bureau of Freelance Photographers, but what's happened recently is a rather odd interpretation of privacy and heightened fears about terrorism. "They [police, park wardens, security guards] seem to think you can't take pictures of people in public places. It's reached a point where everyone in the photographic world has become so concerned we're mounting campaigns and trying to publicise this."
It seems to be increasing, he says. "There's a great deal of paranoia around but the police are on alert for anything that vaguely resembles terrorism. It's difficult because the more professional a photographer, paradoxically, the more likely they are to be stopped or questioned. "If people were using photos for terrorism purposes they would be using the smallest camera possible."
The National Union of Journalists has staged a demo to highlight how media photographers are wrongly challenged by police. In May last year, Thames Valley Police overturned a caution issued to photographer Andy Handley of the MK News in Milton Keynes, after he took pictures at the scene of a road accident.
Guidelines agreed between senior police and the media were adopted by all forces in England and Wales last year. They state that police have no power to prevent the media taking photos. They state that "once images are recorded, [the police] have no power to delete or confiscate them without a court order, even if [the police] think they contain damaging or useful evidence."
And in the case of Phil Smith, an official complaint about the Christmas lights incident helped sort matters out. Not only did he receive a written apology from Suffolk Police, but also a visit from an inspector, who explained that the officer, a special constable, had acted wrongly. And there was one consolation for Mr Smith as he trudged home while lamenting the shots of Letitia Dean that never were - she didn't turn up anyway.
Source
An interview with Kenneth Minogue
By Bernard Chapin
As a long time reader of The New Criterion, I've come across Kenneth Minogue's name several times. Not only is he the author of excellent essays, unlike the average conservative commentator, he is also a member of the professorate. Currently, he is an Honorary Fellow of the London School of Economics, and began his career at the college in 1954 as an Assistant Lecturer in Political Science. Mr. Minogue was born in New Zealand and primarily attended school in Australia; although, he also took an Economics degree from London University. In 2003, he was awarded the Australian Centenary Medal for services to political science. He is the author of numerous papers, essays, and books such as The Liberal Mind, The Concept of a University, Alien Powers: The Pure Theory of Ideology, and Politics: A Very Short Introduction. The interview:
BC: Thanks for taking the time to answer a few questions, Mr. Minogue. Let me begin by asking you that, as someone with an extensive background in the university, indeed as someone who wrote The Concept of the University in 2004, what should be the defining characteristics of such institutions?
KM: The basic point about universities is that they are reflective rather than practical institutions. Nothing in them is ever urgent. The current decadence of most places calling themselves universities is that they are full of unsophisticated people with opinions about how society and its members ought to conduct themselves - along with a passion to entrench those opinions in binding rules. Many professors today are simple moral dogmatists who think that we at last know for certain what is right and wrong. The only thing we may actually be confident about is that, in a generation or two, these opinions will be replaced by others.
BC: Does it make one an incurable romantic to argue that higher education's purpose is to search for truth? How anathema is such a notion today? How prevalent are those "scholars" whose primary interest is not truth but the practice of indoctrinating their students?
KM: As the classic formulation had it, universities are distinguished by the "disinterested pursuit of truth" - a somewhat risky pursuit at times. Amid the current vulgarity, many students would not even understand the word "disinterested." Scholarship and reflection can certainly be found patchily all over the place, but all too many professors are merely peddling some form of political salvationism. Universities used to be stocked by the unworldly and the rich. Both sets of people were valuable because they were not trying to "get on" by trying to please future employers. This gave the academic world in earlier times a sense of adventure, of openness.
BC: What do you make of political correctness? There are those who would argue it's a thing of the past. Frankly, I don't see how that's possible. It seems to me that cultural Marxism is more regnant than ever, would you agree?
KM: In my time, a great deal of what used to be intuitive and instinctive (such as good manners) has been replaced by the rule-bound and rationalised. Political correctness is a politicised version of good manners offering power to the kind of meddlesome people who want to tell others how to behave. As to Marxism, it was merely one more illusion that purported to be the key to life. It is significant in that it reveals one of the dominant passions still at work in our civilisation - the passion to create happiness by technology in the hands of a supposedly enlightened elite.
BC: If you were to rewrite The Liberal Mind, what specifically has changed since its original publication? Many of us, in America, insist that conservatives are the real liberals, and refuse to make use of term "liberal" when describing the left. Do you think that it's misleading, in an age of hate crime legislation and creeping socialism, to pretend that a statist disposition equates with liberal tendencies?
KM: The Liberal Mind was a critical account of precisely what Americans call "liberalism", which is a sentimental kind of egalitarianism. My targets today would focus even more directly on the fake compassion diffused by politicians trying to sound like men of the people. It is vital never to forget (if I may adapt Scott Fitzgerald) that "the powerful are different from us." Turning politics into a kind of soggy public benevolence at the expense of taxpayers does no service to anyone.
BC: Forgive my non-detachment, but what a magnificent article you penned this month for The New Criterion. It's called "Democracy and Political Naivet‚" for those who may not have read it. One of your central arguments is that "some classes of people are more dangerously na‹ve than others." I had to laugh when I saw it as it would definitely offend every cultural commissar in existence, but could you tell readers why this is the case?
KM: "Democracy and Political Naivete" was concerned with contemporary pieties. Piety is a form of respect for one's religion, as when the Romans admired "pious Aeneas." In politics, piety is merely corrupt, largely because it is focused on abstract classes of people such as Gays, Blacks, Women and others who sometimes package themselves as victims. Don't get me wrong - some of my best friends are Gays, Blacks, Women etc. but I don't have to genuflect every time they are presented as suffering, and often suffering because of White Male brutes like me. One should always be alert to the targets of ridicule and derision in public life (authority, pharmaceutical companies, corporations, evangelists) on the one hand, and those who automatically evoke pity on the other.
BC: How much has widespread female participation in electoral politics to blame for the triumph of emotion over reason in regards to government's stance on the big issues of the day?
KM: Yes, the abstract class of "women" has quite a lot to answer for. Plenty of women are of course bright, amusing and hard headed, but there is a lot of wimpish sentimentality being peddled by professional women. Harvard has become a laughing stock because of the Larry Summers affair, with some women going faint at the suggestion that women - as a class - might not be naturally good at maths. The problem results from the Annie Oakley view of women as able to do exactly what men do (which obviously they can't) and which sells everything valuable about female distinctiveness down the river in exchange for an absurdity. One consequence has been to sentimentalise life and diminish important virtues (by no means exclusively male) such as courage and self-control.
BC: You mention that the male chauvinist position is that men are more creatures of reason than are women, but it seems to me that it is also the feminist position. Is not the truly sexist position one which asserts that Woman, by nature of her genitalia, has something more important to say about politics than Man?
KM: As I said in the piece mentioned above, some women have a distinct and valuable talent for politics. I think the French, for example, lost a trick in going for the Salic Law (excluding female rules) in the Middle Ages. But my guess is that more women than men want to spend taxpayers' money in supposedly improving the lives of those who cannot do much for themselves.
BC: Is "intellectual" wholly a term of derision nowadays? Is there any merit to the concept of certain individuals maintaining the role of intellectual in society? This question has perplexed me ever since I read Paul Johnson's work on the subject.
KM: Public intellectuals are journalists, and professors are a lot closer to journalism today than they used to be. Being a journalist used to be a deadly insult in academic terms; no longer. It used to be the case that the French had intellectuals, and the English were merely educated. These days we have intellectuals coming out of our ears. And they are useful, no doubt, in turning public issues into matters of rational debate. Even in answering your questions, I am behaving rather like an intellectual. Few of us today can resist the pleasure of having opinions on subjects we know little about. That is why we need Socratic irony so badly.
BC: What are you working on at the moment?
KM: I am currently working on a book that tries to track the way in which our moral sentiments have evolved in the last century or so. Moral integrity in our dealings with our immediate associates - family, friends, colleagues - has become of less significance than taking up an "ethical" attitude to strangers who are supposedly in need, such as the poor and those living (according to one of those idiotic statistics diffused by charitable lobbies) on "less than a dollar a day." The dominant strain in morality is philanthropic: it admires devoting one's life to caring for others. It is "ethical" in a political sense, and no doubt in some ways admirable, but it suits best those who don't really have a life of their own to lead.
BC: Lastly, and I generally ask this question, do you think that conservatives have a chance to win the culture war? If not, can we at least roll back some of the gains made by the left?
KM: I regard Conservatives as people in touch with reality, and radicals as people aspiring to improve the world. In a sense, I suppose, we need both, though the dominance of improving political radicalism in Western countries these many decades seems to me to have made most things worse. Human beings, as Eliot said, can't bear much reality, so conservatives had better resign themselves to being a kind of saving remnant. Reality seldom wins votes. So we can't win, but winning isn't everything. Integrity is much more important.
Source
Post below lifted from Prof. Brignell. See the original for links
It is rather a depressing thought that the Telegraph is the nearest thing that Britain has to a serious newspaper. This week it has featured an outbreak of empty scares based on meta-studies, absurdly small studies and, of course, ridiculous relative risks (RR).
The first was a scare involving a popular vehicle for of self dosing, vitamins. While it is clear that people on a normal diet with a normal metabolism are wasting their money on these supplements, this is no excuse for spreading unnecessary alarm. With one possible exception, extra vitamins are simply useless. The exception is vitamin A. While a deficiency of this compound can cause serious diseases, including childhood blindness and death, an excess can suppress growth; stop menstruation; damage red blood corpuscles and cause skin rashes, headaches, nausea, and jaundice. Nevertheless, a meta-study yielding RRs of 1.16 or less adds nothing to the sum of human happiness and merely fuels pointless scare journalism.
Breast cancer has long been a favourite of the scare-mongers. For understandable reasons it roused fear in all women. It is frequently used to provide ammunition for the zealots, so the research tends to be directed towards their favourite targets. Now we are told that one glass of wine a day increases the risk of breast cancer (RR 1.07). Sandy tells about the provenance of this vital "research". In the very same week other “experts” picked on another favourite target, obesity. A small study (Trojan Number 547) indicated that fat women with breast cancer are more likely to die than their slim sisters (RR about 1.4). We are not told just how many were regarded as obese, but even if it were about a half of them, the number of excess deaths would be of the order of 12.
As we have observed before, small studies are not just useless, they are malign, as the phenomenon of funnel plots reveals.
Just in case you did not get the message from our sponsors, the risk of Alzheimer’s is increased for smokers, drinkers and those with raised cholesterol. The inclusion of tobacco is interesting, because before the Great Censorship, it was widely accepted that smokers were half as likely to get Alzheimer’s as non-smokers (likewise Parkinson’s to boot). Indeed, this promoted one of the first uses of the word paradox as a paranym. What a strange coincidence it is that the causes of these diseases all happen to be the favourite targets of various groups of zealots and not something else, such as lettuce.
Massive rise in unqualified foreign teachers in Britain
You would have to be desperate to teach in many of Britain's "sink" schools
The number of unqualified teachers taking classes in state schools has risen fivefold since Labour came to power, figures suggest. Two thirds of these teachers were hired from overseas, prompting fears that schools are being forced to look abroad to recruit staff as many British teachers quit the profession. Data released by ministers to the Conservatives yesterday shows that there were 16,710 staff teaching in England’s state schools without qualified teacher status (QTS) in 2007, up from 2,940 ten years earlier. This includes 10,970 teachers trained overseas, up from 2,480 in 1997. In addition 1,562 teachers from the European Economic Area are teaching in Britain after being awarded QTS last year, including 707 teachers from Poland.
Michael Gove, the Shadow Children’s Secretary, said that the fivefold rise in teachers without QTS was surprising as the Government’s advice was that everyone teaching in state schools “should have the official qualification”. He said that many qualified staff were “being put off teaching” by increasing problems with discipline and bureaucracy.
The figures follow data obtained by the Tories showing that there were more than 250,000 qualified teachers in England under 60 who are not currently teaching and 91,000 qualified teachers who have never taught.
A spokesman for the Department for Children, Schools and Families said that the vast majority of teachers from overseas were qualified in their home countries. And he said that all teachers from overseas had to convert their qualifications to QTS within four years of arriving. “We are clear that schools should only employ teachers from overseas if they can demonstrate they have the skills, experience and qualifications relevant to the post,” he added.
A spokeswoman for the Training and Development Agency for Schools said that there had been a small short-fall in the number of teacher training recruits this year. But she said: “It is worth noting that around 10,000 people return to teaching every year.”
Source
Innocent photographer or terrorist?
Misplaced fears about terror, privacy and child protection are preventing amateur photographers from enjoying their hobby, say campaigners.
Phil Smith thought ex-EastEnder Letitia Dean turning on the Christmas lights in Ipswich would make a good snap for his collection. The 49-year-old started by firing off a few shots of the warm-up act on stage. But before the main attraction showed up, Mr Smith was challenged by a police officer who asked if he had a licence for the camera. After explaining he didn't need one, he was taken down a side-street for a formal "stop and search", then asked to delete the photos and ordered not take any more. So he slunk home with his camera.
"People were still taking photos with mobile phones and pocket cameras, so maybe it was because mine looked like a professional camera with a flash on top," he says. "I wasn't very pleased because I was taken through the crowd and through the barriers at the front and people were probably thinking 'I wonder what he was doing.' "To be pulled out of a crowd is very daunting and I wasn't aware of my rights. "It's a sad state of affairs today if an amateur photographer can't stand in the street taking photographs."
But he's not the only snapper to fall foul of the authorities while innocently pursuing a hobby or working. Austin Mitchell MP has tabled a motion in the Commons that has drawn on cross-party support from 150 other MPs, calling on the Home Office and the police to educate officers about photographers' rights. Mr Mitchell, himself a keen photographer, was challenged twice, once by a lock-keeper while photographing a barge on the Leeds to Liverpool canal and once on the beach at Cleethorpes. "There's a general alarm about terrorism and about paedophiles, two heady cocktails, and police and PCSOs [police community support officers] and wardens and authorities generally seem to be worried about this."
Photographers have every right to take photos in a public place, he says, and it's crazy for officials to challenge them when there are so many security cameras around and so many people now have cameras on phones. But it's usually inexperienced officers responsible. "If a decision is made to crack down on photographers, it should be made at the top. It's a general officiousness and a desire to interfere with people going about their legitimate business."
Steve Carroll was another hapless victim of this growing suspicion. Police seized the film from his camera while he was out taking snaps in a Hull shopping centre. They later returned it but a police investigation found they had acted correctly because he appeared to be taking photographs covertly. And photography enthusiast Adam Jones has started an online petition on the Downing Street website urging the prime minister to clarify the law. It has gained hundreds of supporters. He says it has become increasingly difficult to take photos in public places because of terrorism fears.
Holidaymakers to some overseas destinations will be familiar with this sort of attitude - travel guides frequently caution readers that innocently posing for a snapshot outside a government building could lead to some stern questions from local law enforcers. But in Britain this sort of attitude is new. So what is the law?
"If you are a normal person going about your business and you see something you want to take a picture of, then you are fine unless you're taking picture of something inherently private," says Hanna Basha, partner at solicitors Carter-Ruck. "But if it's the London Marathon or something, you're fine." There are also restrictions around some public buildings, like those involved in national defence.
Child protection has been an issue for years, says Stewart Gibson of the Bureau of Freelance Photographers, but what's happened recently is a rather odd interpretation of privacy and heightened fears about terrorism. "They [police, park wardens, security guards] seem to think you can't take pictures of people in public places. It's reached a point where everyone in the photographic world has become so concerned we're mounting campaigns and trying to publicise this."
It seems to be increasing, he says. "There's a great deal of paranoia around but the police are on alert for anything that vaguely resembles terrorism. It's difficult because the more professional a photographer, paradoxically, the more likely they are to be stopped or questioned. "If people were using photos for terrorism purposes they would be using the smallest camera possible."
The National Union of Journalists has staged a demo to highlight how media photographers are wrongly challenged by police. In May last year, Thames Valley Police overturned a caution issued to photographer Andy Handley of the MK News in Milton Keynes, after he took pictures at the scene of a road accident.
Guidelines agreed between senior police and the media were adopted by all forces in England and Wales last year. They state that police have no power to prevent the media taking photos. They state that "once images are recorded, [the police] have no power to delete or confiscate them without a court order, even if [the police] think they contain damaging or useful evidence."
And in the case of Phil Smith, an official complaint about the Christmas lights incident helped sort matters out. Not only did he receive a written apology from Suffolk Police, but also a visit from an inspector, who explained that the officer, a special constable, had acted wrongly. And there was one consolation for Mr Smith as he trudged home while lamenting the shots of Letitia Dean that never were - she didn't turn up anyway.
Source
An interview with Kenneth Minogue
By Bernard Chapin
As a long time reader of The New Criterion, I've come across Kenneth Minogue's name several times. Not only is he the author of excellent essays, unlike the average conservative commentator, he is also a member of the professorate. Currently, he is an Honorary Fellow of the London School of Economics, and began his career at the college in 1954 as an Assistant Lecturer in Political Science. Mr. Minogue was born in New Zealand and primarily attended school in Australia; although, he also took an Economics degree from London University. In 2003, he was awarded the Australian Centenary Medal for services to political science. He is the author of numerous papers, essays, and books such as The Liberal Mind, The Concept of a University, Alien Powers: The Pure Theory of Ideology, and Politics: A Very Short Introduction. The interview:
BC: Thanks for taking the time to answer a few questions, Mr. Minogue. Let me begin by asking you that, as someone with an extensive background in the university, indeed as someone who wrote The Concept of the University in 2004, what should be the defining characteristics of such institutions?
KM: The basic point about universities is that they are reflective rather than practical institutions. Nothing in them is ever urgent. The current decadence of most places calling themselves universities is that they are full of unsophisticated people with opinions about how society and its members ought to conduct themselves - along with a passion to entrench those opinions in binding rules. Many professors today are simple moral dogmatists who think that we at last know for certain what is right and wrong. The only thing we may actually be confident about is that, in a generation or two, these opinions will be replaced by others.
BC: Does it make one an incurable romantic to argue that higher education's purpose is to search for truth? How anathema is such a notion today? How prevalent are those "scholars" whose primary interest is not truth but the practice of indoctrinating their students?
KM: As the classic formulation had it, universities are distinguished by the "disinterested pursuit of truth" - a somewhat risky pursuit at times. Amid the current vulgarity, many students would not even understand the word "disinterested." Scholarship and reflection can certainly be found patchily all over the place, but all too many professors are merely peddling some form of political salvationism. Universities used to be stocked by the unworldly and the rich. Both sets of people were valuable because they were not trying to "get on" by trying to please future employers. This gave the academic world in earlier times a sense of adventure, of openness.
BC: What do you make of political correctness? There are those who would argue it's a thing of the past. Frankly, I don't see how that's possible. It seems to me that cultural Marxism is more regnant than ever, would you agree?
KM: In my time, a great deal of what used to be intuitive and instinctive (such as good manners) has been replaced by the rule-bound and rationalised. Political correctness is a politicised version of good manners offering power to the kind of meddlesome people who want to tell others how to behave. As to Marxism, it was merely one more illusion that purported to be the key to life. It is significant in that it reveals one of the dominant passions still at work in our civilisation - the passion to create happiness by technology in the hands of a supposedly enlightened elite.
BC: If you were to rewrite The Liberal Mind, what specifically has changed since its original publication? Many of us, in America, insist that conservatives are the real liberals, and refuse to make use of term "liberal" when describing the left. Do you think that it's misleading, in an age of hate crime legislation and creeping socialism, to pretend that a statist disposition equates with liberal tendencies?
KM: The Liberal Mind was a critical account of precisely what Americans call "liberalism", which is a sentimental kind of egalitarianism. My targets today would focus even more directly on the fake compassion diffused by politicians trying to sound like men of the people. It is vital never to forget (if I may adapt Scott Fitzgerald) that "the powerful are different from us." Turning politics into a kind of soggy public benevolence at the expense of taxpayers does no service to anyone.
BC: Forgive my non-detachment, but what a magnificent article you penned this month for The New Criterion. It's called "Democracy and Political Naivet‚" for those who may not have read it. One of your central arguments is that "some classes of people are more dangerously na‹ve than others." I had to laugh when I saw it as it would definitely offend every cultural commissar in existence, but could you tell readers why this is the case?
KM: "Democracy and Political Naivete" was concerned with contemporary pieties. Piety is a form of respect for one's religion, as when the Romans admired "pious Aeneas." In politics, piety is merely corrupt, largely because it is focused on abstract classes of people such as Gays, Blacks, Women and others who sometimes package themselves as victims. Don't get me wrong - some of my best friends are Gays, Blacks, Women etc. but I don't have to genuflect every time they are presented as suffering, and often suffering because of White Male brutes like me. One should always be alert to the targets of ridicule and derision in public life (authority, pharmaceutical companies, corporations, evangelists) on the one hand, and those who automatically evoke pity on the other.
BC: How much has widespread female participation in electoral politics to blame for the triumph of emotion over reason in regards to government's stance on the big issues of the day?
KM: Yes, the abstract class of "women" has quite a lot to answer for. Plenty of women are of course bright, amusing and hard headed, but there is a lot of wimpish sentimentality being peddled by professional women. Harvard has become a laughing stock because of the Larry Summers affair, with some women going faint at the suggestion that women - as a class - might not be naturally good at maths. The problem results from the Annie Oakley view of women as able to do exactly what men do (which obviously they can't) and which sells everything valuable about female distinctiveness down the river in exchange for an absurdity. One consequence has been to sentimentalise life and diminish important virtues (by no means exclusively male) such as courage and self-control.
BC: You mention that the male chauvinist position is that men are more creatures of reason than are women, but it seems to me that it is also the feminist position. Is not the truly sexist position one which asserts that Woman, by nature of her genitalia, has something more important to say about politics than Man?
KM: As I said in the piece mentioned above, some women have a distinct and valuable talent for politics. I think the French, for example, lost a trick in going for the Salic Law (excluding female rules) in the Middle Ages. But my guess is that more women than men want to spend taxpayers' money in supposedly improving the lives of those who cannot do much for themselves.
BC: Is "intellectual" wholly a term of derision nowadays? Is there any merit to the concept of certain individuals maintaining the role of intellectual in society? This question has perplexed me ever since I read Paul Johnson's work on the subject.
KM: Public intellectuals are journalists, and professors are a lot closer to journalism today than they used to be. Being a journalist used to be a deadly insult in academic terms; no longer. It used to be the case that the French had intellectuals, and the English were merely educated. These days we have intellectuals coming out of our ears. And they are useful, no doubt, in turning public issues into matters of rational debate. Even in answering your questions, I am behaving rather like an intellectual. Few of us today can resist the pleasure of having opinions on subjects we know little about. That is why we need Socratic irony so badly.
BC: What are you working on at the moment?
KM: I am currently working on a book that tries to track the way in which our moral sentiments have evolved in the last century or so. Moral integrity in our dealings with our immediate associates - family, friends, colleagues - has become of less significance than taking up an "ethical" attitude to strangers who are supposedly in need, such as the poor and those living (according to one of those idiotic statistics diffused by charitable lobbies) on "less than a dollar a day." The dominant strain in morality is philanthropic: it admires devoting one's life to caring for others. It is "ethical" in a political sense, and no doubt in some ways admirable, but it suits best those who don't really have a life of their own to lead.
BC: Lastly, and I generally ask this question, do you think that conservatives have a chance to win the culture war? If not, can we at least roll back some of the gains made by the left?
KM: I regard Conservatives as people in touch with reality, and radicals as people aspiring to improve the world. In a sense, I suppose, we need both, though the dominance of improving political radicalism in Western countries these many decades seems to me to have made most things worse. Human beings, as Eliot said, can't bear much reality, so conservatives had better resign themselves to being a kind of saving remnant. Reality seldom wins votes. So we can't win, but winning isn't everything. Integrity is much more important.
Source
Friday, April 18, 2008
Immigrant crime: A good old British "fudge" again
What no policeman or other official can say in Britain is that the big problem is not with Poles but with blacks. And the "British" population now includes large numbers of blacks. So comparing immgrants overall with the "British" population overall is uninformative. On both sides of the ledger you will have a mixed population of blacks and whites. Comparing crime among immigrant blacks with white British crime, however, would reveal a REALLY alarming situation -- which is why no such comparison will be made available
The influx of migrant workers into England and Wales from eastern Europe has not led to the crime wave that some have suggested, a police report says. Since 2004, about 800,000 people have registered for work in Britain from many eastern European countries.
The report by two chief constables has been sent to the home secretary ahead of a meeting with senior officers. It says the influx of migrants has created problems in some areas but overall crime levels have not risen. With the recent expansion of the EU, migrants have entered the UK from such countries as Poland, Slovakia, Lithuania, and more recently Romania and Bulgaria.
Last year, Cambridgeshire's chief constable, Julie Spence, sparked controversy by claiming the sudden influx in east European workers had led to community tensions and increases in certain types of crime. Several other forces said they were having similar problems.
The Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) canvassed the views of detectives and community officers across the UK. It found no evidence that crime was more prevalent among East Europeans than other groups. It said the sheer number of migrants in some areas had caused tensions and policing pressures - but the problems were minimal. "Our report is very clear: it has led to an increase in some tensions. "Particularly, say, those areas which have had higher concentrations - you get misunderstandings, you get rumours, you've got big pressure on things like housing. You get rumours that wages are being held down," Mr Fahy said.
"What is different about this wave of immigration is that it's so sudden. "Which has created a different dynamic which has created tensions and people like Julie Spence have pointed out that we have had huge increases in the interpreters budget, but that's not really just about eastern Europeans being offenders, it's also about them being victims and witnesses of crime." He said the nationality of offenders should be recorded to make it easier to monitor crime trends, and called on eastern European states to share criminal intelligence more widely.
Mrs Spence stood by her comments, saying that immigrants were not responsible for a "crime wave" but recent population growth had given police "significant challenges", particularly with non-English speakers, as the force deals with people from 93 cultures, speaking 100 languages. "Looking after victims and witnesses and managing community tensions is substantially more complex now than three years ago," she said. "We have seen an increase in specific offences such as motoring offences, sex trafficking, and worker exploitation - a form of modern-day slavery. Our workload and its complexity is increasing. "Some parts of the country are no doubt unaffected by this. However, Cambridgeshire certainly is."
Source
British universities being "bought"
Jonathan Evans, the director-general of MI5, has warned the government that donations of hundreds of millions of pounds from Saudi Arabia and powerful Muslim organizations in Pakistan, Indonesia and the Gulf Straits have led to a "dangerous increase in the spread of extremism in leading university campuses". Eight of Britain's leading universities, including Oxford and Cambridge, have accepted more than 236 million pounds sterling, about $460 million, in donations from Muslim organizations, "many of which are known to have ties to extremist groups, some have links to terrorist organizations." The bulk of the donations have come in the past five years during a period when terrorist activities in Britain have increased. Home Secretary Jacqui Smith announced over the weekend that MI5 was now investigating "42 current terror threats and the possibility of attacks is increasingly real."
Universities that have accepted the money also include the London School of Economics, the City of London, Exeter and Dundee universities. All have a growing number of Muslim students. A major donation has included 20 million pounds sterling from the late King Fahd of Saudi Arabia to help establish the Oxford Center for Islamic Studies, which will be affiliated to the university when it opens next year.
The MI5 claims follow a lengthy investigation that revealed 70 percent of political lectures at the Middle Eastern Center at St. Anthony’s College in Oxford were "implacably hostile to the West and Israel." The MI5 claims are reinforced by Prof. Anthony Glees, the director of Brunel University's Center for Intelligence and Security Studies, a think-tank with close links to the Intelligence Services. "Up to 48 universities in Britain have been infiltrated by fundamentalists financed by Muslim groups. The potential threat this poses is obvious to the security of the country," Glees said.
However, Prime Minister Gordon Brown insists it is strategically "important to study Islam." He has authorized one million pounds sterling to be spent at the campuses on a counter radicalization drive.
Source
Prince of Wales's guide to alternative medicine `inaccurate'
The Prince of Wales is being challenged today to withdraw two guides promoting alternative medicine, by scientists who say that they make misleading and inaccurate claims about its benefits. The documents, published by the Prince and his Foundation for Integrated Health, misrepresent scientific evidence about therapies such as homoeopathy, acupuncture and reflexology, say the authors of a new evaluation of alternative treatments.
In a letter to The Times, Edzard Ernst, Professor of Complementary Medicine at the University of Exeter, and Simon Singh, a science writer and broadcaster, call on the Prince to recall the publications, one of which was produced with a œ900,000 grant from the Department of Health. "They both contain numerous misleading and inaccurate claims concerning the supposed benefits of alternative medicine," they say. "The nation cannot be served by promoting ineffective and sometimes dangerous alternative treatments."
Professor Ernst and Dr Singh say the Prince accepted the importance of "rigorous scientific evidence" to alternative medicine, in an article he wrote for The Times in 2000, and point out that more than 4,000 research studies have since been published. They analysed these studies and previous research for their new book, Trick or Treatment: Alternative Medicine on Trial, finding that only a few treatments, such as some herbal medicines and acupuncture for pain relief, are backed up by the evidence that the Prince demanded. "The majority of alternative therapies appear to be clinically ineffective and many are downright dangerous," the letter says, and it calls on the Prince to withdraw the publications Complementary Health Care: A Guide for Patients and the Smallwood report.
The first document is a pamphlet, part-funded by the taxpayer, that gives advice on finding practitioners of alternative therapies. It is misleading, Professor Ernst said, because it includes disorders for which alternative remedies have been shown to be ineffective. It states, for example, that chi-ropractic is used to treat asthma, digestive disorders and migraine, when it has been shown by rigorous trials only to be useful for back pain. The guide also promotes acupuncture for addiction, when studies suggest that it has no benefit, and homoeopathy, which a major review for The Lancet has indicated works only as a placebo. "It explains what these therapies are used for, and that carries an implication that they work when the evidence suggests that many do not," Professor Ernst said.
The foundation has already withdrawn some sections of the pamphlet from its website, such as a claim that research has shown healing to have benefits for some medical conditions. The Smallwood report, commissioned by the Prince from Christopher Smallwood, an economist, argued that greater provision of alternative medicine on the NHS could save taxpayers' money. A study in the British Medical Journal has shown that only five research projects have examined the cost-effectiveness of alternative medicine, and all but one found that greater provision would add to costs.
Professor Ernst was consulted by Mr Smallwood, but said that his criticisms were ignored. Sir Michael Peat, the Prince's private secretary, accused Professor Ernst of breaching confidence by discussing a draft of the report with The Times. Natasha Finlayson, of the Prince's Foundation for Integrated Health, said: "We entirely reject the accusation that our online publication Complementary Healthcare: A Guide contains any misleading or inaccurate claims about the benefits of complementary therapies. On the contrary, it treats people as adults and takes a responsible approach by encouraging people to look at reliable sources of information . . . so that they can make informed decisions. The foundation does not promote complementary therapies."
Claims and counters
A Guide for Patients Chiropractic: used in disorders of musculoskeletal system such as spine, neck, shoulder problems. It may also be used for asthma
Professor Ernst: no good evidence for anything other than back pain
Acupuncture: increasingly used in trying to overcome addictions to alcohol, drugs and smoking.
The reliable evidence suggests it does not work for addictions
Cranial therapists: the conditions they treat range from acute to chronic health problems
No good evidence for any of this
Homoeopathy: most often used to treat chronic conditions such as asthma; eczema; fatigue disorders; migraine; menopausal problems; irritable bowel syndrome; Crohn's disease; allergies; repeated infections; depression.
Data do not show homoeopathic remedies to be more than placebos
Reflexologists: work with conditions including pain, chronic fatigue, sinusitis, arthritis, digestive problems, stress-related disorders and menopausal symptoms.
No good evidence for any of this
Reiki: used for physical, mental and emotional conditions
There is no good evidence that Reiki is effective for any condition
Shiatsu: used for a wide range of conditions, from injuries to more general symptoms of poor health
No good evidence for any of this
The Smallwood report Phytodolor: recommended for treatment of UK arthritis patients.
This German preparation is not available in the UK
Manipulative therapies: offer advantages over conventional treatments for lower back pain.
A Cochrane review concludes that there is no evidence that this spinal therapy is superior to other standard treatments
Source
The Irish Model
Dean Godson reviews the memoirs of Jonathan Powell, the Tony Blair aide who helped negotiate the Irish power-sharing agreement.
It's important to appreciate that many in the British government see this experience as a model for future dealings with radical Muslim groups in the Middle East and inside Europe. And they will be pushing that model on a President Obama - very hard and probably very successfully.
Indeed, one could say that in many ways the debate over Obama's proposals to talk to Iran is a proxy debate for this coming debate over applying the Irish model to Islamic extremism and terrorism. Talking to Iran after all is not really so radical a departure: The US is talking to Iran now, and has wanted to talk to Iran for years. The big issues are: Should the US be talking to Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Taliban, and ultimately al Qaeda?
In today's Financial Times, columnist Philip Stephens channels the emerging British official view.
I think a President Obama will find this point of view very appealing. In many ways, that is the true ballot question this November: Is it time for the US to stop fighting Islamic terrorists - and start negotiating with them? Time to quit dismissing their vision of the future as unacceptable - and to start treating it as debatable?
Source
What no policeman or other official can say in Britain is that the big problem is not with Poles but with blacks. And the "British" population now includes large numbers of blacks. So comparing immgrants overall with the "British" population overall is uninformative. On both sides of the ledger you will have a mixed population of blacks and whites. Comparing crime among immigrant blacks with white British crime, however, would reveal a REALLY alarming situation -- which is why no such comparison will be made available
The influx of migrant workers into England and Wales from eastern Europe has not led to the crime wave that some have suggested, a police report says. Since 2004, about 800,000 people have registered for work in Britain from many eastern European countries.
The report by two chief constables has been sent to the home secretary ahead of a meeting with senior officers. It says the influx of migrants has created problems in some areas but overall crime levels have not risen. With the recent expansion of the EU, migrants have entered the UK from such countries as Poland, Slovakia, Lithuania, and more recently Romania and Bulgaria.
Last year, Cambridgeshire's chief constable, Julie Spence, sparked controversy by claiming the sudden influx in east European workers had led to community tensions and increases in certain types of crime. Several other forces said they were having similar problems.
The Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) canvassed the views of detectives and community officers across the UK. It found no evidence that crime was more prevalent among East Europeans than other groups. It said the sheer number of migrants in some areas had caused tensions and policing pressures - but the problems were minimal. "Our report is very clear: it has led to an increase in some tensions. "Particularly, say, those areas which have had higher concentrations - you get misunderstandings, you get rumours, you've got big pressure on things like housing. You get rumours that wages are being held down," Mr Fahy said.
"What is different about this wave of immigration is that it's so sudden. "Which has created a different dynamic which has created tensions and people like Julie Spence have pointed out that we have had huge increases in the interpreters budget, but that's not really just about eastern Europeans being offenders, it's also about them being victims and witnesses of crime." He said the nationality of offenders should be recorded to make it easier to monitor crime trends, and called on eastern European states to share criminal intelligence more widely.
Mrs Spence stood by her comments, saying that immigrants were not responsible for a "crime wave" but recent population growth had given police "significant challenges", particularly with non-English speakers, as the force deals with people from 93 cultures, speaking 100 languages. "Looking after victims and witnesses and managing community tensions is substantially more complex now than three years ago," she said. "We have seen an increase in specific offences such as motoring offences, sex trafficking, and worker exploitation - a form of modern-day slavery. Our workload and its complexity is increasing. "Some parts of the country are no doubt unaffected by this. However, Cambridgeshire certainly is."
Source
British universities being "bought"
Jonathan Evans, the director-general of MI5, has warned the government that donations of hundreds of millions of pounds from Saudi Arabia and powerful Muslim organizations in Pakistan, Indonesia and the Gulf Straits have led to a "dangerous increase in the spread of extremism in leading university campuses". Eight of Britain's leading universities, including Oxford and Cambridge, have accepted more than 236 million pounds sterling, about $460 million, in donations from Muslim organizations, "many of which are known to have ties to extremist groups, some have links to terrorist organizations." The bulk of the donations have come in the past five years during a period when terrorist activities in Britain have increased. Home Secretary Jacqui Smith announced over the weekend that MI5 was now investigating "42 current terror threats and the possibility of attacks is increasingly real."
Universities that have accepted the money also include the London School of Economics, the City of London, Exeter and Dundee universities. All have a growing number of Muslim students. A major donation has included 20 million pounds sterling from the late King Fahd of Saudi Arabia to help establish the Oxford Center for Islamic Studies, which will be affiliated to the university when it opens next year.
The MI5 claims follow a lengthy investigation that revealed 70 percent of political lectures at the Middle Eastern Center at St. Anthony’s College in Oxford were "implacably hostile to the West and Israel." The MI5 claims are reinforced by Prof. Anthony Glees, the director of Brunel University's Center for Intelligence and Security Studies, a think-tank with close links to the Intelligence Services. "Up to 48 universities in Britain have been infiltrated by fundamentalists financed by Muslim groups. The potential threat this poses is obvious to the security of the country," Glees said.
However, Prime Minister Gordon Brown insists it is strategically "important to study Islam." He has authorized one million pounds sterling to be spent at the campuses on a counter radicalization drive.
Source
Prince of Wales's guide to alternative medicine `inaccurate'
The Prince of Wales is being challenged today to withdraw two guides promoting alternative medicine, by scientists who say that they make misleading and inaccurate claims about its benefits. The documents, published by the Prince and his Foundation for Integrated Health, misrepresent scientific evidence about therapies such as homoeopathy, acupuncture and reflexology, say the authors of a new evaluation of alternative treatments.
In a letter to The Times, Edzard Ernst, Professor of Complementary Medicine at the University of Exeter, and Simon Singh, a science writer and broadcaster, call on the Prince to recall the publications, one of which was produced with a œ900,000 grant from the Department of Health. "They both contain numerous misleading and inaccurate claims concerning the supposed benefits of alternative medicine," they say. "The nation cannot be served by promoting ineffective and sometimes dangerous alternative treatments."
Professor Ernst and Dr Singh say the Prince accepted the importance of "rigorous scientific evidence" to alternative medicine, in an article he wrote for The Times in 2000, and point out that more than 4,000 research studies have since been published. They analysed these studies and previous research for their new book, Trick or Treatment: Alternative Medicine on Trial, finding that only a few treatments, such as some herbal medicines and acupuncture for pain relief, are backed up by the evidence that the Prince demanded. "The majority of alternative therapies appear to be clinically ineffective and many are downright dangerous," the letter says, and it calls on the Prince to withdraw the publications Complementary Health Care: A Guide for Patients and the Smallwood report.
The first document is a pamphlet, part-funded by the taxpayer, that gives advice on finding practitioners of alternative therapies. It is misleading, Professor Ernst said, because it includes disorders for which alternative remedies have been shown to be ineffective. It states, for example, that chi-ropractic is used to treat asthma, digestive disorders and migraine, when it has been shown by rigorous trials only to be useful for back pain. The guide also promotes acupuncture for addiction, when studies suggest that it has no benefit, and homoeopathy, which a major review for The Lancet has indicated works only as a placebo. "It explains what these therapies are used for, and that carries an implication that they work when the evidence suggests that many do not," Professor Ernst said.
The foundation has already withdrawn some sections of the pamphlet from its website, such as a claim that research has shown healing to have benefits for some medical conditions. The Smallwood report, commissioned by the Prince from Christopher Smallwood, an economist, argued that greater provision of alternative medicine on the NHS could save taxpayers' money. A study in the British Medical Journal has shown that only five research projects have examined the cost-effectiveness of alternative medicine, and all but one found that greater provision would add to costs.
Professor Ernst was consulted by Mr Smallwood, but said that his criticisms were ignored. Sir Michael Peat, the Prince's private secretary, accused Professor Ernst of breaching confidence by discussing a draft of the report with The Times. Natasha Finlayson, of the Prince's Foundation for Integrated Health, said: "We entirely reject the accusation that our online publication Complementary Healthcare: A Guide contains any misleading or inaccurate claims about the benefits of complementary therapies. On the contrary, it treats people as adults and takes a responsible approach by encouraging people to look at reliable sources of information . . . so that they can make informed decisions. The foundation does not promote complementary therapies."
Claims and counters
A Guide for Patients Chiropractic: used in disorders of musculoskeletal system such as spine, neck, shoulder problems. It may also be used for asthma
Professor Ernst: no good evidence for anything other than back pain
Acupuncture: increasingly used in trying to overcome addictions to alcohol, drugs and smoking.
The reliable evidence suggests it does not work for addictions
Cranial therapists: the conditions they treat range from acute to chronic health problems
No good evidence for any of this
Homoeopathy: most often used to treat chronic conditions such as asthma; eczema; fatigue disorders; migraine; menopausal problems; irritable bowel syndrome; Crohn's disease; allergies; repeated infections; depression.
Data do not show homoeopathic remedies to be more than placebos
Reflexologists: work with conditions including pain, chronic fatigue, sinusitis, arthritis, digestive problems, stress-related disorders and menopausal symptoms.
No good evidence for any of this
Reiki: used for physical, mental and emotional conditions
There is no good evidence that Reiki is effective for any condition
Shiatsu: used for a wide range of conditions, from injuries to more general symptoms of poor health
No good evidence for any of this
The Smallwood report Phytodolor: recommended for treatment of UK arthritis patients.
This German preparation is not available in the UK
Manipulative therapies: offer advantages over conventional treatments for lower back pain.
A Cochrane review concludes that there is no evidence that this spinal therapy is superior to other standard treatments
Source
The Irish Model
Dean Godson reviews the memoirs of Jonathan Powell, the Tony Blair aide who helped negotiate the Irish power-sharing agreement.
One of the most striking things about the world according to Jonathan Powell is his approach to the role of the security forces in Northern Ireland. He treats the Army, in particular, as though it was another paramilitary faction to be squared - rather than as the legitimate arm of the state operating in support of civil power. Having spent thousands of hours with the Sinn Fein/IRA leadership, he starts talking like them. Thus, his vocabulary is littered with republican terminology such as `demilitarisation', `securocrats', `collusion' and `Volunteers'. As Powell observes of Blair and himself, `we were of a younger generation and the war against Irish terrorism was not our war'.
It's important to appreciate that many in the British government see this experience as a model for future dealings with radical Muslim groups in the Middle East and inside Europe. And they will be pushing that model on a President Obama - very hard and probably very successfully.
Indeed, one could say that in many ways the debate over Obama's proposals to talk to Iran is a proxy debate for this coming debate over applying the Irish model to Islamic extremism and terrorism. Talking to Iran after all is not really so radical a departure: The US is talking to Iran now, and has wanted to talk to Iran for years. The big issues are: Should the US be talking to Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Taliban, and ultimately al Qaeda?
In today's Financial Times, columnist Philip Stephens channels the emerging British official view.
Democratic governments, for example, should always be willing to talk, albeit sometimes in secret, to their enemies, even when such contacts seem to offend common decency. Were Mr Powell still in 10 Downing Street, he would be advocating a dialogue with Hamas.
Rightly so. Talking is not the same as surrendering - nor, indeed, as negotiating. If terrorist groups do put their weapons to one side, Mr Powell continues, the imperative is to keep everyone in the room. This requires constant attention and engagement. Eventual success in Northern Ireland flowed from a strategy of "never letting the talking stop". There is a moral to be drawn here for the US administration's stop-go efforts to broker peace between Israelis and Palestinians. ...
Mr Blair [and Mr. Bush] sometimes spoke in ... Manichean terms [about Islamic terrorism] , evoking a global ideological struggle that could be with us for generations. The effect has been to impose a homogeneity on armed groups in the Islamic world that defies the realities of their very different aims and methods. ... In real life, there is a lot more light and shade. Not all Muslims - even among those prepared to use violence in pursuit of their cause - think alike. ...
To make such points is not to argue that the Islamist fundamentalism espoused by al-Qaeda and its associates is anything less than a serious threat. There are plenty of dangerous Islamists for whom the only response will be military force. Nor should western policy be held prisoner to its impact on Muslim opinion. Driving al-Qaeda from Afghanistan was the right thing to do.
Yet a mindset that lumps together Hizbollah with al-Qaeda, Hamas with Iraq's Shia militia or Kurdish separatists with the Taliban under the rubric of a single struggle is one that does al-Qaeda's bidding. It excludes recognition of genuine grievances, ignores the impact of western policy and rules out any prospect of some extremists being won over to politics.
The change of administration in Washington will give the US and its friends a chance to reflect and recalibrate. The starting point is to stop talking about a war.
I think a President Obama will find this point of view very appealing. In many ways, that is the true ballot question this November: Is it time for the US to stop fighting Islamic terrorists - and start negotiating with them? Time to quit dismissing their vision of the future as unacceptable - and to start treating it as debatable?
Source
Thursday, April 17, 2008
Desperate British parents to give up their daughter for adoption so she can go to a better school
More testimony to the appalling state of many British government schools
A desperate couple are willing to give their daughter up if it means that she can go her first choice of secondary school. James and Stella Coils say they'll let their 10-year-old daughter Rebecca live with a relative if it means she can go to her favoured school. The Coils are considering transferring guardianship of their child to their daughter's great-aunt, Mary Holland, after being denied a place at Manor College of Technology in Hartlepool.
Holland, lives only half a mile from the Owton Manor Lane school - directly in its catchment area. She is happy to go along with plans and be Rebecca's carer, saying that she feels Hartlepool Borough Council has let her family down. The family has been left distraught after the council allocated Rebecca, a year-six Eldon Grove Primary School pupil, a place at St Hild's C of E Secondary School in Hartlepool. The school is more than five miles away from their home in Seaton Carew.
The couple filled in the selection form around two months ago listing in order of preference the town's six secondary schools. But they were stunned when not only did they miss out on their first choice but were offered a place in their fourth choice school. Mr Coil, 34, said: "We only picked St Hild's because we had to pick schools on the form, we never wanted her to go there. "The school is on the other side of town and it is five miles away. She would have to get two buses to get there."
The parents have appealed against the decision but Holland, who works for Orange, said that if she is not allocated another place he would take the drastic action. He said: "We have considered putting her in the guardianship of Stella's aunty who lives in the catchment area for Manor, or we would home-school her. "That would be worst case scenario but we would do it. Her education will shape her into the person she becomes and we are not happy with the choice of school that we have been given."
Mrs Holland, 54, who lives with her husband Brian, 49, said: "It's a big ask but her education is very important so I would do it. "I'm gobsmacked, It would be a shame that four or five days out of the week her parents would miss out on her upbringing."
A council spokesman said: "Under the allocations process, parents are asked to list a minimum of three schools in order of preference and we do our very best to meet one of those preferences based on the number of places available. "However, if there are more applications for a school than there are places as there are this year in the case of Manor, English Martyrs and High Tunstall, we make allocations for community schools and foundation schools in accordance with the published admissions arrangement. "As with every application we have tried to do our best for Mr and Mrs Coils within the terms of the published admissions arrangements, and we have also advised them of their right to appeal."
Source
Antioxidant pills 'increase risk of early death'
More bad news for pill poppers and health freaks generally. The claim that antioxidants in food are somehow different is just deep faith. Note that in the madhouse that is the medical literature, a Cochrane study is unusually authoritative
Researchers at Copenhagen University carried out a review of 67 studies on 230,000 healthy people and found "no convincing evidence" that any of the antioxidants helped to prolong life expectancy. But some "increased mortality".
About 12 million Britons supplement their diets with vitamins and the industry is worth 330 million pounds. But little research has been done on the long-term health implications.
The Department of Health said yesterday that people should try to get the vitamins they need by eating a balanced diet and advised care in taking large doses of supplements. A spokesman said: "There is a need to exercise caution in the use of high doses of purified supplements of vitamins, including antioxidant vitamins, and minerals. Their impact on long-term health may not have been fully established and they cannot be assumed to be without risk. "Anyone concerned about their diet should speak to their doctor or dietitian."
Antioxidants, including vitamins A, E, C and beta-carotene and selenium, are said to mop up compounds, called free radicals, which cause disease. It is this action that researchers believe may cause problems with the defence system. The Danish research, released by the influential Cochrane Library, applied only to synthetic supplements and not to vitamins that occur naturally in vegetables and fruit.
It found that vitamin A supplements increased the risk of death in healthy people by 16 per cent. Taking beta-carotene was linked to a 7 per cent increased risk, while regular users of vitamin E supplements increased the risk of an early death by four per cent.
Although the review found no significant detrimental effect caused by vitamin C, it found no evidence that it helped ward off disease. Millions take it in the hope of avoiding a common cold.
Goran Bjelakovic, who led the review, said: "We could find no evidence to support taking antioxidant supplements to reduce the risk of dying earlier in healthy people or patients with various diseases. "If anything, people in trial groups given the antioxidants beta-carotene, vitamin A, and vitamin E showed increased rates of mortality."
But Patrick Holford, a nutritionist who has formulated supplements for the company Biocare, said: "Antioxidants are not meant to be magic bullets and should not be expected to undo a lifetime of unhealthy habits. "When used properly, in combination with a healthy diet full of fruit and vegetables, getting plenty of exercise and not smoking, antioxidant supplements can play an important role in maintaining and promoting overall health."
A spokesman for the Health Supplements Information Service said: "People should get all the vitamins and minerals they need from their diet, but for the millions who are not able to do that, vitamins can be a useful supplement and they should not stop taking them."
However, Catherine Collins, of the British Dietetic Association, said: "This study is deeply worrying and shows that there should be more regulation for vitamins and minerals. "The public can buy vitamins as easily as sweets. They should be treated in the same way as paracetamol with maximum limits on the dosage."
Source
More testimony to the appalling state of many British government schools
A desperate couple are willing to give their daughter up if it means that she can go her first choice of secondary school. James and Stella Coils say they'll let their 10-year-old daughter Rebecca live with a relative if it means she can go to her favoured school. The Coils are considering transferring guardianship of their child to their daughter's great-aunt, Mary Holland, after being denied a place at Manor College of Technology in Hartlepool.
Holland, lives only half a mile from the Owton Manor Lane school - directly in its catchment area. She is happy to go along with plans and be Rebecca's carer, saying that she feels Hartlepool Borough Council has let her family down. The family has been left distraught after the council allocated Rebecca, a year-six Eldon Grove Primary School pupil, a place at St Hild's C of E Secondary School in Hartlepool. The school is more than five miles away from their home in Seaton Carew.
The couple filled in the selection form around two months ago listing in order of preference the town's six secondary schools. But they were stunned when not only did they miss out on their first choice but were offered a place in their fourth choice school. Mr Coil, 34, said: "We only picked St Hild's because we had to pick schools on the form, we never wanted her to go there. "The school is on the other side of town and it is five miles away. She would have to get two buses to get there."
The parents have appealed against the decision but Holland, who works for Orange, said that if she is not allocated another place he would take the drastic action. He said: "We have considered putting her in the guardianship of Stella's aunty who lives in the catchment area for Manor, or we would home-school her. "That would be worst case scenario but we would do it. Her education will shape her into the person she becomes and we are not happy with the choice of school that we have been given."
Mrs Holland, 54, who lives with her husband Brian, 49, said: "It's a big ask but her education is very important so I would do it. "I'm gobsmacked, It would be a shame that four or five days out of the week her parents would miss out on her upbringing."
A council spokesman said: "Under the allocations process, parents are asked to list a minimum of three schools in order of preference and we do our very best to meet one of those preferences based on the number of places available. "However, if there are more applications for a school than there are places as there are this year in the case of Manor, English Martyrs and High Tunstall, we make allocations for community schools and foundation schools in accordance with the published admissions arrangement. "As with every application we have tried to do our best for Mr and Mrs Coils within the terms of the published admissions arrangements, and we have also advised them of their right to appeal."
Source
Antioxidant pills 'increase risk of early death'
More bad news for pill poppers and health freaks generally. The claim that antioxidants in food are somehow different is just deep faith. Note that in the madhouse that is the medical literature, a Cochrane study is unusually authoritative
Researchers at Copenhagen University carried out a review of 67 studies on 230,000 healthy people and found "no convincing evidence" that any of the antioxidants helped to prolong life expectancy. But some "increased mortality".
About 12 million Britons supplement their diets with vitamins and the industry is worth 330 million pounds. But little research has been done on the long-term health implications.
The Department of Health said yesterday that people should try to get the vitamins they need by eating a balanced diet and advised care in taking large doses of supplements. A spokesman said: "There is a need to exercise caution in the use of high doses of purified supplements of vitamins, including antioxidant vitamins, and minerals. Their impact on long-term health may not have been fully established and they cannot be assumed to be without risk. "Anyone concerned about their diet should speak to their doctor or dietitian."
Antioxidants, including vitamins A, E, C and beta-carotene and selenium, are said to mop up compounds, called free radicals, which cause disease. It is this action that researchers believe may cause problems with the defence system. The Danish research, released by the influential Cochrane Library, applied only to synthetic supplements and not to vitamins that occur naturally in vegetables and fruit.
It found that vitamin A supplements increased the risk of death in healthy people by 16 per cent. Taking beta-carotene was linked to a 7 per cent increased risk, while regular users of vitamin E supplements increased the risk of an early death by four per cent.
Although the review found no significant detrimental effect caused by vitamin C, it found no evidence that it helped ward off disease. Millions take it in the hope of avoiding a common cold.
Goran Bjelakovic, who led the review, said: "We could find no evidence to support taking antioxidant supplements to reduce the risk of dying earlier in healthy people or patients with various diseases. "If anything, people in trial groups given the antioxidants beta-carotene, vitamin A, and vitamin E showed increased rates of mortality."
But Patrick Holford, a nutritionist who has formulated supplements for the company Biocare, said: "Antioxidants are not meant to be magic bullets and should not be expected to undo a lifetime of unhealthy habits. "When used properly, in combination with a healthy diet full of fruit and vegetables, getting plenty of exercise and not smoking, antioxidant supplements can play an important role in maintaining and promoting overall health."
A spokesman for the Health Supplements Information Service said: "People should get all the vitamins and minerals they need from their diet, but for the millions who are not able to do that, vitamins can be a useful supplement and they should not stop taking them."
However, Catherine Collins, of the British Dietetic Association, said: "This study is deeply worrying and shows that there should be more regulation for vitamins and minerals. "The public can buy vitamins as easily as sweets. They should be treated in the same way as paracetamol with maximum limits on the dosage."
Source
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
THE BBC AND BIASED CLIMATE CHANGE COVERAGE
An email below from Michael Schewitz [Michael.Schewitz@bigfoot.com]
Attached, please find a letter that I sent to the BBC. I posted the letter to Ceri Thomas, editor of the Today program as well as a copy to Roger Harrabin at the beginning of October last year. I never received a response to this letter. Certainly nothing was discussed on the topic that I raised with the BBC.
This was brought to mind by your recent highlight of the email exchange between Roger Harriban and an environmental campaigner. I was amazed at how ready they were to accommodate an environmental campaigner given the fact that my letter was apparently completely ignored.
The issue discussed in the letter seemed to me to be an open and shut case. When an article on climate stability in the past (and therefore proof that current warming is highly anomalous) by Osborn and Briffa appeared in "Science" the BBC Today Program ran the story as a lead story. However, when a refutation of this article was later published in precisely the same journal no mention of this was made on the BBC.
My understanding was that, given the publicity given to the first Science article, the BBC would have felt an obligation (or indeed have a legal obligation in terms of their mandate) to at least discuss the second article. Apparently this was not so.
Foreigners carry out one in every five killings in Britain, police figures reveal
One in every five murders or manslaughters in England and Wales is committed by a foreigner, police figures revealed. In one area of London, the figure is one in three. This is despite the fact that foreigners represent only around one in 16 of the general population. The statistics are so alarming that Home Secretary Jacqui Smith will hold a migrant crime summit on Thursday amid worries that police are struggling to cope.
According to figures revealed under the Freedom of Information Act, the 96 foreign nationals convicted of homicide last year were from 28 different countries. They were involved in 21 per cent of the total of 461 murder and manslaughter cases. Critics blame the Government's failure to deport foreign criminals. Recent cases have involved foreigners who had already been convicted of robbery and assault but were allowed to remain after serving their sentences.
Conservative MP David Davies, a member of the Commons home affairs committee, said: "These extraordinary figures demonstrate the failure of the Government's immigration policy, which has seen all sorts of undesirable characters being able to get into this country and use the Human Rights Act to escape deportation."
The figures show a wide variation between areas. In London, as many as 76 out of 231 identified killers were foreign nationals. In Manchester, it was eight out of 42, and in Bedfordshire, three out of seven. But in West Yorkshire, it was none out of 47.
In many cases, the figures reflect the influence of immigrant crime gangs. Scotland Yard said half of the organised crime gangs in London are "ethnic", or bound by a common language or homeland-The most common nationalities for foreign killers were Pakistani, Indian and Jamaican. Foreigners were also more likely to be victims. According to the figures, 15 per cent of those who died were from overseas. In many cases, both victim and killer were from the same immigrant community, reflecting internal feuding.
Not all police forces responded to requests for information but the figures available cover more than half of the 755 homicides in 2006-2007. Among the most high-profile cases was that of Roberto Malasi, an 18-year-old Angolan asylum seeker who shot dead a 33-year-old woman as she cradled her baby niece at a christening in south London. Malasi went on the run and two weeks later stabbed to death an 18-year-old pastor's daughter who he felt had "disrespected" him.
Other cases include Yusuf Jama, a Somali asylum seeker, who was in the gang that shot dead PC Sharon Beshenivsky in Bradford in 2005. The revelations are likely to feature on the agenda for Thursday's summit, which was called by the Home Office earlier this year. It is the first of its kind, and follows letters of concern from Chief Constables. Cambridgeshire's Julie Spence warned as long ago as 2005 there was "community tension" involving migrants which had the "potential for large-scale public disorder". She was forced to write again last year, saying the problem had "clearly magnified". Kent's Michael Fuller has also warned that the size of his force has not kept pace with an explosion in migrant numbers.
A Home Office spokesman said: "Last year, we deported a record number of foreign national criminals. Anyone convicted of a serious crime, such as murder, will be automatically deported."
Source
Stupid Leftist domestic violence laws in Britain
Thousands of women are at risk of assault because new laws to curb domestic violence have backfired, deterring victims from seeking help,The Times has learnt. Since legislation was introduced in July to criminalise domestic abuse at least 5,000 women have failed to report violent partners, judges have claimed. Under the Domestic Violence Act 2007 a breach of a non-molestation order is now a criminal offence and not dealt with in the civil courts. But battered wives, and sometimes husbands, are reluctant to seek an order for fear of giving their partners a criminal record and, potentially, a prison sentence of up to five years.
The judges' concerns have prompted talks at the highest level between Jack Straw, the Justice Secretary, and Sir Mark Potter, President of the Family Division. The alarm was raised by both circuit judges and the Association of District Judges, whose members deal with domestic violence cases. A Ministry of Justice spokesman said that an urgent meeting with Sir Mark would be held to discuss his fears. "We would be concerned if the courts were not making protecting orders," he said. A spokesman for Sir Mark said: "The president is very concerned that, for whatever reason, the legislation appears to have led to a reduction rather than an increase in the protection afforded to victims of domestic violence as a result of the change of the law." Sir Mark felt it important that judges "at the sharp end seeing its impact" were able to flag up their concerns, he added.
Judge John Platt, a circuit judge with more than 20 years' experience of domestic violence cases, has drawn up a report reflecting the judges' views for the president. He told The Times that he estimated that the number of [mostly] women seeking non-molestation orders had fallen by between 25 and 30 per cent since July 2007. Judges were doing their own informal surveys and "every judge I have spoken to thinks there has been a drop", he said. In 2006 there had been 20,000 such applications - so a 25 per cent drop meant 5,000 women had not come forward to ask for the courts' protection. "Obviously this is a very worrying figure. Either offenders have changed their behaviour - which seems extremely unlikely - or the victims do not want to criminalise the perpetrators."
