Eye on Britain
Wednesday, August 06, 2008
British government bans the word 'obese' to describe overweight children
How confused can you get? They want to harass kids into losing weight but don't want to hurt their feelings. What do they think the kids feel about being told that their weight is unacceptable?
Cotton wool kids
Children are being denied adventurous play because their parents are nervous about exposing them to risk, a new survey suggests. The UK-wide poll, commissioned by Play England, found half of 7-12 year olds have been stopped from climbing trees. It also showed 21% of those surveyed had been banned from playing conkers, and 17% were not allowed to play chase.
The ICM poll interviewed 1,030 children and young people aged 7-16, and 1,031 adults during July 2007. Play England, which says it promotes free play opportunities, insists that parents "constantly wrapping children in cotton wool" can harm the children's development.
The poll found showed 51% of children aged 7-12 were not allowed to climb a tree without adult supervision, with 49% stopped from climbing trees altogether because it was considered too dangerous.
According to the research, 70% of adults had their biggest childhood adventures outdoors among trees, rivers and woods, compared with only 29% of children today. It found children's experiences of adventure are confined to designated areas such as playgrounds (56%), their homes (48%) or theme parks (44%).
Adrian Voce, director of Play England, which is part of the charity National Children's Bureau, said playing was "an essential part of growing up". "Adventurous play both challenges and excites children and helps instil critical life skills," he said. "Constantly wrapping children in cotton wool can leave them ill equipped to deal with stressful or challenging situations they might encounter later in life. "Children both need and want to push their boundaries in order to explore their limits and develop their abilities."
The survey was carried out to mark Playday, the annual celebration of children's right to play, which is co-ordinated by Play England.
Source
Secret deal kept British Army out of battle for Basra: "A secret deal between Britain and the notorious al-Mahdi militia prevented British Forces from coming to the aid of their US and Iraqi allies for nearly a week during the battle for Basra this year, The Times has learnt. Four thousand British troops - including elements of the SAS and an entire mechanised brigade - watched from the sidelines for six days because of an "accommodation" with the Iranian-backed group, according to American and Iraqi officers who took part in the assault. US Marines and soldiers had to be rushed in to fill the void, fighting bitter street battles and facing mortar fire, rockets and roadside bombs with their Iraqi counterparts. Hundreds of militiamen were killed or arrested in the fighting. About 60 Iraqis were killed or injured. One US Marine died and seven were wounded. US advisers who accompanied the Iraqi forces into the fight were shocked to learn of the accommodation made last summer by British Intelligence and elements of al-Mahdi Army"
How confused can you get? They want to harass kids into losing weight but don't want to hurt their feelings. What do they think the kids feel about being told that their weight is unacceptable?
"Parents of primary schoolchildren will start getting letters next month telling them how fat their children are under Government plans to tackle childhood obesity. But however much they weigh, no child will ever be described as "obese".
The Department of Health faced criticism yesterday for a "prissy" approach to tackling obesity after it said that it did not want the term "obese" included in the letters.
The department said that research had shown that the term was a turn-off, so instead it will use the term "very overweight" for those children whose body mass index exceeds 30, in an attempt to enlist parents' support.
Source
Cotton wool kids
Children are being denied adventurous play because their parents are nervous about exposing them to risk, a new survey suggests. The UK-wide poll, commissioned by Play England, found half of 7-12 year olds have been stopped from climbing trees. It also showed 21% of those surveyed had been banned from playing conkers, and 17% were not allowed to play chase.
The ICM poll interviewed 1,030 children and young people aged 7-16, and 1,031 adults during July 2007. Play England, which says it promotes free play opportunities, insists that parents "constantly wrapping children in cotton wool" can harm the children's development.
The poll found showed 51% of children aged 7-12 were not allowed to climb a tree without adult supervision, with 49% stopped from climbing trees altogether because it was considered too dangerous.
According to the research, 70% of adults had their biggest childhood adventures outdoors among trees, rivers and woods, compared with only 29% of children today. It found children's experiences of adventure are confined to designated areas such as playgrounds (56%), their homes (48%) or theme parks (44%).
Adrian Voce, director of Play England, which is part of the charity National Children's Bureau, said playing was "an essential part of growing up". "Adventurous play both challenges and excites children and helps instil critical life skills," he said. "Constantly wrapping children in cotton wool can leave them ill equipped to deal with stressful or challenging situations they might encounter later in life. "Children both need and want to push their boundaries in order to explore their limits and develop their abilities."
The survey was carried out to mark Playday, the annual celebration of children's right to play, which is co-ordinated by Play England.
Source
Secret deal kept British Army out of battle for Basra: "A secret deal between Britain and the notorious al-Mahdi militia prevented British Forces from coming to the aid of their US and Iraqi allies for nearly a week during the battle for Basra this year, The Times has learnt. Four thousand British troops - including elements of the SAS and an entire mechanised brigade - watched from the sidelines for six days because of an "accommodation" with the Iranian-backed group, according to American and Iraqi officers who took part in the assault. US Marines and soldiers had to be rushed in to fill the void, fighting bitter street battles and facing mortar fire, rockets and roadside bombs with their Iraqi counterparts. Hundreds of militiamen were killed or arrested in the fighting. About 60 Iraqis were killed or injured. One US Marine died and seven were wounded. US advisers who accompanied the Iraqi forces into the fight were shocked to learn of the accommodation made last summer by British Intelligence and elements of al-Mahdi Army"
Tuesday, August 05, 2008
The British Left loves criminals and hates ordinary people
Families who overfill rubbish bins are to face bigger fines than those imposed on drunks or shoplifters, the government has told local authorities. New guidance instructs councils to impose fixed penalties of "not less than $150" and up to $220 in what the opposition has attacked as a "new stealth tax". The offences for which householders can be fined include leaving ajar the lid of a wheelie bin, putting out a bin the evening before collection or leaving the bin in the wrong place.
Although the government has previously claimed that it leaves local councils to decide on the level of fines, the Fly-capture Enforcement manual, produced by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, stipulates that fixed penalties for offencesinvolving "waste receptacles" must range from $150 to $220. It suggests a standard fixed penalty of $200, adding that "if a notice is not paid, it is essential it is followed up". The penalties are higher than the o80 on-the-spot fines levied by police for offences ranging from being drunk and disorderly to shoplifting.
Local councils have been sharply criticised for taking harsh measures against trivial misdemeanours. Earlier this year, Gareth Corkhill, a Cardiff bus driver, was given a criminal conviction after being taken to court when he refused to hand over a $220 on-the-spot fine by council inspectors who found the lid of his wheelie bin open by 4in.
Eric Pickles MP, the shadow local government secretary, said Labour was creating "an army of municipal bin bullies hitting law-abiding families with massive fines while professional criminals get the soft touch". He added: "It is clear Whitehall bureaucrats are instructing town halls to target householders with fines for minor breaches. "Yet with the slow death of weekly collections and shrinking bins, it is increasingly hard for families to dispose of their rubbish responsibly. It is fundamentally unfair that householders are now getting hammered with larger fines than shoplifters get for stealing."
The environment department, headed by Hilary Benn, said on-the-spot fines were "intended to be an alternative to prosecution". A spokesman said: "Local authorities wanted flexible fines that they can relate to the severity and frequency of the offence and offender. Ultimately the fines are there to act as a deterrent." According to Phil Woolas, the environment minister, local councils face extra costs of $6.4 billion over the next five years to fund recycling measures, which would equate to a $300 council tax increase.
Source
Huge monetary costs of NHS negligence
Despite the fact that most Brits are effectively discouraged from claiming and despite the fact that awards in Britain are usually only a tiny fraction of the equivalent in the USA
For Dr Spencer at his Norfolk surgery, the whoops-a-daisy moment came when he dosed a woman with bismuth. Startled by her dyspeptic response, and eager to reassure her increasingly agitated husband, he swallowed a spoonful of the stuff himself. "See? Perfectly safe!" Two things then happened: Dr Spencer vomited, fell down and lay writhing on the floor. His patient died.
The explanation was simple. As the doctor explained to the coroner, bismuth and strychnine look remarkably similar in the bottle and, well, mistakes do happen. At the subsequent trial for manslaughter, Mr Justice Willes agreed. A simple blunder, he said, was not in itself a criminal act. To secure a conviction, the crown would have to prove that the doctor's medicines were in such chaotic disorder that it was impossible for him to know which was which. Not guilty, said the jury.
That was in 1867. Legal actions against clinical killers then were exceedingly rare, and would remain so. By 1989 only six more doctors had been fingered for manslaughter - an average of one every 20 years. Then something changed. In the 1990s, 17 were prosecuted, and since 2000 there have been 11 more. One or two of them, like the Spencer case, were tales of startling improbability. A woman under anaesthetic was connected to an oxygen cylinder instead of to a ventilator and inflated like a balloon (the anaesthetist got six months' jail, suspended for 18 months). Mostly, however, they were mundane tragedies of misread notes, wrong drugs or lethal doses administered by exhausted, inexperienced or occasionally negligent practitioners who failed in the most basic of their responsibilities.
This relatively small number of headline cases, however, was only the tiny tip of a legal iceberg. It wasn't just the police and Crown Prosecution Service who were taking a more critical look at wards and clinics - it was the patients themselves. In England between 1990 and 1998, the rate of civil negligence claims against hospitals doubled, reaching a peak in 1998-9 of 6,168. If we didn't know them to be true, the numbers would strain credibility. The cost to the NHS of claims settled in 2006-7 was 579.3m pounds. In the same year it was hit by 5,426 new cases. The NHS Litigation Authority (NHSLA) estimates that the combined cost of settling all outstanding claims, including incidents so far unreported, will be 9.09 billion pounds.
Some of the settlements are whoppers - the actress Leslie Ash made headlines in January this year when she was awarded 5m pounds for the paralysing effects of the hospital "superbug" MRSA. The all-time record is the 12.4m paid last year to a professional dancer, Kerstin Parkin, who suffered brain damage from a heart attack during childbirth. Others by comparison are trifling - "a few hundred pounds for someone scratched during an operation" is one example offered by the NHSLA. But there is an important common factor, and it affects us all.
Paralysing tentacles of fear are now putting the squeeze on medical practice, and changing the way we are treated. Type the words "clinical negligence" or "no win, no fee" into Google and you'll see why - a clamorous pack of legal agencies and law firms who trade on the idea that every accident must be someone's fault. Some websites even provide interactive body maps showing the value of everything from an injured finger (1,000 to 75,000 pounds) to serious brain damage (millions). The come-on to patients is the promise of "no win, no fee". If the lawyer wins your case for you, he collects his fee in costs from the other side and you walk away with your damages in full. If he loses, he charges nothing. So, come on! What are you waiting for? Sue the doc!
Many cases in the past have been the medical equivalents of the time-honoured "slips and trips" actions against local authorities with bumpy pavements. Anyone coming out of hospital with a bruise or a sore eye they didn't go in with was encouraged to call a solicitor. The result was that lawyers' fees were often higher than the damages they won, and these in turn could be eroded by extra costs - medical reports by independent experts, for example - so that even successful litigants wound up out of pocket. According to the National Audit Office, legal and administrative costs exceed money paid to victims in most claims under 45,000. This is why Citizens Advice in 2004 published a 59-page report on personal-injury compensation under the title No Win, No Fee, No Chance.
As so often with the NHS, vice is the bastard child of virtue. "No win, no fee" deals, known in law as conditional-fee arrangements, were introduced by an amendment to the Courts and Legal Services Act in 1995. It was meant to be a double benefit. The courts would be opened up to those in the income trap who were ineligible for legal aid but unable to afford lawyers. The government itself would save money by effectively privatising legal aid. On the surface it looked like the long-overdue democratisation of civil justice.
But law firms are not charities. Working for nothing - pro bono - is not unknown, but it hardly stands as an ideal business model. If lawyers were to drop their fees when they lost, then they would need a bonus when they won. Recognising this, the law allows a "success fee" of up to double the normal scale. In clinical- negligence cases, when judgment favours the patient, this must be paid by the NHS, otherwise known as the taxpayer.
Given all this, the one surprise is that the number of cases each year is actually going down, albeit very slowly. The cost to the NHS nevertheless continues to rise. How can this be? Ironically, it is due in part to improvements in medicine that allow seriously damaged people - especially children - to survive for near-normal life spans. For this reason, courts are awarding much higher damages. Thirty years ago, for example, children suffering cerebral palsy in birth accidents might be expected to die. Now they can reach late middle age. Damages in such cases, which account for 60% of all claims the NHSLA faces, can run to 5m or more....
Walsh does not buy into the idea that avaricious lawyers alone are to blame for the escalating costs of clinical negligence, or even that the costs are excessive. "They come to well under 1% of the NHS budget," he says, "so the notion that claims are bleeding the NHS dry doesn't hold water." Furthermore, it's entirely reasonable for claimants' solicitors to charge more than their opponents do.
Apil's Amanda Stevens agrees. "It's much more costly to prepare evidence to prove a claim than it is to assemble evidence to knock it down," she says. The British public, too, is very far from the writ-happy mob of gold-diggers that the headlines often suggest. "They do not like making a claim." Every year, she says, around 800,000 "adverse clinical events" are recorded in the NHS, and many more - at least 20% - go unreported. Yet only 1% of the victims make a claim, and only 10% of these - ie, 0.1% of the total - get damages.
Thus if the NHSLA believes it is shelling out too much in costs, the remedy is in its own hands. It is a legal catch-22. The NHSLA is duty-bound to keep expense to a minimum, and therefore to challenge costs awarded against it. This means that more cases go to appeal and legal costs escalate. Peter Walsh invites the NHSLA to draw the obvious conclusion. "Stop arguing, admit fault and settle earlier without drawn-out legal wrangling," he says. "That alone would save millions of pounds."
Of all the ways to cut the costs of medical negligence, one stands out way above the others: avoid being negligent in the first place. The NHS needs literally to clean up its act. Here are some figures reported by Sir Liam Donaldson in 2003: 10% of hospital admissions may result in something going wrong; 5% of the entire population report "some adverse effects" of medical care; 18% of patients say they have been victims of "medication error" within the past two years. On top of all the traditional foul-ups - missed diagnoses, poor or inadequate treatment, slipped scalpels and lethal drug doses - now looms the utterly modern phenomenon of the drug-resistant hospital infection. As recently as February, the Department of Health thought it necessary to launch a national campaign against the over-prescription of antibiotics. "The more we take antibiotics when they are not necessary," said Donaldson, "the more bacteria will become resistant to them." Yet patients with runny noses still think they can be cured by them, and - for all that they know better - some doctors still go on doling them out.
The other thing that bacteria love is filth, and the ideal place to look for it is in an NHS hospital. The result is that there are now law firms claiming to specialise in hospital "superbug" cases, and the number of claims is multiplying like bacteria on a Petri dish. One of the most notorious cases involved the three hospitals administered by the Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust where, between April 2004 and September 2006, more than 1,170 patients were infected with Clostridium difficile. According to the Healthcare Commission's official report, about 90 people "definitely or probably died as a result of the infection". The commission's inspectors found that the hospitals were epidemics waiting to happen. Supposedly clean bedpans were contaminated with excrement. Nurses were not washing their hands, emptying commodes, cleaning mattresses and equipment, or wearing aprons and gloves. If there was a parlour game called "pass the bacteria", this is how you'd play it. The health secretary, Alan Johnson, described the episode as "scandalous", and Kent police are still weighing the possibility of prosecution.
Another NHS trust in trouble was Bromley, against which the commission issued an "improvement notice" in February. Inspectors found an absence of routine cleaning around beds in the wards; sterilising equipment not being properly used; dirty commodes marked clean and ready for use; a blood-culture bottle trolley thickly covered in dust, and more. One is always wary of generalising from the particular, but there is no reason to suppose that these two trusts are wholly out of the ordinary. In fact, there is every reason to think otherwise. In June the Healthcare Commission reported that 103 of the 391 primary-care and hospital trusts in England were not meeting statutory hygiene standards - a failure rate of over 25%. The nurses might not be washing their hands, but the lawyers sure as hell are rubbing theirs.
More here
Pesky British navy logbooks upset Greenies
Britain's great seafaring tradition is to provide a unique insight into modern climate change, thanks to thousands of Royal Navy logbooks that have survived from the 17th century onwards. The logbooks kept by every naval ship, ranging from Nelson's Victory and Cook's Endeavour down to the humblest frigate, are emerging as one of the world's best sources for long-term weather data. The discovery has been made by a group of British academics and Met Office scientists who are seeking new ways to plot historic changes in climate.
"This is a treasure trove," said Dr Sam Willis, a maritime historian and author who is affiliated with Exeter University's Centre for Maritime Historical Studies. "Ships' officers recorded air pressure, wind strength, air and sea temperature and other weather conditions. From those records scientists can build a detailed picture of past weather and climate."
A preliminary study of 6,000 logbooks has produced results that raise questions about climate change theories. One paper, published by Dr Dennis Wheeler, a Sunderland University geographer, in the journal The Holocene, details a surge in the frequency of summer storms over Britain in the 1680s and 1690s. Many scientists believe storms are a consequence of global warming, but these were the coldest decades of the so-called Little Ice Age that hit Europe from about 1600 to 1850.
Wheeler and his colleagues have since won European Union funding to extend this research to 1750. This shows that during the 1730s, Europe underwent a period of rapid warming similar to that recorded recently - and which must have had natural origins. Hints of such changes are already known from British records, but Wheeler has found they affected much of the north Atlantic too, and he has traced some of the underlying weather systems that caused it. His research will be published in the journal Climatic Change.
The ships' logs have also shed light on extreme weather events such as hurricanes. It is commonly believed that hurricanes form in the eastern Atlantic and track westwards, so scientists were shocked in 2005 when Hurricane Vince instead moved northeast to hit southern Spain and Portugal. Many interpreted this as a consequence of climate change; but Wheeler, along with colleagues at the University of Madrid, used old ships' logs to show that this had also happened in 1842, when a hurricane followed the same trajectory into Andalusia.
