Thursday, May 31, 2007
NHS knows how to treat war veterans
"Let the B****s die" is the underlying attitude. The fact that he paid his National Insurance contributions for all his working life means nothing to the bureaucrats. When the government is the provider, collecting what you have paid for is a very uncertain business
A 90-year-old war veteran suffering from ten complaints including bowel cancer, dementia and non-Hodgkins lymphoma has been denied NHS nursing care and told that he must pay the 600 pounds -a-week bill himself. Eric Friar, who is almost blind and can hardly walk, served as an RAF navigator in India and Africa during the Second World War. He has been categorised as having "moderate" disabilities by his NHS trust, ruling out state funding for his care.
Mr Friar has been cared for by his wife of 60 years, Norma, since he first suffered from cancer in 1992. She is now unable to care for him as she has osteoporosis. Mrs Friar, 78, has been told that the State will contribute 40 pounds a week to his care, because the couple have too much in savings. Mr Friar, of Highnam, Gloucestershire, is in hospital with pneumonia. While there he has caught MRSA and shingles has been diagnosed. He cannot eat unaided, needs a catheter and is in constant discomfort.
Mrs Friar fears she will not be able to cope when he is discharged and cannot afford the 30,000 pounds -a-year nursing home cost. She said: "How bad has he got to be? We have never asked for anything in our lives. I'm angry, really angry. It's an awful lot to for us to pay. I say to people now - spend the lot and let the Government pay for it." The NHS will contribute the weekly 40 pounds towards costs until Mr Friar's savings drop below 21,500 pounds. Then the State will provide more until his savings reduce to 13,000, when its contribution rises again.
Mr Friar's case is regarded as falling into the third of four bands: critical, substantial, moderate and low. Mrs Friar said that nursing homes that would be suitable for her husband charged about 600 a week.
Gloucestershire Primary Care Trust said that to qualify for "continuing nursing care", which is funded by the NHS, medical needs must be "complex, or intense, or unpredictable". A spokesman for the trust said that it could not comment on individual cases but was sorry to hear that Mr and Mrs Friar were unhappy with the outcome of their case. He added: "We always aim to work with a patient and their family in carrying out an assessment so we can be sure that all of the facts are available and our assessment is understood. "Every assessment is based on individual need and in cases such as these, financial support is provided as a contribution towards meeting the patient's ongoing nursing care. An appeals process is in place and this option is available if the individual or carer believes that the outcome is not the right one." [In other words, "Drop dead!"]
Source
Burgers revival on British school menus
Food freaks forced to back down
England's school food watchdog has denied it is watering down its healthy food guidelines after many pupils opted out of school dinners. Seven months after healthy food guidelines were introduced, the School Food Trust is revising the standards. Canteens will now be allowed to offer manufactured meat products like pies, sausages and healthier burgers four times a fortnight instead of just once. The trust said it was responding to calls for more clarity and flexibility.
New standards were brought into force in September 2006 after TV chef Jamie Oliver revealed the poor nutritional standards of meals on offer in school canteens. But a number of reports and surveys, including one for the BBC, suggest that fewer pupils have been taking school meals.
A trust spokeswoman said the 2006 standards were always going to be refined and clarified, but denied the move was a result of pupils opting for the chip shop instead of the school canteen. "We undertook consultations with cooks, schools and manufacturers and decided clarifications of the standards were needed. "Having listened to people we understand how difficult it is to get from having chips and Turkey Twizzlers every day to not having burgers and chips at all. "There's still a ban on lower quality economy burgers - schools have to serve a good quality one and it might be grilled."
She added: "It's about being informed about making these choices and understanding that having burgers every day is not a choice that is normal. "This is a response to help and encourage children make healthy choices, not because swarms of them are going to the chip shop."
The changes to the meat products restrictions mean canteens will be able, no more than once a fortnight, to offer pupils one item from each of the following four groups:
Other changes mean kitchens can now serve breadsticks and crackers - as long as they are served with fruit, vegetables or dairy foods. They were previously banned along with crisps, salted nuts and other flavoured snacks, but the trust thought they might encourage pupils to eat more fruit, vegetables and dairy food.
School kitchens are still being encouraged to serve more fruit, vegetables, fresh meat and fish, and deep-fried food should not be served more than twice a week. A small snapshot survey of secondary schools for the trust suggested the take-up of the new healthier, school meals has remained roughly stable. Some 30% of the 74 secondary schools that responded said they had seen a reduction in the numbers of pupils having school meals, while a further 30% said they had seen an increase. The rest said things had not changed.
The survey suggests the results were better in primary schools. A poll of 206 for the trust found half had seen no change, a third had seen an increase and just under a fifth had seen a decrease.
Source
Britain: The rise of the contingent racists
After Margaret Hodge's recent comments, how true is it to say that the working class are more prone to racism than the middle class? Maybe the difference lies in different experiences. As the old New York saying goes: A conservative is a liberal who was mugged last night
Margaret Hodge says that white working-class voters in her Barking constituency are being tempted by the BNP. Mrs Hodge told BBC Radio 4's The World This Weekend: "The political class as a whole is often frightened of engaging in the very difficult issues of race and ... the BNP then exploits that and try to create out of a perception a reality which is not the reality of people's lives." She said the area's "difficult" change from a white area to a multi-racial community had caused some people to seek out "scapegoats".
There are more and more respected voices suggesting that the indigenous working classes may not be benefiting from competition in the labour market from immigrant competitors (see, for example, the work of Harvard economist George Borjas).
The left-leaning Young Foundation has controversially argued that administration of local housing policy has benefited newcomers, causing resentment among the white working class and contributing to the rise of racism in Tower Hamlets through the 1980s and 1990s. Ms Hodge's remarks on housing policy, that it should favour those who were born here, even have some pedigree in the left.
So it seems that, arguably, the white working classes might very well not be profiting from immigration in the way that Britain as a whole is said to be benefiting. The middle classes, however, seem to be doing very well from it of course: they must be gleeful at the increased competition in certain quarters of the labour market (such as among waiting staff in restaurants and housecleaners).
My question is about the middle classes. Are we right to keep identifying the white working class as more prone to racism than the middle classes? Are Margaret Hodge and others who use essentially the same language effectively saying that the middle classes do not show racism because they do not have to confront "difficult change" locally, to use her language, because such change never visits the leafy seclusion of comfortable areas of north London or the other tidy neighbourhoods where the middle classes live? When I asked a friend if this was right, her answer was that it was a lack of education that made the white working class seek out scapegoats and that the middle classes had this tendency educated out of them.
But does that ring true or is the truth rather more uncomfortable? Do we all bear a latent tendency towards racism, which manifests itself only when we have personally lost something tangible because of immigrants, such as a job or a housing allocation? If that's the case, then maybe the only thing keeping the middle classes from showing racist proclivities is that their homes are indeed getting cleaned, their restaurant tables being served and their dry-cleaning getting done. In other words, are the middle classes contingent racists, whose racism is held at bay by a decent standard of living, but who could turn nasty the day they have to do their own dirty work.
Source
Britain's new Greenie righteousness: Don't drive your kids to school
For the sake of the planet, let them get attacked by pedophiles and other predators. People are pollution, after all
If there is one thing likely to make parents like me send our children to school in a stretch limo, it is sanctimonious lectures about how not walking risks global destruction. It is government-backed Walk to School Week, billed as "a celebration of how walking to school can reduce air pollution and help save the planet". I admit that, when needs must, my wife, rather than the Devil, drives our daughters to the local junior school. Otherwise, I enjoy walking them - often my most strenuous exercise, and our longest uninterrupted chat. I now discover, however, that it is also meant to be my moral duty.
In the leaflet for Walk to School Week given to children, "Strider", a cartoon talking foot, attacks car-produced "evil pollutants" that increase global warming and are "going to destroy your planet". Strider warns children: "Each time you use a car their army gets stronger and stronger." It's war! So, "Come on mum," say the multi-ethnic kids in the pictures, "let's walk to save the world!"
Let us pass over questions about Strider's scientific expertise at this point, since none of this has anything to do with teaching the complex science of climate change. It is about delivering a simplistic moralistic warning of man-made doom to our children - and through them, to us. The Walk to School website even declares that "We want people to see walking to school as a great way to `do your bit' in the same way as recycling your bottles or turning off lights". When did it become the job of schools to help to forge a pseudo Blitz spirit in the Government's "war" on global warming?
Educational crusaders are using alarmist warnings to re-educate our children in how to behave. Alan Johnson, the Education Secretary, plans to make geography lessons even more explicit morality tales about man-made global warming, in order to help to "lock in a culture change that could, quite literally, save the world". So messing around with the curriculum or walking to school can avoid an apocalypse? In the name of global warming it seems that we are now expected to believe "quite literally" anything.
This policy of indoctrination, indoctrination, indoctrination risks raising children's "awareness" at the expense of their education. They can end up "aware" that life on Earth is ending but ignorant of where the planet's great rivers begin; less well-schooled in geography than in guilt-tripping their parents.
Campaigners complain that "only" 49 per cent of primary pupils walk to school. By coincidence, a survey suggests that half of 7 to 11-year-olds often lose sleep worrying about the havoc they have heard climate change will wreak. Maybe they are too scared to get out of bed - or just too tired to walk the straight and narrow path with Strider.
Source
Green attack on British football
What did you do on Saturday, the sunny day of the FA Cup Final between Manchester United and Chelsea which took place at the rather spectacularly done-up Wembley Stadium? Maybe you were one of 89,826 fans jammy enough to get tickets for the game and to watch it underneath Wembley's new gleaming, cathedral-style arc. Or perhaps you were one of the estimated 500million people who watched it on TV (United and Chelsea's fanbases stretch way beyond the white cliffs of Dover into Europe, Africa and Asia). Maybe, like thousands of others, you watched the game over a pint in a local pub. Or perhaps you don't very much care for football and did something completely unrelated instead: shopping, sleeping, sunbathing.
Or.were you one of a small handful of miserabilist windbags who spent the day pointing out how destructive the FA Cup Final is likely to be for the environment? We should have seen it coming. A few hours before the Cup Final kicked off, it was reported that the event would make an `eco-footprint' 3,000 times the size of the Wembley pitch. Academics totted up the number of pies and other unsavoury savoury products the Wembley-attending fans were likely to consume (the fat bastards) and the number of miles they were likely to drive, and worked out that each fan's `eco-footprint' would be nearly 10 times what it would have been if he or she had watched the game from home.
What curmudgeonliness. The anti-FA Cup miserabilism provided a striking (if somewhat unwitting) snapshot of the inherently elitist streak in the politics of environmentalism. Where millions of people around the world were glued to watching a major annual event in that most mass of mass sports, football, certain green-minded individuals seized an opportunity to lecture and hector the nation about its dirty habits. It was the political equivalent of a dirty tackle from behind. It's high time we showed these greens the red card.
Claims that the first FA Cup Final to be played at Wembley in seven years would make a damaging dent in the natural environment emanated from academics at Cardiff University. I know - you would think that a university has better things to do than put the dampers on a big sporting event. And Cardiff? Maybe they're bitter that Wembley has re-assumed its rightful place as Britain's big national stadium, thus kicking Cardiff's Millennium Stadium into touch. According to the Guardian, Cardiff University found that `the average fan's taste for beer and pies makes up a large chunk of the ecological impact [of the FA Cup Final in Wembley]'. Cardiff's Andrea Collins said, `They are highly processed food and drink products which require a lot of energy to produce' (1). She also said that a lot of waste would be `generated outside [Wembley] stadium', especially by fans driving their cars or using up some other breed of `transport miles' (2).
Cardiff's claims were based on a study it carried out of the FA Cup Final of 2004 when Manchester United played Millwall at the Cardiff Millennium Stadium. Back then researchers found that before, during and after the game Man Utd and Millwall fans ate 37,624 sausage rolls, pies or pasties, 26,965 sandwiches, 17,998 hot dogs, 12,780 burgers, 11,502 packets of crisps and 23,909 portions of chips. They rinsed it all down with 303,001 pints of lager, 66,584 pints of beer, 38,906 pints of cider, 12,452 bottles of wine, 90,481 shots and 63,141 bottles of alcopops. This `binge' left a mark on Cardiff city centre: 37 tonnes of glass, eight tonnes of paper and 11 tonnes of uneaten food were left behind, and none of it was recycled! Can you believe it? Football fans watched a game and then went out to celebrate/commiserate over grub and booze and they didn't even take their rubbish home with them to deposit it in their recycling compost machines (3).
During the 2004 Cup Final, fans' use of transport contributed the largest part of the `eco-footprint'. The researchers found that fans travelled an average of 367 miles each (well, if you are going to hold an English Cup Final in Wales.), 47 per cent of them by car, 34 per cent by rail and the rest in coaches or minibuses. Apparently, all this travelling made an `eco-footprint' that measured 1,670 `global hectares' - though quite how you get from miles travelled by football fans to a footprint measured in hectares is anyone's guess (4). Extrapolating from these 2004 findings, the Cardiff boffins now say that Saturday's final at Wembley will have caused an `eco-footprint' 3,000 times the size of the Wembley pitch. Got that? A study of what fans ate and drank during an FA Cup Final in 2004 can throw light on the amount of land (the eco-footprint) required to provide the necessary resources to replenish those used up by fans at an FA Cup Final in 2007. And they say that those who question the green ethos use dodgy science..
Having colonised the educational sphere and the political sphere, the rapacious green ethos is now spreading into the world of leisure. Even that previously purely emotional sphere of football fandom is being subordinated to the demands of the green priests. Last year's World Cup was similarly measured in terms of its ecological impact. The German authorities claimed that the event would emit 100,000 tonnes of CO2, which they tried to offset by investing $1.5billion in environmental protection projects in Africa and Asia. They also `educated' fans attending World Cup games by issuing them with green advice leaflets, making them drink from recyclable and refillable beer cups, and serving hotdogs without any packaging (5). In Britain, the Football Association has set itself the task of making football `carbon-neutral' (6).
Behind the claims that big cup finals are destroying the environment there lurks an old-fashioned fear and loathing of football fans, of their cavalier attitudes and their potentially destructive and violent impact. Old concerns about large gatherings of working-class men (and some women) are now swaddled in PC environmentalist lingo. Where thousands of fans were traditionally seen as a heaving riot waiting to happen (and sometimes still are), now many see them as toxic waste-creators; where fans used to be looked upon as a threat to public order, now they are described as a threat to the natural order. You can see the fear of the masses in those scary-sounding numbers of how many pints they drink and portions of chips they eat: they are not seen as individuals coming together to cheer their team, but as an out-of-control mass, an intolerable blob, eating tonnes of food, drinking tonnes of booze and leaving behind tonnes of shit.