Victims in a close relationship with a violent partner, who was perhaps the father of their children and the bread-winner, would not want them to have a criminal record, he added. "It's human nature." Women were deterred from the moment they walked into a lawyer's office and were told what the new laws meant. "It is obviously very worrying," he said.
Formerly, judges could add a power of arrest to a non-molestation order. A victim could then ring the police and complain of a breach and the man would be arrested, he said. Some simple breaches were dealt with within 24 hours but most within 14 days in the county courts as a contempt of court. Offenders might be given a second chance and ordered to report back to court, he said. They could be given a suspended sentence of up to two years, jailed for up to two years or, rarely, fined. Now, however, there appear to be few prosecutions, and some offenders are being dealt with by conditional cautions, said Judge Platt. "What we can say is that there are far fewer prosecutions than there would have been arrests if the old legislation was still in place."
The Crown Prosecution Service denied that prosecutions had dropped. A spokesman said that the most recent figures showed that both numbers of cases and the conviction rate were up on previous years. However, these predate the new Act. The spokesman added that conviction rates had risen from their lowest recorded point of 46 per cent in 2003 to 59 per cent in 2005, up to 66 per cent in 2006 - up year on year by 7 per cent and 20 per cent over three years. The spokesman added: "The fact that the Government has increased the number of specialist domestic violence courts to 64 is an indication of the number of cases that are being prosecuted and the seriousness with which it's regarded."
Judge Platt said that a third problem was severe delays in special domestic violence treatment programmes, which judges felt were effective. He added that a community penalty was often best in a family context. But without the special programme, either the woman would remain at risk or the offender would have to be jailed.
Source
British couple who spank their daughter as 'last resort' cannot be foster parents
A couple have been prevented from fostering children after insisting on the right to smack their own daughter "as a last resort". David and Heather Bowen told an adoption panel that they would never smack a foster child but might physically chastise their own daughter "once or twice a year". Despite initially being recommended as good candidates by social workers, the couple were turned down for fostering after refusing to reconsider their position. The couple, from Taunton, Somerset, were told by the panel that they would not be allowed to take in children because of their approach to "behaviour management".
Mr and Mrs Bowen, who are both volunteers at their church and local schools, are appealing against the decision by Somerset county council. Mr Bowen, 42, said: "Based on the evidence presented to the council, we cannot understand why we are unsuitable and it seems that we have been excluded on the basis that we physically chastise our birth child, in accordance with our beliefs and UK law. "I'm sure other parents would have just lied."
He added: "Our birth daughter is only chastised physically as a last resort amongst a whole range of other forms of behaviour management strategies which include rewards and sanctions. The council has made us feel we are bad parents and yet we do nothing that hundreds of thousands across the UK do as loving and responsible mothers and fathers." Parents are legally allowed to smack their children if it is considered a "reasonable chastisement" and provided they leave no more than a "transitory" mark.
The Government ruled out a total ban after reviewing the law in 2000. Mr and Mrs Bowen fear that the ruling against them will mean thousands of children will be denied access to good foster care because potential foster parents smack their own children. The Bowens have a nine- year-old daughter, Emma, and felt they were good candidates for fostering after failing to conceive following the death of their second child, Jonathan, from a rare illness.
They were turned down last month following a 14-month approval process. Mrs Bowen, 47, said: "We felt we had room to give more love to other children. As the outcome sank in we began to grieve again, feeling a tremendous sense of loss that we would not be allowed to complete our family and provide a loving home to a child in need."
The British Association for Adoption and Fostering said it believed smacking was generally inappropriate, particularly for vulnerable children who may have been abused in the past. John Simmonds, its director of policy, research and development, said: "The expectation is that you treat foster children as one of your own. You can't set one standard for your own children and another for the foster child."
Linda Barnett, the head of children's services at Somerset county council, said: "In common with most other local authorities, Somerset has a Foster Carer's Agreement which describes our belief about parenting. Where carers have a very strong personal belief that differs from the Foster Carer Agreement, it is potentially unfair to expect them to operate to a set of guidelines which conflicts with this."
Smacking remains legal but the law on it was toughened up in 2004 in response to pressure from children's campaigners. The Children Act removed the defence of "reasonable chastisement" from parents who left more than a "transitory mark" on their child. Causing a bruise, reddened skin or psychological injuries can result in an assault charge and five years' jail. However, earlier this year the Sentencing Guidelines Council, which sets down rules for magistrates and judges, appeared to signal a change of opinion. It called for leniency, recommending light sentences for parents who are prosecuted for smacking but did not intend to hurt their child.
Campaign groups such as the NSPCC and the National Children's Bureau continue to press for tougher laws, however. The Children Are Unbeatable! alliance wants an outright ban.
Source
Beware of the dog: you may catch MRSA
They might be man's best friend, but dogs should be sold with a health warning, a study suggests. Letting a dog lick your face, picking up its mess or allowing it to sleep on your bed could put you at risk of catching salmonella, campylobacter or MRSA.
Research commissioned by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) from the University of Liverpool Veterinary School, has identified health risks in the interaction between man and dog. The findings, published in The Veterinary Record, may enrage the country's 6.5 million dog owners. Men, in particular, may have to learn cleaner habits because it seems they have a problem picking up dog mess.
Risks of infection from dog to Man at present are low. Carri Westgarth, a researcher on the project, insists that she has no wish to create a scare. Owning a dog has positive health benefits ? people who walk them tend to be fitter and have lower blood pressure.
The research has irritated dog lovers. Caroline Kisko, secretary of the Kennel Club, said that Defra should be spending resources on policies to help to tackle animal welfare. She said: "It has told us nothing, except perhaps to use a bit of common sense."
Carolyn Menteith, a dog behaviourist, was also dismissive. "You are more likely to catch a disease from a child than a dog. I do agree owners should clear up after their dogs, otherwise they cause a social nuisance. Men are worse at it and somehow think it's unmanly to be walking around with a nappy sack. But if you can't do that, don't get a dog, get a stuffed toy."
Source
The ever-meddling British government: "The government may tighten planning laws to end concentrations of student houses in England's university towns. The Department of Communities and Local Government is considering building on the introduction of licensing for houses in multiple occupation. It says 'studentification' makes some areas 'ghost towns' during holidays."
Vicious British bureaucracy: ""A woman who helped to set up the NHS Organ Donor Register says it was wrong to stop a mother who needs a transplant from using her daughter's kidneys. Rachel Leake, 39, of Bierley, West Yorkshire, was told that her daughter Laura Ashworth's dying wish to donate her organs could not be honoured. The 21-year-old's kidneys and liver went instead to three other patients."
An email below from Michael Schewitz [Michael.Schewitz@bigfoot.com]
Attached, please find a letter that I sent to the BBC. I posted the letter to Ceri Thomas, editor of the Today program as well as a copy to Roger Harrabin at the beginning of October last year. I never received a response to this letter. Certainly nothing was discussed on the topic that I raised with the BBC.
This was brought to mind by your recent highlight of the email exchange between Roger Harriban and an environmental campaigner. I was amazed at how ready they were to accommodate an environmental campaigner given the fact that my letter was apparently completely ignored.
The issue discussed in the letter seemed to me to be an open and shut case. When an article on climate stability in the past (and therefore proof that current warming is highly anomalous) by Osborn and Briffa appeared in "Science" the BBC Today Program ran the story as a lead story. However, when a refutation of this article was later published in precisely the same journal no mention of this was made on the BBC.
My understanding was that, given the publicity given to the first Science article, the BBC would have felt an obligation (or indeed have a legal obligation in terms of their mandate) to at least discuss the second article. Apparently this was not so.
LETTER TO THE BBC
In 2006, when Osborn & Briffa published an article in Science that argued that warming in the late 20th century was anomalous, the Today program gave this article considerable coverage. In addition the general news service of the BBC also gave this article considerable exposure.
Attached please find a piece (off the blog World Climate Report) that discusses an article also published in Science by a prominent European statistical climatologist (Gerd Burger) from a respected institution that pretty much debunks entirely the Osborn & Briffa article.
This article was published a few months ago, but there appears to have been no coverage of it anywhere on the BBC. Thus, while the first Science article was brought to your attention, this one seems to have slipped through the net and, for this reason, I have taken the liberty of bringing it to your attention.
As mentioned earlier, the Burger article to which I refer was published in exactly the same journal in which the Osborn & Briffa article was published. Consequently, I feel that the BBC in general and the Today program in particular have a strong obligation - in line with the BBC's policy of objectivity - to give this article the same coverage that the Osborn & Briffa article was given.
I assume it would be appropriate (indeed necessary) in terms of your stated guidelines on balanced reporting to investigate this further, report on it, and maybe interview the relevant authors if they are available.
Incidentally, the attached piece also discusses an article from Earth-Science's review on Lake Baikal's Paleo Climate Record. You may also find this of interest.
I have no connection whatsoever with either the blog, or any of the authors of any of the articles discussed above. I am interested in the debate on climate modelling and so, if you run a story on this, I would greatly appreciate it if you could let me know when this may be.
Foreigners carry out one in every five killings in Britain, police figures reveal
One in every five murders or manslaughters in England and Wales is committed by a foreigner, police figures revealed. In one area of London, the figure is one in three. This is despite the fact that foreigners represent only around one in 16 of the general population. The statistics are so alarming that Home Secretary Jacqui Smith will hold a migrant crime summit on Thursday amid worries that police are struggling to cope.
According to figures revealed under the Freedom of Information Act, the 96 foreign nationals convicted of homicide last year were from 28 different countries. They were involved in 21 per cent of the total of 461 murder and manslaughter cases. Critics blame the Government's failure to deport foreign criminals. Recent cases have involved foreigners who had already been convicted of robbery and assault but were allowed to remain after serving their sentences.
Conservative MP David Davies, a member of the Commons home affairs committee, said: "These extraordinary figures demonstrate the failure of the Government's immigration policy, which has seen all sorts of undesirable characters being able to get into this country and use the Human Rights Act to escape deportation."
The figures show a wide variation between areas. In London, as many as 76 out of 231 identified killers were foreign nationals. In Manchester, it was eight out of 42, and in Bedfordshire, three out of seven. But in West Yorkshire, it was none out of 47.
In many cases, the figures reflect the influence of immigrant crime gangs. Scotland Yard said half of the organised crime gangs in London are "ethnic", or bound by a common language or homeland-The most common nationalities for foreign killers were Pakistani, Indian and Jamaican. Foreigners were also more likely to be victims. According to the figures, 15 per cent of those who died were from overseas. In many cases, both victim and killer were from the same immigrant community, reflecting internal feuding.
Not all police forces responded to requests for information but the figures available cover more than half of the 755 homicides in 2006-2007. Among the most high-profile cases was that of Roberto Malasi, an 18-year-old Angolan asylum seeker who shot dead a 33-year-old woman as she cradled her baby niece at a christening in south London. Malasi went on the run and two weeks later stabbed to death an 18-year-old pastor's daughter who he felt had "disrespected" him.
Other cases include Yusuf Jama, a Somali asylum seeker, who was in the gang that shot dead PC Sharon Beshenivsky in Bradford in 2005. The revelations are likely to feature on the agenda for Thursday's summit, which was called by the Home Office earlier this year. It is the first of its kind, and follows letters of concern from Chief Constables. Cambridgeshire's Julie Spence warned as long ago as 2005 there was "community tension" involving migrants which had the "potential for large-scale public disorder". She was forced to write again last year, saying the problem had "clearly magnified". Kent's Michael Fuller has also warned that the size of his force has not kept pace with an explosion in migrant numbers.
A Home Office spokesman said: "Last year, we deported a record number of foreign national criminals. Anyone convicted of a serious crime, such as murder, will be automatically deported."
Source
Stupid Leftist domestic violence laws in Britain
Thousands of women are at risk of assault because new laws to curb domestic violence have backfired, deterring victims from seeking help,The Times has learnt. Since legislation was introduced in July to criminalise domestic abuse at least 5,000 women have failed to report violent partners, judges have claimed. Under the Domestic Violence Act 2007 a breach of a non-molestation order is now a criminal offence and not dealt with in the civil courts. But battered wives, and sometimes husbands, are reluctant to seek an order for fear of giving their partners a criminal record and, potentially, a prison sentence of up to five years.
The judges' concerns have prompted talks at the highest level between Jack Straw, the Justice Secretary, and Sir Mark Potter, President of the Family Division. The alarm was raised by both circuit judges and the Association of District Judges, whose members deal with domestic violence cases. A Ministry of Justice spokesman said that an urgent meeting with Sir Mark would be held to discuss his fears. "We would be concerned if the courts were not making protecting orders," he said. A spokesman for Sir Mark said: "The president is very concerned that, for whatever reason, the legislation appears to have led to a reduction rather than an increase in the protection afforded to victims of domestic violence as a result of the change of the law." Sir Mark felt it important that judges "at the sharp end seeing its impact" were able to flag up their concerns, he added.
Judge John Platt, a circuit judge with more than 20 years' experience of domestic violence cases, has drawn up a report reflecting the judges' views for the president. He told The Times that he estimated that the number of [mostly] women seeking non-molestation orders had fallen by between 25 and 30 per cent since July 2007. Judges were doing their own informal surveys and "every judge I have spoken to thinks there has been a drop", he said. In 2006 there had been 20,000 such applications - so a 25 per cent drop meant 5,000 women had not come forward to ask for the courts' protection. "Obviously this is a very worrying figure. Either offenders have changed their behaviour - which seems extremely unlikely - or the victims do not want to criminalise the perpetrators."
Victims in a close relationship with a violent partner, who was perhaps the father of their children and the bread-winner, would not want them to have a criminal record, he added. "It's human nature." Women were deterred from the moment they walked into a lawyer's office and were told what the new laws meant. "It is obviously very worrying," he said.
Formerly, judges could add a power of arrest to a non-molestation order. A victim could then ring the police and complain of a breach and the man would be arrested, he said. Some simple breaches were dealt with within 24 hours but most within 14 days in the county courts as a contempt of court. Offenders might be given a second chance and ordered to report back to court, he said. They could be given a suspended sentence of up to two years, jailed for up to two years or, rarely, fined. Now, however, there appear to be few prosecutions, and some offenders are being dealt with by conditional cautions, said Judge Platt. "What we can say is that there are far fewer prosecutions than there would have been arrests if the old legislation was still in place."
The Crown Prosecution Service denied that prosecutions had dropped. A spokesman said that the most recent figures showed that both numbers of cases and the conviction rate were up on previous years. However, these predate the new Act. The spokesman added that conviction rates had risen from their lowest recorded point of 46 per cent in 2003 to 59 per cent in 2005, up to 66 per cent in 2006 - up year on year by 7 per cent and 20 per cent over three years. The spokesman added: "The fact that the Government has increased the number of specialist domestic violence courts to 64 is an indication of the number of cases that are being prosecuted and the seriousness with which it's regarded."
Judge Platt said that a third problem was severe delays in special domestic violence treatment programmes, which judges felt were effective. He added that a community penalty was often best in a family context. But without the special programme, either the woman would remain at risk or the offender would have to be jailed.
Source
British couple who spank their daughter as 'last resort' cannot be foster parents
A couple have been prevented from fostering children after insisting on the right to smack their own daughter "as a last resort". David and Heather Bowen told an adoption panel that they would never smack a foster child but might physically chastise their own daughter "once or twice a year". Despite initially being recommended as good candidates by social workers, the couple were turned down for fostering after refusing to reconsider their position. The couple, from Taunton, Somerset, were told by the panel that they would not be allowed to take in children because of their approach to "behaviour management".
Mr and Mrs Bowen, who are both volunteers at their church and local schools, are appealing against the decision by Somerset county council. Mr Bowen, 42, said: "Based on the evidence presented to the council, we cannot understand why we are unsuitable and it seems that we have been excluded on the basis that we physically chastise our birth child, in accordance with our beliefs and UK law. "I'm sure other parents would have just lied."
He added: "Our birth daughter is only chastised physically as a last resort amongst a whole range of other forms of behaviour management strategies which include rewards and sanctions. The council has made us feel we are bad parents and yet we do nothing that hundreds of thousands across the UK do as loving and responsible mothers and fathers." Parents are legally allowed to smack their children if it is considered a "reasonable chastisement" and provided they leave no more than a "transitory" mark.
The Government ruled out a total ban after reviewing the law in 2000. Mr and Mrs Bowen fear that the ruling against them will mean thousands of children will be denied access to good foster care because potential foster parents smack their own children. The Bowens have a nine- year-old daughter, Emma, and felt they were good candidates for fostering after failing to conceive following the death of their second child, Jonathan, from a rare illness.
They were turned down last month following a 14-month approval process. Mrs Bowen, 47, said: "We felt we had room to give more love to other children. As the outcome sank in we began to grieve again, feeling a tremendous sense of loss that we would not be allowed to complete our family and provide a loving home to a child in need."
The British Association for Adoption and Fostering said it believed smacking was generally inappropriate, particularly for vulnerable children who may have been abused in the past. John Simmonds, its director of policy, research and development, said: "The expectation is that you treat foster children as one of your own. You can't set one standard for your own children and another for the foster child."
Linda Barnett, the head of children's services at Somerset county council, said: "In common with most other local authorities, Somerset has a Foster Carer's Agreement which describes our belief about parenting. Where carers have a very strong personal belief that differs from the Foster Carer Agreement, it is potentially unfair to expect them to operate to a set of guidelines which conflicts with this."
Smacking remains legal but the law on it was toughened up in 2004 in response to pressure from children's campaigners. The Children Act removed the defence of "reasonable chastisement" from parents who left more than a "transitory mark" on their child. Causing a bruise, reddened skin or psychological injuries can result in an assault charge and five years' jail. However, earlier this year the Sentencing Guidelines Council, which sets down rules for magistrates and judges, appeared to signal a change of opinion. It called for leniency, recommending light sentences for parents who are prosecuted for smacking but did not intend to hurt their child.
Campaign groups such as the NSPCC and the National Children's Bureau continue to press for tougher laws, however. The Children Are Unbeatable! alliance wants an outright ban.
Source
Beware of the dog: you may catch MRSA
They might be man's best friend, but dogs should be sold with a health warning, a study suggests. Letting a dog lick your face, picking up its mess or allowing it to sleep on your bed could put you at risk of catching salmonella, campylobacter or MRSA.
Research commissioned by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) from the University of Liverpool Veterinary School, has identified health risks in the interaction between man and dog. The findings, published in The Veterinary Record, may enrage the country's 6.5 million dog owners. Men, in particular, may have to learn cleaner habits because it seems they have a problem picking up dog mess.
Risks of infection from dog to Man at present are low. Carri Westgarth, a researcher on the project, insists that she has no wish to create a scare. Owning a dog has positive health benefits ? people who walk them tend to be fitter and have lower blood pressure.
The research has irritated dog lovers. Caroline Kisko, secretary of the Kennel Club, said that Defra should be spending resources on policies to help to tackle animal welfare. She said: "It has told us nothing, except perhaps to use a bit of common sense."
Carolyn Menteith, a dog behaviourist, was also dismissive. "You are more likely to catch a disease from a child than a dog. I do agree owners should clear up after their dogs, otherwise they cause a social nuisance. Men are worse at it and somehow think it's unmanly to be walking around with a nappy sack. But if you can't do that, don't get a dog, get a stuffed toy."
Source
The ever-meddling British government: "The government may tighten planning laws to end concentrations of student houses in England's university towns. The Department of Communities and Local Government is considering building on the introduction of licensing for houses in multiple occupation. It says 'studentification' makes some areas 'ghost towns' during holidays."
Vicious British bureaucracy: ""A woman who helped to set up the NHS Organ Donor Register says it was wrong to stop a mother who needs a transplant from using her daughter's kidneys. Rachel Leake, 39, of Bierley, West Yorkshire, was told that her daughter Laura Ashworth's dying wish to donate her organs could not be honoured. The 21-year-old's kidneys and liver went instead to three other patients."
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
"Jerusalem" hymn banned by politically correct clergy
It's probably the hymn I love best: "And did those feet in ancient times.... ''. With the marvellous William Blake writing the words and the music by Parry, it had to be good. Comments below by the Revd Dr Peter Mullen, Rector of St Michael's, Cornhill
Funny how the "liberals" in the Church have developed this fondness for banning things. First they banned their own modern Alternative Service Book after only 20 years in use. Now, the Very Reverend Colin Slee, the Dean of Southwark, has banned the hymn Jerusalem from his cathedral because it is "not in the glory of God" and is too nationalistic. But surely there is the radiance of divinity in "And was the Holy Lamb of God on England's pleasant pastures seen"? The pseudo-scholarly clergy don't like that line because they deny the Glastonbury legend about Jesus coming to England with Joseph of Arimathea. This shows a numbskull literal-mindedness.
When I preach the Resurrection on Easter Day, I try to evoke the Lord's appearances around Galilee, and on the walk to Emmaus, as if they had happened in my beloved Yorkshire Dales. Blake didn't think Jesus came to England, either. He was a poet and his lines are the stuff of imaginative allusion. But imagination is a bit beyond the reach of the polite mechanicals among the modern clergy.
Christians in England are redeemed by Christ, as surely as the first disciples were redeemed by him in Galilee. Blake's magnificent poem is a way of bringing this home to us, building the truth of the experience into our hearts and minds by using homely, national imagery. The spirit of God breathes all through Jerusalem. Take the fervent line, "Bring me my chariot of fire." It is straight out of the Bible, the ecstatic vision of the prophet Elijah carried up to heaven in the whirlwind (II Kings 2:11). "Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand" is clearly a reference to "the sword of the Spirit which is the word of God" (Ephesians 6:17).
What the modern clergy can't stand is the powerful evocation of England. When they see the word "England" they don't hear the music of ancient Albion. They see patriotism and national pride, which to them are the next worse things to fascism and expansionary imperialism. But, as Chesterton said, if a man won't love his country, it is difficult to believe he loves anything. Blake's hymn was a prelude to Milton, and he knew that Paradise Lost, the Fall of Man, happens down the Old Kent Road as definitely as anywhere else.
Odd, the trendy clergy's preference for abstractions and internationalism when it was abstracted international communism under Stalin and Mao which slaughtered millions more even than the ueber-nationalists in the Third Reich.
There is nothing abstract or theoretical about Blake's hymn. He wasn't writing a report for the General Synod. As a poet of genius, he knew that the way to convey spiritual realities is to incarnate them in things: swords, chariots, clouded hills, mountains green. St Margaret's, "Parliament's church" in Westminster, disapproves of the line about "dark satanic mills" only by misunderstanding it. No English literature scholar imagines for a minute that Blake was referring to the cotton mills and weaving sheds in Lancashire.
One of our finest biblical commentators, Tom Wright, Bishop of Durham, says: "The 'dark satanic mills' were not the cotton mills and steel mills of the new, noisy and smoky industrial revolution. They were the great churches, such as Westminster Abbey and St Paul's Cathedral, which Blake saw as being hopelessly in thrall to the follies of the world, follies he saw all too clearly in the great thinkers of what was already calling itself the Enlightenment. He faced down the scorn of Voltaire and Rousseau against the deep mysteries of faith. 'You throw the sand against the wind,' he wrote, 'and the wind blows it back again.'?"
Now, at last, we are getting close to understanding this sour prejudice against Jerusalem among so many clergy. For Blake is attacking them - those who, though they promised at ordination to challenge the follies of the age, actually aid and encourage them. It is the Jerusalem haters who have swallowed whole all the dogmas of Rousseauism and the secular superstitions of the Enlightenment in its most recent form: political-correctness.
If Blake could hear for five minutes these people banging on about their true preoccupations, the follies of the age - anti-racism, gender egalitarianism, compliance, the foreign aid industry and the paranoid fantasy of global warming - he would sing all the more loudly against this lot: "Bring me my bow… bring me my arrows… bring me my sword…"
Source
Deportation ruling enrages spy chiefs
British court says bin Laden's 'ambassador' can remain in London
Britain's intelligence chiefs - John Scarlett of MI6 and Jonathan Evans of MI5 - are warning Prime Minister Gordon Brown that judges in an appeals court have "seriously damaged the war on terrorism," The court ruled that Abu Qatada, one of the world's most dangerous terrorists and described by a Spanish court as Osama bin Laden's "ambassador in Europe," cannot be deported to Jordan to face further terrorist charges because to do so would "breach Britain's human rights laws." The infuriated intelligence chiefs have told Brown the decision has "left Britain's anti-terror laws in tatters and raised serious questions in Washington and European capitals about Britain's commitment to fight terrorism."
Abu Qatada, a heavily bearded Jordanian father of five, has been linked to a number of global terror conspiracies. But the Court of Appeal said he cannot be deported to face prosecution in his native Jordan "because the alleged evidence against him there may have been obtained under torture."
The court ruling means not a single terrorist has been forcibly deported from Britain since the London bombing attacks -- despite a Memorandum of Understanding secured by the Home Office from Jordan and other countries that terror suspects would not face torture.
While Abu Qatada remained in a high security prison, the intelligence services had spent three years putting together what one officer called "irrefutable evidence" that he is closely linked to bin Laden and Ayman Al Zarqawi, the deputy leader of al-Qaida. Videos of Abu Qatada's virulent sermons were found in the Hamburg flat of Mohammed Atta, one of the members of the 9/11 terrorists. German intelligence, BND, passed them to MI6 to strengthen the case against Abu Qatada.
Both MI6 and MI5 also provided evidence seen by the Court of Appeal that Abu Qatada, 44, who was born in Bethlehem, had arrived in Britain under a forged United Arab Emirates passport. He claimed asylum and was granted refugee status. He also received monthly welfare benefits.
From his home in Acton, West London, he called on British Muslims to "martyr yourselves in a holy war on British oppression." When he was first arrested in 2001, he was found to have about $1.4 million in his possession, including $1,600 in an envelope marked "for the mujahedin in Chechnya."
Source
Britain's already pathetic maternity services to be cut even further
Plans to downgrade maternity units in four London boroughs and other parts of the country are unacceptable and will deny women choice in how and where they give birth, leading midwives have said. Maternity services in Bexley, Bromley, Greenwich and Lewisham are underfunded and shortstaffed, with an overspend predicted to be 57 million pounds a year by 2010-11.
However, the Royal College of Midwives said that it has “significant reservations” over plans to cut costs by closing at least one – and probably two – maternity units and providing more home births and deliveries by midwives. The planned changes mirror proposals in other parts of the country, with maternity units in Greater Manchester, Teesside, and Oxfordshire already earmarked for radical overhauls.
Source
The British Antarctic survey reports
For a pro-Warmist group, these guys have some surprising spurts of honesty. I guess that they are actually interested in reality. Some excerpts below:
Why should we study Antarctic climate?
The Antarctic region is an important regulator of global climate. The Southern Ocean is a significant sink for both heat and carbon dioxide, acting as a buffer against human-induced climate change. The sea ice that forms around the continent each winter controls the exchange of energy between the Sun and the Earth, and its partition between atmosphere and ocean. As sea ice forms, brine rejected from the ice increases the density of the upper ocean. These waters then sink and form the deep ocean currents that carry heat around the globe.
Changes in global climate can have impacts on the Antarctic environment. The Southern Ocean supports a unique ecosystem that is well adapted to present climate conditions. Changes in ocean temperatures, currents and sea ice will impact on this ecosystem, possibly changing the ocean's capacity to absorb carbon dioxide. Warming of the atmosphere and ocean around Antarctica may lead to increased loss of mass from the Antarctic ice sheets and hence a rise in global sea level. In order to make soundly-based predictions of how the global environment may change over the coming decades and centuries, we need to understand the role played by the Antarctic in the Earth system.
How has Antarctic climate varied over the past 50 years?
Few continuous observations of Antarctic climate are available before the International Geophysical Year of 1957-58. Since this time, surface temperatures have remained fairly stable over much of Antarctica, although individual station records show a high level of year-to-year variability, which could mask any underlying long term-trend. The majority of stations in East Antarctica, including the two long-term records from the high plateau of East Antarctica (South Pole and Vostok) show no statistically-significant warming or cooling trends. By contrast, large and statistically-significant warming trends are seen at stations in the Antarctic Peninsula. Over the past 50 years, the west coast of the Peninsula has been one of the most rapidly-warming parts of the planet. Here, annual mean temperatures have risen by nearly 3øC, with the largest warming occurring in the winter season. This is approximately 10 times the mean rate of global warming [Hence not caused by it], as reported by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The east coast of the Peninsula has warmed more slowly and here the largest warming has taken place in summer and autumn.
Significant warming has also been observed in the Southern Ocean. Upper ocean temperatures to the west of the Antarctic Peninsula have increased by over 1øC since 19554. Within the circumpolar Southern Ocean, it is now well-established that the waters of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC) are warming more rapidly than the global ocean as a whole. A comparison of temperature measurements from the 1990s with data from earlier decades shows a large-scale warming of around 0.2øC in the ACC waters at around 700-1100 m depth21.
Analysis of weather balloon data collected over the past 30 years has shown that the Antarctic atmosphere has warmed below 8 km and cooled above this height. This pattern of warming in the troposphere and cooling in the stratosphere is seen globally and is the expected signature of increases in greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide. However, the 30-year warming at 5 km over the Antarctic during winter (0.75øC) is over three times the average rate of warming at this level for the globe as a whole5.
Reliable year-round measurements of Antarctic sea ice extent are only available from the 1970s, when satellite observations first became available. Unlike in the Arctic, where there has been a significant decline in observed sea ice extent over this period, there has been a small but statistically-significant increase in the overall extent of Antarctic sea ice. However, there are strong geographical variations at a regional scale. Sea ice cover has declined substantially in the seas to the west of the Antarctic Peninsula while it has increased in other parts of the Antarctic
Subtle but important changes have occurred in the atmospheric circulation around Antarctica. Since the early 1960s, atmospheric pressure has dropped over Antarctica and risen in the mid-latitudes of the Southern Hemisphere, a pattern of variability known as the Southern Hemisphere Annular Mode (SAM)7. These changes have resulted in a strengthening of the westerly winds that blow over the Southern Ocean around Antarctica. Stronger westerlies will impact on ocean currents, upwelling and mixing, but the consequences of such changes have yet to be fully understood.
Has human activity caused the recent changes?
Climate can vary as a result of changes in forcing factors that affect the way energy is exchanged between the sun, the earth and space. These forcings can be of natural origin (e.g. volcanic dust in the atmosphere, variations in solar output and variations in the Earth's orbit about the sun) or a result of human activity (e.g. increases in "greenhouse" gases such as carbon dioxide). Additionally, complex interactions between atmosphere, oceans and sea ice can cause climate variability, particularly on a regional scale, over a timescale of years to decades. Attributing observed changes in climate to particular changes in forcing (or to natural variability) is a difficult process that can only be accomplished by bringing together reliable observations of past and present climate with the results of experiments carried out with sophisticated models of the climate system. Attribution of Antarctic climate change is particularly difficult because of the relatively small number of instrumental climate records available from this region and the short length of the records.
As part of the work undertaken for the Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC13, about 20 different climate models were run with historical changes to natural and anthropogenic forcing factors to simulate the climate of the 20th century. The simulated changes in Antarctic surface temperatures over the second half of the 20th century vary greatly from model to model with no single model reproducing exactly the observed pattern of change. However, when results from all models are averaged, the resulting pattern of change bears some resemblance to that observed, with greatest warming in the Peninsula region and little change elsewhere. This result suggests that some of the observed change may have an anthropogenic origin, but the lack of a clear and consistent response to changed forcing between models also suggests that much of the observed change in temperatures may be due to natural variability. The IPCC model experiments fail to reproduce some of the observed features, notably the rapid warming of the lower atmosphere. These differences between modelled and observed changes could be used to argue against attributing change to anthropogenic forcing but some caution is called for as the models used may not adequately represent all of the complex processes that determine temperatures in the polar regions.
More here
It's probably the hymn I love best: "And did those feet in ancient times.... ''. With the marvellous William Blake writing the words and the music by Parry, it had to be good. Comments below by the Revd Dr Peter Mullen, Rector of St Michael's, Cornhill
Funny how the "liberals" in the Church have developed this fondness for banning things. First they banned their own modern Alternative Service Book after only 20 years in use. Now, the Very Reverend Colin Slee, the Dean of Southwark, has banned the hymn Jerusalem from his cathedral because it is "not in the glory of God" and is too nationalistic. But surely there is the radiance of divinity in "And was the Holy Lamb of God on England's pleasant pastures seen"? The pseudo-scholarly clergy don't like that line because they deny the Glastonbury legend about Jesus coming to England with Joseph of Arimathea. This shows a numbskull literal-mindedness.
When I preach the Resurrection on Easter Day, I try to evoke the Lord's appearances around Galilee, and on the walk to Emmaus, as if they had happened in my beloved Yorkshire Dales. Blake didn't think Jesus came to England, either. He was a poet and his lines are the stuff of imaginative allusion. But imagination is a bit beyond the reach of the polite mechanicals among the modern clergy.
Christians in England are redeemed by Christ, as surely as the first disciples were redeemed by him in Galilee. Blake's magnificent poem is a way of bringing this home to us, building the truth of the experience into our hearts and minds by using homely, national imagery. The spirit of God breathes all through Jerusalem. Take the fervent line, "Bring me my chariot of fire." It is straight out of the Bible, the ecstatic vision of the prophet Elijah carried up to heaven in the whirlwind (II Kings 2:11). "Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand" is clearly a reference to "the sword of the Spirit which is the word of God" (Ephesians 6:17).
What the modern clergy can't stand is the powerful evocation of England. When they see the word "England" they don't hear the music of ancient Albion. They see patriotism and national pride, which to them are the next worse things to fascism and expansionary imperialism. But, as Chesterton said, if a man won't love his country, it is difficult to believe he loves anything. Blake's hymn was a prelude to Milton, and he knew that Paradise Lost, the Fall of Man, happens down the Old Kent Road as definitely as anywhere else.
Odd, the trendy clergy's preference for abstractions and internationalism when it was abstracted international communism under Stalin and Mao which slaughtered millions more even than the ueber-nationalists in the Third Reich.
There is nothing abstract or theoretical about Blake's hymn. He wasn't writing a report for the General Synod. As a poet of genius, he knew that the way to convey spiritual realities is to incarnate them in things: swords, chariots, clouded hills, mountains green. St Margaret's, "Parliament's church" in Westminster, disapproves of the line about "dark satanic mills" only by misunderstanding it. No English literature scholar imagines for a minute that Blake was referring to the cotton mills and weaving sheds in Lancashire.
One of our finest biblical commentators, Tom Wright, Bishop of Durham, says: "The 'dark satanic mills' were not the cotton mills and steel mills of the new, noisy and smoky industrial revolution. They were the great churches, such as Westminster Abbey and St Paul's Cathedral, which Blake saw as being hopelessly in thrall to the follies of the world, follies he saw all too clearly in the great thinkers of what was already calling itself the Enlightenment. He faced down the scorn of Voltaire and Rousseau against the deep mysteries of faith. 'You throw the sand against the wind,' he wrote, 'and the wind blows it back again.'?"
Now, at last, we are getting close to understanding this sour prejudice against Jerusalem among so many clergy. For Blake is attacking them - those who, though they promised at ordination to challenge the follies of the age, actually aid and encourage them. It is the Jerusalem haters who have swallowed whole all the dogmas of Rousseauism and the secular superstitions of the Enlightenment in its most recent form: political-correctness.
If Blake could hear for five minutes these people banging on about their true preoccupations, the follies of the age - anti-racism, gender egalitarianism, compliance, the foreign aid industry and the paranoid fantasy of global warming - he would sing all the more loudly against this lot: "Bring me my bow… bring me my arrows… bring me my sword…"
Source
Deportation ruling enrages spy chiefs
British court says bin Laden's 'ambassador' can remain in London
Britain's intelligence chiefs - John Scarlett of MI6 and Jonathan Evans of MI5 - are warning Prime Minister Gordon Brown that judges in an appeals court have "seriously damaged the war on terrorism," The court ruled that Abu Qatada, one of the world's most dangerous terrorists and described by a Spanish court as Osama bin Laden's "ambassador in Europe," cannot be deported to Jordan to face further terrorist charges because to do so would "breach Britain's human rights laws." The infuriated intelligence chiefs have told Brown the decision has "left Britain's anti-terror laws in tatters and raised serious questions in Washington and European capitals about Britain's commitment to fight terrorism."
Abu Qatada, a heavily bearded Jordanian father of five, has been linked to a number of global terror conspiracies. But the Court of Appeal said he cannot be deported to face prosecution in his native Jordan "because the alleged evidence against him there may have been obtained under torture."
The court ruling means not a single terrorist has been forcibly deported from Britain since the London bombing attacks -- despite a Memorandum of Understanding secured by the Home Office from Jordan and other countries that terror suspects would not face torture.
While Abu Qatada remained in a high security prison, the intelligence services had spent three years putting together what one officer called "irrefutable evidence" that he is closely linked to bin Laden and Ayman Al Zarqawi, the deputy leader of al-Qaida. Videos of Abu Qatada's virulent sermons were found in the Hamburg flat of Mohammed Atta, one of the members of the 9/11 terrorists. German intelligence, BND, passed them to MI6 to strengthen the case against Abu Qatada.
Both MI6 and MI5 also provided evidence seen by the Court of Appeal that Abu Qatada, 44, who was born in Bethlehem, had arrived in Britain under a forged United Arab Emirates passport. He claimed asylum and was granted refugee status. He also received monthly welfare benefits.
From his home in Acton, West London, he called on British Muslims to "martyr yourselves in a holy war on British oppression." When he was first arrested in 2001, he was found to have about $1.4 million in his possession, including $1,600 in an envelope marked "for the mujahedin in Chechnya."
Source
Britain's already pathetic maternity services to be cut even further
Plans to downgrade maternity units in four London boroughs and other parts of the country are unacceptable and will deny women choice in how and where they give birth, leading midwives have said. Maternity services in Bexley, Bromley, Greenwich and Lewisham are underfunded and shortstaffed, with an overspend predicted to be 57 million pounds a year by 2010-11.
However, the Royal College of Midwives said that it has “significant reservations” over plans to cut costs by closing at least one – and probably two – maternity units and providing more home births and deliveries by midwives. The planned changes mirror proposals in other parts of the country, with maternity units in Greater Manchester, Teesside, and Oxfordshire already earmarked for radical overhauls.
Source
The British Antarctic survey reports
For a pro-Warmist group, these guys have some surprising spurts of honesty. I guess that they are actually interested in reality. Some excerpts below:
Why should we study Antarctic climate?
The Antarctic region is an important regulator of global climate. The Southern Ocean is a significant sink for both heat and carbon dioxide, acting as a buffer against human-induced climate change. The sea ice that forms around the continent each winter controls the exchange of energy between the Sun and the Earth, and its partition between atmosphere and ocean. As sea ice forms, brine rejected from the ice increases the density of the upper ocean. These waters then sink and form the deep ocean currents that carry heat around the globe.
Changes in global climate can have impacts on the Antarctic environment. The Southern Ocean supports a unique ecosystem that is well adapted to present climate conditions. Changes in ocean temperatures, currents and sea ice will impact on this ecosystem, possibly changing the ocean's capacity to absorb carbon dioxide. Warming of the atmosphere and ocean around Antarctica may lead to increased loss of mass from the Antarctic ice sheets and hence a rise in global sea level. In order to make soundly-based predictions of how the global environment may change over the coming decades and centuries, we need to understand the role played by the Antarctic in the Earth system.
How has Antarctic climate varied over the past 50 years?
Few continuous observations of Antarctic climate are available before the International Geophysical Year of 1957-58. Since this time, surface temperatures have remained fairly stable over much of Antarctica, although individual station records show a high level of year-to-year variability, which could mask any underlying long term-trend. The majority of stations in East Antarctica, including the two long-term records from the high plateau of East Antarctica (South Pole and Vostok) show no statistically-significant warming or cooling trends. By contrast, large and statistically-significant warming trends are seen at stations in the Antarctic Peninsula. Over the past 50 years, the west coast of the Peninsula has been one of the most rapidly-warming parts of the planet. Here, annual mean temperatures have risen by nearly 3øC, with the largest warming occurring in the winter season. This is approximately 10 times the mean rate of global warming [Hence not caused by it], as reported by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The east coast of the Peninsula has warmed more slowly and here the largest warming has taken place in summer and autumn.
Significant warming has also been observed in the Southern Ocean. Upper ocean temperatures to the west of the Antarctic Peninsula have increased by over 1øC since 19554. Within the circumpolar Southern Ocean, it is now well-established that the waters of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC) are warming more rapidly than the global ocean as a whole. A comparison of temperature measurements from the 1990s with data from earlier decades shows a large-scale warming of around 0.2øC in the ACC waters at around 700-1100 m depth21.
Analysis of weather balloon data collected over the past 30 years has shown that the Antarctic atmosphere has warmed below 8 km and cooled above this height. This pattern of warming in the troposphere and cooling in the stratosphere is seen globally and is the expected signature of increases in greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide. However, the 30-year warming at 5 km over the Antarctic during winter (0.75øC) is over three times the average rate of warming at this level for the globe as a whole5.
Reliable year-round measurements of Antarctic sea ice extent are only available from the 1970s, when satellite observations first became available. Unlike in the Arctic, where there has been a significant decline in observed sea ice extent over this period, there has been a small but statistically-significant increase in the overall extent of Antarctic sea ice. However, there are strong geographical variations at a regional scale. Sea ice cover has declined substantially in the seas to the west of the Antarctic Peninsula while it has increased in other parts of the Antarctic
Subtle but important changes have occurred in the atmospheric circulation around Antarctica. Since the early 1960s, atmospheric pressure has dropped over Antarctica and risen in the mid-latitudes of the Southern Hemisphere, a pattern of variability known as the Southern Hemisphere Annular Mode (SAM)7. These changes have resulted in a strengthening of the westerly winds that blow over the Southern Ocean around Antarctica. Stronger westerlies will impact on ocean currents, upwelling and mixing, but the consequences of such changes have yet to be fully understood.
Has human activity caused the recent changes?
Climate can vary as a result of changes in forcing factors that affect the way energy is exchanged between the sun, the earth and space. These forcings can be of natural origin (e.g. volcanic dust in the atmosphere, variations in solar output and variations in the Earth's orbit about the sun) or a result of human activity (e.g. increases in "greenhouse" gases such as carbon dioxide). Additionally, complex interactions between atmosphere, oceans and sea ice can cause climate variability, particularly on a regional scale, over a timescale of years to decades. Attributing observed changes in climate to particular changes in forcing (or to natural variability) is a difficult process that can only be accomplished by bringing together reliable observations of past and present climate with the results of experiments carried out with sophisticated models of the climate system. Attribution of Antarctic climate change is particularly difficult because of the relatively small number of instrumental climate records available from this region and the short length of the records.
As part of the work undertaken for the Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC13, about 20 different climate models were run with historical changes to natural and anthropogenic forcing factors to simulate the climate of the 20th century. The simulated changes in Antarctic surface temperatures over the second half of the 20th century vary greatly from model to model with no single model reproducing exactly the observed pattern of change. However, when results from all models are averaged, the resulting pattern of change bears some resemblance to that observed, with greatest warming in the Peninsula region and little change elsewhere. This result suggests that some of the observed change may have an anthropogenic origin, but the lack of a clear and consistent response to changed forcing between models also suggests that much of the observed change in temperatures may be due to natural variability. The IPCC model experiments fail to reproduce some of the observed features, notably the rapid warming of the lower atmosphere. These differences between modelled and observed changes could be used to argue against attributing change to anthropogenic forcing but some caution is called for as the models used may not adequately represent all of the complex processes that determine temperatures in the polar regions.
More here
Monday, April 14, 2008
Is there any limit to British battiness?
Pirates can claim UK asylum so may not be detained by the navy
The Royal Navy, once the scourge of brigands on the high seas, has been told by the Foreign Office not to detain pirates because doing so may breach their human rights. Warships patrolling pirate-infested waters, such as those off Somalia, have been warned that there is also a risk that captured pirates could claim asylum in Britain. The Foreign Office has advised that pirates sent back to Somalia could have their human rights breached because, under Islamic law, they face beheading for murder or having a hand chopped off for theft.
In 2005 there were almost 40 attacks by pirates and 16 vessels were hijacked and held for ransom. Employing high-tech weaponry, they kill, steal and hold ships' crews to ransom. This year alone pirates killed three people near the Philippines. Last week French commandos seized a Somali pirate gang that had held a luxury yacht with 22 French citizens on board. The hijackers were paid off by the boat's owner and then a French helicopter carrier dispatched 50 commandos to seize the hijackers and the ransom money on dry land.
Britain is part of a coalition force that patrols piracy stricken areas and the guidance has troubled navy officers who believe they should have more freedom to intervene. The guidance was sharply criticised by Julian Brazier MP, the Conservative shipping spokesman, who said: "These people commit horrendous offences. The solution is not to turn a blind eye but to turn them over to the local authorities. The convention on human rights quite rightly doesn't cover the high seas. It's a pathetic indictment of what our legal system has come to."
A Foreign Office spokesman said: "There are issues about human rights and what might happen in these circumstances. The main thing is to ensure any incident is resolved peacefully." The guidance is the latest blow to the robust image of the navy. Last year 15 of its sailors were taken prisoner by the Iranians and publicly humiliated. In the 19th century, British warships largely eradicated piracy when they policed the oceans. The death penalty for piracy on the high seas remained on the statute books until 1998. Modern piracy ranges from maritime mugging to stealing from merchant ships with the crew held at gunpoint.
Source
Look, no scars: organs removed via the mouth
The minister charged with overhauling the NHS is testing a new form of scar-free surgery in which diseased organs are pulled out through the patient’s throat. Professor Lord Darzi, chair of surgery at Imperial College London, has conducted preliminary experiments with the technique in which robotically controlled instruments are lowered into the patient’s stomach. A hole is made in the lining of the stomach, then the organ - usually an appendix or gall bladder - is cut out and pulled up through the throat before the hole is stitched, leaving the patient with no external scars and a reduced risk of infection because the wounds are not exposed to the air. [But it is exposed to acid!]
The technique, called natural orifice translumenal endoscopic surgery, has been successfully used on patients in America, France and India. Darzi, who became a health minister last year, is one of the first surgeons in Britain to use the technique in experiments on pigs, before the first human tests. While admitting it was still “early days”, Darzi believes the probe could eventually be used to remove cancers.
The main after-effects include a sore throat and an unpleasant taste in the mouth from having a diseased organ pulled through it. Other orifices could be used but Darzi said he believed the mouth was the most promising. He said some aspects of the procedure needed perfecting. “If we are going to enter through the stomach we need to develop the appropriate tools to make sure we can close the hole properly,” he said.
Darzi’s team are developing a new surgical robot called the iSnake, which they hope will assist in the new procedure and in keyhole surgery. Other research projects on the new procedure are under way at hospitals around Britain. The first operations on patients in Britain are expected in three to four years.
Source
British education boss on ropes over entry to faith schools
Ed Balls, the children's secretary, has been forced to soften his demands that faith schools change their admissions policies. Jim Knight, Balls's deputy, moved to defuse the row when he told a delegation from Jewish schools that ministers would consider changing the legal code governing admissions to "maintain the concept of equity whilst meeting the need to clarify how we define the ethos of [a religious school]". Religious groups claimed they were unfairly singled out by Balls when he accused dozens of schools of breaching the code, which is designed to prevent "backdoor selection" of middle-class children.
Those at the meeting last Thursday said Knight also talked of changing laws that prevent oversubscribed schools from admitting children only of their own faith, saying: "It is important that you [Jewish schools] preserve your ethos" and "are able to promote strong family values". The hour-long meeting, held at the offices of the Board of Deputies of British Jews in London, was described by Winston Pickett, a spokesman for the board, as a "frank and open interchange".
Michael Gove, the shadow children's secretary, described the concessions by Balls and Knight as "not a total retreat, but definitely a climb-down". "There was a miscalculation and an acknowledgment they had to retreat because they did not have their facts straight," he said. "For ideological reasons, though, they are still intent on making schools the villains in the admissions process."
The row erupted earlier when Balls accused dozens of schools from Manchester, Northamptonshire and Barnet, north London, of breaking the code. He claimed some were "asking parents to commit to making financial contributions as a condition of admission", putting off poor families. Ministers said the abuse was a national issue and "shocking", although they were able to name only six schools that linked payments to admissions. Most of the accused schools turned out to be religious and Balls was accused of a "witch hunt" to pander to the left, many of whom see faith schools as middle class strongholds.
The attack on Balls was joined last night by Frank Field, the reformist Labour MP, who called the criticism of faith schools "incomprehensible ... near-criminal" and "a rant" designed to position the schools secretary for the next leadership contest. He called on Gordon Brown to "rein him in".
Parts of Balls' claims came unstuck last weekend when it emerged that only about a third of parents at some of the schools made the voluntary payments. They are intended to subsidise religious education, security and refurbishments, but it is illegal to link them to admissions. It also emerged that many of the admissions criteria criticised by Balls's officials had been drawn up before the code came into force last year and had already been amended.
Although most schools have now changed their codes to meet the deadline on Tuesday, religious groups are particularly angry that they are not allowed to ask parents whether they support a school's ethos. They argue that this information is vital to preserve a school's distinctive character. Labour's code bans it as it may be interpreted as a request for financial support. It is also seen to favour articulate parents. "It has become absurd, it has come down to arguing over one person's interpretation of the word `support' against another's," said one Catholic head teacher, adding: "They should think hard before they pick a fight with us over angels dancing on pin-heads."
Knight said yesterday: "The Board of Deputies and the government are committed to ending unfair admissions practices . . . we look forward to working with them."
The government is not relaxing its approach to enforcement of the code. Philip Hunter, the schools adjudicator, has written to every education authority demanding signed assurances that they will force schools to comply with the code. Hunter has also taken on a team of barristers to vet policies and told councils "we will expect you to use your powers to object" to any policy deemed noncompliant by the lawyers.
Paul Barber, education officer of the Roman Catholic diocese of Westminster, called Hunter's approach " heavy-handed", but a YouGov poll for The Sunday Times suggests that many voters are sympathetic to Balls. It finds 38% believe that faith schools are being undermined by government statements, but these are outnumbered by the 50% who agree with the statement: "[Balls] is right to get tough on schools that erect hidden barriers that discourage poorer families from applying".
Source
Lying Leftist British politician: "Des Browne, the defence secretary, appears to have misled MPs when he told them an independent report had ruled that the RAF's Nimrod aircraft were safe to fly. Browne made the claim while apologising to relatives of 14 men killed when leaking fuel led to an explosion which destroyed a Nimrod spy plane over Afghanistan in September 2006. A copy of the independent report, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, shows that it found the aircraft did not comply with the Ministry of Defence's own safety rules. The report, produced by QinetiQ in March last year, was highly critical, making 30 recommendations that had to be carried out before the aircraft could be deemed to be safe."
Ban on youngsters playing with toy guns can backfire, Scottish study finds: " Allowing young boys to play with toy guns and take part in superhero games can be good for their development, new research has found. A zero-tolerance approach to replica guns and other toy weapons is active in a large number of nurseries across Scotland and superhero-style play, where children imitate their favourite film characters, is also unpopular among staff as it can lead to fighting and aggression. But Cath Livingstone, a nursery teacher at Abernethy Primary School in Perth and Kinross, found that the "ban" drove the pretend weapons underground, rather than halt interest in them altogether, and children became deceitful and broke nursery rules in order to play their favourite games. She said that the ban went against Scottish Government guidance on engaging children with activities which respond to their needs and interests."
Pirates can claim UK asylum so may not be detained by the navy
The Royal Navy, once the scourge of brigands on the high seas, has been told by the Foreign Office not to detain pirates because doing so may breach their human rights. Warships patrolling pirate-infested waters, such as those off Somalia, have been warned that there is also a risk that captured pirates could claim asylum in Britain. The Foreign Office has advised that pirates sent back to Somalia could have their human rights breached because, under Islamic law, they face beheading for murder or having a hand chopped off for theft.
In 2005 there were almost 40 attacks by pirates and 16 vessels were hijacked and held for ransom. Employing high-tech weaponry, they kill, steal and hold ships' crews to ransom. This year alone pirates killed three people near the Philippines. Last week French commandos seized a Somali pirate gang that had held a luxury yacht with 22 French citizens on board. The hijackers were paid off by the boat's owner and then a French helicopter carrier dispatched 50 commandos to seize the hijackers and the ransom money on dry land.
Britain is part of a coalition force that patrols piracy stricken areas and the guidance has troubled navy officers who believe they should have more freedom to intervene. The guidance was sharply criticised by Julian Brazier MP, the Conservative shipping spokesman, who said: "These people commit horrendous offences. The solution is not to turn a blind eye but to turn them over to the local authorities. The convention on human rights quite rightly doesn't cover the high seas. It's a pathetic indictment of what our legal system has come to."
A Foreign Office spokesman said: "There are issues about human rights and what might happen in these circumstances. The main thing is to ensure any incident is resolved peacefully." The guidance is the latest blow to the robust image of the navy. Last year 15 of its sailors were taken prisoner by the Iranians and publicly humiliated. In the 19th century, British warships largely eradicated piracy when they policed the oceans. The death penalty for piracy on the high seas remained on the statute books until 1998. Modern piracy ranges from maritime mugging to stealing from merchant ships with the crew held at gunpoint.
Source
Look, no scars: organs removed via the mouth
The minister charged with overhauling the NHS is testing a new form of scar-free surgery in which diseased organs are pulled out through the patient’s throat. Professor Lord Darzi, chair of surgery at Imperial College London, has conducted preliminary experiments with the technique in which robotically controlled instruments are lowered into the patient’s stomach. A hole is made in the lining of the stomach, then the organ - usually an appendix or gall bladder - is cut out and pulled up through the throat before the hole is stitched, leaving the patient with no external scars and a reduced risk of infection because the wounds are not exposed to the air. [But it is exposed to acid!]
The technique, called natural orifice translumenal endoscopic surgery, has been successfully used on patients in America, France and India. Darzi, who became a health minister last year, is one of the first surgeons in Britain to use the technique in experiments on pigs, before the first human tests. While admitting it was still “early days”, Darzi believes the probe could eventually be used to remove cancers.
The main after-effects include a sore throat and an unpleasant taste in the mouth from having a diseased organ pulled through it. Other orifices could be used but Darzi said he believed the mouth was the most promising. He said some aspects of the procedure needed perfecting. “If we are going to enter through the stomach we need to develop the appropriate tools to make sure we can close the hole properly,” he said.
Darzi’s team are developing a new surgical robot called the iSnake, which they hope will assist in the new procedure and in keyhole surgery. Other research projects on the new procedure are under way at hospitals around Britain. The first operations on patients in Britain are expected in three to four years.
Source
British education boss on ropes over entry to faith schools
Ed Balls, the children's secretary, has been forced to soften his demands that faith schools change their admissions policies. Jim Knight, Balls's deputy, moved to defuse the row when he told a delegation from Jewish schools that ministers would consider changing the legal code governing admissions to "maintain the concept of equity whilst meeting the need to clarify how we define the ethos of [a religious school]". Religious groups claimed they were unfairly singled out by Balls when he accused dozens of schools of breaching the code, which is designed to prevent "backdoor selection" of middle-class children.
Those at the meeting last Thursday said Knight also talked of changing laws that prevent oversubscribed schools from admitting children only of their own faith, saying: "It is important that you [Jewish schools] preserve your ethos" and "are able to promote strong family values". The hour-long meeting, held at the offices of the Board of Deputies of British Jews in London, was described by Winston Pickett, a spokesman for the board, as a "frank and open interchange".
Michael Gove, the shadow children's secretary, described the concessions by Balls and Knight as "not a total retreat, but definitely a climb-down". "There was a miscalculation and an acknowledgment they had to retreat because they did not have their facts straight," he said. "For ideological reasons, though, they are still intent on making schools the villains in the admissions process."
The row erupted earlier when Balls accused dozens of schools from Manchester, Northamptonshire and Barnet, north London, of breaking the code. He claimed some were "asking parents to commit to making financial contributions as a condition of admission", putting off poor families. Ministers said the abuse was a national issue and "shocking", although they were able to name only six schools that linked payments to admissions. Most of the accused schools turned out to be religious and Balls was accused of a "witch hunt" to pander to the left, many of whom see faith schools as middle class strongholds.
The attack on Balls was joined last night by Frank Field, the reformist Labour MP, who called the criticism of faith schools "incomprehensible ... near-criminal" and "a rant" designed to position the schools secretary for the next leadership contest. He called on Gordon Brown to "rein him in".
Parts of Balls' claims came unstuck last weekend when it emerged that only about a third of parents at some of the schools made the voluntary payments. They are intended to subsidise religious education, security and refurbishments, but it is illegal to link them to admissions. It also emerged that many of the admissions criteria criticised by Balls's officials had been drawn up before the code came into force last year and had already been amended.
Although most schools have now changed their codes to meet the deadline on Tuesday, religious groups are particularly angry that they are not allowed to ask parents whether they support a school's ethos. They argue that this information is vital to preserve a school's distinctive character. Labour's code bans it as it may be interpreted as a request for financial support. It is also seen to favour articulate parents. "It has become absurd, it has come down to arguing over one person's interpretation of the word `support' against another's," said one Catholic head teacher, adding: "They should think hard before they pick a fight with us over angels dancing on pin-heads."
Knight said yesterday: "The Board of Deputies and the government are committed to ending unfair admissions practices . . . we look forward to working with them."
The government is not relaxing its approach to enforcement of the code. Philip Hunter, the schools adjudicator, has written to every education authority demanding signed assurances that they will force schools to comply with the code. Hunter has also taken on a team of barristers to vet policies and told councils "we will expect you to use your powers to object" to any policy deemed noncompliant by the lawyers.
Paul Barber, education officer of the Roman Catholic diocese of Westminster, called Hunter's approach " heavy-handed", but a YouGov poll for The Sunday Times suggests that many voters are sympathetic to Balls. It finds 38% believe that faith schools are being undermined by government statements, but these are outnumbered by the 50% who agree with the statement: "[Balls] is right to get tough on schools that erect hidden barriers that discourage poorer families from applying".
Source
Lying Leftist British politician: "Des Browne, the defence secretary, appears to have misled MPs when he told them an independent report had ruled that the RAF's Nimrod aircraft were safe to fly. Browne made the claim while apologising to relatives of 14 men killed when leaking fuel led to an explosion which destroyed a Nimrod spy plane over Afghanistan in September 2006. A copy of the independent report, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, shows that it found the aircraft did not comply with the Ministry of Defence's own safety rules. The report, produced by QinetiQ in March last year, was highly critical, making 30 recommendations that had to be carried out before the aircraft could be deemed to be safe."
Ban on youngsters playing with toy guns can backfire, Scottish study finds: " Allowing young boys to play with toy guns and take part in superhero games can be good for their development, new research has found. A zero-tolerance approach to replica guns and other toy weapons is active in a large number of nurseries across Scotland and superhero-style play, where children imitate their favourite film characters, is also unpopular among staff as it can lead to fighting and aggression. But Cath Livingstone, a nursery teacher at Abernethy Primary School in Perth and Kinross, found that the "ban" drove the pretend weapons underground, rather than halt interest in them altogether, and children became deceitful and broke nursery rules in order to play their favourite games. She said that the ban went against Scottish Government guidance on engaging children with activities which respond to their needs and interests."