The potential of Royal Navy ships' logs to offer new insights into historic climate change was spotted by Wheeler after he began researching weather conditions during famous naval battles. Later, as global warming moved up the scientific agenda, he and others realised that the same data could shed light on historic climate change. He said: "British archives contain more than 100,000 Royal Navy logbooks from around 1670 to 1850 alone. They are a stunning resource."
Most of these earlier documents contain verbal descriptions of weather rather than numerical data, because ships lacked the instruments to take numerical readings. However, Wheeler and his colleagues found early Royal Navy officers recorded weather in consistent language. "It means we can deduce numerical values for wind strength and direction, temperature and rainfall," he said. The information will ultimately contribute to the International Comprehensive Ocean-Atmos-phere Data Set, a global database maintained by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, a US government agency.
Wheeler makes clear he has no doubts about modern human-induced climate change. [He would be out on his ear if he said otherwise] He said: "Global warming is a reality, but what our data shows is that climate science is complex and that it is wrong to take particular events and link them to CO2 emissions. These records will give us a much clearer picture of what is really happening."
The Met Office has also set up a project, part-funded by Defra, the environment ministry, to study 900 logbooks kept by the East India Company on voyages between Europe and the Far East between 1780 and 1840. Its vessels carried thermometers and barometers so the data is of higher quality.
Faced with logs taken over so many voyages, the researchers have had to be selective. One of the most avid recorders of such data was Nelson himself, whose personal logbook records the air pressure and other readings he took up to several times daily.
Source
A new British "university of life"
It is not so much a school for scoundrels as an academy to turn hooray Henrys into smart Alecs. A new "university of life" will teach its students how to talk at the dinner table, what books to read and how to sneer at British holidaymakers. A group of philosophers, actors, wits and businessmen has been assembled to offer courses on everything from sparkling table talk to French philosophy.
The School of Life, whose faculty includes Alain de Botton, the philosopher and author, and Luke Johnson, chairman of Channel 4, may appear to critics to be an attempt to bolt intellectual pretentiousness onto old-fashioned snobbery. Its backers, however, insist it will help clients who have been too busy in the pursuit of money to develop their social skills and intellectual depth. De Botton, author of How Proust Can Change Your Life, will offer students an insight into ways to revive a relationship, choose a good doctor, enjoy a holiday, make friends and respond to an insult.
Those who would be welcome to attend evening and weekend classes include Katie Price, the model and bestselling author also known as Jordan. Price said she was barred from part of the Cartier polo tournament at Windsor last weekend out of "pure snobbery".
The school, which opens in Bloomsbury in central London next month, was founded by Sophie Howarth, 33, a former curator at Tate Modern. "It is not a finishing school. Nor is it conventional evening classes," Howarth said. "We are going to be teaching essential stuff to bright people and acting as a travel agent for the mind. We are pitching at bright, busy people who want to make the most of their careers and lifestyles and limited time off. The etiquette lessons will not be about which spoon to use or how to fold a napkin but more a menu to good conversation."
Lessons in politics will examine the theories of philosophers from Plato to Karl Marx but will also look into whether it would be more politically effective to become a billionaire than prime minister.
Learning courses - which include lessons in love, work, family and play - will cost $400 a term, starting in September. Meals will cost $90 for three courses. There is also the opportunity for a "one-to-one" with an expert for $100 an hour and a chance to listen to a "sermon" from a guest speaker or go on specialised holidays with a guest lecturer. The "sermons" are not religious but will discuss modern ethics.
Experts such as Susan Elderkin, author of Sunset Over Chocolate Mountains, will give students a spot of "biblio-therapy" with tailored reading lists. Students will also be invited on field trips. De Botton will teach them the meaning of travel at Heathrow airport for two days for $600 a head; and Martin Parr, a photographer, will lead an expedition to the Isle of Wight to observe "the vulgarity, nostalgia and brashness of British holidaymaking in its full glory".
Source
Families who overfill rubbish bins are to face bigger fines than those imposed on drunks or shoplifters, the government has told local authorities. New guidance instructs councils to impose fixed penalties of "not less than $150" and up to $220 in what the opposition has attacked as a "new stealth tax". The offences for which householders can be fined include leaving ajar the lid of a wheelie bin, putting out a bin the evening before collection or leaving the bin in the wrong place.
Although the government has previously claimed that it leaves local councils to decide on the level of fines, the Fly-capture Enforcement manual, produced by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, stipulates that fixed penalties for offencesinvolving "waste receptacles" must range from $150 to $220. It suggests a standard fixed penalty of $200, adding that "if a notice is not paid, it is essential it is followed up". The penalties are higher than the o80 on-the-spot fines levied by police for offences ranging from being drunk and disorderly to shoplifting.
Local councils have been sharply criticised for taking harsh measures against trivial misdemeanours. Earlier this year, Gareth Corkhill, a Cardiff bus driver, was given a criminal conviction after being taken to court when he refused to hand over a $220 on-the-spot fine by council inspectors who found the lid of his wheelie bin open by 4in.
Eric Pickles MP, the shadow local government secretary, said Labour was creating "an army of municipal bin bullies hitting law-abiding families with massive fines while professional criminals get the soft touch". He added: "It is clear Whitehall bureaucrats are instructing town halls to target householders with fines for minor breaches. "Yet with the slow death of weekly collections and shrinking bins, it is increasingly hard for families to dispose of their rubbish responsibly. It is fundamentally unfair that householders are now getting hammered with larger fines than shoplifters get for stealing."
The environment department, headed by Hilary Benn, said on-the-spot fines were "intended to be an alternative to prosecution". A spokesman said: "Local authorities wanted flexible fines that they can relate to the severity and frequency of the offence and offender. Ultimately the fines are there to act as a deterrent." According to Phil Woolas, the environment minister, local councils face extra costs of $6.4 billion over the next five years to fund recycling measures, which would equate to a $300 council tax increase.
Source
Huge monetary costs of NHS negligence
Despite the fact that most Brits are effectively discouraged from claiming and despite the fact that awards in Britain are usually only a tiny fraction of the equivalent in the USA
For Dr Spencer at his Norfolk surgery, the whoops-a-daisy moment came when he dosed a woman with bismuth. Startled by her dyspeptic response, and eager to reassure her increasingly agitated husband, he swallowed a spoonful of the stuff himself. "See? Perfectly safe!" Two things then happened: Dr Spencer vomited, fell down and lay writhing on the floor. His patient died.
The explanation was simple. As the doctor explained to the coroner, bismuth and strychnine look remarkably similar in the bottle and, well, mistakes do happen. At the subsequent trial for manslaughter, Mr Justice Willes agreed. A simple blunder, he said, was not in itself a criminal act. To secure a conviction, the crown would have to prove that the doctor's medicines were in such chaotic disorder that it was impossible for him to know which was which. Not guilty, said the jury.
That was in 1867. Legal actions against clinical killers then were exceedingly rare, and would remain so. By 1989 only six more doctors had been fingered for manslaughter - an average of one every 20 years. Then something changed. In the 1990s, 17 were prosecuted, and since 2000 there have been 11 more. One or two of them, like the Spencer case, were tales of startling improbability. A woman under anaesthetic was connected to an oxygen cylinder instead of to a ventilator and inflated like a balloon (the anaesthetist got six months' jail, suspended for 18 months). Mostly, however, they were mundane tragedies of misread notes, wrong drugs or lethal doses administered by exhausted, inexperienced or occasionally negligent practitioners who failed in the most basic of their responsibilities.
This relatively small number of headline cases, however, was only the tiny tip of a legal iceberg. It wasn't just the police and Crown Prosecution Service who were taking a more critical look at wards and clinics - it was the patients themselves. In England between 1990 and 1998, the rate of civil negligence claims against hospitals doubled, reaching a peak in 1998-9 of 6,168. If we didn't know them to be true, the numbers would strain credibility. The cost to the NHS of claims settled in 2006-7 was 579.3m pounds. In the same year it was hit by 5,426 new cases. The NHS Litigation Authority (NHSLA) estimates that the combined cost of settling all outstanding claims, including incidents so far unreported, will be 9.09 billion pounds.
Some of the settlements are whoppers - the actress Leslie Ash made headlines in January this year when she was awarded 5m pounds for the paralysing effects of the hospital "superbug" MRSA. The all-time record is the 12.4m paid last year to a professional dancer, Kerstin Parkin, who suffered brain damage from a heart attack during childbirth. Others by comparison are trifling - "a few hundred pounds for someone scratched during an operation" is one example offered by the NHSLA. But there is an important common factor, and it affects us all.
Paralysing tentacles of fear are now putting the squeeze on medical practice, and changing the way we are treated. Type the words "clinical negligence" or "no win, no fee" into Google and you'll see why - a clamorous pack of legal agencies and law firms who trade on the idea that every accident must be someone's fault. Some websites even provide interactive body maps showing the value of everything from an injured finger (1,000 to 75,000 pounds) to serious brain damage (millions). The come-on to patients is the promise of "no win, no fee". If the lawyer wins your case for you, he collects his fee in costs from the other side and you walk away with your damages in full. If he loses, he charges nothing. So, come on! What are you waiting for? Sue the doc!
Many cases in the past have been the medical equivalents of the time-honoured "slips and trips" actions against local authorities with bumpy pavements. Anyone coming out of hospital with a bruise or a sore eye they didn't go in with was encouraged to call a solicitor. The result was that lawyers' fees were often higher than the damages they won, and these in turn could be eroded by extra costs - medical reports by independent experts, for example - so that even successful litigants wound up out of pocket. According to the National Audit Office, legal and administrative costs exceed money paid to victims in most claims under 45,000. This is why Citizens Advice in 2004 published a 59-page report on personal-injury compensation under the title No Win, No Fee, No Chance.
As so often with the NHS, vice is the bastard child of virtue. "No win, no fee" deals, known in law as conditional-fee arrangements, were introduced by an amendment to the Courts and Legal Services Act in 1995. It was meant to be a double benefit. The courts would be opened up to those in the income trap who were ineligible for legal aid but unable to afford lawyers. The government itself would save money by effectively privatising legal aid. On the surface it looked like the long-overdue democratisation of civil justice.
But law firms are not charities. Working for nothing - pro bono - is not unknown, but it hardly stands as an ideal business model. If lawyers were to drop their fees when they lost, then they would need a bonus when they won. Recognising this, the law allows a "success fee" of up to double the normal scale. In clinical- negligence cases, when judgment favours the patient, this must be paid by the NHS, otherwise known as the taxpayer.
Given all this, the one surprise is that the number of cases each year is actually going down, albeit very slowly. The cost to the NHS nevertheless continues to rise. How can this be? Ironically, it is due in part to improvements in medicine that allow seriously damaged people - especially children - to survive for near-normal life spans. For this reason, courts are awarding much higher damages. Thirty years ago, for example, children suffering cerebral palsy in birth accidents might be expected to die. Now they can reach late middle age. Damages in such cases, which account for 60% of all claims the NHSLA faces, can run to 5m or more....
Walsh does not buy into the idea that avaricious lawyers alone are to blame for the escalating costs of clinical negligence, or even that the costs are excessive. "They come to well under 1% of the NHS budget," he says, "so the notion that claims are bleeding the NHS dry doesn't hold water." Furthermore, it's entirely reasonable for claimants' solicitors to charge more than their opponents do.
Apil's Amanda Stevens agrees. "It's much more costly to prepare evidence to prove a claim than it is to assemble evidence to knock it down," she says. The British public, too, is very far from the writ-happy mob of gold-diggers that the headlines often suggest. "They do not like making a claim." Every year, she says, around 800,000 "adverse clinical events" are recorded in the NHS, and many more - at least 20% - go unreported. Yet only 1% of the victims make a claim, and only 10% of these - ie, 0.1% of the total - get damages.
Thus if the NHSLA believes it is shelling out too much in costs, the remedy is in its own hands. It is a legal catch-22. The NHSLA is duty-bound to keep expense to a minimum, and therefore to challenge costs awarded against it. This means that more cases go to appeal and legal costs escalate. Peter Walsh invites the NHSLA to draw the obvious conclusion. "Stop arguing, admit fault and settle earlier without drawn-out legal wrangling," he says. "That alone would save millions of pounds."
Of all the ways to cut the costs of medical negligence, one stands out way above the others: avoid being negligent in the first place. The NHS needs literally to clean up its act. Here are some figures reported by Sir Liam Donaldson in 2003: 10% of hospital admissions may result in something going wrong; 5% of the entire population report "some adverse effects" of medical care; 18% of patients say they have been victims of "medication error" within the past two years. On top of all the traditional foul-ups - missed diagnoses, poor or inadequate treatment, slipped scalpels and lethal drug doses - now looms the utterly modern phenomenon of the drug-resistant hospital infection. As recently as February, the Department of Health thought it necessary to launch a national campaign against the over-prescription of antibiotics. "The more we take antibiotics when they are not necessary," said Donaldson, "the more bacteria will become resistant to them." Yet patients with runny noses still think they can be cured by them, and - for all that they know better - some doctors still go on doling them out.
The other thing that bacteria love is filth, and the ideal place to look for it is in an NHS hospital. The result is that there are now law firms claiming to specialise in hospital "superbug" cases, and the number of claims is multiplying like bacteria on a Petri dish. One of the most notorious cases involved the three hospitals administered by the Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust where, between April 2004 and September 2006, more than 1,170 patients were infected with Clostridium difficile. According to the Healthcare Commission's official report, about 90 people "definitely or probably died as a result of the infection". The commission's inspectors found that the hospitals were epidemics waiting to happen. Supposedly clean bedpans were contaminated with excrement. Nurses were not washing their hands, emptying commodes, cleaning mattresses and equipment, or wearing aprons and gloves. If there was a parlour game called "pass the bacteria", this is how you'd play it. The health secretary, Alan Johnson, described the episode as "scandalous", and Kent police are still weighing the possibility of prosecution.
Another NHS trust in trouble was Bromley, against which the commission issued an "improvement notice" in February. Inspectors found an absence of routine cleaning around beds in the wards; sterilising equipment not being properly used; dirty commodes marked clean and ready for use; a blood-culture bottle trolley thickly covered in dust, and more. One is always wary of generalising from the particular, but there is no reason to suppose that these two trusts are wholly out of the ordinary. In fact, there is every reason to think otherwise. In June the Healthcare Commission reported that 103 of the 391 primary-care and hospital trusts in England were not meeting statutory hygiene standards - a failure rate of over 25%. The nurses might not be washing their hands, but the lawyers sure as hell are rubbing theirs.
More here
Pesky British navy logbooks upset Greenies
Britain's great seafaring tradition is to provide a unique insight into modern climate change, thanks to thousands of Royal Navy logbooks that have survived from the 17th century onwards. The logbooks kept by every naval ship, ranging from Nelson's Victory and Cook's Endeavour down to the humblest frigate, are emerging as one of the world's best sources for long-term weather data. The discovery has been made by a group of British academics and Met Office scientists who are seeking new ways to plot historic changes in climate.
"This is a treasure trove," said Dr Sam Willis, a maritime historian and author who is affiliated with Exeter University's Centre for Maritime Historical Studies. "Ships' officers recorded air pressure, wind strength, air and sea temperature and other weather conditions. From those records scientists can build a detailed picture of past weather and climate."
A preliminary study of 6,000 logbooks has produced results that raise questions about climate change theories. One paper, published by Dr Dennis Wheeler, a Sunderland University geographer, in the journal The Holocene, details a surge in the frequency of summer storms over Britain in the 1680s and 1690s. Many scientists believe storms are a consequence of global warming, but these were the coldest decades of the so-called Little Ice Age that hit Europe from about 1600 to 1850.
Wheeler and his colleagues have since won European Union funding to extend this research to 1750. This shows that during the 1730s, Europe underwent a period of rapid warming similar to that recorded recently - and which must have had natural origins. Hints of such changes are already known from British records, but Wheeler has found they affected much of the north Atlantic too, and he has traced some of the underlying weather systems that caused it. His research will be published in the journal Climatic Change.
The ships' logs have also shed light on extreme weather events such as hurricanes. It is commonly believed that hurricanes form in the eastern Atlantic and track westwards, so scientists were shocked in 2005 when Hurricane Vince instead moved northeast to hit southern Spain and Portugal. Many interpreted this as a consequence of climate change; but Wheeler, along with colleagues at the University of Madrid, used old ships' logs to show that this had also happened in 1842, when a hurricane followed the same trajectory into Andalusia.
The potential of Royal Navy ships' logs to offer new insights into historic climate change was spotted by Wheeler after he began researching weather conditions during famous naval battles. Later, as global warming moved up the scientific agenda, he and others realised that the same data could shed light on historic climate change. He said: "British archives contain more than 100,000 Royal Navy logbooks from around 1670 to 1850 alone. They are a stunning resource."
Most of these earlier documents contain verbal descriptions of weather rather than numerical data, because ships lacked the instruments to take numerical readings. However, Wheeler and his colleagues found early Royal Navy officers recorded weather in consistent language. "It means we can deduce numerical values for wind strength and direction, temperature and rainfall," he said. The information will ultimately contribute to the International Comprehensive Ocean-Atmos-phere Data Set, a global database maintained by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, a US government agency.
Wheeler makes clear he has no doubts about modern human-induced climate change. [He would be out on his ear if he said otherwise] He said: "Global warming is a reality, but what our data shows is that climate science is complex and that it is wrong to take particular events and link them to CO2 emissions. These records will give us a much clearer picture of what is really happening."
The Met Office has also set up a project, part-funded by Defra, the environment ministry, to study 900 logbooks kept by the East India Company on voyages between Europe and the Far East between 1780 and 1840. Its vessels carried thermometers and barometers so the data is of higher quality.
Faced with logs taken over so many voyages, the researchers have had to be selective. One of the most avid recorders of such data was Nelson himself, whose personal logbook records the air pressure and other readings he took up to several times daily.
Source
A new British "university of life"
It is not so much a school for scoundrels as an academy to turn hooray Henrys into smart Alecs. A new "university of life" will teach its students how to talk at the dinner table, what books to read and how to sneer at British holidaymakers. A group of philosophers, actors, wits and businessmen has been assembled to offer courses on everything from sparkling table talk to French philosophy.