The anti-fan component to the greening of football is clear in the solution put forward: to change mass behaviour. David James, until recently the England team goalkeeper and a leading light in the football world's efforts to make the game more planet-friendly, says the real problem is `habit and tradition': `Football is pure bloke territory: it's still acceptable to spit out gum and chuck bottles on the floor, and the industry mirrors this selfishness across the scale.' James says the football authorities must re-educate people and reshape their `attitudes' - that is, effectively de-bloke them. `We've got to make use of football as a driving force for environmental change. We'd be stupid not to. It doesn't take a think tank to see that the game holds a powerful influence over kids and adults around the world.' (7) In short, the authorities should exploit football to change the way fans think and behave. Even the old fan-hating law'n'order lobby never tried that - they might have whacked fans across the head, but they didn't try to change what was inside their heads.
It takes a killjoy of the highest order to hector football fans for not thinking about the consequences of their behaviour while they're watching a game. Like Catholic priests of old, the greens demand that we stop and think before doing anything potentially `destructive' or `immoral'. They seem not to understand that there are moments in life when we simply lose ourselves in passion or fury and throw `good sense' and `good behaviour' to the wind. No self-respecting football fan is going to think about recycling a hotdog napkin when his team is 1-0 down and there are only five minutes left; no fan whose team has just won the FA Cup is going to collect together all his beer bottles as he drinks himself silly and put them in a bottle bank on the way home. Life, love, football: they just don't work like that. And if you can't see why, then maybe you'd be better off watching bowls.
Source
Attempt to destroy the unique Oxford University system underway
Fabulous success must be levelled down
Funding reforms will put at risk the one-to-one tutorials in Oxford colleges, according to dons and students. They say that the proposals risk turning the university into a two-tier system. The row over the change in funding rules comes after John Hood, the vice-chancellor, was defeated last year when dons threw out his plans to hand the strategic control of the university to business and political outsiders.
In a letter to undergraduates, union representatives from 23 colleges are urging the student body to reject the funding plans, which could come into effect in October next year. Under the joint resource allocation mechanism, the university will distribute government money “as earned” between departments and colleges, so that research-intensive colleges receive more. Colleges will also be compensated for taking more graduates and overseas students.
The students’ college representatives say that poorer colleges, such as St Catherine’s, Keble, Hertford and Pembroke, will lose funding to richer colleges and face having to cut their distinctive one-to-one tutorial system. This will be divisive, they say, splitting the university between the rich and poor colleges.
“Richer ‘mixed’ colleges such as St John’s and Christ Church, while subject to the same incentives to turn to research, will be rich enough to subsidise their tutorial systems,” they wrote. “The evident result of some colleges maintaining the tutorial system, while others are forced to move to classroom-based teaching, is that Oxford will fragment.” Since 1998 colleges and departments have shared out the government block grant, based partly on research and partly on student numbers, so that no college should suffer. Oxford wants to change the system to reward research. Donald Hay, the chairman of the funding committee for the new system, said that it was being phased in over a decade and that the university would subsidise tutorials.
Source
Tony Blair Still Gets It: "I was stopped by someone the other week who said it was not surprising there was so much terrorism in the world when we invaded their countries (meaning Afghanistan and Iraq). No wonder Muslims felt angry. When he had finished, I said to him: tell me exactly what they feel angry about. We remove two utterly brutal and dictatorial regimes; we replace them with a United Nations-supervised democratic process and the Muslims in both countries get the chance to vote, which incidentally they take in very large numbers. And the only reason it is difficult still is because other Muslims are using terrorism to try to destroy the fledgling democracy and, in doing so, are killing fellow Muslims. What's more, British troops are risking their lives trying to prevent the killing. Why should anyone feel angry about us? Why aren't they angry about the people doing the killing? The odd thing about the conversation is that I could tell it was the first time he had even heard the alternative argument."
"Let the B****s die" is the underlying attitude. The fact that he paid his National Insurance contributions for all his working life means nothing to the bureaucrats. When the government is the provider, collecting what you have paid for is a very uncertain business
A 90-year-old war veteran suffering from ten complaints including bowel cancer, dementia and non-Hodgkins lymphoma has been denied NHS nursing care and told that he must pay the 600 pounds -a-week bill himself. Eric Friar, who is almost blind and can hardly walk, served as an RAF navigator in India and Africa during the Second World War. He has been categorised as having "moderate" disabilities by his NHS trust, ruling out state funding for his care.
Mr Friar has been cared for by his wife of 60 years, Norma, since he first suffered from cancer in 1992. She is now unable to care for him as she has osteoporosis. Mrs Friar, 78, has been told that the State will contribute 40 pounds a week to his care, because the couple have too much in savings. Mr Friar, of Highnam, Gloucestershire, is in hospital with pneumonia. While there he has caught MRSA and shingles has been diagnosed. He cannot eat unaided, needs a catheter and is in constant discomfort.
Mrs Friar fears she will not be able to cope when he is discharged and cannot afford the 30,000 pounds -a-year nursing home cost. She said: "How bad has he got to be? We have never asked for anything in our lives. I'm angry, really angry. It's an awful lot to for us to pay. I say to people now - spend the lot and let the Government pay for it." The NHS will contribute the weekly 40 pounds towards costs until Mr Friar's savings drop below 21,500 pounds. Then the State will provide more until his savings reduce to 13,000, when its contribution rises again.
Mr Friar's case is regarded as falling into the third of four bands: critical, substantial, moderate and low. Mrs Friar said that nursing homes that would be suitable for her husband charged about 600 a week.
Gloucestershire Primary Care Trust said that to qualify for "continuing nursing care", which is funded by the NHS, medical needs must be "complex, or intense, or unpredictable". A spokesman for the trust said that it could not comment on individual cases but was sorry to hear that Mr and Mrs Friar were unhappy with the outcome of their case. He added: "We always aim to work with a patient and their family in carrying out an assessment so we can be sure that all of the facts are available and our assessment is understood. "Every assessment is based on individual need and in cases such as these, financial support is provided as a contribution towards meeting the patient's ongoing nursing care. An appeals process is in place and this option is available if the individual or carer believes that the outcome is not the right one." [In other words, "Drop dead!"]
Source
Burgers revival on British school menus
Food freaks forced to back down
England's school food watchdog has denied it is watering down its healthy food guidelines after many pupils opted out of school dinners. Seven months after healthy food guidelines were introduced, the School Food Trust is revising the standards. Canteens will now be allowed to offer manufactured meat products like pies, sausages and healthier burgers four times a fortnight instead of just once. The trust said it was responding to calls for more clarity and flexibility.
New standards were brought into force in September 2006 after TV chef Jamie Oliver revealed the poor nutritional standards of meals on offer in school canteens. But a number of reports and surveys, including one for the BBC, suggest that fewer pupils have been taking school meals.
A trust spokeswoman said the 2006 standards were always going to be refined and clarified, but denied the move was a result of pupils opting for the chip shop instead of the school canteen. "We undertook consultations with cooks, schools and manufacturers and decided clarifications of the standards were needed. "Having listened to people we understand how difficult it is to get from having chips and Turkey Twizzlers every day to not having burgers and chips at all. "There's still a ban on lower quality economy burgers - schools have to serve a good quality one and it might be grilled."
She added: "It's about being informed about making these choices and understanding that having burgers every day is not a choice that is normal. "This is a response to help and encourage children make healthy choices, not because swarms of them are going to the chip shop."
The changes to the meat products restrictions mean canteens will be able, no more than once a fortnight, to offer pupils one item from each of the following four groups:
- Burgers, hamburgers, chopped meat and corned meat
- Sausages, sausage meat, link, chipolata and luncheon meat
- Meat pies, meat puddings, Melton Mowbray pie, game pie, Scottish pie, pasty, pasties, bridie and sausage rolls
- Any other shaped or coated meat product
Other changes mean kitchens can now serve breadsticks and crackers - as long as they are served with fruit, vegetables or dairy foods. They were previously banned along with crisps, salted nuts and other flavoured snacks, but the trust thought they might encourage pupils to eat more fruit, vegetables and dairy food.
School kitchens are still being encouraged to serve more fruit, vegetables, fresh meat and fish, and deep-fried food should not be served more than twice a week. A small snapshot survey of secondary schools for the trust suggested the take-up of the new healthier, school meals has remained roughly stable. Some 30% of the 74 secondary schools that responded said they had seen a reduction in the numbers of pupils having school meals, while a further 30% said they had seen an increase. The rest said things had not changed.
The survey suggests the results were better in primary schools. A poll of 206 for the trust found half had seen no change, a third had seen an increase and just under a fifth had seen a decrease.
Source
Britain: The rise of the contingent racists
After Margaret Hodge's recent comments, how true is it to say that the working class are more prone to racism than the middle class? Maybe the difference lies in different experiences. As the old New York saying goes: A conservative is a liberal who was mugged last night
Margaret Hodge says that white working-class voters in her Barking constituency are being tempted by the BNP. Mrs Hodge told BBC Radio 4's The World This Weekend: "The political class as a whole is often frightened of engaging in the very difficult issues of race and ... the BNP then exploits that and try to create out of a perception a reality which is not the reality of people's lives." She said the area's "difficult" change from a white area to a multi-racial community had caused some people to seek out "scapegoats".
There are more and more respected voices suggesting that the indigenous working classes may not be benefiting from competition in the labour market from immigrant competitors (see, for example, the work of Harvard economist George Borjas).
The left-leaning Young Foundation has controversially argued that administration of local housing policy has benefited newcomers, causing resentment among the white working class and contributing to the rise of racism in Tower Hamlets through the 1980s and 1990s. Ms Hodge's remarks on housing policy, that it should favour those who were born here, even have some pedigree in the left.
So it seems that, arguably, the white working classes might very well not be profiting from immigration in the way that Britain as a whole is said to be benefiting. The middle classes, however, seem to be doing very well from it of course: they must be gleeful at the increased competition in certain quarters of the labour market (such as among waiting staff in restaurants and housecleaners).
My question is about the middle classes. Are we right to keep identifying the white working class as more prone to racism than the middle classes? Are Margaret Hodge and others who use essentially the same language effectively saying that the middle classes do not show racism because they do not have to confront "difficult change" locally, to use her language, because such change never visits the leafy seclusion of comfortable areas of north London or the other tidy neighbourhoods where the middle classes live? When I asked a friend if this was right, her answer was that it was a lack of education that made the white working class seek out scapegoats and that the middle classes had this tendency educated out of them.
But does that ring true or is the truth rather more uncomfortable? Do we all bear a latent tendency towards racism, which manifests itself only when we have personally lost something tangible because of immigrants, such as a job or a housing allocation? If that's the case, then maybe the only thing keeping the middle classes from showing racist proclivities is that their homes are indeed getting cleaned, their restaurant tables being served and their dry-cleaning getting done. In other words, are the middle classes contingent racists, whose racism is held at bay by a decent standard of living, but who could turn nasty the day they have to do their own dirty work.
Source
Britain's new Greenie righteousness: Don't drive your kids to school
For the sake of the planet, let them get attacked by pedophiles and other predators. People are pollution, after all
If there is one thing likely to make parents like me send our children to school in a stretch limo, it is sanctimonious lectures about how not walking risks global destruction. It is government-backed Walk to School Week, billed as "a celebration of how walking to school can reduce air pollution and help save the planet". I admit that, when needs must, my wife, rather than the Devil, drives our daughters to the local junior school. Otherwise, I enjoy walking them - often my most strenuous exercise, and our longest uninterrupted chat. I now discover, however, that it is also meant to be my moral duty.
In the leaflet for Walk to School Week given to children, "Strider", a cartoon talking foot, attacks car-produced "evil pollutants" that increase global warming and are "going to destroy your planet". Strider warns children: "Each time you use a car their army gets stronger and stronger." It's war! So, "Come on mum," say the multi-ethnic kids in the pictures, "let's walk to save the world!"
Let us pass over questions about Strider's scientific expertise at this point, since none of this has anything to do with teaching the complex science of climate change. It is about delivering a simplistic moralistic warning of man-made doom to our children - and through them, to us. The Walk to School website even declares that "We want people to see walking to school as a great way to `do your bit' in the same way as recycling your bottles or turning off lights". When did it become the job of schools to help to forge a pseudo Blitz spirit in the Government's "war" on global warming?
Educational crusaders are using alarmist warnings to re-educate our children in how to behave. Alan Johnson, the Education Secretary, plans to make geography lessons even more explicit morality tales about man-made global warming, in order to help to "lock in a culture change that could, quite literally, save the world". So messing around with the curriculum or walking to school can avoid an apocalypse? In the name of global warming it seems that we are now expected to believe "quite literally" anything.
This policy of indoctrination, indoctrination, indoctrination risks raising children's "awareness" at the expense of their education. They can end up "aware" that life on Earth is ending but ignorant of where the planet's great rivers begin; less well-schooled in geography than in guilt-tripping their parents.
Campaigners complain that "only" 49 per cent of primary pupils walk to school. By coincidence, a survey suggests that half of 7 to 11-year-olds often lose sleep worrying about the havoc they have heard climate change will wreak. Maybe they are too scared to get out of bed - or just too tired to walk the straight and narrow path with Strider.
Source
Green attack on British football
What did you do on Saturday, the sunny day of the FA Cup Final between Manchester United and Chelsea which took place at the rather spectacularly done-up Wembley Stadium? Maybe you were one of 89,826 fans jammy enough to get tickets for the game and to watch it underneath Wembley's new gleaming, cathedral-style arc. Or perhaps you were one of the estimated 500million people who watched it on TV (United and Chelsea's fanbases stretch way beyond the white cliffs of Dover into Europe, Africa and Asia). Maybe, like thousands of others, you watched the game over a pint in a local pub. Or perhaps you don't very much care for football and did something completely unrelated instead: shopping, sleeping, sunbathing.
Or.were you one of a small handful of miserabilist windbags who spent the day pointing out how destructive the FA Cup Final is likely to be for the environment? We should have seen it coming. A few hours before the Cup Final kicked off, it was reported that the event would make an `eco-footprint' 3,000 times the size of the Wembley pitch. Academics totted up the number of pies and other unsavoury savoury products the Wembley-attending fans were likely to consume (the fat bastards) and the number of miles they were likely to drive, and worked out that each fan's `eco-footprint' would be nearly 10 times what it would have been if he or she had watched the game from home.
What curmudgeonliness. The anti-FA Cup miserabilism provided a striking (if somewhat unwitting) snapshot of the inherently elitist streak in the politics of environmentalism. Where millions of people around the world were glued to watching a major annual event in that most mass of mass sports, football, certain green-minded individuals seized an opportunity to lecture and hector the nation about its dirty habits. It was the political equivalent of a dirty tackle from behind. It's high time we showed these greens the red card.
Claims that the first FA Cup Final to be played at Wembley in seven years would make a damaging dent in the natural environment emanated from academics at Cardiff University. I know - you would think that a university has better things to do than put the dampers on a big sporting event. And Cardiff? Maybe they're bitter that Wembley has re-assumed its rightful place as Britain's big national stadium, thus kicking Cardiff's Millennium Stadium into touch. According to the Guardian, Cardiff University found that `the average fan's taste for beer and pies makes up a large chunk of the ecological impact [of the FA Cup Final in Wembley]'. Cardiff's Andrea Collins said, `They are highly processed food and drink products which require a lot of energy to produce' (1). She also said that a lot of waste would be `generated outside [Wembley] stadium', especially by fans driving their cars or using up some other breed of `transport miles' (2).