Sunday, April 13, 2008
The inconvenient truth about immigration in Britain
A black British citizen says below that the tensions predicted by Enoch Powell have come to pass but that grumbling is about all that the British will do about it. He is probably right about that. He very much understates the Muslim problem, however and completely ignores the huge problem of black crime
On the afternoon of April 20, 1968, when Conservative MP Enoch Powell was making the most provocative and notorious speech in the history of race relations in Britain, I was a nine-month-old baby living in Mogadishu, Somalia. Speaking at the Midland Hotel in Birmingham, Powell predicted that the cost of the burgeoning immigration to Britain would be rivers of blood - communities torn apart by the tensions of conflicting cultures learning to live together. His words have reverberated ever since. Now, more than ever, Britain is experiencing unfettered immigration, the like of which Powell could never have imagined. Each year, around 190,000 immigrants are arriving in this country.
Last week, a report by the House of Lords economic affairs committee concluded that high net immigration has had little effect on income per head in the resident population - in fact, benefitting the population by just 58p a week. The report also said that ministers should limit the number of workers entering from outside the EU.
My family moved to Britain in 1973, four years after President Shermarke was assassinated in a military coup. In my family's case, the streets of Britain were paved with gold. We came from a former British colony and my parents wanted us to have a British education and upbringing. We were not political refugees: this was 18 years before the country's civil war. Britain became my home. I was educated at Cheltenham College and New College, Oxford - both privileged institutions - which gave me a sense of confidence that I could integrate and feel British. I was very fortunate.
But my parents also stressed my Somali heritage and identity. We spoke Somali at home, ate Somali food and went there in the holidays. This gave me a pride in my roots and a confidence to get on with people from all backgrounds.
It was people like me whom the London dockers were objecting to in the Seventies when they marched from the East End to the Palace of Westminster carrying placards saying 'Back Britain, not Black Britain'. It was my family that the factory workers and Smithfield meat porters were striking against when they supported Powell.
So now, 40 years after his incendiary speech, I have travelled around Britain for a Channel 4 Dispatches documentary - Immigration: The Inconvenient Truth - to find out the real legacy of his words, and the state of race relations today. What I discovered was a complex, sometimes confused, but nonetheless compelling glimpse of a society under the most extraordinary strain it has ever faced outside wartime. And my investigation led me to the most troubling question of all: Was Enoch Powell right?
In his speech, Powell warned that Britain's native population would become 'strangers in their own country', and 'the black man will have the whip hand over the white man'. He said: 'They found their wives unable to obtain hospital beds in childbirth, their children unable to obtain school places, their homes and neighbourhoods changed beyond recognition, their plans and prospects for the future defeated.' Warning that the nation was 'busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre', he added: 'As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see the River Tiber foaming with much blood.'
A survey by YouGov for Dispatches now suggests that he was right. Eighty-three per cent of Britons polled said they feel that there is an immigration crisis, and 84 per cent believe that the Government should stop or reduce immigration altogether. Sixty-six per cent feel their jobs are being undercut by migrant workers, and 69 per cent feel they are losing out because new immigrants are given special treatment.
Certainly, since I returned to Britain, after working abroad as a foreign correspondent, I have noticed that immigration is at the forefront of people's minds and is being discussed across the country. Many people fear that the uncontrolled number of immigrants has put an intolerable strain on housing, health and education.
My children Loula, seven, Sami, five, and Zachary, two, are at school here, and my wife Nina and I are part of the local community. People talk about immigration at home, at the school gates, in the workplace. They worry about the bread-and-butter issues: whether there will be enough places for their kids in our schools, how they will get on in a school where English is the second language, whether they can get a job.
Yet things have moved on enormously over the 40 years since Powell's speech. Back then, immigration was about cultural issues; about prejudice against skin colour and creed. Now, the grievances are focused on economics and the change in the labour market, on the effect on the NHS and on education.
What I found most shocking was that even second and third generation immigrants are resentful of new immigrants. You would think that because immigration and race have become entwined as an issue, this would not be the case. If anything, though, these people's feelings of grievance towards the wave of Poles now arriving in Britain is intensified. I interviewed Harbhajan Dardi, a Punjabi Sikh who arrived in Britain in 1968 and now lives in Smethwick, Birmingham. Although he remembered the days when Asians and dogs were banned from his local pub, he still felt animosity towards the new wave of Eastern European immigrants coming into Britain. 'They don't actually contribute to the country, to the economy,' he told me. 'They are not here to settle. They are here to have the benefits.'
Even Jamaican immigrants, who were the prime target of Powell's speech - he provocatively described their children as ' piccaninnies' - felt aggrieved towards Polish immigrants. Going back to Brixton, where I first started work as a trainee journalist on the black newspaper The Voice, I met Ricky, a carpet cleaner, whose grandparents came over from Jamaica during the Fifties. He told me he felt his job was under threat because the Poles are undercutting his rates.....
However, I don't think we will see the same levels of violence in Britain now as in the riot-torn Eighties because there are a completely different set of social dynamics. English people are generally more tolerant, and institutions like the police are more enlightened. The idea of the BNP marching through New Cross in South-East London and policemen giving them the thumbsup is unthinkable today. Our willingness to confront the problems and talk about them openly will prevent them becoming a real battleground in the way that Enoch Powell predicted.
Powell argued that one of the problems with immigration was that the majority of immigrants did not want to integrate and had a vested interest in fostering racial and religious differences. You may not have communities which are as starkly segregated as in Powell's day, but what you do have - and which modern technology has made available - is segregation of the mind. People can belong to utterly separate communities, which reject the mainstream and don't want, or need, to integrate. Instead of multi-culturalism, we are getting tribalisation.
The Muslims are particularly susceptible to this tribalisation because of a minority of extremists in their midst. Their young could be sitting in a bedroom in Bradford, connected via the internet to a radical Islamic preacher. In Southall, there are third generation British Asians who have their own community, their own music, their own language. They don't see themselves as British Asian: they see themselves as Punjabi. We thought that the generation after my parents' one would be totally integrated - but things have gone full circle. That has got to be the result of a multi- culturalism which encourages loyalty to one's own culture over-and-above all loyalty to the host Britain's....
There is no point sitting around saying Enoch Powell was a small-minded racist bigot. If there are people who still evoke his name and ideas, we have to tackle the problem and ask why.
More here
BBC PRESSURED TO COME CLEAN: WHAT DID THE WMO SAY, WHEN DID THEY SAY IT?
The BBC is sending this fatuous response to queries about the infamous capitulation to climate activist Jo Abbess's extortion:
Well, for a start the Beeb is supposed to report what is known and in most cases the available data is open to interpretation - it is in fact ambiguous by nature. No points there. So, if the WMO (source of the press release reported on by Harrabin) actually complained (and they might have since they are a UN shopfront):
* what exactly did they say
* what changes did they request
* why was this not noted when edits were made
* why wasn't the editing timestamp updated to reflect changes
* importantly, why was Abbess invited to "Have a look in 10 minutes and tell me you are happier. We have changed headline and more"
* does the BBC believe Abbess to be a representative of the WMO
* if not, what position does Abbess occupy that gives her editorial control over BBC content
* How does this comply with the BBC Trust's stated values?
If you'd like to help find out whether the WMO really requested changes and what they said, if they did, then the place to start asking is NewsOnline Complaints and pose your questions. Perhaps ask who contacted them from WMO and what did they say?
If the BBC wants to be a clearing house for activist propaganda that's fine - so long as the activists are the one's footing the bill rather than the fees levied on the British public.
Source
Faces give away giveaways - psych profs' amazing claim
I think that the mocking tone of the report below is probably justified
In today's pseudoscience news, the quality press is alive with the findings by UK psych researchers that people can fairly reliably tell how slutty someone is merely by looking at a picture of their face. Psychologists at several UK universities teamed up on the research, which will plainly lead in short order to the betterment of humanity. The link between looking dirty and being a tramp was firmly established for both sexes.
This was done by asking students to fill out questionnaires regarding how likely they were to put out, how often they had done so lately etc. Data from such questionnaires is well known to be solidly grounded in fact. This done, the subjects were photographed.
Other students were then asked to look at the photographed faces and say how easy they reckoned the pictured individual might be. In a staggering 72 per cent of cases, they correctly guessed whether the person in the portrait was or was not a slag. Or at least, whether or not they were likely to admit being a slag on an anonymous questionnaire.
"We may be subtly aware of other people's attitudes to sex," says Dr Lynda Boothroyd of Durham Uni, lead author of the groundbreaking slapper-spotting research. "What is far more interesting is that despite the subtlety of the explicit awareness... there is a very strong tendency for women to be attracted to... men who are less interested in casual sex. Men have the opposite preference with female faces; they strongly prefer the [easy] women."
Participants were also asked to rate faces on how masculine/feminine they looked, and the researchers believe this shows a connection between masculine aspect in men and a tendency to be anyone's after a couple of drinks. It seems that the study also supports the idea that "male masculinity" has "negative connotations... for long term partnerships".
In other words, manly men are easy, and women don't like that. Or put another way: "Androgenisation in men is related to less restricted sexual behaviour... women are averse to unrestricted men." Comfort, then, for any chaps out there who don't look very studly and don't get much action - it seems women are much more attracted to your type. Even if they sometimes have an odd way of showing it.
Source
AS THEY TACKLE CLIMATE CHANGE, GOVERNMENTS ARE STARVING THE PEOPLE THEY SET OUT TO HELP
The law of unintended consequences has claimed many millions of victims over the centuries; the first decade of the 21st century is now demonstrating that governments have not lost the knack of destroying the livelihoods of the very people they purport to help.
On a brief visit to Britain, the head of the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) yesterday told us of his desperate concern over rising food prices, especially in the developing world. Antonio Guterres singled out for special blame the biofuels business, which he said was having an, "unexpected very negative impact on the availability of food".
Unexpected? How could it not have been anticipated that the turning over of millions of acres of farmland to the production of fuel for cars rather than humans would not have had this effect? To be fair to Mr Guterres, the governments of the developed world showed no outward signs of anticipating this inevitable consequence, so seduced were they by the idea of a "renewable" alternative to fossil fuels; it would, they claimed, simultaneously reduce our political dependency on Middle Eastern oil and save the lives of millions in the Third World who would otherwise perish through climate change.
The first part of that equation was especially attractive to President George W Bush. Following the collapse of his policy to "democratise" the Middle East, he promulgated laws which mandated the turning over of about a third of the US corn belt into the production of ethanol. Since ethanol is dramatically less efficient than dead dinosaurs as a way of powering engines, this has also involved vast subsidies - as much as $25bn a year, according to some estimates.
Don't, by the way, expect this to change after Bush leaves the White House. Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John McCain all support this grotesque policy - as they have taken great care to point out when electioneering in Iowa, the Saudi Arabia of ethanol production.
They, rather more than Mr Bush, have tended to justify this monumental bribe as part of a policy to "reduce climate change". In this they are much closer to the governments of the European Union, which is collectively committed to a mad plan to generate a third of our fuel from crops, as part of its attempt to conform to Kyoto treaty obligations. It is especially mad, because recent research has suggested that most biofuel production, especially when it involves the uprooting of vast tracts of forest, is much more environmentally damaging than the burning of fossil fuels.
Gordon Brown has now called for a review of the consequences of this policy for world food production and distribution, to the irritation of the President of the European Commission, who (somewhat bizarrely) sticks to the view that it has no significant consequences for food prices.
Yet one can also understand Jose Manuel Barroso's feelings: it makes the EU look ridiculous to say that it will examine the consequences of a policy - after rather than before the member governments agreed to implement it.
More here
BBC bias again: "Here's a great example from the BBC of the presumably unthinking double standard that guides so much Middle East reporting: "Egypt has sent 1,200 extra security personnel to the border area with Gaza, officials say. The Egyptians fear another breach of the frontier by Palestinians trying to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza. A senior member of Hamas, which controls Gaza, threatened on Tuesday to repeat a breach of the border with Egypt earlier this year." So Egypt is trying to prevent "a breach of the border," while Israel is imposing a "blockade." Yet there is no difference between what the two countries are actually doing."
Penny-pinching British government under fire: "Families of British troops killed in war zones because of faulty equipment may be able to sue the Government for a breach of human rights after a landmark High Court ruling yesterday. The court set out new grounds for legal action by stating that the Army's duty to protect soldiers could extend to patrols outside a military base and even to a battlefield. After the judgment, some relatives of soldiers killed in Iraq - and who blame the Ministry of Defence for inadequate equipment, training or care - said they would consider bringing a group legal action. Mr Justice Collins, in a judgment on the conduct of inquests into the deaths of service personnel, said that members of the Armed Forces serving abroad could not receive absolute protection. But he ruled that the MoD had an obligation to avoid or minimise risks to the lives of its troops"
A black British citizen says below that the tensions predicted by Enoch Powell have come to pass but that grumbling is about all that the British will do about it. He is probably right about that. He very much understates the Muslim problem, however and completely ignores the huge problem of black crime
On the afternoon of April 20, 1968, when Conservative MP Enoch Powell was making the most provocative and notorious speech in the history of race relations in Britain, I was a nine-month-old baby living in Mogadishu, Somalia. Speaking at the Midland Hotel in Birmingham, Powell predicted that the cost of the burgeoning immigration to Britain would be rivers of blood - communities torn apart by the tensions of conflicting cultures learning to live together. His words have reverberated ever since. Now, more than ever, Britain is experiencing unfettered immigration, the like of which Powell could never have imagined. Each year, around 190,000 immigrants are arriving in this country.
Last week, a report by the House of Lords economic affairs committee concluded that high net immigration has had little effect on income per head in the resident population - in fact, benefitting the population by just 58p a week. The report also said that ministers should limit the number of workers entering from outside the EU.
My family moved to Britain in 1973, four years after President Shermarke was assassinated in a military coup. In my family's case, the streets of Britain were paved with gold. We came from a former British colony and my parents wanted us to have a British education and upbringing. We were not political refugees: this was 18 years before the country's civil war. Britain became my home. I was educated at Cheltenham College and New College, Oxford - both privileged institutions - which gave me a sense of confidence that I could integrate and feel British. I was very fortunate.
But my parents also stressed my Somali heritage and identity. We spoke Somali at home, ate Somali food and went there in the holidays. This gave me a pride in my roots and a confidence to get on with people from all backgrounds.
It was people like me whom the London dockers were objecting to in the Seventies when they marched from the East End to the Palace of Westminster carrying placards saying 'Back Britain, not Black Britain'. It was my family that the factory workers and Smithfield meat porters were striking against when they supported Powell.
So now, 40 years after his incendiary speech, I have travelled around Britain for a Channel 4 Dispatches documentary - Immigration: The Inconvenient Truth - to find out the real legacy of his words, and the state of race relations today. What I discovered was a complex, sometimes confused, but nonetheless compelling glimpse of a society under the most extraordinary strain it has ever faced outside wartime. And my investigation led me to the most troubling question of all: Was Enoch Powell right?
In his speech, Powell warned that Britain's native population would become 'strangers in their own country', and 'the black man will have the whip hand over the white man'. He said: 'They found their wives unable to obtain hospital beds in childbirth, their children unable to obtain school places, their homes and neighbourhoods changed beyond recognition, their plans and prospects for the future defeated.' Warning that the nation was 'busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre', he added: 'As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see the River Tiber foaming with much blood.'
A survey by YouGov for Dispatches now suggests that he was right. Eighty-three per cent of Britons polled said they feel that there is an immigration crisis, and 84 per cent believe that the Government should stop or reduce immigration altogether. Sixty-six per cent feel their jobs are being undercut by migrant workers, and 69 per cent feel they are losing out because new immigrants are given special treatment.
Certainly, since I returned to Britain, after working abroad as a foreign correspondent, I have noticed that immigration is at the forefront of people's minds and is being discussed across the country. Many people fear that the uncontrolled number of immigrants has put an intolerable strain on housing, health and education.
My children Loula, seven, Sami, five, and Zachary, two, are at school here, and my wife Nina and I are part of the local community. People talk about immigration at home, at the school gates, in the workplace. They worry about the bread-and-butter issues: whether there will be enough places for their kids in our schools, how they will get on in a school where English is the second language, whether they can get a job.
Yet things have moved on enormously over the 40 years since Powell's speech. Back then, immigration was about cultural issues; about prejudice against skin colour and creed. Now, the grievances are focused on economics and the change in the labour market, on the effect on the NHS and on education.
What I found most shocking was that even second and third generation immigrants are resentful of new immigrants. You would think that because immigration and race have become entwined as an issue, this would not be the case. If anything, though, these people's feelings of grievance towards the wave of Poles now arriving in Britain is intensified. I interviewed Harbhajan Dardi, a Punjabi Sikh who arrived in Britain in 1968 and now lives in Smethwick, Birmingham. Although he remembered the days when Asians and dogs were banned from his local pub, he still felt animosity towards the new wave of Eastern European immigrants coming into Britain. 'They don't actually contribute to the country, to the economy,' he told me. 'They are not here to settle. They are here to have the benefits.'
Even Jamaican immigrants, who were the prime target of Powell's speech - he provocatively described their children as ' piccaninnies' - felt aggrieved towards Polish immigrants. Going back to Brixton, where I first started work as a trainee journalist on the black newspaper The Voice, I met Ricky, a carpet cleaner, whose grandparents came over from Jamaica during the Fifties. He told me he felt his job was under threat because the Poles are undercutting his rates.....
However, I don't think we will see the same levels of violence in Britain now as in the riot-torn Eighties because there are a completely different set of social dynamics. English people are generally more tolerant, and institutions like the police are more enlightened. The idea of the BNP marching through New Cross in South-East London and policemen giving them the thumbsup is unthinkable today. Our willingness to confront the problems and talk about them openly will prevent them becoming a real battleground in the way that Enoch Powell predicted.
Powell argued that one of the problems with immigration was that the majority of immigrants did not want to integrate and had a vested interest in fostering racial and religious differences. You may not have communities which are as starkly segregated as in Powell's day, but what you do have - and which modern technology has made available - is segregation of the mind. People can belong to utterly separate communities, which reject the mainstream and don't want, or need, to integrate. Instead of multi-culturalism, we are getting tribalisation.
The Muslims are particularly susceptible to this tribalisation because of a minority of extremists in their midst. Their young could be sitting in a bedroom in Bradford, connected via the internet to a radical Islamic preacher. In Southall, there are third generation British Asians who have their own community, their own music, their own language. They don't see themselves as British Asian: they see themselves as Punjabi. We thought that the generation after my parents' one would be totally integrated - but things have gone full circle. That has got to be the result of a multi- culturalism which encourages loyalty to one's own culture over-and-above all loyalty to the host Britain's....
There is no point sitting around saying Enoch Powell was a small-minded racist bigot. If there are people who still evoke his name and ideas, we have to tackle the problem and ask why.
More here
BBC PRESSURED TO COME CLEAN: WHAT DID THE WMO SAY, WHEN DID THEY SAY IT?
The BBC is sending this fatuous response to queries about the infamous capitulation to climate activist Jo Abbess's extortion:
Dear Reader
There has been considerable interest in the story about global temperatures authored by our correspondent Roger Harrabin, and the alteration made to the text after publication. A minor change was made to the piece on our website to better reflect the science. A number of people, including the report's authors the World Meteorological Organization, pointed out to us that the earlier version had been ambiguous.
With thanks for your mail, time and interest, BBC News website
Well, for a start the Beeb is supposed to report what is known and in most cases the available data is open to interpretation - it is in fact ambiguous by nature. No points there. So, if the WMO (source of the press release reported on by Harrabin) actually complained (and they might have since they are a UN shopfront):
* what exactly did they say
* what changes did they request
* why was this not noted when edits were made
* why wasn't the editing timestamp updated to reflect changes
* importantly, why was Abbess invited to "Have a look in 10 minutes and tell me you are happier. We have changed headline and more"
* does the BBC believe Abbess to be a representative of the WMO
* if not, what position does Abbess occupy that gives her editorial control over BBC content
* How does this comply with the BBC Trust's stated values?
Our values
Trust is the foundation of the BBC: we are independent, impartial and honest.
Audiences are at the heart of everything we do.
We take pride in delivering quality and value for money.
Creativity is the lifeblood of our organisation.
We respect each other and celebrate our diversity so that everyone can give their best.
We are one BBC: great things happen when we work together.
If you'd like to help find out whether the WMO really requested changes and what they said, if they did, then the place to start asking is NewsOnline Complaints and pose your questions. Perhaps ask who contacted them from WMO and what did they say?
If the BBC wants to be a clearing house for activist propaganda that's fine - so long as the activists are the one's footing the bill rather than the fees levied on the British public.
Source
Faces give away giveaways - psych profs' amazing claim
I think that the mocking tone of the report below is probably justified
In today's pseudoscience news, the quality press is alive with the findings by UK psych researchers that people can fairly reliably tell how slutty someone is merely by looking at a picture of their face. Psychologists at several UK universities teamed up on the research, which will plainly lead in short order to the betterment of humanity. The link between looking dirty and being a tramp was firmly established for both sexes.
This was done by asking students to fill out questionnaires regarding how likely they were to put out, how often they had done so lately etc. Data from such questionnaires is well known to be solidly grounded in fact. This done, the subjects were photographed.
Other students were then asked to look at the photographed faces and say how easy they reckoned the pictured individual might be. In a staggering 72 per cent of cases, they correctly guessed whether the person in the portrait was or was not a slag. Or at least, whether or not they were likely to admit being a slag on an anonymous questionnaire.
"We may be subtly aware of other people's attitudes to sex," says Dr Lynda Boothroyd of Durham Uni, lead author of the groundbreaking slapper-spotting research. "What is far more interesting is that despite the subtlety of the explicit awareness... there is a very strong tendency for women to be attracted to... men who are less interested in casual sex. Men have the opposite preference with female faces; they strongly prefer the [easy] women."
Participants were also asked to rate faces on how masculine/feminine they looked, and the researchers believe this shows a connection between masculine aspect in men and a tendency to be anyone's after a couple of drinks. It seems that the study also supports the idea that "male masculinity" has "negative connotations... for long term partnerships".
In other words, manly men are easy, and women don't like that. Or put another way: "Androgenisation in men is related to less restricted sexual behaviour... women are averse to unrestricted men." Comfort, then, for any chaps out there who don't look very studly and don't get much action - it seems women are much more attracted to your type. Even if they sometimes have an odd way of showing it.
Source
AS THEY TACKLE CLIMATE CHANGE, GOVERNMENTS ARE STARVING THE PEOPLE THEY SET OUT TO HELP
The law of unintended consequences has claimed many millions of victims over the centuries; the first decade of the 21st century is now demonstrating that governments have not lost the knack of destroying the livelihoods of the very people they purport to help.
On a brief visit to Britain, the head of the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) yesterday told us of his desperate concern over rising food prices, especially in the developing world. Antonio Guterres singled out for special blame the biofuels business, which he said was having an, "unexpected very negative impact on the availability of food".
Unexpected? How could it not have been anticipated that the turning over of millions of acres of farmland to the production of fuel for cars rather than humans would not have had this effect? To be fair to Mr Guterres, the governments of the developed world showed no outward signs of anticipating this inevitable consequence, so seduced were they by the idea of a "renewable" alternative to fossil fuels; it would, they claimed, simultaneously reduce our political dependency on Middle Eastern oil and save the lives of millions in the Third World who would otherwise perish through climate change.
The first part of that equation was especially attractive to President George W Bush. Following the collapse of his policy to "democratise" the Middle East, he promulgated laws which mandated the turning over of about a third of the US corn belt into the production of ethanol. Since ethanol is dramatically less efficient than dead dinosaurs as a way of powering engines, this has also involved vast subsidies - as much as $25bn a year, according to some estimates.
Don't, by the way, expect this to change after Bush leaves the White House. Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John McCain all support this grotesque policy - as they have taken great care to point out when electioneering in Iowa, the Saudi Arabia of ethanol production.
They, rather more than Mr Bush, have tended to justify this monumental bribe as part of a policy to "reduce climate change". In this they are much closer to the governments of the European Union, which is collectively committed to a mad plan to generate a third of our fuel from crops, as part of its attempt to conform to Kyoto treaty obligations. It is especially mad, because recent research has suggested that most biofuel production, especially when it involves the uprooting of vast tracts of forest, is much more environmentally damaging than the burning of fossil fuels.
Gordon Brown has now called for a review of the consequences of this policy for world food production and distribution, to the irritation of the President of the European Commission, who (somewhat bizarrely) sticks to the view that it has no significant consequences for food prices.
Yet one can also understand Jose Manuel Barroso's feelings: it makes the EU look ridiculous to say that it will examine the consequences of a policy - after rather than before the member governments agreed to implement it.
More here
BBC bias again: "Here's a great example from the BBC of the presumably unthinking double standard that guides so much Middle East reporting: "Egypt has sent 1,200 extra security personnel to the border area with Gaza, officials say. The Egyptians fear another breach of the frontier by Palestinians trying to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza. A senior member of Hamas, which controls Gaza, threatened on Tuesday to repeat a breach of the border with Egypt earlier this year." So Egypt is trying to prevent "a breach of the border," while Israel is imposing a "blockade." Yet there is no difference between what the two countries are actually doing."
Penny-pinching British government under fire: "Families of British troops killed in war zones because of faulty equipment may be able to sue the Government for a breach of human rights after a landmark High Court ruling yesterday. The court set out new grounds for legal action by stating that the Army's duty to protect soldiers could extend to patrols outside a military base and even to a battlefield. After the judgment, some relatives of soldiers killed in Iraq - and who blame the Ministry of Defence for inadequate equipment, training or care - said they would consider bringing a group legal action. Mr Justice Collins, in a judgment on the conduct of inquests into the deaths of service personnel, said that members of the Armed Forces serving abroad could not receive absolute protection. But he ruled that the MoD had an obligation to avoid or minimise risks to the lives of its troops"
Saturday, April 12, 2008
The BBC again
The Wattmaster has a fun flashing GIF showing how the BBC backed down on their global cooling story. There have been many characterizations of the BBC over this but the one characterizing them as having "no balls" gets pretty close, I think.
London Mayoral candidates call for illegal immigration amnesty
Today, all four major candidates in London's mayoral election join religious and business leaders in proposing a radical solution for illegal immigrants. A formidable coalition of businessmen, politicians, religious leaders and community workers will pledge their support tonight for an amnesty for illegal immigrants who have been resident in the UK for several years and can pass strict tests to prove their contribution to British society.
All four of London's main mayoral candidates - including, against the official policy of his party, the Tory candidate Boris Johnson - will back the campaign to offer undocumented workers the chance to be integrated into mainstream society and obtain papers allowing them to work and pay taxes legally. In an unprecedented move that will exert even more pressure on the Government to heed calls for an amnesty, they will be joined by an array of influential figures from outside the political world, including Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, Dr Muhammad Abdul Bari, leader of the Muslim Council of Britain and Stephen O'Brien, one of the City's leading businessmen.
"Enormous untapped potential and appalling waste is taking place right in front us," Mr O'Brien, chairman of the lobby group London First and former chief executive of Business in the Community, said yesterday. "Business leaders recognise that the case for an amnesty is both principled and pragmatic. The economic and moral case for liberating this army of workers from the underground economy is irrefutable."
The Government's tough new immigration controls have just suffered an embarrassing setback when the High Court ruled them illegal and unfair. Home Office changes to the Highly Skilled Migrants Programme (HSMP), which could lead to thousands of deportations, amounted to "conspicuous unfairness and an abuse of power", judges concluded.
Pressure to make the offer of a one-off amnesty has intensified in the wake of a campaign by London Citizens, the capital's largest community organisation. At a public assembly in Westminster tonight, more than 2,000 representatives of the city's community groups will demand the next mayor back their campaign. All four candidates, the Labour Mayor Ken Livingstone, the Liberal Democrats' Brian Paddick, the Green Party's Sian Berry and Mr Johnson, will agree.
Bishop Pat Lynch, a senior representative of Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor, said the Catholic Church backed the changes to reward immigrants who have proved their worth to British society. "We support an agreed pathway into citizenship for irregular migrants," he said. "Families like them have contributed in a number of ways to society through work, commitment to family and schools. They are settled and trying to integrate into British life." The Muslim leader Dr Bari added: "We have to find a way of helping these people become legal citizens. We are happy to accept their labour, but not grant them rights. The present situation is not just or right and we need to come to their aid."
Estimates of the number of illegal workers range from 500,000 to 700,000, half of which may be failed asylum-seekers. An estimated two-thirds of illegal migrants work in London and the South-east, in cleaning, catering, hospitality and construction. Because they do not have legal rights, their pay and conditions are subject to abrupt changes.
The Government has steadfastly refused to agree to a blanket amnesty, claiming it would lead to a vast increase in the number of immigrants arriving. Liam Byrne, the Immigration minister, reaffirmed the Government's commitment to clampdown on businesses employing workers without full legal rights. But critics say granting deserving candidates an amnesty would be ethically and financially sound. A report by the Institute for Public Policy Research concludes that allowing illegal immigrants to work legally and pay taxes could yield a windfall of between 1 billion pounds and 3.3bn.
Last month Mr Livingstone called for a "fresh start", with a one-off amnesty for migrants without "regular status", in spite of his party's stance. "Migrants contribute hugely to the economic, civic and cultural life of London and the UK," he said. "To have a substantial number of them living here without regular status because of deep-rooted failings in the immigration system, some dating back over a decade, is deeply damaging to London as well as to them."
London Citizens' proposals demand undocumented workers meet strict criteria before obtaining full legal privileges. These include proof of their residence in the UK for at least four years, no significant criminal record, and a willingness to learn English. If individuals met these criteria, they would be placed on a two-year path to citizenship, after which they would have to have a favourable reference from an employer or a community leader. The Liberal Democrats are the only party committed to the idea of an "earned path to citizenship". The Tory leader, David Cameron, distanced himself from an amnesty, saying: "Boris is his own man. He is standing on his own platform and he dictates his own policies."
In the High Court, Sir George Newman said there was no reason why migrants who had come to Britain in 2002 under the HSMP should be deported for failing to accrue the requisite number of points. But Mr Byrne said he would appeal against the ruling.
Source
BBC bias to lessen? "Mark Thompson, the Director General of the BBC, tonight warned broadcasters against becoming overly-cautious in their reporting on Islam for fear of causing offence to Muslims. Speaking at Westminster Cathedral Mr Thompson, a practising Catholic, said there was "a growing nervousness about discussion about Islam and its relationship to the traditions and values of British and Western society as a whole". He said that the BBC and other major channels "have a special responsibility" to ensure that debates about "faith and society" and about any religion "should not be foreclosed or censored".
The Wattmaster has a fun flashing GIF showing how the BBC backed down on their global cooling story. There have been many characterizations of the BBC over this but the one characterizing them as having "no balls" gets pretty close, I think.
London Mayoral candidates call for illegal immigration amnesty
Today, all four major candidates in London's mayoral election join religious and business leaders in proposing a radical solution for illegal immigrants. A formidable coalition of businessmen, politicians, religious leaders and community workers will pledge their support tonight for an amnesty for illegal immigrants who have been resident in the UK for several years and can pass strict tests to prove their contribution to British society.
All four of London's main mayoral candidates - including, against the official policy of his party, the Tory candidate Boris Johnson - will back the campaign to offer undocumented workers the chance to be integrated into mainstream society and obtain papers allowing them to work and pay taxes legally. In an unprecedented move that will exert even more pressure on the Government to heed calls for an amnesty, they will be joined by an array of influential figures from outside the political world, including Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, Dr Muhammad Abdul Bari, leader of the Muslim Council of Britain and Stephen O'Brien, one of the City's leading businessmen.
"Enormous untapped potential and appalling waste is taking place right in front us," Mr O'Brien, chairman of the lobby group London First and former chief executive of Business in the Community, said yesterday. "Business leaders recognise that the case for an amnesty is both principled and pragmatic. The economic and moral case for liberating this army of workers from the underground economy is irrefutable."
The Government's tough new immigration controls have just suffered an embarrassing setback when the High Court ruled them illegal and unfair. Home Office changes to the Highly Skilled Migrants Programme (HSMP), which could lead to thousands of deportations, amounted to "conspicuous unfairness and an abuse of power", judges concluded.
Pressure to make the offer of a one-off amnesty has intensified in the wake of a campaign by London Citizens, the capital's largest community organisation. At a public assembly in Westminster tonight, more than 2,000 representatives of the city's community groups will demand the next mayor back their campaign. All four candidates, the Labour Mayor Ken Livingstone, the Liberal Democrats' Brian Paddick, the Green Party's Sian Berry and Mr Johnson, will agree.
Bishop Pat Lynch, a senior representative of Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor, said the Catholic Church backed the changes to reward immigrants who have proved their worth to British society. "We support an agreed pathway into citizenship for irregular migrants," he said. "Families like them have contributed in a number of ways to society through work, commitment to family and schools. They are settled and trying to integrate into British life." The Muslim leader Dr Bari added: "We have to find a way of helping these people become legal citizens. We are happy to accept their labour, but not grant them rights. The present situation is not just or right and we need to come to their aid."
Estimates of the number of illegal workers range from 500,000 to 700,000, half of which may be failed asylum-seekers. An estimated two-thirds of illegal migrants work in London and the South-east, in cleaning, catering, hospitality and construction. Because they do not have legal rights, their pay and conditions are subject to abrupt changes.
The Government has steadfastly refused to agree to a blanket amnesty, claiming it would lead to a vast increase in the number of immigrants arriving. Liam Byrne, the Immigration minister, reaffirmed the Government's commitment to clampdown on businesses employing workers without full legal rights. But critics say granting deserving candidates an amnesty would be ethically and financially sound. A report by the Institute for Public Policy Research concludes that allowing illegal immigrants to work legally and pay taxes could yield a windfall of between 1 billion pounds and 3.3bn.
Last month Mr Livingstone called for a "fresh start", with a one-off amnesty for migrants without "regular status", in spite of his party's stance. "Migrants contribute hugely to the economic, civic and cultural life of London and the UK," he said. "To have a substantial number of them living here without regular status because of deep-rooted failings in the immigration system, some dating back over a decade, is deeply damaging to London as well as to them."
London Citizens' proposals demand undocumented workers meet strict criteria before obtaining full legal privileges. These include proof of their residence in the UK for at least four years, no significant criminal record, and a willingness to learn English. If individuals met these criteria, they would be placed on a two-year path to citizenship, after which they would have to have a favourable reference from an employer or a community leader. The Liberal Democrats are the only party committed to the idea of an "earned path to citizenship". The Tory leader, David Cameron, distanced himself from an amnesty, saying: "Boris is his own man. He is standing on his own platform and he dictates his own policies."
In the High Court, Sir George Newman said there was no reason why migrants who had come to Britain in 2002 under the HSMP should be deported for failing to accrue the requisite number of points. But Mr Byrne said he would appeal against the ruling.
Source
BBC bias to lessen? "Mark Thompson, the Director General of the BBC, tonight warned broadcasters against becoming overly-cautious in their reporting on Islam for fear of causing offence to Muslims. Speaking at Westminster Cathedral Mr Thompson, a practising Catholic, said there was "a growing nervousness about discussion about Islam and its relationship to the traditions and values of British and Western society as a whole". He said that the BBC and other major channels "have a special responsibility" to ensure that debates about "faith and society" and about any religion "should not be foreclosed or censored".
Friday, April 11, 2008
BBC UPDATE
The furore continues but I don't have the time at the moment to comment further on it. Some links here and here and here and here and here and here. Note that there are now TWO BBC articles that are under heavy fire.
THE BBC'S ALLEGED VALUES
Just for a laugh, of course:
* Trust is the foundation of the BBC: we are independent, impartial and honest.
* Audiences are at the heart of everything we do.
* We take pride in delivering quality and value for money.
* Creativity is the lifeblood of our organisation.
* We respect each other and celebrate our diversity so that everyone can give their best.
* We are one BBC: great things happen when we work together.
Source
Muslim sex offenders to be let off therapy?
Muslims convicted of sex offences could opt out of treatment programmes intended to stop them offending because open discussion of their crimes is against their religion. Ahtsham Ali, the prison service's Muslim adviser, said that there was a "legitimate Islamic position" that criminals should not discuss their crimes with others. The move could result in Muslim sex offenders being able to avoid sex offender treatment programmes run by the prison service, which involve group discussion of crimes.
Mr Ali is now planning to hold discussions with officials in the Ministry of Justice over the issue. He told Inside Time, the prisoners' newspaper: "I will be taking it forward as a matter of some urgency with colleagues, including those with policy responsibility for the sex offender treatment programme, who are very willing to discuss these issues."
The possibility of an exemption for Muslims came to light after a prisoner wrote to the newspaper asking for clarification of the position of Muslims on the programme. He wrote: "I have always insisted that it was against Islamic teachings to discuss your offence [with] anyone, let alone act it out within a peer group."
A Prison Service spokeswoman said: "We are seeking to ensure that the policy for the sex offender treatment programme is sensitive to the diversity of religions within the prison context." However Mark Leech, editor of the Prisons Handbook, said that a change could lead to Muslims spending longer in prison because their risk of reoffending could not be assessed. [Good one!]
Source
Thousands of migrants win right to stay in Britain
I agree with the judge here. The British Labour party is just thrashing uselessly about and mostly hitting the wrong people in the process
Thousands of highly skilled migrants who were faced with deportation can now stay in Britain, a court ruled yesterday. The ruling is a blow to the Government and its attempt to demonstrate to the public that it is taking a tough stance to meet concern over the extent of immigration. Sir George Newman, a High Court judge, branded the new rules unfair and migrant groups claim that they could mean up to 44,000 people having to leave the country. The numbers are disputed by the Home Office, which says that only 1,370 applicants are affected.
Under the old rules migrants had to say they intended to make their main home in Britain and were allowed to stay for a year initially. They could then apply for a two-year extension and a further three years before seeking permanent settlement. The system was based on qualifications, experience and earning ability, but in November 2006 the Government suspended the scheme for a month after it was found that some migrants had entered on forged papers, others were working in unskilled jobs and some were not working at all. A new criterion was introduced where migrants would have to score points based on their education, salary and age.
The changes were attacked by the HSMP Forum, which represents those on the Highly Skilled Migrant Programme. It said that the rules were unlawful and a breach of migrants’ legitimate expectations. The High Court granted the forum a judicial review of the Government’s decision and ruled that the original system should be honoured for people already in Britain. Sir George said that the changes were unfair to those already admitted to Britain under the programme and that there was “no good reason why those already on the scheme shall not enjoy the benefits of it as orginally offered to them”. He added: “Good administration and straightforward dealing with the public require it. Not to restrain the impact of the changes would, in my judgment, give rise to conspicuous unfairness and an abuse of power.”
The court had been told by John Fordham, QC, that the goalposts had been moved for those previously admitted under the scheme. He said it was “a grossly unfair, massive change to the nature of the programme” visited on highly skilled individuals who had left their homes, relatives, friends and jobs and committed themselves to living in Britain.
The ruling comes after a call last year from the Joint Human Rights Committee of MPs and peers for the changes to be scrapped, arguing that it was a breach of the right to respect for home and family life contained in Article 8 of European Convention of Human Rights. Amit Kapadia, executive director of the HSMP Forum, said: “People left their careers, uprooted their families to come to the UK and settle down. After some time you come up with new rules and say, ‘Forget all those promises, now you have to go back to your country’.”
Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, was ordered to pay the legal costs of the forum and was refused permission to appeal. The Home Office insisted that the number involved was much lower than the 44,000 figure put forward by the forum. A spokeswoman said that about 16,000 people who arrived under the old rules needed their leave considered under the new rules. She said that 7,000 had had their cases considered and that only 650 had failed. Liam Byrne, the Immigration Minister, said: “Did we give migrants a big enough warning that the rules could get tougher while they were here? We said yes, others said no. That’s why it was right for a judge to take a look at this case.”
Chris Huhne, the Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman, said: “The ruling makes it clear that the Government’s decision to change the rules for highly skilled immigrants already working in this country was not only deeply unfair but also completely illegal. The Government must now recognise that you cannot invite people to come here to build lives and careers under one scheme and then simply move the goalposts.”
David Davis, the Shadow Home Secretary, said: “It is unfair that skilled workers who have made a commitment to this country should have the rules of the game changed after they have been welcomed.”
Source
NHS authorised ambulance teams to give restricted drugs
An ambulance service jeopardised patient and staff safety to try to improve its performance, a health watchdog said. Staffordshire Ambulance Service NHS Trust also issued staff with drugs that they were not legally allowed to have, the Healthcare Commission found. The trust took risks with patient and staff safety while making “innovative” attempts to improve its service. The service has since merged with West Midlands Ambulance.
In a 96-page report, the commission emphasised that the Staffordshire service was a “good performer” in terms of response times for emergency calls. But the eight-month inquiry found that the achievements of the service were undermined by a “culture and approach” that did not prioritise safety. Investigators found that ambulance staff and volunteer community first responders were supplied with controlled drugs, such as the sedatives diazepam and midazolam, that they were not entitled to possess. It was also discovered that medicines in the trust’s stations regularly went missing or were unaccounted for and that community first responders were allowed to drive at speed using blue lights and sirens without the necessary advanced driver training.
Commenting on the report, Anna Walker, the Healthcare Commission chief executive, said that managers at Staffordshire Ambulance Service NHS Trust were motivated by the best intentions. But she added: “Some of the practices in the trust put the safety of patients, volunteers and staff at risk. “Patients, staff and the public could have been seriously hurt as a result of the compromised safety culture. The trust sought to be innovative, and that is to be applauded, but it did not have effective systems in place to handle this innovation safely. “This undermined many of the good achievements made on behalf of patients.”
Source
Brits can't deport bin Laden's right hand man: "The government's anti-terror policy was dealt a double blow yesterday when firebrand preacher Abu Qatada won his fight against deportation, and ministers were forced to abandon their bid to eject a further 12 terror suspects from Britain. Qatada, a Jordanian once described as "Osama bin Laden's right-hand man in Europe", will remain behind bars while the Home Office appeals against his landmark victory in the Court of Appeal. In the second case, two Libyans known only as "AS" and "DD" won their appeals against deportation, leading the Home Office to drop proceedings against them and ten other Libyans suspected of terrorism."
The furore continues but I don't have the time at the moment to comment further on it. Some links here and here and here and here and here and here. Note that there are now TWO BBC articles that are under heavy fire.
THE BBC'S ALLEGED VALUES
Just for a laugh, of course:
* Trust is the foundation of the BBC: we are independent, impartial and honest.
* Audiences are at the heart of everything we do.
* We take pride in delivering quality and value for money.
* Creativity is the lifeblood of our organisation.
* We respect each other and celebrate our diversity so that everyone can give their best.
* We are one BBC: great things happen when we work together.
Source
Muslim sex offenders to be let off therapy?
Muslims convicted of sex offences could opt out of treatment programmes intended to stop them offending because open discussion of their crimes is against their religion. Ahtsham Ali, the prison service's Muslim adviser, said that there was a "legitimate Islamic position" that criminals should not discuss their crimes with others. The move could result in Muslim sex offenders being able to avoid sex offender treatment programmes run by the prison service, which involve group discussion of crimes.
Mr Ali is now planning to hold discussions with officials in the Ministry of Justice over the issue. He told Inside Time, the prisoners' newspaper: "I will be taking it forward as a matter of some urgency with colleagues, including those with policy responsibility for the sex offender treatment programme, who are very willing to discuss these issues."
The possibility of an exemption for Muslims came to light after a prisoner wrote to the newspaper asking for clarification of the position of Muslims on the programme. He wrote: "I have always insisted that it was against Islamic teachings to discuss your offence [with] anyone, let alone act it out within a peer group."
A Prison Service spokeswoman said: "We are seeking to ensure that the policy for the sex offender treatment programme is sensitive to the diversity of religions within the prison context." However Mark Leech, editor of the Prisons Handbook, said that a change could lead to Muslims spending longer in prison because their risk of reoffending could not be assessed. [Good one!]
Source
Thousands of migrants win right to stay in Britain
I agree with the judge here. The British Labour party is just thrashing uselessly about and mostly hitting the wrong people in the process
Thousands of highly skilled migrants who were faced with deportation can now stay in Britain, a court ruled yesterday. The ruling is a blow to the Government and its attempt to demonstrate to the public that it is taking a tough stance to meet concern over the extent of immigration. Sir George Newman, a High Court judge, branded the new rules unfair and migrant groups claim that they could mean up to 44,000 people having to leave the country. The numbers are disputed by the Home Office, which says that only 1,370 applicants are affected.
Under the old rules migrants had to say they intended to make their main home in Britain and were allowed to stay for a year initially. They could then apply for a two-year extension and a further three years before seeking permanent settlement. The system was based on qualifications, experience and earning ability, but in November 2006 the Government suspended the scheme for a month after it was found that some migrants had entered on forged papers, others were working in unskilled jobs and some were not working at all. A new criterion was introduced where migrants would have to score points based on their education, salary and age.
The changes were attacked by the HSMP Forum, which represents those on the Highly Skilled Migrant Programme. It said that the rules were unlawful and a breach of migrants’ legitimate expectations. The High Court granted the forum a judicial review of the Government’s decision and ruled that the original system should be honoured for people already in Britain. Sir George said that the changes were unfair to those already admitted to Britain under the programme and that there was “no good reason why those already on the scheme shall not enjoy the benefits of it as orginally offered to them”. He added: “Good administration and straightforward dealing with the public require it. Not to restrain the impact of the changes would, in my judgment, give rise to conspicuous unfairness and an abuse of power.”
The court had been told by John Fordham, QC, that the goalposts had been moved for those previously admitted under the scheme. He said it was “a grossly unfair, massive change to the nature of the programme” visited on highly skilled individuals who had left their homes, relatives, friends and jobs and committed themselves to living in Britain.
The ruling comes after a call last year from the Joint Human Rights Committee of MPs and peers for the changes to be scrapped, arguing that it was a breach of the right to respect for home and family life contained in Article 8 of European Convention of Human Rights. Amit Kapadia, executive director of the HSMP Forum, said: “People left their careers, uprooted their families to come to the UK and settle down. After some time you come up with new rules and say, ‘Forget all those promises, now you have to go back to your country’.”
Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, was ordered to pay the legal costs of the forum and was refused permission to appeal. The Home Office insisted that the number involved was much lower than the 44,000 figure put forward by the forum. A spokeswoman said that about 16,000 people who arrived under the old rules needed their leave considered under the new rules. She said that 7,000 had had their cases considered and that only 650 had failed. Liam Byrne, the Immigration Minister, said: “Did we give migrants a big enough warning that the rules could get tougher while they were here? We said yes, others said no. That’s why it was right for a judge to take a look at this case.”
Chris Huhne, the Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman, said: “The ruling makes it clear that the Government’s decision to change the rules for highly skilled immigrants already working in this country was not only deeply unfair but also completely illegal. The Government must now recognise that you cannot invite people to come here to build lives and careers under one scheme and then simply move the goalposts.”
David Davis, the Shadow Home Secretary, said: “It is unfair that skilled workers who have made a commitment to this country should have the rules of the game changed after they have been welcomed.”
Source
NHS authorised ambulance teams to give restricted drugs
An ambulance service jeopardised patient and staff safety to try to improve its performance, a health watchdog said. Staffordshire Ambulance Service NHS Trust also issued staff with drugs that they were not legally allowed to have, the Healthcare Commission found. The trust took risks with patient and staff safety while making “innovative” attempts to improve its service. The service has since merged with West Midlands Ambulance.
In a 96-page report, the commission emphasised that the Staffordshire service was a “good performer” in terms of response times for emergency calls. But the eight-month inquiry found that the achievements of the service were undermined by a “culture and approach” that did not prioritise safety. Investigators found that ambulance staff and volunteer community first responders were supplied with controlled drugs, such as the sedatives diazepam and midazolam, that they were not entitled to possess. It was also discovered that medicines in the trust’s stations regularly went missing or were unaccounted for and that community first responders were allowed to drive at speed using blue lights and sirens without the necessary advanced driver training.
Commenting on the report, Anna Walker, the Healthcare Commission chief executive, said that managers at Staffordshire Ambulance Service NHS Trust were motivated by the best intentions. But she added: “Some of the practices in the trust put the safety of patients, volunteers and staff at risk. “Patients, staff and the public could have been seriously hurt as a result of the compromised safety culture. The trust sought to be innovative, and that is to be applauded, but it did not have effective systems in place to handle this innovation safely. “This undermined many of the good achievements made on behalf of patients.”
Source
Brits can't deport bin Laden's right hand man: "The government's anti-terror policy was dealt a double blow yesterday when firebrand preacher Abu Qatada won his fight against deportation, and ministers were forced to abandon their bid to eject a further 12 terror suspects from Britain. Qatada, a Jordanian once described as "Osama bin Laden's right-hand man in Europe", will remain behind bars while the Home Office appeals against his landmark victory in the Court of Appeal. In the second case, two Libyans known only as "AS" and "DD" won their appeals against deportation, leading the Home Office to drop proceedings against them and ten other Libyans suspected of terrorism."
Thursday, April 10, 2008
BBC now a laughing stock
The BBC's retreat from balance in their global cooling story is now being laughed at all over the place -- e.g. here and here. One lot of mockers even squeezed a brief comment about it out of the BBC -- in which the Beeb calls balance "ambiguous". And we can't tolerate ambiguity, can we? According to received wisdom among psychologists, intolerance of ambiguity is a sign of narrow-mindedness, bigotry and dogmatism -- so who am I to argue with that?
THE BBC, CLIMATE HYSTERIA AND THE CRISIS OF DEMOCRACY
An email from John A [johna.sci@googlemail.com] of Climate Audit
Can it be any more apparent that the BBC is actively engaged in laundering environmental reports especially on climate to satisfy a few extremists? That what we read about climate history changes faster and more efficiently than even Winston Smith could have managed with his Speakwrite? Witness the constant changing of historical temperature data by James Hansen now being dissected on Climate Audit.
This is not simply a scandal, it is a crisis reaching to the foundations of our democracy - that news and information be disseminated by a Free Press without fear or favour to the Powers that be, nor to extremists and radicals seeking the overthrow of democracy by stealth through a crisis which bears all the hallmarks of being manufactured?
Just imagine, for a moment, what a global emissions trading scheme would look like: no Western democracy would have any control over the price of energy even in its local markets, its entire economy being subject to minute bureaucratic control of everything from the gas heater in the house to energy required to produce steel. Without any control of the cost of energy, food prices would inevitably rise and a black market in basic foodstuffs would appear (this is what happened during the fall of the Soviet Union) including a resurgent Mafia-style criminal underclass.
What then, would be the point of voting for any party? Or of democracy itself? What state could withstand the inevitable social turmoil when basic foodstuffs become more expensive than the poor can afford because the market has been rigged?
It is axiomatic that any State, no matter how brutal, must eventually fall when it has lost control of the price of food - witness Zimbabwe right now, or the fall of the Soviet Union, or the fall of Suharto in Indonesia, or the Weimar Republic in the early 1930s.
Make no mistake, and speaking as a classical liberal, we are looking at the most serious attempt to collectivize the world economy since the fall of Communism in the 20th Century and to render democracy moot in the Western World and beyond. Who speaks for the farmers of Kenya whose exports into the EU and beyond are the only thing between themselves and starvation and whose products are now being labelled with airmiles by Western environmental extremists?
Did any of us vote for the imposition of world energy cartel? I can't remember such a proposition being on any manifesto. But that's what it is.
All of this makes the betrayal of the BBC even to its own charter that much more dangerous to all of us who hold liberal democracy so dear. In the "Green Room" we see academics and activists talk blandly about population control (really? how?), the marginalization of democracy through a consensus of self-appointed "experts" and the need to somehow control the absolutely uncontrollable (the Earth's climate) via trying to moderate a single variable, carbon dioxide concentration, whose ability to control climate in any meaningful way is entirely absent from any paleoclimatic proxy?
Yet the opinions given by academics on subjects well away from their areas of specialization are published as if those opinions are unquestionable truths. Comments are censored prior to publication to prevent serious criticisms being made, and a false impression of support for the ludicrous and dangerous propositions is thereby created.
No right of reply is ever allowed except by that favourite abuse of propagandists - the "skeptic sandwich". Note that twice now, the BBC has announced that the work of Svensmark has been debunked, and twice Svensmark has replied showing that the studies are flawed and the BBC has refused to publish those replies.
NIGEL LAWSON IS NOT ALONE!
An email from David Lord Howell [howelld@parliament.uk]
Many commentators on Lawson have obviously not read the book I published last summer, in my capacity as deputy leader of the Conservatives in the House of Lords, which warned against climate and green hysteria and pointed to a more balanced way forward. The book, 'Out of the Energy Labyrinth' is published by I.B. Tauris. I am in Tokyo today, launching the Japanese edition. Lord Lawson is definitely not alone!
Lord Howell of Guildford, Energy Secretary under Margaret Thatcher
More than half of NHS staff feel patient care is not the priority
Less than half of NHS staff believe that patient care is the top priority where they work, according to the annual survey of staff opinion run by the Healthcare Commission. One in four does not believe that health trusts see patient care as their most important issue, with 29 per cent undecided. The poll also indicated that only 26 per cent of NHS staff think their employers value their work; just 22 per cent believe there is effective communication between staff and senior managers, and only 23 per cent feel staff are involved in important decisions.
Survey forms were returned by 155,922 employees from all 391 NHS trusts - a response rate of 54 per cent. The poll found wide variations between hospitals on measures taken to fight infections such as Clostridium difficile and MRSA. Only 61 per cent said handwashing equipment was always available when they needed it. The number saying it was always available varied from the 39 per cent at Homerton University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust in East London, to 82 per cent at the Queen Victoria Hospital NHS Foundation Trust in East Grinstead.
Thirteen per cent of those questioned had suffered physical violence at the hands of a patient or their relatives in the past year, the same as in 2006 and 1 per cent more than in 2005. Among those working in ambulance trusts, 29 per cent reported being attacked, while the figure was 22 per cent for mental health trusts.
Anna Walker, the commission's chief executive, said: "We know that health workers are more likely to experience violence, harassment and abuse than workers from other sectors and the NHS has made a concerted effort to address this problem. "Trusts must continue to step up to this challenge because it is unacceptable for NHS staff, who provide vital, often life-saving care, to be put in the position where they face violence and abuse as they go about their work."
The findings were released as a second survey showed that GPs are pessimistic about the future of the NHS. The poll in Pulse, the medical magazine, suggests that the advance of the private sector into primary care is unstoppable. A quarter of the 500 GPs who responded to the poll said that they had already been approached by a private firm with an offer to team up in providing primary care. About 40 per cent of the GPs said they were prepared to practise in a surgery owned by a private company, and a third said that they were willing to work for a private concern.
Meanwhile, figures released by the Department of Health show that GPs are still failing to offer patients a choice of hospitals for elective operations. The annual patient choice survey showed that, in November 2007, 44 per cent of patients said that they had been offered a choice of hospitals. This was down from the figure of 45 per cent in September 2007 and 48 per cent recorded in March 2007
Source
The BBC's retreat from balance in their global cooling story is now being laughed at all over the place -- e.g. here and here. One lot of mockers even squeezed a brief comment about it out of the BBC -- in which the Beeb calls balance "ambiguous". And we can't tolerate ambiguity, can we? According to received wisdom among psychologists, intolerance of ambiguity is a sign of narrow-mindedness, bigotry and dogmatism -- so who am I to argue with that?
THE BBC, CLIMATE HYSTERIA AND THE CRISIS OF DEMOCRACY
An email from John A [johna.sci@googlemail.com] of Climate Audit
Can it be any more apparent that the BBC is actively engaged in laundering environmental reports especially on climate to satisfy a few extremists? That what we read about climate history changes faster and more efficiently than even Winston Smith could have managed with his Speakwrite? Witness the constant changing of historical temperature data by James Hansen now being dissected on Climate Audit.
This is not simply a scandal, it is a crisis reaching to the foundations of our democracy - that news and information be disseminated by a Free Press without fear or favour to the Powers that be, nor to extremists and radicals seeking the overthrow of democracy by stealth through a crisis which bears all the hallmarks of being manufactured?
Just imagine, for a moment, what a global emissions trading scheme would look like: no Western democracy would have any control over the price of energy even in its local markets, its entire economy being subject to minute bureaucratic control of everything from the gas heater in the house to energy required to produce steel. Without any control of the cost of energy, food prices would inevitably rise and a black market in basic foodstuffs would appear (this is what happened during the fall of the Soviet Union) including a resurgent Mafia-style criminal underclass.
What then, would be the point of voting for any party? Or of democracy itself? What state could withstand the inevitable social turmoil when basic foodstuffs become more expensive than the poor can afford because the market has been rigged?
It is axiomatic that any State, no matter how brutal, must eventually fall when it has lost control of the price of food - witness Zimbabwe right now, or the fall of the Soviet Union, or the fall of Suharto in Indonesia, or the Weimar Republic in the early 1930s.
Make no mistake, and speaking as a classical liberal, we are looking at the most serious attempt to collectivize the world economy since the fall of Communism in the 20th Century and to render democracy moot in the Western World and beyond. Who speaks for the farmers of Kenya whose exports into the EU and beyond are the only thing between themselves and starvation and whose products are now being labelled with airmiles by Western environmental extremists?
Did any of us vote for the imposition of world energy cartel? I can't remember such a proposition being on any manifesto. But that's what it is.
All of this makes the betrayal of the BBC even to its own charter that much more dangerous to all of us who hold liberal democracy so dear. In the "Green Room" we see academics and activists talk blandly about population control (really? how?), the marginalization of democracy through a consensus of self-appointed "experts" and the need to somehow control the absolutely uncontrollable (the Earth's climate) via trying to moderate a single variable, carbon dioxide concentration, whose ability to control climate in any meaningful way is entirely absent from any paleoclimatic proxy?
Yet the opinions given by academics on subjects well away from their areas of specialization are published as if those opinions are unquestionable truths. Comments are censored prior to publication to prevent serious criticisms being made, and a false impression of support for the ludicrous and dangerous propositions is thereby created.
No right of reply is ever allowed except by that favourite abuse of propagandists - the "skeptic sandwich". Note that twice now, the BBC has announced that the work of Svensmark has been debunked, and twice Svensmark has replied showing that the studies are flawed and the BBC has refused to publish those replies.
NIGEL LAWSON IS NOT ALONE!
An email from David Lord Howell [howelld@parliament.uk]
Many commentators on Lawson have obviously not read the book I published last summer, in my capacity as deputy leader of the Conservatives in the House of Lords, which warned against climate and green hysteria and pointed to a more balanced way forward. The book, 'Out of the Energy Labyrinth' is published by I.B. Tauris. I am in Tokyo today, launching the Japanese edition. Lord Lawson is definitely not alone!
Lord Howell of Guildford, Energy Secretary under Margaret Thatcher
More than half of NHS staff feel patient care is not the priority
Less than half of NHS staff believe that patient care is the top priority where they work, according to the annual survey of staff opinion run by the Healthcare Commission. One in four does not believe that health trusts see patient care as their most important issue, with 29 per cent undecided. The poll also indicated that only 26 per cent of NHS staff think their employers value their work; just 22 per cent believe there is effective communication between staff and senior managers, and only 23 per cent feel staff are involved in important decisions.
Survey forms were returned by 155,922 employees from all 391 NHS trusts - a response rate of 54 per cent. The poll found wide variations between hospitals on measures taken to fight infections such as Clostridium difficile and MRSA. Only 61 per cent said handwashing equipment was always available when they needed it. The number saying it was always available varied from the 39 per cent at Homerton University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust in East London, to 82 per cent at the Queen Victoria Hospital NHS Foundation Trust in East Grinstead.