The School of Life, whose faculty includes Alain de Botton, the philosopher and author, and Luke Johnson, chairman of Channel 4, may appear to critics to be an attempt to bolt intellectual pretentiousness onto old-fashioned snobbery. Its backers, however, insist it will help clients who have been too busy in the pursuit of money to develop their social skills and intellectual depth. De Botton, author of How Proust Can Change Your Life, will offer students an insight into ways to revive a relationship, choose a good doctor, enjoy a holiday, make friends and respond to an insult.
Those who would be welcome to attend evening and weekend classes include Katie Price, the model and bestselling author also known as Jordan. Price said she was barred from part of the Cartier polo tournament at Windsor last weekend out of "pure snobbery".
The school, which opens in Bloomsbury in central London next month, was founded by Sophie Howarth, 33, a former curator at Tate Modern. "It is not a finishing school. Nor is it conventional evening classes," Howarth said. "We are going to be teaching essential stuff to bright people and acting as a travel agent for the mind. We are pitching at bright, busy people who want to make the most of their careers and lifestyles and limited time off. The etiquette lessons will not be about which spoon to use or how to fold a napkin but more a menu to good conversation."
Lessons in politics will examine the theories of philosophers from Plato to Karl Marx but will also look into whether it would be more politically effective to become a billionaire than prime minister.
Learning courses - which include lessons in love, work, family and play - will cost $400 a term, starting in September. Meals will cost $90 for three courses. There is also the opportunity for a "one-to-one" with an expert for $100 an hour and a chance to listen to a "sermon" from a guest speaker or go on specialised holidays with a guest lecturer. The "sermons" are not religious but will discuss modern ethics.
Experts such as Susan Elderkin, author of Sunset Over Chocolate Mountains, will give students a spot of "biblio-therapy" with tailored reading lists. Students will also be invited on field trips. De Botton will teach them the meaning of travel at Heathrow airport for two days for $600 a head; and Martin Parr, a photographer, will lead an expedition to the Isle of Wight to observe "the vulgarity, nostalgia and brashness of British holidaymaking in its full glory".
Source
Monday, August 04, 2008
Shock! Some NHS hospitals do allow patients to buy expensive drugs that the NHS is too mean to give them
The government’s ban on NHS patients paying for medicines the health service does not fund is in disarray. Figures obtained under freedom of information legislation show that NHS hospitals were allowing dozens of patients to top up with private drugs before the government warned them it was not allowed under NHS rules in July last year. The evidence that top-up payments have previously been allowed, apparently without difficulties, undermines the government’s claim they are contrary to the fundamental principles of the NHS.
At one trust, the Royal Cornwall Hospitals NHS Trust, 20 patients were allowed to co-pay for cancer drugs that the health service refused to fund before the government ban was introduced.
The figures also provide further evidence that many trusts are allowing patients to top up with additional drugs without removing the remainder of their NHS care. Freedom of information data shows that Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust has allowed patients to pay for drugs their consultant has recommended without losing the rest of their NHS treatment. John Baron, MP for Billericay, who obtained the figures, said: “This undermines the case of those who argue co-payments cannot exist within the NHS.”
Other trusts that have allowed co-payments include the University Hospital Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust, ABM University NHS Trust in Bridgend, south Wales, and Weston Area Health NHS Trust in Somerset.
Source
When atheism is "Islamophobic"
LOL. I find this rather amusing: A sort of clash of correctnesses. I do rather wonder why Richard Dawkins finds religion so threatening. Much good science has been done by religious people -- going back at least as far as Isaac Newton. Isaac was actually rather a whizz at Bible interpretation
In addition to overseeing our understanding of science, Dawkins is also the best-known atheist in the country, a man who considers the worship of Christ to be about as relevant as dancing around a totem pole or deifying the Giant Spaghetti Monster. His fans will know all about this from his books, notably The God Delusion – a bestseller that picks apart the inconsistencies in religion with scalpel-like logic.
Dawkins is about to chew up religion again now, in a television series about his hero, Charles Darwin, which holds up to ridicule those who refuse to accept the theory of evolution. Astounding though it may seem, 150 years after the publication of On the Origin of Species, there are many people who don’t believe its findings, he says.
Some of these are evangelicals in far-off countries who think that God created everything in six days and that rainy days began with Noah’s Flood. Others, however, are a bit closer to home. British secondary-school science teachers, for example.
“Science is being threatened in our class-rooms,” says Dawkins, citing examples such as the schools funded by the evangelical car dealer Peter Vardy and the private Blue Coat school in Liverpool that employs a creationist science teacher called Nick Cowan. When Dawkins himself met Cowan, he was confidently assured that the Earth is only 6,000 years old (rather than 4.5 billion). Cowan also apparently solved the chicken-and-egg conundrum by explaining: “God created the chicken, and the chicken laid the egg.” “Nick Cowan is a scandal,” fumes Dawkins. “To have him teaching science at a respectable school is about equivalent to having a flat-Earther teaching geography.”
More seriously, Dawkins believes that many science teachers who do believe in evolution are selling our children short by kowtowing to political correctness. At the moment, he points out, Darwinian evolution is taught in British schools at key stages 3 and 4, but under the national curriculum, alternative theories such as “intelligent design” (part of the creationist credo) “could be discussed in schools . . . in the context of being one of a range of views on evolution”, according to a government education minister.
“It’s fine to teach children about scientific controversies,” Dawkins says. “What is not fine is to say, ‘There are these two theories. One is called evolution, the other is called Genesis.’ If you are going to say that, then you should talk about the Nigerian tribe who believe the world was created from the excrement of ants.”
Cowardice is at the root of the problem, he feels. When it comes to presenting the truth of science against the “mythology” of religion, science teachers duck the issue for fear of reprimand. And not only from evangelical Christians. In his view, devout Muslims are a large part of the problem.
“Islam is importing creationism into this country,” he says. “Most devout Muslims are creationists – so when you go to schools, there are a large number of children of Islamic parents who trot out what they have been taught.”
In his TV series, Dawkins faces a class of 15-year-olds at Park High secondary school in London. A few of the pupils readily tell him they don’t believe in evolution because it runs counter to their religious beliefs. It’s only after he bundles them into a coach and shows them fossils at the seaside that one or two admit there might be something in this evolution gig after all.
“I was shocked by how some put up barriers to understanding,” says Dawkins. “I showed them the evidence, and they just said, ‘This is what it says in my holy book.’ And so I asked, ‘If your holy book says one thing, but the evidence says something else, you then go with your holy book?’ And they said, ‘Yes.’ And I said, ‘Why?’ And they said, ‘It’s the way we’ve been brought up’.”
Even worse, from his point of view, their science teachers are extremely unwilling to oppose anything that smacks of a faith-held belief. And the same applies to their head teachers and the government – even when a belief is contradicted by scientific truth. This infuriates Dawkins.
“Teachers are bending over backwards to ‘respect’ home prejudices that children have been brought up with,” he says . “The government could do more, but it doesn’t want to because it is fanatical about multi-culturalism and the need to ‘respect’ the different ‘traditions’ from which these children come. The government – particularly under Tony Blair – thinks it is wonderful to have children brought up with their traditional religions. I call it brainwashing.”
Dawkins shakes his head with dismay. His large, light Oxford house is filled with books, of which his most precious is a first edition of On the Origin of Species, an imprint that ran to only 1,250 copies and sold out immediately. The book has never been out of print since.
Clearly, the weedy way in which the momentous findings of Darwin’s masterpiece are being taught in some schools pains him. “I would like to see evolution taught a lot earlier. There should be no problem teaching it to eight-year-olds.” What if parents don’t want their children included in the lesson? “For parents to deprive their children of an educational opportunity because of a traditional bigotry is unfair on the child.”
And science teachers, people who should be Darwin’s flag-wavers, are simply looking the other way. “It seems as though teachers are terribly frightened of being thought racist,” says Dawkins. “It’s almost impossible to say anything against Islam in this country, because [if you do] you are accused of being racist or Islamophobic.”
Source
Eminent British educationist says that centralization of education is the evil and school choice is the answer
Chris Woodhead was a champion of the Tory education reforms but now admits they have failed. Here he explains why
Twenty years ago last week the educational landscape changed. Kenneth Baker's Education Reform Act, the most comprehensive and controversial piece of education legislation since the second world war, became law. I did not know it at the time but my life was about to move on, too.
Naturally, most teachers were deeply suspicious. They dismissed the idea of a national curriculum to be defined by politicians as an intrusion into their professional domain. They hated the introduction of national curriculum tests to be taken by children at seven, 11 and 14, and they hated the prospect of inspections every six years, with more published reports .
The idea that heads should take greater financial responsibility for their schools was more welcome, and entrepreneurial head teachers could see that the introduction of a new category of grant-main-tained schools could free them from the clutches of local authority bureaucrats. Most, though, were nervous of this new independence. They may not have liked their local education authority, but they liked the idea of standing on their own two feet even less.
My reaction was more positive. The basic logic seemed right to me. Why shouldn't parliament set out what it expected the nation's children to be taught? Given that broad specification, why not devolve as much responsibility as possible to the individual school to take financial and educational decisions that made sense in its particular circum-stance? And why not hold schools accountable, through tests and inspections, for the quality of those decisions and the standards achieved by their pupils?
The devil, as always, would be in the detail, but there was nothing here that was not good management practice. Tell people what you want them to do, give them the resources and space to get on with it and hold them accountable. I hoped, too, that a national curriculum would mean a national entitlement to study a broad range of subjects, ending what can only be called the eccentricity of local provision in many schools.
I thought it would raise expectations in those schools that did not demand enough of their pupils. Likewise the prospect of real accountability and, yes, the danger of public humiliation might focus a few minds that needed focusing. And, working as I was in a local authority, I was only too aware of both bureaucratic waste and the eccentricity of some local politicians.
A couple of years later I found myself in charge of the national curriculum. Then in 1992, when responsibilities for the curriculum were merged with testing, I headed up the new School Curriculum and Assessment Authority. Later I took over Ofsted, the inspectorate. That is what I mean when I say my life changed. I became responsible at different times for most of the key aspects of the act.
I have therefore to ask myself a difficult question. How much am I to blame for the failure of a series of educational reforms that in principle I continue to believe make basic sense, but which in practice I now consider to have done more harm than good?
If David Cameron and his Conservatives were to ask me what to do about it all, I would tell them to abolish both the national curriculum and Ofsted. The tests at 11 and perhaps at seven should be kept but are in need of radical reform, as is the so-called autonomy of schools. The idea behind the act was that they should be autonomous institutions, free from local authority and central government control, but the tentacles of bureaucratic control are as strong now as they were in 1988 - stronger perhaps.
Baker and subsequent Conservative politicians saw the national curriculum as a challenge to progressive, child-centred educational theories. So the English curriculum insisted on the teaching of spelling and grammar and listed the classics of English literature that should be taught to pupils as they moved through school. The history programme of study sought to ensure that children learnt something at least of the nation's story - and geography, in a similar fashion, focused on a fair number of geographical facts.
My own view was that these were much-needed developments but, as the years have gone by, the original knowledge-based core of the curriculum has come under ever greater attack. With hindsight, what has happened is utterly predictable. The national curriculum now enshrines the very educational beliefs it was originally intended to confront. Hence my belief that it has become part of the problem and should be abolished.
Inspections made a contribution when they focused in a rigorously objective way on what matters most in a school: the quality of leadership and teaching. Now they are based on the school's own self-evaluation, teachers are rarely observed and the evidence from inspection seems more often than not to be used to buttress ministerial claims that everything is progressing wonderfully. Once again a good idea has been rendered impotent, if not downright dangerous.
The tests, in particular those sat by 11-year-olds, matter because they give parents some sense of how successful the school their child attends, or might attend, is in teaching basic skills of English and mathematics. But at the moment, as we all know from news reports, the testing system is in chaos, so even here it is hard to say the reform act initiated a change that has survived the years.
I tried in the different jobs I did to insist on what I thought mattered. Many people of course disagreed with what I wanted to achieve, but not many have accused me of failing to fight my corner. I fought and perhaps I should have fought harder. But in the end, whatever I did or anybody else tries to do in the future, my conclusion is that any attempt to reform the nation's 24,000 schools from the centre is doomed to failure.
Our current government is never going to deviate from its centralist path. Cameron could. He could develop a truly Conservative approach to state education that finds ways to empower parents as consumers and relies on the wisdom of their choices. That is the prize. The history of the past 20 years shows there is no alternative.
Source
British Conservative leader wavers on green pledges
David Cameron has shelved his commitment to green taxes because of rising fuel prices and the economic downturn
A range of measures designed to penalise motoring and other polluting activities has been put on hold amid fears that it would alienate working families feeling the pinch as the economy slows. Senior strategists admit privately that initiatives prepared by the Tory leader are unlikely to see the light of day, including raising taxes on short-haul flights and on larger cars. Elaborate plans for widespread micro-generation of energy in homes and offices are also being quietly shelved in favour of a strategy little different from Labour's, based on a new generation of nuclear power stations
Rather than taxing a range of polluting behaviours, the Tories will offer incentives to choose more environmentally-friendly alternatives, insiders say. A senior party source admitted: "We can't possibly sell the idea of green taxes to voters during a downturn."
Last year, Mr Cameron welcomed a Tory policy review that called for Vehicle Excise Duty (VED) on the highest-emitting cars to be up to $1,000 more than for the greenest vehicles and a "showroom tax" of up to 10 per cent on "gas guzzlers". The Tories led calls for a ground-breaking Climate Change Bill to set a target for cutting carbon emissions by 2050 and campaigned under the banner "vote blue, go green" in the local elections. The party's "quality of life" group, led by John Gummer and Zac Goldsmith, proposed radical parking charges at out-of-town supermarkets and shopping malls, a moratorium on airport expansion and increased taxes - including VAT - on short-haul flights. Mr Cameron had pledged to increase the proportion of taxation raised through green levies by rebalancing taxation away from "good" things, such as jobs and investment, towards "bad" things, like pollution and carbon emissions. He also promised that the money raised from green taxes would fund tax cuts for families.
But this summer Mr Cameron dropped his support for higher road tax as he clashed with Gordon Brown over the Government's plans to impose retrospective rises of up to $400 in VED on cars up to seven years old while George Osborne, the shadow chancellor, promised to cut tax on fuel when prices at the pump rose.
Strategists said it was possible the Tory leader could resurrect green taxes, but not for a year or until the economy has rallied. One senior MP said: "The question is whether the party will keep its nerve about doing things that will be uncomfortable for consumers. At the moment the jury is out."
Another issue of concern for some is that the Tories are warming to nuclear power. Last year, it viewed a new generation of nuclear power stations as "a last resort" but would now support the move if there were no taxpayers' subsidy. The about-turn is significant because green issues were once the lynchpin of Mr Cameron's modernising drive. But he has not made a major speech on the environment or hinted at policy in this area for many months.
This week the Tories will open a new offensive on education, promising to address the plight of the poorest children. Michael Gove, the shadow schools secretary, will claim that the Government has failed to eradicate glaring inequalities between the achievements of the richest and poorest children.
Source
The government’s ban on NHS patients paying for medicines the health service does not fund is in disarray. Figures obtained under freedom of information legislation show that NHS hospitals were allowing dozens of patients to top up with private drugs before the government warned them it was not allowed under NHS rules in July last year. The evidence that top-up payments have previously been allowed, apparently without difficulties, undermines the government’s claim they are contrary to the fundamental principles of the NHS.
At one trust, the Royal Cornwall Hospitals NHS Trust, 20 patients were allowed to co-pay for cancer drugs that the health service refused to fund before the government ban was introduced.
The figures also provide further evidence that many trusts are allowing patients to top up with additional drugs without removing the remainder of their NHS care. Freedom of information data shows that Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust has allowed patients to pay for drugs their consultant has recommended without losing the rest of their NHS treatment. John Baron, MP for Billericay, who obtained the figures, said: “This undermines the case of those who argue co-payments cannot exist within the NHS.”
Other trusts that have allowed co-payments include the University Hospital Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust, ABM University NHS Trust in Bridgend, south Wales, and Weston Area Health NHS Trust in Somerset.
Source
When atheism is "Islamophobic"
LOL. I find this rather amusing: A sort of clash of correctnesses. I do rather wonder why Richard Dawkins finds religion so threatening. Much good science has been done by religious people -- going back at least as far as Isaac Newton. Isaac was actually rather a whizz at Bible interpretation
In addition to overseeing our understanding of science, Dawkins is also the best-known atheist in the country, a man who considers the worship of Christ to be about as relevant as dancing around a totem pole or deifying the Giant Spaghetti Monster. His fans will know all about this from his books, notably The God Delusion – a bestseller that picks apart the inconsistencies in religion with scalpel-like logic.
Dawkins is about to chew up religion again now, in a television series about his hero, Charles Darwin, which holds up to ridicule those who refuse to accept the theory of evolution. Astounding though it may seem, 150 years after the publication of On the Origin of Species, there are many people who don’t believe its findings, he says.
Some of these are evangelicals in far-off countries who think that God created everything in six days and that rainy days began with Noah’s Flood. Others, however, are a bit closer to home. British secondary-school science teachers, for example.
“Science is being threatened in our class-rooms,” says Dawkins, citing examples such as the schools funded by the evangelical car dealer Peter Vardy and the private Blue Coat school in Liverpool that employs a creationist science teacher called Nick Cowan. When Dawkins himself met Cowan, he was confidently assured that the Earth is only 6,000 years old (rather than 4.5 billion). Cowan also apparently solved the chicken-and-egg conundrum by explaining: “God created the chicken, and the chicken laid the egg.” “Nick Cowan is a scandal,” fumes Dawkins. “To have him teaching science at a respectable school is about equivalent to having a flat-Earther teaching geography.”
More seriously, Dawkins believes that many science teachers who do believe in evolution are selling our children short by kowtowing to political correctness. At the moment, he points out, Darwinian evolution is taught in British schools at key stages 3 and 4, but under the national curriculum, alternative theories such as “intelligent design” (part of the creationist credo) “could be discussed in schools . . . in the context of being one of a range of views on evolution”, according to a government education minister.
“It’s fine to teach children about scientific controversies,” Dawkins says. “What is not fine is to say, ‘There are these two theories. One is called evolution, the other is called Genesis.’ If you are going to say that, then you should talk about the Nigerian tribe who believe the world was created from the excrement of ants.”