Cardiff's claims were based on a study it carried out of the FA Cup Final of 2004 when Manchester United played Millwall at the Cardiff Millennium Stadium. Back then researchers found that before, during and after the game Man Utd and Millwall fans ate 37,624 sausage rolls, pies or pasties, 26,965 sandwiches, 17,998 hot dogs, 12,780 burgers, 11,502 packets of crisps and 23,909 portions of chips. They rinsed it all down with 303,001 pints of lager, 66,584 pints of beer, 38,906 pints of cider, 12,452 bottles of wine, 90,481 shots and 63,141 bottles of alcopops. This `binge' left a mark on Cardiff city centre: 37 tonnes of glass, eight tonnes of paper and 11 tonnes of uneaten food were left behind, and none of it was recycled! Can you believe it? Football fans watched a game and then went out to celebrate/commiserate over grub and booze and they didn't even take their rubbish home with them to deposit it in their recycling compost machines (3).
During the 2004 Cup Final, fans' use of transport contributed the largest part of the `eco-footprint'. The researchers found that fans travelled an average of 367 miles each (well, if you are going to hold an English Cup Final in Wales.), 47 per cent of them by car, 34 per cent by rail and the rest in coaches or minibuses. Apparently, all this travelling made an `eco-footprint' that measured 1,670 `global hectares' - though quite how you get from miles travelled by football fans to a footprint measured in hectares is anyone's guess (4). Extrapolating from these 2004 findings, the Cardiff boffins now say that Saturday's final at Wembley will have caused an `eco-footprint' 3,000 times the size of the Wembley pitch. Got that? A study of what fans ate and drank during an FA Cup Final in 2004 can throw light on the amount of land (the eco-footprint) required to provide the necessary resources to replenish those used up by fans at an FA Cup Final in 2007. And they say that those who question the green ethos use dodgy science..
Having colonised the educational sphere and the political sphere, the rapacious green ethos is now spreading into the world of leisure. Even that previously purely emotional sphere of football fandom is being subordinated to the demands of the green priests. Last year's World Cup was similarly measured in terms of its ecological impact. The German authorities claimed that the event would emit 100,000 tonnes of CO2, which they tried to offset by investing $1.5billion in environmental protection projects in Africa and Asia. They also `educated' fans attending World Cup games by issuing them with green advice leaflets, making them drink from recyclable and refillable beer cups, and serving hotdogs without any packaging (5). In Britain, the Football Association has set itself the task of making football `carbon-neutral' (6).
Behind the claims that big cup finals are destroying the environment there lurks an old-fashioned fear and loathing of football fans, of their cavalier attitudes and their potentially destructive and violent impact. Old concerns about large gatherings of working-class men (and some women) are now swaddled in PC environmentalist lingo. Where thousands of fans were traditionally seen as a heaving riot waiting to happen (and sometimes still are), now many see them as toxic waste-creators; where fans used to be looked upon as a threat to public order, now they are described as a threat to the natural order. You can see the fear of the masses in those scary-sounding numbers of how many pints they drink and portions of chips they eat: they are not seen as individuals coming together to cheer their team, but as an out-of-control mass, an intolerable blob, eating tonnes of food, drinking tonnes of booze and leaving behind tonnes of shit.
The anti-fan component to the greening of football is clear in the solution put forward: to change mass behaviour. David James, until recently the England team goalkeeper and a leading light in the football world's efforts to make the game more planet-friendly, says the real problem is `habit and tradition': `Football is pure bloke territory: it's still acceptable to spit out gum and chuck bottles on the floor, and the industry mirrors this selfishness across the scale.' James says the football authorities must re-educate people and reshape their `attitudes' - that is, effectively de-bloke them. `We've got to make use of football as a driving force for environmental change. We'd be stupid not to. It doesn't take a think tank to see that the game holds a powerful influence over kids and adults around the world.' (7) In short, the authorities should exploit football to change the way fans think and behave. Even the old fan-hating law'n'order lobby never tried that - they might have whacked fans across the head, but they didn't try to change what was inside their heads.
It takes a killjoy of the highest order to hector football fans for not thinking about the consequences of their behaviour while they're watching a game. Like Catholic priests of old, the greens demand that we stop and think before doing anything potentially `destructive' or `immoral'. They seem not to understand that there are moments in life when we simply lose ourselves in passion or fury and throw `good sense' and `good behaviour' to the wind. No self-respecting football fan is going to think about recycling a hotdog napkin when his team is 1-0 down and there are only five minutes left; no fan whose team has just won the FA Cup is going to collect together all his beer bottles as he drinks himself silly and put them in a bottle bank on the way home. Life, love, football: they just don't work like that. And if you can't see why, then maybe you'd be better off watching bowls.
Source
Attempt to destroy the unique Oxford University system underway
Fabulous success must be levelled down
Funding reforms will put at risk the one-to-one tutorials in Oxford colleges, according to dons and students. They say that the proposals risk turning the university into a two-tier system. The row over the change in funding rules comes after John Hood, the vice-chancellor, was defeated last year when dons threw out his plans to hand the strategic control of the university to business and political outsiders.
In a letter to undergraduates, union representatives from 23 colleges are urging the student body to reject the funding plans, which could come into effect in October next year. Under the joint resource allocation mechanism, the university will distribute government money “as earned” between departments and colleges, so that research-intensive colleges receive more. Colleges will also be compensated for taking more graduates and overseas students.
The students’ college representatives say that poorer colleges, such as St Catherine’s, Keble, Hertford and Pembroke, will lose funding to richer colleges and face having to cut their distinctive one-to-one tutorial system. This will be divisive, they say, splitting the university between the rich and poor colleges.
“Richer ‘mixed’ colleges such as St John’s and Christ Church, while subject to the same incentives to turn to research, will be rich enough to subsidise their tutorial systems,” they wrote. “The evident result of some colleges maintaining the tutorial system, while others are forced to move to classroom-based teaching, is that Oxford will fragment.” Since 1998 colleges and departments have shared out the government block grant, based partly on research and partly on student numbers, so that no college should suffer. Oxford wants to change the system to reward research. Donald Hay, the chairman of the funding committee for the new system, said that it was being phased in over a decade and that the university would subsidise tutorials.
Source
Tony Blair Still Gets It: "I was stopped by someone the other week who said it was not surprising there was so much terrorism in the world when we invaded their countries (meaning Afghanistan and Iraq). No wonder Muslims felt angry. When he had finished, I said to him: tell me exactly what they feel angry about. We remove two utterly brutal and dictatorial regimes; we replace them with a United Nations-supervised democratic process and the Muslims in both countries get the chance to vote, which incidentally they take in very large numbers. And the only reason it is difficult still is because other Muslims are using terrorism to try to destroy the fledgling democracy and, in doing so, are killing fellow Muslims. What's more, British troops are risking their lives trying to prevent the killing. Why should anyone feel angry about us? Why aren't they angry about the people doing the killing? The odd thing about the conversation is that I could tell it was the first time he had even heard the alternative argument."
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
Christian Teaching Banned; Wiccans OK
Edinburgh University in Scotland has a history of Leftist nuttery -- and declining academic standards:
Truly insane British immigration rules
Here's a quiz. Not a very good quiz because you will know the answer before you've finished reading the question. Whether you can comprehend it is another matter. An awful lot of immigrants are allowed into Britain these days and very few deported because they are undesirable. However, as a nation we must draw the line somewhere. So, using your understanding of How Britain Is, estimate which of the following four aspirant British citizens has been told to get out and stay out. And which three can stay?
1) Mouloud Sihali, Algerian. Lived at Finsbury Park mosque, breeding ground of Islamic terrorism. Described in court as "unprincipled and dishonest". Illegal immigrant.
2) Yonis Dirie, Somalian. Drug addict, armed robber and burglar. Convicted of raping a young woman in London. Illegal immigrant.
3) Tul Bahadur Pun VC, Nepalese. Won the Victoria Cross for taking out a Japanese machinegun post in 1944 in Burma single-handedly. Now 84, of unblemished conduct, suffering from heart problems and diabetes and would like treatment here. Legal applicant.
4) "AS", Libyan. Islamic extremist involved with Milan terrorist group. Court accepts that he is likely to try to kill us all again quite soon. Illegal immigrant.
You got it, didn't you? Old Pun's application was rejected because - and here's another punchline, in case the first wasn't funny enough - he "failed to demonstrate" that he had "strong ties with Britain". How much stronger do you want? There can be hardly a soul who wouldn't be happy to have Pun here. And not one who could make a case for allowing Dirie, the robber-rapist, say, to get preferential treatment. Some of us would have happily dispatched him back to Mogadishu strapped to a missile.
There is no great objection to immigration in this country; the objection is to how it is done and who benefits, exemplified by the cases I quote above. I suspect the public feels there are people who should be allowed in - people to whom we owe a profound debt of gratitude (like Pun), or those whose countries we have let down in one way or another (such as the Hong Kong Chinese or the black Zimbabweans). And yet it seems we do precisely the opposite.
Libyan and Algerian extremists who feel the regimes in their home countries are not sufficiently rigorous are allowed to stay because we worry they might be bumped off at home - regardless of what threat they pose to us. I would vote for any party that pledged to extricate us from the international legislation that insists on such absurdities. By then, however, it will most likely be too late for Tul Bahadur Pun VC. The Japs couldn't kill him - but we're not making a bad job of it.
Source
Dangerous "Green" car
The shocking image of this tangled wreck of what was a Reva all-electric car has prompted road safety authorities to keep it off Australian roads. The wreckage of the Indian-built car is the result of a simulated crash at just 48 km/h.
Edinburgh University in Scotland has a history of Leftist nuttery -- and declining academic standards:
"Some would call it the Devil's work. Two ancient religions have locked horns in a bizarre "freedom of speech" row that is echoing around the corridors of one of Scotland's oldest academic institutions. The University of Edinburgh has granted permission to the Pagan Society to hold its annual conference - involving talks on witchcraft, pagan weddings and tribal dancing - on campus next month. Druids, heathens, shamans and witches are expected to attend what is a major event in the pagan calendar.
But the move has enraged the Christian Union, which accuses the university of double standards after banning one of its events on the "dangers" of homosexuality. Matthew Tindale, an Edinburgh-based Christian Union staff worker, claimed some faiths and beliefs appeared to be more equal than others on campus. "This seems to be a clear case of discrimination," he said. "It's okay for other religions, such as the pagans, to have their say at the university, but there appears to be a reluctance to allow Christians to do the same. All we are asking for is the tolerance that is afforded to other faiths and organisations."
The Union has won strong backing from the Catholic Church in Scotland, whose spokesman, Simon Dames, felt that allowing the pagan festival to go ahead while barring the Union meeting was an example of "Christianphobia". "This appears to be a clear case of double standards," he said. "The principles of a pluralistic democracy revolve around an acceptance of competing ideas and universities should be enshrining this principle. Anti-racism groups would never be asked to put up posters saying there are alternative views."
The row has its roots in last year's decision by university officials to ban the Christian Union from using campus premises to run a course which claimed that gay sex was morally wrong. The course was deemed to be in breach of university anti-discrimination guidelines although a compromise measure was later offered to allow the course to take place if posters offering differing views were prominently displayed. Much to the displeasure of some campus Christians and the Catholic Church, no such conditions will be attached to the pagan gathering.
Source
Truly insane British immigration rules
Here's a quiz. Not a very good quiz because you will know the answer before you've finished reading the question. Whether you can comprehend it is another matter. An awful lot of immigrants are allowed into Britain these days and very few deported because they are undesirable. However, as a nation we must draw the line somewhere. So, using your understanding of How Britain Is, estimate which of the following four aspirant British citizens has been told to get out and stay out. And which three can stay?
1) Mouloud Sihali, Algerian. Lived at Finsbury Park mosque, breeding ground of Islamic terrorism. Described in court as "unprincipled and dishonest". Illegal immigrant.
2) Yonis Dirie, Somalian. Drug addict, armed robber and burglar. Convicted of raping a young woman in London. Illegal immigrant.
3) Tul Bahadur Pun VC, Nepalese. Won the Victoria Cross for taking out a Japanese machinegun post in 1944 in Burma single-handedly. Now 84, of unblemished conduct, suffering from heart problems and diabetes and would like treatment here. Legal applicant.
4) "AS", Libyan. Islamic extremist involved with Milan terrorist group. Court accepts that he is likely to try to kill us all again quite soon. Illegal immigrant.
You got it, didn't you? Old Pun's application was rejected because - and here's another punchline, in case the first wasn't funny enough - he "failed to demonstrate" that he had "strong ties with Britain". How much stronger do you want? There can be hardly a soul who wouldn't be happy to have Pun here. And not one who could make a case for allowing Dirie, the robber-rapist, say, to get preferential treatment. Some of us would have happily dispatched him back to Mogadishu strapped to a missile.
There is no great objection to immigration in this country; the objection is to how it is done and who benefits, exemplified by the cases I quote above. I suspect the public feels there are people who should be allowed in - people to whom we owe a profound debt of gratitude (like Pun), or those whose countries we have let down in one way or another (such as the Hong Kong Chinese or the black Zimbabweans). And yet it seems we do precisely the opposite.
Libyan and Algerian extremists who feel the regimes in their home countries are not sufficiently rigorous are allowed to stay because we worry they might be bumped off at home - regardless of what threat they pose to us. I would vote for any party that pledged to extricate us from the international legislation that insists on such absurdities. By then, however, it will most likely be too late for Tul Bahadur Pun VC. The Japs couldn't kill him - but we're not making a bad job of it.
Source
Dangerous "Green" car
The shocking image of this tangled wreck of what was a Reva all-electric car has prompted road safety authorities to keep it off Australian roads. The wreckage of the Indian-built car is the result of a simulated crash at just 48 km/h.
The crash test dummy at the wheel of the Reva has its legs crushed, and hangs limply and exposed out of the door, its head having taken the full force of the disintegrated bonnet and windshield during the crash. Watch the crash test below:
But the man who wants Australian metropolitan commuters to go green in the Reva, says the shocking crash test has little relevance and that he knows the car is not as safe as other vehicles on our roads. Adrian Ferraretto, general manager of The Solar Shop in Adelaide, has been pushing for trials of the Reva here for years, and yesterday defended its safety record on the basis that it is allowed on roads elsewhere under the classification of a heavy quadricycle.
"We know the car's not as safe as say an S-Class Mercedes Benz or a Hummer or other passenger cars, but it has a different application," Mr Ferraretto said. "It's for low-speed city motoring. I don't think (the crash tests are) relevant. While it's not as safe as other passenger cars, it's safer than a motorbike."