Thirteen per cent of those questioned had suffered physical violence at the hands of a patient or their relatives in the past year, the same as in 2006 and 1 per cent more than in 2005. Among those working in ambulance trusts, 29 per cent reported being attacked, while the figure was 22 per cent for mental health trusts.
Anna Walker, the commission's chief executive, said: "We know that health workers are more likely to experience violence, harassment and abuse than workers from other sectors and the NHS has made a concerted effort to address this problem. "Trusts must continue to step up to this challenge because it is unacceptable for NHS staff, who provide vital, often life-saving care, to be put in the position where they face violence and abuse as they go about their work."
The findings were released as a second survey showed that GPs are pessimistic about the future of the NHS. The poll in Pulse, the medical magazine, suggests that the advance of the private sector into primary care is unstoppable. A quarter of the 500 GPs who responded to the poll said that they had already been approached by a private firm with an offer to team up in providing primary care. About 40 per cent of the GPs said they were prepared to practise in a surgery owned by a private company, and a third said that they were willing to work for a private concern.
Meanwhile, figures released by the Department of Health show that GPs are still failing to offer patients a choice of hospitals for elective operations. The annual patient choice survey showed that, in November 2007, 44 per cent of patients said that they had been offered a choice of hospitals. This was down from the figure of 45 per cent in September 2007 and 48 per cent recorded in March 2007
Source
Wednesday, April 09, 2008
The BBC shows no self-awareness
The report below about net censorship is from the BBC:
Since the BBC is both a government instrumentality and a very active filterer of content (see below, for instance), it must have been convenient that Britain was not included in the countries surveyed.
BBC CHANGES NEWS TO ACCOMMODATE CLIMATE ACTIVIST
I noted two days ago the way the BBC had changed a climate story to make it more congenial to Warmists. Various other bloggers noted the change and we now have some details of what happened behind the scenes. Jennifer Marohasy reports:
The correspondence concerned is at Jennifer's site. In it we see a Warmist who appears to represent some Warmist group emailing Roger Harrabin in progressively more intimidatory ways, accompanied by a number of false or unsubstantiated assertions about climate events. Harrabin initially stands up under the criticism but when the Warmist in effect threatens to get him flooded with abusive emails he suddenly backs down -- possibly after having consulted with his bosses at the BBC. American Thinker notes that the article was in fact watered down several times.
The whole thing is of course more testimony to the susceptibility of the BBC to Greenie pressure and will always encourage questions about any BBC stories that have reference to Green/Left ideology. The BBC have in effect blown any residual reputation for integrity that they may have had. The Greenies may in fact come to regret their actions in this matter. They have in effect blown the cover of one of their more reliable mouthpieces. ALL BBC stories will from now on be readily ridiculable. All BBC stories will henceforth be easily dismissed as the product of political pressure. If I were a Greenie, I would be pressing for immediate reinstatement of the original story.
The two articles immediately below follow up on the substantive issues originally raised in the BBC article.
BBC: "GLOBAL TEMPERATURES GOING DOWN IMPLY TEMPERTAURES WILL GO UP"
The scare: The BBC published an article by its "environment analyst", commenting on an announcement by the World Meteorological Organization that 2008 was likely to be the tenth successive year in which global temperatures had not risen. The BBC's story stressed that the stasis in global temperatures was only temporary and that anthropogenic "global warming" would inexorably resume.
The truth: The BBC opens its story with the words "Global temperatures will drop slightly this year ." However, the BBC somehow fails to mention that, according to the UK's Hadley Centre for Forecasting and the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, global temperatures have already been falling for more than six years, and that the downtrend, far from being slight, is equivalent to 0.4 degrees Kelvin (almost 1 degree F) per decade:
The downtrend that the BBC somehow failed to mention: Since late 2001, the trend of global surface temperatures has been firmly downward. "Global warming" stopped in 1998; and, though it may resume in future years, the rate of warming is self-evidently less than official forecasts had shown, and is very likely to be harmless.
Next, the BBC uses a favorite tactic, citing unnamed "experts" as a way of falsely giving apparent legitimacy to what are in fact its own biased opinions. It says, "Experts say we are clearly in a long-term warming trend." So we are. Since the end of the Maunder Minimum in 1700, global temperatures have recovered from the Little Ice Age at a near-linear rate of 0.5 degrees K (almost 1 F) per century (Akasofu, 2008).
In the 20th century, an additional 0.2 degrees K of warming occurred, over and above the long-term recovery from the Little Ice Age. However, part of this very small addition to the long-established warming rate probably arises from the 70-year Solar Grand Maximum that peaked in the early 1960s and now appears to have ended. Also the direct output of heat by human activities and machines has contributed. It is by no means certain that anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide either has had or could possibly have had more than a very small influence on global temperatures.
The BBC, as usual, fails to point out that temperatures in the Arctic were warmer in the 1940s than they are today; that the Greenland ice sheet actually thickened by 5 cm (2 inches) per year in the decade 1993-2003 (Johannesen et al., 2005); that most of the Antarctic continent has been cooling for half a century (Doran et al., 2002); that there has been no increase in ocean temperatures in recent years (Lyman et al., 2006); that global temperatures were warmer than today in the Mediaeval Warm Period (McIntyre & McKitrick, 2005), in the Roman Warm Period; and, for at least 2000 years, in the Bronze Age Holocene Climate Optimum. The BBC's story also fails to mention that global surface temperatures, as inferred from oxygen isotope ratios in ice-core samples from Antarctica, were at least 5 degrees Celsius (9 F) warmer than today's in each of the four previous interglacial periods (Petit et al., 1999, etc.).
The BBC goes on to say that the unidentified "experts" predict a new record high temperature within the next five years. However, it somehow fails to point out that not one of the computer models relied upon by the IPCC predicted ten years ago that global temperatures would be lower in 2008 than they were in 1998.
Next, the BBC deploys another favorite tactic: it quotes the World Meteorological Organization as saying that "the decade from 1998 to 2007 was the warmest on record." The WMO did not in fact say anything of the kind. The phrase "warmest on record", not uttered by the WMO, is deliberately chosen by the BBC because it sounds far more drastic than the truth, which the BBC somehow fails to mention, that the "record" extends back only as far as 1880. Also, the BBC somehow omits to note that the January-to-January fall in global mean surface temperatures between 2007 and 2008 was the largest since records were first kept in 1880 - or, in the BBC's loaded language, the largest "on record".
The BBC also somehow fails to point out that, given that global mean surface temperatures have been rising at a near-linear centennial rate for the past three centuries, the fact that the most recent decade is the warmest "on record" is not in the least surprising: and it certainly provides no basis for the implicit assumption that the warming which stopped in 1998 is principally (or at all) attributable to anthropogenic "global warming".
Next, the BBC says that unnamed "researchers" say that the long-term temperature trend will be upward. However, it is possible that the rapid slowing of the solar sub-surface magnetic convection currents presages a long-term solar cooling. If so, on the evidence of the Maunder Minimum, when there were no sunspots for 60 years, the small warming effect of additional anthropogenic carbon dioxide will at least be mitigated and potentially altogether eliminated by the cooling Sun and the cooling oceans.
Then the BBC says, "Temperatures have not risen globally since 1998 when El Nino warmed the world." The BBC somehow fails to say that there have been two El Ninos since 1998, leaving its audience with the impression that the only reason for the fall in global temperatures in recent years was the magnitude of the 1998 El Nino event.
The BBC moves on to another questionable tactic: the unverified headcount. It says: "A minority of scientists question whether this means global warming has peaked and argue the Earth has proved more resilient to greenhouse gases than predicted." The BBC offers no evidence that it is "a minority of scientists" who question whether `global warming' has peaked.
It was this very tactic that the BBC's "Head of Newsgathering", Fran Unsworth, deployed when making her public announcement - at a conference of news organizations in Amsterdam in November, 2006 - that the BBC would not in future provide balanced coverage of the climate scare. Here is what she said:
"Once we'd got one person setting the case for man-made global warming, and somebody opposing it, the viewer is probably left with the impression that there's equal weight to these arguments. And I think that we have now moved on in our coverage of it. There is now a dwindling band of scientists who don't accept that there is man-made global warming."
And what expertise does Fran Unsworth have in evaluating how many "scientists" accept or do not accept that there is man-made "global warming"? How many scientific papers has she read? Has she ever read a scientific paper on climate from a peer-reviewed, learned journal? Would she have understood it if she had? We are entitled to ask all these questions, because Fran has adopted the BBC's traditional tactic of not providing any evidence whatsoever for her proposition, which she merely recites, mantra-like, as though it were an article of blind, religious faith.
Besides, the question is not so much whether there is what Fran describes as "man-made global warming", as how much of the warming that began in 1700 and ended in 1998 was attributable to human activities, including greenhouse-gas enrichment of the atmosphere. On that question there is not and has never been a scientific consensus: indeed, the IPCC's calculations of climate sensitivity in each successive quinquennial assessment report are mutually incompatible and contradictory in several fundamental respects.
Next, the BBC quotes a Mr. Jarraud of the WMO as saying, "When you look at climate change you should not look at any particular year. You should look at trends over a pretty long period and the trend of temperature globally is still very much indicative of warming. La Nina is part of what we call 'variability'. There has always been and there will always be cooler and warmer years, but what is important for climate change is that the trend is up; the climate on average is warming even if there is a temporary cooling because of La Nina."
The graph from the Hadley Centre does not demonstrate that "the trend is up or that "the climate on average is warming", or that there is nothing more than "a temporary cooling because of la Nina." A diligent journalist would have looked at this graph before interviewing Mr. Jarraud, and would have asked him to explain it further in the light of the very clear evidence to the contrary. The BBC, of course, asked no such questions: Mr. Jarraud was saying what they wanted to hear.
Mr. Jarraud, on being shown the Hadley Centre's graph, might have replied that the period covered by the graph is too short. And that is why we have gone back 300 years, noticing that the uptrend began in 1700 for well-understood and entirely natural reasons, and continued until 1998. Of course, it is possible that the up-trend will resume in the coming years: increased carbon dioxide concentrations do cause some warming. However, the fact that the warming began 300 years ago, long before the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide had begun to rise, and the fact that the warming ceased as solar activity declined from the Grand Maximum, and the fact that global mean surface temperatures today are still well below the median value for the past half-billion years (some 7 degrees K, or 12.5 F, warmer than the present), do suggest that there are credible natural explanations for the warming that has been observed, and that the warming effect of carbon dioxide - whose magnitude is highly speculative, and which the IPCC's computer models are tuned to assume as a given - may be far less than the assumptions pre-programmed into the models.
Such doubts and cautions as these do not appear in most of the BBC's reports. Fran Unsworth has publicly made it explicit that the BBC intends henceforth only to present biased coverage of the "climate" scare, just as it whipped up needless and scientifically-unjustified alarm about a host of previous and equally baseless scares, such as "salmonella in eggs", "Creutzfeld-Jakob Disease in British beef," and "the bird-flu pandemic". The BBC was wrong, relentlessly wrong, about each and all of these previous scares, and about many others like them. It is wrong, relentlessly wrong, about the "global warming" scare too. End of scare.
Source
FROM "DENIERS" TO SCIENTISTS
An email from David Whitehouse [me@davidwhitehouse.com]
Something remarkable has happened! The BBC said that there is a minority of scientists who question 'climate change theory,' in particular the strong link between greenhouse gasses and global temperature. That description is a brief recognition that those who demur from the simple consensus are in fact scientists and not 'climate change deniers.'
We all know that 'climate change deniers' are irresponsible people, funded by the oil industry, oblivious to the facts, determined to spoil the world and put our children in danger. They could never be correct. Scientists however, especially when in a minority, could very well eventually be proven right, and often are.
Having said that, this piece of journalism is rather contradictory. It is not the current strong La Nina that is responsible for global temperatures not having risen since 1998, as it implies, the reason must lie elsewhere. It also misses the entire point. The Met Office Hadley Centre and now the World Meteorological Organisation also, deliberately, miss the point. They all say that the consensus is safe and global warming continues because the decade 1998 - 2007 was the warmest on record. Never mind that the global temperature has not risen and that by their own records 2001-2007 was statistically indistinguishable, that is, completely flat.
The truth is that the data says we are living in the warmest decade but that for ten years it has not got warmer. True, when looked at over 30 years we have a warming trend, but the warming occurred between 1980 - 1998. Since then it is flat. To lump the two distinct periods together is misleading.
The WMO then do another dodgy thing with statistics by saying that throughout the 20th century the world has been steadily getting warmer, so that what we have now is a continual warming. But hold on, the global temperature was static and about average between 1940 - 1980, and rose before that since the start of the century.
But since we have been told many times that prior to 1950 the change was due to solar effects and post 1950 it was due to man-made greenhouse gasses one wonders why the temperature rise over the entire century is used as supporting evidence for today's 'continuing warming.' (Also, as an aside, has anyone noticed and wondered about the remarkable fact that the rise in the global temperature due to the sun (purportedly) and the later rise due to greenhouse gasses (purportedly) has, within the errors, the same gradient!)
The BBC then says that the UK's Hadley centre says that 2005 was the warmest year on record even though this conclusion is totally unsupported statistically because of the uncertainties. Tut tut. Those watching the TV report would also come away confused as it starts off talking about this year being cooler than previous years due to El Nino but towards the end of the report it talks of the 'recent standstill' with no further explanation.
Also Mr Jarraud of the WMO, quoted in the BBC report says that looking at climate change (surely he means temperature change here) is wrong because of what he condescendingly calls 'variability' (his quotes). Isn't it interesting that during the recent temperature rise (1980 -1998) the temperature graph was very variable (partly due to Pinatubo and El Chicon, La Nina, El Nino) but that post 2001 it has not been variable at all!
To a physicist or electrical engineer looking at the data they would say that 1980 -1998 was a rising noisy signal but that post 2001 we have a strong, steady signal with less noise. As far as we can measure the 'variability' that was there is not any more. Somebody tell Mr Jarraud.
The fact is that global temperatures are not going the way of the 'consensus' theory, they haven't been for several years now, though we need a few more years to be sure. El Nino and La Nina events make no difference in the long term because carbon dioxide continues to accumulate in the atmosphere and therefore the 'pressure' to rising temperatures will be all the more greater when the current La Nino has ended (and whatever has temporarily caused the 2001-2007 standstill) and we can expect temperatures to rise rapidly with a steeper gradient as the system tries to restore itself to equilibrium.
The Hadley Centre is talking nonsense when it recently said that half of the forthcoming years will exceed 1998 in temperature. Soon all years will have to or else we will have to continue to find excuses as to why the global temperature does not rise as the theory predicts. The fact is the theory says the temperature must increase. For the most recent third of the current warming spell its hasn't. THAT HAS TO CHANGE.
Also one wonders if this year's weather can, for a while, reduce the global temperature to the region before the current warming spell, one wonders about the true significance of the changes we have seen in the past few years!
We have a good theory and a good set of data that doesn't match. If it continues not to match then I, for one, will eventually throw the theory away and keep the data. I will also never trust another computer-based prediction.
BBC MISREPRESENTS THE RESEARCH ON SOLAR INFLUENCES
On Thursday 3rd April BBC News website's Richard Black penned an article entitled, 'No Sun link' to climate change, based on a flawed paper (not discussed in detail here) in a lesser known journal called Environmental Research Letters, which refers only to Palle/Butler and Marsh/Svensmark (2000), but not Shaviv/Veizer. The article begins:
The paper referred to is: 'Testing the proposed causal link between cosmic rays and cloud cover'. The paper concludes:
Not exactly, 'no link.' and Giles Harrison from Reading University, is quoted as saying that the work was important "as it provides an upper limit on the cosmic ray-cloud effect in global satellite cloud data". Harrison's own UK study from 2006 concluded:
No mention is made by the BBC of the more favourable 2008 review of the evidence for a cosmic ray-climate link by Usoskin and Kovaltsov, which concluded:
Source
Patients 'being let down and ignored by the NHS,' says damning report
Elderly patients are being left to starve in soiled bedclothes, a damning report into the Health Service says today. Tens of thousands of patients suffer appalling service - but their complaints are ignored by negligent trusts, it is claimed. The report, by watchdog the Healthcare Commission, also said that mothers are being left alone during labour without pain relief. And GPs come under attack for being rude, allowing patients only the briefest of consultations, and missing signs of deadly diseases.
The commission said that far too often the NHS failed to take complaints seriously, or failed to apologise when clearly in the wrong. The Daily Mail's Dignity for the Elderly campaign has highlighted the poor quality of hospital food and the raw deal many pensioners get in hospitals and care homes. Last night Charlotte Potter, senior policy officer at Help the Aged, said: "Older people are the biggest users of the NHS, yet all too often receive below par treatment. "Thirty per cent of complaints about hospitals concerned lapses in fundamental aspects of nursing care. Nutrition, privacy and dignity, and communication should not be optional extras."
The Spotlight on Complaints report looked at more than 10,000 complaints independently reviewed by the commission between August 2006 and July 2007. Twenty per cent were upheld - up from 8 per cent the year before. And there was a large rise in the number of cases where the NHS response was "not as accurate as it should be". More than half of complaints were about hospital care, and of those a third were about the "fundamentals of nursing care". This includes unmet personal hygiene needs, a lack of privacy, inadequate help with eating, and nurses being "abrupt" or "sharp".
Some elderly patients were unable to reach call bells, or were left in soiled bedding and clothing. Other patients complained about inadequate clothing such as "gowns not maintaining patients' modesty" or bedside curtains being opened when the patient was receiving intimate care. And patients were not given regular baths, hair care, nail care or oral hygiene. Nutrition was also a problem for many, with a lack of choice of meals, inedible food, and nursing staff not helping frail patients to eat.
A third of complaints were against GP practices, with many saying their examination was too quick, GPs were rude or did not listen, and surgeries were "unwelcoming". In casualty departments, signs of health problems were often not recognised, meaning some patients - mainly elderly - were sent home only for the problem to get worse.
Common complaints against maternity services were that staff did not listen, women were left alone in labour without pain relief, and that midwives were too busy or were rude.
Health minister Ann Keen said healthcare in Britain was as safe as in the U.S., Australia, New Zealand or Denmark. But she said patients deserved an apology when mistakes happened.
Source
Brunettes bag the billionaires, blondes get the barmen
These frequencies probably just reflect the frequencies of the different hair colours in the respective populations. And with hair colour very changeable and changing, it is in any case hard to know what is being surveyed here
It's official, if you're a brunette like Carla Bruni, you're more likely to marry a successful man than your blonde counterparts. Experts at LOVE@LYCOS the dating channel of Lycos.co.uk analysed the WAG's hair colour of the world's top 100 billionaires to determine if there is a predominant hair colour wealthy men seen to go for. The majority by a long way were brunettes, with 62% of billionaires marrying women with brown hair.
The results went on to show that fair haired ladies come in a poor second with only 22% of the world's top billionaires marrying blondes. Women with black hair lag behind in third place, enticing on 16% of the world's wealthiest, whilst carrot-tops come in last.
Source
The report below about net censorship is from the BBC:
"The level of state-led censorship of the net is growing around the world, a study of so-called internet filtering by the Open Net Initiative suggests. The study of thousands of websites across 120 Internet Service Providers found 25 of 41 countries surveyed showed evidence of content filtering.... "In five years we have gone from a couple of states doing state-mandated net filtering to 25," said John Palfrey, at Harvard Law School.
ONI is made up of research groups at the universities of Toronto, Harvard Law School, Oxford and Cambridge. It chose 41 countries for the survey in which testing could be done safely and where there was "the most to learn about government online surveillance".
A number of states in Europe and the US were not tested because the private sector rather than the government tends to carry out filtering, it said.
Source
Since the BBC is both a government instrumentality and a very active filterer of content (see below, for instance), it must have been convenient that Britain was not included in the countries surveyed.
BBC CHANGES NEWS TO ACCOMMODATE CLIMATE ACTIVIST
I noted two days ago the way the BBC had changed a climate story to make it more congenial to Warmists. Various other bloggers noted the change and we now have some details of what happened behind the scenes. Jennifer Marohasy reports:
I have been emailed the following correspondence, purportedly between an activist, Jo Abbess, and BBC Environment reporter Roger Harrabin. It would appear that the result of the email exchange between the activist and the reporter was that the BBC changed its story. In particular instead of reporting the story as received from the World Meteorological Organisation, the BBC modified the story as demanded by the activist who was concerned that in its original form it supported 'the skeptics' correct observation that there has been no warming since 1998.
The correspondence concerned is at Jennifer's site. In it we see a Warmist who appears to represent some Warmist group emailing Roger Harrabin in progressively more intimidatory ways, accompanied by a number of false or unsubstantiated assertions about climate events. Harrabin initially stands up under the criticism but when the Warmist in effect threatens to get him flooded with abusive emails he suddenly backs down -- possibly after having consulted with his bosses at the BBC. American Thinker notes that the article was in fact watered down several times.
The whole thing is of course more testimony to the susceptibility of the BBC to Greenie pressure and will always encourage questions about any BBC stories that have reference to Green/Left ideology. The BBC have in effect blown any residual reputation for integrity that they may have had. The Greenies may in fact come to regret their actions in this matter. They have in effect blown the cover of one of their more reliable mouthpieces. ALL BBC stories will from now on be readily ridiculable. All BBC stories will henceforth be easily dismissed as the product of political pressure. If I were a Greenie, I would be pressing for immediate reinstatement of the original story.
The two articles immediately below follow up on the substantive issues originally raised in the BBC article.
BBC: "GLOBAL TEMPERATURES GOING DOWN IMPLY TEMPERTAURES WILL GO UP"
The scare: The BBC published an article by its "environment analyst", commenting on an announcement by the World Meteorological Organization that 2008 was likely to be the tenth successive year in which global temperatures had not risen. The BBC's story stressed that the stasis in global temperatures was only temporary and that anthropogenic "global warming" would inexorably resume.
The truth: The BBC opens its story with the words "Global temperatures will drop slightly this year ." However, the BBC somehow fails to mention that, according to the UK's Hadley Centre for Forecasting and the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, global temperatures have already been falling for more than six years, and that the downtrend, far from being slight, is equivalent to 0.4 degrees Kelvin (almost 1 degree F) per decade:
The downtrend that the BBC somehow failed to mention: Since late 2001, the trend of global surface temperatures has been firmly downward. "Global warming" stopped in 1998; and, though it may resume in future years, the rate of warming is self-evidently less than official forecasts had shown, and is very likely to be harmless.
Next, the BBC uses a favorite tactic, citing unnamed "experts" as a way of falsely giving apparent legitimacy to what are in fact its own biased opinions. It says, "Experts say we are clearly in a long-term warming trend." So we are. Since the end of the Maunder Minimum in 1700, global temperatures have recovered from the Little Ice Age at a near-linear rate of 0.5 degrees K (almost 1 F) per century (Akasofu, 2008).
In the 20th century, an additional 0.2 degrees K of warming occurred, over and above the long-term recovery from the Little Ice Age. However, part of this very small addition to the long-established warming rate probably arises from the 70-year Solar Grand Maximum that peaked in the early 1960s and now appears to have ended. Also the direct output of heat by human activities and machines has contributed. It is by no means certain that anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide either has had or could possibly have had more than a very small influence on global temperatures.
The BBC, as usual, fails to point out that temperatures in the Arctic were warmer in the 1940s than they are today; that the Greenland ice sheet actually thickened by 5 cm (2 inches) per year in the decade 1993-2003 (Johannesen et al., 2005); that most of the Antarctic continent has been cooling for half a century (Doran et al., 2002); that there has been no increase in ocean temperatures in recent years (Lyman et al., 2006); that global temperatures were warmer than today in the Mediaeval Warm Period (McIntyre & McKitrick, 2005), in the Roman Warm Period; and, for at least 2000 years, in the Bronze Age Holocene Climate Optimum. The BBC's story also fails to mention that global surface temperatures, as inferred from oxygen isotope ratios in ice-core samples from Antarctica, were at least 5 degrees Celsius (9 F) warmer than today's in each of the four previous interglacial periods (Petit et al., 1999, etc.).
The BBC goes on to say that the unidentified "experts" predict a new record high temperature within the next five years. However, it somehow fails to point out that not one of the computer models relied upon by the IPCC predicted ten years ago that global temperatures would be lower in 2008 than they were in 1998.
Next, the BBC deploys another favorite tactic: it quotes the World Meteorological Organization as saying that "the decade from 1998 to 2007 was the warmest on record." The WMO did not in fact say anything of the kind. The phrase "warmest on record", not uttered by the WMO, is deliberately chosen by the BBC because it sounds far more drastic than the truth, which the BBC somehow fails to mention, that the "record" extends back only as far as 1880. Also, the BBC somehow omits to note that the January-to-January fall in global mean surface temperatures between 2007 and 2008 was the largest since records were first kept in 1880 - or, in the BBC's loaded language, the largest "on record".
The BBC also somehow fails to point out that, given that global mean surface temperatures have been rising at a near-linear centennial rate for the past three centuries, the fact that the most recent decade is the warmest "on record" is not in the least surprising: and it certainly provides no basis for the implicit assumption that the warming which stopped in 1998 is principally (or at all) attributable to anthropogenic "global warming".
Next, the BBC says that unnamed "researchers" say that the long-term temperature trend will be upward. However, it is possible that the rapid slowing of the solar sub-surface magnetic convection currents presages a long-term solar cooling. If so, on the evidence of the Maunder Minimum, when there were no sunspots for 60 years, the small warming effect of additional anthropogenic carbon dioxide will at least be mitigated and potentially altogether eliminated by the cooling Sun and the cooling oceans.
Then the BBC says, "Temperatures have not risen globally since 1998 when El Nino warmed the world." The BBC somehow fails to say that there have been two El Ninos since 1998, leaving its audience with the impression that the only reason for the fall in global temperatures in recent years was the magnitude of the 1998 El Nino event.
The BBC moves on to another questionable tactic: the unverified headcount. It says: "A minority of scientists question whether this means global warming has peaked and argue the Earth has proved more resilient to greenhouse gases than predicted." The BBC offers no evidence that it is "a minority of scientists" who question whether `global warming' has peaked.
It was this very tactic that the BBC's "Head of Newsgathering", Fran Unsworth, deployed when making her public announcement - at a conference of news organizations in Amsterdam in November, 2006 - that the BBC would not in future provide balanced coverage of the climate scare. Here is what she said:
"Once we'd got one person setting the case for man-made global warming, and somebody opposing it, the viewer is probably left with the impression that there's equal weight to these arguments. And I think that we have now moved on in our coverage of it. There is now a dwindling band of scientists who don't accept that there is man-made global warming."
And what expertise does Fran Unsworth have in evaluating how many "scientists" accept or do not accept that there is man-made "global warming"? How many scientific papers has she read? Has she ever read a scientific paper on climate from a peer-reviewed, learned journal? Would she have understood it if she had? We are entitled to ask all these questions, because Fran has adopted the BBC's traditional tactic of not providing any evidence whatsoever for her proposition, which she merely recites, mantra-like, as though it were an article of blind, religious faith.
Besides, the question is not so much whether there is what Fran describes as "man-made global warming", as how much of the warming that began in 1700 and ended in 1998 was attributable to human activities, including greenhouse-gas enrichment of the atmosphere. On that question there is not and has never been a scientific consensus: indeed, the IPCC's calculations of climate sensitivity in each successive quinquennial assessment report are mutually incompatible and contradictory in several fundamental respects.
Next, the BBC quotes a Mr. Jarraud of the WMO as saying, "When you look at climate change you should not look at any particular year. You should look at trends over a pretty long period and the trend of temperature globally is still very much indicative of warming. La Nina is part of what we call 'variability'. There has always been and there will always be cooler and warmer years, but what is important for climate change is that the trend is up; the climate on average is warming even if there is a temporary cooling because of La Nina."
The graph from the Hadley Centre does not demonstrate that "the trend is up or that "the climate on average is warming", or that there is nothing more than "a temporary cooling because of la Nina." A diligent journalist would have looked at this graph before interviewing Mr. Jarraud, and would have asked him to explain it further in the light of the very clear evidence to the contrary. The BBC, of course, asked no such questions: Mr. Jarraud was saying what they wanted to hear.
Mr. Jarraud, on being shown the Hadley Centre's graph, might have replied that the period covered by the graph is too short. And that is why we have gone back 300 years, noticing that the uptrend began in 1700 for well-understood and entirely natural reasons, and continued until 1998. Of course, it is possible that the up-trend will resume in the coming years: increased carbon dioxide concentrations do cause some warming. However, the fact that the warming began 300 years ago, long before the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide had begun to rise, and the fact that the warming ceased as solar activity declined from the Grand Maximum, and the fact that global mean surface temperatures today are still well below the median value for the past half-billion years (some 7 degrees K, or 12.5 F, warmer than the present), do suggest that there are credible natural explanations for the warming that has been observed, and that the warming effect of carbon dioxide - whose magnitude is highly speculative, and which the IPCC's computer models are tuned to assume as a given - may be far less than the assumptions pre-programmed into the models.
Such doubts and cautions as these do not appear in most of the BBC's reports. Fran Unsworth has publicly made it explicit that the BBC intends henceforth only to present biased coverage of the "climate" scare, just as it whipped up needless and scientifically-unjustified alarm about a host of previous and equally baseless scares, such as "salmonella in eggs", "Creutzfeld-Jakob Disease in British beef," and "the bird-flu pandemic". The BBC was wrong, relentlessly wrong, about each and all of these previous scares, and about many others like them. It is wrong, relentlessly wrong, about the "global warming" scare too. End of scare.
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FROM "DENIERS" TO SCIENTISTS
An email from David Whitehouse [me@davidwhitehouse.com]
Something remarkable has happened! The BBC said that there is a minority of scientists who question 'climate change theory,' in particular the strong link between greenhouse gasses and global temperature. That description is a brief recognition that those who demur from the simple consensus are in fact scientists and not 'climate change deniers.'
We all know that 'climate change deniers' are irresponsible people, funded by the oil industry, oblivious to the facts, determined to spoil the world and put our children in danger. They could never be correct. Scientists however, especially when in a minority, could very well eventually be proven right, and often are.
Having said that, this piece of journalism is rather contradictory. It is not the current strong La Nina that is responsible for global temperatures not having risen since 1998, as it implies, the reason must lie elsewhere. It also misses the entire point. The Met Office Hadley Centre and now the World Meteorological Organisation also, deliberately, miss the point. They all say that the consensus is safe and global warming continues because the decade 1998 - 2007 was the warmest on record. Never mind that the global temperature has not risen and that by their own records 2001-2007 was statistically indistinguishable, that is, completely flat.
The truth is that the data says we are living in the warmest decade but that for ten years it has not got warmer. True, when looked at over 30 years we have a warming trend, but the warming occurred between 1980 - 1998. Since then it is flat. To lump the two distinct periods together is misleading.
The WMO then do another dodgy thing with statistics by saying that throughout the 20th century the world has been steadily getting warmer, so that what we have now is a continual warming. But hold on, the global temperature was static and about average between 1940 - 1980, and rose before that since the start of the century.
But since we have been told many times that prior to 1950 the change was due to solar effects and post 1950 it was due to man-made greenhouse gasses one wonders why the temperature rise over the entire century is used as supporting evidence for today's 'continuing warming.' (Also, as an aside, has anyone noticed and wondered about the remarkable fact that the rise in the global temperature due to the sun (purportedly) and the later rise due to greenhouse gasses (purportedly) has, within the errors, the same gradient!)
The BBC then says that the UK's Hadley centre says that 2005 was the warmest year on record even though this conclusion is totally unsupported statistically because of the uncertainties. Tut tut. Those watching the TV report would also come away confused as it starts off talking about this year being cooler than previous years due to El Nino but towards the end of the report it talks of the 'recent standstill' with no further explanation.
Also Mr Jarraud of the WMO, quoted in the BBC report says that looking at climate change (surely he means temperature change here) is wrong because of what he condescendingly calls 'variability' (his quotes). Isn't it interesting that during the recent temperature rise (1980 -1998) the temperature graph was very variable (partly due to Pinatubo and El Chicon, La Nina, El Nino) but that post 2001 it has not been variable at all!
To a physicist or electrical engineer looking at the data they would say that 1980 -1998 was a rising noisy signal but that post 2001 we have a strong, steady signal with less noise. As far as we can measure the 'variability' that was there is not any more. Somebody tell Mr Jarraud.
The fact is that global temperatures are not going the way of the 'consensus' theory, they haven't been for several years now, though we need a few more years to be sure. El Nino and La Nina events make no difference in the long term because carbon dioxide continues to accumulate in the atmosphere and therefore the 'pressure' to rising temperatures will be all the more greater when the current La Nino has ended (and whatever has temporarily caused the 2001-2007 standstill) and we can expect temperatures to rise rapidly with a steeper gradient as the system tries to restore itself to equilibrium.
The Hadley Centre is talking nonsense when it recently said that half of the forthcoming years will exceed 1998 in temperature. Soon all years will have to or else we will have to continue to find excuses as to why the global temperature does not rise as the theory predicts. The fact is the theory says the temperature must increase. For the most recent third of the current warming spell its hasn't. THAT HAS TO CHANGE.
Also one wonders if this year's weather can, for a while, reduce the global temperature to the region before the current warming spell, one wonders about the true significance of the changes we have seen in the past few years!
We have a good theory and a good set of data that doesn't match. If it continues not to match then I, for one, will eventually throw the theory away and keep the data. I will also never trust another computer-based prediction.
BBC MISREPRESENTS THE RESEARCH ON SOLAR INFLUENCES
On Thursday 3rd April BBC News website's Richard Black penned an article entitled, 'No Sun link' to climate change, based on a flawed paper (not discussed in detail here) in a lesser known journal called Environmental Research Letters, which refers only to Palle/Butler and Marsh/Svensmark (2000), but not Shaviv/Veizer. The article begins:
"Scientists have produced further compelling evidence showing that modern-day climate change is not caused by changes in the Sun's activity. The research contradicts a favoured theory of climate "sceptics", that changes in cosmic rays coming to Earth determine cloudiness and temperature. The idea is that variations in solar activity affect cosmic ray intensity. But Lancaster University scientists found there has been no significant link between them in the last 20 years".
The paper referred to is: 'Testing the proposed causal link between cosmic rays and cloud cover'. The paper concludes:
"In conclusion, no corroboration of the claim of a causal connection between the changes in ionization and low cloud cover, made in [1, 2], could be found in this investigation. From the distribution of the depth of the dip in solar cycle 22 with geomagnetic latitude (the VRCO) we find that, averaged over the whole Earth, less than 23% of the dip comes from the solar modulation of the cosmic ray intensity, at the 95% confidence level. This implies that, if the dip represents a real correlation, more than 77% of it is caused by a source other than ionization and this source must be correlated with solar activity.
Not exactly, 'no link.' and Giles Harrison from Reading University, is quoted as saying that the work was important "as it provides an upper limit on the cosmic ray-cloud effect in global satellite cloud data". Harrison's own UK study from 2006 concluded:
Changes in diffuse fraction (DF) and the frequency of overcast days represent changes in the weather and the atmospheric energy balance. The decrease in the proportion of direct solar radiation associated with an increase in DF will lead to a local reduction in daytime surface temperature. Further, because the net global effect of cloud is cooling (Hartman 1993), any widespread increase in the overcast days could also reduce temperature. At Reading, the measured sensitivity of daily average temperatures to DF for overcast days is K0.2 K per 0.01 change in DF for 1997-2004). Consequently the inverse relationship between GCR and solar activity will lead to cooling at solar minimum. This might amplify the effect of the small solar cycle variation in total solar irradiance, believed to be underestimated by climate models (Stott et al. 2003), which neglect a cosmic ray effect. In summary, our data analysis confirms the existence of a small, yet statistically robust, cosmic ray effect on clouds, that will emerge on long time scales with less variability than the considerable variability of daily cloudiness.
No mention is made by the BBC of the more favourable 2008 review of the evidence for a cosmic ray-climate link by Usoskin and Kovaltsov, which concluded:
"a CR-climate link seems to be a plausible climate driver, as supported by the bulk of statistical studies and existing theoretical models. However, further studies, in particular a clear case study as well as improved model development, are foreseen to improve our understanding of the link between cosmic rays and the climate on Earth."
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Patients 'being let down and ignored by the NHS,' says damning report
Elderly patients are being left to starve in soiled bedclothes, a damning report into the Health Service says today. Tens of thousands of patients suffer appalling service - but their complaints are ignored by negligent trusts, it is claimed. The report, by watchdog the Healthcare Commission, also said that mothers are being left alone during labour without pain relief. And GPs come under attack for being rude, allowing patients only the briefest of consultations, and missing signs of deadly diseases.
The commission said that far too often the NHS failed to take complaints seriously, or failed to apologise when clearly in the wrong. The Daily Mail's Dignity for the Elderly campaign has highlighted the poor quality of hospital food and the raw deal many pensioners get in hospitals and care homes. Last night Charlotte Potter, senior policy officer at Help the Aged, said: "Older people are the biggest users of the NHS, yet all too often receive below par treatment. "Thirty per cent of complaints about hospitals concerned lapses in fundamental aspects of nursing care. Nutrition, privacy and dignity, and communication should not be optional extras."
The Spotlight on Complaints report looked at more than 10,000 complaints independently reviewed by the commission between August 2006 and July 2007. Twenty per cent were upheld - up from 8 per cent the year before. And there was a large rise in the number of cases where the NHS response was "not as accurate as it should be". More than half of complaints were about hospital care, and of those a third were about the "fundamentals of nursing care". This includes unmet personal hygiene needs, a lack of privacy, inadequate help with eating, and nurses being "abrupt" or "sharp".
Some elderly patients were unable to reach call bells, or were left in soiled bedding and clothing. Other patients complained about inadequate clothing such as "gowns not maintaining patients' modesty" or bedside curtains being opened when the patient was receiving intimate care. And patients were not given regular baths, hair care, nail care or oral hygiene. Nutrition was also a problem for many, with a lack of choice of meals, inedible food, and nursing staff not helping frail patients to eat.
A third of complaints were against GP practices, with many saying their examination was too quick, GPs were rude or did not listen, and surgeries were "unwelcoming". In casualty departments, signs of health problems were often not recognised, meaning some patients - mainly elderly - were sent home only for the problem to get worse.
Common complaints against maternity services were that staff did not listen, women were left alone in labour without pain relief, and that midwives were too busy or were rude.
Health minister Ann Keen said healthcare in Britain was as safe as in the U.S., Australia, New Zealand or Denmark. But she said patients deserved an apology when mistakes happened.
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Brunettes bag the billionaires, blondes get the barmen
These frequencies probably just reflect the frequencies of the different hair colours in the respective populations. And with hair colour very changeable and changing, it is in any case hard to know what is being surveyed here
It's official, if you're a brunette like Carla Bruni, you're more likely to marry a successful man than your blonde counterparts. Experts at LOVE@LYCOS the dating channel of Lycos.co.uk analysed the WAG's hair colour of the world's top 100 billionaires to determine if there is a predominant hair colour wealthy men seen to go for. The majority by a long way were brunettes, with 62% of billionaires marrying women with brown hair.
The results went on to show that fair haired ladies come in a poor second with only 22% of the world's top billionaires marrying blondes. Women with black hair lag behind in third place, enticing on 16% of the world's wealthiest, whilst carrot-tops come in last.
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Tuesday, April 08, 2008
Immigration clampdown may close 16,000 British eateries
The article below is from a red-top so one does not exactly expect econometrics from it but there are many voices saying the same. They are all prophecies, however. So how about some reality instead? The new British regulations are modelled on Australian ones and there have long been and still are Indian and Chinese restaurants all over the place in Australia. So Brits can rest easy: Their curry and their fried rice are not at risk
Up to 16,000 Chinese and Indian restaurants could be forced to close because of a crackdown on immigration. Bosses fear they will be unable to find chefs because foreigners wishing to settle here will soon have to prove they can speak English. And they claim immigration officers already disrupt business by raiding diners and takeaways at peak times. Maria Fernandes, who chairs the Ethnic Minority Citizens Forum, warned: "Restaurants in high streets will simply disappear. They rely on chefs coming from abroad. "The new rules will spell the end of the UK as the recognised capital for high quality, multicultural cuisine."
From October a new points system for the granting of work permits will include the need to speak English. But Ms Fernandes thinks the level of ability demanded is too high. She said: "Of course it is important that people are able to communicate. "We are not arguing they should not speak English. But a chef does not need to speak English to university level. "If you only want people like that, you won't get real chefs but people who have studied the hospitality industry. They will be highly qualified but may not have the right skills to cook excellent meals."
Britain has about 32,000 Indian restaurants and takeaways and 30,000 Chinese. Small takeaways run by families for generations will survive. But restaurants in high-rent areas are under most threat because they need to find skilled kitchen staff.
The owners are also furious about the chaos caused when they are raided in searches for illegal immigrants. Labour MP Derek Wyatt said: "The immigration service are now visiting between 7pm and 8pm on Fridays and Saturdays, the busiest period of the week. "They are closing restaurants, clearing out customers and leaving without paying anything. This is not acceptable."
Cabinet minister Harriet Harman has agreed to meet a delegation of restaurant owners. But she added: "The enforcement of immigration rules has to be an operational matter for the Border and Immigration Agency."
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Parts of UK colder than Antarctica
Snow blanketed much of Britain yesterday with some areas of the country colder than Antarctica. Just 72 hours after the warmest day of the year so far, temperatures in many parts of the country hovered just above freezing while a thermometer at Palmer Station, a US research centre in the Antarctic, registered 41F (5C). Forecasters said such widespread snowfall had not been seen in April since 1989. They predicted more snow for northern and eastern parts today.
A year ago people were soaking up the sun on Brighton beach, above. Yesterday, on the same stretch of coast in East Sussex, children wore ski coats and built snowmen. In West Sussex the snow gave a special touch to a picturesque scene as a steam train pulled out of Horsted Keynes station on the Bluebell Railway line. More than three inches of snow fell on some parts of Berkshire and Surrey and London was blanketed.
Philip Eden, from the Royal Meteorological Society, said: "Britain faces another northerly blast coming straight out of the Arctic, and this weather is set to last for most of the week. Snow showers are possible more or less anywhere."
In the Cairngorms, the weather hampered a mountain search for a light aircraft which was believed to have crashed. The aircraft disappeared off the radar on Saturday with only a male pilot on board.
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The REAL inconvenient truth: Zealotry over global warming could damage our Earth far more than climate change
By NIGEL LAWSON
Over the past half-century, we have become used to planetary scares. In the late Sixties, we were told of a population explosion that would lead to global starvation. Then, a little later, we were warned the world was running out of natural resources. By the Seventies, when global temperatures began to dip, many eminent scientists warned us that we faced a new Ice Age. But the latest scare, global warming, has engaged the political and opinion-forming classes to a greater extent than any of these.
The readiness to embrace this fashionable belief has led the present Labour Government, enthusiastically supported by the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, to commit itself to a policy of drastically cutting back carbon dioxide emissions - at huge cost to the British economy and to the living standards not merely of this generation, but of our children's generation, too. That is why I have written a book about the subject.
Now, I readily admit that I am not a scientist; but then neither are the vast majority of those who espouse the currently fashionable madness. Moreover, most of those scientists who speak with such certainty about global warming and climate change are not climate scientists, or Earth scientists of any kind, and thus have no special knowledge to contribute. Those who have to take the key decisions aren't scientists either. They are politicians who, having listened to the opinions of relevant scientists and having studied the evidence, must reach the best decisions they can - just as I did when I was Energy Secretary in Margaret Thatcher's first government in the early Eighties.
But science is only part of the story. Even if the climate scientists can tell us what is happening, and why they think it is happening, they cannot tell us what governments should be doing about it. For this, we also need an understanding of the economics: of what the economic consequences of any warming might be, and, if there is a problem, the best way of dealing with it.
First, then, what is happening? Given that nowadays pretty well every adverse development in the natural world is automatically attributed to global warming, perhaps the most surprising fact about it is that it is not, in fact, happening at all. The truth is that there has so far been no recorded global warming at all this century. The world's temperature rose about half a degree centigrade during the last quarter of the 20th century; but even the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research - part of Britain's Met Office and a citadel of the current global warming orthodoxy - has now conceded that recorded temperature figures for the first seven years of the 21st century reveal there has been a standstill.
The centre now officially expects global warming to resume at some point between 2009 and 2014. Maybe it will. But the fact that the present lull was not predicted by any of the complex computer models upon which the global warming orthodoxy relies is clear evidence that the science of what determines the world's temperature is distinctly uncertain and far from "settled".
Genuine climate scientists admit that Earth's climate is determined by hugely complex systems, and reliable prediction is impossible. That does not mean, of course, that we know nothing. We know that the planet is made habitable only thanks to the warmth we receive from the rays of the sun. Most of this heat bounces back into space; but some of it is trapped by the so-called greenhouse gases which exist in the Earth's atmosphere. If it were not for that, our planet would be far too cold for man to survive.
The most important greenhouse gas is water vapour, including water suspended in clouds. Rather a long way behind, the second most important is carbon dioxide. The vast bulk of the carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere is natural - that is, nothing to do with man. But there is no doubt that ever since the Industrial Revolution in the latter part of the 19th century, man has added greatly to atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide by burning carbon - first in the form of coal, and subsequently in the form of oil and gas, too. So it is reasonable to suppose that, other things being equal, this will have warmed the planet, and that further man-made carbon dioxide emissions will warm it still further.
But in the first place, other things are very far from equal. And in the second place, even if they were, there is no agreement among reputable climate scientists over how much this contributed to the modest late-20th century warming of the planet, and thus may be expected to do so in future. It is striking that during the 21st century, carbon dioxide emissions have been growing faster than ever - thanks in particular to the rapid growth of the Chinese economy - yet there has been no further global warming at all.
Carbon dioxide, like water vapour and oxygen, is not only completely harmless but is an essential element in our life support system. Not only do we exhale carbon dioxide every time we breathe (indeed, an important cause of the increased amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is simply the huge increase in the world's population), but plants need to absorb carbon dioxide in order to survive. Without carbon dioxide, there would be no plant life on the planet. And without plant life, there would be no human life either.
While climate scientists disagree about how much further warming continued carbon dioxide emissions might cause, there is an established majority view. This is articulated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an offshoot of the United Nations, whose view is that 'most' of the modest (0.5 per cent) late-20th century warming was "very likely" caused by man-made carbon dioxide emissions. And if the growth of such emissions continues unabated, their 'best guess' is that in 100 years' time, the planet will be somewhere between 1.8 and 4 per cent warmer than it is today, with a mid-point of a shade under 3 per cent. (Incidentally, this was published before the early 21st century warming standstill was officially acknowledged, so was not taken into account.)
Alistair Darling told us in his recent Budget speech that this would have "catastrophic economic and social consequences". But that is just alarmist poppycock. Let's look at just two of the alleged "catastrophic" consequences of global warming: the threat to food production, leading to mass starvation; and the threat to human health, leading to disease and death.
So far as food production is concerned, it is not clear why a warmer climate would be a problem at all. Even the IPCC concedes that for a warming of anything up to 3 per cent, "globally, the potential for food production is projected to increase". Yes: increase.
As to health, in its most recent report, the IPCC found only one outcome which they ranked as "virtually certain" to happen - and that was "reduced human mortality from decreased cold exposure". This echoes a study done by our own Department of Health which predicted that by the 2050s, the UK would suffer an increase in heat-related deaths by 2,000 a year, and a decrease in cold-related mortality of 20,000 deaths a year - something that ministers have been curiously silent about.
The IPCC systematically exaggerates the likely adverse effects of any warming that might occur because estimates of the likely impact of the global warming it projects for the next 100 years are explicitly based on two assumptions, both of them absurd. The first is that while the developed world can adapt to warming, the developing world cannot. The second is that even in the developed world, the capacity to adapt is constrained by the limits of existing technology. In other words, there will be no technological development over the next 100 years.
So far as the first of these two assumptions is concerned, if necessary, the developed world will focus its overseas aid on ensuring that the developing countries acquire the required ability to adapt. The second is, of course, ludicrous - notably in the case of food production, where, with the development of bio-engineering and genetic modification, the world is currently in the early stages of a genuine revolution in agricultural technology.
All in all, given that global warming produces benefits as well as costs, it is far from clear that the currently projected warming, far from being "catastrophic", will do any net harm at all. To which it will be replied that while that may be so for the world as a whole, the people in the developing world will indeed suffer. But the greatest curse of the developing world is mass poverty, and the malnutrition, disease and unnecessary death that poverty brings. To impede their escape from poverty by denying them the benefits of cheap carbon-based energy would damage them far more than global warming ever could.
Nonetheless, on the basis of its deeply flawed assumptions, the IPCC predicts that if the warming is as much as 4 degrees centigrade by the end of this century, then the economic cost would be a cut of between 1 per cent and 5 per cent of what world output (GDP) would otherwise have been - with the developed world suffering much less, and the developing world much more than this.
But supposing the developing world suffers as much as a 10 per cent loss of GDP from what it would have been in 100 years' time. That means that by the year 2100, people in the developing world, instead of being some 9.5 times better off than they are today, will be 'only' 8.5 times better off (which, incidentally, will still leave them better off than people in the developed world today). And, remember, all this is on the basis of the IPCC's own grotesquely inflated estimate of the likely damage from further warming.
So the fundamental question is: how big a sacrifice should the present generation make now in the hope of avoiding this? The cost of the drastic reduction in carbon dioxide emissions which we are told is necessary would be huge. The Government has introduced legislation to force us to cut emissions by between 60 per cent and 80 per cent by 2050, and Tony Blair, as self-appointed head of a group of "experts", last month declared that "emissions in the richer countries will have to fall close to zero".
One thing is clear: the "feelgood" measures so popular among some sections of the middle classes, from driving a hybrid car and having a wind turbine on one's roof to not leaving the television set on standby, are trivial to the point of total irrelevance. What would be required is for all transport to be 100 per cent electric, and all electricity to be generated by nuclear power.
To cut back carbon dioxide emissions on the scale the present Labour Government (supported by the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats) is demanding would require a fundamental restructuring of the economy, involving a rise in the cost of energy dwarfing anything we have seen so far. No doubt we could afford this hardship if it made sense. But does it? The UK accounts for only 2 per cent of global carbon dioxide emissions. Even if the entire European Union adopted this policy, that accounts for only 15 per cent of global emissions.
By contrast, China - which has already overtaken the U.S. as the biggest single emitter - has said that there is no way it will agree to a cap on its carbon dioxide emissions for the foreseeable future. And India has said precisely the same. Both of them point out that it was the industrialised West, not they, that caused the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations during the last century, and that it is now their turn to catch up. Also, that their emissions per head of population, although rising fast, are still well below those of the U.S. and Europe; and that their overriding priority is - quite rightly - the fastest possible rate of economic growth, and thus the most rapid emancipation of their people from poverty. One good reason why there will not be any effective global agreement.
So the chief consequence of decarbonising here, and making energy much more expensive, would simply be to accelerate the exodus of industry from the UK and Europe to China and elsewhere in the developing world - with, as a result, little or no reduction in overall global emissions. And even if there were a global agreement to cut drastically carbon dioxide emissions, the economic cost of doing so would far exceed any benefit.
So does all this mean that we should do nothing about global warming? Well, not quite. (Although doing nothing is better than doing something stupid.) We do need to monitor as accurately as we can what is happening to temperatures across the globe, and we do need to assist the developing countries to adapt to a warmer temperature, should (one day) the need arise. It makes sense, too, to invest in research in the hoped-for technology of generating electricity using commercial carbon capture (so that carbon dioxide emissions might be "captured" before they can escape into the atmosphere) and also, as the U.S. is already doing, in the technology of geoengineering to cool the planet artificially. But that is about the size of it.
This is not the easiest message to get across - not least because the issues surrounding global warming are so often discussed in terms of belief rather than reason. There may be a political explanation for this. With the collapse of Marxism and, to all intents and purposes, of other forms of socialism too, those who dislike capitalism and its foremost exemplar, the United States, with equal passion, have been obliged to find a new creed. For many of them, green is the new red. And those who wish to order us how to run our lives, faced with the uncomfortable evidence that economic prosperity is more likely to be achieved by less government intervention rather than more, naturally welcome the emergence of a new licence to intrude, to interfere, to tax and to regulate: all in the great cause of saving the planet from the alleged horrors of global warming.
But there is something much more fundamental at work. I suspect that it is no accident that it is in Europe that eco-fundamentalism in general and global warming absolutism in particular has found its most fertile soil. For it is Europe that has become the most secular society in the world, where the traditional religions have the weakest hold. Yet people still feel the need for the comfort and higher values that religion can provide; and it is the quasi-religion of green alarmism, of which the global warming issue is the most striking example, which has filled the vacuum, with reasoned questioning of its mantras regarded as little short of sacrilege.
Does all this matter? Up to a point, no. Unbelievers should not be dismissive of the comfort that 'religion' can bring. If people feel better when they drive a hybrid car or ride a bicycle to work, and like to parade their virtue in this way, then so be it. Nonetheless, the new and unattractively intolerant religion of eco-fundamentalism and global warming presents real dangers. The most obvious is that the governments of Europe may get so carried away by their own rhetoric as to impose measures that do serious harm to their economies. That is a particular danger at the present time in the UK.
Another danger is that even if the governments do not go too far and damage their own economies, they may still cause great damage to the developing world by engaging in what might be termed green protectionism. The movement to make us feel guilty about buying overseas produce because of the "food miles" involved is just one example of this. And France's President Sarkozy is currently urging the European Union to impose trade barriers against those countries that are not prepared to limit their carbon dioxide emissions. It should not need pointing out that a lurch into protectionism, and a rolling back of globalisation, would do far more damage to the world economy - and in particular to living standards in the developing countries - than could conceivably result from the projected continuation of global warming.
But even if this danger can be averted, it is clear that the would-be saviours of the planet are, in practice, the enemies of poverty reduction in the developing world. So the new religion of global warming, however convenient it may be to the politicians, is not as harmless as it may appear. Indeed, the more one examines it, the more it resembles a Da Vinci Code of environmentalism. It is a great story, and a phenomenal bestseller. It contains a grain of truth - and a mountain of nonsense. And that nonsense could be very damaging indeed.
We appear to have entered a new age of unreason, which threatens to be as economically harmful as it is profoundly disquieting. It is from this, above all, that we really do need to save the planet.
Source
An amazing idea from a Leftist government: "School children in Britain could soon be signing up for controversial lessons in military drills and weapons training. Prime Minister Gordon Brown is reportedly backing the plan, which aims to improve links between the public and armed forces. The plan has been drawn up after a review of the military's role in British society found that encouraging high school pupils to join the country's cadet corps could help improve discipline among teenagers, and improve attitudes towards the army, navy and air force. The Observer newspaper said the Labour MP who carried out the review for the government, Quentin Davies, was alarmed by how many pupils had no idea of military life. He wants high school pupils to receive basic military training to help foster a greater affiliation with the defence forces. "The prime minister is very, very keen on the opportunities represented by cadet forces and we will be making a number of recommendations to increase the use of this superb national asset," Davies told the newspaper."
The article below is from a red-top so one does not exactly expect econometrics from it but there are many voices saying the same. They are all prophecies, however. So how about some reality instead? The new British regulations are modelled on Australian ones and there have long been and still are Indian and Chinese restaurants all over the place in Australia. So Brits can rest easy: Their curry and their fried rice are not at risk
Up to 16,000 Chinese and Indian restaurants could be forced to close because of a crackdown on immigration. Bosses fear they will be unable to find chefs because foreigners wishing to settle here will soon have to prove they can speak English. And they claim immigration officers already disrupt business by raiding diners and takeaways at peak times. Maria Fernandes, who chairs the Ethnic Minority Citizens Forum, warned: "Restaurants in high streets will simply disappear. They rely on chefs coming from abroad. "The new rules will spell the end of the UK as the recognised capital for high quality, multicultural cuisine."
From October a new points system for the granting of work permits will include the need to speak English. But Ms Fernandes thinks the level of ability demanded is too high. She said: "Of course it is important that people are able to communicate. "We are not arguing they should not speak English. But a chef does not need to speak English to university level. "If you only want people like that, you won't get real chefs but people who have studied the hospitality industry. They will be highly qualified but may not have the right skills to cook excellent meals."
Britain has about 32,000 Indian restaurants and takeaways and 30,000 Chinese. Small takeaways run by families for generations will survive. But restaurants in high-rent areas are under most threat because they need to find skilled kitchen staff.
The owners are also furious about the chaos caused when they are raided in searches for illegal immigrants. Labour MP Derek Wyatt said: "The immigration service are now visiting between 7pm and 8pm on Fridays and Saturdays, the busiest period of the week. "They are closing restaurants, clearing out customers and leaving without paying anything. This is not acceptable."
Cabinet minister Harriet Harman has agreed to meet a delegation of restaurant owners. But she added: "The enforcement of immigration rules has to be an operational matter for the Border and Immigration Agency."
Source
Parts of UK colder than Antarctica
Snow blanketed much of Britain yesterday with some areas of the country colder than Antarctica. Just 72 hours after the warmest day of the year so far, temperatures in many parts of the country hovered just above freezing while a thermometer at Palmer Station, a US research centre in the Antarctic, registered 41F (5C). Forecasters said such widespread snowfall had not been seen in April since 1989. They predicted more snow for northern and eastern parts today.
A year ago people were soaking up the sun on Brighton beach, above. Yesterday, on the same stretch of coast in East Sussex, children wore ski coats and built snowmen. In West Sussex the snow gave a special touch to a picturesque scene as a steam train pulled out of Horsted Keynes station on the Bluebell Railway line. More than three inches of snow fell on some parts of Berkshire and Surrey and London was blanketed.
Philip Eden, from the Royal Meteorological Society, said: "Britain faces another northerly blast coming straight out of the Arctic, and this weather is set to last for most of the week. Snow showers are possible more or less anywhere."
In the Cairngorms, the weather hampered a mountain search for a light aircraft which was believed to have crashed. The aircraft disappeared off the radar on Saturday with only a male pilot on board.
Source
The REAL inconvenient truth: Zealotry over global warming could damage our Earth far more than climate change
By NIGEL LAWSON
Over the past half-century, we have become used to planetary scares. In the late Sixties, we were told of a population explosion that would lead to global starvation. Then, a little later, we were warned the world was running out of natural resources. By the Seventies, when global temperatures began to dip, many eminent scientists warned us that we faced a new Ice Age. But the latest scare, global warming, has engaged the political and opinion-forming classes to a greater extent than any of these.
The readiness to embrace this fashionable belief has led the present Labour Government, enthusiastically supported by the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, to commit itself to a policy of drastically cutting back carbon dioxide emissions - at huge cost to the British economy and to the living standards not merely of this generation, but of our children's generation, too. That is why I have written a book about the subject.
Now, I readily admit that I am not a scientist; but then neither are the vast majority of those who espouse the currently fashionable madness. Moreover, most of those scientists who speak with such certainty about global warming and climate change are not climate scientists, or Earth scientists of any kind, and thus have no special knowledge to contribute. Those who have to take the key decisions aren't scientists either. They are politicians who, having listened to the opinions of relevant scientists and having studied the evidence, must reach the best decisions they can - just as I did when I was Energy Secretary in Margaret Thatcher's first government in the early Eighties.
But science is only part of the story. Even if the climate scientists can tell us what is happening, and why they think it is happening, they cannot tell us what governments should be doing about it. For this, we also need an understanding of the economics: of what the economic consequences of any warming might be, and, if there is a problem, the best way of dealing with it.