Cowardice is at the root of the problem, he feels. When it comes to presenting the truth of science against the “mythology” of religion, science teachers duck the issue for fear of reprimand. And not only from evangelical Christians. In his view, devout Muslims are a large part of the problem.
“Islam is importing creationism into this country,” he says. “Most devout Muslims are creationists – so when you go to schools, there are a large number of children of Islamic parents who trot out what they have been taught.”
In his TV series, Dawkins faces a class of 15-year-olds at Park High secondary school in London. A few of the pupils readily tell him they don’t believe in evolution because it runs counter to their religious beliefs. It’s only after he bundles them into a coach and shows them fossils at the seaside that one or two admit there might be something in this evolution gig after all.
“I was shocked by how some put up barriers to understanding,” says Dawkins. “I showed them the evidence, and they just said, ‘This is what it says in my holy book.’ And so I asked, ‘If your holy book says one thing, but the evidence says something else, you then go with your holy book?’ And they said, ‘Yes.’ And I said, ‘Why?’ And they said, ‘It’s the way we’ve been brought up’.”
Even worse, from his point of view, their science teachers are extremely unwilling to oppose anything that smacks of a faith-held belief. And the same applies to their head teachers and the government – even when a belief is contradicted by scientific truth. This infuriates Dawkins.
“Teachers are bending over backwards to ‘respect’ home prejudices that children have been brought up with,” he says . “The government could do more, but it doesn’t want to because it is fanatical about multi-culturalism and the need to ‘respect’ the different ‘traditions’ from which these children come. The government – particularly under Tony Blair – thinks it is wonderful to have children brought up with their traditional religions. I call it brainwashing.”
Dawkins shakes his head with dismay. His large, light Oxford house is filled with books, of which his most precious is a first edition of On the Origin of Species, an imprint that ran to only 1,250 copies and sold out immediately. The book has never been out of print since.
Clearly, the weedy way in which the momentous findings of Darwin’s masterpiece are being taught in some schools pains him. “I would like to see evolution taught a lot earlier. There should be no problem teaching it to eight-year-olds.” What if parents don’t want their children included in the lesson? “For parents to deprive their children of an educational opportunity because of a traditional bigotry is unfair on the child.”
And science teachers, people who should be Darwin’s flag-wavers, are simply looking the other way. “It seems as though teachers are terribly frightened of being thought racist,” says Dawkins. “It’s almost impossible to say anything against Islam in this country, because [if you do] you are accused of being racist or Islamophobic.”
Source
Eminent British educationist says that centralization of education is the evil and school choice is the answer
Chris Woodhead was a champion of the Tory education reforms but now admits they have failed. Here he explains why
Twenty years ago last week the educational landscape changed. Kenneth Baker's Education Reform Act, the most comprehensive and controversial piece of education legislation since the second world war, became law. I did not know it at the time but my life was about to move on, too.
Naturally, most teachers were deeply suspicious. They dismissed the idea of a national curriculum to be defined by politicians as an intrusion into their professional domain. They hated the introduction of national curriculum tests to be taken by children at seven, 11 and 14, and they hated the prospect of inspections every six years, with more published reports .
The idea that heads should take greater financial responsibility for their schools was more welcome, and entrepreneurial head teachers could see that the introduction of a new category of grant-main-tained schools could free them from the clutches of local authority bureaucrats. Most, though, were nervous of this new independence. They may not have liked their local education authority, but they liked the idea of standing on their own two feet even less.
My reaction was more positive. The basic logic seemed right to me. Why shouldn't parliament set out what it expected the nation's children to be taught? Given that broad specification, why not devolve as much responsibility as possible to the individual school to take financial and educational decisions that made sense in its particular circum-stance? And why not hold schools accountable, through tests and inspections, for the quality of those decisions and the standards achieved by their pupils?
The devil, as always, would be in the detail, but there was nothing here that was not good management practice. Tell people what you want them to do, give them the resources and space to get on with it and hold them accountable. I hoped, too, that a national curriculum would mean a national entitlement to study a broad range of subjects, ending what can only be called the eccentricity of local provision in many schools.
I thought it would raise expectations in those schools that did not demand enough of their pupils. Likewise the prospect of real accountability and, yes, the danger of public humiliation might focus a few minds that needed focusing. And, working as I was in a local authority, I was only too aware of both bureaucratic waste and the eccentricity of some local politicians.
A couple of years later I found myself in charge of the national curriculum. Then in 1992, when responsibilities for the curriculum were merged with testing, I headed up the new School Curriculum and Assessment Authority. Later I took over Ofsted, the inspectorate. That is what I mean when I say my life changed. I became responsible at different times for most of the key aspects of the act.
I have therefore to ask myself a difficult question. How much am I to blame for the failure of a series of educational reforms that in principle I continue to believe make basic sense, but which in practice I now consider to have done more harm than good?
If David Cameron and his Conservatives were to ask me what to do about it all, I would tell them to abolish both the national curriculum and Ofsted. The tests at 11 and perhaps at seven should be kept but are in need of radical reform, as is the so-called autonomy of schools. The idea behind the act was that they should be autonomous institutions, free from local authority and central government control, but the tentacles of bureaucratic control are as strong now as they were in 1988 - stronger perhaps.
Baker and subsequent Conservative politicians saw the national curriculum as a challenge to progressive, child-centred educational theories. So the English curriculum insisted on the teaching of spelling and grammar and listed the classics of English literature that should be taught to pupils as they moved through school. The history programme of study sought to ensure that children learnt something at least of the nation's story - and geography, in a similar fashion, focused on a fair number of geographical facts.
My own view was that these were much-needed developments but, as the years have gone by, the original knowledge-based core of the curriculum has come under ever greater attack. With hindsight, what has happened is utterly predictable. The national curriculum now enshrines the very educational beliefs it was originally intended to confront. Hence my belief that it has become part of the problem and should be abolished.
Inspections made a contribution when they focused in a rigorously objective way on what matters most in a school: the quality of leadership and teaching. Now they are based on the school's own self-evaluation, teachers are rarely observed and the evidence from inspection seems more often than not to be used to buttress ministerial claims that everything is progressing wonderfully. Once again a good idea has been rendered impotent, if not downright dangerous.
The tests, in particular those sat by 11-year-olds, matter because they give parents some sense of how successful the school their child attends, or might attend, is in teaching basic skills of English and mathematics. But at the moment, as we all know from news reports, the testing system is in chaos, so even here it is hard to say the reform act initiated a change that has survived the years.
I tried in the different jobs I did to insist on what I thought mattered. Many people of course disagreed with what I wanted to achieve, but not many have accused me of failing to fight my corner. I fought and perhaps I should have fought harder. But in the end, whatever I did or anybody else tries to do in the future, my conclusion is that any attempt to reform the nation's 24,000 schools from the centre is doomed to failure.
Our current government is never going to deviate from its centralist path. Cameron could. He could develop a truly Conservative approach to state education that finds ways to empower parents as consumers and relies on the wisdom of their choices. That is the prize. The history of the past 20 years shows there is no alternative.
Source
British Conservative leader wavers on green pledges
David Cameron has shelved his commitment to green taxes because of rising fuel prices and the economic downturn
A range of measures designed to penalise motoring and other polluting activities has been put on hold amid fears that it would alienate working families feeling the pinch as the economy slows. Senior strategists admit privately that initiatives prepared by the Tory leader are unlikely to see the light of day, including raising taxes on short-haul flights and on larger cars. Elaborate plans for widespread micro-generation of energy in homes and offices are also being quietly shelved in favour of a strategy little different from Labour's, based on a new generation of nuclear power stations
Rather than taxing a range of polluting behaviours, the Tories will offer incentives to choose more environmentally-friendly alternatives, insiders say. A senior party source admitted: "We can't possibly sell the idea of green taxes to voters during a downturn."
Last year, Mr Cameron welcomed a Tory policy review that called for Vehicle Excise Duty (VED) on the highest-emitting cars to be up to $1,000 more than for the greenest vehicles and a "showroom tax" of up to 10 per cent on "gas guzzlers". The Tories led calls for a ground-breaking Climate Change Bill to set a target for cutting carbon emissions by 2050 and campaigned under the banner "vote blue, go green" in the local elections. The party's "quality of life" group, led by John Gummer and Zac Goldsmith, proposed radical parking charges at out-of-town supermarkets and shopping malls, a moratorium on airport expansion and increased taxes - including VAT - on short-haul flights. Mr Cameron had pledged to increase the proportion of taxation raised through green levies by rebalancing taxation away from "good" things, such as jobs and investment, towards "bad" things, like pollution and carbon emissions. He also promised that the money raised from green taxes would fund tax cuts for families.
But this summer Mr Cameron dropped his support for higher road tax as he clashed with Gordon Brown over the Government's plans to impose retrospective rises of up to $400 in VED on cars up to seven years old while George Osborne, the shadow chancellor, promised to cut tax on fuel when prices at the pump rose.
Strategists said it was possible the Tory leader could resurrect green taxes, but not for a year or until the economy has rallied. One senior MP said: "The question is whether the party will keep its nerve about doing things that will be uncomfortable for consumers. At the moment the jury is out."
Another issue of concern for some is that the Tories are warming to nuclear power. Last year, it viewed a new generation of nuclear power stations as "a last resort" but would now support the move if there were no taxpayers' subsidy. The about-turn is significant because green issues were once the lynchpin of Mr Cameron's modernising drive. But he has not made a major speech on the environment or hinted at policy in this area for many months.
This week the Tories will open a new offensive on education, promising to address the plight of the poorest children. Michael Gove, the shadow schools secretary, will claim that the Government has failed to eradicate glaring inequalities between the achievements of the richest and poorest children.
Source
Sunday, August 03, 2008
Dangerous salt phobia in Britain
Moves to cut salt levels in bacon and ham risk increasing potentially fatal cases of the paralysing food bug botulism, the Food Standards Agency has been warned. Ham processors are particularly concerned at moves to reduce salt content to 2.13g per 100g by 2010 and to 1.75g by 2012. They said their concern was not because of a resistance to change, but was related to the health risks. Other food sectors are also unhappy about the revised salt reduction targets from the watchdog, which they insist are putting consumers off sandwiches and ready meals.
The issue threatens to create a rift between the food industry and the agency. But health campaigners are urging the FSA to stand firm and to resist what they say is scaremongering from an industry reluctant to change its manufacturing practices. Malcolm Kane, an independent food technology consultant who advises the campaign group Consensus Action of Salt in Health, suggested that the objections from industry were because companies feared the shelf-life of products may have to be reduced below the current average of ten-day "use by" dates: "I'm disappointed. It is just a feeble excuse for doing nothing about salt levels. They don't want to lower salt levels because they are nervous about consumer reaction and people not liking the taste with less salt."
The agency suggested last month that 14,000 premature deaths a year could be avoided if adults reduced salt intake to 6g a day. The current average is 8.6g a day, already down from 9.5g in 2001.
Claire Cheney, director-general of the Provision Trade Federation, which represents leading processed meat companies, has denounced the targets as unrealistic and a potential risk to human health. "If you have not got sufficient preservative in a product like ham you get pockets where the salt levels are too low to prevent the formation of the botulism toxin."
She told The Grocer magazine: "This will force us to reduce it [the shelf-life] further and with that come serious food safety concerns, not least the risk of botulism." She said that salt was in the product for technological reasons not for taste. Her view is supported by the British Meat Processors Association. Elizabeth Andoh-Kesson, its technical manager, said: "We are very worried about the stricter targets and believe that reducing salt further has implications for food safety and shelf life of products," she said.
Other trade associations are also objecting to further salt cuts. Jim Winship, the chairman of the British Sandwich Association, denounced the targets as "absolutely staggering". He said: "We are already getting complaints from retailers that consumers don't like the blandness of many sandwiches to meet existing salt targets. Sandwich makers don't add salt to sandwiches at all but it is in products such as cheese, bacon and ham. We'll soon be at a point where people stop buying sandwiches and make them at home where they add as much salt as they want. This would affect an important industry. We sell 2.8 billion packs of sandwiches a year with a market value of 5.25 billion pounds."
Ready-meal manufacturers such as Northern Foods and Kerry Foods, which are represented by the Chilled Food Association, are also anxious that further salt reductions will affect their œ9 billion a year market. Kaarin Goodburn, the secretary-general, said: "We are already reformulating many recipes but we have got reports that consumers don't like the taste especially in some healthy ranges of meals, such as lasagne, where there has been a decline in sales. What's the incentive to reformulate if it results in falling sales? People are already putting in lots more herbs instead of salt but many people don't like the taste. " Peter Sherratt, the general secretary of the Salt Association, said that feed-back from its members suggested that the agency targets had gone too far."
Source
Final grade school exams in Britain expected to show quarter of pupils without grasp of basics
Fewer children are expected to start secondary school in September with a decent grasp of the basics, according to official forecasts
The number of 11-year-olds reaching national standards in English, mathematics and science will drop across the board, it is predicted. Sats results published next week are expected to show a quarter of pupils failed to reach the level expected of their age in maths. At least one-in-five is predicted to fail in English.
It follows new rules introduced for the first time this year - preventing schools "inflating" scores for thousands of borderline pupils. In the past, children just missing national standards had exam papers automatically reviewed - resulting in some many papers being upgraded. The loophole has now been closed.
Government statisticians said they expected results to drop by up to two percentage points when they are published on Tuesday, putting standards back at levels achieved in 2004. But there are fears that results could also be affected by the chaos surrounding the marking of this year's Sats papers. Results for 6,000 primary pupils had still not been delivered to schools earlier this week following errors by the company handling the process. Thousands more results for 14-year-olds were also outstanding.
Ofqual, the exams watchdog, said the delays would not affect marking, insisting "there was no evidence of widespread problems with the quality" of scripts. But some teachers have complained of irregularities, including papers being returned with no marks at all.
Alan Smithers, professor of education at Buckingham University, said: "The Government would have been better advised to hold them back so we could be assured that we were looking at authentic results. "So many doubts have been expressed that there has to be question marks against whatever results are published next week. If we are going to compare them properly against previous years, and use them as an accurate reflection of the performance of the system, we need to know that the results are as accurate as they could be."
The National Association of Head Teachers said the decision to publish national figures "beggars belief". It said it received 300 complaints from members about inaccuracies, which may only represent the "tip of the iceberg".
Some 600,000 children took Sats tests in their final year of primary school. In 2007, 80 per cent of pupils gained the level expected of their age in English, 77 per cent in maths and 88 per cent in science. The Department for Children, Schools and Families said it expected results to fall following the removal of so-called borderlining. In a statement, officials said it was likely to cause "a fall in the proportion of pupils achieving the expected level by up to two percentage points". It is believed English results will be worst hit.
Since the mid-90s, pupils with results two or three points below the pass mark in tests had papers automatically reviewed. But results for those who only just scraped over the borderline were never re-checked. It means thousands were marked up - but no-one was downgraded. Since 1999, average results have been boosted by 1.2 percentage points in English, 0.2 points in maths and 0.6 points in science, according to the Government's National Assessment Agency.
Nick Gibb, the Conservative shadow schools minister, said: "If these are more accurate figures, it just shows that the small rises in results we have seen in the last few years have been completely bogus. It will just reiterate the fact that standards of reading, writing and maths have plateaued over the last six or seven years. We should be getting all children to the required standard."
Source
UK 'delusional' over climate change
The UK has massively overstated its reduction in carbon emissions, say two new reports which cast a harsh light on Britain's environmental policy. Government claims of reduced emissions are based on calculations which exclude significant contributing factors to global warming, the reports read. If aviation, shipping and the importing of goods are factored into the calculations UK greenhouse emissions are actually 49 per cent higher than reported. That means UK emissions have actually risen since the 1990s - contrary to government claims.
Both reports are by the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) in the University of York.
Liberal Democrat environment spokesman Steve Webb said: "The government has been unbelievably complacent about the UK's record on greenhouse gases. "The reality is that we have simply exported our emissions to countries that do the manufacturing that we used to do in the past."
Shadow environment secretary Peter Ainsworth said: "Rather than hiding behind dodgy data and relying on green gimmicks the government need to make urgent changes to move the country to a low carbon economy."
Source
Ignore this missive from people-hating doctors
The British Medical Journal's insistence that people should have fewer children speaks to our misanthropic, Malthusian, baby-fearing times
We live in a culture that finds it increasingly difficult to value life. So it isn't surprising that even the prestigious British Medical Journal (BMJ) has published an editorial calling on doctors to advise their patients to have fewer children. According to the authors of the editorial - life-long Malthusian Professor John Guillebaud and Pip Hayes, an Exeter-based GP - not having children is `analogous to avoiding patio heaters and high-carbon cars'. Newborn babies are a danger to the environment, they argue, and although they rhetorically state that `we must not put pressure on people', pressure is exactly what they want doctors to exercise as part of this new Malthusian crusade.
`We are not criticising those people in Britain who had large families in the past, because a lot of people had no inkling about the sustainability implications', Guillebeaud informed the UK Guardian (1). In fact, as a hard-line Malthusian zealot, Guillebeaud has been criticising people who breed `too much' for a very long time. All that has changed in recent years is the packaging of anti-natalist arguments.
In the past, Malthusians warned that overpopulation would lead to famine. When that argument disintegrated, they said overpopulation would undermine economic development. Later they claimed that overpopulation might assist the spread of communism, and more recently they have argued that it aids terrorism (lots of poor young men with no jobs apparently leads to apocalyptic violence).
Now they have latched on to environmentalism and the widespread concern about humanity's impact on the planet. What we have today is a new form of joined-up scaremongering, where the traditional fear of human fertility is linking up with anxieties about what humans are doing to the Earth.