The test on the Reva was conducted by UK motoring magazine Top Gear. It prompted road authorities in Britain to conduct their own crash tests and re-examine the road laws which allowed it on the roads there. Footage from the test was shown at a recent Australian Transport Council meeting of state and federal transport ministers. At the start of this month, as an outcome of that meeting, the Reva all-electric car was banned from use on Australian roads as it had failed a frontal crash test and did not comply with safety standards. An application by the West Australian Government to trial the Reva, an automatic two-door hatch, was rejected by the Australian Transport Council.
In Britain, however, the Reva - known as a G-Wiz - is classed as a heavy quadricycle and therefore has not had to meet the same safety standards as a car. Australia has no such vehicle category.
Source
Global cooling? Britain colder than Alaska!
The Brits were widely certain that their unusually warm summer proved global warming. What now?
More than 74,000 homes across the east of England were left without electricity yesterday as wind and heavy rain brought down power lines. EDF energy said last night that it had restored power in most areas but 4,000 homes were still without electricity. The disruption came as millions of Britons shivered through the washed-out Bank Holiday, which weather forecasters had predicted.
Plummeting temperatures, gales and torrential rain persisted. Public transport was disrupted, events were cancelled and emergency services were kept busy. In Alaska temperatures hit 16C (61F) – practically balmy compared with England’s average of 11C. Parts of Siberia were warmer than High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, the coldest spot in the country, where temperatures fell to 5C. The Met Office reported that the weekend was one of the wettest and coldest bank holidays for years, far below the May average of 17C.
However, indoor attractions were celebrating the bad weather. Shops and museums in London were bustling and the new 62 million Dickens World, an indoor theme park in Kent, was filled to capacity. Thames Water confirmed that the deluge had made water restrictions less likely this summer.
Seaside resorts were heavily booked by families counting on bursts of sunshine. But by Saturday afternoon all hope had evaporated. Much of England endured downpours topping 50mm (2in). St Catherine’s Point, on the Isle of Wight, had received almost 75mm since the start of the Bank Holiday. Ferries to the island were cancelled and two yachts from France had to be rescued in the Channel.
In Exeter, three teenagers who camped beside the River Exe had to be rescued after being surrounded by fast-flowing water. One of Britain’s biggest carnivals, the Luton International Festival, which was expected to attract more than 100,000 people, was cancelled.
Most of Western Europe suffered too. The weather will improve today, then it is misery again for most of the week.
Source
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
Private medical treatment saves British woman
Under NHS rules she would have died
Sarah Burnell was 43 when breast cancer was diagnosed in November 2005. Despite having had the all-clear after a mammogram a year earlier, she had developed 11 tumours and had to have a mastectomy and chemotherapy. Because of a family history of breast cancer – her mother had the diagnosis at 51 – she had insisted on annual mammograms from the age of 38. They probably saved her life.
Her mother had been perimenopausal when her diagnosis was made, Ms Burnell, a radiologist, said, so she would not have been screened by the NHS until she was 46. “It was only because of my work as a radiologist that I was able to get screening before this age,” she said. “This meant that I caught the cancer early, before it had a chance to spread to my lymph nodes.”
A colleague at the private Princess Grace Hospital in Central London did the mammogram, and showed Ms Burnell the results. “I only saw the largest tumour. It was only when I went for ultrasound that I found out I had 11 tumours,” she said. “Thankfully, they were all very small.”
Ms Burnell, of Battersea, had a mastectomy, reconstructive surgery and chemotherapy. A year later her aunt, 70, was told that cancer was present in both breasts, indicating an even stronger genetic link.
Ms Burnell’s daughter, Xanthe, 9, is now worried that she will develop the disease and wants to have genetic testing. “Xanthe is concerned, but we are glad at this breakthrough in research,” Ms Burnell said. “We hope it will help her decide when to start screening. If she has the gene, I think she should start being screened at the age of 25. “I would hate her to go through what I went through. It’s been a very tough time.”
Source
NHS dentistry: Splendid British bureaucratic logic at work
They only treat you if you have GOOD teeth! Don't you love it?
DENTISTS on the National Health Service are turning away people with bad teeth because they say they are only paid enough to treat patients with a good dental health record. One surgery admitted that people who have not had a dental appointment for three years will be refused treatment. Others are employing more subtle methods to reject patients.
Dentists' leaders say the NHS dental contract, introduced in April last year, has had a perverse effect because dentists earn the same for giving a patient one filling or 10. The Oakwood Dental Centre in Derby, for instance, says on Derby City Primary Care Trust's website that it "will only accept patients who have visited a dental surgery within the last three years". Aneu Sood, who runs the practice, said it had no time to treat those who "need a tremendous amount of work".
According to dentists' leaders, potentially unprofitable patients are screened out by giving preference to those patients who have recently been dropped by an NHS practice which has gone private. This sort of patient is likely to have had recent and regular treatment and therefore is unlikely to need extensive new surgery. Dentists will also take on the relatives of existing patients with healthy teeth in the expectation that family members will need little treatment as well.
Source
Leeds academics fight back against censorship by threat of violence
Following the controversial last-minute cancellation by the University of Leeds of a lecture from Dr Matthias Kntzel, 'The Nazi Legacy: the export of anti-Semitism to the Middle East', the University authorities went to considerable lengths to persuade Leeds UCU that no issues of principle were involved - that the lecture was cancelled on public safety grounds only. The initial response of local union leaders was to accept their explanation - we were told that the union needs to maintain a 'constructive' relationship with the University (which no-one would dispute).
A few of us felt that the issue was too important to be brushed under the carpet, and decided to fight. With no backing from the local leadership, we canvassed support for an Extraordinary General Meeting to discuss the lecture cancellation and the wider issue of academic freedom. We were successful - 34 members supported the call (local rules require 25), and the meeting took place on Tuesday 8th May.
In the meantime, the matter was discussed at a meeting of the Joint Committee of the University and the UCU, which concluded that the University's statement was 'a truthful and complete account' of the incident. This statement claims that the lecture was cancelled 'on safety grounds alone', that no issue of academic freedom was involved, and that 'the University was not given sufficient notice' by the organisers of the meeting. Our union representatives reported to us that there was no reason to doubt the claims, or the Vice Chancellor's assurances that 'nobody was leant on by the University authorities to cancel the speech'.
This completely misses the point. We now know that only three emails of protest were received, at least one of which did not even ask for the meeting to be cancelled. None of us ever believed that there was a real threat to public safety, or that anyone had tried to put pressure on the University authorities. The sad fact is that the threats and the pressure were figments of the University's imagination. Apparently it's not possible, if you are a Muslim, to send a protest to the University without its being interpreted as a threat of violence - a rather disturbing state of affairs.
In response to our successful call and our submitted motion, some of the local officers put forward a very much watered-down version, which criticised the University only to the extent that its 'handling of the situation was unfortunate'. So, our task at the meeting was to convince people that the officers' compromise motion did not adequately address the seriousness of what had happened and its implications for academic freedom, and they should therefore support ours.
After a lively but civil debate, our motion was passed by just one vote! A message will now be sent to the University that UCU members disapprove of their action, do not accept their explanation, and will not tolerate any attempt to interfere with academic freedom and freedom of speech on our campus.
Carol Wilson (Medicine)
Eva Frojmovic (Centre for Jewish Studies)
David Miller (Medicine)
Annette Seidel-Arpaci (Modern Languages and Cultures)
Morten Hunke (Modern Languages and Cultures)
The motion:
Leeds UCU is deeply concerned about the University's decision to cancel a lecture by Dr Matthias Kntzel, "The Nazi Legacy: the export of anti-Semitism to the Middle East", organised by the German department. Both the initial decision and subsequent public statements have damaged the University's reputation by demonstrating an apparent lack of concern for its duty to uphold the principle of academic freedom.
The initial statement from Roger Gair, University Secretary, treated the justifiable concerns of staff, students, the invited speaker and the public in a wholly inappropriate manner. It incorrectly blamed the organisers of the meeting for a failure to abide by the Freedom of Expression policy, and labelled their protests as 'making mischief'. The replacement, whilst moderating its tone, repeated the same untrue claim.
The incident has raised serious concerns, both inside and outside the University, about the wider implications for academic freedom.
We note that:
* The University has failed to give a coherent and plausible explanation of the cancellation, either to Dr Kntzel and the academics concerned, or in its public statements.
* Although the University publicly asserted that it took the decision because of security fears it has produced no evidence of any threat of violence or disruption, and there were no reasonable grounds for regarding the talk as posing a safety problem.
* The University's handling of the incident was inept throughout, and has left a public impression of extreme discourtesy towards Dr Kntzel.
* The new Freedom of Expression policy allows the University too much discretion to ban an event (especially Clause 6, which includes a potential 'verbal attack' on 'religion and belief' as a reason for a ban). The wording effectively gives a right of veto over freedom of speech to anyone who objects to a controversial meeting, should the University choose to interpret it in this way.
We seek assurances from the Vice-Chancellor that:
* The University recognises that the decision to cancel the meeting was a serious blunder, which will not be repeated.
* Those involved in the decision will be given guidance in (1) the correct operation of the Freedom of Expression policy; and (2) the extent of the University's responsibilities in upholding academic freedom.
* The University will rectify its misleading public account of the events leading to the cancellation, invite Dr Kntzel back to give his lecture at the University's expense, and apologise to him and to the academics concerned.
* The Freedom of Expression policy will be revised, in collaboration with Leeds UCU, to ensure that it can under no circumstances be used to obstruct free speech within the law.
Source
Selective schools improve nearby non-selective schools
They set up a standard for comparison. Both types of school are publicly funded
David Cameron is facing a fresh challenge to his authority with a member of his frontbench team producing new evidence showing that grammar schools dramatically improve the exam results of a whole neighbourhood. Graham Brady, the Shadow Europe Minister and a former grammar school pupil, has passed data to The Timesshowing that GCSE results are significantly better in areas that have an element of selective education - with ethnic minority children benefiting most.
The figures show that in comprehensive areas with no selection, 42.6 per cent of GCSE pupils get 5 or more A* to C grades in subjects including English and maths. This rises to 46 per cent in partially selective areas and 49.8 per cent in wholly selective areas where all pupils take the 11 plus.
This new frontbench division will dismay both Mr Cameron and David Willetts, the Shadow Education Secretary, who unveiled further controversial policy reforms yesterday. He wants city academies to choose pupils by a range of nonacademic criteria, including race, which he hopes will halt growing segregation in some inner city areas. Mr Cameron yesterday called critics of his refusal to bring back grammar schools "inverse class warriors".
Mr Brady's figures challenge a key element of Tory thinking - that pupils who fail to get into grammar schools suffer more than those who go to schools where there is no local selection. His figures show: Areas with academic selection appear to benefit ethnic minorities, and Chinese and Bangladeshi children most. Chinese students get a 82.4 per cent rating for good GCSEs in selective areas but average 61.2 per cent in comprehensive areas. Bangladeshi students get 57 per cent in selective areas but 37.9 per cent in nonselective areas. Eight out of the top ten highest-scoring local authorities in maths and seven out of ten in English are either fully selective or partially selective. Children in areas with nonselective schools are more likely to go backwards between the ages of 11 and 14, according to data released this week.
In a further challenge, Mr Brady questioned whether free school meals - the measure of poverty used by Mr Willetts - was appropriate. He passed a letter to The Times from the headmaster of Altrincham Grammar School for Boys, who says that the educational maintenance allowance, which has a higher cutoff, provides a "truer reflection" of the profile of the school.
Mr Brady said: "These facts appear to confirm my own experiences: that selection raises the standards for everyone in both grammar and high schools in selective areas. "I accept the party's policy on grammar schools. But it is vitally important that policy should be developed with a full understanding of all of these facts - which might lead to the introduction of selection in other ways, including partial selection in academies and other schools."
Professor Alan Smithers, of the University of Buckingham, said that the figures were significant. "It's acknowledged that grammar schools work very well for children in them, but the argument against has always been that children who don't go to the grammar achieve below what they would get in a comprehensive system. But it does look as though it is difficult to sustain the argument." He noted that grammar school pupils often came from more privileged backgrounds.
Source
A strangely selective conscience : "There is an article on the Guardian site called Throw a pebble at Goliath: don't buy Israeli produce, by Yvonne Roberts, in which she urges people to boycott Israel because of its human rights record. Now I know nothing about Yvonne Robert and have never even heard of her before, but I assume she also an avid campaigner for people to boycott products from Cuba, Burma, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, China (good luck doing that), Iran, Syria, Belorus, Zimbabwe, North Korea (assuming they actually produce any products) etc. etc. etc... after all, if she is such a tireless campaigner for human rights, surely she could not possibly feel it was alright for people to trade with all those places, given the state of human rights in those places. Right? Anyone want to take any bets on this?"
Under NHS rules she would have died
Sarah Burnell was 43 when breast cancer was diagnosed in November 2005. Despite having had the all-clear after a mammogram a year earlier, she had developed 11 tumours and had to have a mastectomy and chemotherapy. Because of a family history of breast cancer – her mother had the diagnosis at 51 – she had insisted on annual mammograms from the age of 38. They probably saved her life.
Her mother had been perimenopausal when her diagnosis was made, Ms Burnell, a radiologist, said, so she would not have been screened by the NHS until she was 46. “It was only because of my work as a radiologist that I was able to get screening before this age,” she said. “This meant that I caught the cancer early, before it had a chance to spread to my lymph nodes.”
A colleague at the private Princess Grace Hospital in Central London did the mammogram, and showed Ms Burnell the results. “I only saw the largest tumour. It was only when I went for ultrasound that I found out I had 11 tumours,” she said. “Thankfully, they were all very small.”
Ms Burnell, of Battersea, had a mastectomy, reconstructive surgery and chemotherapy. A year later her aunt, 70, was told that cancer was present in both breasts, indicating an even stronger genetic link.
Ms Burnell’s daughter, Xanthe, 9, is now worried that she will develop the disease and wants to have genetic testing. “Xanthe is concerned, but we are glad at this breakthrough in research,” Ms Burnell said. “We hope it will help her decide when to start screening. If she has the gene, I think she should start being screened at the age of 25. “I would hate her to go through what I went through. It’s been a very tough time.”
Source
NHS dentistry: Splendid British bureaucratic logic at work
They only treat you if you have GOOD teeth! Don't you love it?
DENTISTS on the National Health Service are turning away people with bad teeth because they say they are only paid enough to treat patients with a good dental health record. One surgery admitted that people who have not had a dental appointment for three years will be refused treatment. Others are employing more subtle methods to reject patients.
Dentists' leaders say the NHS dental contract, introduced in April last year, has had a perverse effect because dentists earn the same for giving a patient one filling or 10. The Oakwood Dental Centre in Derby, for instance, says on Derby City Primary Care Trust's website that it "will only accept patients who have visited a dental surgery within the last three years". Aneu Sood, who runs the practice, said it had no time to treat those who "need a tremendous amount of work".