First, then, what is happening? Given that nowadays pretty well every adverse development in the natural world is automatically attributed to global warming, perhaps the most surprising fact about it is that it is not, in fact, happening at all. The truth is that there has so far been no recorded global warming at all this century. The world's temperature rose about half a degree centigrade during the last quarter of the 20th century; but even the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research - part of Britain's Met Office and a citadel of the current global warming orthodoxy - has now conceded that recorded temperature figures for the first seven years of the 21st century reveal there has been a standstill.
The centre now officially expects global warming to resume at some point between 2009 and 2014. Maybe it will. But the fact that the present lull was not predicted by any of the complex computer models upon which the global warming orthodoxy relies is clear evidence that the science of what determines the world's temperature is distinctly uncertain and far from "settled".
Genuine climate scientists admit that Earth's climate is determined by hugely complex systems, and reliable prediction is impossible. That does not mean, of course, that we know nothing. We know that the planet is made habitable only thanks to the warmth we receive from the rays of the sun. Most of this heat bounces back into space; but some of it is trapped by the so-called greenhouse gases which exist in the Earth's atmosphere. If it were not for that, our planet would be far too cold for man to survive.
The most important greenhouse gas is water vapour, including water suspended in clouds. Rather a long way behind, the second most important is carbon dioxide. The vast bulk of the carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere is natural - that is, nothing to do with man. But there is no doubt that ever since the Industrial Revolution in the latter part of the 19th century, man has added greatly to atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide by burning carbon - first in the form of coal, and subsequently in the form of oil and gas, too. So it is reasonable to suppose that, other things being equal, this will have warmed the planet, and that further man-made carbon dioxide emissions will warm it still further.
But in the first place, other things are very far from equal. And in the second place, even if they were, there is no agreement among reputable climate scientists over how much this contributed to the modest late-20th century warming of the planet, and thus may be expected to do so in future. It is striking that during the 21st century, carbon dioxide emissions have been growing faster than ever - thanks in particular to the rapid growth of the Chinese economy - yet there has been no further global warming at all.
Carbon dioxide, like water vapour and oxygen, is not only completely harmless but is an essential element in our life support system. Not only do we exhale carbon dioxide every time we breathe (indeed, an important cause of the increased amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is simply the huge increase in the world's population), but plants need to absorb carbon dioxide in order to survive. Without carbon dioxide, there would be no plant life on the planet. And without plant life, there would be no human life either.
While climate scientists disagree about how much further warming continued carbon dioxide emissions might cause, there is an established majority view. This is articulated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an offshoot of the United Nations, whose view is that 'most' of the modest (0.5 per cent) late-20th century warming was "very likely" caused by man-made carbon dioxide emissions. And if the growth of such emissions continues unabated, their 'best guess' is that in 100 years' time, the planet will be somewhere between 1.8 and 4 per cent warmer than it is today, with a mid-point of a shade under 3 per cent. (Incidentally, this was published before the early 21st century warming standstill was officially acknowledged, so was not taken into account.)
Alistair Darling told us in his recent Budget speech that this would have "catastrophic economic and social consequences". But that is just alarmist poppycock. Let's look at just two of the alleged "catastrophic" consequences of global warming: the threat to food production, leading to mass starvation; and the threat to human health, leading to disease and death.
So far as food production is concerned, it is not clear why a warmer climate would be a problem at all. Even the IPCC concedes that for a warming of anything up to 3 per cent, "globally, the potential for food production is projected to increase". Yes: increase.
As to health, in its most recent report, the IPCC found only one outcome which they ranked as "virtually certain" to happen - and that was "reduced human mortality from decreased cold exposure". This echoes a study done by our own Department of Health which predicted that by the 2050s, the UK would suffer an increase in heat-related deaths by 2,000 a year, and a decrease in cold-related mortality of 20,000 deaths a year - something that ministers have been curiously silent about.
The IPCC systematically exaggerates the likely adverse effects of any warming that might occur because estimates of the likely impact of the global warming it projects for the next 100 years are explicitly based on two assumptions, both of them absurd. The first is that while the developed world can adapt to warming, the developing world cannot. The second is that even in the developed world, the capacity to adapt is constrained by the limits of existing technology. In other words, there will be no technological development over the next 100 years.
So far as the first of these two assumptions is concerned, if necessary, the developed world will focus its overseas aid on ensuring that the developing countries acquire the required ability to adapt. The second is, of course, ludicrous - notably in the case of food production, where, with the development of bio-engineering and genetic modification, the world is currently in the early stages of a genuine revolution in agricultural technology.
All in all, given that global warming produces benefits as well as costs, it is far from clear that the currently projected warming, far from being "catastrophic", will do any net harm at all. To which it will be replied that while that may be so for the world as a whole, the people in the developing world will indeed suffer. But the greatest curse of the developing world is mass poverty, and the malnutrition, disease and unnecessary death that poverty brings. To impede their escape from poverty by denying them the benefits of cheap carbon-based energy would damage them far more than global warming ever could.
Nonetheless, on the basis of its deeply flawed assumptions, the IPCC predicts that if the warming is as much as 4 degrees centigrade by the end of this century, then the economic cost would be a cut of between 1 per cent and 5 per cent of what world output (GDP) would otherwise have been - with the developed world suffering much less, and the developing world much more than this.
But supposing the developing world suffers as much as a 10 per cent loss of GDP from what it would have been in 100 years' time. That means that by the year 2100, people in the developing world, instead of being some 9.5 times better off than they are today, will be 'only' 8.5 times better off (which, incidentally, will still leave them better off than people in the developed world today). And, remember, all this is on the basis of the IPCC's own grotesquely inflated estimate of the likely damage from further warming.
So the fundamental question is: how big a sacrifice should the present generation make now in the hope of avoiding this? The cost of the drastic reduction in carbon dioxide emissions which we are told is necessary would be huge. The Government has introduced legislation to force us to cut emissions by between 60 per cent and 80 per cent by 2050, and Tony Blair, as self-appointed head of a group of "experts", last month declared that "emissions in the richer countries will have to fall close to zero".
One thing is clear: the "feelgood" measures so popular among some sections of the middle classes, from driving a hybrid car and having a wind turbine on one's roof to not leaving the television set on standby, are trivial to the point of total irrelevance. What would be required is for all transport to be 100 per cent electric, and all electricity to be generated by nuclear power.
To cut back carbon dioxide emissions on the scale the present Labour Government (supported by the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats) is demanding would require a fundamental restructuring of the economy, involving a rise in the cost of energy dwarfing anything we have seen so far. No doubt we could afford this hardship if it made sense. But does it? The UK accounts for only 2 per cent of global carbon dioxide emissions. Even if the entire European Union adopted this policy, that accounts for only 15 per cent of global emissions.
By contrast, China - which has already overtaken the U.S. as the biggest single emitter - has said that there is no way it will agree to a cap on its carbon dioxide emissions for the foreseeable future. And India has said precisely the same. Both of them point out that it was the industrialised West, not they, that caused the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations during the last century, and that it is now their turn to catch up. Also, that their emissions per head of population, although rising fast, are still well below those of the U.S. and Europe; and that their overriding priority is - quite rightly - the fastest possible rate of economic growth, and thus the most rapid emancipation of their people from poverty. One good reason why there will not be any effective global agreement.
So the chief consequence of decarbonising here, and making energy much more expensive, would simply be to accelerate the exodus of industry from the UK and Europe to China and elsewhere in the developing world - with, as a result, little or no reduction in overall global emissions. And even if there were a global agreement to cut drastically carbon dioxide emissions, the economic cost of doing so would far exceed any benefit.
So does all this mean that we should do nothing about global warming? Well, not quite. (Although doing nothing is better than doing something stupid.) We do need to monitor as accurately as we can what is happening to temperatures across the globe, and we do need to assist the developing countries to adapt to a warmer temperature, should (one day) the need arise. It makes sense, too, to invest in research in the hoped-for technology of generating electricity using commercial carbon capture (so that carbon dioxide emissions might be "captured" before they can escape into the atmosphere) and also, as the U.S. is already doing, in the technology of geoengineering to cool the planet artificially. But that is about the size of it.
This is not the easiest message to get across - not least because the issues surrounding global warming are so often discussed in terms of belief rather than reason. There may be a political explanation for this. With the collapse of Marxism and, to all intents and purposes, of other forms of socialism too, those who dislike capitalism and its foremost exemplar, the United States, with equal passion, have been obliged to find a new creed. For many of them, green is the new red. And those who wish to order us how to run our lives, faced with the uncomfortable evidence that economic prosperity is more likely to be achieved by less government intervention rather than more, naturally welcome the emergence of a new licence to intrude, to interfere, to tax and to regulate: all in the great cause of saving the planet from the alleged horrors of global warming.
But there is something much more fundamental at work. I suspect that it is no accident that it is in Europe that eco-fundamentalism in general and global warming absolutism in particular has found its most fertile soil. For it is Europe that has become the most secular society in the world, where the traditional religions have the weakest hold. Yet people still feel the need for the comfort and higher values that religion can provide; and it is the quasi-religion of green alarmism, of which the global warming issue is the most striking example, which has filled the vacuum, with reasoned questioning of its mantras regarded as little short of sacrilege.
Does all this matter? Up to a point, no. Unbelievers should not be dismissive of the comfort that 'religion' can bring. If people feel better when they drive a hybrid car or ride a bicycle to work, and like to parade their virtue in this way, then so be it. Nonetheless, the new and unattractively intolerant religion of eco-fundamentalism and global warming presents real dangers. The most obvious is that the governments of Europe may get so carried away by their own rhetoric as to impose measures that do serious harm to their economies. That is a particular danger at the present time in the UK.
Another danger is that even if the governments do not go too far and damage their own economies, they may still cause great damage to the developing world by engaging in what might be termed green protectionism. The movement to make us feel guilty about buying overseas produce because of the "food miles" involved is just one example of this. And France's President Sarkozy is currently urging the European Union to impose trade barriers against those countries that are not prepared to limit their carbon dioxide emissions. It should not need pointing out that a lurch into protectionism, and a rolling back of globalisation, would do far more damage to the world economy - and in particular to living standards in the developing countries - than could conceivably result from the projected continuation of global warming.
But even if this danger can be averted, it is clear that the would-be saviours of the planet are, in practice, the enemies of poverty reduction in the developing world. So the new religion of global warming, however convenient it may be to the politicians, is not as harmless as it may appear. Indeed, the more one examines it, the more it resembles a Da Vinci Code of environmentalism. It is a great story, and a phenomenal bestseller. It contains a grain of truth - and a mountain of nonsense. And that nonsense could be very damaging indeed.
We appear to have entered a new age of unreason, which threatens to be as economically harmful as it is profoundly disquieting. It is from this, above all, that we really do need to save the planet.
Source
An amazing idea from a Leftist government: "School children in Britain could soon be signing up for controversial lessons in military drills and weapons training. Prime Minister Gordon Brown is reportedly backing the plan, which aims to improve links between the public and armed forces. The plan has been drawn up after a review of the military's role in British society found that encouraging high school pupils to join the country's cadet corps could help improve discipline among teenagers, and improve attitudes towards the army, navy and air force. The Observer newspaper said the Labour MP who carried out the review for the government, Quentin Davies, was alarmed by how many pupils had no idea of military life. He wants high school pupils to receive basic military training to help foster a greater affiliation with the defence forces. "The prime minister is very, very keen on the opportunities represented by cadet forces and we will be making a number of recommendations to increase the use of this superb national asset," Davies told the newspaper."
Monday, April 07, 2008
BBC censors Harrabin
Roger Harrabin is one of the less ideological reporters for the BBC and he sometimes mentions things that call global warming into question. But that does not suit the British Bias Corporation of course. In this article, Harrabin mentioned recent global cooling. But when someone senior to him saw it, they were obviously not happy. The article was changed after it initially appeared.
I have a PDF of the article produced shortly after it was posted. I also have a PDF of what was up last time I checked. Let us compare the 3rd/4th sentences in each. In V1, they say:
In V2 they say:
How low the BBC has sunk from the grand old days of Lord Reith when it could be relied on as a source of objective and unbiased information! The Left corrupt anything they get their hands on. As Orwell pointed out, they think that truth is what they declare it to be.
Britain: Women in their reproductive years have a legal licence to exploit their employers and fellow workers
Brass neck is the phrase that comes to mind on contemplating the newsreader Natasha Kaplinsky. She is the woman who accepted 1m pounds a year for a new job as “the face of Five News” and who, only six weeks into her contract, announced that she was 12 weeks pregnant. If I were running Five I would be beside myself with rage. Undisclosed sources say her bosses are indeed dismayed that she will be out of action so soon after starting on this hugely paid and hugely publicised role. Apparently she is taking maternity leave in September, for “a few months”, although of course she will have the option of extending her leave and may never return.
Meanwhile, instead of the ferociously sexy on-the-ball babe that Five hired, Kaplinsky will be becoming larger and mumsier, she may have a nauseous or difficult pregnancy requiring lots of time off, and at some point her brain will be affected by the amnesia of pregnancy. This is a phenomenon that is now widely admitted, even by feminists (although it is equally often denied when inconvenient); there is even a nasty new fashionable word for a woman in this state - preghead. Luckily there is, of course, Autocue at Five News. And an expensive stand-in will have to be found.
The proper word for all this is exploitation. It is women such as Kaplinsky, appearing so flamboyantly unreliable and unapologetic, who make working life much harder for the rest of us - working mothers, childless women and, of course, all employers. To add insult to injury, employers are not even allowed to say so. On the contrary, a top man at Five has said that he is “genuinely delighted” and indeed he could have said nothing else. It would probably have been illegal - discrimination against women - even to hint at any other response.
I have not tried to count the weeks and figure out the moment of Kaplinsky’s conception; somehow it seems rather rude. It may be that when she signed her contract she wasn’t - quite - pregnant. However, she must have been when she started work and she may well have known it. In any case she must surely have been aware of her own hopes and intentions about having a baby, presumably sooner rather than later, unless this infant was a “mistake”. This strikes me as unfair to her employers, unless they knew and accepted this risk in advance.
When I was interviewed for a traineeship at the BBC, the panel asked what my plans for having children were and how I would combine children with work. It seemed to me then (and still does) a reasonable question. I was married and 27, which at that time was considered late to start having babies. However, the woman from personnel told me not to answer; she said the question was sexist and impermissible. It would now, like many such reasonable questions, be illegal although, oddly, it is legal (although entirely unreasonable) to ask people about their sexual orientation when they apply for Arts Council grants.
Sir Alan Sugar was right when he said recently that women should tell their employers about their reproductive plans. In doing so he made himself unpopular. However, it is surely unfair - and commercially disastrous - to expect an employer to take on, unknown, the risks to his business that new mothers are likely to impose on him. Perhaps Kaplinsky discussed this with Five; but the point is that women in their reproductive years have a legal licence to exploit their employers and fellow workers.
The fact that Kaplinsky will not be entitled to maternity pay from Five because she works as a freelance means only that her employers will not pay her a huge fee for work she does not do. They will have to find and negotiate with someone else, they will have to pay for massive publicity for someone else, having just met the bills for all the PR hoopla they bought to launch Kaplinsky. Then that other newsreader, having been starred up at their expense, will take the results to a competitor. They will have to endure the internal disruption that will follow the departure in only a few months of their star and with her the possible loss of her ratings.
It is depressing, from a woman’s point of view, that the pendulum has swung so quickly from one unfair extreme to another. In the 1960s women were harassed and underpaid and their problems with childcare were overlooked. While there are plenty of low-paid women for whom that is still true, these days the boot is usually on the woman’s foot and she puts it in when she can. Many women seem to expect extraordinary rights and allowances so that they can keep their jobs whatever the cost and inconvenience to their employer and to be equally paid when they are not always of equal value. Government and public opinion support them.
Yet I have several professional women friends, committed feminists, who dread hiring women for all the obvious reasons. The most pressing are their long periods of maternity leave and the extreme difficulty of replacing them temporarily in demanding service industries such as publishing and law with equally good people, who will then have to be dropped.
Last week there was an interesting controversy about women doctors in the pages of the British Medical Journal. A brave doctor claimed on the Radio 4 Today programme on Friday that three female doctors need to be trained to produce the same “work time output” as two male doctors (because of maternity leave, time off and early retirement). Furthermore, for the same reasons, women doctors cause disruption in the continuity of care and face problems in maintaining their practical skills, such as in surgery, with an interrupted career path.
All this is extremely difficult and I am very uncertain as to what, if anything, can reasonably be done. However, surely the most important first step in dealing with such intractable problems is to be free to admit what they are. When hiring women of childbearing age is more problematic than hiring men or other women, employers should be allowed to say so. They should not be forced to pretend that it isn’t so, while at the same time making special allowances for working mothers and offering equal pay for what may not be equal services.
Source
At least Britain is honest about immigration now
Last week a Lords committee said immigration had brought little economic benefit to Britons. A black "Times" correspondent tours Britain and finds similar sentiment on the ground. And expression of that sentiment can no longer be suppressed
Enoch Powell's explosive "rivers of blood" speech in 1968 effectively closed down public debate about immigration for several decades. His inflammatory language made the topic radioactive, while at a stroke destroying his political career. Forty years on, immigration is being discussed up and down the country and occupies centre-stage in parliament. It's a topic that presses emotional buttons in everyone - white, black or Asian - as I found during a journey across Britain to discover whether Powell's apocalyptic visions have any basis in today's reality.
It has been a fascinating experience for me - a Briton born in Somalia barely a year before Powell's speech - to listen to these concerns. As an overseas reporter I have been more used to hearing villagers' grievances against another tribe of a different ethnicity. Yet in a sense these were familiar scenarios - whether I was talking to a white family who felt under siege in picture-postcard Lichfield or a second-generation black worker in Brixton who was complaining about Polish workers undercutting his business.
It was striking how ill-informed we are about immigration. There are so many half-truths bandied around that none of us feels we have been given the full picture. What became clear to me is that the issue is less about colour and cultural differences - in the way Powell portrayed - and more about the sense that people's jobs and livelihoods are being threatened.
My point of departure was the room in the Midland hotel in Birmingham where Powell made his fateful speech. First I talked to people who had been there at the time. A friend of Powell, a policeman from Wolverhampton, told me that he thought the speech was one of Powell's worst: the MP, he said, had looked self-conscious and worried as he delivered it. Even today it still has the power to shock with its bleak vision and Powell's warning - in messianic, racist tones - that Britain was about to change for ever. However, stripped of its poisonous rhetoric, it is impossible to deny that some of his predictions have been borne out by events. In effect, Powell was articulating a critique of multiculturalism - before multiculturalism became official policy. At the time he called it communalism, a "canker" that would isolate communities and which the majority, native British population would struggle to understand.
Most people now believe that multiculturalism - the celebration of ethnic diversity without the need to integrate - is imploding. Powell's spectre of "the River Tiber foaming with much blood" was in fact a reference to the racial ferment in America, which many people at the time - including Richard Nixon - thought might be on the verge of civil war. In Britain people pointed to the race riots of 1981 as a fulfilment of Powell's prophecy.
In some ways we are still stuck with the parameters of his speech, with its emphasis on people coming to live here permanently. By combining the issues of race and cultural identity, it continues to divide people and evoke anger. However, I think we have moved far beyond the kind of world that Powell predicted. To me the real revelation is the way in which second and third-generation immigrants feel embedded in Britain - and now talk about east Europeans with the same sense of fear, foreboding and anger that white people expressed about Asians 30 or 40 years ago. According to a YouGov survey commissioned by Channel 4, 58% of settled British migrants feel there is an immigration "crisis". Among the total population this view is echoed by 83% - with 84% in favour of halting immigration altogether. The poll also found that 66% feel that their jobs are being undercut by migrant workers and 69% believe the latter are given special treatment.
One of the most striking interviews I conducted was with Ricky Scott, a carpet cleaner from south London whose grandparents had emigrated to Britain from Jamaica in the 1950s. Concerned that east Europeans were undercutting his charges with rates of 30 pounds a day, he also complained about the number of newcomers on the streets who were speaking foreign languages. In an uncanny echo of Powell - who spoke of the majority British becoming "strangers in their own country" - the carpet cleaner said: "I can't be understood in my own country."
It is not just second and third-generation immigrants who are directing their ire at east Europeans. In Lichfield a white working-class family told me that it was only a matter of time before "rivers of blood" became a reality. Dave James, who had experienced difficulty in finding work, recalled going to a job-seeking agency and finding himself at the end of a queue of east Europeans who were receiving priority treatment. He walked out. "It makes me feel like a second-class citizen," he said. I met many others from the so-called white working class who feel they can no longer compete for the jobs that are now taken by Polish electricians and other skilled workers. They feel utterly marginalised and ignored by everybody - which makes their stories compelling and sad.
Because Poles are white and Christian, attracting little racist sentiment, they are to some extent seen as fair game. They represent the lightning rod of immigration: the focus for people's fears about their livelihoods being threatened by the sheer numbers arriving from abroad.
This is very like the scenario that Powell described - people unable to find jobs, changed neighbourhoods and different languages spoken at schools. But immigration these days is a matter of constant churning change. I interviewed many Polish people who said they would definitely be going back home. They do not see themselves as immigrants but as part of the global workforce. Our economy - Europe's most open, wealthy and diverse - beckons them to a place where they can use their skills and then move on.
This is perhaps the crucial distinction from Powell's frame of reference. The new transient immigration is all about the needs of our economy. Meanwhile, a huge number of indigenous British people have been failed by the education system and are not prepared for such a dynamic globalised workplace.
Last week a House of Lords committee declared that immigration had brought "little or no" economic benefit to the majority population. But after speaking to a range of employers - from City bankers to people who employ immigrants on building sites - I am convinced that they are wrong. Our economy has outshone that of every other European country: immigration certainly has not held it back. In rejecting the committee's conclusion, Gordon Brown ruled out an annual limit on immigration, favouring a new points-based system that will allow only highly skilled workers into the UK. Immigration, it seems, is now part of our economic policy and therefore extremely difficult to control.
This will be of no comfort to indigenous Britons such as Richard, a middle-class writer who told me that his area of Wibsey is the last bastion of British civilisation in Bradford. Feeling outnumbered by Pakistanis in areas of the town where he says "whitey is not welcome", he dreams of going down to Whitehall and seeing it "lined with politicians and civil servants hanging from the lampposts" - a fitting punishment, he feels, for having destabilised this country.
Pakistanis, of course, have worries of their own. Indeed, I spoke to many Asians in the Midlands who felt they were suffering from discrimination. One said: "I'm British and if I want to bring my wife and uncle from Pakistan, why do I have a harder time than a Polish guy who can just walk in?"
For me the most positive aspect of the immigration issue is that it is no longer a no-go area. Today it is being discussed openly by people of all colours, from many points of view. And it is surely better to debate the pros and cons of immigration than to close the argument down - as Enoch Powell did all those years ago.
Source
Roger Harrabin is one of the less ideological reporters for the BBC and he sometimes mentions things that call global warming into question. But that does not suit the British Bias Corporation of course. In this article, Harrabin mentioned recent global cooling. But when someone senior to him saw it, they were obviously not happy. The article was changed after it initially appeared.
I have a PDF of the article produced shortly after it was posted. I also have a PDF of what was up last time I checked. Let us compare the 3rd/4th sentences in each. In V1, they say:
'This would mean global temperatures have not risen since 1998, prompting some to question climate change theory. But experts say we are still clearly in a long-term warming trend - and they forecast a new record high temperature within five years.'
In V2 they say:
'But this year's temperature would still be way above the average - and we would soon exceed the record year of 1998 because of global warming induced by greenhouse gases.'
How low the BBC has sunk from the grand old days of Lord Reith when it could be relied on as a source of objective and unbiased information! The Left corrupt anything they get their hands on. As Orwell pointed out, they think that truth is what they declare it to be.
Britain: Women in their reproductive years have a legal licence to exploit their employers and fellow workers
Brass neck is the phrase that comes to mind on contemplating the newsreader Natasha Kaplinsky. She is the woman who accepted 1m pounds a year for a new job as “the face of Five News” and who, only six weeks into her contract, announced that she was 12 weeks pregnant. If I were running Five I would be beside myself with rage. Undisclosed sources say her bosses are indeed dismayed that she will be out of action so soon after starting on this hugely paid and hugely publicised role. Apparently she is taking maternity leave in September, for “a few months”, although of course she will have the option of extending her leave and may never return.
Meanwhile, instead of the ferociously sexy on-the-ball babe that Five hired, Kaplinsky will be becoming larger and mumsier, she may have a nauseous or difficult pregnancy requiring lots of time off, and at some point her brain will be affected by the amnesia of pregnancy. This is a phenomenon that is now widely admitted, even by feminists (although it is equally often denied when inconvenient); there is even a nasty new fashionable word for a woman in this state - preghead. Luckily there is, of course, Autocue at Five News. And an expensive stand-in will have to be found.
The proper word for all this is exploitation. It is women such as Kaplinsky, appearing so flamboyantly unreliable and unapologetic, who make working life much harder for the rest of us - working mothers, childless women and, of course, all employers. To add insult to injury, employers are not even allowed to say so. On the contrary, a top man at Five has said that he is “genuinely delighted” and indeed he could have said nothing else. It would probably have been illegal - discrimination against women - even to hint at any other response.
I have not tried to count the weeks and figure out the moment of Kaplinsky’s conception; somehow it seems rather rude. It may be that when she signed her contract she wasn’t - quite - pregnant. However, she must have been when she started work and she may well have known it. In any case she must surely have been aware of her own hopes and intentions about having a baby, presumably sooner rather than later, unless this infant was a “mistake”. This strikes me as unfair to her employers, unless they knew and accepted this risk in advance.
When I was interviewed for a traineeship at the BBC, the panel asked what my plans for having children were and how I would combine children with work. It seemed to me then (and still does) a reasonable question. I was married and 27, which at that time was considered late to start having babies. However, the woman from personnel told me not to answer; she said the question was sexist and impermissible. It would now, like many such reasonable questions, be illegal although, oddly, it is legal (although entirely unreasonable) to ask people about their sexual orientation when they apply for Arts Council grants.
Sir Alan Sugar was right when he said recently that women should tell their employers about their reproductive plans. In doing so he made himself unpopular. However, it is surely unfair - and commercially disastrous - to expect an employer to take on, unknown, the risks to his business that new mothers are likely to impose on him. Perhaps Kaplinsky discussed this with Five; but the point is that women in their reproductive years have a legal licence to exploit their employers and fellow workers.
The fact that Kaplinsky will not be entitled to maternity pay from Five because she works as a freelance means only that her employers will not pay her a huge fee for work she does not do. They will have to find and negotiate with someone else, they will have to pay for massive publicity for someone else, having just met the bills for all the PR hoopla they bought to launch Kaplinsky. Then that other newsreader, having been starred up at their expense, will take the results to a competitor. They will have to endure the internal disruption that will follow the departure in only a few months of their star and with her the possible loss of her ratings.
It is depressing, from a woman’s point of view, that the pendulum has swung so quickly from one unfair extreme to another. In the 1960s women were harassed and underpaid and their problems with childcare were overlooked. While there are plenty of low-paid women for whom that is still true, these days the boot is usually on the woman’s foot and she puts it in when she can. Many women seem to expect extraordinary rights and allowances so that they can keep their jobs whatever the cost and inconvenience to their employer and to be equally paid when they are not always of equal value. Government and public opinion support them.
Yet I have several professional women friends, committed feminists, who dread hiring women for all the obvious reasons. The most pressing are their long periods of maternity leave and the extreme difficulty of replacing them temporarily in demanding service industries such as publishing and law with equally good people, who will then have to be dropped.
Last week there was an interesting controversy about women doctors in the pages of the British Medical Journal. A brave doctor claimed on the Radio 4 Today programme on Friday that three female doctors need to be trained to produce the same “work time output” as two male doctors (because of maternity leave, time off and early retirement). Furthermore, for the same reasons, women doctors cause disruption in the continuity of care and face problems in maintaining their practical skills, such as in surgery, with an interrupted career path.
All this is extremely difficult and I am very uncertain as to what, if anything, can reasonably be done. However, surely the most important first step in dealing with such intractable problems is to be free to admit what they are. When hiring women of childbearing age is more problematic than hiring men or other women, employers should be allowed to say so. They should not be forced to pretend that it isn’t so, while at the same time making special allowances for working mothers and offering equal pay for what may not be equal services.
Source
At least Britain is honest about immigration now
Last week a Lords committee said immigration had brought little economic benefit to Britons. A black "Times" correspondent tours Britain and finds similar sentiment on the ground. And expression of that sentiment can no longer be suppressed
Enoch Powell's explosive "rivers of blood" speech in 1968 effectively closed down public debate about immigration for several decades. His inflammatory language made the topic radioactive, while at a stroke destroying his political career. Forty years on, immigration is being discussed up and down the country and occupies centre-stage in parliament. It's a topic that presses emotional buttons in everyone - white, black or Asian - as I found during a journey across Britain to discover whether Powell's apocalyptic visions have any basis in today's reality.
It has been a fascinating experience for me - a Briton born in Somalia barely a year before Powell's speech - to listen to these concerns. As an overseas reporter I have been more used to hearing villagers' grievances against another tribe of a different ethnicity. Yet in a sense these were familiar scenarios - whether I was talking to a white family who felt under siege in picture-postcard Lichfield or a second-generation black worker in Brixton who was complaining about Polish workers undercutting his business.
It was striking how ill-informed we are about immigration. There are so many half-truths bandied around that none of us feels we have been given the full picture. What became clear to me is that the issue is less about colour and cultural differences - in the way Powell portrayed - and more about the sense that people's jobs and livelihoods are being threatened.
My point of departure was the room in the Midland hotel in Birmingham where Powell made his fateful speech. First I talked to people who had been there at the time. A friend of Powell, a policeman from Wolverhampton, told me that he thought the speech was one of Powell's worst: the MP, he said, had looked self-conscious and worried as he delivered it. Even today it still has the power to shock with its bleak vision and Powell's warning - in messianic, racist tones - that Britain was about to change for ever. However, stripped of its poisonous rhetoric, it is impossible to deny that some of his predictions have been borne out by events. In effect, Powell was articulating a critique of multiculturalism - before multiculturalism became official policy. At the time he called it communalism, a "canker" that would isolate communities and which the majority, native British population would struggle to understand.
Most people now believe that multiculturalism - the celebration of ethnic diversity without the need to integrate - is imploding. Powell's spectre of "the River Tiber foaming with much blood" was in fact a reference to the racial ferment in America, which many people at the time - including Richard Nixon - thought might be on the verge of civil war. In Britain people pointed to the race riots of 1981 as a fulfilment of Powell's prophecy.
In some ways we are still stuck with the parameters of his speech, with its emphasis on people coming to live here permanently. By combining the issues of race and cultural identity, it continues to divide people and evoke anger. However, I think we have moved far beyond the kind of world that Powell predicted. To me the real revelation is the way in which second and third-generation immigrants feel embedded in Britain - and now talk about east Europeans with the same sense of fear, foreboding and anger that white people expressed about Asians 30 or 40 years ago. According to a YouGov survey commissioned by Channel 4, 58% of settled British migrants feel there is an immigration "crisis". Among the total population this view is echoed by 83% - with 84% in favour of halting immigration altogether. The poll also found that 66% feel that their jobs are being undercut by migrant workers and 69% believe the latter are given special treatment.
One of the most striking interviews I conducted was with Ricky Scott, a carpet cleaner from south London whose grandparents had emigrated to Britain from Jamaica in the 1950s. Concerned that east Europeans were undercutting his charges with rates of 30 pounds a day, he also complained about the number of newcomers on the streets who were speaking foreign languages. In an uncanny echo of Powell - who spoke of the majority British becoming "strangers in their own country" - the carpet cleaner said: "I can't be understood in my own country."
It is not just second and third-generation immigrants who are directing their ire at east Europeans. In Lichfield a white working-class family told me that it was only a matter of time before "rivers of blood" became a reality. Dave James, who had experienced difficulty in finding work, recalled going to a job-seeking agency and finding himself at the end of a queue of east Europeans who were receiving priority treatment. He walked out. "It makes me feel like a second-class citizen," he said. I met many others from the so-called white working class who feel they can no longer compete for the jobs that are now taken by Polish electricians and other skilled workers. They feel utterly marginalised and ignored by everybody - which makes their stories compelling and sad.
Because Poles are white and Christian, attracting little racist sentiment, they are to some extent seen as fair game. They represent the lightning rod of immigration: the focus for people's fears about their livelihoods being threatened by the sheer numbers arriving from abroad.
This is very like the scenario that Powell described - people unable to find jobs, changed neighbourhoods and different languages spoken at schools. But immigration these days is a matter of constant churning change. I interviewed many Polish people who said they would definitely be going back home. They do not see themselves as immigrants but as part of the global workforce. Our economy - Europe's most open, wealthy and diverse - beckons them to a place where they can use their skills and then move on.
This is perhaps the crucial distinction from Powell's frame of reference. The new transient immigration is all about the needs of our economy. Meanwhile, a huge number of indigenous British people have been failed by the education system and are not prepared for such a dynamic globalised workplace.
Last week a House of Lords committee declared that immigration had brought "little or no" economic benefit to the majority population. But after speaking to a range of employers - from City bankers to people who employ immigrants on building sites - I am convinced that they are wrong. Our economy has outshone that of every other European country: immigration certainly has not held it back. In rejecting the committee's conclusion, Gordon Brown ruled out an annual limit on immigration, favouring a new points-based system that will allow only highly skilled workers into the UK. Immigration, it seems, is now part of our economic policy and therefore extremely difficult to control.
This will be of no comfort to indigenous Britons such as Richard, a middle-class writer who told me that his area of Wibsey is the last bastion of British civilisation in Bradford. Feeling outnumbered by Pakistanis in areas of the town where he says "whitey is not welcome", he dreams of going down to Whitehall and seeing it "lined with politicians and civil servants hanging from the lampposts" - a fitting punishment, he feels, for having destabilised this country.
Pakistanis, of course, have worries of their own. Indeed, I spoke to many Asians in the Midlands who felt they were suffering from discrimination. One said: "I'm British and if I want to bring my wife and uncle from Pakistan, why do I have a harder time than a Polish guy who can just walk in?"
For me the most positive aspect of the immigration issue is that it is no longer a no-go area. Today it is being discussed openly by people of all colours, from many points of view. And it is surely better to debate the pros and cons of immigration than to close the argument down - as Enoch Powell did all those years ago.
Source
Sunday, April 06, 2008
Britain CANNOT cut (legal) immigration very much
Economists are generally pro-immigation because they are aware that immigrants improve labour market flexibility and labour market inflexibility is a major barrier to improved national productivity. So the article below from "The Economist" rightly points out that there are major limits on what the British government can do. One can deceive by omission, however and what the article completely glides over is the weak-kneed attitude of the British government towards illegal immigration. They are nearly as bad as the U.S. government over it. Energetic pursuit and deportation of illegals would greatly reduce the social problems of immigration -- as illegals tend to be undesirable immigrants in many ways.
Another category unmentioned is family reunions, which are in fact a large part of current immigration. Restricting such reunions to dependant children and spouses from non-arranged marriages would be an obvious step.
SIX billion pounds is, as Britain's immigration minister Liam Byrne put it, "a big number". This figure is the amount that the government reckons was added to the economy by immigrants in 2006, and a number that it has repeatedly used to justify the record numbers of migrants that Britain has absorbed in recent years.
But there is another big number: 190,000. That is the amount of net immigration that Britain can expect to receive each year unless the government tightens things up, according to a report published on April 1st by the House of Lords economic-affairs committee. Their lordships put these two big numbers together and calculated that they pretty much cancelled each other out. Gross domestic product (GDP) may have grown handsomely thanks to migrants, they said, but GDP per head-each person's share-has hardly budged. Using bald GDP growth to justify immigration was "preposterous and irrelevant", the committee's chairman said.
Strong words, and manna for migration sceptics ("Immigration: the great lies", trumpeted one newspaper, thrilled). The report was actually more balanced than that. It found evidence that immigration had pushed down the wages of the lowest-paid by a fraction but higher-paid people had experienced a small fillip. As far as competition for jobs was concerned, it pointed out that the number of vacancies is about the same now as it was seven years ago, since migrants create jobs as well as taking them. Immigration is pushing up house prices, it observed, which may be good news for some of those who are most vocal about the downside of open borders. And it heard evidence that migrants may push down the "natural" rate of unemployment, since they are more flexible than sluggish Britons about which jobs they take. ("This effect may, however, decrease...as migrants become more like the native population," noted Stephen Nickell, an economist who gave evidence to the committee.)
This was not, all in all, a bad-news report. But the problem for the government is that it has relentlessly made the case that the economic benefits of migration are vast, in order to buy off those who don't like its social effects. The suggestion that the pay-off is merely neutral is therefore quite a blow. The government's own calculations value the benefits of immigration to Britons at about 30 pounds ($59.4) per person per year. That is not much of a bribe for people who reflexively dislike it-and there may be more of them about. Immigration has raced up voters' worry lists over the past two years and now vies with crime for the top position, according to Ipsos-MORI, a pollster. Some 68% believe that Britain has too many migrants.
But it is hard to cut back. The Lords recommended an annual cap on migrant numbers, a policy that the Conservatives have been plugging as part of a commitment to "substantially lower" immigration. The Liberal Democrats would cut down too but, like the government, they want to tighten the criteria for work permits rather than define a ceiling.
In truth, most immigration to Britain is out of any government's hands. EU citizens, who make up nearly 30% of net immigration, may come and go as they please. (Numbers will increase when Romanians and Bulgarians are given the right to work in Britain, which must be granted before 2014.) Asylum-seekers are entitled by UN conventions to a fair hearing, and the government cannot stop its citizens from marrying foreigners and having children with them.
Such folk account for half of Britain's annual immigration. Of the remainder, the majority are students, prized because they pay hefty tuition fees. The only category left to play with is skilled workers from outside the EU, who make up just one-fifth of all immigrants; and some of them (from American bankers to Brazilian footballers) are among the most useful. Cuts in immigration look on the cards, but it is unlikely they will be substantial.
Source
"UK is European center of anti-Semitism"
For a historian, this guy should know better than to dwell on British history as particularly antisemitic. Going back in history all the way to 1290 to make your point is quite pathetic. Britain has a far greater record of tolerance than most European countries. There was neither a Dreyfus case nor a holocaust in Britain -- but there WAS a Disraeli. And nor is the recent upsurge of antisemitism peculiar to Britain. As I understand it, the biggest exodus of Jews from Europe to "safer" (!) Israel is in fact from France. Such obvious hatred of Britain undermines the credibility of all that this fool says
Britain has become the epicenter for anti-Semitic trends in Europe as traditional, age-old anti-Semitism in a country whose literature and cultural tradition were "drenched" in anti-Semitism has developed into a contemporary mix of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, an Israeli historian said Monday. The problem of anti-Semitism in Britain is exacerbated by a growing and increasingly radical Muslim population, the weak approach taken by a timid British Jewish leadership, and the detachment of the British from their Christian roots, said Hebrew University historian Prof. Robert S. Wistrich in a lecture on British anti-Semitism at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. "Britain has become the center point for the meeting of anti-Semitic trends in Europe," Wistrich said.
In a wide-ranging two-hour address, the Cambridge University-educated historian, who has just completed a book on global anti-Semitism, traced the roots of British anti-Semitism to its history, culture and literature going back to medieval times. "Anti-Semitism in Great Britain is at least a millennial phenomenon and has been around for 1000 years of recorded history," Wistrich said. [as it has elsewhere]
He noted that the expulsion of all Jews from Britain in 1290 by King Edward I following years of anti-Semitic violence was the first major expulsion of any Jewish community in Europe. Jews were banned from Britain until 1656, when Oliver Cromwell, who had overthrown the monarchy, authorized their return.
Wistrich noted that a Jewish presence was not required in Britain to produce potent and resonating anti-Semitic stereotypes in classic English literature, including in works by Chaucer, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Dickens, Trollope, T. S. Elliot, and D. H. Lawrence, which he said continues to impact British society hundreds of years later today. "The authors are conveying and transmitting to a future generation an embedded anti-Semitism whose influence is impossible to underestimate," Wistrich said. "English literature and culture is in fact drenched in anti-Semitism," he said, adding that British intellectuals fail to understand the long-term impact of this phenomenon.
During World War II, the British refusal to rescue the Jews of Europe and their decision to close the gates of Palestine stemmed not only from a policy of realpolitik but by anti-Semitic sentiments, he said. "Nothing was to be construed as fighting a Jewish war," he said. He noted that the famed British wartime leader, Winston Churchill's, record on Zionism was "far from brilliant, rhetoric aside" noting that he promoted the infamous White Paper, which severely limited Jews from immigrating to Palestine during World War II.
The recent controversial contemporary theory of a Jewish lobby controlling American government policies in the wake of the 2003 Iraq War actually had its antecedents a century earlier, and dated back to the infamous anti-Semitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, while anti-Israel activities on British campuses was going "strong blast" in the 1970s, he said.
In his address, Wistrich said that today's British media had taken an almost universally anti-Israel bias, especially but not exclusively on the BBC, with context removed from description of Israeli military actions, and Islamic jihadist activity such as suicide bombing never connected to ideology. "Under no circumstance will a Palestinian act of terrorism be referred to as terrorist, They are militants similar to the floor-shop dispute in Liverpool whose workers have decided to go on strike," he said. "Palestinian terrorism is portrayed as a minor pin-prick compared to 'massive' retaliation of this 'rogue' state [Israel]," he said. "You cannot read a British newspaper without encountering a variant of the libel that Zionism is racism or Zionism is Nazism," he said, describing a culture of "barely disguised hatred" when the subject of Zionism of British Jewry or Anglo-Israel relations is broached, unless they are "the good anti-Zionists."
With the media and the elites skewed against Israel - aided by former Israeli academics who routinely condemn the Jewish state and who have attained "historic dissident status and are listened to as the authentic voice of Israel" - the whole discussion of anti-Semitism had become distorted in Britain, with the accuser becoming the accused, he said. "The self-proclaimed anti-racists of the [London Mayor Ken] Livingstone brand lead the pack when it comes to the prevailing discourse about Israel and by implication Jews." "If you bring up the subject of anti-Semitism you are playing the anti-Semitism card and you are [seen as] a dishonest deceitful manipulative Jew or lover of Jews who is using the language of anti-Semitism to disguise hide or silence criticism of Israel," he said.
The tenure of former prime minister Tony Blair - considered to be the most favorable British premier to the State of Israel - was a paradox of the British situation today, Wistrich said. He said that Blair's support for Israel during the Second Lebanon War was "the straw that broke the camel's back" for a British premier who had already supported the Iraq War and was closely allied with US President George W. Bush, and helped bring about his downfall.
Today, the rapidly growing Muslim community in Britain numbers at least 1.6 million, compared to about 350,000 Jews. Wistrich faulted British-Jewish leadership for taking a "softly softly approach," which he said was "very strange" and did not bear fruit in contemporary times. "There is a long tradition of doing things behind closed doors and it is different to break with tradition but it should be broken," he said.
The historian noted that the straying of the British from their Christian roots has also created a changed reality in the Anglo-Israeli relationship with no Bible-based reasons or raison d'etre for a Jewish presence in the Holy Land. He cited the recent support of the archbishop of Canterbury for the adoption of parts of Sharia, or Islamic law, in Britain - the same country, which, he noted, was once the birthplace of the US evangelical movement. "The loss of Christian identity in what was the most Bible-believing culture in its day is one of the deeper layers of what has happened here," he said.
He noted some of the biblical remarks of prominent British leaders such as Lord Balfour and Lloyd George would be viewed as anathema today. "You cannot speak or act that way today, or you would be considered the 'biggest threat to civilization' as American evangelicals are."
Source
Old lady forced to pull out own teeth after 12 NHS dentists refuse to treat her
Socialized medicine takes people back to the caves
A grandmother performed her own tooth extractions in despair after being turned away by 12 dentists. Elizabeth Green, 76, was in agony with two front teeth and after a fruitless search for an NHS practitioner, resorted to DIY. Her case is the latest of many to highlight the dwindling availability of NHS dental treatment.
Mrs Green, a former chef, said it was made plain to her that if she could pay for treatment she would have been welcomed. "I feel so angry," she said. "I've worked all my life and paid taxes and then when I need help I can't get it."
Last night she explained how she took matters into her own hands. "Two of my front teeth started getting loose and became more and more painful. "My gum became very sore so I contacted a dentist that I had been to in the past, but they said they were not taking on new patients. "The problem was getting worse so I started ringing round the dentists in the Yellow Pages. "I phoned about 12 but they all said they same thing - 'Sorry, we are not taking on any new NHS patients'.
"I also phoned a dental helpline but they couldn't offer a solution either. The teeth got more and more painful and one evening I couldn't take it any longer so I moved the teeth back and forwards and twisted them and eventually they came out." Mrs Green, a mother-of-five and grandmother of 11, who lives in Winchester, has taken her complaint to her local Liberal Democrat parliamentary candidate, Martin Tod. He described her case as "a shocking story and an indictment of the current situation".
Mrs Green, whose late husband George served in the Army for more than 30 years, has now joined the waiting list for an NHS dentist in nearby Andover. Since Labour introduced a new contract for dentists in 2006, more than 1,000 practices have stopped providing NHS care and 500,000 fewer patients see NHS dentists. Dentists complain the new system forces them to provide "conveyor belt care" and to "drill and fill" to meet meaningless targets.
Last year, a great grandmother from Scarborough told how she pulled a tooth with a pair of pliers from her husband's toolbox after drinking beer as an anaesthetic. Valerie Holsworth, 67, has repeated the operation six times now. "It is just a matter of tugging and wiggling until the root comes loose,", she said. In October, a survey of patients and dentists exposed a case in Lancashire in which a man had to "remove 14 teeth using pliers".
Helen Clanchy, spokesman for the Hampshire Primary Care Trust, said: "We are very concerned to hear that this patient felt they had no option but to take this kind of drastic action. "We have a dental helpline that is able to offer patients who are unable or have chosen not to register with an NHS dentist, sameday emergency treatment."
Source
Another downgrade of British medical services
High-street chemists are to become "healthy living centres" providing a range of services, under plans outlined in a White Paper (David Rose writes). The NHS could save 3.5 billion pounds in a decade if pharmacists, rather than doctors, diagnosed and treated minor illnesses such as colds, ministers believe.
Pharmacists could also provide flu vaccinations and tests for sexually transmitted infections, as well as health advice. GPs spend the equivalent of an hour a day dealing with minor ailments, equivalent to 57 million consultations a year. Chemists are expected to take care of half of these cases within three years.
Source
Economists are generally pro-immigation because they are aware that immigrants improve labour market flexibility and labour market inflexibility is a major barrier to improved national productivity. So the article below from "The Economist" rightly points out that there are major limits on what the British government can do. One can deceive by omission, however and what the article completely glides over is the weak-kneed attitude of the British government towards illegal immigration. They are nearly as bad as the U.S. government over it. Energetic pursuit and deportation of illegals would greatly reduce the social problems of immigration -- as illegals tend to be undesirable immigrants in many ways.
Another category unmentioned is family reunions, which are in fact a large part of current immigration. Restricting such reunions to dependant children and spouses from non-arranged marriages would be an obvious step.
SIX billion pounds is, as Britain's immigration minister Liam Byrne put it, "a big number". This figure is the amount that the government reckons was added to the economy by immigrants in 2006, and a number that it has repeatedly used to justify the record numbers of migrants that Britain has absorbed in recent years.
But there is another big number: 190,000. That is the amount of net immigration that Britain can expect to receive each year unless the government tightens things up, according to a report published on April 1st by the House of Lords economic-affairs committee. Their lordships put these two big numbers together and calculated that they pretty much cancelled each other out. Gross domestic product (GDP) may have grown handsomely thanks to migrants, they said, but GDP per head-each person's share-has hardly budged. Using bald GDP growth to justify immigration was "preposterous and irrelevant", the committee's chairman said.
Strong words, and manna for migration sceptics ("Immigration: the great lies", trumpeted one newspaper, thrilled). The report was actually more balanced than that. It found evidence that immigration had pushed down the wages of the lowest-paid by a fraction but higher-paid people had experienced a small fillip. As far as competition for jobs was concerned, it pointed out that the number of vacancies is about the same now as it was seven years ago, since migrants create jobs as well as taking them. Immigration is pushing up house prices, it observed, which may be good news for some of those who are most vocal about the downside of open borders. And it heard evidence that migrants may push down the "natural" rate of unemployment, since they are more flexible than sluggish Britons about which jobs they take. ("This effect may, however, decrease...as migrants become more like the native population," noted Stephen Nickell, an economist who gave evidence to the committee.)
This was not, all in all, a bad-news report. But the problem for the government is that it has relentlessly made the case that the economic benefits of migration are vast, in order to buy off those who don't like its social effects. The suggestion that the pay-off is merely neutral is therefore quite a blow. The government's own calculations value the benefits of immigration to Britons at about 30 pounds ($59.4) per person per year. That is not much of a bribe for people who reflexively dislike it-and there may be more of them about. Immigration has raced up voters' worry lists over the past two years and now vies with crime for the top position, according to Ipsos-MORI, a pollster. Some 68% believe that Britain has too many migrants.
But it is hard to cut back. The Lords recommended an annual cap on migrant numbers, a policy that the Conservatives have been plugging as part of a commitment to "substantially lower" immigration. The Liberal Democrats would cut down too but, like the government, they want to tighten the criteria for work permits rather than define a ceiling.
In truth, most immigration to Britain is out of any government's hands. EU citizens, who make up nearly 30% of net immigration, may come and go as they please. (Numbers will increase when Romanians and Bulgarians are given the right to work in Britain, which must be granted before 2014.) Asylum-seekers are entitled by UN conventions to a fair hearing, and the government cannot stop its citizens from marrying foreigners and having children with them.
Such folk account for half of Britain's annual immigration. Of the remainder, the majority are students, prized because they pay hefty tuition fees. The only category left to play with is skilled workers from outside the EU, who make up just one-fifth of all immigrants; and some of them (from American bankers to Brazilian footballers) are among the most useful. Cuts in immigration look on the cards, but it is unlikely they will be substantial.
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"UK is European center of anti-Semitism"
For a historian, this guy should know better than to dwell on British history as particularly antisemitic. Going back in history all the way to 1290 to make your point is quite pathetic. Britain has a far greater record of tolerance than most European countries. There was neither a Dreyfus case nor a holocaust in Britain -- but there WAS a Disraeli. And nor is the recent upsurge of antisemitism peculiar to Britain. As I understand it, the biggest exodus of Jews from Europe to "safer" (!) Israel is in fact from France. Such obvious hatred of Britain undermines the credibility of all that this fool says
Britain has become the epicenter for anti-Semitic trends in Europe as traditional, age-old anti-Semitism in a country whose literature and cultural tradition were "drenched" in anti-Semitism has developed into a contemporary mix of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, an Israeli historian said Monday. The problem of anti-Semitism in Britain is exacerbated by a growing and increasingly radical Muslim population, the weak approach taken by a timid British Jewish leadership, and the detachment of the British from their Christian roots, said Hebrew University historian Prof. Robert S. Wistrich in a lecture on British anti-Semitism at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. "Britain has become the center point for the meeting of anti-Semitic trends in Europe," Wistrich said.
In a wide-ranging two-hour address, the Cambridge University-educated historian, who has just completed a book on global anti-Semitism, traced the roots of British anti-Semitism to its history, culture and literature going back to medieval times. "Anti-Semitism in Great Britain is at least a millennial phenomenon and has been around for 1000 years of recorded history," Wistrich said. [as it has elsewhere]
He noted that the expulsion of all Jews from Britain in 1290 by King Edward I following years of anti-Semitic violence was the first major expulsion of any Jewish community in Europe. Jews were banned from Britain until 1656, when Oliver Cromwell, who had overthrown the monarchy, authorized their return.
Wistrich noted that a Jewish presence was not required in Britain to produce potent and resonating anti-Semitic stereotypes in classic English literature, including in works by Chaucer, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Dickens, Trollope, T. S. Elliot, and D. H. Lawrence, which he said continues to impact British society hundreds of years later today. "The authors are conveying and transmitting to a future generation an embedded anti-Semitism whose influence is impossible to underestimate," Wistrich said. "English literature and culture is in fact drenched in anti-Semitism," he said, adding that British intellectuals fail to understand the long-term impact of this phenomenon.
During World War II, the British refusal to rescue the Jews of Europe and their decision to close the gates of Palestine stemmed not only from a policy of realpolitik but by anti-Semitic sentiments, he said. "Nothing was to be construed as fighting a Jewish war," he said. He noted that the famed British wartime leader, Winston Churchill's, record on Zionism was "far from brilliant, rhetoric aside" noting that he promoted the infamous White Paper, which severely limited Jews from immigrating to Palestine during World War II.
The recent controversial contemporary theory of a Jewish lobby controlling American government policies in the wake of the 2003 Iraq War actually had its antecedents a century earlier, and dated back to the infamous anti-Semitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, while anti-Israel activities on British campuses was going "strong blast" in the 1970s, he said.
In his address, Wistrich said that today's British media had taken an almost universally anti-Israel bias, especially but not exclusively on the BBC, with context removed from description of Israeli military actions, and Islamic jihadist activity such as suicide bombing never connected to ideology. "Under no circumstance will a Palestinian act of terrorism be referred to as terrorist, They are militants similar to the floor-shop dispute in Liverpool whose workers have decided to go on strike," he said. "Palestinian terrorism is portrayed as a minor pin-prick compared to 'massive' retaliation of this 'rogue' state [Israel]," he said. "You cannot read a British newspaper without encountering a variant of the libel that Zionism is racism or Zionism is Nazism," he said, describing a culture of "barely disguised hatred" when the subject of Zionism of British Jewry or Anglo-Israel relations is broached, unless they are "the good anti-Zionists."
With the media and the elites skewed against Israel - aided by former Israeli academics who routinely condemn the Jewish state and who have attained "historic dissident status and are listened to as the authentic voice of Israel" - the whole discussion of anti-Semitism had become distorted in Britain, with the accuser becoming the accused, he said. "The self-proclaimed anti-racists of the [London Mayor Ken] Livingstone brand lead the pack when it comes to the prevailing discourse about Israel and by implication Jews." "If you bring up the subject of anti-Semitism you are playing the anti-Semitism card and you are [seen as] a dishonest deceitful manipulative Jew or lover of Jews who is using the language of anti-Semitism to disguise hide or silence criticism of Israel," he said.
The tenure of former prime minister Tony Blair - considered to be the most favorable British premier to the State of Israel - was a paradox of the British situation today, Wistrich said. He said that Blair's support for Israel during the Second Lebanon War was "the straw that broke the camel's back" for a British premier who had already supported the Iraq War and was closely allied with US President George W. Bush, and helped bring about his downfall.
Today, the rapidly growing Muslim community in Britain numbers at least 1.6 million, compared to about 350,000 Jews. Wistrich faulted British-Jewish leadership for taking a "softly softly approach," which he said was "very strange" and did not bear fruit in contemporary times. "There is a long tradition of doing things behind closed doors and it is different to break with tradition but it should be broken," he said.
The historian noted that the straying of the British from their Christian roots has also created a changed reality in the Anglo-Israeli relationship with no Bible-based reasons or raison d'etre for a Jewish presence in the Holy Land. He cited the recent support of the archbishop of Canterbury for the adoption of parts of Sharia, or Islamic law, in Britain - the same country, which, he noted, was once the birthplace of the US evangelical movement. "The loss of Christian identity in what was the most Bible-believing culture in its day is one of the deeper layers of what has happened here," he said.
He noted some of the biblical remarks of prominent British leaders such as Lord Balfour and Lloyd George would be viewed as anathema today. "You cannot speak or act that way today, or you would be considered the 'biggest threat to civilization' as American evangelicals are."
Source
Old lady forced to pull out own teeth after 12 NHS dentists refuse to treat her
Socialized medicine takes people back to the caves
A grandmother performed her own tooth extractions in despair after being turned away by 12 dentists. Elizabeth Green, 76, was in agony with two front teeth and after a fruitless search for an NHS practitioner, resorted to DIY. Her case is the latest of many to highlight the dwindling availability of NHS dental treatment.
Mrs Green, a former chef, said it was made plain to her that if she could pay for treatment she would have been welcomed. "I feel so angry," she said. "I've worked all my life and paid taxes and then when I need help I can't get it."
Last night she explained how she took matters into her own hands. "Two of my front teeth started getting loose and became more and more painful. "My gum became very sore so I contacted a dentist that I had been to in the past, but they said they were not taking on new patients. "The problem was getting worse so I started ringing round the dentists in the Yellow Pages. "I phoned about 12 but they all said they same thing - 'Sorry, we are not taking on any new NHS patients'.
"I also phoned a dental helpline but they couldn't offer a solution either. The teeth got more and more painful and one evening I couldn't take it any longer so I moved the teeth back and forwards and twisted them and eventually they came out." Mrs Green, a mother-of-five and grandmother of 11, who lives in Winchester, has taken her complaint to her local Liberal Democrat parliamentary candidate, Martin Tod. He described her case as "a shocking story and an indictment of the current situation".
Mrs Green, whose late husband George served in the Army for more than 30 years, has now joined the waiting list for an NHS dentist in nearby Andover. Since Labour introduced a new contract for dentists in 2006, more than 1,000 practices have stopped providing NHS care and 500,000 fewer patients see NHS dentists. Dentists complain the new system forces them to provide "conveyor belt care" and to "drill and fill" to meet meaningless targets.
Last year, a great grandmother from Scarborough told how she pulled a tooth with a pair of pliers from her husband's toolbox after drinking beer as an anaesthetic. Valerie Holsworth, 67, has repeated the operation six times now. "It is just a matter of tugging and wiggling until the root comes loose,", she said. In October, a survey of patients and dentists exposed a case in Lancashire in which a man had to "remove 14 teeth using pliers".
Helen Clanchy, spokesman for the Hampshire Primary Care Trust, said: "We are very concerned to hear that this patient felt they had no option but to take this kind of drastic action. "We have a dental helpline that is able to offer patients who are unable or have chosen not to register with an NHS dentist, sameday emergency treatment."
Source
Another downgrade of British medical services
High-street chemists are to become "healthy living centres" providing a range of services, under plans outlined in a White Paper (David Rose writes). The NHS could save 3.5 billion pounds in a decade if pharmacists, rather than doctors, diagnosed and treated minor illnesses such as colds, ministers believe.
Pharmacists could also provide flu vaccinations and tests for sexually transmitted infections, as well as health advice. GPs spend the equivalent of an hour a day dealing with minor ailments, equivalent to 57 million consultations a year. Chemists are expected to take care of half of these cases within three years.
Source
Saturday, April 05, 2008
Diagnosing the New British Disease
By Hal G.P. Colebatch
BEFORE MARGARET THATCHER made great moves to set British Industry to rights, the "British Disease" meant strike-happy unions, obsolete industrial plant and work practices, low productivity, and industries ripe for foreign takeovers. After eleven years of New Labour government, Thatcherism is looking like an anomalous interlude of relative social health between two rather different kinds of social pathologies. The new British Disease, in many ways more potentially totalitarian and threatening to British identity and traditional values than the old, is also rather harder to diagnose.