King Herod's fear of the newborn was confined to one baby. Today's misanthrophic fear merchants have a far bigger target in their sights. One Australian professor of obstetric medicine, Barry Walters, believes the survival of the planet requires stringent controls on the number of children parents can have. He argues: 'Anthropogenic greenhouse gases constitute the largest source of pollution, with by far the greatest contribution from humans in the developed world. Every newborn baby in Australia represents a potent source of greenhouse gas emissions for an average of 80 years, not simply by breathing, but by the profligate consumption of resources typical of our society. What then should we do as environmentally responsible medical practitioners? We should point out the consequences to all who fail to see them, including, if necessary, the ministers for health. Far from showering financial booty on new mothers and thereby rewarding greenhouse-unfriendly behaviour, a "Baby Levy" in the form of a carbon tax should apply, in line with the "polluter pays" principle.' (2)
Throughout history, different cultures have celebrated birth as a unique moment, signifying the joy of life. The reinterpretation of a new birth as `greenhouse-unfriendly behaviour' speaks to today's degraded imagination, where carbon-reduction has become the supreme moral imperative. Once every newborn baby is dehumanised in this way - represented as little more than a professional polluter who is a `potent source of greenhouse gas emissions' - then it becomes difficult for people to read the BMJ editorial without nodding along in agreement.
If the birth of a baby is regarded as an unnecessary and unacceptable burden on the carrying capacity of the planet, then it's only a matter of time before a child's very existence will be regarded as a threat. One of the distinct features of contemporary environmentalism is its intense suspicion of the human species. Environmentalists' systematic spread of fear about the `human impact' promotes mistrust of people's motives, and in the end of people themselves. Going further down this route, the new demands for a carbon tax on fertility means that the defining identity of a newborn baby would be `Polluter'.
Subjecting the act of birth itself, that once-celebrated creation of a new life, to the `polluter pays' principle exposes the dark side of today's misanthrophic imagination.
More here
17 NHS patients with cancer wrongly get the all-clear
Seventeen cancer patients were wrongly given the allclear by a hospital after test results were misinterpreted, it was revealed yesterday. The men and women may have missed out on months of potentially life-saving treatment because of the blunders at Hereford County Hospital. In some cases the delay could have been more than two years. They have now received the devastating news that their initial diagnosis was wrong and have begun treatment. In addition 14 people were told they had cancer when they did not. Some may have needlessly undergone debilitating treatment.
The scandal came to light after concerns were raised about a consultant who examined tissue samples at the hospital. Six months ago a review of his work between May 2006 and August 2007 was started, and is now complete. The consultant, who has not been named, has been suspended and is facing disciplinary action. Legal experts said the hospital may be sued by patients.
Paul Keetch, Liberal Democrat MP for Hereford, has sent a letter to Health Secretary Alan Johnson asking him to ensure resources are made available for treating the wrongly diagnosed patients. Mr Keetch said: 'These people have not just been failed by Hereford, they have been failed by the NHS. 'Obviously there will be some patients who are undergoing speeded-up treatment for cancer, and we will be looking for other hospitals in the region to help. 'We must make sure none of the patients suffers as a result of this.'
Dr Lesley Walker of Cancer Research UK said: 'This is extremely unfortunate and distressing news. It's vital that robust systems are put in place at Hereford County Hospital to stop this happening again.'
Caroline Klage, from national medical legal firm Bolt Burden Kemp, said the NHS trust faces being sued by many of the patients. She said: 'In the very worst scenario, where someone has lost the opportunity to be given effective treatment for cancer, the outlook is now bleak and they have a number of dependents, a compensation claim is likely to be significant.'
The review looked at 5,404 tissue samples from 4,654 patients which had been worked on by the consultant in the hospital's histopathology department. Not all the cases involved cancer patients. It found the diagnosis of 102 patients was wrong and their treatment needed altering. The situation of 40 was 'more serious' than at first thought, while the remaining 62 were less serious or 'not materially different'.
Around a quarter of the department's work concerns cancer patients. It also examines samples taken from patients with other conditions, such as the bowel disease Crohn's.
Hereford Hospitals NHS Trust chief executive Martin Woodford said he wanted to apologise 'personally and on behalf of the trust' to all the patients affected. He said: 'We have acted as quickly as possible to make sure that the review was carried out thoroughly and effectively. 'I can confirm that 17 patients were initially informed, incorrectly, that they did not have a malignancy such as cancer. 'However we must emphasise that a number of these patients would have undergone precautionary treatment anyway or been subject to clinical review. 'Furthermore we can give an absolute assurance that all patients are now following the correct course of treatment.'
Source
Official rubbish snoopers in Britain
Bins belonging to celebrities, judges and London mayor Boris Johnson were searched by council-hired snoops. In all, 53 streets in Islington, North London, were secretly targeted by 'bin spies' in an operation which has angered residents. Last night, the Liberal Democrat-run council added fuel to the fire by stating: 'No permission was sought from residents as none is required.' It insisted it had not been snooping but simply 'investigating' the types of rubbish thrown away to see if more could be recycled.
Comedy actress Su Pollard lives in one of the streets involved. Miss Pollard, who starred in Hide-Hi! and You Rang, M'Lord?, said: 'I am quite incensed. It smacks of Big Brother. 'One feels like a suspect in some way. 'There is nothing in my bins that would incriminate me in any way - it's mostly yoghurt pots - but I am terribly uneasy about it. 'It will make you think twice before leaving rubbish out.'
Birds of a Feather star Linda Robson, who lived in the area at the time of the searches, said: 'That is terrible. How dare they? 'I recycle but there may have been private things I was throwing away. It is really intrusive. Is nothing sacred?' Mr Johnson declined to comment.
Emily Thornberry, Labour MP for Islington South and Finsbury, last night said serious security issues could be involved. 'High Court judges and High Court appeal judges live in those streets,' she said. 'I am sure they are careful but a sheet of paper can easily go amiss, and council officers could have seen them. 'My concerns are who authorised this and what they do with the stuff. They should have told people what they were going to do.'
The spying was uncovered after a Freedom of Information request to Islington asking whether it had undertaken any kind of survey of bins during the last five years. The answer was that it had - between August 1 and 12 2005 and between November 8 and 19 2004. In total, 1,000 households had their rubbish inspected secretly. The council said: 'The operatives involved were waste professionals acting under a strict code of conduct which included the possibility of finding items of a personal nature such as confidential paperwork.'
Liberal Democrat councillor Greg Foxsmith said: 'This is not about snooping into households' bins or invading privacy. It was an investigation into rubbish to see what is being sent to landfill and how much more could be recycled. 'Rubbish is not looked at individually or records taken - confidentiality is taken very seriously.'
Source
Moves to cut salt levels in bacon and ham risk increasing potentially fatal cases of the paralysing food bug botulism, the Food Standards Agency has been warned. Ham processors are particularly concerned at moves to reduce salt content to 2.13g per 100g by 2010 and to 1.75g by 2012. They said their concern was not because of a resistance to change, but was related to the health risks. Other food sectors are also unhappy about the revised salt reduction targets from the watchdog, which they insist are putting consumers off sandwiches and ready meals.
The issue threatens to create a rift between the food industry and the agency. But health campaigners are urging the FSA to stand firm and to resist what they say is scaremongering from an industry reluctant to change its manufacturing practices. Malcolm Kane, an independent food technology consultant who advises the campaign group Consensus Action of Salt in Health, suggested that the objections from industry were because companies feared the shelf-life of products may have to be reduced below the current average of ten-day "use by" dates: "I'm disappointed. It is just a feeble excuse for doing nothing about salt levels. They don't want to lower salt levels because they are nervous about consumer reaction and people not liking the taste with less salt."
The agency suggested last month that 14,000 premature deaths a year could be avoided if adults reduced salt intake to 6g a day. The current average is 8.6g a day, already down from 9.5g in 2001.
Claire Cheney, director-general of the Provision Trade Federation, which represents leading processed meat companies, has denounced the targets as unrealistic and a potential risk to human health. "If you have not got sufficient preservative in a product like ham you get pockets where the salt levels are too low to prevent the formation of the botulism toxin."
She told The Grocer magazine: "This will force us to reduce it [the shelf-life] further and with that come serious food safety concerns, not least the risk of botulism." She said that salt was in the product for technological reasons not for taste. Her view is supported by the British Meat Processors Association. Elizabeth Andoh-Kesson, its technical manager, said: "We are very worried about the stricter targets and believe that reducing salt further has implications for food safety and shelf life of products," she said.
Other trade associations are also objecting to further salt cuts. Jim Winship, the chairman of the British Sandwich Association, denounced the targets as "absolutely staggering". He said: "We are already getting complaints from retailers that consumers don't like the blandness of many sandwiches to meet existing salt targets. Sandwich makers don't add salt to sandwiches at all but it is in products such as cheese, bacon and ham. We'll soon be at a point where people stop buying sandwiches and make them at home where they add as much salt as they want. This would affect an important industry. We sell 2.8 billion packs of sandwiches a year with a market value of 5.25 billion pounds."
Ready-meal manufacturers such as Northern Foods and Kerry Foods, which are represented by the Chilled Food Association, are also anxious that further salt reductions will affect their œ9 billion a year market. Kaarin Goodburn, the secretary-general, said: "We are already reformulating many recipes but we have got reports that consumers don't like the taste especially in some healthy ranges of meals, such as lasagne, where there has been a decline in sales. What's the incentive to reformulate if it results in falling sales? People are already putting in lots more herbs instead of salt but many people don't like the taste. " Peter Sherratt, the general secretary of the Salt Association, said that feed-back from its members suggested that the agency targets had gone too far."
Source
Final grade school exams in Britain expected to show quarter of pupils without grasp of basics
Fewer children are expected to start secondary school in September with a decent grasp of the basics, according to official forecasts
The number of 11-year-olds reaching national standards in English, mathematics and science will drop across the board, it is predicted. Sats results published next week are expected to show a quarter of pupils failed to reach the level expected of their age in maths. At least one-in-five is predicted to fail in English.
It follows new rules introduced for the first time this year - preventing schools "inflating" scores for thousands of borderline pupils. In the past, children just missing national standards had exam papers automatically reviewed - resulting in some many papers being upgraded. The loophole has now been closed.
Government statisticians said they expected results to drop by up to two percentage points when they are published on Tuesday, putting standards back at levels achieved in 2004. But there are fears that results could also be affected by the chaos surrounding the marking of this year's Sats papers. Results for 6,000 primary pupils had still not been delivered to schools earlier this week following errors by the company handling the process. Thousands more results for 14-year-olds were also outstanding.
Ofqual, the exams watchdog, said the delays would not affect marking, insisting "there was no evidence of widespread problems with the quality" of scripts. But some teachers have complained of irregularities, including papers being returned with no marks at all.
Alan Smithers, professor of education at Buckingham University, said: "The Government would have been better advised to hold them back so we could be assured that we were looking at authentic results. "So many doubts have been expressed that there has to be question marks against whatever results are published next week. If we are going to compare them properly against previous years, and use them as an accurate reflection of the performance of the system, we need to know that the results are as accurate as they could be."
The National Association of Head Teachers said the decision to publish national figures "beggars belief". It said it received 300 complaints from members about inaccuracies, which may only represent the "tip of the iceberg".
Some 600,000 children took Sats tests in their final year of primary school. In 2007, 80 per cent of pupils gained the level expected of their age in English, 77 per cent in maths and 88 per cent in science. The Department for Children, Schools and Families said it expected results to fall following the removal of so-called borderlining. In a statement, officials said it was likely to cause "a fall in the proportion of pupils achieving the expected level by up to two percentage points". It is believed English results will be worst hit.
Since the mid-90s, pupils with results two or three points below the pass mark in tests had papers automatically reviewed. But results for those who only just scraped over the borderline were never re-checked. It means thousands were marked up - but no-one was downgraded. Since 1999, average results have been boosted by 1.2 percentage points in English, 0.2 points in maths and 0.6 points in science, according to the Government's National Assessment Agency.
Nick Gibb, the Conservative shadow schools minister, said: "If these are more accurate figures, it just shows that the small rises in results we have seen in the last few years have been completely bogus. It will just reiterate the fact that standards of reading, writing and maths have plateaued over the last six or seven years. We should be getting all children to the required standard."
Source
UK 'delusional' over climate change
The UK has massively overstated its reduction in carbon emissions, say two new reports which cast a harsh light on Britain's environmental policy. Government claims of reduced emissions are based on calculations which exclude significant contributing factors to global warming, the reports read. If aviation, shipping and the importing of goods are factored into the calculations UK greenhouse emissions are actually 49 per cent higher than reported. That means UK emissions have actually risen since the 1990s - contrary to government claims.
Both reports are by the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) in the University of York.
Liberal Democrat environment spokesman Steve Webb said: "The government has been unbelievably complacent about the UK's record on greenhouse gases. "The reality is that we have simply exported our emissions to countries that do the manufacturing that we used to do in the past."
Shadow environment secretary Peter Ainsworth said: "Rather than hiding behind dodgy data and relying on green gimmicks the government need to make urgent changes to move the country to a low carbon economy."
Source
Ignore this missive from people-hating doctors
The British Medical Journal's insistence that people should have fewer children speaks to our misanthropic, Malthusian, baby-fearing times
We live in a culture that finds it increasingly difficult to value life. So it isn't surprising that even the prestigious British Medical Journal (BMJ) has published an editorial calling on doctors to advise their patients to have fewer children. According to the authors of the editorial - life-long Malthusian Professor John Guillebaud and Pip Hayes, an Exeter-based GP - not having children is `analogous to avoiding patio heaters and high-carbon cars'. Newborn babies are a danger to the environment, they argue, and although they rhetorically state that `we must not put pressure on people', pressure is exactly what they want doctors to exercise as part of this new Malthusian crusade.
`We are not criticising those people in Britain who had large families in the past, because a lot of people had no inkling about the sustainability implications', Guillebeaud informed the UK Guardian (1). In fact, as a hard-line Malthusian zealot, Guillebeaud has been criticising people who breed `too much' for a very long time. All that has changed in recent years is the packaging of anti-natalist arguments.
In the past, Malthusians warned that overpopulation would lead to famine. When that argument disintegrated, they said overpopulation would undermine economic development. Later they claimed that overpopulation might assist the spread of communism, and more recently they have argued that it aids terrorism (lots of poor young men with no jobs apparently leads to apocalyptic violence).
Now they have latched on to environmentalism and the widespread concern about humanity's impact on the planet. What we have today is a new form of joined-up scaremongering, where the traditional fear of human fertility is linking up with anxieties about what humans are doing to the Earth.
King Herod's fear of the newborn was confined to one baby. Today's misanthrophic fear merchants have a far bigger target in their sights. One Australian professor of obstetric medicine, Barry Walters, believes the survival of the planet requires stringent controls on the number of children parents can have. He argues: 'Anthropogenic greenhouse gases constitute the largest source of pollution, with by far the greatest contribution from humans in the developed world. Every newborn baby in Australia represents a potent source of greenhouse gas emissions for an average of 80 years, not simply by breathing, but by the profligate consumption of resources typical of our society. What then should we do as environmentally responsible medical practitioners? We should point out the consequences to all who fail to see them, including, if necessary, the ministers for health. Far from showering financial booty on new mothers and thereby rewarding greenhouse-unfriendly behaviour, a "Baby Levy" in the form of a carbon tax should apply, in line with the "polluter pays" principle.' (2)
Throughout history, different cultures have celebrated birth as a unique moment, signifying the joy of life. The reinterpretation of a new birth as `greenhouse-unfriendly behaviour' speaks to today's degraded imagination, where carbon-reduction has become the supreme moral imperative. Once every newborn baby is dehumanised in this way - represented as little more than a professional polluter who is a `potent source of greenhouse gas emissions' - then it becomes difficult for people to read the BMJ editorial without nodding along in agreement.
If the birth of a baby is regarded as an unnecessary and unacceptable burden on the carrying capacity of the planet, then it's only a matter of time before a child's very existence will be regarded as a threat. One of the distinct features of contemporary environmentalism is its intense suspicion of the human species. Environmentalists' systematic spread of fear about the `human impact' promotes mistrust of people's motives, and in the end of people themselves. Going further down this route, the new demands for a carbon tax on fertility means that the defining identity of a newborn baby would be `Polluter'.
Subjecting the act of birth itself, that once-celebrated creation of a new life, to the `polluter pays' principle exposes the dark side of today's misanthrophic imagination.
More here
17 NHS patients with cancer wrongly get the all-clear
Seventeen cancer patients were wrongly given the allclear by a hospital after test results were misinterpreted, it was revealed yesterday. The men and women may have missed out on months of potentially life-saving treatment because of the blunders at Hereford County Hospital. In some cases the delay could have been more than two years. They have now received the devastating news that their initial diagnosis was wrong and have begun treatment. In addition 14 people were told they had cancer when they did not. Some may have needlessly undergone debilitating treatment.
The scandal came to light after concerns were raised about a consultant who examined tissue samples at the hospital. Six months ago a review of his work between May 2006 and August 2007 was started, and is now complete. The consultant, who has not been named, has been suspended and is facing disciplinary action. Legal experts said the hospital may be sued by patients.
Paul Keetch, Liberal Democrat MP for Hereford, has sent a letter to Health Secretary Alan Johnson asking him to ensure resources are made available for treating the wrongly diagnosed patients. Mr Keetch said: 'These people have not just been failed by Hereford, they have been failed by the NHS. 'Obviously there will be some patients who are undergoing speeded-up treatment for cancer, and we will be looking for other hospitals in the region to help. 'We must make sure none of the patients suffers as a result of this.'
Dr Lesley Walker of Cancer Research UK said: 'This is extremely unfortunate and distressing news. It's vital that robust systems are put in place at Hereford County Hospital to stop this happening again.'
Caroline Klage, from national medical legal firm Bolt Burden Kemp, said the NHS trust faces being sued by many of the patients. She said: 'In the very worst scenario, where someone has lost the opportunity to be given effective treatment for cancer, the outlook is now bleak and they have a number of dependents, a compensation claim is likely to be significant.'
The review looked at 5,404 tissue samples from 4,654 patients which had been worked on by the consultant in the hospital's histopathology department. Not all the cases involved cancer patients. It found the diagnosis of 102 patients was wrong and their treatment needed altering. The situation of 40 was 'more serious' than at first thought, while the remaining 62 were less serious or 'not materially different'.
Around a quarter of the department's work concerns cancer patients. It also examines samples taken from patients with other conditions, such as the bowel disease Crohn's.