According to dentists' leaders, potentially unprofitable patients are screened out by giving preference to those patients who have recently been dropped by an NHS practice which has gone private. This sort of patient is likely to have had recent and regular treatment and therefore is unlikely to need extensive new surgery. Dentists will also take on the relatives of existing patients with healthy teeth in the expectation that family members will need little treatment as well.
Source
Leeds academics fight back against censorship by threat of violence
Following the controversial last-minute cancellation by the University of Leeds of a lecture from Dr Matthias Kntzel, 'The Nazi Legacy: the export of anti-Semitism to the Middle East', the University authorities went to considerable lengths to persuade Leeds UCU that no issues of principle were involved - that the lecture was cancelled on public safety grounds only. The initial response of local union leaders was to accept their explanation - we were told that the union needs to maintain a 'constructive' relationship with the University (which no-one would dispute).
A few of us felt that the issue was too important to be brushed under the carpet, and decided to fight. With no backing from the local leadership, we canvassed support for an Extraordinary General Meeting to discuss the lecture cancellation and the wider issue of academic freedom. We were successful - 34 members supported the call (local rules require 25), and the meeting took place on Tuesday 8th May.
In the meantime, the matter was discussed at a meeting of the Joint Committee of the University and the UCU, which concluded that the University's statement was 'a truthful and complete account' of the incident. This statement claims that the lecture was cancelled 'on safety grounds alone', that no issue of academic freedom was involved, and that 'the University was not given sufficient notice' by the organisers of the meeting. Our union representatives reported to us that there was no reason to doubt the claims, or the Vice Chancellor's assurances that 'nobody was leant on by the University authorities to cancel the speech'.
This completely misses the point. We now know that only three emails of protest were received, at least one of which did not even ask for the meeting to be cancelled. None of us ever believed that there was a real threat to public safety, or that anyone had tried to put pressure on the University authorities. The sad fact is that the threats and the pressure were figments of the University's imagination. Apparently it's not possible, if you are a Muslim, to send a protest to the University without its being interpreted as a threat of violence - a rather disturbing state of affairs.
In response to our successful call and our submitted motion, some of the local officers put forward a very much watered-down version, which criticised the University only to the extent that its 'handling of the situation was unfortunate'. So, our task at the meeting was to convince people that the officers' compromise motion did not adequately address the seriousness of what had happened and its implications for academic freedom, and they should therefore support ours.
After a lively but civil debate, our motion was passed by just one vote! A message will now be sent to the University that UCU members disapprove of their action, do not accept their explanation, and will not tolerate any attempt to interfere with academic freedom and freedom of speech on our campus.
Carol Wilson (Medicine)
Eva Frojmovic (Centre for Jewish Studies)
David Miller (Medicine)
Annette Seidel-Arpaci (Modern Languages and Cultures)
Morten Hunke (Modern Languages and Cultures)
The motion:
Leeds UCU is deeply concerned about the University's decision to cancel a lecture by Dr Matthias Kntzel, "The Nazi Legacy: the export of anti-Semitism to the Middle East", organised by the German department. Both the initial decision and subsequent public statements have damaged the University's reputation by demonstrating an apparent lack of concern for its duty to uphold the principle of academic freedom.
The initial statement from Roger Gair, University Secretary, treated the justifiable concerns of staff, students, the invited speaker and the public in a wholly inappropriate manner. It incorrectly blamed the organisers of the meeting for a failure to abide by the Freedom of Expression policy, and labelled their protests as 'making mischief'. The replacement, whilst moderating its tone, repeated the same untrue claim.
The incident has raised serious concerns, both inside and outside the University, about the wider implications for academic freedom.
We note that:
* The University has failed to give a coherent and plausible explanation of the cancellation, either to Dr Kntzel and the academics concerned, or in its public statements.
* Although the University publicly asserted that it took the decision because of security fears it has produced no evidence of any threat of violence or disruption, and there were no reasonable grounds for regarding the talk as posing a safety problem.
* The University's handling of the incident was inept throughout, and has left a public impression of extreme discourtesy towards Dr Kntzel.
* The new Freedom of Expression policy allows the University too much discretion to ban an event (especially Clause 6, which includes a potential 'verbal attack' on 'religion and belief' as a reason for a ban). The wording effectively gives a right of veto over freedom of speech to anyone who objects to a controversial meeting, should the University choose to interpret it in this way.
We seek assurances from the Vice-Chancellor that:
* The University recognises that the decision to cancel the meeting was a serious blunder, which will not be repeated.
* Those involved in the decision will be given guidance in (1) the correct operation of the Freedom of Expression policy; and (2) the extent of the University's responsibilities in upholding academic freedom.
* The University will rectify its misleading public account of the events leading to the cancellation, invite Dr Kntzel back to give his lecture at the University's expense, and apologise to him and to the academics concerned.
* The Freedom of Expression policy will be revised, in collaboration with Leeds UCU, to ensure that it can under no circumstances be used to obstruct free speech within the law.
Source
Selective schools improve nearby non-selective schools
They set up a standard for comparison. Both types of school are publicly funded
David Cameron is facing a fresh challenge to his authority with a member of his frontbench team producing new evidence showing that grammar schools dramatically improve the exam results of a whole neighbourhood. Graham Brady, the Shadow Europe Minister and a former grammar school pupil, has passed data to The Timesshowing that GCSE results are significantly better in areas that have an element of selective education - with ethnic minority children benefiting most.
The figures show that in comprehensive areas with no selection, 42.6 per cent of GCSE pupils get 5 or more A* to C grades in subjects including English and maths. This rises to 46 per cent in partially selective areas and 49.8 per cent in wholly selective areas where all pupils take the 11 plus.
This new frontbench division will dismay both Mr Cameron and David Willetts, the Shadow Education Secretary, who unveiled further controversial policy reforms yesterday. He wants city academies to choose pupils by a range of nonacademic criteria, including race, which he hopes will halt growing segregation in some inner city areas. Mr Cameron yesterday called critics of his refusal to bring back grammar schools "inverse class warriors".
Mr Brady's figures challenge a key element of Tory thinking - that pupils who fail to get into grammar schools suffer more than those who go to schools where there is no local selection. His figures show: Areas with academic selection appear to benefit ethnic minorities, and Chinese and Bangladeshi children most. Chinese students get a 82.4 per cent rating for good GCSEs in selective areas but average 61.2 per cent in comprehensive areas. Bangladeshi students get 57 per cent in selective areas but 37.9 per cent in nonselective areas. Eight out of the top ten highest-scoring local authorities in maths and seven out of ten in English are either fully selective or partially selective. Children in areas with nonselective schools are more likely to go backwards between the ages of 11 and 14, according to data released this week.
In a further challenge, Mr Brady questioned whether free school meals - the measure of poverty used by Mr Willetts - was appropriate. He passed a letter to The Times from the headmaster of Altrincham Grammar School for Boys, who says that the educational maintenance allowance, which has a higher cutoff, provides a "truer reflection" of the profile of the school.
Mr Brady said: "These facts appear to confirm my own experiences: that selection raises the standards for everyone in both grammar and high schools in selective areas. "I accept the party's policy on grammar schools. But it is vitally important that policy should be developed with a full understanding of all of these facts - which might lead to the introduction of selection in other ways, including partial selection in academies and other schools."
Professor Alan Smithers, of the University of Buckingham, said that the figures were significant. "It's acknowledged that grammar schools work very well for children in them, but the argument against has always been that children who don't go to the grammar achieve below what they would get in a comprehensive system. But it does look as though it is difficult to sustain the argument." He noted that grammar school pupils often came from more privileged backgrounds.
Source
A strangely selective conscience : "There is an article on the Guardian site called Throw a pebble at Goliath: don't buy Israeli produce, by Yvonne Roberts, in which she urges people to boycott Israel because of its human rights record. Now I know nothing about Yvonne Robert and have never even heard of her before, but I assume she also an avid campaigner for people to boycott products from Cuba, Burma, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, China (good luck doing that), Iran, Syria, Belorus, Zimbabwe, North Korea (assuming they actually produce any products) etc. etc. etc... after all, if she is such a tireless campaigner for human rights, surely she could not possibly feel it was alright for people to trade with all those places, given the state of human rights in those places. Right? Anyone want to take any bets on this?"
Monday, May 28, 2007
The BBC blames Israel for 'unstable borders.'
Post lifted from American Thinker. See the original for links
In a shameless effort to rewrite history:
"The BBC News website is publishing a series of articles about the attempts to achieve peace in the Middle East and the main obstacles. Yesterday, Martin Asser looked at the question of Israel's borders and settlements."
Surprise! It turns out that Israel is to blame for its "unstable borders." By Gum, it's just as if Israel wasn't attacked by invading Arab armies from its first day of life in 1948, and again in 1967 and 1974, when it pushed back the invaders to achieve some measure of border stability. Reading Martin Asser's wildly anti-Israel BBC "history" of the past sixty years, those events never happened. So Israel's defensive push-back is twisted into offensive imperialism, and the Beeb manages to "confuse the fire with the fire brigade," in the apt words of Winston Churchill.
The BBC's dishonesty is beyond belief. But constant, relentless propaganda works. Most people can't resist the Big Lie when it is repeated over and over again. Naturally the Beeb's British and international audience hates Israel for making all the trouble in the world. Appeasers always look for scapegoats, and Israel is the natural choice. The BBC is run by the far Left in Britain, and once again, the extremes of fascism and the Left are allied, just as they were in the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1938.
As the Beeb's favorite philosopher said, "history repeats, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce." [Marx]
The BBC's malevolence has unintended consequences, however --- such as the radicalization of thousands of domestic terrorists in Britain's own alienated cities. The men who suicide-bombed the London Underground on "7/7" were radicalized by Islamist imams peddling Wahhabi world conquest. British police and intelligence agencies have warned that thousands of homegrown Islamist extremists may be ready to place more bombs. But the ideological ground was laid for them by ... the BBC, which continues to pump out industrial-strength hatred for America and Israel.
The leftists who run BBC have naturally persuaded themselves that Islamist terrorism is not a real threat. Terrorism is all the fault of Bush and Blair. So today, an upside-down "history" of the Israel-Palestinian conflict is being peddled to push the incoming Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, into an anti-Israel stance. This is the message from the Labour Left, which controls the biggest tax-funded propaganda empire in the world --- more than six billion dollars per year.
Yet Islamist terrorism is a very real threat in Londonistan and Britanostan. Islamists hate Britain and the West, as well as Israel, for being Christian, Jewish or atheist, for being pro-Gay and pro-women, for being richer and more productive than the Muslim world, and for a hundred other reasons. So the BBC itself is radicalizing Britain's Muslim population, even while seeming to displace all blame on Israel. While the aim is to discredit and ultimately destroy Israel, the Islamist backlash will inevitably harm the people of Britain, just as the Underground Bombing did. The Beeb ends up cutting its own throat. So the biter was bitten on 7/7, and has learned nothing in consequence.
It may take more terror attacks to finally convince ordinary people that they have been systematically misled for decades. Unfortunately, Islamist terror bombs are far more likely to hurt innocent people than the sources of pernicious propaganda. George Orwell worked for the BBC, and satirized it in his dystopian novel 1984 as the "Ministry of Truth" --- which is of course the Ministry of Lies. The BBC continues to reveal a shameful black mark against a once-great country. Orwell lives.
Don't get mesothelioma in England
Excerpts from a doctor who was recently diagnosed as having it. It is cancer of the lungs, most usually caused by high levels of asbestos fibre inhalation
Mesothelioma is a rare form of cancer and, until recently, there was little to offer in the way of treatment. Treatments are available now, but as ever in parts of the UK the drug that is used as a frontline treatment is not available on the NHS.
This is because for each year of (quality-adjusted) life it brings it costs too much, more than 30,000 pounds. Diagnosed with a mesothelioma in Scotland, Australia and many European countries, you will receive the drug - but not in England. Nice (which should perhaps stand for the National Institute for Curtailing Expenditure rather than the National Institute for Clinical Excellence) has made a ruling on cost-effectiveness grounds that the only drug that has been shown to have effectiveness, albeit of a limited nature, will not be available.
There is nothing intrinsically wrong with limiting treatment on cost grounds, but we need to be honest and open that that is what we are doing. It might seem reasonable to limit how much might be spent but I am not at death's door yet, nor are many mesothelioma sufferers. Politicians will often come out with the old chestnut, "you cannot put a price on life", well, they do put a price on it. In my case, a year is not worth spending more than 30,000.
Patricia Hewitt, my boss, has said: "A modern health and social care system has to be completely focused on the needs of its users," and "We are trying to find out what patients need, rather than what it suits us to provide." There are many sufferers from mesothelioma out there, Mrs Hewitt, who have justifiable healthcare needs and who will not be provided with drugs which may prolong their lives because it suits you not to provide it on cost grounds. I do not think they feel completely focused on. Mind you, 30,000 is a lot of money to waste on a very sick person. You could, for example, employ for nearly a year a "senior parenting practitioner" in the London borough of Tower Hamlets.
I have gone from highly strung (for no good reason, now I think of it) consultant, father and husband into highly strung (now with a good reason) patient, father and husband. I can string a few words together when the fatigue, nausea and sleep deprivation are not so bad. I have not suffered badly from the chemo-therapy, but for some it must be like seasickness. There is a period when you think you are going to die followed by a period when you wish you were.
It is good for medics to be on the other side, you appreciate the good and spot the bad. I have liked the internet as a source of medical information for many years. It empowers patients to ask questions that encourage doctors to explain more fully. However, it cannot answer all the questions. You may not discover all that you do not know and sadly, some of the stuff you find may not be helpful.
Being a pain specialist, I looked at the pain management section of a leading university unit dealing with mesothelioma. Big mistake - I know pain is a major problem in mesothelioma and I know that resources allocated to it are inadequate. What I was not prepared for was facing the issue from the other side. By the end of my reading, I felt like looking for the weblink that would allow me for $39.99 - a special offer - to have a loaded 9mm Browning delivered to my door.
Reading one paper I felt angry that an expert had been blunt to the point of callousness. We need to care for patients, as well as treat them. Caring involves giving information in a sensitive fashion, not "click on here" to find out just how bad it can get. My esteemed colleague who, at the beginning of a presentation on mesothelioma had a slide which showed a photograph of the "shit creek paddle shop", should realise that it is accessible from the internet.
Source
British private schools popular in China
It should help them give more "scholarships" to poor but bright British students -- something the government is urging them to do -- but they will have to be super-careful to avoid attack as "racist"
PRIVATE schools are imposing unofficial limits on the numbers of Chinese pupils they admit because of fears that British parents will be deterred from sending their children there. Schools including Wellington College in Berkshire, the Leys school in Cambridge and Brighton college, East Sussex, have decided to restrict their numbers of foreign pupils under pressure from growing Chinese demand. Some schools are adopting the policy to preserve their character, while others are reacting to concerns among parents. According to the most recent figures from the Independent Schools Council, the numbers from mainland China have risen from a few hundred in 2000 to 2,345 this year. When added to pupils from Hong Kong, the total rises to 8,652, 40% of all foreign pupils. There are just 1,888 German pupils, the next biggest foreign contingent.