Further, while the Labour government of Gordon Brown is obviously on death row, it is hard to be confident that a change of government will tackle many of the problems with a sufficient degree of new thinking: Britain appears to be in a late phase of a successful Gramscian campaign to capture not merely parliamentary power (the British electorate shows itself highly distrustful of ideological extremists at general elections), but, probably more importantly, the institutions of power and ideology at local government and quango levels. Although David Cameron is now looking a better and more effective leader than pessimists-including me-previously thought, these are not things which either the Tory Party or the conventional political processes in general seem really geared to dealing with. The conflict taking place over what sort of country Britain will be in the future is social and cultural at least as much as it is political in the sense of conventional party activity at the national level.
New nanny-state intrusiveness at the local government level seems to be reported every day. Among the latest developments are that every town hall in Britain has been ordered to send out surveys demanding local residents' personal information including details of their children, mortgage, ethnic background, religion and sexual orientation. While this would be outrageous enough if the information were kept confidential, there is no assurance that it will be. Ministers have even given instructions that local councils must try to disguise their involvement in the survey to avoid attracting criticism. The questioning will be paid for out of council taxes and carried out every two years.
Questions on ethnicity and sexuality are intended to be used in government initiatives to promote greater numbers of local councillors from ethnic and sexual minority groups (which presumably means that potential local councillors not from such minority groups will be penalised). Town halls are also assembling a database called ContactPoint to contain details of every child in the country, including information on health and education.
I am waiting for some sign of anger at or defiance of this demand. I think I know how a demand from city hall bureaucrats to publicly disclose one's sexuality would be replied to in the USA, and I certainly hope I know how it would be replied to in Australia-the reply would be short and to the point. Perhaps the fact that more than 300,000 people turned out in Britain over the Christmas holidays to defy the ban on fox-hunting is a hopeful sign of some kind of fightback.
Meanwhile, it has been revealed that 80 per cent of new jobs are being filled by foreign workers. Poles and other well-educated and motivated Eastern Europeans are seen as more desirable employees than are the products of the British education system.
More than one in five births in Britain are now to immigrant mothers and, strikingly, more than half of British babies are now born outside marriage. All these statistics are significant but it seems to me that the last is the most important because it indicates how widespread the breakdown of conventional family life has become. It symbolises the "broken society", with an explosion of juvenile crime, drug abuse and alcoholism, gangs of fatherless feral children in the cities and mothers leading half-lives on welfare in inner-city slum apartments. The Daily Telegraph reported recently:
It has been pointed out repeatedly for years that government taxation and welfare policies are not only encouraging unmarried teenage mothers but are also penalising marriage heavily, despite the government's professed commitments to families and family values. In the 1970 fewer than one in ten children were born outside marriage and in the 1950s fewer than one in fifty. Marriage among the indigenous British population has slumped to the lowest level since records began to be kept more than 150 years ago. Evidence of the positive benefits of intact conventional families both for the well-being of children and the efficient delivery of social support is too overwhelming to need re-statement, yet this seems to have no effect on the government's anti-family incentives. Tory spokesman Iain Duncan Smith has said this "has done more to damage the prospects of children than at any time for more than 100 years".
In the past three years 4368 children have been admitted to hospital because they drank too much. Another study in 2007 showed that girls aged between eleven and thirteen are consuming almost double the amount of alcohol that they were seven years ago. The number of alcohol-related hospital admissions has increased by almost a third in two years with new twenty-four-hour drinking laws. More than 500 people a day are now being admitted to hospitals in England after drinking too much.
AS SCHIZOPHRENIC as the government's family policies has been the granting of knighthoods and other honours to icons of the drug culture, while declaring "war on drugs". In its attitude to the defence forces, it has committed more troops to war service overseas than any government since the Second World War, yet has stinted the defence forces of money and equipment and treated defence personnel so shabbily that recently all five former chiefs of the defence forces publicly condemned it. A number of military deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan have been blamed directly on stinted and inadequate equipment, and complaints about equipment issued to servicemen on active service have been made by responsible senior officers for at least a decade. In a recent incident which seems to epitomise the shoddy treatment of servicemen, amputees and others mutilated by war wounds have had to go to public swimming-baths for rehabilitation, where in at least one case they have been verbally attacked by other pool-users offended by the sight.
Decline in educational standards, particularly physics and other "hard" subjects, is endemic. A third of university physics departments have closed in the past few years. Journalist Jeff Randall wrote of strategies announced in the 2005 budget to restore Britain's technological expertise:
Increasingly the government appears to tackle social problems by announcing a series of gimmicks which no one, including the government itself, even pretends to take seriously. There is something like Eastern Europe circa 1988 about this.
Two stories from the same edition of the British Weekly Telegraph of October 17, 2007, made ominous reading, the more so when one considered the fact that something like them could be read almost every week. One article stated that one child in seven was unable to write his or her own first name or say the alphabet after a year in school. An analysis of 535,000 five-year-olds showed that 76,500 could not write simple words such as mum, dad or cat. The other article was a feature by senior journalist Charles Moore on public health standards:
Having been part of a government which has initiated or condoned attacks on most aspects of Britain's traditions, Prime Minister Gordon Brown now declares: "I want to see an Institute of Britishness so that we can discuss, debate and celebrate the ideas and writings that have made Britain the great country that it is . We must always strive to go further in understanding, valuing and celebrating our national history."
At the same time, Mr Brown more-or-less secretively signed the European Reform Treaty which constitutional experts say has further severely reduced Britain's sovereignty by handing a further swathe of power to the European Union. This suggests cognitive dissonance on an almost Fuhrerbunker scale.
The break-up of the union with Scotland, quite unthinkable in serious political circles a few years ago, has now never looked more probable.
Some commentators have drawn attention to the fact that Mohammed, or some variation thereof, is on track to become the most popular boys' name in England and Wales. The name was second only to Jack in 2007, which has been top for the last thirteen years. This says something about Britain's immigration policies over the last few years, and has implications about its future demographics. Further, there is a great deal of evidence that British-dwelling Muslims, particularly the young, are becoming more, not less radicalised with the passage of time. There are plans for a gigantic new "super-mosque" which will overshadow much of London. Conservative columnist Peter Hitchens wrote recently:
However, I find it at least equally significant as the popularity of the name Mohammed the fact that in 2007, Alfie made it into the top ten for the first time in recent years. This, according to the press, may have been influenced by the hit single Lily Allen wrote about her brother, Alfie, as well as the remake of the film Alfie.
Alfie? In English history Alfred the Great was a noble, wise and heroic king, the deliverer of the nation, a patron of learning, an intrepid warrior, a champion of Christianity, one of the brightest lights of the Dark Ages whose darkness he did much to dispel, and whose achievements and fame have resisted all efforts at debunking or revisionism. Alfred is a name anyone might be proud of. Even today it has echoes of majesty and heroism. But Alfie? That it should be so rising in popularity speaks volumes about cultural infantilism, and not anything very pleasant. I have not seen the re-make of the film Alfie, but in the original film, starring Michael Caine, Alfie was a working-class lecher who got his friend's vulnerable wife pregnant and forced her to have an abortion. A hero for our times?
Meanwhile, the government's "equality" tsar, Trevor Phillips, has claimed British history should be re-written to make it more "inclusive". An example suggested was that it was actually the Turks, not Sir Francis Drake and co, who saved Britain from invasion by the Spanish Armada, a suggestion which a leading Turkish historian, Professor Mete Tuncay, is quoted as saying, "is not known at all".
The points I have listed here-and there are many more I might add-might be criticised as being not obviously connected, but I think this is not the case. Most of these things point in the same direction-to a slow but definite many-sided cultural breakdown.
Source
'No Sun link' to climate change
By Richard Black, Environment correspondent, BBC News website
The Greenie article from the BBC below sounds like a sober and balanced account of scientific findings. It is not. It is so evasive that it does not link to, quote or or even name the scientific article it purports to describe. One would normally expect some link on a website. So why is there none? Because the article says some things that DON'T suit the Greenie agenda. And the BBC writer does not mention those things, funnily enough. Rather amazing cheek but very BBC. These days BBC seems to stand for British Bias Corporation.
There are already some loud grumbles about this BBC propaganda effort and I reproduce some of that below. First is a scathing letter to the BBC author from John A. of Climate Audit and then follows a short excert from a very long and outraged email I have from Piers Corbyn of Weather Action. Corbyn is a very successful long-range British weather forecaster who relies heavily for his forecasts on his knowledge of solar cycles. So he KNOWS that solar variations drive temperature etc. here on earth. Corbyn is particularly outraged by the reference to the slapped-together Royal Society paper by Lockwood and Froehlich and it is commentary from Corbyn about that paper that I briefly excerpt
Scientists have produced further compelling evidence showing that modern-day climate change is not caused by changes in the Sun's activity. The research contradicts a favoured theory of climate "sceptics", that changes in cosmic rays coming to Earth determine cloudiness and temperature. The idea is that variations in solar activity affect cosmic ray intensity. But Lancaster University scientists found there has been no significant link between them in the last 20 years.
Presenting their findings in the Institute of Physics journal, Environmental Research Letters, the UK team explain that they used three different ways to search for a correlation, and found virtually none. This is the latest piece of evidence which at the very least puts the cosmic ray theory, developed by Danish scientist Henrik Svensmark at the Danish National Space Center (DNSC), under very heavy pressure.
Dr Svensmark's idea formed a centrepiece of the controversial documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle. "We started on this game because of Svensmark's work," said Terry Sloan from Lancaster University. "If he is right, then we are going down the wrong path of taking all these expensive measures to cut carbon emissions; if he is right, we could carry on with carbon emissions as normal."
Cosmic rays are deflected away from Earth by our planet's magnetic field, and by the solar wind - streams of electrically charged particles coming from the Sun. The Svensmark hypothesis is that when the solar wind is weak, more cosmic rays penetrate to Earth. That creates more charged particles in the atmosphere, which in turn induces more clouds to form, cooling the climate. The planet warms up when the Sun's output is strong.
Professor Sloan's team investigated the link by looking for periods in time and for places on the Earth which had documented weak or strong cosmic ray arrivals, and seeing if that affected the cloudiness observed in those locations or at those times. "For example; sometimes the Sun 'burps' - it throws out a huge burst of charged particles," he explained to BBC News. "So we looked to see whether cloud cover increased after one of these bursts of rays from the Sun; we saw nothing."
Over the course of one of the Sun's natural 11-year cycles, there was a weak correlation between cosmic ray intensity and cloud cover - but cosmic ray variability could at the very most explain only a quarter of the changes in cloudiness. And for the following cycle, no correlation was found.
Dr Svensmark himself was unimpressed by the findings. "Terry Sloan has simply failed to understand how cosmic rays work on clouds," he told BBC News. "He predicts much bigger effects than we would do, as between the equator and the poles, and after solar eruptions; then, because he doesn't see those big effects, he says our story is wrong, when in fact we have plenty of evidence to support it."
But another researcher who has worked on the issue, Giles Harrison from Reading University, said the work was important "as it provides an upper limit on the cosmic ray-cloud effect in global satellite cloud data". Dr Harrison's own research, looking at the UK only, has also suggested that cosmic rays make only a very weak contribution to cloud formation.
The Svensmark hypothesis has also been attacked in recent months by Mike Lockwood from the UK's Rutherford-Appleton Laboratory. He showed that over the last 20 years, solar activity has been slowly declining, which should have led to a drop in global temperatures if the theory was correct.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in its vast assessment of climate science last year, concluded that since temperatures began rising rapidly in the 1970s, the contribution of humankind's greenhouse gas emissions has outweighed that of solar variability by a factor of about 13 to one.
According to Terry Sloan, the message coming from his research is simple. "We tried to corroborate Svensmark's hypothesis, but we could not; as far as we can see, he has no reason to challenge the IPCC - the IPCC has got it right. "So we had better carry on trying to cut carbon emissions."
Source
Letter to Richard Black by John A. below:
Richard,
I note your latest attempt in your continuing campaign to ignore and demean the considerable and growing evidence of natural influences on climate change, and especially on the cosmic ray/solar cycle hypothesis of Svensmark et al.
Last time you raced out of the blocks with an article entitled "No Sun link' to climate change" about a paper then yet to be published, and couldn't be bothered beyond leaving a few voicemail messages to contact Dr Svensmark for a response. The paper of course was by Lockwood and Froelich.
Then of course, you didn't bother reporting the reply from Svensmark because we don't want the license payers unnecessarily confused with a solid rebuttal, would we Richard? Especially since that paper by Lockwood that you trumpeted was rife with errors.
Here's the reply from Svensmark. Here's another from Ken Gregory. And here's another from Anthony Watts.
Obviously you won't spend any time reporting on them, because life's too short isn't it Richard? After all, what with burning up all of those carbon credits to visit glaciers calving perfectly naturally, and polar bear populations stridently not declining but growing strongly, there's no time for nuanced scientific reporting is there?
Now we have yet another example of your tawdry one-sided reporting with this one: "No Sun link' to climate change" (by the way, are you minimizing your carbon footprint by recycling the titles to articles?).
This time its a letter to a little known and little read environmental science journal - so we're a long way from any expertise in statistics or solar science, aren't we? This time the two scientists are Sloan and Wolfendale, and would you believe it! They come to the same conclusion as the one you want to hear! I'm not a betting man but if I was, I'd bet they contacted you about their forthcoming letter and you got some nice juicy "colour quotes" to pad it out to justify your BBC salary and the rest is history!
Nobody cares, because nobody checks anything! Except that even Sloan and Wolfendale don't show that there is "'No Sun link' to climate change", they say that even with their limited analysis of 20 some years, the Svensmark process on its own contributed perhaps 25% of the warming. That's not insignificant. That's not "no link", that's "some link" Richard. Even this limited analysis showed some connection between the Svensmark process and global climate.
You could have asked them to run the identical analysis looking at the correlation between carbon dioxide rise and temperature over the same time period, but you don't want to rock the boat by showing that the carbon dioxide link is even more tenuous than the Svensmark process you're trying to bury! Carbon dioxide has continued to rise, while global temperatures appear to have stopped rising in 1998 having stabilized below the 1998 level and might even now be starting to fall. Even the Met Office admits this - but you don't report that of course.
But that doesn't save the day, because in the same article that you failed to quote or even link to (and I think I know why you didn't link to it) comes this:
So here was another model study over 700,000 years and the link between climate change and the solar/cosmic ray variation was crystal clear. But you couldn't be bothered reporting it, could you Richard? It didn't fit the narrative you've constructed.
Between copying and pasting Greenpeace publicity and encouraging reckless damage to the world economy and to the world's poor in the "Green Room", there simply isn't time in your day to even report accurately and fairly on environmental issues.
It doesn't matter that the BBC Trust says that its not the BBC's responsibility to save the planet, nor is it responsible journalism to refuse to report on the criticisms of well-qualified skeptics to the whole global warming scare, because with you and your colleagues in the hot seat to set the agenda of continuing alarm, the BBC Trust can go hang and the concerns of many BBC License payers are so much white noise to be filtered out by the next "Alarm over..." or the next "The IPCC says..." story concocted in the BBC tearoom from the latest mailshot from Greenpeace or Fiends of the Earth or the WWF - those billion dollar multi-national corporations of public alarm.
Of course when you or Shukman or the others are travelling to the four corners of the globe to report on why everyone else shouldn't travel to the four corners of the globe, there isn't time to stop in small faraway places like New York and report on major scientific conferences attended by hundreds of well-qualified scientists who dispute the IPCC reports and the AGW scare? Who knows? You could have interviewed the President of the Czech Republic after he give his keynote speech?
But no. No reporting because its not what you want to hear. So it wasn't reported by the BBC. Problem solved. Your journalistic behaviour has at least been consistent: tawdry, one-sided, lazy, propagandist, alarmist and disgraceful. This isn't BBC journalism that John Reith espoused, its more like extreme left-wing evangelization for the repeal of market economies by way of a faked vision of environmental apocalypse.
I encourage you to get honest: just join Greenpeace's publicity department officially and have done with it. You're doing the job already so you might as well get paid for it.
Excerpt from some comments by Piers Corbyn below:
I think that the BBC link and the related paper by Prof Lockwood is one of the most dishonest pieces of pseudo-science (next to Al Gore's movie) put about in the last 50 years and marks one of the lowest points in the CO2 Global Warming brainwashing enterprise.
The BBC steadfastly refuse to publish anything which refutes their baseless claims, and you may be interested to know that the BBC 'report' on Lockwood's findings appeared at the same time as his paper and had therefore clearly been drawn up in advance as propaganda and NOT a 'report' in the normal (?!) sense of investgating both sides of a subject and reporting fairly. I did appear on News24 and Radio 5 at the time but those comments and also comments by Nigel Calder on BBC around the same time were just to establish pseudo-balance and are not included in the BBC link above which is devoid of comment, gives no opportunity to comment and for which the BBC have refused to allow fair comment.
"Attempts to test influences of solar activity on Earth in detail shorter than 22 years without considering the magnetic links prove nothing. This however is what Prof Lockwood does. Obviously since temperatures driven by solar activity follow a 22yr (solar magnetic) cycle and the measures of solar activity used by Prof Lockwood follow an 11year cycle they must move in opposite directions half the time. Professor Lockwood's `finding' of a period of `oppositely directed trends' is just one such period. In fact Lockwood's finding confirms the general hypothesis of the solar charged particle based theory! The theories he actually tests are something else - involving only 11yr cycles - and amount to `straw men' to be knocked down. The cosmic ray theory is one of these. Although its originators did excellent experiments which showed that charged particles do have weather and climate effects, extra solar cosmic rays as such have no significant weather or climate impact.
It beggars belief that the Royal Society would publish a paper which purports to dismiss all theories of solar influence on Earth's weather while ignoring the ones that actually appear to work (certainly better than all others) and not even mentioning the many published observations of 22yr signals in various weather /flood etc parameters. (I say all theories here because the paper and its write-ups use Lockwood's dismissal of 11 yr theories as proof that all theories of sun-earth drivers fail). This means that the Royal Society peer review process in this case was strained in either integrity or knowledge of the subject.
TERROR? OBESITY? WELCOME TO THE APOCALYPSE AUCTION
Should you be more scared of hoodies or terrorists? Ought global warming make us shiver more than the Cold War? Welcome to the apocalypse auction, where experts and authorities bid up their pet threats to public safety. In competing to win headlines, they all seem to lose a sense of perspective.
Sir Ian Blair, Metropolitan Police chief, now claims that "youth violence" is the greatest "threat to the whole of London, perhaps with the exception of terrorism". Only "perhaps"? After all, Sir Ian has previously said that Islamic terrorism poses a threat to London "far graver" than the Second World War. Prime Minister Gordon Brown prefers to compare terrorism today to the Cold War. Are we to conclude that the hoodies now present "perhaps" as big a threat to our society as the Luftwaffe or the Red Army?
But hold your four horsemen of the apocalypse a minute. An army of experts led by Sir David King, until recently the chief government scientist, has declared global warming an even bigger threat than terrorism. Should we focus all our fears on that instead? Then again, that might underestimate the threat of the enemy within our waistbands, since the Health Secretary, Alan Johnson, has pronounced obesity "a potential crisis on the scale of climate change".
To recap the bids. Youth violence is perhaps as big a threat as terrorism, which is a far graver threat than the Nazis, but not as hot as global warming, which is the same size threat as obesity. We await news of more new little Hitlers and Stalins lurking out there.
What purpose is served by this apocalypse auction? Who does it help to compare the tragic killing of 11 London teenagers this year with a terrorist threat? Come to that, how can it further our understanding of Islamic terrorism - which killed 52 people in London in 2005 - to claim that it is more serious than the wartime Blitz that left 43,000 Londoners dead?
And how complex issues such as climate change and obesity might be clarified by overheated, fat-headed comparisons is anybody's guess.
As they compete to make a media impact, experts raise the scaremongering stakes ever higher. New research even claims that mobile phones are "more dangerous than smoking". (Maybe they'll ban mobiles in public...) The likely results of this my-risk's-bigger- than-yours talk will be to raise public anxieties further - and lower public trust in anything that officials say.
These comparisons are not only odious, but dangerous. In fact, it is surely no exaggeration to suggest that the apocalypse auction might pose a bigger threat to rational discussion than, er, anything else that ever happened before.
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Drugs for dementia 'killing thousands' of British elderly
Drugs prescribed to make dementia sufferers more manageable in care homes could be killing more than 23,000 people prematurely each year, a report claims today. Anti-psychotic drugs prescribed to treat agitation, sleep disturbance and aggression are being given to 100,000 elderly people each year to keep them "quiet and manageable", according to the report by the Liberal Democrat MP Paul Burstow.
Mr Burstow bases his figures on the findings of a study by King's College London, which compared survival rates between a group of patients given the drugs and a group given a placebo. After 24 months those taking a placebo had a 78 per cent survival rate, compared with 55 per cent for those on drugs; after 42 months the survival rates were 60 per cent on the placebo and 28 per cent for those prescribed the drugs.
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Criticism of immigration is not racist says court
Abuse is the normal Leftist substitute for rational debate and the term "racist" has some very unpleasant connotations so Leftists use it a lot. They particularly apply it to anyone who has any criticisms of immigration.
Conservatives are so used to abuse from Leftists that they usually just let such criticisms pass. Perhaps they should not.
Someone recently was foolish enough to imply that a rich British rock singer (Morrissey) was a racist. Bad move! Out came the lawyers, an action for libel was launched and much grovelling has now been produced by order of the court. See here for details. No doubt the accuser bore significant legal costs too.
The comments by Morrissey that led to the slur against him are here
By Hal G.P. Colebatch
BEFORE MARGARET THATCHER made great moves to set British Industry to rights, the "British Disease" meant strike-happy unions, obsolete industrial plant and work practices, low productivity, and industries ripe for foreign takeovers. After eleven years of New Labour government, Thatcherism is looking like an anomalous interlude of relative social health between two rather different kinds of social pathologies. The new British Disease, in many ways more potentially totalitarian and threatening to British identity and traditional values than the old, is also rather harder to diagnose.
Further, while the Labour government of Gordon Brown is obviously on death row, it is hard to be confident that a change of government will tackle many of the problems with a sufficient degree of new thinking: Britain appears to be in a late phase of a successful Gramscian campaign to capture not merely parliamentary power (the British electorate shows itself highly distrustful of ideological extremists at general elections), but, probably more importantly, the institutions of power and ideology at local government and quango levels. Although David Cameron is now looking a better and more effective leader than pessimists-including me-previously thought, these are not things which either the Tory Party or the conventional political processes in general seem really geared to dealing with. The conflict taking place over what sort of country Britain will be in the future is social and cultural at least as much as it is political in the sense of conventional party activity at the national level.
New nanny-state intrusiveness at the local government level seems to be reported every day. Among the latest developments are that every town hall in Britain has been ordered to send out surveys demanding local residents' personal information including details of their children, mortgage, ethnic background, religion and sexual orientation. While this would be outrageous enough if the information were kept confidential, there is no assurance that it will be. Ministers have even given instructions that local councils must try to disguise their involvement in the survey to avoid attracting criticism. The questioning will be paid for out of council taxes and carried out every two years.
Questions on ethnicity and sexuality are intended to be used in government initiatives to promote greater numbers of local councillors from ethnic and sexual minority groups (which presumably means that potential local councillors not from such minority groups will be penalised). Town halls are also assembling a database called ContactPoint to contain details of every child in the country, including information on health and education.
I am waiting for some sign of anger at or defiance of this demand. I think I know how a demand from city hall bureaucrats to publicly disclose one's sexuality would be replied to in the USA, and I certainly hope I know how it would be replied to in Australia-the reply would be short and to the point. Perhaps the fact that more than 300,000 people turned out in Britain over the Christmas holidays to defy the ban on fox-hunting is a hopeful sign of some kind of fightback.
Meanwhile, it has been revealed that 80 per cent of new jobs are being filled by foreign workers. Poles and other well-educated and motivated Eastern Europeans are seen as more desirable employees than are the products of the British education system.
More than one in five births in Britain are now to immigrant mothers and, strikingly, more than half of British babies are now born outside marriage. All these statistics are significant but it seems to me that the last is the most important because it indicates how widespread the breakdown of conventional family life has become. It symbolises the "broken society", with an explosion of juvenile crime, drug abuse and alcoholism, gangs of fatherless feral children in the cities and mothers leading half-lives on welfare in inner-city slum apartments. The Daily Telegraph reported recently:
"Every year, almost 50,000 girls under 18 fall pregnant, leading critics to claim that government-led efforts to encourage safer sex are backfiring. The number who conceive is at its highest level since a multi-million-pound teenage pregnancy crackdown almost a decade ago. Britain has the highest per capita rate of teenage mothers in western Europe, despite also having a record number of school-age abortions .
"In the 1970s, rates were similar across western Europe, but while other states have had marked success in bringing down the numbers of pregnancies, Britain now has the highest teenage birth rate: six times that of Holland, four times that of Italy and three times higher than in France.
"The Government committed itself in 1999 to halving the teenage pregnancy rate among 16- and 17-year-olds by 2010, compared with 1998 figures.
"However, by 2005-the last year for which full figures are available-the rate fell by only 11.4 per cent. The same figures show that between 1999 and 2005 the overall number of 16- and 17-year-olds becoming pregnant increased from 39,247 to 39,804. When girls aged between 13 and 15 were added, the total rose from 46,655 to 47,277, more than when Labour launched the strategy in 1999.
"In 2005, 47 per cent of pregnancies among 16- and 17-year-olds were terminated, compared with 42 per cent in 1998. Among younger girls, the rate rose from 53 per cent to 58 per cent."
It has been pointed out repeatedly for years that government taxation and welfare policies are not only encouraging unmarried teenage mothers but are also penalising marriage heavily, despite the government's professed commitments to families and family values. In the 1970 fewer than one in ten children were born outside marriage and in the 1950s fewer than one in fifty. Marriage among the indigenous British population has slumped to the lowest level since records began to be kept more than 150 years ago. Evidence of the positive benefits of intact conventional families both for the well-being of children and the efficient delivery of social support is too overwhelming to need re-statement, yet this seems to have no effect on the government's anti-family incentives. Tory spokesman Iain Duncan Smith has said this "has done more to damage the prospects of children than at any time for more than 100 years".
In the past three years 4368 children have been admitted to hospital because they drank too much. Another study in 2007 showed that girls aged between eleven and thirteen are consuming almost double the amount of alcohol that they were seven years ago. The number of alcohol-related hospital admissions has increased by almost a third in two years with new twenty-four-hour drinking laws. More than 500 people a day are now being admitted to hospitals in England after drinking too much.
AS SCHIZOPHRENIC as the government's family policies has been the granting of knighthoods and other honours to icons of the drug culture, while declaring "war on drugs". In its attitude to the defence forces, it has committed more troops to war service overseas than any government since the Second World War, yet has stinted the defence forces of money and equipment and treated defence personnel so shabbily that recently all five former chiefs of the defence forces publicly condemned it. A number of military deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan have been blamed directly on stinted and inadequate equipment, and complaints about equipment issued to servicemen on active service have been made by responsible senior officers for at least a decade. In a recent incident which seems to epitomise the shoddy treatment of servicemen, amputees and others mutilated by war wounds have had to go to public swimming-baths for rehabilitation, where in at least one case they have been verbally attacked by other pool-users offended by the sight.
Decline in educational standards, particularly physics and other "hard" subjects, is endemic. A third of university physics departments have closed in the past few years. Journalist Jeff Randall wrote of strategies announced in the 2005 budget to restore Britain's technological expertise:
"[Chancellor, now Prime Minister, Gordon Brown is] going to open 250 after-school science clubs. No, don't laugh, he means it.
"Truancy rates are running at their highest level since 1994, 55,000 pupils miss classes every day, despite the government having spent œ900 million to tackle the problem.
"With so many children refusing even to turn up for school, persuading them to stay behind for lessons on splitting the atom looks challenging ... "
Increasingly the government appears to tackle social problems by announcing a series of gimmicks which no one, including the government itself, even pretends to take seriously. There is something like Eastern Europe circa 1988 about this.
Two stories from the same edition of the British Weekly Telegraph of October 17, 2007, made ominous reading, the more so when one considered the fact that something like them could be read almost every week. One article stated that one child in seven was unable to write his or her own first name or say the alphabet after a year in school. An analysis of 535,000 five-year-olds showed that 76,500 could not write simple words such as mum, dad or cat. The other article was a feature by senior journalist Charles Moore on public health standards:
"Florence Nightingale's famous Notes on Nursing, published in 1859, state that "the greater part of nursing consists in cleanliness". In my edition, the foreword points out that much of Miss Nightingale's writing, excellent though it is, is now out of date. In particular, the need for cleanliness is well understood. That foreword was written in 1946.
"Now it is 2007, and we learn that nurses in the hospitals run by the Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells National Health Service Trust told patients suffering from diarrhoea to "go in their beds". Between 2004 and 2006, 90 patients died from Clostridium difficile, and the disease was a factor in the death of a further 241.
"Were it not for bad nursing, bad medical attention and bad administration, none of these patients need have died. Indeed, they would not have contracted C. difficile at all unless they had gone into hospital. So, after 150 years' advance of education, technology, prosperity and science, we have lost what Florence Nightingale taught ."
Having been part of a government which has initiated or condoned attacks on most aspects of Britain's traditions, Prime Minister Gordon Brown now declares: "I want to see an Institute of Britishness so that we can discuss, debate and celebrate the ideas and writings that have made Britain the great country that it is . We must always strive to go further in understanding, valuing and celebrating our national history."
At the same time, Mr Brown more-or-less secretively signed the European Reform Treaty which constitutional experts say has further severely reduced Britain's sovereignty by handing a further swathe of power to the European Union. This suggests cognitive dissonance on an almost Fuhrerbunker scale.
The break-up of the union with Scotland, quite unthinkable in serious political circles a few years ago, has now never looked more probable.
Some commentators have drawn attention to the fact that Mohammed, or some variation thereof, is on track to become the most popular boys' name in England and Wales. The name was second only to Jack in 2007, which has been top for the last thirteen years. This says something about Britain's immigration policies over the last few years, and has implications about its future demographics. Further, there is a great deal of evidence that British-dwelling Muslims, particularly the young, are becoming more, not less radicalised with the passage of time. There are plans for a gigantic new "super-mosque" which will overshadow much of London. Conservative columnist Peter Hitchens wrote recently:
"The deeply English, deeply Christian city of Oxford, one of the homes of free thought, is now being asked to accept the Islamic call to prayer wafting from mosque loudspeakers over its spires and domes.
"If that is not a threat to our "way of life", then I don't know what is. Allowing the regular electronic proclamation of Allah's supremacy in a British city is not tolerance, but a surrender of the sky to a wholly different culture. Just you wait and see what opponents of this scheme are accused of."
However, I find it at least equally significant as the popularity of the name Mohammed the fact that in 2007, Alfie made it into the top ten for the first time in recent years. This, according to the press, may have been influenced by the hit single Lily Allen wrote about her brother, Alfie, as well as the remake of the film Alfie.
Alfie? In English history Alfred the Great was a noble, wise and heroic king, the deliverer of the nation, a patron of learning, an intrepid warrior, a champion of Christianity, one of the brightest lights of the Dark Ages whose darkness he did much to dispel, and whose achievements and fame have resisted all efforts at debunking or revisionism. Alfred is a name anyone might be proud of. Even today it has echoes of majesty and heroism. But Alfie? That it should be so rising in popularity speaks volumes about cultural infantilism, and not anything very pleasant. I have not seen the re-make of the film Alfie, but in the original film, starring Michael Caine, Alfie was a working-class lecher who got his friend's vulnerable wife pregnant and forced her to have an abortion. A hero for our times?
Meanwhile, the government's "equality" tsar, Trevor Phillips, has claimed British history should be re-written to make it more "inclusive". An example suggested was that it was actually the Turks, not Sir Francis Drake and co, who saved Britain from invasion by the Spanish Armada, a suggestion which a leading Turkish historian, Professor Mete Tuncay, is quoted as saying, "is not known at all".
The points I have listed here-and there are many more I might add-might be criticised as being not obviously connected, but I think this is not the case. Most of these things point in the same direction-to a slow but definite many-sided cultural breakdown.
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'No Sun link' to climate change
By Richard Black, Environment correspondent, BBC News website
The Greenie article from the BBC below sounds like a sober and balanced account of scientific findings. It is not. It is so evasive that it does not link to, quote or or even name the scientific article it purports to describe. One would normally expect some link on a website. So why is there none? Because the article says some things that DON'T suit the Greenie agenda. And the BBC writer does not mention those things, funnily enough. Rather amazing cheek but very BBC. These days BBC seems to stand for British Bias Corporation.
There are already some loud grumbles about this BBC propaganda effort and I reproduce some of that below. First is a scathing letter to the BBC author from John A. of Climate Audit and then follows a short excert from a very long and outraged email I have from Piers Corbyn of Weather Action. Corbyn is a very successful long-range British weather forecaster who relies heavily for his forecasts on his knowledge of solar cycles. So he KNOWS that solar variations drive temperature etc. here on earth. Corbyn is particularly outraged by the reference to the slapped-together Royal Society paper by Lockwood and Froehlich and it is commentary from Corbyn about that paper that I briefly excerpt
Scientists have produced further compelling evidence showing that modern-day climate change is not caused by changes in the Sun's activity. The research contradicts a favoured theory of climate "sceptics", that changes in cosmic rays coming to Earth determine cloudiness and temperature. The idea is that variations in solar activity affect cosmic ray intensity. But Lancaster University scientists found there has been no significant link between them in the last 20 years.
Presenting their findings in the Institute of Physics journal, Environmental Research Letters, the UK team explain that they used three different ways to search for a correlation, and found virtually none. This is the latest piece of evidence which at the very least puts the cosmic ray theory, developed by Danish scientist Henrik Svensmark at the Danish National Space Center (DNSC), under very heavy pressure.
Dr Svensmark's idea formed a centrepiece of the controversial documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle. "We started on this game because of Svensmark's work," said Terry Sloan from Lancaster University. "If he is right, then we are going down the wrong path of taking all these expensive measures to cut carbon emissions; if he is right, we could carry on with carbon emissions as normal."
Cosmic rays are deflected away from Earth by our planet's magnetic field, and by the solar wind - streams of electrically charged particles coming from the Sun. The Svensmark hypothesis is that when the solar wind is weak, more cosmic rays penetrate to Earth. That creates more charged particles in the atmosphere, which in turn induces more clouds to form, cooling the climate. The planet warms up when the Sun's output is strong.
Professor Sloan's team investigated the link by looking for periods in time and for places on the Earth which had documented weak or strong cosmic ray arrivals, and seeing if that affected the cloudiness observed in those locations or at those times. "For example; sometimes the Sun 'burps' - it throws out a huge burst of charged particles," he explained to BBC News. "So we looked to see whether cloud cover increased after one of these bursts of rays from the Sun; we saw nothing."
Over the course of one of the Sun's natural 11-year cycles, there was a weak correlation between cosmic ray intensity and cloud cover - but cosmic ray variability could at the very most explain only a quarter of the changes in cloudiness. And for the following cycle, no correlation was found.
Dr Svensmark himself was unimpressed by the findings. "Terry Sloan has simply failed to understand how cosmic rays work on clouds," he told BBC News. "He predicts much bigger effects than we would do, as between the equator and the poles, and after solar eruptions; then, because he doesn't see those big effects, he says our story is wrong, when in fact we have plenty of evidence to support it."
But another researcher who has worked on the issue, Giles Harrison from Reading University, said the work was important "as it provides an upper limit on the cosmic ray-cloud effect in global satellite cloud data". Dr Harrison's own research, looking at the UK only, has also suggested that cosmic rays make only a very weak contribution to cloud formation.
The Svensmark hypothesis has also been attacked in recent months by Mike Lockwood from the UK's Rutherford-Appleton Laboratory. He showed that over the last 20 years, solar activity has been slowly declining, which should have led to a drop in global temperatures if the theory was correct.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in its vast assessment of climate science last year, concluded that since temperatures began rising rapidly in the 1970s, the contribution of humankind's greenhouse gas emissions has outweighed that of solar variability by a factor of about 13 to one.
According to Terry Sloan, the message coming from his research is simple. "We tried to corroborate Svensmark's hypothesis, but we could not; as far as we can see, he has no reason to challenge the IPCC - the IPCC has got it right. "So we had better carry on trying to cut carbon emissions."
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Letter to Richard Black by John A. below:
Richard,
I note your latest attempt in your continuing campaign to ignore and demean the considerable and growing evidence of natural influences on climate change, and especially on the cosmic ray/solar cycle hypothesis of Svensmark et al.
Last time you raced out of the blocks with an article entitled "No Sun link' to climate change" about a paper then yet to be published, and couldn't be bothered beyond leaving a few voicemail messages to contact Dr Svensmark for a response. The paper of course was by Lockwood and Froelich.
Then of course, you didn't bother reporting the reply from Svensmark because we don't want the license payers unnecessarily confused with a solid rebuttal, would we Richard? Especially since that paper by Lockwood that you trumpeted was rife with errors.
Here's the reply from Svensmark. Here's another from Ken Gregory. And here's another from Anthony Watts.
Obviously you won't spend any time reporting on them, because life's too short isn't it Richard? After all, what with burning up all of those carbon credits to visit glaciers calving perfectly naturally, and polar bear populations stridently not declining but growing strongly, there's no time for nuanced scientific reporting is there?
Now we have yet another example of your tawdry one-sided reporting with this one: "No Sun link' to climate change" (by the way, are you minimizing your carbon footprint by recycling the titles to articles?).
This time its a letter to a little known and little read environmental science journal - so we're a long way from any expertise in statistics or solar science, aren't we? This time the two scientists are Sloan and Wolfendale, and would you believe it! They come to the same conclusion as the one you want to hear! I'm not a betting man but if I was, I'd bet they contacted you about their forthcoming letter and you got some nice juicy "colour quotes" to pad it out to justify your BBC salary and the rest is history!
Nobody cares, because nobody checks anything! Except that even Sloan and Wolfendale don't show that there is "'No Sun link' to climate change", they say that even with their limited analysis of 20 some years, the Svensmark process on its own contributed perhaps 25% of the warming. That's not insignificant. That's not "no link", that's "some link" Richard. Even this limited analysis showed some connection between the Svensmark process and global climate.
You could have asked them to run the identical analysis looking at the correlation between carbon dioxide rise and temperature over the same time period, but you don't want to rock the boat by showing that the carbon dioxide link is even more tenuous than the Svensmark process you're trying to bury! Carbon dioxide has continued to rise, while global temperatures appear to have stopped rising in 1998 having stabilized below the 1998 level and might even now be starting to fall. Even the Met Office admits this - but you don't report that of course.
But that doesn't save the day, because in the same article that you failed to quote or even link to (and I think I know why you didn't link to it) comes this:
"However, Sloan and Wolfendale are not the only physicists to have recently turned their attention to the cosmic ray hypothesis. Vitaliy Rusov of the National Polytechnic University in Odessa, Ukraine and colleagues do not agree with the IPCC's view that man is to blame for the recent warming. To prove their point, they looked for a direct connection between cosmic ray flux and temperature."
"The team constructed a model of the Earth's climate in which the only significant inputs were variations in the Sun's power output and changes to the galactic cosmic ray flux (arxiv.org/abs/0803.2765). They found that the model's predicted evolution of the Earth's surface temperature over the last 700,000 years agrees well with proxy temperature data taken from Antarctic ice cores (arxiv.org/abs/0803.2766)."
"Rusov agrees that Svensmark's cosmic ray ionization mechanism cannot fully account for the observed correlation between cosmic ray flux and cloud cover, as Sloan and Wolfendale have demonstrated. But he believes that a small but direct link between cosmic rays and clouds could itself trigger a mechanism which causes further, and greater, changes in cloud cover."
So here was another model study over 700,000 years and the link between climate change and the solar/cosmic ray variation was crystal clear. But you couldn't be bothered reporting it, could you Richard? It didn't fit the narrative you've constructed.
Between copying and pasting Greenpeace publicity and encouraging reckless damage to the world economy and to the world's poor in the "Green Room", there simply isn't time in your day to even report accurately and fairly on environmental issues.
It doesn't matter that the BBC Trust says that its not the BBC's responsibility to save the planet, nor is it responsible journalism to refuse to report on the criticisms of well-qualified skeptics to the whole global warming scare, because with you and your colleagues in the hot seat to set the agenda of continuing alarm, the BBC Trust can go hang and the concerns of many BBC License payers are so much white noise to be filtered out by the next "Alarm over..." or the next "The IPCC says..." story concocted in the BBC tearoom from the latest mailshot from Greenpeace or Fiends of the Earth or the WWF - those billion dollar multi-national corporations of public alarm.
Of course when you or Shukman or the others are travelling to the four corners of the globe to report on why everyone else shouldn't travel to the four corners of the globe, there isn't time to stop in small faraway places like New York and report on major scientific conferences attended by hundreds of well-qualified scientists who dispute the IPCC reports and the AGW scare? Who knows? You could have interviewed the President of the Czech Republic after he give his keynote speech?
But no. No reporting because its not what you want to hear. So it wasn't reported by the BBC. Problem solved. Your journalistic behaviour has at least been consistent: tawdry, one-sided, lazy, propagandist, alarmist and disgraceful. This isn't BBC journalism that John Reith espoused, its more like extreme left-wing evangelization for the repeal of market economies by way of a faked vision of environmental apocalypse.
I encourage you to get honest: just join Greenpeace's publicity department officially and have done with it. You're doing the job already so you might as well get paid for it.
Excerpt from some comments by Piers Corbyn below:
I think that the BBC link and the related paper by Prof Lockwood is one of the most dishonest pieces of pseudo-science (next to Al Gore's movie) put about in the last 50 years and marks one of the lowest points in the CO2 Global Warming brainwashing enterprise.
The BBC steadfastly refuse to publish anything which refutes their baseless claims, and you may be interested to know that the BBC 'report' on Lockwood's findings appeared at the same time as his paper and had therefore clearly been drawn up in advance as propaganda and NOT a 'report' in the normal (?!) sense of investgating both sides of a subject and reporting fairly. I did appear on News24 and Radio 5 at the time but those comments and also comments by Nigel Calder on BBC around the same time were just to establish pseudo-balance and are not included in the BBC link above which is devoid of comment, gives no opportunity to comment and for which the BBC have refused to allow fair comment.
"Attempts to test influences of solar activity on Earth in detail shorter than 22 years without considering the magnetic links prove nothing. This however is what Prof Lockwood does. Obviously since temperatures driven by solar activity follow a 22yr (solar magnetic) cycle and the measures of solar activity used by Prof Lockwood follow an 11year cycle they must move in opposite directions half the time. Professor Lockwood's `finding' of a period of `oppositely directed trends' is just one such period. In fact Lockwood's finding confirms the general hypothesis of the solar charged particle based theory! The theories he actually tests are something else - involving only 11yr cycles - and amount to `straw men' to be knocked down. The cosmic ray theory is one of these. Although its originators did excellent experiments which showed that charged particles do have weather and climate effects, extra solar cosmic rays as such have no significant weather or climate impact.
It beggars belief that the Royal Society would publish a paper which purports to dismiss all theories of solar influence on Earth's weather while ignoring the ones that actually appear to work (certainly better than all others) and not even mentioning the many published observations of 22yr signals in various weather /flood etc parameters. (I say all theories here because the paper and its write-ups use Lockwood's dismissal of 11 yr theories as proof that all theories of sun-earth drivers fail). This means that the Royal Society peer review process in this case was strained in either integrity or knowledge of the subject.
TERROR? OBESITY? WELCOME TO THE APOCALYPSE AUCTION
Should you be more scared of hoodies or terrorists? Ought global warming make us shiver more than the Cold War? Welcome to the apocalypse auction, where experts and authorities bid up their pet threats to public safety. In competing to win headlines, they all seem to lose a sense of perspective.
Sir Ian Blair, Metropolitan Police chief, now claims that "youth violence" is the greatest "threat to the whole of London, perhaps with the exception of terrorism". Only "perhaps"? After all, Sir Ian has previously said that Islamic terrorism poses a threat to London "far graver" than the Second World War. Prime Minister Gordon Brown prefers to compare terrorism today to the Cold War. Are we to conclude that the hoodies now present "perhaps" as big a threat to our society as the Luftwaffe or the Red Army?
But hold your four horsemen of the apocalypse a minute. An army of experts led by Sir David King, until recently the chief government scientist, has declared global warming an even bigger threat than terrorism. Should we focus all our fears on that instead? Then again, that might underestimate the threat of the enemy within our waistbands, since the Health Secretary, Alan Johnson, has pronounced obesity "a potential crisis on the scale of climate change".
To recap the bids. Youth violence is perhaps as big a threat as terrorism, which is a far graver threat than the Nazis, but not as hot as global warming, which is the same size threat as obesity. We await news of more new little Hitlers and Stalins lurking out there.
What purpose is served by this apocalypse auction? Who does it help to compare the tragic killing of 11 London teenagers this year with a terrorist threat? Come to that, how can it further our understanding of Islamic terrorism - which killed 52 people in London in 2005 - to claim that it is more serious than the wartime Blitz that left 43,000 Londoners dead?
And how complex issues such as climate change and obesity might be clarified by overheated, fat-headed comparisons is anybody's guess.
As they compete to make a media impact, experts raise the scaremongering stakes ever higher. New research even claims that mobile phones are "more dangerous than smoking". (Maybe they'll ban mobiles in public...) The likely results of this my-risk's-bigger- than-yours talk will be to raise public anxieties further - and lower public trust in anything that officials say.
These comparisons are not only odious, but dangerous. In fact, it is surely no exaggeration to suggest that the apocalypse auction might pose a bigger threat to rational discussion than, er, anything else that ever happened before.
Source
Drugs for dementia 'killing thousands' of British elderly
Drugs prescribed to make dementia sufferers more manageable in care homes could be killing more than 23,000 people prematurely each year, a report claims today. Anti-psychotic drugs prescribed to treat agitation, sleep disturbance and aggression are being given to 100,000 elderly people each year to keep them "quiet and manageable", according to the report by the Liberal Democrat MP Paul Burstow.
Mr Burstow bases his figures on the findings of a study by King's College London, which compared survival rates between a group of patients given the drugs and a group given a placebo. After 24 months those taking a placebo had a 78 per cent survival rate, compared with 55 per cent for those on drugs; after 42 months the survival rates were 60 per cent on the placebo and 28 per cent for those prescribed the drugs.
Source
Criticism of immigration is not racist says court
Abuse is the normal Leftist substitute for rational debate and the term "racist" has some very unpleasant connotations so Leftists use it a lot. They particularly apply it to anyone who has any criticisms of immigration.
Conservatives are so used to abuse from Leftists that they usually just let such criticisms pass. Perhaps they should not.
Someone recently was foolish enough to imply that a rich British rock singer (Morrissey) was a racist. Bad move! Out came the lawyers, an action for libel was launched and much grovelling has now been produced by order of the court. See here for details. No doubt the accuser bore significant legal costs too.
The comments by Morrissey that led to the slur against him are here
Friday, April 04, 2008
Homosexuals as a favoured class in Britain
And too bad about privacy
Theatreland will have to give up its bedroom secrets in the quest for funding, under new Arts Council requirements. Organisations applying for grants are being asked to state how many board members are bisexual, homosexual, heterosexual, lesbian or whose inclinations are "not known". Audrey Roy, the director of grants, said that the council needed to understand who its audience was and to whom its funding was going. "We see diversity as broader than race, ethnicity, faith and disability," she said. Question 22 of the Grants for the Arts forms, relating to sexual orientation, was not compulsory, she added, although the form states that it must be answered.
The question caused anger and bemusement among leading figures of the arts world yesterday. The Oscar-nominated actor Sir Ian McKellen, who is openly gay, said: "It sounds extraordinary. It shouldn't be on a form. It's quite inappropriate." Vanessa Redgrave, the actress and human rights campaigner, said: "Everyone should put down `trisexual', whoever you are. Britain has become the world's leading population of trisexuals."
Michael Frayn, the author of the farce Noises Off, suggested boxes to "specify how many members are longsighted or shortsighted, how many wear black socks or brown socks". Christopher Hampton, whose adaptation of God of Carnage is showing in the West End, said: "It's bureaucracy and political correctness gone mad."
The application form notes that the question is for government purposes only and will not enter into the grant decision, but that claim was contradicted by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. Its spokesman said: "We appreciate that, as a responsible public body they need to monitor their overall grant-making programmes. But it is absolutely not the case that sexual orientation monitoring is a government requirement."
Condemnation of the question spanned the arts. Julian Spalding, the former director of galleries and museums in Sheffield, Manchester and Glasgow, said: "I can't see what relevance it's got. It's a horrible invasion into one's personal and private life." He added: "What they like to do in bed is not the Arts Council's business."
Maggi Hambling, the painter who describes herself as "queer", said: "It's insidious, insulting and quite outrageous for the Arts Council to consider anyone's sexual orientation of any kind to be their business. It appears to be somewhat Hitlerian in its suggestion that grants will be given if, among the applicants, there is a nice smattering of dykes and queers."
Nicolas Kent, the artistic director of the Tricycle Theatre in London, said: "This is ridiculous. It has no relevance. The Arts Council is prone to huge overregulation, as seems to be the case with the whole of society. But the Arts Council has caught it very badly. They should advance the arts instead of ticking every box they invent."
Referring to the recent protest over the council's decision to cut the grants to prominent companies, Simon Callow, the gay actor, said: "The Arts Council comedy continues. What is difficult is to divine to what conceivable use they could put this information. I love the presence of a category for the Not Known - a despicable heresy, surely, in 2008?"
Almost a year ago James Purnell, then the Culture Secretary, vowed to relieve arts organisations of the burden of meeting "crude targets" as a condition of funding. Yet the Arts Council's application form also asks about ethnic backgrounds. The council said that the answers were confidential and exempt from release under the Freedom of Information Act. It said that it does not issue guidelines on how to persuade board members to reveal details of their sex lives.
Source
British health boss accuses Muslim doctors of betraying women's trust
Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt faced fierce criticism after claiming that Muslim GPs are revealing the intimate secrets of women patients. She said she had been told by Muslim women that GPs passed information to members of their family. "I have had Muslim women give me chapter and verse on very distressing breaches of confidentiality by Muslim GPs," Miss Hewitt told the GP magazine Pulse. "Some women patients feel they cannot trust their own GP, who knows the patient's extended families. If they talk to their GP about a very difficult situation concerning domestic violence or sexual health problems they fear he will share that with other members of her community." She said some women in "close-knit" communities were missing out on care because they were too afraid to go to their GP.
But Dr Prakash Chandra, local medical committee chairman in the London borough of Newham, which has many Muslim residents, said: "It surprises me that Patricia Hewitt would make such a statement. It's highly irresponsible. This is not a problem I have come across."
Surrey GP Dr Khalid Wyne, chairman of the Muslim Health Network, said he did not believe Muslim GPs were more likely to breach confidentiality than non-Muslims. He said: "If these breaches have happened it is very serious and should be taken up by the General Medical Council. It should be reported whether they are Muslim, Christian, Jewish, black or white."
Dr Reesat Drabu, chairman of the Muslim Council of Britain's social and family affairs committee, said there were no figures to back Miss Hewitt's claims. She said: "As a Muslim doctor I find it very offensive."
Shadow health secretary Andrew Lansley said: "These are very serious accusations. Patricia Hewitt must know that if she has evidence of such breaches of confidentiality she should refer them to the GMC. "In any case, I do question whether it is at all helpful to make such generalised statements. Muslim doctors make a very significant contribution to our NHS and their competence and professional standards should be acknowledged."
But there was support for Miss Hewitt from the Muslim Women's Network on Health, which produced a report in December claiming some women were afraid to consult their GP because of concern over confidentiality. Spokesman Haleh Afshar said: "In our report we said this is a concern shared by all women, but the difficulty for Muslim women is that sometimes they don't have the option of going to a GP outside their community. "Patricia Hewitt has taken this on board. We are asking for the possibility of interpreters to enable these women to move beyond their community."
The GMC said 11 doctors had been referred to a disciplinary committee in the past year over allegations of disclosure of information. It said it could not provide information on their religion.
Source
BBC is too scared of Islam, says novelist Ben Elton
Ben Elton has accused the BBC of unjust political correctness by allowing jokes about vicars but vetoing gags about imams. Elton, whose children attend a church school, said that the BBC was too "scared" of Islam and of jokes about Islam to let them pass.
Asked about the new law on religious hatred, and whether too much deference was being shown to religious people, he said: "I think it all starts with people nodding whenever anyone says, `As a person of faith . . .' "And I believe that part of it is due to the genuine fear that the authorities and the community have about provoking the radical elements of Islam. "There's no doubt about it, the BBC will let vicar gags pass but they would not let imam gags pass." He said the BBC might pretend that this hesitancy had something to do with moral sensibilities. "But it isn't. It's because they're scared."
Elton said the situation was so bad that even everyday sayings were frowned upon: "I wanted to use the phrase `Mohammed came to the mountain' and everybody said, `Oh, just don't! Just don't! Don't go there!' "It was nothing to do with Islam, I was merely referring to the old proverb, `If the mountain won't come to Mohammed, Mohammed must go to the mountain'. And people said, `Let's just not!' It's incredible."
The writer, whose latest novel, Blind Faith, addresses the cult of the individual in postmodern society, continued: "I'm quite certain that the average Muslim does not want everybody going around thinking, `We can't mention you. We've just got to pretend you don't exist because we're scared that somebody who claims to represent you will threaten to kill us.'" The comedian, who was interviewed by Third Way, a Christian culture magazine, admitted believing in "almost nothing", even though his children attend a church school.
He said people should be taught the essentials of Christianity, if only for cultural reasons. But he also said that "lack of faith" should be taught in schools. "I think the concept that faith in itself is a good thing should be questioned from day one. There's a presumption that if you're a religious leader you are in some way already halfway up to the moral high ground and your opinion has more relevance than anyone else's."
Source
Muslims' fury forces schools to shelve homophilic storybooks for 5-year-olds
Christians have been complaining about this stuff for years but they don't count, of course
Two primary schools have withdrawn storybooks about same-sex relationships after objections from Muslim parents. Up to 90 gathered at the schools to complain about the books which are aimed at pupils as young as five. One story, titled King & King, is a fairytale about a prince who turns down three princesses before marrying one of their brothers. Another named And Tango Makes Three features two male penguins who fall in love at a New York zoo.
Bristol City Council said the two schools had been using the books to ensure they complied with gay rights laws which came into force last April. They were intended to help prevent homophobic bullying, it said. But the council has since removed the books from Easton Primary School and Bannerman Road Community School, both in Bristol. A book and DVD titled That's a Family!, which teaches children about different family set-ups including gay or lesbian parents, has also been withdrawn.
The decision was made to enable the schools to "operate safely" after parents voiced their concerns at meetings. Around 40 are said to have gathered at Easton to speak to staff and another 50 at Bannerman Road. Members of the Bristol Muslim Cultural Society said parents were upset at the lack of consultation over the use of the materials. Farooq Siddique, community development officer for the society and a governor at Bannerman Road, said there were also concerns about whether the stories were appropriate for young children.
"The main issue was there was a total lack of consultation with parents," he said. "The schools refused to deal with the parents, and were completely authoritarian. "The agenda was to reduce homophobic bullying and all the parents said they were not against that side of it, but families were saying to us 'our child is coming home and talking about same-sex relationships, when we haven't even talked about heterosexual relationships with them yet'. "They don't do sex education until Year Six and at least there you have got the option of withdrawing the children. "But here you don't have that option apparently. You can't withdraw because it is no particular lesson they are used in."
He added: "In Islam homosexual relationships are not acceptable, as they are not in Christianity and many other religions but the main issue is that they didn't bother to consult with parents. "The issue should have been, how do we stop bullying in general, and teaching about homosexuality can be a part of that. "This was completely one-sided. "Homosexuality is not a priority to parents but academic achievement is. This just makes parents think 'What the heck is my child being taught at school?'."
He said the two schools were 60 to 70 per cent Muslim but pointed out that non-Muslim parents were among those who complained. Traditional Islamic views condemn homosexuality but there are liberal movements, such as the Al-Fatiha Foundation, which is dedicated to gay Muslims.
The schools used materials promoted by the No Outsiders project, led by academics at Sunderland University. A spokesman for Bristol City Council said: "All Bristol schools have a legal duty to report and deal with homophobic harassment as part of the curriculum since April 2007." She said the council had "temporarily withdrawn" the use of the materials in question and was liaising with various groups to "ensure that the topic can be addressed in an inclusive manner in the curriculum". Ben Summerskills of gay rights group Stonewall said: "The small number of parents who make a fuss will cause children to think there is something wrong."
Source
The British equivalent of "Honey" as a form of address is now forbidden by the EU
In both Australia and Britain it is common for women serving customers to address the customers as "Love" and that form of address is sometimes returned, mainly by regular customers:
Networks Hype Rising Sea Levels in One-Sided Global Warming Reports
Parts of the Eastern English coastline have been sinking for many years
This time, the "CBS Evening News" traveled all the way across the pond to pushing the alarmists' global warming agenda. The March 27 "Evening News" went to the coastlines of England to show melting ice caps causing people to lose their homes. "Much of the effects of climate change have been couched in terms of if or when its effects will be felt," CBS correspondent Mark Phillips said. "Well, here there is no `if.' And when is now. So choices are being made. It's called managed retreat. Some areas of coastline deemed indefensible are being abandoned. Climate change is producing winners and losers, and Diana Wrightson and the others here have already lost."
However, global warming expert Lord Christopher Monckton, a policy adviser to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, told the Business & Media Institute blaming global warming for this is "nonsense." "This story is nonsense from start to finish," Monckton told the Business & Media Institute. "As a result of continuing isostatic recovery following the recent end of the last Ice Age (about 9,000 years ago), the western half of the U.K. has been rising, and the eastern half has been falling."
Monckton continued, "The loss of coastal properties in eastern England, which began occurring long before we could have had any appreciable influence on the climate, has nothing to do with rising seas and everything to do with falling land. But stories like this are constantly peddled by the leftist media, who have no regard whatsoever for objective truth."
That same night, "NBC Nightly News" correspondent George Lewis took on rising sea levels, but they went all the way to Antarctica to find a source of their global warming alarmism.
Source
Armed police tackle oldster on scooter: "Armed police raided an old folks' home to arrest a pensioner in a cowboy hat brandishing a plastic pistol. Eugene Hide, 75, was arrested as he raced up and down corridors on his electric mobility scooter, reports The Sun. Staff dialled 999 complaining he was using 'threatening' behaviour. They evacuated all 25 residents while the armed response unit was scrambled. Police dashed in to find Eugene waving his toy shooter in the air. He was taken away for questioning before being released without charge. The retired council worker refused to comment yesterday, but he apologised to residents for 'getting a bit excited.' Friends said he was 'agitated' because Rosenheath rest home in Stone, Staffs, is being closed down later this year. Last year he was involved in a failed High Court bid to stop the council shutting it."
And too bad about privacy
Theatreland will have to give up its bedroom secrets in the quest for funding, under new Arts Council requirements. Organisations applying for grants are being asked to state how many board members are bisexual, homosexual, heterosexual, lesbian or whose inclinations are "not known". Audrey Roy, the director of grants, said that the council needed to understand who its audience was and to whom its funding was going. "We see diversity as broader than race, ethnicity, faith and disability," she said. Question 22 of the Grants for the Arts forms, relating to sexual orientation, was not compulsory, she added, although the form states that it must be answered.
The question caused anger and bemusement among leading figures of the arts world yesterday. The Oscar-nominated actor Sir Ian McKellen, who is openly gay, said: "It sounds extraordinary. It shouldn't be on a form. It's quite inappropriate." Vanessa Redgrave, the actress and human rights campaigner, said: "Everyone should put down `trisexual', whoever you are. Britain has become the world's leading population of trisexuals."