Hereford Hospitals NHS Trust chief executive Martin Woodford said he wanted to apologise 'personally and on behalf of the trust' to all the patients affected. He said: 'We have acted as quickly as possible to make sure that the review was carried out thoroughly and effectively. 'I can confirm that 17 patients were initially informed, incorrectly, that they did not have a malignancy such as cancer. 'However we must emphasise that a number of these patients would have undergone precautionary treatment anyway or been subject to clinical review. 'Furthermore we can give an absolute assurance that all patients are now following the correct course of treatment.'
Source
Official rubbish snoopers in Britain
Bins belonging to celebrities, judges and London mayor Boris Johnson were searched by council-hired snoops. In all, 53 streets in Islington, North London, were secretly targeted by 'bin spies' in an operation which has angered residents. Last night, the Liberal Democrat-run council added fuel to the fire by stating: 'No permission was sought from residents as none is required.' It insisted it had not been snooping but simply 'investigating' the types of rubbish thrown away to see if more could be recycled.
Comedy actress Su Pollard lives in one of the streets involved. Miss Pollard, who starred in Hide-Hi! and You Rang, M'Lord?, said: 'I am quite incensed. It smacks of Big Brother. 'One feels like a suspect in some way. 'There is nothing in my bins that would incriminate me in any way - it's mostly yoghurt pots - but I am terribly uneasy about it. 'It will make you think twice before leaving rubbish out.'
Birds of a Feather star Linda Robson, who lived in the area at the time of the searches, said: 'That is terrible. How dare they? 'I recycle but there may have been private things I was throwing away. It is really intrusive. Is nothing sacred?' Mr Johnson declined to comment.
Emily Thornberry, Labour MP for Islington South and Finsbury, last night said serious security issues could be involved. 'High Court judges and High Court appeal judges live in those streets,' she said. 'I am sure they are careful but a sheet of paper can easily go amiss, and council officers could have seen them. 'My concerns are who authorised this and what they do with the stuff. They should have told people what they were going to do.'
The spying was uncovered after a Freedom of Information request to Islington asking whether it had undertaken any kind of survey of bins during the last five years. The answer was that it had - between August 1 and 12 2005 and between November 8 and 19 2004. In total, 1,000 households had their rubbish inspected secretly. The council said: 'The operatives involved were waste professionals acting under a strict code of conduct which included the possibility of finding items of a personal nature such as confidential paperwork.'
Liberal Democrat councillor Greg Foxsmith said: 'This is not about snooping into households' bins or invading privacy. It was an investigation into rubbish to see what is being sent to landfill and how much more could be recycled. 'Rubbish is not looked at individually or records taken - confidentiality is taken very seriously.'
Source
Saturday, August 02, 2008
'Women must have brittle bone drug', campaigners beg NHS
The Health Secretary must overturn 'farcical' rules that deny thousands of women medicine for thinning bones, campaigners say. In an unprecedented move, the National Osteoporosis Society, of which the Duchess of Cornwall is president, is writing to Alan Johnson asking him to intervene over the 'unfair and clinically unworkable' guidance.
Guidelines set by the Government's drug regulator mean doctors are only able to give women with osteoporosis the cheapest drug available - even though a quarter cannot take it. Those who cannot tolerate alendronate will have to prove that their condition has worsened by up to 60 per cent before they are allowed to have alternative treatment. It is unethical as some women will have to get 'significantly worse' than other patients before receiving a treatment they need, the charity said.
It is likely to affect thousands who experience crippling stomach pains as a side-effect or do not respond to alendronate, which costs $100 a year. Other drugs cost $34 a month. A woman in her early seventies who cannot tolerate alendronate would have to get 20 per cent worse - using a clinical scoring system - to qualify for medication such as risedronate or etidronate. The same woman would have to deteriorate 60 per cent to be eligible for strontium ranelate.
Doctors fear that the restrictions proposed for England by the rationing body, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, could lead to an epidemic of broken bones among older women. Osteoporosis can affect anyone because of natural bone loss caused by ageing. But women are at greater risk. Up to 14,000 a year die as a result of an osteoporotic hip fracture. Many others experience debilitating pain and disability from fractures.
Last year, the charity won an appeal against even more draconian restrictions put forward by NICE. But it says this has made little difference in practice. It has decided not to appeal again - which would result in the same NICE team reviewing drug treatments for a third time - but it wants a fresh appraisal. In a letter to Mr Johnson, chief executive Claire Severgnini said: 'The recommendations remain unnecessarily restrictive, denying many patients treatment at a point where treatment might make most difference to longterm quality of life. 'Their condition must be allowed to get progressively worse before each alternative treatment will be prescribed. 'Using barriers to limit treatment without regard to clinical or cost effectiveness is not how NICE is meant to appraise treatment options.'
Nick Rijke, of the charity, said the whole process is a 'farce', based on a computer model of pricing options in which the cost of treating hip fractures was grossly under-estimated. NICE had failed to give the charity access to the model despite a legal judgment this year which ruled against similar secrecy used in a drugs ban imposed on thou-with Alzheimer's disease. Mr Rijke said: 'We have been left with no option other than to plead with the Department of Health to secure a fresh, open-minded and fair appraisal.
A Department of Health spokesman said NICE is appraising 'a number of treatments for primary and secondary prevention of osteoporotic fractures. 'Stakeholders have recently had the opportunity to lodge appeals against NICE's revised draft guidance and I understand that NICE has now received an appeal which will be heard in public. NICE will not issue final guidance to the NHS until the appeal has been heard and considered. 'It would be inappropriate for ministers to intervene in the conduct of an ongoing NICE appraisal.'
Source
The state-sanctioned bullying of fat kids
Why is Britain opening so many `fat camps'? The evidence suggests they don't work, and only make overweight children feel isolated and ashamed
Last year's erroneously titled Foresight report on obesity, published by the UK government, recommended `fat camps' for overweight British teenagers, because apparently radical strategies are necessary to avert a public health catastrophe. This draconian policy found its way into the government's evidence-free obesity strategy, Healthy Weight, Healthy Lives, which prescribes anti-obesity interventions at the local level.
Consequently, Rotherham Primary Care Trust, as part of the new Rotherham Obesity Strategy, has unveiled a three-year plan targeting families with overweight children. The Trust identified Rotherham's fattest children and this summer banished 38 of them to a fat camp, the Carnegie Residential Weight Loss Camp, in Leeds.
This is not the first time that fat British children have been sent away because they are aesthetically unpleasing to their parents, peers and the public health establishment. The summer of 1999 saw Britain's first residential fat camp (based on the American model) open its doors to 40 overweight children. The Too Fat to Toddle camp, the first British fat camp for under-fives, opened for business late last year.
This week, officialdom's war against fat children was stepped up a mark. The government revealed that, starting in the next school term, parents will be sent `fat reports' on their children. As part of the anti-obesity crusade, schools will weigh children at the age of four to five and again at 10 to 11 and send details about their Body Mass Index to parents, with advice on whether their child's weight is unhealthy. And Sunday's Observer reported that Britain's first live-in fat camp - a `boarding school exclusively for overweight and obese teenagers' - will open soon in the Lake District.
It is deeply frustrating that British policymakers did not heed the lessons of the American experience, where fat camps have existed for 45 years, before unleashing yet another futile childhood obesity intervention.
The first fat camp for children, New York State's Camp Napanoch, opened in 1963. Three years later, it was out of business. During the next 30 years, a large number of fat camps appeared across America. Eventually, the fat camp business turned sour and most camps went bust. By the mid-1990s, there were fewer than 20 fat camps in operation. Today, there are only a dozen left.
Why is business so bad in America, the world leader in fat children and obsessive parenting? Because the dirty little secret of fat camps is that they do not work. It is true that often a child will go to a fat camp and return home a stone or two lighter. At the UK's original fat camp in Leeds, obese teenagers typically lose 12lb over a one-month residential stay.
Chances are, however, that they will regain the weight in a few months. The Los Angeles Times reported that only one in 10 American campers actually keep the weight off. A New York Times investigation found that the majority of campers attending these programmes are repeat customers.
Individual camp's self-reporting success stories are littered with methodological problems, as most fat camps neither track nor report post-camp outcomes. Most do not remain in contact with their customers and camp `graduates' cannot be trusted to honestly respond to questionnaires that attempt to keep tabs on their weight history.
Most fat campers regain substantial amounts of weight within the first year. In a warning to parents, Dr Oded Bar-Or, director of McMaster University's Children's Exercise and Nutrition Center, said: `If you think the camp is going to solve the problem - the child will at long last lose weight and keep it that way - you can forget it.'
Therefore, it is unsurprising, yet deeply revealing, that the Rotherham Obesity Strategy provides information neither on the anticipated effectiveness of its own fat camps nor on the effectiveness of similar camps. To be fair, it cannot do so because there is no empirical evidence, as the Foresight report acknowledged, that government intervention in this area produces the desired outcome.
Most tellingly, perhaps, last autumn a qualitative study of the management of childhood obesity was published in the journal, BMC Family Practice. In this study, a representative group of primary care doctors in the 39 general practices that contract with Rotherham Primary Care Trust concluded that the evidence base for these programmes remains poor.
Earlier, the prestigious Cochrane systematic reviews of interventions for childhood obesity, which included 18 studies of various different treatments, found none of them to be effective....
Fat camps isolate children with a weight problem and add to the distress of an obese child. Professor Nick Finer of Luton and Dunstable Hospital's Obesity Research Centre, says: `You have to consider the psychological effects of sending your child away to such a place. Society already discriminates against fat people and I'm concerned that children might see being sent to these camps as a punishment for being fat.'
Fat children are expected to suffer, with stereotypical jolliness, the slings and arrows of a society dangerously obsessed with thinness. Probably, school playgrounds will always witness the bullying of fat children. But, as adults, we can and should eliminate fat-based bullying from government policy.
Source
Turning the tables on the Inquisitors
Catholic barrister and legal author Neil Addison offers a personal view on the case of Christian registrar, Lillian Ladelle. Addison argues that Ladelle's victory provides welcome recognition for the right of religious people to refuse to carry out work which contradicts their beliefs. And the widespread condemnation of the court victory shows up the intolerance of today's liberal crusaders
In June, Christian registrar Lillian Ladelle won a case for religious discrimination against her employers, Islington Council in London, after she was `discriminated, bullied and harrassed' for refusing to conduct civil partnership ceremonies for gay couples. To judge from the howls of anguish following the judgement, one might think that the Inquisition was already setting up stakes outside St Paul's, with the Archbishop of Canterbury issuing fatwas from Number 10.
`Secularism in peril!', declared the National Secular Society (NSS) (1) after its president, Terry Sanderson, wrote in a Guardian comment piece that `This is a catastrophic judgment, not just for gay people but for the wider community'. It might seem easy just to dismiss this comment as just one, rather predictable, reaction by a particularly anti-religious organisation. But, significantly, the Commission for Equality and Human Rights (CEHR) decided that the NSS statement should be the only information about the Ladelle case to be put on the its website (it has now been removed).
Since the CEHR has a statutory responsibility to oppose all forms of discrimination, one might have expected it to have applauded, rather than criticised, a victory for a victim of religious discrimination. But the reaction of the CEHR and other `liberal' commentators to the Ladelle case has shown up the nasty, intolerant underside of the modern diversity and equality establishment, and its double standards concerning the interrelationship of Christianity, law and society. In addition, the reactions demonstrate an increasing inability to understand the concept of conscientious moral objection.
If you take the trouble to read the tribunal judgement in the Ladelle case (2), it will become clear that Ladelle was not trying to avoid her work responsibilities, nor was she abusive or insulting to any gay colleagues or members of the public. She had moral, religious objections to performing civil partnership ceremonies because she saw that as an endorsement of homosexual conduct - something she disagreed with. So, when a civil partnership came up, she asked other staff members, who were happy to perform them, to step in. This did not cause any administrative problems for her employers, Islington Council. It did not delay or cause problems for a single civil partnership and no complaints about Lillian were received from any gay member of the public.
But two employees at Islington, who described themselves as `members of the gay community', complained about Ladelle. In consequence, Lillian was bullied by her manager and details of her personal situation and a `confidential' management letter about her was revealed to the local Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender (LGBT) Forum. What her complainants ultimately objected to was not what Lillian did or how she acted, but what she thought and what she believed. She could not be allowed to continue her work in peace, she had to be challenged and her views had to be changed because, in the mind of the heresy hunters of the modern diversity industry, she was guilty of `thought crime'.
Ladelle's case was brought under the 2003 Employment Equality (Religion and Belief) regulations (3), which were brought in at the same time as the Employment Equality (Sexual Orientation) regulations (4). In paragraph 50 of its judgement, the employment tribunal notes that there is a complex interrelationship between these two sets of regulations and the two principles of non-discrimination they represent: `This is a case where there is a direct conflict between the legislative protection afforded to religion and belief and the legislative protection afforded to sexual orientation. One set of rights cannot overrule the other set of rights.'
In all areas of discrimination law, there is the question of `reasonable accommodation' so that, for example, Sikh employees are not required to take off their turbans in order to conform to the uniform worn by everyone else. However, during the tribunal hearing, Ladelle's manager said: `I don't believe we should be accommodating people's religious beliefs in the registry service.'
The tribunal had to reject that point of view just as they would have to reject the point of view of any manager who didn't believe it was necessary to accommodate someone's sexual orientation, disability, sex, race or age. If it had been impracticable for Islington to accommodate Lillian, or if it would have made the working of the registry service impossible or unreasonably difficult, then Ladelle would not have won her case. But the evidence was that Ladelle's unwillingness to conduct civil partnerships caused no such problems. Her manager was not prepared to accommodate her religious beliefs because the manager did not agree with them.
Rod Liddle criticised Ladelle in The Sunday Times and described Christians as a `vanishingly small section of the British population' (5). Even if assuming, for the sake of the argument, his remark is true, surely the whole purpose of discrimination law is to protect minorities? In any event, the number of civil partnerships in 2007 - 8,728 - is also `vanishingly small' compared to the number of marriages - 275,140 (7).
Part of the hysterical overreaction to the Ladelle case arises from a profound theological illiteracy in modern society and a refusal to recognise that there is a distinction between discriminating against someone because of their actions and being morally complicit in those actions. For example, Ben Summerskill, the national director of the gay rights campaign, Stonewall, suggested on BBC News that because of the Ladelle case, Christian firefighters might refuse to rescue gay people trapped in a burning building. In a recent BMA general meeting it was suggested that Muslim doctors might refuse to treat alcoholics. In neither of these hypothetical situations would a Christian or Muslim have any theological, or legal, basis for refusing their services because in neither case would they be morally complicit in the actions of the people they were assisting.
If a gay couple is trapped in a fire, then a firefighter who saves them is passing no moral judgement on them or their sexual activities nor is he morally complicit in them. However, a registrar who `marries' them is morally complicit. Similarly, a Muslim doctor who treats an alcoholic is not morally complicit in their alcohol drinking, but a Muslim shop assistant who sells alcohol is. This failure to recognise the concept of moral complicity lies at the heart of the problem that the Roman Catholic adoption agencies face since being required to abide by the Sexual Orientation Regulations. If an adoption agency places a child for adoption with a gay couple then it is, in effect, giving moral approval to that relationship and is thereby morally complicit in it. There is no explicit scope for conscientious objection and the giving of a child for adoption is treated on the same legal basis as the selling of a beef burger.
Several commentators on the Ladelle case have suggested that, because Lillian was engaged in a secular employment, her religious views should have no relevance. I have some sympathy with that view. However, if we are to have a division between secular and sacred then that division cannot just be one way. If religious belief should stay out of secular employment and services, then surely discrimination law should similarly stay out of religion services and employment, but that is not the way the law works. In 2007, the Bishop of Hereford was taken to an employment tribunal over his decision that the diocese should not employ a gay youth worker (8). The Christian views on sexual morality were not regarded as relevant by the tribunal.
By extending anti-discrimination laws to cover sexual orientation and religious belief, the law has, in effect, entered the area of personal conscience to an extent not seen in this country since the repeal of the Anti-Catholic Test Acts in 1829. Today, the descendents of Torquemada and the Inquisition no longer work for the Church - they have instead become diversity officers mercilessly enforcing the new orthodoxy and relentlessly hounding those, like Lillian Ladelle, who are the heretics of the new age.
Source
"Blame everybody but the guilty party" loses for once in Britain
A couple ordered to $2 million damages to a boy who suffered brain damage on a bouncy castle have won their appeal in a 'victory for common sense'. Timothy and Catherine Perry were held responsible for the accident in which 13-year-old Sam Harris was kicked in the head by an older teenager. But yesterday the country's top judge overturned a High Court ruling in May that the couple had not paid close enough attention to the children's party.
Lord Chief Justice Lord Phillips, sitting with Lord Justice May and Lord Justice Wilson at the Court of Appeal, overruled Mr Justice Steel's decision by declaring that it was a 'freak and tragic accident'.
Legal experts hailed the decision a victory for those supervising bouncy castles who had been left open to compensation claims by parents over even minor accidents.
The accident happened at a tenth birthday party the Perrys were holding for their triplets in a playing field in Strood, near Rochester, Kent, in September 2005. Sam Harris, then aged 11, asked Mrs Perry if he and another boy, Sammy Pring, 15, could have a go. The Perrys had also hired a bungee run and while Mrs Perry had her back turned, Sammy accidentally kicked Sam in the head when performing a somersault. Sam suffered a 'very serious and traumatic brain injury', and now needs round-the-clock care. His parents, Janet and David Harris, who are separated, sued the Perrys.
The High Court ruled that Mr and Mrs Perry should pay an immediate $200,000 to the Harris family and were liable to pay up to as much as $2 million more in damages. But yesterday the High Court ruling was overturned. Sam will not receive any compensation and his parents are expected to take their case to the House of Lords.
Neil Addison, a barrister specialising in civil law, said: 'This appeal simply marks common sense. 'It is a tragic accident and one obviously feels sorry for the boy and his parents but I am not at all surprised at the outcome.'
During the appeal hearing, Lord Phillips said Mrs Perry was under no obligation to keep the bouncy castle under continuous observation, and it was not 'foreseeable' that it posed a 'significant risk of harm'. He added that Mrs Perry had acted 'reasonably' in believing she could supervise the castle and the bungee run at the same time.