Ralph Lucas, editor of the Good Schools Guide, said many schools did not want to take more than 10% of their pupils from China although, given the demand, they could easily surpass this number. "To keep the traditional feel of an English public school, they are setting limits," he said. "Chinese pupils sometimes tend to keep themselves to themselves."
The growing numbers have sparked a backlash among some British parents. Margie Burnet Ward, headmistress of Wycliffe college in Stonehouse, Gloucestershire, has cut the number of pupils from China in recent years. "The fact that dare not speak its name is that parents are saying, `We don't want to come to you because you have too many Chinese pupils'," she said. "Five years ago we had 90 pupils from China and now we have 45 . . . Chinese children want to study maths and physics and parents are concerned that their child could be the only UK student in those classes."
Mark Slater, headmaster of the Leys, which has about 8% of its pupils from the Far East, said he believed in limiting the intake, although he added: "Up to a certain percentage it is a very healthy aspect of the school." Anthony Seldon, headmaster of Wellington, said: "They're desperate in China to come to England." He plans to set an informal limit of 15%-20% of foreign students. At Brighton, the ceiling is 8%.
For some independent schools Chinese pupils are, however, a lifeline. Some single-sex schools, particularly girls' boarding institutions, are struggling as more British parents opt for coeducational day schools. Chinese parents, by contrast, almost always pay full boarding fees and are willing to send their children to single-sex schools.
Nick Leiper, director of admissions for Ampleforth college, North Yorkshire, said some schools were now moving so aggressively into China that they were employing brokers to supply pupils in return for 10% of the first term's fees. Before British rule ended in 1997, many Hong Kong Chinese opted for a British private education because of its social cachet. Now, with mainland China's economy booming, the motives have changed. Parents from China see an English-language education as the gateway to an international career.
While most applicants are the children of the country's new rich, others come from less well-off backgrounds, with members of extended families clubbing together to pay fees. Many leading schools argue they are so popular that they could fill their places with children from Hong Kong and mainland China. Some, including Harrow and Dulwich college in London, have even opened branch schools in China.
Others have no plans to curb the numbers of Chinese. At Roedean, the girls' school near Brighton, one-third of the sixth form are from China and one-third from other foreign countries. "Some schools may have quotas, but we do not," said a spokeswoman.
Heathfield St Mary's school in Ascot, Berkshire, has resisted the financial benefits of recruitment from China. Frances King, the headmistress, said: "We are a very small boarding school and the interest in our school has increased. The Chinese are looking for entry into UK or American universities. If there are a lot pupils coming from one place I have to look at it every year. "We are an English boarding school and the Chinese pupils want to feel that they are coming to an English school. We like to have cultural diversity."
Source
Pockets of Christianity left in the Church of England
"Strait is the gate and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it" -- Matthew 7:14
Ninety-five per cent of Britons are heading for hell, according to the principal of Wycliffe Hall, Oxford, who has been under fire from some staff for taking one of the leading Anglican theological training colleges in a conservative direction.
Richard Turnbull, appointed two years ago, made the claim in a speech to the annual conference of Reform, a conservative evangelical pressure group within the Church of England. If he truly believes it, the figure would encompass at least all non-evangelical Christians, including many members of the Church of England, and those of all other religions and none.
A recording of the speech, made in October last year and seen by the Guardian, was posted last night on the Thinking Anglicans liberal website. In it, Dr Turnbull also warns against the danger of liberalism in the church, talks of "the strategic nature" of evangelical control of training colleges and calls on conservatives to syphon off 10% of their financial contributions to the Church of England to help pay the costs of like-minded colleges. The message excludes even evangelicals who are regarded as more liberal in their beliefs.
Dr Turnbull told them: "We are committed to bringing the gospel message of Jesus Christ to those who don't know [him] and in this land that's 95% of the people: 95% of people facing hell unless the message of the gospel is brought to them."
Traditionally Wycliffe, a permanent private hall of Oxford University founded in 1877, has trained evangelical Anglicans for the clergy, but its reputation has been as an open evangelical college, welcoming would-be ordinands from a wide range of theological and liturgical beliefs.
Critics within the college have accused the principal of taking it in a much more restrictive and exclusionary direction. At least a third of the academic staff have resigned and its best-known member, the Thought for the Day contributor Elaine Storkey, has been threatened with disciplinary action, allegedly for raising concerns at an internal staff meeting.
In his speech, the principal criticised the Church of England for "restrictive trade practices" in limiting funding for its students and added: "I view [my] post as strategic because it would allow influence to be brought to bear upon generations of the ministry...capture the theological colleges and you have captured the influence that is brought to bear." He warns that unless like-minded parishes fund colleges such as his own, they face closure within 10 years. At the same conference in Derbyshire, Reform members agreed to remain within the Church of England for the time being but to set up an advisory panel to support conservative clergy and encourage ordinands of their viewpoint. They were told by one senior member, the Rev David Holloway, vicar of Jesmond, that the church was a dysfunctional body with incompetent leadership.
In an article to be published in tomorrow's Church of England Newspaper - a more broadly-based evangelical publication - Dr Turnbull's message appears rather more tolerant. He writes: "For me and for Wycliffe, inclusive means exactly that, rather than the exclusion of particular views. So issues which divide ... have to be debated in the open, albeit with care and sensitivity ..."
Source
Post lifted from American Thinker. See the original for links
In a shameless effort to rewrite history:
"The BBC News website is publishing a series of articles about the attempts to achieve peace in the Middle East and the main obstacles. Yesterday, Martin Asser looked at the question of Israel's borders and settlements."
Surprise! It turns out that Israel is to blame for its "unstable borders." By Gum, it's just as if Israel wasn't attacked by invading Arab armies from its first day of life in 1948, and again in 1967 and 1974, when it pushed back the invaders to achieve some measure of border stability. Reading Martin Asser's wildly anti-Israel BBC "history" of the past sixty years, those events never happened. So Israel's defensive push-back is twisted into offensive imperialism, and the Beeb manages to "confuse the fire with the fire brigade," in the apt words of Winston Churchill.
The BBC's dishonesty is beyond belief. But constant, relentless propaganda works. Most people can't resist the Big Lie when it is repeated over and over again. Naturally the Beeb's British and international audience hates Israel for making all the trouble in the world. Appeasers always look for scapegoats, and Israel is the natural choice. The BBC is run by the far Left in Britain, and once again, the extremes of fascism and the Left are allied, just as they were in the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1938.
As the Beeb's favorite philosopher said, "history repeats, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce." [Marx]
The BBC's malevolence has unintended consequences, however --- such as the radicalization of thousands of domestic terrorists in Britain's own alienated cities. The men who suicide-bombed the London Underground on "7/7" were radicalized by Islamist imams peddling Wahhabi world conquest. British police and intelligence agencies have warned that thousands of homegrown Islamist extremists may be ready to place more bombs. But the ideological ground was laid for them by ... the BBC, which continues to pump out industrial-strength hatred for America and Israel.
The leftists who run BBC have naturally persuaded themselves that Islamist terrorism is not a real threat. Terrorism is all the fault of Bush and Blair. So today, an upside-down "history" of the Israel-Palestinian conflict is being peddled to push the incoming Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, into an anti-Israel stance. This is the message from the Labour Left, which controls the biggest tax-funded propaganda empire in the world --- more than six billion dollars per year.
Yet Islamist terrorism is a very real threat in Londonistan and Britanostan. Islamists hate Britain and the West, as well as Israel, for being Christian, Jewish or atheist, for being pro-Gay and pro-women, for being richer and more productive than the Muslim world, and for a hundred other reasons. So the BBC itself is radicalizing Britain's Muslim population, even while seeming to displace all blame on Israel. While the aim is to discredit and ultimately destroy Israel, the Islamist backlash will inevitably harm the people of Britain, just as the Underground Bombing did. The Beeb ends up cutting its own throat. So the biter was bitten on 7/7, and has learned nothing in consequence.
It may take more terror attacks to finally convince ordinary people that they have been systematically misled for decades. Unfortunately, Islamist terror bombs are far more likely to hurt innocent people than the sources of pernicious propaganda. George Orwell worked for the BBC, and satirized it in his dystopian novel 1984 as the "Ministry of Truth" --- which is of course the Ministry of Lies. The BBC continues to reveal a shameful black mark against a once-great country. Orwell lives.
Don't get mesothelioma in England
Excerpts from a doctor who was recently diagnosed as having it. It is cancer of the lungs, most usually caused by high levels of asbestos fibre inhalation
Mesothelioma is a rare form of cancer and, until recently, there was little to offer in the way of treatment. Treatments are available now, but as ever in parts of the UK the drug that is used as a frontline treatment is not available on the NHS.
This is because for each year of (quality-adjusted) life it brings it costs too much, more than 30,000 pounds. Diagnosed with a mesothelioma in Scotland, Australia and many European countries, you will receive the drug - but not in England. Nice (which should perhaps stand for the National Institute for Curtailing Expenditure rather than the National Institute for Clinical Excellence) has made a ruling on cost-effectiveness grounds that the only drug that has been shown to have effectiveness, albeit of a limited nature, will not be available.
There is nothing intrinsically wrong with limiting treatment on cost grounds, but we need to be honest and open that that is what we are doing. It might seem reasonable to limit how much might be spent but I am not at death's door yet, nor are many mesothelioma sufferers. Politicians will often come out with the old chestnut, "you cannot put a price on life", well, they do put a price on it. In my case, a year is not worth spending more than 30,000.
Patricia Hewitt, my boss, has said: "A modern health and social care system has to be completely focused on the needs of its users," and "We are trying to find out what patients need, rather than what it suits us to provide." There are many sufferers from mesothelioma out there, Mrs Hewitt, who have justifiable healthcare needs and who will not be provided with drugs which may prolong their lives because it suits you not to provide it on cost grounds. I do not think they feel completely focused on. Mind you, 30,000 is a lot of money to waste on a very sick person. You could, for example, employ for nearly a year a "senior parenting practitioner" in the London borough of Tower Hamlets.
I have gone from highly strung (for no good reason, now I think of it) consultant, father and husband into highly strung (now with a good reason) patient, father and husband. I can string a few words together when the fatigue, nausea and sleep deprivation are not so bad. I have not suffered badly from the chemo-therapy, but for some it must be like seasickness. There is a period when you think you are going to die followed by a period when you wish you were.
It is good for medics to be on the other side, you appreciate the good and spot the bad. I have liked the internet as a source of medical information for many years. It empowers patients to ask questions that encourage doctors to explain more fully. However, it cannot answer all the questions. You may not discover all that you do not know and sadly, some of the stuff you find may not be helpful.
Being a pain specialist, I looked at the pain management section of a leading university unit dealing with mesothelioma. Big mistake - I know pain is a major problem in mesothelioma and I know that resources allocated to it are inadequate. What I was not prepared for was facing the issue from the other side. By the end of my reading, I felt like looking for the weblink that would allow me for $39.99 - a special offer - to have a loaded 9mm Browning delivered to my door.
Reading one paper I felt angry that an expert had been blunt to the point of callousness. We need to care for patients, as well as treat them. Caring involves giving information in a sensitive fashion, not "click on here" to find out just how bad it can get. My esteemed colleague who, at the beginning of a presentation on mesothelioma had a slide which showed a photograph of the "shit creek paddle shop", should realise that it is accessible from the internet.
Source
British private schools popular in China
It should help them give more "scholarships" to poor but bright British students -- something the government is urging them to do -- but they will have to be super-careful to avoid attack as "racist"
PRIVATE schools are imposing unofficial limits on the numbers of Chinese pupils they admit because of fears that British parents will be deterred from sending their children there. Schools including Wellington College in Berkshire, the Leys school in Cambridge and Brighton college, East Sussex, have decided to restrict their numbers of foreign pupils under pressure from growing Chinese demand. Some schools are adopting the policy to preserve their character, while others are reacting to concerns among parents. According to the most recent figures from the Independent Schools Council, the numbers from mainland China have risen from a few hundred in 2000 to 2,345 this year. When added to pupils from Hong Kong, the total rises to 8,652, 40% of all foreign pupils. There are just 1,888 German pupils, the next biggest foreign contingent.
Ralph Lucas, editor of the Good Schools Guide, said many schools did not want to take more than 10% of their pupils from China although, given the demand, they could easily surpass this number. "To keep the traditional feel of an English public school, they are setting limits," he said. "Chinese pupils sometimes tend to keep themselves to themselves."
The growing numbers have sparked a backlash among some British parents. Margie Burnet Ward, headmistress of Wycliffe college in Stonehouse, Gloucestershire, has cut the number of pupils from China in recent years. "The fact that dare not speak its name is that parents are saying, `We don't want to come to you because you have too many Chinese pupils'," she said. "Five years ago we had 90 pupils from China and now we have 45 . . . Chinese children want to study maths and physics and parents are concerned that their child could be the only UK student in those classes."
Mark Slater, headmaster of the Leys, which has about 8% of its pupils from the Far East, said he believed in limiting the intake, although he added: "Up to a certain percentage it is a very healthy aspect of the school." Anthony Seldon, headmaster of Wellington, said: "They're desperate in China to come to England." He plans to set an informal limit of 15%-20% of foreign students. At Brighton, the ceiling is 8%.
For some independent schools Chinese pupils are, however, a lifeline. Some single-sex schools, particularly girls' boarding institutions, are struggling as more British parents opt for coeducational day schools. Chinese parents, by contrast, almost always pay full boarding fees and are willing to send their children to single-sex schools.
Nick Leiper, director of admissions for Ampleforth college, North Yorkshire, said some schools were now moving so aggressively into China that they were employing brokers to supply pupils in return for 10% of the first term's fees. Before British rule ended in 1997, many Hong Kong Chinese opted for a British private education because of its social cachet. Now, with mainland China's economy booming, the motives have changed. Parents from China see an English-language education as the gateway to an international career.
While most applicants are the children of the country's new rich, others come from less well-off backgrounds, with members of extended families clubbing together to pay fees. Many leading schools argue they are so popular that they could fill their places with children from Hong Kong and mainland China. Some, including Harrow and Dulwich college in London, have even opened branch schools in China.
Others have no plans to curb the numbers of Chinese. At Roedean, the girls' school near Brighton, one-third of the sixth form are from China and one-third from other foreign countries. "Some schools may have quotas, but we do not," said a spokeswoman.
Heathfield St Mary's school in Ascot, Berkshire, has resisted the financial benefits of recruitment from China. Frances King, the headmistress, said: "We are a very small boarding school and the interest in our school has increased. The Chinese are looking for entry into UK or American universities. If there are a lot pupils coming from one place I have to look at it every year. "We are an English boarding school and the Chinese pupils want to feel that they are coming to an English school. We like to have cultural diversity."