Michael Frayn, the author of the farce Noises Off, suggested boxes to "specify how many members are longsighted or shortsighted, how many wear black socks or brown socks". Christopher Hampton, whose adaptation of God of Carnage is showing in the West End, said: "It's bureaucracy and political correctness gone mad."
The application form notes that the question is for government purposes only and will not enter into the grant decision, but that claim was contradicted by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. Its spokesman said: "We appreciate that, as a responsible public body they need to monitor their overall grant-making programmes. But it is absolutely not the case that sexual orientation monitoring is a government requirement."
Condemnation of the question spanned the arts. Julian Spalding, the former director of galleries and museums in Sheffield, Manchester and Glasgow, said: "I can't see what relevance it's got. It's a horrible invasion into one's personal and private life." He added: "What they like to do in bed is not the Arts Council's business."
Maggi Hambling, the painter who describes herself as "queer", said: "It's insidious, insulting and quite outrageous for the Arts Council to consider anyone's sexual orientation of any kind to be their business. It appears to be somewhat Hitlerian in its suggestion that grants will be given if, among the applicants, there is a nice smattering of dykes and queers."
Nicolas Kent, the artistic director of the Tricycle Theatre in London, said: "This is ridiculous. It has no relevance. The Arts Council is prone to huge overregulation, as seems to be the case with the whole of society. But the Arts Council has caught it very badly. They should advance the arts instead of ticking every box they invent."
Referring to the recent protest over the council's decision to cut the grants to prominent companies, Simon Callow, the gay actor, said: "The Arts Council comedy continues. What is difficult is to divine to what conceivable use they could put this information. I love the presence of a category for the Not Known - a despicable heresy, surely, in 2008?"
Almost a year ago James Purnell, then the Culture Secretary, vowed to relieve arts organisations of the burden of meeting "crude targets" as a condition of funding. Yet the Arts Council's application form also asks about ethnic backgrounds. The council said that the answers were confidential and exempt from release under the Freedom of Information Act. It said that it does not issue guidelines on how to persuade board members to reveal details of their sex lives.
Source
British health boss accuses Muslim doctors of betraying women's trust
Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt faced fierce criticism after claiming that Muslim GPs are revealing the intimate secrets of women patients. She said she had been told by Muslim women that GPs passed information to members of their family. "I have had Muslim women give me chapter and verse on very distressing breaches of confidentiality by Muslim GPs," Miss Hewitt told the GP magazine Pulse. "Some women patients feel they cannot trust their own GP, who knows the patient's extended families. If they talk to their GP about a very difficult situation concerning domestic violence or sexual health problems they fear he will share that with other members of her community." She said some women in "close-knit" communities were missing out on care because they were too afraid to go to their GP.
But Dr Prakash Chandra, local medical committee chairman in the London borough of Newham, which has many Muslim residents, said: "It surprises me that Patricia Hewitt would make such a statement. It's highly irresponsible. This is not a problem I have come across."
Surrey GP Dr Khalid Wyne, chairman of the Muslim Health Network, said he did not believe Muslim GPs were more likely to breach confidentiality than non-Muslims. He said: "If these breaches have happened it is very serious and should be taken up by the General Medical Council. It should be reported whether they are Muslim, Christian, Jewish, black or white."
Dr Reesat Drabu, chairman of the Muslim Council of Britain's social and family affairs committee, said there were no figures to back Miss Hewitt's claims. She said: "As a Muslim doctor I find it very offensive."
Shadow health secretary Andrew Lansley said: "These are very serious accusations. Patricia Hewitt must know that if she has evidence of such breaches of confidentiality she should refer them to the GMC. "In any case, I do question whether it is at all helpful to make such generalised statements. Muslim doctors make a very significant contribution to our NHS and their competence and professional standards should be acknowledged."
But there was support for Miss Hewitt from the Muslim Women's Network on Health, which produced a report in December claiming some women were afraid to consult their GP because of concern over confidentiality. Spokesman Haleh Afshar said: "In our report we said this is a concern shared by all women, but the difficulty for Muslim women is that sometimes they don't have the option of going to a GP outside their community. "Patricia Hewitt has taken this on board. We are asking for the possibility of interpreters to enable these women to move beyond their community."
The GMC said 11 doctors had been referred to a disciplinary committee in the past year over allegations of disclosure of information. It said it could not provide information on their religion.
Source
BBC is too scared of Islam, says novelist Ben Elton
Ben Elton has accused the BBC of unjust political correctness by allowing jokes about vicars but vetoing gags about imams. Elton, whose children attend a church school, said that the BBC was too "scared" of Islam and of jokes about Islam to let them pass.
Asked about the new law on religious hatred, and whether too much deference was being shown to religious people, he said: "I think it all starts with people nodding whenever anyone says, `As a person of faith . . .' "And I believe that part of it is due to the genuine fear that the authorities and the community have about provoking the radical elements of Islam. "There's no doubt about it, the BBC will let vicar gags pass but they would not let imam gags pass." He said the BBC might pretend that this hesitancy had something to do with moral sensibilities. "But it isn't. It's because they're scared."
Elton said the situation was so bad that even everyday sayings were frowned upon: "I wanted to use the phrase `Mohammed came to the mountain' and everybody said, `Oh, just don't! Just don't! Don't go there!' "It was nothing to do with Islam, I was merely referring to the old proverb, `If the mountain won't come to Mohammed, Mohammed must go to the mountain'. And people said, `Let's just not!' It's incredible."
The writer, whose latest novel, Blind Faith, addresses the cult of the individual in postmodern society, continued: "I'm quite certain that the average Muslim does not want everybody going around thinking, `We can't mention you. We've just got to pretend you don't exist because we're scared that somebody who claims to represent you will threaten to kill us.'" The comedian, who was interviewed by Third Way, a Christian culture magazine, admitted believing in "almost nothing", even though his children attend a church school.
He said people should be taught the essentials of Christianity, if only for cultural reasons. But he also said that "lack of faith" should be taught in schools. "I think the concept that faith in itself is a good thing should be questioned from day one. There's a presumption that if you're a religious leader you are in some way already halfway up to the moral high ground and your opinion has more relevance than anyone else's."
Source
Muslims' fury forces schools to shelve homophilic storybooks for 5-year-olds
Christians have been complaining about this stuff for years but they don't count, of course
Two primary schools have withdrawn storybooks about same-sex relationships after objections from Muslim parents. Up to 90 gathered at the schools to complain about the books which are aimed at pupils as young as five. One story, titled King & King, is a fairytale about a prince who turns down three princesses before marrying one of their brothers. Another named And Tango Makes Three features two male penguins who fall in love at a New York zoo.
Bristol City Council said the two schools had been using the books to ensure they complied with gay rights laws which came into force last April. They were intended to help prevent homophobic bullying, it said. But the council has since removed the books from Easton Primary School and Bannerman Road Community School, both in Bristol. A book and DVD titled That's a Family!, which teaches children about different family set-ups including gay or lesbian parents, has also been withdrawn.
The decision was made to enable the schools to "operate safely" after parents voiced their concerns at meetings. Around 40 are said to have gathered at Easton to speak to staff and another 50 at Bannerman Road. Members of the Bristol Muslim Cultural Society said parents were upset at the lack of consultation over the use of the materials. Farooq Siddique, community development officer for the society and a governor at Bannerman Road, said there were also concerns about whether the stories were appropriate for young children.
"The main issue was there was a total lack of consultation with parents," he said. "The schools refused to deal with the parents, and were completely authoritarian. "The agenda was to reduce homophobic bullying and all the parents said they were not against that side of it, but families were saying to us 'our child is coming home and talking about same-sex relationships, when we haven't even talked about heterosexual relationships with them yet'. "They don't do sex education until Year Six and at least there you have got the option of withdrawing the children. "But here you don't have that option apparently. You can't withdraw because it is no particular lesson they are used in."
He added: "In Islam homosexual relationships are not acceptable, as they are not in Christianity and many other religions but the main issue is that they didn't bother to consult with parents. "The issue should have been, how do we stop bullying in general, and teaching about homosexuality can be a part of that. "This was completely one-sided. "Homosexuality is not a priority to parents but academic achievement is. This just makes parents think 'What the heck is my child being taught at school?'."
He said the two schools were 60 to 70 per cent Muslim but pointed out that non-Muslim parents were among those who complained. Traditional Islamic views condemn homosexuality but there are liberal movements, such as the Al-Fatiha Foundation, which is dedicated to gay Muslims.
The schools used materials promoted by the No Outsiders project, led by academics at Sunderland University. A spokesman for Bristol City Council said: "All Bristol schools have a legal duty to report and deal with homophobic harassment as part of the curriculum since April 2007." She said the council had "temporarily withdrawn" the use of the materials in question and was liaising with various groups to "ensure that the topic can be addressed in an inclusive manner in the curriculum". Ben Summerskills of gay rights group Stonewall said: "The small number of parents who make a fuss will cause children to think there is something wrong."
Source
The British equivalent of "Honey" as a form of address is now forbidden by the EU
In both Australia and Britain it is common for women serving customers to address the customers as "Love" and that form of address is sometimes returned, mainly by regular customers:
"Pub landlords beware: from next Sunday it will be an offence, punishable by unlimited compensation orders, to allow customers to chat up bar staff. No, this isn't an early April fool. It's a European directive, sneaked into British law by Women's Minister Harriet Harman. From April 6, employers will risk being sued if a bar worker or waitress complains of being called "love" or "darling", or if staff overhear customers telling sexist jokes.
So serious is the threat that lawyers are advising pub owners to cover themselves by displaying warning notices declaring: "Harassment is not tolerated."
But why do we need yet another law - and yet more red tape - to enforce what has always been a matter for common sense, to be dealt with by the landlord's ancient right to ban difficult customers? Isn't this an invitation to employees to cash in on imaginary grievances?
In fact, everything about this new law is an affront not only to common sense but to democracy itself. Nobody voted for it. It was dreamed up by unelected bureaucrats in Brussels and is now being imposed on Britain without parliamentary debate or division, after a ruling by an unelected judge.
Source
Networks Hype Rising Sea Levels in One-Sided Global Warming Reports
Parts of the Eastern English coastline have been sinking for many years
This time, the "CBS Evening News" traveled all the way across the pond to pushing the alarmists' global warming agenda. The March 27 "Evening News" went to the coastlines of England to show melting ice caps causing people to lose their homes. "Much of the effects of climate change have been couched in terms of if or when its effects will be felt," CBS correspondent Mark Phillips said. "Well, here there is no `if.' And when is now. So choices are being made. It's called managed retreat. Some areas of coastline deemed indefensible are being abandoned. Climate change is producing winners and losers, and Diana Wrightson and the others here have already lost."
However, global warming expert Lord Christopher Monckton, a policy adviser to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, told the Business & Media Institute blaming global warming for this is "nonsense." "This story is nonsense from start to finish," Monckton told the Business & Media Institute. "As a result of continuing isostatic recovery following the recent end of the last Ice Age (about 9,000 years ago), the western half of the U.K. has been rising, and the eastern half has been falling."
Monckton continued, "The loss of coastal properties in eastern England, which began occurring long before we could have had any appreciable influence on the climate, has nothing to do with rising seas and everything to do with falling land. But stories like this are constantly peddled by the leftist media, who have no regard whatsoever for objective truth."
That same night, "NBC Nightly News" correspondent George Lewis took on rising sea levels, but they went all the way to Antarctica to find a source of their global warming alarmism.
Source
Armed police tackle oldster on scooter: "Armed police raided an old folks' home to arrest a pensioner in a cowboy hat brandishing a plastic pistol. Eugene Hide, 75, was arrested as he raced up and down corridors on his electric mobility scooter, reports The Sun. Staff dialled 999 complaining he was using 'threatening' behaviour. They evacuated all 25 residents while the armed response unit was scrambled. Police dashed in to find Eugene waving his toy shooter in the air. He was taken away for questioning before being released without charge. The retired council worker refused to comment yesterday, but he apologised to residents for 'getting a bit excited.' Friends said he was 'agitated' because Rosenheath rest home in Stone, Staffs, is being closed down later this year. Last year he was involved in a failed High Court bid to stop the council shutting it."
Thursday, April 03, 2008
British Prime Minister rejects cap on immigration
The comments by the PM below are something of a curate's egg: Both good and bad. To attribute all the economic growth of the last 10 years to immigration is such a towering absurdity that it is really beneath comment. Most of that growth is simply inflation, for a start. The PM must have been desperate to makes such an assertion. On the other hand, it would seem to be true that the new points system will probably achieve more than a numerical cap would. It could however probably be tightened to ensure that only highly qualified immigrants are accepted.
The real issue is the number of "parasite" immigrants being accepted, particularly refugees from Africa. African refugees are highly welfare-dependant and, such are the troubles of Africa, you could under present rules have half of Africa in Britain eventually. If anything is unsustainable that is. A very strict numerical cap there would make sense.
No-one is game to mention Africans, of course, but the Lords do at least mention the other largely parasitical category: Family reunions. These are often elderly or unskilled relatives from the Indian sub-continent and many do not contribute much to the economy but do draw on government services. Clearly, most people in this category should have to pass the points system on approximately the same basis as other immigrants. Immigrants who wish to support relatives should generally be able to do so by way of remittances to the home country, something that is already widespread. Brown completely fails to address that issue
Gordon Brown says immigration is good for the UK and has rejected suggestions that an annual limit is needed. The PM was responding to a report by a House of Lords committee saying record immigration had had "little or no" impact on people's economic well-being. Mr Brown said the concerns raised were being tackled by a new points-based system that will allow only highly skilled workers into the UK. He said migration had added 6 billion pounds to the economy and was a "substantial income". Most British businesses who have faced labour shortages had benefited from being able to recruit more widely for skilled labour, he said.
Speaking at his monthly news conference, he said the Australian-style points-based system would effectively "restrict the numbers of people who come into this country from outside Europe". It would bar unskilled immigrants from outside the European Union, he said. There would be a new citizenship fund, with people coming into the country being expected to contribute to the public services they use. And there was more financial help for local authorities to enable them to deal with the influx.
Mr Brown conceded that it was important to get the balance right given "pressures on the economy". But he said that gross domestic product per head had risen since 1997 from 13,900 to 22,840 pounds in the last year.
"Most people in the City of London know they have benefited very substantially," he told reporters. "Not just from the inward investment that's coming from international companies, but the number of key workers who are coming to join them and are making a huge contribution to the British economy. "But we want to get the balance right between that and of course being sensible about the pressures on our economy."
Mr Brown said a cap on immigrants coming to the UK could only be applied to those outside the EU. "Most people who are proposing a cap are proposing a cap of only 20% of possible migrants into this country," he said. "And of course many of these people are the highly skilled workers who are important to the economy."
Mr Brown's comments follow a report by the Lords Economic Affairs Committee which says competition from immigrants had had a negative impact on the low paid, on training for young UK workers, and had contributed to high house prices. The peers called for a cap on immigration levels, saying the government "should have an explicit target range" and set rules to keep within that limit. They raised the prospect of cutting the rights of people to follow relatives who have settled in the UK.
And they rejected claims by ministers that a high level of immigration was needed to prevent labour shortages as "fundamentally flawed". They also warned that the points-based system carried a "clear danger of inconsistencies and overlap".
The committee, whose members include two ex-chancellors and other Cabinet members, took eight months to consider government immigration policies. Inquiry chairman Lord Wakeham said: "Looking to the future, if you have got that increase in numbers and you haven't got any economic benefit from it, you have got to ask yourself, is that a wise thing to do? "That is why we want the government to look at it."
Committee chairman Lord Vallance of Tummel, a former CBI president, said the government's analysis of the economic impact from immigration was "very shaky". The report claims that if net immigration of 190,000 people per year continued over the next 20 years, it would contribute to a 10% increase in house prices.
Shadow home secretary David Davis said the peers had shown "unequivocally that the benefits of the current immigration policy to ordinary UK citizens are largely non-existent".
Chris Huhne, the Lib Dems home affairs spokesman, said the report made clear that "the government has completely lost track of the number of people who live in this country".
UK Independence Party leader Nigel Farage said: "The fact still remains that all three parties voted for an enlarged EU and open borders with half a billion people living in the EU."
Sir Andrew Green of pressure group Migration Watch, said the report had "torn to shreds the government's economic case for the massive levels of immigration which they have actively encouraged
Source
Arrant British nonsense
Why do you need to go to university before you are qualified to look after little kids? A kind heart is infinitely more important -- as a British mother observes
The education of young children is being compromised because so few nursery staff are educated beyond secondary school level, a report suggests. Only 7 per cent of nursery heads, nursery nurses and assistants have post-secondary school qualifications, the report found. The vast majority finished their training having passed GNVQ level 3, a vocational qualification that is equivalent to an A level. The poorly qualified early-years workforce is in sharp contrast to much of Europe, and elsewhere, where the majority of staff are qualified to degree level, or have three years of intensive training in child development before they start work. New Zealand is retraining its entire childcare workforce so that they are all of degree standard by 2012.
The skills crisis has come to light only months before the introduction of a new curriculum for all under5s in September, part of a government plan to raise standards in nurseries. Education experts fear the curriculum will become a box-ticking exercise if staff do not have the skill or confidence to interpret the new rules. The report, which will be published this week by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), also identified a gulf between private and voluntary nurseries, which make up about 70 per cent of the sector, and govern-ment-funded nurseries attached to schools.
More than 80 per cent of staff at school-based nurseries are educated beyond secondary school level. "There has been nothing like the scale of action needed to transform the low-skilled and low-paid childcare workforce," said Graeme Cooke, co-author of the report. "This is despite all the evidence which shows that a highly skilled workforce is essential in early-years education." Research by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) shows that highly qualified childcare workers are the decisive ingredient in getting children to behave well, socialise and start to learn before reaching school. [Another example of "research" with foreordained conclusions, no doubt]
The Government aims to increase the number of graduates in nurseries and has stipulated that by 2015 each will have a graduate in charge. The IPPR said that this was a partial reading of the OECD research. "There is a limit to what a graduate leader can do with a low-skilled workforce, many of whom are qualified to GNVQ level 2 only, equivalent to a GCSE," Mr Cooke said. Purnima Tanuku, the chief executive of the National Day Nurseries Association, said: "Professional development has large costs attached for nurseries in terms of increased salaries, training costs and time away from the nursery, especially at higher levels. "As salaries already account for 80 per cent of parental fees, investing in this area means that the costs will have to be passed on to parents."
Source
British police worker who fought forced marriages is facing dismissal for speaking publicly about their plight
A police worker praised by MPs for protecting thousands of girls from forced marriages is facing dismissal for speaking publicly about their plight. Philip Balmforth has been removed from his duties and faces a disciplinary hearing next week after giving an interview to The Times about Asian children who go missing from schools in Bradford. The former police inspector, regarded as a national authority on "honour-based" violence, stands accused of "damaging the reputation" of West Yorkshire Police by speaking to a newspaper without consent.
It is understood that the force, which has investigated 176 cases of forced marriage in the past year alone, took action against Mr Balmforth after receiving a complaint from Bradford council. Senior figures on the local authority are said to have claimed that his high-profile work was damaging the city's image and was "bad for regeneration".
Last week 56 MPs signed a Commons early day motion praising Mr Balmforth. It was tabled by Ann Cryer, the MP for Keighley and a campaigner for the welfare of ethnic minority women. The motion applauds his work "in protecting thousands of vulnerable girls in the Bradford district" and commends the police "for having the foresight to engage Philip 12 years ago, thus enabling him to give so many young women the right to choose whom and when to marry". Ninety per cent of the victims who have been dealt with by the Government's Forced Marriage Unit are from a Pakistani or Bangladeshi background and the majority are taken to their families' countries of origin to be married, often to a first cousin.
Mr Balmforth, a full-time police support worker whose post as vulnerable persons officer (Asian women) is partly funded by Bradford social services, has been contacted for help by more than 2,000 local women in recent years. He was interviewed by The Times this month after the Commons Home Affairs Select Committee inquiry into domestic violence established that 33 pupils had vanished from schools in Bradford. Mr Balmforth suggested that every education authority in the country should be asked: "How many children did you lose last year? And where are they?"
The comments are telling, especially from local people:
"Bradford council refused to comment most probably because there are so few councillors that can speak English. I would be very surprised if Mr Balmforth ever returns to his role as he has committed the most heinous of hate crimes in this country today. He has turned over a rock and told us what **** under it, which this government absolutely hates".
Source
British child psychologist warns that digital-age children should be left to take risks
Asked by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown to investigate the new dangers to children being brought up in the digital age, Tanya Byron last week produced a 224-page report. The child psychologist's recommendations included a cinema-style system of classification for video games and a thorough public education campaign. However, she warns that protecting children against all risks stunts their development and an important part of growing up is learning to assess and deal with danger
Shortly before she published a report last week on keeping children safe in the online age, Dr Tanya Byron was invited to lunch with Gordon Brown at Chequers. It was a family affair: Byron, her husband Bruce, who plays DC Terry Perkins in The Bill, and their two children, Lily, 12, and Jack, 10, all went along. Lunch at the prime minister's country estate is the sort of occasion when any parent would want their little ones to be bright, presentable and on their best behaviour. But not even Byron, a child psychologist who has advised millions on parenting through her television series, is immune from modest rebellion.
"My son piped up just before we were going and he said, `Mummy, I could take my PlayStation and I could really make you scared in front of the prime minister'. He could. The prospect of son Jack smuggling in some dodgy game and whipping out his portable PlayStation to blast away in front of the prime minister had Byron "feeling slightly twitchy". That's not surprising given that she was about to advise Brown on how to protect young children from unsuitable computer material. But in typical calm style she simply said: "No, darling. You don't play those games, so let's not go there."
A tall, curvaceous woman with wide eyes and a warm smile, Byron must be as annoying as hell to all those postfeministas who say you can't have it all. She is clever, articulate, attractive and a natural performer, as well as being a mother and government adviser. Although most people know her from television programmes such as Little Angels and The House of Tiny Tearaways, she is no pop-psycho with more beauty than brains. She did her first degree at York, a masters at University College London and a doctorate at University College hospital and Surrey University. For 18 years she worked in the National Health Service, rising to be a consultant for children with severe mental disorders. She still works one day a week as a consultant in child mental health, although most of her time is taken up filming with the BBC.
Glamour, fame, acclaim - yet Byron, 41, also retains the common sense of an ordinary mum: making her the perfect candidate for a report into children growing up in a world where the risks, as well as benefits, of the internet and computer games are all-pervasive. "When I came to doing the report . . . concerns were very much fuelled by a lack of understanding of the technology. People were asking, is it all big, bad and scary out there? I know a lot more than I did six months ago. It's made me feel more positive and confident and less anxious."
Of course she recognises the dangers - from paedophiles to porn, violence and cyberbullying. In her report, which arrived with much ministerial fanfare last week, she carefully examines the scientific evidence about how children are affected by nasty computer games or hardcore porn. Research, she concludes, shows mixed results.
Although, for example, there is a correlation between aggression and playing violent computer games, it's not clear that there is a causal relationship - that violent games make children more violent. Convenient, since any kind of ban would be a political minefield. In person, though, she is more forthright. "I'm really clear that adult content is harmful and inappropriate for young children particularly," she says. "They do not have the neural networks in place to be able to critically evaluate the content, to differentiate fantasy from reality." Byron would like the law on such matters to be clearer and to be applied with more vigour: "I am saying clarify the law . . . be clear about when there is content on websites that is breaking the law."
She also encourages parents to challenge the classification of computer games if they think they are inappropriate: "It's important to have a system where there can be a challenge, where people can complain."
A less astute person might have let such conclusions suck them into recommending censorship of violent games or websites. Byron knows that won't work: "If you go down the censorship route, the content would still be there somewhere. Children would go online to websites outside the UK, to unmoderated sites." And parents, already struggling to keep up, might have even less idea what their youngsters are doing. "The rapid pace at which new media are evolving has left adults and children stranded either side of a generational digital divide," she says. Older people may still regard the internet as a parallel universe that somehow arrives through a machine at the office or home, but for youngsters it's a seamless part of their lives. They are the cyborg generation.
The answer, Byron believes, is to trust in the better side of human nature. Families can navigate the risks provided they are informed and sensible. "I'm more of a `half-full' girl than a `half-empty' girl. That's how I like to live life," she explains. Her report, which runs to more than 200 pages, is packed with recommendations some of which the government has promised to adopt. Key measures include a UK council on child internet safety to develop voluntary codes of practice for the industry and better information for the public; teaching adults about "parental control" systems on computers; a new classification of computer games like those used for films; and courses in schools to teach children "e-safety".
It's hard to argue against any of it (although whether the portly public sector needs yet another quango is debatable). Byron, using common sense, already regulates her children's use of computers: "They don't have a computer in their own rooms. We have got some in the office and one downstairs in the kitchen. Gaming and going online is good . . . but in a way that is right for their age and stage of development. It's something you do after your homework. It never takes place instead of a family meal. When my son is gaming and I'm cooking, he's there and I know what he's doing."
Her daughter, two years older, is given more leeway and Byron admits that she does not know exactly what her daughter does online: "We have a good relationship and I respect her privacy. In the same way I don't know entirely what's in her diary. But I know my child; I know when something has upset them or when they are distressed." They talk, they work it out, just as they would some other problem. That, in a nutshell, is how Byron believes parents should approach bringing up children in the digital age. You can buy software to block websites, you can spy on children's internet history, you can restrict access when they are young - but in the end children are going to go out into the big wide world and need to be able to look after themselves.
"We live in a risk-averse culture, but risk is a developmental imperative of childhood and I think we need to recognise that. It's about fostering the independent child. What I want to get across is that [dealing with the online world] is similar to how we would parent children in the offline world."
That old world has its own temptations, for adults as well as children. It's clear that Byron enjoys the cameras and corridors of power: "I really like advising politicians. I really liked saying to the PM this morning, `The UK child internet safety council, you set it up, we could take a global lead, what do you reckon?' And he says, `Okay'."
Is she going to be on the internet safety council? "Oh no," she laughs. "I'm outta here. It's all about kids for me. I'd much rather work on behalf of children." So she doesn't want to be a politician? She gives that big disarming smile again: "Do you know, I really like advising them . . ." She has already become too much of a politician to say no.
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British policy advisor says Gore is in 'panic' mode
British environmental analyst Christopher Monckton says Al Gore's latest attack on global warming skeptics shows the former vice president and other climate alarmists are "panicking." On Sunday, CBS News correspondent Leslie Stahl asked Al Gore on the television show 60 Minutes what he thinks of people like Vice President Dick Cheney who doubt that global warming is caused by human activity. "I think that those people are in such a tiny, tiny minority now with their point of view, they're almost like the ones who still believe that the moon landing was staged in a movie lot in Arizona, and those who believe the earth is flat," replied Gore. "That demeans them a little bit, but it's not that far off."
However, Lord Christopher Monckton, a policy advisor for former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher during the 1980s, says the former vice president can enjoy his "flat earth fantasies" for a few months, but in the end, the world will be laughing at him. "The alarmists are alarmed, the panic mongers are panicking, the scare mongers are scared; the Gores are gored. Why? Because global warming stopped ten years ago; it hasn't got warmer since 1998," he points out. "And in fact in the last seven years, there has been a downturn in global temperatures equivalent on average to about [or] very close to one degree Fahrenheit per decade. We're actually in a period ... of global cooling."
Monckton contends Gore is now "panicking" because he has staked his reputation as a former American VP on "telling the world that we're all doomed unless we shut down 90 percent of the Western economies." He also contends that Gore is the largest "global-warming profiteer."
Gore's group The Alliance for Climate Protection is currently launching a new $300 million ad campaign that demands reforms in environmental law to help reduce the supposed "climate crisis." But Monckton points out that in the U.K., Gore is not allowed to speak in public about his "green investment company" because to do so would violate racketeering laws by "peddling a false prospectus." He says that fact came about after a British high court found Gore's movie, An Inconvenient Truth, riddled with errors. Monckton challenged Gore to an internationally televised debate on climate change last year.
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FOOD MILES ARE JUST A FORM OF PROTECTIONISM
Middle-class neurosis is being exploited to protect an archaic form of agriculture
By Dominic Lawson
Was Prince Charles' chum Patrick Holden, director of the Soil Association, expecting the Kenyan High Commissioner to fall to his knees in gratitude? It rather sounded like it yesterday morning, when the two of them met in a BBC radio studio.
They were there to discuss the Soil Association's proposals to discriminate against the "organic food" which is air freighted into this country, mostly from East Africa. "One option was to ban it altogether," declared Mr Holden, but instead he and his colleagues had decided that such food would only be banned if it was "not produced ethically" - whatever that means.
Of course, this is folie de grandeur on the part of the Soil Association. It cannot, fortunately, "ban" us from buying whatever food we wish to eat. All that Mr Holden really meant was that his organisation would withdraw its certification from foreign farmers whom it deemed to be "unethical". Needless to say, British organic farmers (like Mr Holden CBE) will be subject to no such extra conditions, over and above the standard requirement of not using pesticides or other man-made aids to enhance production.
In so far as this is not just old-style agricultural protectionism, it is all about the fashionable obsession with "food miles". The Soil Association, which evidently sees itself as some sort of global environmental organisation, has been agonising over the fact that the farmers of Africa are using aeroplanes - spawn of the devil! - to freight bona fide "organic" food into this country. Somehow it has convinced itself that this means that the food is not "organic", in the spiritual sense, and so must be "banned".
As the Kenyan High Commissioner, Joseph Muchemi, patiently tried to explain, the carbon emissions from his country's food producers are much less per vegetable than those of British "organic" farmers, even if you factor in the CO2 generated by flying the stuff halfway across the world. "Our farmers use manual labour, not tractors; we use compost rather than organic fertilisers," he said.
For some reason, Mr Holden did not want to address this powerful point; instead he asserted that there was really no case at all for "global trade in food", although he allowed that an exception could be made for "things like tea, coffee and bananas - things we can't produce ourselves".
This is the classic argument put by British landowners for the extortion of a monopoly rent from captive local consumers. The great Scottish economist Adam Smith delivered a withering retort to such selfish domestic agricultural interests over two centuries ago: "By means of glasses, hotbeds and hotwalls very good grapes can be raised in Scotland ... would it be a reasonable law to prohibit the importation of all foreign wines, merely to encourage the making of Claret and Burgundy in Scotland?"
This sort of thinking lay behind the recent creation of the Icelandic banana industry: the Icelandic government banned banana imports, as a result of which local landowners began to produce them in gigantic greenhouses. They were fabulously expensive, of course, which was not such good news for families who wished to feed their children healthily at a reasonable cost.
Similarly, there are tiny hobby producers of tea and coffee in Great Britain. In Patrick Holden's perfect deglobalised world, we could do with these products what the Icelanders did with bananas. Obviously this would mean that tea and coffee could be enjoyed only by the rich in this country, and Third World producers would suffer a dramatic loss of revenue and employment. This might seem a preposterous example of "self-sufficiency". Yet if we were to allow a fetish with the carbon emissions from airfreight to dominate agricultural policy, then this is the sort of mutual impoverishment that could result.
Let us, for the sake of argument, accept that the Soil Association's members are not merely acting as a trade union for Prince Charles' Duchy Originals and assorted other quaintly expensive British food producers. Let us accept, therefore, that in implementing some sort of discriminatory policy against long-distance air-freighted food, they really do believe that they are trying to "limit the damage of climate change".
Surely it ought to have occurred to them that they will only be hurting the very people whom they affect to be concerned about? After all, it is Africa, not Great Britain, which would suffer from a significant increase in average temperatures - whether caused by man or nature.
As Clare Malamed of the charity Action Aid has pointed out, the "banning of organic green beans from Kenya or mange tout from Zambia" will make no measurable difference to the UK's carbon emissions: "however, there are many poor people in Africa who depend on that trade so, for them, banning organic air freight means less development of the economy and more poverty". Mr Holden complained yesterday that many of the African food exporters are "multinationals"; but even multinationals employ locals.
There is something else quite odd about the Soil Association's position. Its members assert that "organic food" is healthier for the consumer than food which is produced with the aid of pesticides. If they are right, then if low-cost African producers can land such "good" food in this country at a price which is competitive with non-organic local producers, this ought to encourage more people to buy organic, to the great benefit of the public's health.
In fact there has never been any reliable scientific evidence that so-called "organic" food is actually better for you than food produced with the aid of pesticides. At the weekend, the former head of the Food Standards Agency, Lord Krebs, wearily reiterated that there was no such evidence. Thus last year David Miliband spoke nothing less than the truth when, as Environment Secretary, he described "organic" food as a "lifestyle choice".
On the whole it is a "lifestyle choice" limited to middle-class mothers in the South-east of England who are neurotic enough to believe the insinuations of the Soil Association that little Henry and Caroline are more likely to get cancer if mummy doesn't buy organic (at twice the price).
Now another largely middle-class neurosis - we are all doomed unless everybody stops flying! - is being exploited to protect an archaic form of agriculture which could never feed this country, still less the world. It is, at best, an exercise in self-delusion. At worst, it is a way of using food as the instrument of a deliberate policy of racial discrimination.
Source
Another useless (Sorry: "underqualified") Muslim doctor in Britain
And the hospital he worked in was a mess too
A consultant radiologist who wrongly gave the all-clear to 20 breast cancer patients was yesterday suspended from practising for 12 months. One woman died after the misdiagnosis by Amjad Husien was not spotted for three months. A General Medical Council panel ruled he "repeatedly failed to provide an acceptable level of care to patients" in his breast imaging work at Trafford general hospital.
Husien's breast scan mistakes led to a review of almost 2,500 mammograms at Trafford and North Manchester general hospital, where he also worked. A total of 176 women had to be recalled and retested after the mistakes were identified in April 2005. Husien, who worked at Trafford general for two years, was subsequently suspended on full pay.
A month after his suspension, a report revealed his probable error rate in taking breast scans at Trafford General was 11.3%.The panel said this was "inadequate, inappropriate, not in the patients' best interest and not of a standard expected of a reasonably competent consultant radiologist". Husien told the hearing he would never work in breast radiology again and would give written undertakings that would safeguard patients.
Dr Richard Campbell, the retired medical director at Trafford general, gave evidence about the "dysfunctional" radiology department. He said it had serious clinical failings and that Husien was working under difficult conditions as he was the sole breast radiologist. A report by Professor Mark Baker on behalf of NHS North West into the misreadings ruled that Husien's failure was "compounded by systematic weaknesses in Trafford NHS trust".
In a statement, the trust said: "We can confirm that ... breast diagnosis is no longer carried out at Trafford Healthcare NHS Trust. We are pleased to report that shortly after Dr Husien's suspension we recruited two experienced consultant radiologists who are still with us."
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The comments by the PM below are something of a curate's egg: Both good and bad. To attribute all the economic growth of the last 10 years to immigration is such a towering absurdity that it is really beneath comment. Most of that growth is simply inflation, for a start. The PM must have been desperate to makes such an assertion. On the other hand, it would seem to be true that the new points system will probably achieve more than a numerical cap would. It could however probably be tightened to ensure that only highly qualified immigrants are accepted.
The real issue is the number of "parasite" immigrants being accepted, particularly refugees from Africa. African refugees are highly welfare-dependant and, such are the troubles of Africa, you could under present rules have half of Africa in Britain eventually. If anything is unsustainable that is. A very strict numerical cap there would make sense.
No-one is game to mention Africans, of course, but the Lords do at least mention the other largely parasitical category: Family reunions. These are often elderly or unskilled relatives from the Indian sub-continent and many do not contribute much to the economy but do draw on government services. Clearly, most people in this category should have to pass the points system on approximately the same basis as other immigrants. Immigrants who wish to support relatives should generally be able to do so by way of remittances to the home country, something that is already widespread. Brown completely fails to address that issue
Gordon Brown says immigration is good for the UK and has rejected suggestions that an annual limit is needed. The PM was responding to a report by a House of Lords committee saying record immigration had had "little or no" impact on people's economic well-being. Mr Brown said the concerns raised were being tackled by a new points-based system that will allow only highly skilled workers into the UK. He said migration had added 6 billion pounds to the economy and was a "substantial income". Most British businesses who have faced labour shortages had benefited from being able to recruit more widely for skilled labour, he said.
Speaking at his monthly news conference, he said the Australian-style points-based system would effectively "restrict the numbers of people who come into this country from outside Europe". It would bar unskilled immigrants from outside the European Union, he said. There would be a new citizenship fund, with people coming into the country being expected to contribute to the public services they use. And there was more financial help for local authorities to enable them to deal with the influx.
Mr Brown conceded that it was important to get the balance right given "pressures on the economy". But he said that gross domestic product per head had risen since 1997 from 13,900 to 22,840 pounds in the last year.
"Most people in the City of London know they have benefited very substantially," he told reporters. "Not just from the inward investment that's coming from international companies, but the number of key workers who are coming to join them and are making a huge contribution to the British economy. "But we want to get the balance right between that and of course being sensible about the pressures on our economy."
Mr Brown said a cap on immigrants coming to the UK could only be applied to those outside the EU. "Most people who are proposing a cap are proposing a cap of only 20% of possible migrants into this country," he said. "And of course many of these people are the highly skilled workers who are important to the economy."
Mr Brown's comments follow a report by the Lords Economic Affairs Committee which says competition from immigrants had had a negative impact on the low paid, on training for young UK workers, and had contributed to high house prices. The peers called for a cap on immigration levels, saying the government "should have an explicit target range" and set rules to keep within that limit. They raised the prospect of cutting the rights of people to follow relatives who have settled in the UK.
And they rejected claims by ministers that a high level of immigration was needed to prevent labour shortages as "fundamentally flawed". They also warned that the points-based system carried a "clear danger of inconsistencies and overlap".
The committee, whose members include two ex-chancellors and other Cabinet members, took eight months to consider government immigration policies. Inquiry chairman Lord Wakeham said: "Looking to the future, if you have got that increase in numbers and you haven't got any economic benefit from it, you have got to ask yourself, is that a wise thing to do? "That is why we want the government to look at it."
Committee chairman Lord Vallance of Tummel, a former CBI president, said the government's analysis of the economic impact from immigration was "very shaky". The report claims that if net immigration of 190,000 people per year continued over the next 20 years, it would contribute to a 10% increase in house prices.
Shadow home secretary David Davis said the peers had shown "unequivocally that the benefits of the current immigration policy to ordinary UK citizens are largely non-existent".
Chris Huhne, the Lib Dems home affairs spokesman, said the report made clear that "the government has completely lost track of the number of people who live in this country".
UK Independence Party leader Nigel Farage said: "The fact still remains that all three parties voted for an enlarged EU and open borders with half a billion people living in the EU."
Sir Andrew Green of pressure group Migration Watch, said the report had "torn to shreds the government's economic case for the massive levels of immigration which they have actively encouraged
Source
Arrant British nonsense
Why do you need to go to university before you are qualified to look after little kids? A kind heart is infinitely more important -- as a British mother observes
The education of young children is being compromised because so few nursery staff are educated beyond secondary school level, a report suggests. Only 7 per cent of nursery heads, nursery nurses and assistants have post-secondary school qualifications, the report found. The vast majority finished their training having passed GNVQ level 3, a vocational qualification that is equivalent to an A level. The poorly qualified early-years workforce is in sharp contrast to much of Europe, and elsewhere, where the majority of staff are qualified to degree level, or have three years of intensive training in child development before they start work. New Zealand is retraining its entire childcare workforce so that they are all of degree standard by 2012.
The skills crisis has come to light only months before the introduction of a new curriculum for all under5s in September, part of a government plan to raise standards in nurseries. Education experts fear the curriculum will become a box-ticking exercise if staff do not have the skill or confidence to interpret the new rules. The report, which will be published this week by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), also identified a gulf between private and voluntary nurseries, which make up about 70 per cent of the sector, and govern-ment-funded nurseries attached to schools.
More than 80 per cent of staff at school-based nurseries are educated beyond secondary school level. "There has been nothing like the scale of action needed to transform the low-skilled and low-paid childcare workforce," said Graeme Cooke, co-author of the report. "This is despite all the evidence which shows that a highly skilled workforce is essential in early-years education." Research by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) shows that highly qualified childcare workers are the decisive ingredient in getting children to behave well, socialise and start to learn before reaching school. [Another example of "research" with foreordained conclusions, no doubt]
The Government aims to increase the number of graduates in nurseries and has stipulated that by 2015 each will have a graduate in charge. The IPPR said that this was a partial reading of the OECD research. "There is a limit to what a graduate leader can do with a low-skilled workforce, many of whom are qualified to GNVQ level 2 only, equivalent to a GCSE," Mr Cooke said. Purnima Tanuku, the chief executive of the National Day Nurseries Association, said: "Professional development has large costs attached for nurseries in terms of increased salaries, training costs and time away from the nursery, especially at higher levels. "As salaries already account for 80 per cent of parental fees, investing in this area means that the costs will have to be passed on to parents."
Source
British police worker who fought forced marriages is facing dismissal for speaking publicly about their plight
A police worker praised by MPs for protecting thousands of girls from forced marriages is facing dismissal for speaking publicly about their plight. Philip Balmforth has been removed from his duties and faces a disciplinary hearing next week after giving an interview to The Times about Asian children who go missing from schools in Bradford. The former police inspector, regarded as a national authority on "honour-based" violence, stands accused of "damaging the reputation" of West Yorkshire Police by speaking to a newspaper without consent.
It is understood that the force, which has investigated 176 cases of forced marriage in the past year alone, took action against Mr Balmforth after receiving a complaint from Bradford council. Senior figures on the local authority are said to have claimed that his high-profile work was damaging the city's image and was "bad for regeneration".
Last week 56 MPs signed a Commons early day motion praising Mr Balmforth. It was tabled by Ann Cryer, the MP for Keighley and a campaigner for the welfare of ethnic minority women. The motion applauds his work "in protecting thousands of vulnerable girls in the Bradford district" and commends the police "for having the foresight to engage Philip 12 years ago, thus enabling him to give so many young women the right to choose whom and when to marry". Ninety per cent of the victims who have been dealt with by the Government's Forced Marriage Unit are from a Pakistani or Bangladeshi background and the majority are taken to their families' countries of origin to be married, often to a first cousin.
Mr Balmforth, a full-time police support worker whose post as vulnerable persons officer (Asian women) is partly funded by Bradford social services, has been contacted for help by more than 2,000 local women in recent years. He was interviewed by The Times this month after the Commons Home Affairs Select Committee inquiry into domestic violence established that 33 pupils had vanished from schools in Bradford. Mr Balmforth suggested that every education authority in the country should be asked: "How many children did you lose last year? And where are they?"
The comments are telling, especially from local people:
"Bradford council refused to comment most probably because there are so few councillors that can speak English. I would be very surprised if Mr Balmforth ever returns to his role as he has committed the most heinous of hate crimes in this country today. He has turned over a rock and told us what **** under it, which this government absolutely hates".
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British child psychologist warns that digital-age children should be left to take risks
Asked by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown to investigate the new dangers to children being brought up in the digital age, Tanya Byron last week produced a 224-page report. The child psychologist's recommendations included a cinema-style system of classification for video games and a thorough public education campaign. However, she warns that protecting children against all risks stunts their development and an important part of growing up is learning to assess and deal with danger
Shortly before she published a report last week on keeping children safe in the online age, Dr Tanya Byron was invited to lunch with Gordon Brown at Chequers. It was a family affair: Byron, her husband Bruce, who plays DC Terry Perkins in The Bill, and their two children, Lily, 12, and Jack, 10, all went along. Lunch at the prime minister's country estate is the sort of occasion when any parent would want their little ones to be bright, presentable and on their best behaviour. But not even Byron, a child psychologist who has advised millions on parenting through her television series, is immune from modest rebellion.
"My son piped up just before we were going and he said, `Mummy, I could take my PlayStation and I could really make you scared in front of the prime minister'. He could. The prospect of son Jack smuggling in some dodgy game and whipping out his portable PlayStation to blast away in front of the prime minister had Byron "feeling slightly twitchy". That's not surprising given that she was about to advise Brown on how to protect young children from unsuitable computer material. But in typical calm style she simply said: "No, darling. You don't play those games, so let's not go there."
A tall, curvaceous woman with wide eyes and a warm smile, Byron must be as annoying as hell to all those postfeministas who say you can't have it all. She is clever, articulate, attractive and a natural performer, as well as being a mother and government adviser. Although most people know her from television programmes such as Little Angels and The House of Tiny Tearaways, she is no pop-psycho with more beauty than brains. She did her first degree at York, a masters at University College London and a doctorate at University College hospital and Surrey University. For 18 years she worked in the National Health Service, rising to be a consultant for children with severe mental disorders. She still works one day a week as a consultant in child mental health, although most of her time is taken up filming with the BBC.
Glamour, fame, acclaim - yet Byron, 41, also retains the common sense of an ordinary mum: making her the perfect candidate for a report into children growing up in a world where the risks, as well as benefits, of the internet and computer games are all-pervasive. "When I came to doing the report . . . concerns were very much fuelled by a lack of understanding of the technology. People were asking, is it all big, bad and scary out there? I know a lot more than I did six months ago. It's made me feel more positive and confident and less anxious."
Of course she recognises the dangers - from paedophiles to porn, violence and cyberbullying. In her report, which arrived with much ministerial fanfare last week, she carefully examines the scientific evidence about how children are affected by nasty computer games or hardcore porn. Research, she concludes, shows mixed results.
Although, for example, there is a correlation between aggression and playing violent computer games, it's not clear that there is a causal relationship - that violent games make children more violent. Convenient, since any kind of ban would be a political minefield. In person, though, she is more forthright. "I'm really clear that adult content is harmful and inappropriate for young children particularly," she says. "They do not have the neural networks in place to be able to critically evaluate the content, to differentiate fantasy from reality." Byron would like the law on such matters to be clearer and to be applied with more vigour: "I am saying clarify the law . . . be clear about when there is content on websites that is breaking the law."
She also encourages parents to challenge the classification of computer games if they think they are inappropriate: "It's important to have a system where there can be a challenge, where people can complain."
A less astute person might have let such conclusions suck them into recommending censorship of violent games or websites. Byron knows that won't work: "If you go down the censorship route, the content would still be there somewhere. Children would go online to websites outside the UK, to unmoderated sites." And parents, already struggling to keep up, might have even less idea what their youngsters are doing. "The rapid pace at which new media are evolving has left adults and children stranded either side of a generational digital divide," she says. Older people may still regard the internet as a parallel universe that somehow arrives through a machine at the office or home, but for youngsters it's a seamless part of their lives. They are the cyborg generation.
The answer, Byron believes, is to trust in the better side of human nature. Families can navigate the risks provided they are informed and sensible. "I'm more of a `half-full' girl than a `half-empty' girl. That's how I like to live life," she explains. Her report, which runs to more than 200 pages, is packed with recommendations some of which the government has promised to adopt. Key measures include a UK council on child internet safety to develop voluntary codes of practice for the industry and better information for the public; teaching adults about "parental control" systems on computers; a new classification of computer games like those used for films; and courses in schools to teach children "e-safety".
It's hard to argue against any of it (although whether the portly public sector needs yet another quango is debatable). Byron, using common sense, already regulates her children's use of computers: "They don't have a computer in their own rooms. We have got some in the office and one downstairs in the kitchen. Gaming and going online is good . . . but in a way that is right for their age and stage of development. It's something you do after your homework. It never takes place instead of a family meal. When my son is gaming and I'm cooking, he's there and I know what he's doing."
Her daughter, two years older, is given more leeway and Byron admits that she does not know exactly what her daughter does online: "We have a good relationship and I respect her privacy. In the same way I don't know entirely what's in her diary. But I know my child; I know when something has upset them or when they are distressed." They talk, they work it out, just as they would some other problem. That, in a nutshell, is how Byron believes parents should approach bringing up children in the digital age. You can buy software to block websites, you can spy on children's internet history, you can restrict access when they are young - but in the end children are going to go out into the big wide world and need to be able to look after themselves.
"We live in a risk-averse culture, but risk is a developmental imperative of childhood and I think we need to recognise that. It's about fostering the independent child. What I want to get across is that [dealing with the online world] is similar to how we would parent children in the offline world."
That old world has its own temptations, for adults as well as children. It's clear that Byron enjoys the cameras and corridors of power: "I really like advising politicians. I really liked saying to the PM this morning, `The UK child internet safety council, you set it up, we could take a global lead, what do you reckon?' And he says, `Okay'."
Is she going to be on the internet safety council? "Oh no," she laughs. "I'm outta here. It's all about kids for me. I'd much rather work on behalf of children." So she doesn't want to be a politician? She gives that big disarming smile again: "Do you know, I really like advising them . . ." She has already become too much of a politician to say no.
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British policy advisor says Gore is in 'panic' mode
British environmental analyst Christopher Monckton says Al Gore's latest attack on global warming skeptics shows the former vice president and other climate alarmists are "panicking." On Sunday, CBS News correspondent Leslie Stahl asked Al Gore on the television show 60 Minutes what he thinks of people like Vice President Dick Cheney who doubt that global warming is caused by human activity. "I think that those people are in such a tiny, tiny minority now with their point of view, they're almost like the ones who still believe that the moon landing was staged in a movie lot in Arizona, and those who believe the earth is flat," replied Gore. "That demeans them a little bit, but it's not that far off."
However, Lord Christopher Monckton, a policy advisor for former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher during the 1980s, says the former vice president can enjoy his "flat earth fantasies" for a few months, but in the end, the world will be laughing at him. "The alarmists are alarmed, the panic mongers are panicking, the scare mongers are scared; the Gores are gored. Why? Because global warming stopped ten years ago; it hasn't got warmer since 1998," he points out. "And in fact in the last seven years, there has been a downturn in global temperatures equivalent on average to about [or] very close to one degree Fahrenheit per decade. We're actually in a period ... of global cooling."
Monckton contends Gore is now "panicking" because he has staked his reputation as a former American VP on "telling the world that we're all doomed unless we shut down 90 percent of the Western economies." He also contends that Gore is the largest "global-warming profiteer."
Gore's group The Alliance for Climate Protection is currently launching a new $300 million ad campaign that demands reforms in environmental law to help reduce the supposed "climate crisis." But Monckton points out that in the U.K., Gore is not allowed to speak in public about his "green investment company" because to do so would violate racketeering laws by "peddling a false prospectus." He says that fact came about after a British high court found Gore's movie, An Inconvenient Truth, riddled with errors. Monckton challenged Gore to an internationally televised debate on climate change last year.
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FOOD MILES ARE JUST A FORM OF PROTECTIONISM
Middle-class neurosis is being exploited to protect an archaic form of agriculture
By Dominic Lawson
Was Prince Charles' chum Patrick Holden, director of the Soil Association, expecting the Kenyan High Commissioner to fall to his knees in gratitude? It rather sounded like it yesterday morning, when the two of them met in a BBC radio studio.
They were there to discuss the Soil Association's proposals to discriminate against the "organic food" which is air freighted into this country, mostly from East Africa. "One option was to ban it altogether," declared Mr Holden, but instead he and his colleagues had decided that such food would only be banned if it was "not produced ethically" - whatever that means.
Of course, this is folie de grandeur on the part of the Soil Association. It cannot, fortunately, "ban" us from buying whatever food we wish to eat. All that Mr Holden really meant was that his organisation would withdraw its certification from foreign farmers whom it deemed to be "unethical". Needless to say, British organic farmers (like Mr Holden CBE) will be subject to no such extra conditions, over and above the standard requirement of not using pesticides or other man-made aids to enhance production.
In so far as this is not just old-style agricultural protectionism, it is all about the fashionable obsession with "food miles". The Soil Association, which evidently sees itself as some sort of global environmental organisation, has been agonising over the fact that the farmers of Africa are using aeroplanes - spawn of the devil! - to freight bona fide "organic" food into this country. Somehow it has convinced itself that this means that the food is not "organic", in the spiritual sense, and so must be "banned".
As the Kenyan High Commissioner, Joseph Muchemi, patiently tried to explain, the carbon emissions from his country's food producers are much less per vegetable than those of British "organic" farmers, even if you factor in the CO2 generated by flying the stuff halfway across the world. "Our farmers use manual labour, not tractors; we use compost rather than organic fertilisers," he said.
For some reason, Mr Holden did not want to address this powerful point; instead he asserted that there was really no case at all for "global trade in food", although he allowed that an exception could be made for "things like tea, coffee and bananas - things we can't produce ourselves".
This is the classic argument put by British landowners for the extortion of a monopoly rent from captive local consumers. The great Scottish economist Adam Smith delivered a withering retort to such selfish domestic agricultural interests over two centuries ago: "By means of glasses, hotbeds and hotwalls very good grapes can be raised in Scotland ... would it be a reasonable law to prohibit the importation of all foreign wines, merely to encourage the making of Claret and Burgundy in Scotland?"
This sort of thinking lay behind the recent creation of the Icelandic banana industry: the Icelandic government banned banana imports, as a result of which local landowners began to produce them in gigantic greenhouses. They were fabulously expensive, of course, which was not such good news for families who wished to feed their children healthily at a reasonable cost.
Similarly, there are tiny hobby producers of tea and coffee in Great Britain. In Patrick Holden's perfect deglobalised world, we could do with these products what the Icelanders did with bananas. Obviously this would mean that tea and coffee could be enjoyed only by the rich in this country, and Third World producers would suffer a dramatic loss of revenue and employment. This might seem a preposterous example of "self-sufficiency". Yet if we were to allow a fetish with the carbon emissions from airfreight to dominate agricultural policy, then this is the sort of mutual impoverishment that could result.
Let us, for the sake of argument, accept that the Soil Association's members are not merely acting as a trade union for Prince Charles' Duchy Originals and assorted other quaintly expensive British food producers. Let us accept, therefore, that in implementing some sort of discriminatory policy against long-distance air-freighted food, they really do believe that they are trying to "limit the damage of climate change".
Surely it ought to have occurred to them that they will only be hurting the very people whom they affect to be concerned about? After all, it is Africa, not Great Britain, which would suffer from a significant increase in average temperatures - whether caused by man or nature.
As Clare Malamed of the charity Action Aid has pointed out, the "banning of organic green beans from Kenya or mange tout from Zambia" will make no measurable difference to the UK's carbon emissions: "however, there are many poor people in Africa who depend on that trade so, for them, banning organic air freight means less development of the economy and more poverty". Mr Holden complained yesterday that many of the African food exporters are "multinationals"; but even multinationals employ locals.
There is something else quite odd about the Soil Association's position. Its members assert that "organic food" is healthier for the consumer than food which is produced with the aid of pesticides. If they are right, then if low-cost African producers can land such "good" food in this country at a price which is competitive with non-organic local producers, this ought to encourage more people to buy organic, to the great benefit of the public's health.
In fact there has never been any reliable scientific evidence that so-called "organic" food is actually better for you than food produced with the aid of pesticides. At the weekend, the former head of the Food Standards Agency, Lord Krebs, wearily reiterated that there was no such evidence. Thus last year David Miliband spoke nothing less than the truth when, as Environment Secretary, he described "organic" food as a "lifestyle choice".
On the whole it is a "lifestyle choice" limited to middle-class mothers in the South-east of England who are neurotic enough to believe the insinuations of the Soil Association that little Henry and Caroline are more likely to get cancer if mummy doesn't buy organic (at twice the price).
Now another largely middle-class neurosis - we are all doomed unless everybody stops flying! - is being exploited to protect an archaic form of agriculture which could never feed this country, still less the world. It is, at best, an exercise in self-delusion. At worst, it is a way of using food as the instrument of a deliberate policy of racial discrimination.
Source
Another useless (Sorry: "underqualified") Muslim doctor in Britain
And the hospital he worked in was a mess too
A consultant radiologist who wrongly gave the all-clear to 20 breast cancer patients was yesterday suspended from practising for 12 months. One woman died after the misdiagnosis by Amjad Husien was not spotted for three months. A General Medical Council panel ruled he "repeatedly failed to provide an acceptable level of care to patients" in his breast imaging work at Trafford general hospital.
Husien's breast scan mistakes led to a review of almost 2,500 mammograms at Trafford and North Manchester general hospital, where he also worked. A total of 176 women had to be recalled and retested after the mistakes were identified in April 2005. Husien, who worked at Trafford general for two years, was subsequently suspended on full pay.
A month after his suspension, a report revealed his probable error rate in taking breast scans at Trafford General was 11.3%.The panel said this was "inadequate, inappropriate, not in the patients' best interest and not of a standard expected of a reasonably competent consultant radiologist". Husien told the hearing he would never work in breast radiology again and would give written undertakings that would safeguard patients.
Dr Richard Campbell, the retired medical director at Trafford general, gave evidence about the "dysfunctional" radiology department. He said it had serious clinical failings and that Husien was working under difficult conditions as he was the sole breast radiologist. A report by Professor Mark Baker on behalf of NHS North West into the misreadings ruled that Husien's failure was "compounded by systematic weaknesses in Trafford NHS trust".
In a statement, the trust said: "We can confirm that ... breast diagnosis is no longer carried out at Trafford Healthcare NHS Trust. We are pleased to report that shortly after Dr Husien's suspension we recruited two experienced consultant radiologists who are still with us."
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Wednesday, April 02, 2008
UK's Sir David King Embarrassed by Skeptical Scientists
Britain's Cambridge university has recently appointed Britain's chief climate alarmist to a prestigious position. Below is a letter written by Britain's Rupert Wyndham about the matter. The letter was in response to a request for donations from his University Master. Wyndham explains a few facts to the Master as to why donations might not be forthcoming this year
31 March 2008.
Lord Butler, Master University College Oxford
Dear Robin
Thank you for your letter last week on the subject of fund raising for the College. When last we exchanged correspondence about this, attention was drawn to the fact that contributions had been made on a number of occasions in the past, and I looked forward to gifting further in the future. However, as I also mentioned, just at this precise moment, I am already fairly heavily committed. In short, there are a dozen small (and now not so small) waifs in Chiangmai, orphaned by AIDS but not themselves carriers of the virus, who depend on me directly for a significant part of their welfare, especially educational.
There is, however, another factor, which I should like to draw to your attention. I ask your indulgence if this letter turns out to be a little long, but think you'll see why. Anyway, a little background history is called for.
Four years ago Dr. Andrei Ilarionov, then chief economic adviser to Vladimir Putin, decided to cross check the advice coming to him from the Russian Academy of Sciences on the subject of global warming. Its members had opined that it would not be significant and would pose no threat. To this end, and here I quote from an impeccable source, "he looked around for the sappiest, laziest, most acquiescent, most true-elieving government in the world, and settled upon the UK.."
The then Foreign Secretary was invited to a meeting avec entourage, including the then Chief Scientific Adviser, Sir David King. Unbeknown to them, six of the world's most eminent sceptical scientists had also been invited. Let me continue by further quoting my source:
Fortuitously, it just so happens that I am a child of empire, one of the last, and this rings a bell entirely personal to me. You see, as a small boy in either Kenya or Uganda, I remember Kilimanjaro (as well as what I now know to be the Furtwangler Glacier) being discussed at my father's dinner table. Of course, I do not remember the detail of the grown-up conversation nor would I have understood it all, but its essence I do remember. It was a speculation about the apparent diminution of ice at the summit. So, to return:
I will not comment on the conclusion contained in the last sentence, save to say that it wouldn't surprise me any more than would the indented part of paragraph 2 above.