Source
Brownout: "A year ago, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown was enjoying a honeymoon as a new prime minister, building on a decade of Labour Party dominance under Tony Blair. How things have changed. A poll yesterday for the Independent newspaper found nearly a quarter of Labour voters believe Conservative Party leader David Cameron would make a better prime minister than their own Mr. Brown. Among all voters, Mr. Cameron held an 18-point lead on that question. That's why the Scotsman, the leading newspaper in Mr. Brown's native Scotland, is rattling political china with its report that Labour ministers are considering a "suicide election" to give the party a fresh start under a new leader. Under this scenario, Mr. Brown would be dumped either this fall or next spring, and the party would call an immediate election in which defeat would be the most likely outcome".
The Health Secretary must overturn 'farcical' rules that deny thousands of women medicine for thinning bones, campaigners say. In an unprecedented move, the National Osteoporosis Society, of which the Duchess of Cornwall is president, is writing to Alan Johnson asking him to intervene over the 'unfair and clinically unworkable' guidance.
Guidelines set by the Government's drug regulator mean doctors are only able to give women with osteoporosis the cheapest drug available - even though a quarter cannot take it. Those who cannot tolerate alendronate will have to prove that their condition has worsened by up to 60 per cent before they are allowed to have alternative treatment. It is unethical as some women will have to get 'significantly worse' than other patients before receiving a treatment they need, the charity said.
It is likely to affect thousands who experience crippling stomach pains as a side-effect or do not respond to alendronate, which costs $100 a year. Other drugs cost $34 a month. A woman in her early seventies who cannot tolerate alendronate would have to get 20 per cent worse - using a clinical scoring system - to qualify for medication such as risedronate or etidronate. The same woman would have to deteriorate 60 per cent to be eligible for strontium ranelate.
Doctors fear that the restrictions proposed for England by the rationing body, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, could lead to an epidemic of broken bones among older women. Osteoporosis can affect anyone because of natural bone loss caused by ageing. But women are at greater risk. Up to 14,000 a year die as a result of an osteoporotic hip fracture. Many others experience debilitating pain and disability from fractures.
Last year, the charity won an appeal against even more draconian restrictions put forward by NICE. But it says this has made little difference in practice. It has decided not to appeal again - which would result in the same NICE team reviewing drug treatments for a third time - but it wants a fresh appraisal. In a letter to Mr Johnson, chief executive Claire Severgnini said: 'The recommendations remain unnecessarily restrictive, denying many patients treatment at a point where treatment might make most difference to longterm quality of life. 'Their condition must be allowed to get progressively worse before each alternative treatment will be prescribed. 'Using barriers to limit treatment without regard to clinical or cost effectiveness is not how NICE is meant to appraise treatment options.'
Nick Rijke, of the charity, said the whole process is a 'farce', based on a computer model of pricing options in which the cost of treating hip fractures was grossly under-estimated. NICE had failed to give the charity access to the model despite a legal judgment this year which ruled against similar secrecy used in a drugs ban imposed on thou-with Alzheimer's disease. Mr Rijke said: 'We have been left with no option other than to plead with the Department of Health to secure a fresh, open-minded and fair appraisal.
A Department of Health spokesman said NICE is appraising 'a number of treatments for primary and secondary prevention of osteoporotic fractures. 'Stakeholders have recently had the opportunity to lodge appeals against NICE's revised draft guidance and I understand that NICE has now received an appeal which will be heard in public. NICE will not issue final guidance to the NHS until the appeal has been heard and considered. 'It would be inappropriate for ministers to intervene in the conduct of an ongoing NICE appraisal.'
Source
The state-sanctioned bullying of fat kids
Why is Britain opening so many `fat camps'? The evidence suggests they don't work, and only make overweight children feel isolated and ashamed
Last year's erroneously titled Foresight report on obesity, published by the UK government, recommended `fat camps' for overweight British teenagers, because apparently radical strategies are necessary to avert a public health catastrophe. This draconian policy found its way into the government's evidence-free obesity strategy, Healthy Weight, Healthy Lives, which prescribes anti-obesity interventions at the local level.
Consequently, Rotherham Primary Care Trust, as part of the new Rotherham Obesity Strategy, has unveiled a three-year plan targeting families with overweight children. The Trust identified Rotherham's fattest children and this summer banished 38 of them to a fat camp, the Carnegie Residential Weight Loss Camp, in Leeds.
This is not the first time that fat British children have been sent away because they are aesthetically unpleasing to their parents, peers and the public health establishment. The summer of 1999 saw Britain's first residential fat camp (based on the American model) open its doors to 40 overweight children. The Too Fat to Toddle camp, the first British fat camp for under-fives, opened for business late last year.
This week, officialdom's war against fat children was stepped up a mark. The government revealed that, starting in the next school term, parents will be sent `fat reports' on their children. As part of the anti-obesity crusade, schools will weigh children at the age of four to five and again at 10 to 11 and send details about their Body Mass Index to parents, with advice on whether their child's weight is unhealthy. And Sunday's Observer reported that Britain's first live-in fat camp - a `boarding school exclusively for overweight and obese teenagers' - will open soon in the Lake District.
It is deeply frustrating that British policymakers did not heed the lessons of the American experience, where fat camps have existed for 45 years, before unleashing yet another futile childhood obesity intervention.
The first fat camp for children, New York State's Camp Napanoch, opened in 1963. Three years later, it was out of business. During the next 30 years, a large number of fat camps appeared across America. Eventually, the fat camp business turned sour and most camps went bust. By the mid-1990s, there were fewer than 20 fat camps in operation. Today, there are only a dozen left.
Why is business so bad in America, the world leader in fat children and obsessive parenting? Because the dirty little secret of fat camps is that they do not work. It is true that often a child will go to a fat camp and return home a stone or two lighter. At the UK's original fat camp in Leeds, obese teenagers typically lose 12lb over a one-month residential stay.
Chances are, however, that they will regain the weight in a few months. The Los Angeles Times reported that only one in 10 American campers actually keep the weight off. A New York Times investigation found that the majority of campers attending these programmes are repeat customers.
Individual camp's self-reporting success stories are littered with methodological problems, as most fat camps neither track nor report post-camp outcomes. Most do not remain in contact with their customers and camp `graduates' cannot be trusted to honestly respond to questionnaires that attempt to keep tabs on their weight history.
Most fat campers regain substantial amounts of weight within the first year. In a warning to parents, Dr Oded Bar-Or, director of McMaster University's Children's Exercise and Nutrition Center, said: `If you think the camp is going to solve the problem - the child will at long last lose weight and keep it that way - you can forget it.'
Therefore, it is unsurprising, yet deeply revealing, that the Rotherham Obesity Strategy provides information neither on the anticipated effectiveness of its own fat camps nor on the effectiveness of similar camps. To be fair, it cannot do so because there is no empirical evidence, as the Foresight report acknowledged, that government intervention in this area produces the desired outcome.
Most tellingly, perhaps, last autumn a qualitative study of the management of childhood obesity was published in the journal, BMC Family Practice. In this study, a representative group of primary care doctors in the 39 general practices that contract with Rotherham Primary Care Trust concluded that the evidence base for these programmes remains poor.
Earlier, the prestigious Cochrane systematic reviews of interventions for childhood obesity, which included 18 studies of various different treatments, found none of them to be effective....
Fat camps isolate children with a weight problem and add to the distress of an obese child. Professor Nick Finer of Luton and Dunstable Hospital's Obesity Research Centre, says: `You have to consider the psychological effects of sending your child away to such a place. Society already discriminates against fat people and I'm concerned that children might see being sent to these camps as a punishment for being fat.'
Fat children are expected to suffer, with stereotypical jolliness, the slings and arrows of a society dangerously obsessed with thinness. Probably, school playgrounds will always witness the bullying of fat children. But, as adults, we can and should eliminate fat-based bullying from government policy.
Source
Turning the tables on the Inquisitors
Catholic barrister and legal author Neil Addison offers a personal view on the case of Christian registrar, Lillian Ladelle. Addison argues that Ladelle's victory provides welcome recognition for the right of religious people to refuse to carry out work which contradicts their beliefs. And the widespread condemnation of the court victory shows up the intolerance of today's liberal crusaders
In June, Christian registrar Lillian Ladelle won a case for religious discrimination against her employers, Islington Council in London, after she was `discriminated, bullied and harrassed' for refusing to conduct civil partnership ceremonies for gay couples. To judge from the howls of anguish following the judgement, one might think that the Inquisition was already setting up stakes outside St Paul's, with the Archbishop of Canterbury issuing fatwas from Number 10.
`Secularism in peril!', declared the National Secular Society (NSS) (1) after its president, Terry Sanderson, wrote in a Guardian comment piece that `This is a catastrophic judgment, not just for gay people but for the wider community'. It might seem easy just to dismiss this comment as just one, rather predictable, reaction by a particularly anti-religious organisation. But, significantly, the Commission for Equality and Human Rights (CEHR) decided that the NSS statement should be the only information about the Ladelle case to be put on the its website (it has now been removed).
Since the CEHR has a statutory responsibility to oppose all forms of discrimination, one might have expected it to have applauded, rather than criticised, a victory for a victim of religious discrimination. But the reaction of the CEHR and other `liberal' commentators to the Ladelle case has shown up the nasty, intolerant underside of the modern diversity and equality establishment, and its double standards concerning the interrelationship of Christianity, law and society. In addition, the reactions demonstrate an increasing inability to understand the concept of conscientious moral objection.
If you take the trouble to read the tribunal judgement in the Ladelle case (2), it will become clear that Ladelle was not trying to avoid her work responsibilities, nor was she abusive or insulting to any gay colleagues or members of the public. She had moral, religious objections to performing civil partnership ceremonies because she saw that as an endorsement of homosexual conduct - something she disagreed with. So, when a civil partnership came up, she asked other staff members, who were happy to perform them, to step in. This did not cause any administrative problems for her employers, Islington Council. It did not delay or cause problems for a single civil partnership and no complaints about Lillian were received from any gay member of the public.
But two employees at Islington, who described themselves as `members of the gay community', complained about Ladelle. In consequence, Lillian was bullied by her manager and details of her personal situation and a `confidential' management letter about her was revealed to the local Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender (LGBT) Forum. What her complainants ultimately objected to was not what Lillian did or how she acted, but what she thought and what she believed. She could not be allowed to continue her work in peace, she had to be challenged and her views had to be changed because, in the mind of the heresy hunters of the modern diversity industry, she was guilty of `thought crime'.
Ladelle's case was brought under the 2003 Employment Equality (Religion and Belief) regulations (3), which were brought in at the same time as the Employment Equality (Sexual Orientation) regulations (4). In paragraph 50 of its judgement, the employment tribunal notes that there is a complex interrelationship between these two sets of regulations and the two principles of non-discrimination they represent: `This is a case where there is a direct conflict between the legislative protection afforded to religion and belief and the legislative protection afforded to sexual orientation. One set of rights cannot overrule the other set of rights.'
In all areas of discrimination law, there is the question of `reasonable accommodation' so that, for example, Sikh employees are not required to take off their turbans in order to conform to the uniform worn by everyone else. However, during the tribunal hearing, Ladelle's manager said: `I don't believe we should be accommodating people's religious beliefs in the registry service.'
The tribunal had to reject that point of view just as they would have to reject the point of view of any manager who didn't believe it was necessary to accommodate someone's sexual orientation, disability, sex, race or age. If it had been impracticable for Islington to accommodate Lillian, or if it would have made the working of the registry service impossible or unreasonably difficult, then Ladelle would not have won her case. But the evidence was that Ladelle's unwillingness to conduct civil partnerships caused no such problems. Her manager was not prepared to accommodate her religious beliefs because the manager did not agree with them.
Rod Liddle criticised Ladelle in The Sunday Times and described Christians as a `vanishingly small section of the British population' (5). Even if assuming, for the sake of the argument, his remark is true, surely the whole purpose of discrimination law is to protect minorities? In any event, the number of civil partnerships in 2007 - 8,728 - is also `vanishingly small' compared to the number of marriages - 275,140 (7).
Part of the hysterical overreaction to the Ladelle case arises from a profound theological illiteracy in modern society and a refusal to recognise that there is a distinction between discriminating against someone because of their actions and being morally complicit in those actions. For example, Ben Summerskill, the national director of the gay rights campaign, Stonewall, suggested on BBC News that because of the Ladelle case, Christian firefighters might refuse to rescue gay people trapped in a burning building. In a recent BMA general meeting it was suggested that Muslim doctors might refuse to treat alcoholics. In neither of these hypothetical situations would a Christian or Muslim have any theological, or legal, basis for refusing their services because in neither case would they be morally complicit in the actions of the people they were assisting.
If a gay couple is trapped in a fire, then a firefighter who saves them is passing no moral judgement on them or their sexual activities nor is he morally complicit in them. However, a registrar who `marries' them is morally complicit. Similarly, a Muslim doctor who treats an alcoholic is not morally complicit in their alcohol drinking, but a Muslim shop assistant who sells alcohol is. This failure to recognise the concept of moral complicity lies at the heart of the problem that the Roman Catholic adoption agencies face since being required to abide by the Sexual Orientation Regulations. If an adoption agency places a child for adoption with a gay couple then it is, in effect, giving moral approval to that relationship and is thereby morally complicit in it. There is no explicit scope for conscientious objection and the giving of a child for adoption is treated on the same legal basis as the selling of a beef burger.
Several commentators on the Ladelle case have suggested that, because Lillian was engaged in a secular employment, her religious views should have no relevance. I have some sympathy with that view. However, if we are to have a division between secular and sacred then that division cannot just be one way. If religious belief should stay out of secular employment and services, then surely discrimination law should similarly stay out of religion services and employment, but that is not the way the law works. In 2007, the Bishop of Hereford was taken to an employment tribunal over his decision that the diocese should not employ a gay youth worker (8). The Christian views on sexual morality were not regarded as relevant by the tribunal.
By extending anti-discrimination laws to cover sexual orientation and religious belief, the law has, in effect, entered the area of personal conscience to an extent not seen in this country since the repeal of the Anti-Catholic Test Acts in 1829. Today, the descendents of Torquemada and the Inquisition no longer work for the Church - they have instead become diversity officers mercilessly enforcing the new orthodoxy and relentlessly hounding those, like Lillian Ladelle, who are the heretics of the new age.
Source
"Blame everybody but the guilty party" loses for once in Britain
A couple ordered to $2 million damages to a boy who suffered brain damage on a bouncy castle have won their appeal in a 'victory for common sense'. Timothy and Catherine Perry were held responsible for the accident in which 13-year-old Sam Harris was kicked in the head by an older teenager. But yesterday the country's top judge overturned a High Court ruling in May that the couple had not paid close enough attention to the children's party.
Lord Chief Justice Lord Phillips, sitting with Lord Justice May and Lord Justice Wilson at the Court of Appeal, overruled Mr Justice Steel's decision by declaring that it was a 'freak and tragic accident'.
Legal experts hailed the decision a victory for those supervising bouncy castles who had been left open to compensation claims by parents over even minor accidents.
The accident happened at a tenth birthday party the Perrys were holding for their triplets in a playing field in Strood, near Rochester, Kent, in September 2005. Sam Harris, then aged 11, asked Mrs Perry if he and another boy, Sammy Pring, 15, could have a go. The Perrys had also hired a bungee run and while Mrs Perry had her back turned, Sammy accidentally kicked Sam in the head when performing a somersault. Sam suffered a 'very serious and traumatic brain injury', and now needs round-the-clock care. His parents, Janet and David Harris, who are separated, sued the Perrys.
The High Court ruled that Mr and Mrs Perry should pay an immediate $200,000 to the Harris family and were liable to pay up to as much as $2 million more in damages. But yesterday the High Court ruling was overturned. Sam will not receive any compensation and his parents are expected to take their case to the House of Lords.
Neil Addison, a barrister specialising in civil law, said: 'This appeal simply marks common sense. 'It is a tragic accident and one obviously feels sorry for the boy and his parents but I am not at all surprised at the outcome.'
During the appeal hearing, Lord Phillips said Mrs Perry was under no obligation to keep the bouncy castle under continuous observation, and it was not 'foreseeable' that it posed a 'significant risk of harm'. He added that Mrs Perry had acted 'reasonably' in believing she could supervise the castle and the bungee run at the same time.
Source
Brownout: "A year ago, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown was enjoying a honeymoon as a new prime minister, building on a decade of Labour Party dominance under Tony Blair. How things have changed. A poll yesterday for the Independent newspaper found nearly a quarter of Labour voters believe Conservative Party leader David Cameron would make a better prime minister than their own Mr. Brown. Among all voters, Mr. Cameron held an 18-point lead on that question. That's why the Scotsman, the leading newspaper in Mr. Brown's native Scotland, is rattling political china with its report that Labour ministers are considering a "suicide election" to give the party a fresh start under a new leader. Under this scenario, Mr. Brown would be dumped either this fall or next spring, and the party would call an immediate election in which defeat would be the most likely outcome".
Friday, August 01, 2008
British courts stymie crackdown on sham marriages
On "human rights" grounds
Law Lords have ruled the home secretary cannot use controversial powers to stop sham marriages as they discriminate against foreigners in the UK. They said the Home Office had interfered in an "arbitrary and unjust" way in the rights of 15,000 people.
Ministers said the rules were vital to tackle illegal immigration scams - but conceded they will need to be reformed. The measures were brought in after registrars complained they they had no way of stopping bogus marriage rackets. But many foreign nationals said they were being treated unfairly, and that the scheme was unnecessary, slow and bureaucratic. They also said it was expensive - the regulations meant they had to pay up to $1200 in fees to get permission to marry.
The controversial Home Office powers on marriages were introduced in February 2005. The rules meant people who were not legally permanently settled in the UK were obliged to seek special permission to marry, irrespective of the status of their partner. But the powers were challenged in April 2006 when three couples alleged their human rights had been breached.