Source
Pockets of Christianity left in the Church of England
"Strait is the gate and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it" -- Matthew 7:14
Ninety-five per cent of Britons are heading for hell, according to the principal of Wycliffe Hall, Oxford, who has been under fire from some staff for taking one of the leading Anglican theological training colleges in a conservative direction.
Richard Turnbull, appointed two years ago, made the claim in a speech to the annual conference of Reform, a conservative evangelical pressure group within the Church of England. If he truly believes it, the figure would encompass at least all non-evangelical Christians, including many members of the Church of England, and those of all other religions and none.
A recording of the speech, made in October last year and seen by the Guardian, was posted last night on the Thinking Anglicans liberal website. In it, Dr Turnbull also warns against the danger of liberalism in the church, talks of "the strategic nature" of evangelical control of training colleges and calls on conservatives to syphon off 10% of their financial contributions to the Church of England to help pay the costs of like-minded colleges. The message excludes even evangelicals who are regarded as more liberal in their beliefs.
Dr Turnbull told them: "We are committed to bringing the gospel message of Jesus Christ to those who don't know [him] and in this land that's 95% of the people: 95% of people facing hell unless the message of the gospel is brought to them."
Traditionally Wycliffe, a permanent private hall of Oxford University founded in 1877, has trained evangelical Anglicans for the clergy, but its reputation has been as an open evangelical college, welcoming would-be ordinands from a wide range of theological and liturgical beliefs.
Critics within the college have accused the principal of taking it in a much more restrictive and exclusionary direction. At least a third of the academic staff have resigned and its best-known member, the Thought for the Day contributor Elaine Storkey, has been threatened with disciplinary action, allegedly for raising concerns at an internal staff meeting.
In his speech, the principal criticised the Church of England for "restrictive trade practices" in limiting funding for its students and added: "I view [my] post as strategic because it would allow influence to be brought to bear upon generations of the ministry...capture the theological colleges and you have captured the influence that is brought to bear." He warns that unless like-minded parishes fund colleges such as his own, they face closure within 10 years. At the same conference in Derbyshire, Reform members agreed to remain within the Church of England for the time being but to set up an advisory panel to support conservative clergy and encourage ordinands of their viewpoint. They were told by one senior member, the Rev David Holloway, vicar of Jesmond, that the church was a dysfunctional body with incompetent leadership.
In an article to be published in tomorrow's Church of England Newspaper - a more broadly-based evangelical publication - Dr Turnbull's message appears rather more tolerant. He writes: "For me and for Wycliffe, inclusive means exactly that, rather than the exclusion of particular views. So issues which divide ... have to be debated in the open, albeit with care and sensitivity ..."
Source
Sunday, May 27, 2007
BRITISH BUCKPASSING KILLS WOMAN
Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister-in-waiting, said today that the NHS had to "be there for people when they need it" after a damning report on the death of a woman who was forced to consult eight out-of-hours GPs in four days over an Easter weekend. Penny Campbell, a 41-year-old journalist and mother, died in March 2005 from multiple organ failure. She had become infected with septicaemia during an operation for haemorrhoids but none of the doctors she spoke to or met diagnosed it. A report by a panel of independent investigators published today found that the actions of at least one of the GPs, together with problems in how the out-of-hours service was run, meant that she was not offered appropriate care.
Camidoc, a private company contracted to provide out-of-hours cover, had no procedures to ensure that notes on patients were easily available to all GPs, so that each time she rang for help they treated her as a new patient. This was a "major system failure" and was a direct factor leading to Miss Campbell’s death, the report said. Ms Campbell's partner, Angus McKinnon, said today that he was convinced that a similar tragedy could happen again. "I’ve had dozens of people contact me, cases where people had really narrow escapes," he said.
Mr Brown was asked about the case at a South London school and said that the Health Service had to "do better". "What I’ve been talking about is how we can extend the range of facilities for healthcare at the weekends and out of hours," he said. "So we need more access to doctors, we need walk-in centres, we need local healthcare centres to be more effective, we need NHS Direct to be working. "And we need pharmacies, interestingly enough, to have more ability to, for example, do blood tests and some of the basic things where you can just walk in off the street and get some of the basic tests done. And we need prescriptions to be translated to people, directly to the chemist, in a way that you don’t have to queue up at the doctor’s for a repeat prescription. "So in all these areas we need more access for patients. The health service has got to be there for people when they need it and we need to do better in the future."
But Mr Brown's intervention was scorned by the Tories. “It is odd that Gordon Brown should now realise that GP cover needs to be improved," said Andrew Lansley, the Shadow Health Secretary. “Just three years ago he allowed a new GP contract to go ahead, which doubled the costs of providing out-of-hours care and led to worsening services for patients.
Today’s report identified weaknesses in the arrangements for out-of-hours care. Responsibility for providing the care passed from individual GPs to Primary Care Trusts in 2004 when the new GPs' contract came in. The report criticises the speed at which the change was implemented, and urges the Department of Health to provide a clear definition of the role of out-of-hours care.
Ms Campbell, from Islington, North London, was diagnosed with various conditions by the GPs, including colic, flu and viral infections, an inquest heard last year. The coroner ruled that the doctors contributed to Miss Campbell’s death because they failed to recognise the seriousness of her condition. All eight doctors voluntarily stepped down from out-of-hours care while the investigation into her death was carried out - although they continue to work as GPs.
Today’s report said that six GPs provided Miss Campbell with a "reasonable standard" of care but one, named as Dr Chuah, did not adequately explore her symptoms to see if she had an acute illness. Dr Chuah failed to offer Miss Campbell a reasonable standard of care during an 11-minute call at 4.50am on Monday, March 28, the day before her death. A transcript of their conversation shows that, when she checked with him that it was "not anything serious", he replied that if it was more serious, she would be a lot more sick and "wouldn’t be talking to me like this".
It adds: "Reviewing this transcript, it is apparent that Penny Campbell was articulate and coherent. In the course of the conversation she describes her symptoms quite clearly. "It is also evident that Dr Chuah did not pick up the cues offered by her or further explore any of these symptoms to clearly and definitely exclude any serious pathology that could have accounted for these symptoms."
The investigation found that the care offered by an eighth GP, Dr Bengi Beyzade, could not be adequately assessed in retrospect. Camidoc has said the six cleared of wrongdoing will be able to work again for them following a review. Dr Beyzade and Dr Chuah would have to go through a much more rigorous process involving a performance review with their PCT if they wished to return to work, it said.
Mr MacKinnon, 40, said the fact that the two doctors may be able to work again showed a "total lack of accountability" and was indicative of a wider problem regarding the work of doctors. "To get justice where doctors have performed unprofessionally, to get justice for the victims of their incompetence, you have to sue them. That’s a broader problem within our health system," he said. "Dr Chuah should be struck off." Mr MacKinnon plans to write to the General Medical Council (GMC) about the conduct of four of the doctors. He is also pursuing civil action over the case.
Islington Primary Care Trust (PCT), which commissions Camidoc’s services, issued a statement today extending its sympathy to Ms Campbell's family and admitting failings in her care.
Today’s report says the system of "safety netting" - where Miss Campbell was told to call back if she did not recover - was "seriously flawed". Each of her calls to doctors were treated as an individual "episode", with Miss Campbell having to recount her symptoms again and again. Although Camidoc had put in place methods to transfer to a computerised records system, it failed to address existing risks and take steps to overcome the problems. The report says that Camidoc was unprepared for its shift to a major out-of-hours provider of care. It also criticises Camidoc’s lack of process for driving up standards, saying that the systems for ensuring clinical governance was in place were not fit for purpose.
The system of out-of-hours care in England has been much criticised, with a recent study from the Public Accounts Committee saying that the Government thoroughly mishandled its introduction. Prior to 2004, out-of-hours care was managed by GPs but this was handed over to PCTs as a result of the new GP contract.
Mr MacKinnon backed those criticisms today. "If Tesco can open till midnight every night, why can’t our GPs open till midnight every night?" he said. "The National Audit Office said last year that the reform of out-of-hours has been incredibly expensive - it’s massively over-budget - so if they had spent a little less money on doubling doctors’ wages they would be able to afford better night-time and weekend care." Ms Campbell had a son, Joseph, who was 6 at the time of her death.
Source
Dumbed-down British vocational qualification
Tens of thousands of teenagers are taking a new qualification worth up to four good GCSEs but which government experts say an average 11-year-old could pass. Half of all secondaries are estimated to be opting for the OCR national level 2 in ICT, where tasks include sending an email and searching the internet. It is being adopted as a replacement for the GNVQ in ICT, which controversially helped many low performing schools leap up the league tables. As with its predecessor, schools can use the OCR exam to gain the equivalent of four A*-C GCSEs, even though it only requires the teaching time of one.
But a document leaked to The TES shows consultants from the Government's National Strategies have found a pass in the qualification's compulsory unit "generally" equals level 4 of the key stage 3 national curriculum - the standards expected of an 11-year-old. Some points matched level 5, those of a 14-year-old. The revelation is a new blow to the Government's attempt to ensure vocational qualifications gain parity of esteem with academic ones.
A local authority ICT adviser has rated some of the qualification's most popular optional units and told The TES he found exactly the same standards uncovered by the National Strategies consultants. "The demands of this specification are very low indeed," he said. "Schools are using it to get soft certificates. Many are now putting all their students in for this in the expectation that they will all pass."
Some schools argue the consultants' verdict is too harsh. Mike Reid, an ICT teacher at Broughton Hall high in Liverpool, said: "The level of the tasks they have to perform are industry standard." To gain a distinction in the OCR national, equivalent to A* GCSEs, pupils must master extra tasks that include using quotes and words such as `and' and `or' when searching the internet. The local authority adviser described it as a "tick-box" course, enabling E grade pupils to gain the equivalent of Cs.
A spokesman for the OCR exam board said the National Strategies consultants could not have carried out a genuine comparison because the first results of the new qualification or details about the candidates taking it were still unknown. He said: "The ICT national level 2 is doing incredibly well because it was created in partnership with teachers and is interesting enough to be very learnable for students."
Clare Johnson, a National Strategies ICT programme adviser, said the conclusions by consultants from the West Midlands were part of a draft document that would not be distributed to schools. She did not know of anything that contradicted their conclusions, but said comparing vocational qualifications with an academic programme of study was inappropriate. The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority said it will monitor the new qualification.
Source
Absurd British "human rights" laws to be suspended?
John Reid faced growing anger as he signalled the Government was ready to declare that Britain faced an "emergency" over terrorism and opt out of human rights legislation. As the recriminations flew over the disappearance of three radical Islamists who had been on control orders, he made clear his determination to bring in tougher curbs on terror suspects. The Home Secretary said that could mean "derogating" from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) so he could impose tougher control orders on suspects. The convention, which entered British law via the Human Rights Act, allows countries to suspend parts of the ECHR in "time of emergency".
Control orders, which restrict movements and contact with other people for terror suspects who cannot be brought to court, were introduced two years ago. They replaced the detention without trial of the "Belmarsh detainees," which was ruled illegal. The latest disappearances bring to six the number of people on control orders who have vanished in the past year and have left the control-order system in disarray.
A major police search was under way last night for Lamine Adam, 26, his brother Ibrahim, 20, and Cerie Bullivant, 24, after they went missing this week. Police believe they may try to travel to Iraq or Afghanistan. A third Adams brother, Anthony Garcia, 25, was jailed for life last month for his part in the "fertiliser bomb" plot to attack targets including a shopping mall and a London nightclub. Bullivant is due to stand trial over claims he breached his control order on 13 occasions over the past 10 months. All three had been assessed at the lower end of risk, but the fact that they co-ordinated their disappearances has alarmed the police.
Sir Ian Blair, the Metropolitan Police commissioner, said: "Nobody can be perfectly satisfied they are not a risk to the public here, but the intelligence is pointing in another direction." However, Mr Reid had said the men were "not considered at this time to represent a direct threat to the public in the UK".
News of the absconders triggered fiery clashes over the control-order system in the Commons. The Home Secretary admitted that he would prefer to detain terror suspects or deport those who are foreign nationals, but said he was constrained by legal and political opposition to that approach. He said he wanted to impose tougher control-order regimes, but was hampered from doing so by court judgments under the ECHR. Mr Reid said he wanted the convention modernised by European leaders to reflect the realities of the terrorist threat. But he added: "We will consider other options, which include derogation, if we have exhausted ways of overturning previous judgments on this issue."
Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman, said: "By threatening to derogate from the European Convention on Human Rights, John Reid reveals a worrying mix of sloppy thinking and buck-passing." He said it was "wildly inaccurate to claim that the three escapees were somehow helped by our respect for human rights".
David Davis, the shadow Home Secretary, said the escapes were caused by the Government failing to use existing powers, such as tagging suspects. He also said the delay in releasing the identities of the fugitives had allowed them to flee abroad. "He is now blaming his own Human Rights Act when he has not even tried to derogate under its provisions. He can blame the courts and the opposition, but the problems are of his own making," Mr Davis said. Shami Chakrabarti, the director of the campaign group Liberty, said: "This is last year's rhetoric from yesterday's Home Secretary."
Source
Claims are mounting against child-rearing "experts"
CLAIMS are mounting that child-rearing experts such as Supernanny and Gina Ford are damaging family life by undermining parents' authority in the home. There was growing confusion among parents over how to bring up children because of the parenting advice "industry", a leading sociologist has warned. He said that relying on techniques from the so-called experts could be destroying some parents' confidence in their own child-rearing abilities, weakening their control over their offspring.
Professor Frank Furedi also cautioned that the spread of the nanny state was adding to bewilderment among parents.
The Kent University sociologist was among academics to challenge increasing interference in family life at a two-day conference at the British university. He claimed figures including TV Supernanny Jo Frost, whose discipline techniques include the "naughty step", portrayed mothers and fathers as incompetent. "They basically assume the high ground 'I am the supernanny, unlike you, the incompetent, bumbling idiot'," Professor Furedi said.
But he warned that the wealth of advice available, from Frost and others including the no-nonsense author Gina Ford, risked demoralising parents. "Parents who don't believe in themselves are not going to be very confident," he said. "The main thing is that it leads to estrangement. Mothers and fathers become estranged from each other and their children. Rather than a family developing a strong sense of itself, it is looking too much to the outside."
Professor Furedi, author of Paranoid Parenting and the Culture of Fear, went on to accuse governments, particularly the British Labour Government, of politicising parenting. "Over the past 10 years, virtually every aspect of childrearing is turned into a problem that requires their support or intervention," he said. "This undermines parents' confidence. "Targeting parents has become a national sport. New Labour politicians appear to take the view that almost every social problem is caused by bad parenting. This allows failed politicians to avoid confronting their policy failures - in health, in education and in community building."
He also criticised as patronising advice booklets published by the British Government. For example, a "Dad Pack" published last year advised men not to have affairs during their partner's pregnancy. Professor Furedi added: "Parenting has become an industry. It's no longer about the relationship with your children, it's something for politicians and professionals to have an opinion about."