So, what is the point of all this? The point is a simple one. It is that anthropogenic global warming, now spun to climate change, has not a scintilla of authentic scientific evidence to support it. Likewise, there is not a scintilla of authentic scientific evidence to support the plethora of catastrophic phantasmagoria which the likes of David King and Al Gore are determined to promote as fact. In other words, King, himself a distinguished chemist if not scientist, is content not simply to watch the corruption of scientific method, and therefore the scientific endeavour generally, but to act as an enthusiastic participant. This issue, we are admonished ad nauseam, is the defining challenge to the species in the 21st century.
Intellectually, however, it is no more than a vast inverted pyramid constructed on the summit of a sand dune. Let me go a step further and suggest that it is so manifestly shoddy, mendacious and corrupt that it is simply not possible for AGW science to be pursued disinterestedly and with honesty of purpose. At a macro level, Nigel Lawson has called for the dissolution of the IPCC. He's right to do so.
You may or may not agree with the proposition just put, but it represents my carefully considered conviction and, moreover, I believe it to be supremely important on many levels. I am not alone.
So, where does that leave us or, more accurately, where does it leave me? Well, I find myself confronted with an uncomfortable dilemma. In general terms, do I consider that donating to the University in one guise or another is `a good thing'? Yes, of course. Do I, on the other hand, really feel in good conscience that financial support should be given to an institution, which not only promotes the self-preening of a vain man, but actually goes further by installing him in a sinecure calculated to allow him to further his malignant proselytising endeavours.
No doubt, in the fullness of time, the ethical conundrum will resolve itself in my mind - perhaps to the benefit of the university and/or college, perhaps not. Either way, in purely monetary terms, the effect will be insignificant. In the long run, I am not so sure that that it will remain so with regard to the appointment of the Director of the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment at the University of Oxford. We shall see.
Yours sincerely
R.C.E. Wyndham
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UK Muslim Bus Driver Kicks Passengers Off Bus...So He Can Pray!
I'm not sure this story is a good idea so soon after the Fitna flap that had Ace so exercised, but maybe this could act as a good test post. There is nothing wrong with objecting to unreasonable intrusions of religion in public life, and that's what, IMHO this is:
Perhaps they were being paranoid. But as one person said in the comment section: "You can't fault anyone for not wanting to get back on after the rucksack came out - the London bombings are still very much with the general public and it is a legitimate concern that we all have to live with. The world IS a much different place post 9-11/7-7."
Also, judging from the comments, people would very much like to see this bus driver "sacked". I totally agree.
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Britain introduces new visa system for highly skilled workers
Professionals and highly-skilled persons willing to migrate to Britain will have to apply for visa under the new points-based system which comes into force in India from Tuesday. The point-based system-Tier 1 (PBS-TO), which covers highly skilled migrants, entrepreneurs, investors, and graduate students, replaces the Highly Skilled Migrant Programme, the Entrepreneur and Investor schemes and the International Graduates. The initial visa will be granted for three years as against two years under the previous systems.
India, Britain's most important market for highly skilled migrants, will be the first country where the new visa regime is being introduced from tomorrow. "The roll-out for rest of the world will take place in summer," a British High Commission statement said.
The new system is expected to make the visa process easier for legitimate travellers and tough for those intending to cheat the system of immigration and ensure that unwanted outsiders do not enter Britain and settle there. Anybody trying to cheat the system will be banned from applying for a visa for 10 years.
Under the PBS-TO, visa applicants will need sufficient points to qualify. Points are awarded for objective criteria such as qualifications, previous earnings, age and UK experience, the statement said. "The new system allows those wanting to work in Britain to calculate, before they make their application, whether their points add up to entry as highly-skilled worker," British High Commissioner to India Richard Stagg said.
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Immigration doesn't benefit Britain
By Philip Johnston
For those of us who have felt unsettled, or even alarmed, by the exceptional scale of recent immigration to the United Kingdom, there has been one argument that has been difficult to rebut. It was, indeed, the very justification for the Government's immigration policy, if it deserves to be so described: without the foreign workers who have poured in over the past 10 years, both legally and illegally, economic growth would have stalled and we would be a less prosperous nation.
The highest levels of immigration by far in our history may well have had other deleterious impacts, including that on the country's cultural cohesion and, self-evidently, on the public services and infrastructure, strained by the rising population, and even the reintroduction of some serious diseases, such as TB, which had all but been eradicated. But we were assured by ministers and proponents of large-scale immigration, including business leaders and union bosses, that these were more than outweighed by the economic benefits that have accrued to the nation
The problem with this argument is that it is not true, but it was difficult to prove its falsity because no authoritative study able to command widespread acceptance had been undertaken to test its veracity. Well, now one has. The economic affairs committee of the House of Lords will report tomorrow after a three-month inquiry. This committee includes Lords Lawson and Lamont, former Chancellors of the Exchequer; Lords MacGregor and Wakeham, former cabinet ministers; Lords Layard and Skidelsky, eminent economists; Lords Turner and Paul from the world of commerce and industry; and other former Labour ministers and senior politicians. They took voluminous quantities of evidence from a wide variety of parties, ranging from the Government to academics, demographers and pressure-group campaigners. Anyone who attended the hearings can testify to the rigorous nature of their investigation.
We already know the general tenor of their report, and it would be a surprise, given the evidence, if they were to conclude anything other than that the economic benefits of immigration to the country as a whole have been marginal, even non-existent. This is not to say that nobody benefits. Clearly an immigrant who earns far more than at home gains, and his remittances will help his family and his country's economy.
So, too, do householders who pay a plasterer/nanny/plumber half the amount they would to a domestic worker. So, also, does the employer whose costs are cut by using cheaper labour. I have never understood the enthusiasm of the trade unions for large-scale immigration since it depresses wages, but they may judge that more low-paid workers mean more members. Furthermore, there is obviously a need for foreign companies based in Britain to bring in their own skilled workers and managers to run their operations, which also adds to immigration, though these incomers rarely settle, but move back home or to another country.
While all these factors can be said to point to the advantages of immigration in specific spheres, it is not the same as saying that immigration benefits the country as a whole because some, usually the poor, lose out to the competition; and, as output rises, it is consumed by the larger population. Taking all this into account, the Lords committee is expected to conclude that "the economic benefits of net immigration to the resident population are small and close to zero in the long run".
This key conclusion demolishes the Government's case for large-scale immigration. If it has not been to the economic benefit of the resident population, what has been its purpose? The truth is that the Government simply lost control and then sought to make a virtue out of doing so by concocting a spurious economic case in its defence. Last autumn, in evidence to the committee, a joint study by the Home Office and the Office for National Statistics said immigration boosted GDP by œ6 billion in 2006, which sounds impressive but is irrelevant since it also added to the population. On a per capita basis, the increase in economic output could be measured in pence.
The Government report also said that migrants are more diligent and more reliable than British-born workers. This may be true and a lot of employers will concur. Yet with more than one million young people on benefits and out of work, should ways not have been found to get them into jobs first, by reforming welfare so that it does not pay to stay at home while a job is taken by a migrant worker? Most of the jobs created in recent years have gone to foreign workers, many of whom, since 2004, have been from the new EU countries in eastern Europe to which Britain opened its labour markets, unlike other major economies.
The only other justification for large-scale immigration is that it is good to have lots of different - and often very enterprising - people in the country from all over the world because they enrich our society. I would go along with that, though it is not difficult to do so living in London, which has always been one of the world's most cosmopolitan cities.
On a small and crowded island, boosting the population from 60 million to 70 million by 2030, almost entirely as a result of immigration, as official figures forecast, is a serious matter (especially when, as we report today, decision-making is hamstrung because we can't be sure it hasn't already happened). Did the Government take a decision in 1997 that the British population was not growing rapidly enough and that, for the long-term economic betterment of the country, it had to be boosted by roughly one sixth in just over 30 years? If so, it passed everyone by.
It was never debated by Parliament or put to the people in a general election. When there was an attempt to raise the issue in the 2001 election campaign, the Government cynically played the race card to close the debate down. Yet it could be argued that the changes to Britain engineered by mass immigration will be Labour's most enduring legacy.
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NHS dentists not paid to work -- so they don't
Health service dentists have been forced to go on holiday or spend time on the golf course this month despite millions of patients being denied dental care. Many have fulfilled their annual work quotas allotted by the National Health Service and have been turning patients away because they are not paid to do extra work. This is despite the fact that more than 7m people in Britain are unable to find an NHS dentist.
Patients have been told they must either pay privately or return in April when the new work year begins. People suffering from toothache have been advised to go to hospital. Areas affected include Merseyside, Derbyshire, Birmingham and East Sussex. Eddie Crouch, secretary of the Birmingham local dental committee, estimates that up to a third of dentists in the West Midlands have run out of work or have had to reduce the number of NHS patients they treat. “Patients in pain have had to shop around to find a dentist that has not used up their quota,” he said.
The British Dental Association fears that other dentists have been unable to meet their quotas and will be forced to pay back thousands of pounds to the NHS. The health department says dentists should have managed their workload throughout the year.
Source
Hopeless Brits still cannot run an airport terminal: "Five days after Terminal Five opened, ministers criticised anger at the chaos which has engulfed the multi-billion pound facility, while it also emerged that the turmoil had triggered a diplomatic incident. "It is extremely regrettable to say the least that passengers using T5 have had to suffer an unacceptably poor travel experience," Aviation Minister Jim Fitzpatrick told the House of Commons. British Airways - the only airline using the new terminal - cancelled another 54 flights on Monday after a nightmare weekend, while a spokesman said another 50 flights will be cancelled on Tuesday. "We continue to work towards increasing the number of services we are operating to and from Terminal 5 in the days ahead," he said. Terminal Five has been blighted by logistical troubles ever since it opened to much fanfare on Thursday, with problems compounded by a major computer glitch in the luggage handling system. The luggage backlog has so far grown to 28,000 bags, and could take up to a week to return them to owners, the minister said. Earlier BA said there were 15,000, while the BBC published photos of the bags piled on top of each other. BA chief executive Willie Walsh was forced to make his second apology in three days on Sunday, as the airline scrapped dozens of flights over the weekend."
Britain's Cambridge university has recently appointed Britain's chief climate alarmist to a prestigious position. Below is a letter written by Britain's Rupert Wyndham about the matter. The letter was in response to a request for donations from his University Master. Wyndham explains a few facts to the Master as to why donations might not be forthcoming this year
31 March 2008.
Lord Butler, Master University College Oxford
Dear Robin
Thank you for your letter last week on the subject of fund raising for the College. When last we exchanged correspondence about this, attention was drawn to the fact that contributions had been made on a number of occasions in the past, and I looked forward to gifting further in the future. However, as I also mentioned, just at this precise moment, I am already fairly heavily committed. In short, there are a dozen small (and now not so small) waifs in Chiangmai, orphaned by AIDS but not themselves carriers of the virus, who depend on me directly for a significant part of their welfare, especially educational.
There is, however, another factor, which I should like to draw to your attention. I ask your indulgence if this letter turns out to be a little long, but think you'll see why. Anyway, a little background history is called for.
Four years ago Dr. Andrei Ilarionov, then chief economic adviser to Vladimir Putin, decided to cross check the advice coming to him from the Russian Academy of Sciences on the subject of global warming. Its members had opined that it would not be significant and would pose no threat. To this end, and here I quote from an impeccable source, "he looked around for the sappiest, laziest, most acquiescent, most true-elieving government in the world, and settled upon the UK.."
The then Foreign Secretary was invited to a meeting avec entourage, including the then Chief Scientific Adviser, Sir David King. Unbeknown to them, six of the world's most eminent sceptical scientists had also been invited. Let me continue by further quoting my source:
"Sir David King, not realizing he had been ambushed, launched into his usual exaggerated, alarmist presentation (he actually knows remarkably little about the science of climate, and makes an ass of himself every time he opens his mouth on the subject).
The six sceptics heard him politely until one of them, who told me the story, could contain himself no longer. When Sir David said that the snows of Kilimanjaro were melting because of "global warming", my informant pointed out that, in the 30 years since satellite monitoring of the summit had begun, temperature had at no instant risen above -1.6oC, and had averaged -7oC (Molg et al., 2003); that the region around the mountain had cooled throughout the period (Cullen, 2006); that the recession of the glacier had begun in the 1880s, long before any anthropogenic influence (Robinson, Robinson & Soon, 2007); and that the reason for the long-established recession of the Furtwangler glacier at the summit was ablation caused by the desiccation of the atmosphere owing to the regional cooling. It had nothing to do with global warming."
Fortuitously, it just so happens that I am a child of empire, one of the last, and this rings a bell entirely personal to me. You see, as a small boy in either Kenya or Uganda, I remember Kilimanjaro (as well as what I now know to be the Furtwangler Glacier) being discussed at my father's dinner table. Of course, I do not remember the detail of the grown-up conversation nor would I have understood it all, but its essence I do remember. It was a speculation about the apparent diminution of ice at the summit. So, to return:
"Sir David King, embarrassed at having been caught out, said he had never been so insulted in all his life. He flounced out of the meeting, followed by the rest of the British delegation. To Dr. Ilarionov, two conclusions were evident: first, that the supporters of the "consensus" position had based their argument on known scientific falsehoods and were accordingly unable to argue against the well-informed sceptics; secondly, that, as he put it at the time, the British Government were behaving like old-style imperialists. The breakdown in relations between the UK and Russia began at that moment."
I will not comment on the conclusion contained in the last sentence, save to say that it wouldn't surprise me any more than would the indented part of paragraph 2 above.
So, what is the point of all this? The point is a simple one. It is that anthropogenic global warming, now spun to climate change, has not a scintilla of authentic scientific evidence to support it. Likewise, there is not a scintilla of authentic scientific evidence to support the plethora of catastrophic phantasmagoria which the likes of David King and Al Gore are determined to promote as fact. In other words, King, himself a distinguished chemist if not scientist, is content not simply to watch the corruption of scientific method, and therefore the scientific endeavour generally, but to act as an enthusiastic participant. This issue, we are admonished ad nauseam, is the defining challenge to the species in the 21st century.
Intellectually, however, it is no more than a vast inverted pyramid constructed on the summit of a sand dune. Let me go a step further and suggest that it is so manifestly shoddy, mendacious and corrupt that it is simply not possible for AGW science to be pursued disinterestedly and with honesty of purpose. At a macro level, Nigel Lawson has called for the dissolution of the IPCC. He's right to do so.
You may or may not agree with the proposition just put, but it represents my carefully considered conviction and, moreover, I believe it to be supremely important on many levels. I am not alone.
So, where does that leave us or, more accurately, where does it leave me? Well, I find myself confronted with an uncomfortable dilemma. In general terms, do I consider that donating to the University in one guise or another is `a good thing'? Yes, of course. Do I, on the other hand, really feel in good conscience that financial support should be given to an institution, which not only promotes the self-preening of a vain man, but actually goes further by installing him in a sinecure calculated to allow him to further his malignant proselytising endeavours.
No doubt, in the fullness of time, the ethical conundrum will resolve itself in my mind - perhaps to the benefit of the university and/or college, perhaps not. Either way, in purely monetary terms, the effect will be insignificant. In the long run, I am not so sure that that it will remain so with regard to the appointment of the Director of the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment at the University of Oxford. We shall see.
Yours sincerely
R.C.E. Wyndham
Source
UK Muslim Bus Driver Kicks Passengers Off Bus...So He Can Pray!
I'm not sure this story is a good idea so soon after the Fitna flap that had Ace so exercised, but maybe this could act as a good test post. There is nothing wrong with objecting to unreasonable intrusions of religion in public life, and that's what, IMHO this is:
The white Islamic convert rolled out his prayer mat in the aisle and knelt on the floor facing Mecca. Passengers watched in amazement as he held out his palms towards the sky, bowed his head and began to chant. One guy whipped out his cell phone to videotape the special moment from outside the bus. The video can be viewed at The Sun Online.
"Eventually everyone started complaining. One woman said, `What the hell are you doing? I'm going to be late for work'."
After a few minutes the driver calmly got up, opened the doors and asked everyone back on board. But when the already unnerved passengers saw the driver's rucksack on the floor, they refused to get back on. "One chap said, `I'm not getting on there now'". "An elderly couple also looked really confused and worried.
"After seeing that no-one wanted to get on he drove off and we all waited until the next bus came about 20 minutes later. I was left totally stunned. It made me not want to get on a bus again."
Perhaps they were being paranoid. But as one person said in the comment section: "You can't fault anyone for not wanting to get back on after the rucksack came out - the London bombings are still very much with the general public and it is a legitimate concern that we all have to live with. The world IS a much different place post 9-11/7-7."
Also, judging from the comments, people would very much like to see this bus driver "sacked". I totally agree.
Source
Britain introduces new visa system for highly skilled workers
Professionals and highly-skilled persons willing to migrate to Britain will have to apply for visa under the new points-based system which comes into force in India from Tuesday. The point-based system-Tier 1 (PBS-TO), which covers highly skilled migrants, entrepreneurs, investors, and graduate students, replaces the Highly Skilled Migrant Programme, the Entrepreneur and Investor schemes and the International Graduates. The initial visa will be granted for three years as against two years under the previous systems.
India, Britain's most important market for highly skilled migrants, will be the first country where the new visa regime is being introduced from tomorrow. "The roll-out for rest of the world will take place in summer," a British High Commission statement said.
The new system is expected to make the visa process easier for legitimate travellers and tough for those intending to cheat the system of immigration and ensure that unwanted outsiders do not enter Britain and settle there. Anybody trying to cheat the system will be banned from applying for a visa for 10 years.
Under the PBS-TO, visa applicants will need sufficient points to qualify. Points are awarded for objective criteria such as qualifications, previous earnings, age and UK experience, the statement said. "The new system allows those wanting to work in Britain to calculate, before they make their application, whether their points add up to entry as highly-skilled worker," British High Commissioner to India Richard Stagg said.
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Immigration doesn't benefit Britain
By Philip Johnston
For those of us who have felt unsettled, or even alarmed, by the exceptional scale of recent immigration to the United Kingdom, there has been one argument that has been difficult to rebut. It was, indeed, the very justification for the Government's immigration policy, if it deserves to be so described: without the foreign workers who have poured in over the past 10 years, both legally and illegally, economic growth would have stalled and we would be a less prosperous nation.
The highest levels of immigration by far in our history may well have had other deleterious impacts, including that on the country's cultural cohesion and, self-evidently, on the public services and infrastructure, strained by the rising population, and even the reintroduction of some serious diseases, such as TB, which had all but been eradicated. But we were assured by ministers and proponents of large-scale immigration, including business leaders and union bosses, that these were more than outweighed by the economic benefits that have accrued to the nation
The problem with this argument is that it is not true, but it was difficult to prove its falsity because no authoritative study able to command widespread acceptance had been undertaken to test its veracity. Well, now one has. The economic affairs committee of the House of Lords will report tomorrow after a three-month inquiry. This committee includes Lords Lawson and Lamont, former Chancellors of the Exchequer; Lords MacGregor and Wakeham, former cabinet ministers; Lords Layard and Skidelsky, eminent economists; Lords Turner and Paul from the world of commerce and industry; and other former Labour ministers and senior politicians. They took voluminous quantities of evidence from a wide variety of parties, ranging from the Government to academics, demographers and pressure-group campaigners. Anyone who attended the hearings can testify to the rigorous nature of their investigation.
We already know the general tenor of their report, and it would be a surprise, given the evidence, if they were to conclude anything other than that the economic benefits of immigration to the country as a whole have been marginal, even non-existent. This is not to say that nobody benefits. Clearly an immigrant who earns far more than at home gains, and his remittances will help his family and his country's economy.
So, too, do householders who pay a plasterer/nanny/plumber half the amount they would to a domestic worker. So, also, does the employer whose costs are cut by using cheaper labour. I have never understood the enthusiasm of the trade unions for large-scale immigration since it depresses wages, but they may judge that more low-paid workers mean more members. Furthermore, there is obviously a need for foreign companies based in Britain to bring in their own skilled workers and managers to run their operations, which also adds to immigration, though these incomers rarely settle, but move back home or to another country.
While all these factors can be said to point to the advantages of immigration in specific spheres, it is not the same as saying that immigration benefits the country as a whole because some, usually the poor, lose out to the competition; and, as output rises, it is consumed by the larger population. Taking all this into account, the Lords committee is expected to conclude that "the economic benefits of net immigration to the resident population are small and close to zero in the long run".
This key conclusion demolishes the Government's case for large-scale immigration. If it has not been to the economic benefit of the resident population, what has been its purpose? The truth is that the Government simply lost control and then sought to make a virtue out of doing so by concocting a spurious economic case in its defence. Last autumn, in evidence to the committee, a joint study by the Home Office and the Office for National Statistics said immigration boosted GDP by œ6 billion in 2006, which sounds impressive but is irrelevant since it also added to the population. On a per capita basis, the increase in economic output could be measured in pence.
The Government report also said that migrants are more diligent and more reliable than British-born workers. This may be true and a lot of employers will concur. Yet with more than one million young people on benefits and out of work, should ways not have been found to get them into jobs first, by reforming welfare so that it does not pay to stay at home while a job is taken by a migrant worker? Most of the jobs created in recent years have gone to foreign workers, many of whom, since 2004, have been from the new EU countries in eastern Europe to which Britain opened its labour markets, unlike other major economies.
The only other justification for large-scale immigration is that it is good to have lots of different - and often very enterprising - people in the country from all over the world because they enrich our society. I would go along with that, though it is not difficult to do so living in London, which has always been one of the world's most cosmopolitan cities.
On a small and crowded island, boosting the population from 60 million to 70 million by 2030, almost entirely as a result of immigration, as official figures forecast, is a serious matter (especially when, as we report today, decision-making is hamstrung because we can't be sure it hasn't already happened). Did the Government take a decision in 1997 that the British population was not growing rapidly enough and that, for the long-term economic betterment of the country, it had to be boosted by roughly one sixth in just over 30 years? If so, it passed everyone by.
It was never debated by Parliament or put to the people in a general election. When there was an attempt to raise the issue in the 2001 election campaign, the Government cynically played the race card to close the debate down. Yet it could be argued that the changes to Britain engineered by mass immigration will be Labour's most enduring legacy.
Source
NHS dentists not paid to work -- so they don't
Health service dentists have been forced to go on holiday or spend time on the golf course this month despite millions of patients being denied dental care. Many have fulfilled their annual work quotas allotted by the National Health Service and have been turning patients away because they are not paid to do extra work. This is despite the fact that more than 7m people in Britain are unable to find an NHS dentist.
Patients have been told they must either pay privately or return in April when the new work year begins. People suffering from toothache have been advised to go to hospital. Areas affected include Merseyside, Derbyshire, Birmingham and East Sussex. Eddie Crouch, secretary of the Birmingham local dental committee, estimates that up to a third of dentists in the West Midlands have run out of work or have had to reduce the number of NHS patients they treat. “Patients in pain have had to shop around to find a dentist that has not used up their quota,” he said.
The British Dental Association fears that other dentists have been unable to meet their quotas and will be forced to pay back thousands of pounds to the NHS. The health department says dentists should have managed their workload throughout the year.
Source
Hopeless Brits still cannot run an airport terminal: "Five days after Terminal Five opened, ministers criticised anger at the chaos which has engulfed the multi-billion pound facility, while it also emerged that the turmoil had triggered a diplomatic incident. "It is extremely regrettable to say the least that passengers using T5 have had to suffer an unacceptably poor travel experience," Aviation Minister Jim Fitzpatrick told the House of Commons. British Airways - the only airline using the new terminal - cancelled another 54 flights on Monday after a nightmare weekend, while a spokesman said another 50 flights will be cancelled on Tuesday. "We continue to work towards increasing the number of services we are operating to and from Terminal 5 in the days ahead," he said. Terminal Five has been blighted by logistical troubles ever since it opened to much fanfare on Thursday, with problems compounded by a major computer glitch in the luggage handling system. The luggage backlog has so far grown to 28,000 bags, and could take up to a week to return them to owners, the minister said. Earlier BA said there were 15,000, while the BBC published photos of the bags piled on top of each other. BA chief executive Willie Walsh was forced to make his second apology in three days on Sunday, as the airline scrapped dozens of flights over the weekend."
Tuesday, April 01, 2008
British government in illegal immigrants cover-up
Hundreds of illegal immigrants - including a suspected murderer and other criminals - are working in care homes in Britain, a leaked Home Office report has disclosed. In some homes more than half the employees have entered the country illegally and are now being entrusted with caring for old and vulnerable people. The immigration intelligence report found that one illegal worker was a murder suspect from the Philippines and others had been involved in the "abuse and mistreatment" of elderly people.
The report, which was produced more than two years ago, warned that the problems were "widespread" and "significant". But officials say its findings have been ignored. "Very few of these cases are acted on," one official said. "Ministers have turned a blind eye in the obscene interests of costs. These cases are not seen as a priority and most of them simply go to the bottom of the pile."
The leak follows the fiasco last year when Jacqui Smith, the home secretary, admitted that more than 11,000 illegal immigrants had been cleared to work as security guards. It also comes as Gordon Brown prepares to launch his flagship UK Border Agency, which is designed to bolster the country's protection from illegal immigrants, terrorists and other criminals.
David Davis, the shadow home secretary, said: "The Home Office is turning a blind eye and allowing some of the most vulnerable people to be put in the care of people who by definition cannot have a criminal records check."
The 22-page intelligence report examined 110 investigations into the employment of suspected illegal immigrants in care homes in the south and southwest of England. The situation was so bad, the report notes, that "there is potential for embarrassment if the immigration service is not seen to be actively addressing this issue". Many of the illegal workers were using false names and forged identity documents to bypass police criminal records checks. The suspected Filipino murderer had used fraudulent references to get a job at a care home in Plymouth.
The report discloses that Home Office ministers had failed to tackle the problem because most of the illegal care home workers were from countries such as Zimbabwe, Nigeria and South Africa, which were not on the priority list identifying those who should be targeted. This restriction "does not allow the immigration service to take any form of action", it says. Offenders are rarely brought to court because of a lack of resources. "There is no deterrent factor for those involved in these activities," the report states.
One of the few prosecutions was a case in Nottingham in 2001 when an illegal immigrant was jailed for raping a woman in his care. The woman could not speak and had the mental ability of a three-year-old. The report, which has been leaked by Whitehall officials exasperated that little has been done about the problem, reveals:
- that 58 of 113 employees of a firm running two homes in Hampshire and Wiltshire were suspected illegal offenders;
- that 36 of 58 people at a Southampton care agency were working illegally, mostly using fake identity papers;
- and that 22 of 55 foreign nationals who applied for employment through a Salisbury agency were immigration offenders
The document says the proliferation of untrained and unqualified illegal migrants, many with unknown backgrounds, poses a direct risk to some of the estimated 480,000 elderly and vulnerable people in the 21,000 care homes in England and Wales. It states: "The severity of the reported incidents varies, ranging from care workers not being suitably qualified, to the abuse of clients within their care. If this is allowed to continue without action all have the potential to be damaging to the public and media perception of the immigration service."
Mark Hammond, of the PCS union, which represents 2,000 immigration officials, said: "This report exposes the government's big lie. There are not enough resources to enforce immigration law because of budgetary constraints and activity is set to decrease not increase, due to cuts in duties scheduled for weekends. Vitally important work won't be actioned and vulnerable people will be at risk."
The report found that there were so many illegal immigrants in two care homes in Bristol that a proposed operation at Christmas by the Home Office to arrest them was cancelled because it would have involved the removal of the majority of staff. The Home Office feared there would be "negative publicity" if it was held responsible for leaving old people without care.
Liam Byrne, the immigration minister, said controls had been tightened up since the report. "Every visa applicant is now fingerprinted before they reach here, ID cards become compulsory for all foreign nationals from November and œ10,000 on-the-spot fines are now in place for any illegal workers."
The report, however, blames government policy for the lack of action. "The predominant nationalities identified working illegally within the care industry do not necessarily correspond with current national priorities for enforcement action," it says.
Source
It's all too easy to get into Britain
People flock to Britain because its system of visas and social benefits are skewed in favour of those entering Britain
Last week's report by the Independent Asylum Commission, which describes our asylum system as "shameful", flies in the face of reality. It's almost as if the former appeal court judge Sir John Waite is pulling our legs. His conclusion - that the UK's treatment of asylum seekers falls "seriously below" the standards of a civilised society and that our treatment of them has "blemished" our international reputation - is, to say the least, a slight exaggeration.
Indeed it was only last month that the government proposed tightening immigration laws relating to asylum, citizenship and visas because it is felt - with justification - that too many people from abroad are taking advantage of our welcome and hospitality. This is borne out by Migration Watch UK's prediction that more than 2m people will arrive in the UK every 10 years for the foreseeable future - taking our population to 65m by 2016. Even the Home Office's own figures note that the UK has the third-largest foreign population and labour force in the European Union - currently about 2.2m.
It's not exactly hard to come to the UK. A couple of years ago a close friend of mine who was getting married decided to invite an uncle over from Punjab, in India. The uncle duly received an invitation and a sponsorship form and within a few weeks had obtained a visa from the British high commission in Delhi. Just like that.
There don't seem to be any stringent checks on foreigners arriving here. And various independent investigations - including one by the BBC's Panorama programme - have already documented how easy it is to obtain visas and British passports by duplicitous means.
You would think that when so many people in Britain are concerned about the polarisation of communities and the erosion of a single national and cultural identity, that there would be some joined-up thinking. Surely, you might surmise, the government and the Foreign Office are singing from the same hymn sheet. Alas, you'd be wrong. Although Gordon Brown's administration talks about tightening existing laws, it doesn't seem to convey this to the visa sections in British consulates and embassies around the world - least of all in the Indian subcontinent.
It's quite simple, really: if our government wants to control immigration and asylum, it needs to design a robust and consistent policy for entry, visas and deportation of failed applications for asylum - and this then has to be communicated to all relevant agencies. Soundbites about our rotten treatment of asylum seekers may help to win elections but they don't safeguard the interests of the country at large.
Before Waite described our nation as "shameful", perhaps he should have talked to ordinary people to get a real sense of what most of us feel about the existing asylum system. Perhaps he could have explained to them why some asylum seekers, allegedly fleeing for their lives, are crossing countries and even continents to get to the UK (surely, if you are genuinely seeking safety, you would ask for haven in the nearest country).
As everyone seems to know - except Waite - people flock here because our system of issuing visas and our social benefits system are skewed in favour of those entering Britain. However, unlike his commission, British people know full well when their hospitality and their country's welfare system are being abused and exploited.
Back to my friend and his relative. Surprisingly, his uncle missed the wedding and instead turned up a few days later. A couple of weeks on, he asked to be shown the wonderful sights of our country. My friend did as much as he could, showing him around London, Manchester, Stratford-upon-Avon, the Lake District and north Wales. Eventually he had to say: "I'm sorry but I can't keep taking you around because we can't afford it." His uncle took offence. "Well, then," he said, "get me a job so I can earn some money of my own." Anyone who comes over on a tourist visa, of course, cannot work here legally. Naturally, my friend - being a pillar of the community - declined to help, explaining to his uncle that he too would be breaking the law if he helped him to find illegal employment. Rather miffed, his uncle decided to move in with another relative in Middlesex.
Almost a year later, my friend spoke to the relative who had taken him in. This man said that he had given the uncle many hints about going home to India - but he just didn't take any notice. Apparently, six months is the minimum period for a tourist visa. Why, the uncle's new host asked plaintively, are tourists given such a long period of stay in this country?
As many British Asians know only too well, living with visitors with whom you have little in common can be a nightmare. Getting them to go home is almost impossible. Indeed the uncle's host said he felt as though he was living in the Big Brother house with a guest from hell. So you can imagine how flabbergasted he was when the uncle suggested at the end of the six months that he wanted to extend his stay. No way, thought his host, who then helped him pack his bags and ordered a taxi to the airport.
This is quite a typical scenario. In other parts of our communities, "arranged" marriages are nothing more than economic contracts that enable young men from the Indian subcontinent to stay in Britain. Even so-called spiritual guides, such as the Sikh a cousin of mine once invited over, can be suspect. After six months the guru suddenly told my cousin that he was being persecuted in India - for being a Sikh. And, yes, he wanted to apply for political asylum.
It was like a sketch from Goodness Gracious Me. Yet the guru was serious: he knew that if he lodged an application for asylum, it might be years before the government heard his case. In the meantime he'd be free to do as he pleased. The next day he did a runner. Thus a Sikh who had nothing to complain about in his native land became one of the 60,000 people who, according to Migration Watch UK, enter this country every year on a visitor's visa and then disappear. Most visitors from the Indian subcontinent, I'm afraid, will do whatever they can to stay in the UK. Maybe Sir John Waite could consider making that the subject of his next commission
Source
Doctors take heartless NHS to court
A group representing nearly 1,000 doctors is preparing to mount a legal action against the health service to stop care being withdrawn from patients who want to pay for their own cancer medicines. It is seeking a judicial review of the Department of Health policy that forces patients to pay for all their treatment if they buy any additional medicine.
Many patients would like to buy extra drugs that are not offered as part of their treatment because the National Health Service has ruled that the benefits do not justify the costs. The government fears that if patients make the purchases, called co-payments, it will lead to a “two-tier” NHS.
Doctors for Reform believes patients should be given the freedom to choose. Its intervention follows a campaign by The Sunday Times highlighting the plight of breast cancer sufferers denied the opportunity to improve their chances by paying privately for drugs.
Last December we reported the case of Colette Mills, a breast cancer sufferer from Stokesley in North Yorkshire, who was told that if she topped up her medication with privately bought drugs she would have to pay for her entire treatment – about £10,000 a month. The Department of Health has issued guidance to health trusts warning them that co-payments are not allowed. In December Alan Johnson, the health secretary, reiterated the rules.
Doctors for Reform has teamed up with Halliwells, the law firm, to challenge the ruling. Halliwells is offering its services free as the doctors are trying to raise £35,000 in donations towards government legal fees if they lose. The doctors point out that examples of co-payments already exist in the NHS, for instance in dental care.
Dr Christoph Lees, a steering group member, said: “Doctors are caught in a terrible dilemma: do you tell a patient about a drug that could improve their quality of life, or do you pretend it doesn’t exist?”
Another cancer patient, Debbie Hirst, 56, from St Ives, Cornwall, began legal action against her local NHS trust to win the right to pay for the drug Avastin. Legal judgment was averted when the trust decided to treat Hirst as a special case and paid for the medicine.
Source
No privacy for role-playing games?
We read:
I have no idea what kinky sex is all about. I must have been born without that gene. Nonetheless, a liking for it seems to be very common -- particularly in Britain. And strange garb and stranger games are apparently a common part of it. And according to a now generally accepted defence of homosexuality, what you do between consenting adults in the privacy of your own bedroom is no business of anybody else. So how did this guy go wrong? Why is he being called on to resign?
Incidentally, Sir Oswald Mosley remained a British patriot both before and during WWII. Leftists generally were patriotic once. Sir Oswald left the British Labour party and founded the British Union of Fascists because the Labour party was not socialist enough for him.
West slowly awakening from suicidal slumber?
It is, by any measure, a sunny day when moralising elites are forced to eat their words. Only a few short years ago many were busily deriding Australia as an "international pariah" on immigration. Indeed, only last year our new citizenship test was labelled as nasty stuff by people such as journalist David Marr and former Liberal PM Malcolm Fraser.
Enter the British Labour Government, which last month announced its intention to introduce tough new citizenship tests and, get this, bring in immigration controls "based on the Australian model". Far from pariah-dom, Australia is a role model on how to control immigration and integrate migrants. More important, as Western nations learn from one another, each new step taken looks more confident and assertive than the previous one.
Finally, perhaps, the West is realising, as Britain's Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks said late last year, that "it is confidence in your own heritage that allows you to be generous to those of another heritage".
Old ideas that should have never been discarded are being revisited. Although the Brown Government is pitching this as a "vision of British citizenship for the 21st century", it is, in reality, an old one. Prime Minister Gordon Brown's vision of British citizenship as one "founded on a unifying idea of rights matched with responsibilities" marks a long overdue turning point in Western thinking, a return to more sensible times where basic Western values were asserted with confidence.
For the past few decades, the progressive fad of minority rights, fuelled by multiculturalism, has flourished. Once a hard form of multiculturalism took root, one that treated all cultures as equal, the values of the host country were effectively under attack. Cultural relativism morphed into a virulent strand of Western self-loathing where tolerance was reinterpreted to mean tolerating those intolerant of Western culture and values. Brown's reforms are aimed at overturning that rights fetish, a counterproductive and indeed dangerously one-sided notion where people could demand of the state but the state could not demand of them.
These days the multiculti crowd is dwindling to a few stragglers. But they include people who should know better. Last month, Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the spiritual leader of the world's 77 million Anglicans, called for the introduction of some aspects of sharia law into Britain and told the BBC that Muslims should not be required to choose between "the stark alternatives of cultural loyalty and state loyalty".
The cultural loyalty that Williams robustly defended explains why parts of British society are already unofficially dispensing their own form of sharia law. A few weeks ago London's Daily Mail exposed how parallel courts were operating in Sheffield, Milton Keynes, Manchester, Dewsbury, Birmingham and other towns settled by the 43,000-strong Somali population. Violence within the Somali community is dealt with by groups of elders who meet to hand out punishments in the form of an apology and compensation to the victim. Aydraus Hassan, a Somali youth worker from Woolwich, told the Daily Mail that families rarely called in the police because they preferred their own system of justice. "This is how we have dealt with crime since the 10th century. This is something we can sort out for ourselves," he said.
Cultural loyalty also explains the heartbreaking reports of female genital mutilation among African communities in Britain. Last month, a Liverpool newspaper reported that, despite new laws to prohibit FGM, up to 90 per cent of women in some ethnic communities are mutilated. African tribal elders are being flown into Britain to perform the mutilation. This is happening under the noses of authorities for the simple reason that Western nations such as Britain succumbed to the scourge of cultural relativism where migrants were allowed to openly spurn Western values.
Brown's reforms are a small but important step in reasserting the traditional three-way contract: majority tolerance, minority loyalty and government vigilance in both directions. That contract, well understood by migrants in the 1950s and '60s when they arrived with a sense of obligation to the new country, knowing what was expected of them, was scuppered by multiculturalism. In a sign that the British Government is finally learning the lessons of the past three decades of multicultural mayhem, the 60-page green paper published by Home Secretary Jacqui Smith mentions the M-word only once, as follows, quoting from an Aberdeen participant: "Multiculturalism is a two-way street; they must accept us and change too."
As Brown outlined in his speech in London to launch the reforms, British citizenship will depend on migrants entering into a contract where rights are matched with responsibilities. For example, he says, people are protected from crime but in return agree to obey the law. People can expect and receive services but in return will pay their fair share of taxes and have an obligation to work. Britain will support families but will expect families to take care of their own. Importantly, the Brown Government will consider amending its Human Rights Act to create a new British bill of rights and responsibilities that will detail "not just what people are entitled to but what they are expected to do in return".
In line with Brown's notion of "earned citizenship", a new category of probationary citizens will not be entitled to full rights associated with citizenship. The Brown Government will explore whether some services - such as the right to post-18 education, the right to public housing and social security benefits - will apply only on full citizenship. Probationary citizens will be required to donate to a fund to help finance local public services.
The Brown Government's reforms are an acknowledgment of the "progressive dilemma" - the conflict between solidarity and diversity - outlined a few years ago by David Goodhart, editor of the progressive Prospect. Coming from a member of the Left, Goodhart's observations packed a punch. He talked about us not just living among strangers but having to share with them. "All such acts of sharing are more smoothly and generously negotiated if we can take for granted a limited set of common values and assumptions," he said.
The changes outlined by Brown are unashamedly about cementing solidarity, outlining a common identity and expecting migrants to sign on to the traditional social contract in an era of globalisation where more and more people born in one country want to live in another. It is Goodhart's thesis writ large and long overdue.
That Western governments are forced to articulate the importance of Western values and the traditional social contract tells you how far these core principles fell into disrepair. But at least, finally, it suggests that the West is slowly waking from its suicidal slumber.
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BRAVE GREEN WORLD: CLIMATE HYSTERIA HITTING EUROPEANS HARD
It will cost every household in the UK at least 2,000 pounds to comply with the new European Union target of producing 15 per cent of all energy from renewable sources by 2020, according to a report commissioned by the government. The report also says the UK will have to spend far more to meet the target than other EU countries, because the UK lags behind the rest of Europe on renewables and is a heavy energy user.
According to energy consultancy Poyry, the bill for the UK to meet the target would be at least 5 billion euros a year for more than a decade, compared with just over 3bn a year for France and Germany, and well under 500m for most other countries. Energy companies are expected to pass on to consumers - who already face soaring utility bills - the costs of building the necessary wind farms, biomass plants and solar generators.
Chris Goodall, author of How to Live a Low-Carbon Life, says even these estimates are conservative, and fail to take into account the huge investment needed to connect new renewable and micro-generators to the national grid.
A government spokeswoman admitted that meeting the EU target would be challenging, but added: 'We must make these hard choices if we are to tackle climate change.'
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Socialist Britain now too poor to fix its potholes: "When is a pothole in the road not a pothole? When it is less than 4cm deep, according to new guidelines that have been adopted by cash-strapped councils across Britain. The councils are this weekend accused of contributing to the "chronic disrepair" of UK roads by redefining the size of potholes that they are obliged to fill. More than 20 local authorities are cutting road maintenance bills by refusing to repair potholes less than 4cm deep. Some councils have doubled the size of "actionable" potholes in recent years. The revelation comes ahead of a comprehensive survey of Britain's roads, which will this week reveal that local authorities are facing a shortfall of more than 1 billion pounds as they attempt to fill in 1 million potholes a year."
Hundreds of illegal immigrants - including a suspected murderer and other criminals - are working in care homes in Britain, a leaked Home Office report has disclosed. In some homes more than half the employees have entered the country illegally and are now being entrusted with caring for old and vulnerable people. The immigration intelligence report found that one illegal worker was a murder suspect from the Philippines and others had been involved in the "abuse and mistreatment" of elderly people.
The report, which was produced more than two years ago, warned that the problems were "widespread" and "significant". But officials say its findings have been ignored. "Very few of these cases are acted on," one official said. "Ministers have turned a blind eye in the obscene interests of costs. These cases are not seen as a priority and most of them simply go to the bottom of the pile."
The leak follows the fiasco last year when Jacqui Smith, the home secretary, admitted that more than 11,000 illegal immigrants had been cleared to work as security guards. It also comes as Gordon Brown prepares to launch his flagship UK Border Agency, which is designed to bolster the country's protection from illegal immigrants, terrorists and other criminals.
David Davis, the shadow home secretary, said: "The Home Office is turning a blind eye and allowing some of the most vulnerable people to be put in the care of people who by definition cannot have a criminal records check."
The 22-page intelligence report examined 110 investigations into the employment of suspected illegal immigrants in care homes in the south and southwest of England. The situation was so bad, the report notes, that "there is potential for embarrassment if the immigration service is not seen to be actively addressing this issue". Many of the illegal workers were using false names and forged identity documents to bypass police criminal records checks. The suspected Filipino murderer had used fraudulent references to get a job at a care home in Plymouth.
The report discloses that Home Office ministers had failed to tackle the problem because most of the illegal care home workers were from countries such as Zimbabwe, Nigeria and South Africa, which were not on the priority list identifying those who should be targeted. This restriction "does not allow the immigration service to take any form of action", it says. Offenders are rarely brought to court because of a lack of resources. "There is no deterrent factor for those involved in these activities," the report states.
One of the few prosecutions was a case in Nottingham in 2001 when an illegal immigrant was jailed for raping a woman in his care. The woman could not speak and had the mental ability of a three-year-old. The report, which has been leaked by Whitehall officials exasperated that little has been done about the problem, reveals:
- that 58 of 113 employees of a firm running two homes in Hampshire and Wiltshire were suspected illegal offenders;
- that 36 of 58 people at a Southampton care agency were working illegally, mostly using fake identity papers;
- and that 22 of 55 foreign nationals who applied for employment through a Salisbury agency were immigration offenders
The document says the proliferation of untrained and unqualified illegal migrants, many with unknown backgrounds, poses a direct risk to some of the estimated 480,000 elderly and vulnerable people in the 21,000 care homes in England and Wales. It states: "The severity of the reported incidents varies, ranging from care workers not being suitably qualified, to the abuse of clients within their care. If this is allowed to continue without action all have the potential to be damaging to the public and media perception of the immigration service."
Mark Hammond, of the PCS union, which represents 2,000 immigration officials, said: "This report exposes the government's big lie. There are not enough resources to enforce immigration law because of budgetary constraints and activity is set to decrease not increase, due to cuts in duties scheduled for weekends. Vitally important work won't be actioned and vulnerable people will be at risk."
The report found that there were so many illegal immigrants in two care homes in Bristol that a proposed operation at Christmas by the Home Office to arrest them was cancelled because it would have involved the removal of the majority of staff. The Home Office feared there would be "negative publicity" if it was held responsible for leaving old people without care.
Liam Byrne, the immigration minister, said controls had been tightened up since the report. "Every visa applicant is now fingerprinted before they reach here, ID cards become compulsory for all foreign nationals from November and œ10,000 on-the-spot fines are now in place for any illegal workers."
The report, however, blames government policy for the lack of action. "The predominant nationalities identified working illegally within the care industry do not necessarily correspond with current national priorities for enforcement action," it says.
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It's all too easy to get into Britain
People flock to Britain because its system of visas and social benefits are skewed in favour of those entering Britain
Last week's report by the Independent Asylum Commission, which describes our asylum system as "shameful", flies in the face of reality. It's almost as if the former appeal court judge Sir John Waite is pulling our legs. His conclusion - that the UK's treatment of asylum seekers falls "seriously below" the standards of a civilised society and that our treatment of them has "blemished" our international reputation - is, to say the least, a slight exaggeration.
Indeed it was only last month that the government proposed tightening immigration laws relating to asylum, citizenship and visas because it is felt - with justification - that too many people from abroad are taking advantage of our welcome and hospitality. This is borne out by Migration Watch UK's prediction that more than 2m people will arrive in the UK every 10 years for the foreseeable future - taking our population to 65m by 2016. Even the Home Office's own figures note that the UK has the third-largest foreign population and labour force in the European Union - currently about 2.2m.
It's not exactly hard to come to the UK. A couple of years ago a close friend of mine who was getting married decided to invite an uncle over from Punjab, in India. The uncle duly received an invitation and a sponsorship form and within a few weeks had obtained a visa from the British high commission in Delhi. Just like that.
There don't seem to be any stringent checks on foreigners arriving here. And various independent investigations - including one by the BBC's Panorama programme - have already documented how easy it is to obtain visas and British passports by duplicitous means.
You would think that when so many people in Britain are concerned about the polarisation of communities and the erosion of a single national and cultural identity, that there would be some joined-up thinking. Surely, you might surmise, the government and the Foreign Office are singing from the same hymn sheet. Alas, you'd be wrong. Although Gordon Brown's administration talks about tightening existing laws, it doesn't seem to convey this to the visa sections in British consulates and embassies around the world - least of all in the Indian subcontinent.
It's quite simple, really: if our government wants to control immigration and asylum, it needs to design a robust and consistent policy for entry, visas and deportation of failed applications for asylum - and this then has to be communicated to all relevant agencies. Soundbites about our rotten treatment of asylum seekers may help to win elections but they don't safeguard the interests of the country at large.
Before Waite described our nation as "shameful", perhaps he should have talked to ordinary people to get a real sense of what most of us feel about the existing asylum system. Perhaps he could have explained to them why some asylum seekers, allegedly fleeing for their lives, are crossing countries and even continents to get to the UK (surely, if you are genuinely seeking safety, you would ask for haven in the nearest country).
As everyone seems to know - except Waite - people flock here because our system of issuing visas and our social benefits system are skewed in favour of those entering Britain. However, unlike his commission, British people know full well when their hospitality and their country's welfare system are being abused and exploited.
Back to my friend and his relative. Surprisingly, his uncle missed the wedding and instead turned up a few days later. A couple of weeks on, he asked to be shown the wonderful sights of our country. My friend did as much as he could, showing him around London, Manchester, Stratford-upon-Avon, the Lake District and north Wales. Eventually he had to say: "I'm sorry but I can't keep taking you around because we can't afford it." His uncle took offence. "Well, then," he said, "get me a job so I can earn some money of my own." Anyone who comes over on a tourist visa, of course, cannot work here legally. Naturally, my friend - being a pillar of the community - declined to help, explaining to his uncle that he too would be breaking the law if he helped him to find illegal employment. Rather miffed, his uncle decided to move in with another relative in Middlesex.
Almost a year later, my friend spoke to the relative who had taken him in. This man said that he had given the uncle many hints about going home to India - but he just didn't take any notice. Apparently, six months is the minimum period for a tourist visa. Why, the uncle's new host asked plaintively, are tourists given such a long period of stay in this country?
As many British Asians know only too well, living with visitors with whom you have little in common can be a nightmare. Getting them to go home is almost impossible. Indeed the uncle's host said he felt as though he was living in the Big Brother house with a guest from hell. So you can imagine how flabbergasted he was when the uncle suggested at the end of the six months that he wanted to extend his stay. No way, thought his host, who then helped him pack his bags and ordered a taxi to the airport.
This is quite a typical scenario. In other parts of our communities, "arranged" marriages are nothing more than economic contracts that enable young men from the Indian subcontinent to stay in Britain. Even so-called spiritual guides, such as the Sikh a cousin of mine once invited over, can be suspect. After six months the guru suddenly told my cousin that he was being persecuted in India - for being a Sikh. And, yes, he wanted to apply for political asylum.
It was like a sketch from Goodness Gracious Me. Yet the guru was serious: he knew that if he lodged an application for asylum, it might be years before the government heard his case. In the meantime he'd be free to do as he pleased. The next day he did a runner. Thus a Sikh who had nothing to complain about in his native land became one of the 60,000 people who, according to Migration Watch UK, enter this country every year on a visitor's visa and then disappear. Most visitors from the Indian subcontinent, I'm afraid, will do whatever they can to stay in the UK. Maybe Sir John Waite could consider making that the subject of his next commission
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Doctors take heartless NHS to court
A group representing nearly 1,000 doctors is preparing to mount a legal action against the health service to stop care being withdrawn from patients who want to pay for their own cancer medicines. It is seeking a judicial review of the Department of Health policy that forces patients to pay for all their treatment if they buy any additional medicine.
Many patients would like to buy extra drugs that are not offered as part of their treatment because the National Health Service has ruled that the benefits do not justify the costs. The government fears that if patients make the purchases, called co-payments, it will lead to a “two-tier” NHS.
Doctors for Reform believes patients should be given the freedom to choose. Its intervention follows a campaign by The Sunday Times highlighting the plight of breast cancer sufferers denied the opportunity to improve their chances by paying privately for drugs.
Last December we reported the case of Colette Mills, a breast cancer sufferer from Stokesley in North Yorkshire, who was told that if she topped up her medication with privately bought drugs she would have to pay for her entire treatment – about £10,000 a month. The Department of Health has issued guidance to health trusts warning them that co-payments are not allowed. In December Alan Johnson, the health secretary, reiterated the rules.
Doctors for Reform has teamed up with Halliwells, the law firm, to challenge the ruling. Halliwells is offering its services free as the doctors are trying to raise £35,000 in donations towards government legal fees if they lose. The doctors point out that examples of co-payments already exist in the NHS, for instance in dental care.
Dr Christoph Lees, a steering group member, said: “Doctors are caught in a terrible dilemma: do you tell a patient about a drug that could improve their quality of life, or do you pretend it doesn’t exist?”
Another cancer patient, Debbie Hirst, 56, from St Ives, Cornwall, began legal action against her local NHS trust to win the right to pay for the drug Avastin. Legal judgment was averted when the trust decided to treat Hirst as a special case and paid for the medicine.
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No privacy for role-playing games?
We read:
"The president of the body governing world motor racing - the son of a notorious wartime fascist - has allegedly been caught on video cavorting with prostitutes in a Nazi role-play sex game. Max Mosley - the son of British Union of Fascists party founder Oswald Mosley - was reported by the News of the World to have taken part in the sleazy scene at a London apartment.
A video on the News of the World's website shows a man identified as Mosley arriving at an apartment. The man is then greeted by a woman playing the role of a prison guard, checking his hair to see if he has been kept clean "at the other facility". Later, another woman in a prisoner's uniform enters the video and the man said to be Mosley is heard speaking German.
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I have no idea what kinky sex is all about. I must have been born without that gene. Nonetheless, a liking for it seems to be very common -- particularly in Britain. And strange garb and stranger games are apparently a common part of it. And according to a now generally accepted defence of homosexuality, what you do between consenting adults in the privacy of your own bedroom is no business of anybody else. So how did this guy go wrong? Why is he being called on to resign?
Incidentally, Sir Oswald Mosley remained a British patriot both before and during WWII. Leftists generally were patriotic once. Sir Oswald left the British Labour party and founded the British Union of Fascists because the Labour party was not socialist enough for him.
West slowly awakening from suicidal slumber?
It is, by any measure, a sunny day when moralising elites are forced to eat their words. Only a few short years ago many were busily deriding Australia as an "international pariah" on immigration. Indeed, only last year our new citizenship test was labelled as nasty stuff by people such as journalist David Marr and former Liberal PM Malcolm Fraser.
Enter the British Labour Government, which last month announced its intention to introduce tough new citizenship tests and, get this, bring in immigration controls "based on the Australian model". Far from pariah-dom, Australia is a role model on how to control immigration and integrate migrants. More important, as Western nations learn from one another, each new step taken looks more confident and assertive than the previous one.
Finally, perhaps, the West is realising, as Britain's Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks said late last year, that "it is confidence in your own heritage that allows you to be generous to those of another heritage".
Old ideas that should have never been discarded are being revisited. Although the Brown Government is pitching this as a "vision of British citizenship for the 21st century", it is, in reality, an old one. Prime Minister Gordon Brown's vision of British citizenship as one "founded on a unifying idea of rights matched with responsibilities" marks a long overdue turning point in Western thinking, a return to more sensible times where basic Western values were asserted with confidence.
For the past few decades, the progressive fad of minority rights, fuelled by multiculturalism, has flourished. Once a hard form of multiculturalism took root, one that treated all cultures as equal, the values of the host country were effectively under attack. Cultural relativism morphed into a virulent strand of Western self-loathing where tolerance was reinterpreted to mean tolerating those intolerant of Western culture and values. Brown's reforms are aimed at overturning that rights fetish, a counterproductive and indeed dangerously one-sided notion where people could demand of the state but the state could not demand of them.
These days the multiculti crowd is dwindling to a few stragglers. But they include people who should know better. Last month, Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the spiritual leader of the world's 77 million Anglicans, called for the introduction of some aspects of sharia law into Britain and told the BBC that Muslims should not be required to choose between "the stark alternatives of cultural loyalty and state loyalty".
The cultural loyalty that Williams robustly defended explains why parts of British society are already unofficially dispensing their own form of sharia law. A few weeks ago London's Daily Mail exposed how parallel courts were operating in Sheffield, Milton Keynes, Manchester, Dewsbury, Birmingham and other towns settled by the 43,000-strong Somali population. Violence within the Somali community is dealt with by groups of elders who meet to hand out punishments in the form of an apology and compensation to the victim. Aydraus Hassan, a Somali youth worker from Woolwich, told the Daily Mail that families rarely called in the police because they preferred their own system of justice. "This is how we have dealt with crime since the 10th century. This is something we can sort out for ourselves," he said.
Cultural loyalty also explains the heartbreaking reports of female genital mutilation among African communities in Britain. Last month, a Liverpool newspaper reported that, despite new laws to prohibit FGM, up to 90 per cent of women in some ethnic communities are mutilated. African tribal elders are being flown into Britain to perform the mutilation. This is happening under the noses of authorities for the simple reason that Western nations such as Britain succumbed to the scourge of cultural relativism where migrants were allowed to openly spurn Western values.
Brown's reforms are a small but important step in reasserting the traditional three-way contract: majority tolerance, minority loyalty and government vigilance in both directions. That contract, well understood by migrants in the 1950s and '60s when they arrived with a sense of obligation to the new country, knowing what was expected of them, was scuppered by multiculturalism. In a sign that the British Government is finally learning the lessons of the past three decades of multicultural mayhem, the 60-page green paper published by Home Secretary Jacqui Smith mentions the M-word only once, as follows, quoting from an Aberdeen participant: "Multiculturalism is a two-way street; they must accept us and change too."
As Brown outlined in his speech in London to launch the reforms, British citizenship will depend on migrants entering into a contract where rights are matched with responsibilities. For example, he says, people are protected from crime but in return agree to obey the law. People can expect and receive services but in return will pay their fair share of taxes and have an obligation to work. Britain will support families but will expect families to take care of their own. Importantly, the Brown Government will consider amending its Human Rights Act to create a new British bill of rights and responsibilities that will detail "not just what people are entitled to but what they are expected to do in return".
In line with Brown's notion of "earned citizenship", a new category of probationary citizens will not be entitled to full rights associated with citizenship. The Brown Government will explore whether some services - such as the right to post-18 education, the right to public housing and social security benefits - will apply only on full citizenship. Probationary citizens will be required to donate to a fund to help finance local public services.
The Brown Government's reforms are an acknowledgment of the "progressive dilemma" - the conflict between solidarity and diversity - outlined a few years ago by David Goodhart, editor of the progressive Prospect. Coming from a member of the Left, Goodhart's observations packed a punch. He talked about us not just living among strangers but having to share with them. "All such acts of sharing are more smoothly and generously negotiated if we can take for granted a limited set of common values and assumptions," he said.
The changes outlined by Brown are unashamedly about cementing solidarity, outlining a common identity and expecting migrants to sign on to the traditional social contract in an era of globalisation where more and more people born in one country want to live in another. It is Goodhart's thesis writ large and long overdue.
That Western governments are forced to articulate the importance of Western values and the traditional social contract tells you how far these core principles fell into disrepair. But at least, finally, it suggests that the West is slowly waking from its suicidal slumber.
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BRAVE GREEN WORLD: CLIMATE HYSTERIA HITTING EUROPEANS HARD
It will cost every household in the UK at least 2,000 pounds to comply with the new European Union target of producing 15 per cent of all energy from renewable sources by 2020, according to a report commissioned by the government. The report also says the UK will have to spend far more to meet the target than other EU countries, because the UK lags behind the rest of Europe on renewables and is a heavy energy user.
According to energy consultancy Poyry, the bill for the UK to meet the target would be at least 5 billion euros a year for more than a decade, compared with just over 3bn a year for France and Germany, and well under 500m for most other countries. Energy companies are expected to pass on to consumers - who already face soaring utility bills - the costs of building the necessary wind farms, biomass plants and solar generators.
Chris Goodall, author of How to Live a Low-Carbon Life, says even these estimates are conservative, and fail to take into account the huge investment needed to connect new renewable and micro-generators to the national grid.
A government spokeswoman admitted that meeting the EU target would be challenging, but added: 'We must make these hard choices if we are to tackle climate change.'
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Socialist Britain now too poor to fix its potholes: "When is a pothole in the road not a pothole? When it is less than 4cm deep, according to new guidelines that have been adopted by cash-strapped councils across Britain. The councils are this weekend accused of contributing to the "chronic disrepair" of UK roads by redefining the size of potholes that they are obliged to fill. More than 20 local authorities are cutting road maintenance bills by refusing to repair potholes less than 4cm deep. Some councils have doubled the size of "actionable" potholes in recent years. The revelation comes ahead of a comprehensive survey of Britain's roads, which will this week reveal that local authorities are facing a shortfall of more than 1 billion pounds as they attempt to fill in 1 million potholes a year."