In the first case the home secretary refused permission to marry to Mahmoud Baiai, 37, an Algerian illegal immigrant, and Izabella Trzcinska, 28, from Poland, who was in the UK legally. The two other cases related to asylum seekers - including one individual who had been told to leave the country, but wanted to marry someone already given protection as a refugee. All three were later given permission to marry.
In his ruling against the Home Office, Lord Bingham said immigration rules, as well as the right to respect for family life under the European Convention, gave protection to some migrants who marry in the UK - even if they had limited or no leave to enter or stay.
He added that the Immigration Directorate had issued instructions, without clear parliamentary approval, to deny permission to marry under certain circumstances. "The vice of the scheme is that none of these conditions, although of course relevant to immigration status, has any relevance to the genuineness of a proposed marriage," he said.
The ruling was welcomed by some campaigners - the chief executive of the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, Habib Rahman, said the government's policy was now in "tatters". He added: "It's a great day for human rights, for justice and for migrant communities... The government will have to go back to the drawing board." Solicitor Amit Sachdev, who represented three of the claimants in the case, described the marriage legislation as "draconian... misconceived and ill thought-out".
The scale of sham marriages is unknown, although senior registrars suggested that before the new legislation there could have been at least 10,000 a year. Registrars at Brent Council in north London suggested in 2005 that a fifth of all marriages there were bogus, with officials able to spot couples who barely knew each other.
According to Home Office figures, since the new checks were introduced the number of suspicious marriage reports received from registrars fell from 3,740 in 2004 to fewer than 300 by the end of May 2005. Between January and August 2006, there were only 149 such reports, it said.
Source
Britain shuffling the student visa deckchairs
Foreign students who miss more than 10 lectures in a row will be reported to the Government under new plans to crack down on illegal immigration. However, foreigners will be able to avoid the new requirements if they opt to enter the UK as a "student visitor", rather than under a student visa.
The Conservatives said that this was a potential loophole which could be exploited by unscrupulous immigrants who had no intention of studying here. The moves were announced by the immigration minister Liam Byrne as part of a shake-up of the student visa system to crack down on bogus colleges. Universities and colleges will also have to apply for a $800 licence to recruit international students and could be blacklisted if they fail to comply with new regulations.
The proposals form Tier 4 of the Government's new points-based immigration system. It will force colleges offering courses longer than six months to accept responsibility for a student while he or she is in the UK. They will have to keep up-to-date contact details for all students and report to the Home Office if a student misses 10 lectures in a row, fails to enrol on time or quits college. If this happened to a number of students, the Home Office would consider the college's "overall suitability" as a licensed college to teach international students.
Once accepted on a course by a licensed college, each student will have to prove to the UK Border Agency that he or she has enough money to pay their fees and support themselves and any dependants. They will also have to prove they have a track record in achieving qualifications before coming to the UK. If successful they will be allowed to stay in the UK for up to four years, longer than under present rules. They will also be allowed to work in the country for up to two years after completing their studies - 12 months more than at present, as discloseed by The Daily Telegraph yesterday.
Immigration minister Liam Byrne said: "All those who come to Britain must play by the rules. It is right that foreign students wanting to take advantage of our world-class universities and colleges must meet strict criteria. "By locking people to one identity with ID cards, alongside a tough new sponsorship system, we will know exactly who is coming here to study and crack down on bogus colleges."
In 2006, 309,000 people from outside Europe came to Britain on student visas - but this figure does not include those coming as short-term student visitors. The Home Office said that student visitors had to pass an "intentions test" showing they support themselves and will leave after completing their course.
But shadow immigration minister Damian Green said: "This new system is so full of loopholes it will be useless at best and might even encourage the growth of bogus colleges or applications."
Source
UN to Britain: Stop Being Islamophobic
These are the guys who constantly condemn Israel but who have yet to utter a single condemnation of the vast human rights abuses in Muslim countries such as Iran and Saudi Arabia
Extending its campaign to squelch discussion of Islam and lobby member countries to roll back their citizens' speech rights, the United Nations has asked that Great Britain do more to challenge negative views about Muslims:
Concrete "acts of discrimination" are one thing; "negative public attitudes" are an entirely different matter. Is it the role of governments to allow or disallow certain beliefs to inhabit the minds of people? And who gets to decide what constitutes "negative public attitudes"?
Moreover, Britain already has bent over backwards for its Muslim population. The term "war on terror" - often criticized by anti-Islamist researchers as imprecise - was scrapped by the Foreign Office in 2006 due to concerns that it might anger Muslims. Earlier this year, ministers waded further into the swamp of political correctness by stipulating that Islamic terrorism should be referred to as "anti-Islamic activity." The nation has also done much to accommodate Islamic law in both welfare and finance. Furthermore, two leading public figures - Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams and Lord Chief Justice Lord Phillips - have endorsed the adoption of Shari'a for adjudicating marital and financial disputes.
The committee's demand that Britain police the thoughts and words of its people is consistent with recent speech-suppression efforts undertaken by the Islamist-dominated UN Human Rights Council. In March, the body passed a resolution that condemns "attempts to identify Islam with terrorism, violence, and human rights violations," while declaring that "freedom of expression . may therefore be subject to certain restrictions . necessary for the respect of the rights or reputations of others." In June, the HRC severely constrained discussion of Islam during debates at the council, after Muslim members objected to a presentation on female genital mutilation, stoning, and child marriage.
"It is regrettable that there are false translations and interpretations of the freedom of expression," delegates from Saudi Arabia stated in March. What's truly regrettable is that the UN gives Islamists a platform from which to promote the curtailment of Western liberties.
Source
Smaller private schools at risk of closure because of credit crisis
Independent schools are at the risk of closure because parents can no longer afford the fees, education experts have warned
It came after two schools were forced to close, becoming the first high-profile victims of the credit crisis. One school shut altogether while a second has been forced to call in receivers, who are attempting to sell it to a new buyer. Both were members of the prestigious Girls' Schools Association, the group representing Britain's top single-sex schools. Wispers School in Haslemere, Surrey, will not reopen after the summer holidays, blaming financial pressures and a drop in demand for all-girls' education. And Wentworth College, Bournemouth, will shut next week, citing the "current economic climate, linked with a short term fall in pupil numbers".
Last night, experts said the schools' closures were likely to be the "first of many" as the independent sector is squeezed by the financial downturn. All bar one of England's top 20 private schools raised fees above inflation this year, according to one report, prompting claims that some schools were "underestimating parents' sensitivities to fee increases".
Sue Fieldman, regional editor of the Good Schools Guide, said: "These are the first ones to close for a while but I think we may see a string of them. Girls' schools are particularly vulnerable. "Of course, the top schools remain very strong, but the middle-ranking and very small schools may suffer. "Some of these only need to lose two or three pupils a year and it is going to start being very difficult to stay afloat, particularly in the present climate."
Wispers, an all-girl boarding school, announced it was closing at the end of the summer term after 60 years. The school, for 11 to 18-year-olds, charged up to $42$42,000 for boarders and $26,500 for day pupils - with 72 students registered last year. It was known as a strong academic school, sending all pupils to top universities, including Oxford and Cambridge. In a statement, John Parker, president of trustees, said: "We are saddened that the difficulties facing small schools in budgeting for ever increasing costs has resulted in this decision to close. "Wispers' small size has been one of its strengths but its size also makes it vulnerable when single-sex girls' schools are under increasing pressure from the trend towards co-education and when the demand for boarding is in decline." The school will use the sale of its assets - thought to be worth $8m - to create an educational trust, providing bursaries for girls from deprived backgrounds to attend other fee-paying schools.
Wentworth College, for 144 pupils, founded in 1871, was placed in the hands of receivers Grant Thornton this week and will be officially closed on August 4. The girls' school, which charged $32,350 for boarders and $20,850 for day pupils, had been due to admit boys for the first time from September to boast numbers. In a statement, Grant Thornton said it was hoped it would reopen if a new owner was found. "The cost base of the school has risen and management sought to address this by expanding pupil numbers," the firm said. "However, given the current economic climate, linked with a short term fall in pupil numbers and limited availability of funding, the board of governors took the decision to place [the school] into administration." Parents have been advised to find alternative schools for September.
Between 2001 and 2006, average school fees across the country rose by 39 per cent - compared with an 18 per cent rise in average earnings. The Independent Schools Council said the rises were due to staffing costs. Vicky Tuck, principal of Cheltenham Ladies' College and president of the Girls' Schools Association, insisted these were "isolated" cases. "My conversations with fellow heads in GSA indicate that recruitment is going very well," she said. "We have all got parents who are taking all sorts of contingency measures to pay for education. "They want independent education and many recognise they have to go without certain things as a result. "
Source
On "human rights" grounds
Law Lords have ruled the home secretary cannot use controversial powers to stop sham marriages as they discriminate against foreigners in the UK. They said the Home Office had interfered in an "arbitrary and unjust" way in the rights of 15,000 people.
Ministers said the rules were vital to tackle illegal immigration scams - but conceded they will need to be reformed. The measures were brought in after registrars complained they they had no way of stopping bogus marriage rackets. But many foreign nationals said they were being treated unfairly, and that the scheme was unnecessary, slow and bureaucratic. They also said it was expensive - the regulations meant they had to pay up to $1200 in fees to get permission to marry.
The controversial Home Office powers on marriages were introduced in February 2005. The rules meant people who were not legally permanently settled in the UK were obliged to seek special permission to marry, irrespective of the status of their partner. But the powers were challenged in April 2006 when three couples alleged their human rights had been breached.
In the first case the home secretary refused permission to marry to Mahmoud Baiai, 37, an Algerian illegal immigrant, and Izabella Trzcinska, 28, from Poland, who was in the UK legally. The two other cases related to asylum seekers - including one individual who had been told to leave the country, but wanted to marry someone already given protection as a refugee. All three were later given permission to marry.
In his ruling against the Home Office, Lord Bingham said immigration rules, as well as the right to respect for family life under the European Convention, gave protection to some migrants who marry in the UK - even if they had limited or no leave to enter or stay.
He added that the Immigration Directorate had issued instructions, without clear parliamentary approval, to deny permission to marry under certain circumstances. "The vice of the scheme is that none of these conditions, although of course relevant to immigration status, has any relevance to the genuineness of a proposed marriage," he said.
The ruling was welcomed by some campaigners - the chief executive of the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, Habib Rahman, said the government's policy was now in "tatters". He added: "It's a great day for human rights, for justice and for migrant communities... The government will have to go back to the drawing board." Solicitor Amit Sachdev, who represented three of the claimants in the case, described the marriage legislation as "draconian... misconceived and ill thought-out".
The scale of sham marriages is unknown, although senior registrars suggested that before the new legislation there could have been at least 10,000 a year. Registrars at Brent Council in north London suggested in 2005 that a fifth of all marriages there were bogus, with officials able to spot couples who barely knew each other.
According to Home Office figures, since the new checks were introduced the number of suspicious marriage reports received from registrars fell from 3,740 in 2004 to fewer than 300 by the end of May 2005. Between January and August 2006, there were only 149 such reports, it said.
Source
Britain shuffling the student visa deckchairs
Foreign students who miss more than 10 lectures in a row will be reported to the Government under new plans to crack down on illegal immigration. However, foreigners will be able to avoid the new requirements if they opt to enter the UK as a "student visitor", rather than under a student visa.
The Conservatives said that this was a potential loophole which could be exploited by unscrupulous immigrants who had no intention of studying here. The moves were announced by the immigration minister Liam Byrne as part of a shake-up of the student visa system to crack down on bogus colleges. Universities and colleges will also have to apply for a $800 licence to recruit international students and could be blacklisted if they fail to comply with new regulations.
The proposals form Tier 4 of the Government's new points-based immigration system. It will force colleges offering courses longer than six months to accept responsibility for a student while he or she is in the UK. They will have to keep up-to-date contact details for all students and report to the Home Office if a student misses 10 lectures in a row, fails to enrol on time or quits college. If this happened to a number of students, the Home Office would consider the college's "overall suitability" as a licensed college to teach international students.
Once accepted on a course by a licensed college, each student will have to prove to the UK Border Agency that he or she has enough money to pay their fees and support themselves and any dependants. They will also have to prove they have a track record in achieving qualifications before coming to the UK. If successful they will be allowed to stay in the UK for up to four years, longer than under present rules. They will also be allowed to work in the country for up to two years after completing their studies - 12 months more than at present, as discloseed by The Daily Telegraph yesterday.
Immigration minister Liam Byrne said: "All those who come to Britain must play by the rules. It is right that foreign students wanting to take advantage of our world-class universities and colleges must meet strict criteria. "By locking people to one identity with ID cards, alongside a tough new sponsorship system, we will know exactly who is coming here to study and crack down on bogus colleges."
In 2006, 309,000 people from outside Europe came to Britain on student visas - but this figure does not include those coming as short-term student visitors. The Home Office said that student visitors had to pass an "intentions test" showing they support themselves and will leave after completing their course.
But shadow immigration minister Damian Green said: "This new system is so full of loopholes it will be useless at best and might even encourage the growth of bogus colleges or applications."
Source
UN to Britain: Stop Being Islamophobic
These are the guys who constantly condemn Israel but who have yet to utter a single condemnation of the vast human rights abuses in Muslim countries such as Iran and Saudi Arabia
Extending its campaign to squelch discussion of Islam and lobby member countries to roll back their citizens' speech rights, the United Nations has asked that Great Britain do more to challenge negative views about Muslims:
The nine-member human rights committee composed of legal experts said it was concerned "negative public attitudes towards Muslim members of society" continued to be allowed in Britain. It recommended the government "should take energetic measures to eliminate this phenomenon and ensure that authors of such acts of discrimination on the basis of religion are adequately deterred and sanctioned."
Concrete "acts of discrimination" are one thing; "negative public attitudes" are an entirely different matter. Is it the role of governments to allow or disallow certain beliefs to inhabit the minds of people? And who gets to decide what constitutes "negative public attitudes"?
Moreover, Britain already has bent over backwards for its Muslim population. The term "war on terror" - often criticized by anti-Islamist researchers as imprecise - was scrapped by the Foreign Office in 2006 due to concerns that it might anger Muslims. Earlier this year, ministers waded further into the swamp of political correctness by stipulating that Islamic terrorism should be referred to as "anti-Islamic activity." The nation has also done much to accommodate Islamic law in both welfare and finance. Furthermore, two leading public figures - Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams and Lord Chief Justice Lord Phillips - have endorsed the adoption of Shari'a for adjudicating marital and financial disputes.
The committee's demand that Britain police the thoughts and words of its people is consistent with recent speech-suppression efforts undertaken by the Islamist-dominated UN Human Rights Council. In March, the body passed a resolution that condemns "attempts to identify Islam with terrorism, violence, and human rights violations," while declaring that "freedom of expression . may therefore be subject to certain restrictions . necessary for the respect of the rights or reputations of others." In June, the HRC severely constrained discussion of Islam during debates at the council, after Muslim members objected to a presentation on female genital mutilation, stoning, and child marriage.
"It is regrettable that there are false translations and interpretations of the freedom of expression," delegates from Saudi Arabia stated in March. What's truly regrettable is that the UN gives Islamists a platform from which to promote the curtailment of Western liberties.
Source
Smaller private schools at risk of closure because of credit crisis
Independent schools are at the risk of closure because parents can no longer afford the fees, education experts have warned
It came after two schools were forced to close, becoming the first high-profile victims of the credit crisis. One school shut altogether while a second has been forced to call in receivers, who are attempting to sell it to a new buyer. Both were members of the prestigious Girls' Schools Association, the group representing Britain's top single-sex schools. Wispers School in Haslemere, Surrey, will not reopen after the summer holidays, blaming financial pressures and a drop in demand for all-girls' education. And Wentworth College, Bournemouth, will shut next week, citing the "current economic climate, linked with a short term fall in pupil numbers".
Last night, experts said the schools' closures were likely to be the "first of many" as the independent sector is squeezed by the financial downturn. All bar one of England's top 20 private schools raised fees above inflation this year, according to one report, prompting claims that some schools were "underestimating parents' sensitivities to fee increases".
Sue Fieldman, regional editor of the Good Schools Guide, said: "These are the first ones to close for a while but I think we may see a string of them. Girls' schools are particularly vulnerable. "Of course, the top schools remain very strong, but the middle-ranking and very small schools may suffer. "Some of these only need to lose two or three pupils a year and it is going to start being very difficult to stay afloat, particularly in the present climate."
Wispers, an all-girl boarding school, announced it was closing at the end of the summer term after 60 years. The school, for 11 to 18-year-olds, charged up to $42$42,000 for boarders and $26,500 for day pupils - with 72 students registered last year. It was known as a strong academic school, sending all pupils to top universities, including Oxford and Cambridge. In a statement, John Parker, president of trustees, said: "We are saddened that the difficulties facing small schools in budgeting for ever increasing costs has resulted in this decision to close. "Wispers' small size has been one of its strengths but its size also makes it vulnerable when single-sex girls' schools are under increasing pressure from the trend towards co-education and when the demand for boarding is in decline." The school will use the sale of its assets - thought to be worth $8m - to create an educational trust, providing bursaries for girls from deprived backgrounds to attend other fee-paying schools.
Wentworth College, for 144 pupils, founded in 1871, was placed in the hands of receivers Grant Thornton this week and will be officially closed on August 4. The girls' school, which charged $32,350 for boarders and $20,850 for day pupils, had been due to admit boys for the first time from September to boast numbers. In a statement, Grant Thornton said it was hoped it would reopen if a new owner was found. "The cost base of the school has risen and management sought to address this by expanding pupil numbers," the firm said. "However, given the current economic climate, linked with a short term fall in pupil numbers and limited availability of funding, the board of governors took the decision to place [the school] into administration." Parents have been advised to find alternative schools for September.
Between 2001 and 2006, average school fees across the country rose by 39 per cent - compared with an 18 per cent rise in average earnings. The Independent Schools Council said the rises were due to staffing costs. Vicky Tuck, principal of Cheltenham Ladies' College and president of the Girls' Schools Association, insisted these were "isolated" cases. "My conversations with fellow heads in GSA indicate that recruitment is going very well," she said. "We have all got parents who are taking all sorts of contingency measures to pay for education. "They want independent education and many recognise they have to go without certain things as a result. "
Source