Source
Britain: Comparing apples and oranges
A multiculturalism debate didn't get off the ground last week - mainly because the panellists failed to define what they were talking about
On Friday night I attended a charity fundraiser where the big draw was a debate with Trevor Phillips and Kenan Malik arguing that "multiculturalism encourages separateness", and the MP Sadiq Khan and Arun Kundnani arguing that it doesn't. When questions were invited from the floor, I castigated the panel for their failure to define "multiculturalism", which had resulted in a dog's dinner of a debate with rambling monologues at cross-purposes. The subsequent attempts by each of the panellists to define the word were rather revealing.
Reminding them of last week's Rowntree report, produced by the New Policy Institute, I raised one particular finding. The income poverty rate of the British population as a whole stands at around 20%. The same rate for Bangladeshis is about 65%. The researchers had discovered that half of the difference was due to the fact that huge numbers of Bangladeshi women were not in paid work. I asked Khan if this was because values in that community were keeping women from going out to work?
Khan's response was to enumerate a litany of complaints about racism, discrimination in employment, unfair housing policy and all the rest of it. Khan must have been very tired when he read the report (or its summary) because he evidently failed to note that the report itself states that half of the difference is the figure it arrives at after taking into account those very factors that Khan mentioned. Clearly Khan, like the other panellists, was more comfortable discussing vague terms like multiculturalism, especially when they're left undefined.
When the chair pressed them to define the term, Arun Kundnani said that multiculturalism was "ethnic pluralism recognising difference between groups within the public sphere". Sadiq Khan said multiculturalism was "mutual respect based on common ethics". Trevor Philips said that multiculturalism was "valuing the things that divide us more than the things that unite us". Finally, Kenan Malik spoke of multiculturalism as consisting of "policies of cultural diversity which require us publicly to celebrate difference".
There we have it: a plurality of definitions and no two the same. This is Babel. It's not possible for two people to have a debate about the truth of a proposition, if they are both considering different propositions: you ask me if I think apples are tasty, and I tell you that oranges are delicious. The debate was ultimately farcical, a mix-up, a fruit-salad of a debate. Philips was talking about apples, Malik about oranges, Kundnani about pears and Khan about goodness knows what.
Take Khan's definition, "mutual respect based on common ethics". Who on earth would think that "mutual respect based on common ethics" could encourage separateness? Surely not even Trevor Philips, the bane of multiculturalists? And isn't Khan's definition as far from Philips's as you can get? Khan's "common ethics" might arguably be opposed to Philips's "valuing the things that divide us more than the things that unite us". Here are two almost diametrically opposed and certainly inconsistent definitions.
Which definition is right is irrelevant: the point is that without a common definition, there's no sensible debate, just a multiculturalism debate gone mad. When pressed, we see that the panellists reached for "thin" definitions, which invariably are not robust or controversial enough for divisions to show or which, alternatively, build in the arguments their advocates seek to advance.
There is, however, a way out of these sorts of thin and unsatisfying discussions. But it requires courage, something touched on by Malik, who brought a shaft of light in an otherwise dreary debate. Multiculturalists, he said, want public affirmation of cultural difference and this undermines much of what is good about diversity as a lived experience. By affirming those differences, we limit the scope of disputes, of a healthy kind, from taking place. After all, Malik observed, what is diversity good for? "It allows us to consider alternatives and thereby enhance debate. These clashes and conflicts are what multiculturalists most fear."
We need culture clashes and conflicts, not race riots but lively debate and discussion. While we discuss abstract distended nouns of unwieldy "ismic" proportions, like multiculturalism, we must make greater space to pose challenging questions and say difficult things about "thick values". Are women being held back by your culture's values? Your culture doesn't value marriage and that's wrong. Do you value friendships with non-Pakistanis as much as you value your friendships with Pakistanis? Your culture doesn't value family enough: you abandon your elderly.
Creating space for a diversity of views means ending the state- and establishment-endorsed fetish for celebrating diversity of ethnicity and faith. But a diversity in the views we ventilate is not an end in itself. Clashes and conflicts are vital for creating the circumstances in which citizens engage in a discussion about values so that society and culture can evolve in directions that draw everyone in.
Source
Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister-in-waiting, said today that the NHS had to "be there for people when they need it" after a damning report on the death of a woman who was forced to consult eight out-of-hours GPs in four days over an Easter weekend. Penny Campbell, a 41-year-old journalist and mother, died in March 2005 from multiple organ failure. She had become infected with septicaemia during an operation for haemorrhoids but none of the doctors she spoke to or met diagnosed it. A report by a panel of independent investigators published today found that the actions of at least one of the GPs, together with problems in how the out-of-hours service was run, meant that she was not offered appropriate care.
Camidoc, a private company contracted to provide out-of-hours cover, had no procedures to ensure that notes on patients were easily available to all GPs, so that each time she rang for help they treated her as a new patient. This was a "major system failure" and was a direct factor leading to Miss Campbell’s death, the report said. Ms Campbell's partner, Angus McKinnon, said today that he was convinced that a similar tragedy could happen again. "I’ve had dozens of people contact me, cases where people had really narrow escapes," he said.
Mr Brown was asked about the case at a South London school and said that the Health Service had to "do better". "What I’ve been talking about is how we can extend the range of facilities for healthcare at the weekends and out of hours," he said. "So we need more access to doctors, we need walk-in centres, we need local healthcare centres to be more effective, we need NHS Direct to be working. "And we need pharmacies, interestingly enough, to have more ability to, for example, do blood tests and some of the basic things where you can just walk in off the street and get some of the basic tests done. And we need prescriptions to be translated to people, directly to the chemist, in a way that you don’t have to queue up at the doctor’s for a repeat prescription. "So in all these areas we need more access for patients. The health service has got to be there for people when they need it and we need to do better in the future."
But Mr Brown's intervention was scorned by the Tories. “It is odd that Gordon Brown should now realise that GP cover needs to be improved," said Andrew Lansley, the Shadow Health Secretary. “Just three years ago he allowed a new GP contract to go ahead, which doubled the costs of providing out-of-hours care and led to worsening services for patients.
Today’s report identified weaknesses in the arrangements for out-of-hours care. Responsibility for providing the care passed from individual GPs to Primary Care Trusts in 2004 when the new GPs' contract came in. The report criticises the speed at which the change was implemented, and urges the Department of Health to provide a clear definition of the role of out-of-hours care.
Ms Campbell, from Islington, North London, was diagnosed with various conditions by the GPs, including colic, flu and viral infections, an inquest heard last year. The coroner ruled that the doctors contributed to Miss Campbell’s death because they failed to recognise the seriousness of her condition. All eight doctors voluntarily stepped down from out-of-hours care while the investigation into her death was carried out - although they continue to work as GPs.
Today’s report said that six GPs provided Miss Campbell with a "reasonable standard" of care but one, named as Dr Chuah, did not adequately explore her symptoms to see if she had an acute illness. Dr Chuah failed to offer Miss Campbell a reasonable standard of care during an 11-minute call at 4.50am on Monday, March 28, the day before her death. A transcript of their conversation shows that, when she checked with him that it was "not anything serious", he replied that if it was more serious, she would be a lot more sick and "wouldn’t be talking to me like this".
It adds: "Reviewing this transcript, it is apparent that Penny Campbell was articulate and coherent. In the course of the conversation she describes her symptoms quite clearly. "It is also evident that Dr Chuah did not pick up the cues offered by her or further explore any of these symptoms to clearly and definitely exclude any serious pathology that could have accounted for these symptoms."
The investigation found that the care offered by an eighth GP, Dr Bengi Beyzade, could not be adequately assessed in retrospect. Camidoc has said the six cleared of wrongdoing will be able to work again for them following a review. Dr Beyzade and Dr Chuah would have to go through a much more rigorous process involving a performance review with their PCT if they wished to return to work, it said.
Mr MacKinnon, 40, said the fact that the two doctors may be able to work again showed a "total lack of accountability" and was indicative of a wider problem regarding the work of doctors. "To get justice where doctors have performed unprofessionally, to get justice for the victims of their incompetence, you have to sue them. That’s a broader problem within our health system," he said. "Dr Chuah should be struck off." Mr MacKinnon plans to write to the General Medical Council (GMC) about the conduct of four of the doctors. He is also pursuing civil action over the case.
Islington Primary Care Trust (PCT), which commissions Camidoc’s services, issued a statement today extending its sympathy to Ms Campbell's family and admitting failings in her care.
Today’s report says the system of "safety netting" - where Miss Campbell was told to call back if she did not recover - was "seriously flawed". Each of her calls to doctors were treated as an individual "episode", with Miss Campbell having to recount her symptoms again and again. Although Camidoc had put in place methods to transfer to a computerised records system, it failed to address existing risks and take steps to overcome the problems. The report says that Camidoc was unprepared for its shift to a major out-of-hours provider of care. It also criticises Camidoc’s lack of process for driving up standards, saying that the systems for ensuring clinical governance was in place were not fit for purpose.
The system of out-of-hours care in England has been much criticised, with a recent study from the Public Accounts Committee saying that the Government thoroughly mishandled its introduction. Prior to 2004, out-of-hours care was managed by GPs but this was handed over to PCTs as a result of the new GP contract.
Mr MacKinnon backed those criticisms today. "If Tesco can open till midnight every night, why can’t our GPs open till midnight every night?" he said. "The National Audit Office said last year that the reform of out-of-hours has been incredibly expensive - it’s massively over-budget - so if they had spent a little less money on doubling doctors’ wages they would be able to afford better night-time and weekend care." Ms Campbell had a son, Joseph, who was 6 at the time of her death.
Source
Dumbed-down British vocational qualification
Tens of thousands of teenagers are taking a new qualification worth up to four good GCSEs but which government experts say an average 11-year-old could pass. Half of all secondaries are estimated to be opting for the OCR national level 2 in ICT, where tasks include sending an email and searching the internet. It is being adopted as a replacement for the GNVQ in ICT, which controversially helped many low performing schools leap up the league tables. As with its predecessor, schools can use the OCR exam to gain the equivalent of four A*-C GCSEs, even though it only requires the teaching time of one.
But a document leaked to The TES shows consultants from the Government's National Strategies have found a pass in the qualification's compulsory unit "generally" equals level 4 of the key stage 3 national curriculum - the standards expected of an 11-year-old. Some points matched level 5, those of a 14-year-old. The revelation is a new blow to the Government's attempt to ensure vocational qualifications gain parity of esteem with academic ones.
A local authority ICT adviser has rated some of the qualification's most popular optional units and told The TES he found exactly the same standards uncovered by the National Strategies consultants. "The demands of this specification are very low indeed," he said. "Schools are using it to get soft certificates. Many are now putting all their students in for this in the expectation that they will all pass."
Some schools argue the consultants' verdict is too harsh. Mike Reid, an ICT teacher at Broughton Hall high in Liverpool, said: "The level of the tasks they have to perform are industry standard." To gain a distinction in the OCR national, equivalent to A* GCSEs, pupils must master extra tasks that include using quotes and words such as `and' and `or' when searching the internet. The local authority adviser described it as a "tick-box" course, enabling E grade pupils to gain the equivalent of Cs.
A spokesman for the OCR exam board said the National Strategies consultants could not have carried out a genuine comparison because the first results of the new qualification or details about the candidates taking it were still unknown. He said: "The ICT national level 2 is doing incredibly well because it was created in partnership with teachers and is interesting enough to be very learnable for students."
Clare Johnson, a National Strategies ICT programme adviser, said the conclusions by consultants from the West Midlands were part of a draft document that would not be distributed to schools. She did not know of anything that contradicted their conclusions, but said comparing vocational qualifications with an academic programme of study was inappropriate. The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority said it will monitor the new qualification.
Source
Absurd British "human rights" laws to be suspended?
John Reid faced growing anger as he signalled the Government was ready to declare that Britain faced an "emergency" over terrorism and opt out of human rights legislation. As the recriminations flew over the disappearance of three radical Islamists who had been on control orders, he made clear his determination to bring in tougher curbs on terror suspects. The Home Secretary said that could mean "derogating" from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) so he could impose tougher control orders on suspects. The convention, which entered British law via the Human Rights Act, allows countries to suspend parts of the ECHR in "time of emergency".
Control orders, which restrict movements and contact with other people for terror suspects who cannot be brought to court, were introduced two years ago. They replaced the detention without trial of the "Belmarsh detainees," which was ruled illegal. The latest disappearances bring to six the number of people on control orders who have vanished in the past year and have left the control-order system in disarray.
A major police search was under way last night for Lamine Adam, 26, his brother Ibrahim, 20, and Cerie Bullivant, 24, after they went missing this week. Police believe they may try to travel to Iraq or Afghanistan. A third Adams brother, Anthony Garcia, 25, was jailed for life last month for his part in the "fertiliser bomb" plot to attack targets including a shopping mall and a London nightclub. Bullivant is due to stand trial over claims he breached his control order on 13 occasions over the past 10 months. All three had been assessed at the lower end of risk, but the fact that they co-ordinated their disappearances has alarmed the police.
Sir Ian Blair, the Metropolitan Police commissioner, said: "Nobody can be perfectly satisfied they are not a risk to the public here, but the intelligence is pointing in another direction." However, Mr Reid had said the men were "not considered at this time to represent a direct threat to the public in the UK".
News of the absconders triggered fiery clashes over the control-order system in the Commons. The Home Secretary admitted that he would prefer to detain terror suspects or deport those who are foreign nationals, but said he was constrained by legal and political opposition to that approach. He said he wanted to impose tougher control-order regimes, but was hampered from doing so by court judgments under the ECHR. Mr Reid said he wanted the convention modernised by European leaders to reflect the realities of the terrorist threat. But he added: "We will consider other options, which include derogation, if we have exhausted ways of overturning previous judgments on this issue."
Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman, said: "By threatening to derogate from the European Convention on Human Rights, John Reid reveals a worrying mix of sloppy thinking and buck-passing." He said it was "wildly inaccurate to claim that the three escapees were somehow helped by our respect for human rights".
David Davis, the shadow Home Secretary, said the escapes were caused by the Government failing to use existing powers, such as tagging suspects. He also said the delay in releasing the identities of the fugitives had allowed them to flee abroad. "He is now blaming his own Human Rights Act when he has not even tried to derogate under its provisions. He can blame the courts and the opposition, but the problems are of his own making," Mr Davis said. Shami Chakrabarti, the director of the campaign group Liberty, said: "This is last year's rhetoric from yesterday's Home Secretary."
Source
Claims are mounting against child-rearing "experts"
CLAIMS are mounting that child-rearing experts such as Supernanny and Gina Ford are damaging family life by undermining parents' authority in the home. There was growing confusion among parents over how to bring up children because of the parenting advice "industry", a leading sociologist has warned. He said that relying on techniques from the so-called experts could be destroying some parents' confidence in their own child-rearing abilities, weakening their control over their offspring.
Professor Frank Furedi also cautioned that the spread of the nanny state was adding to bewilderment among parents.
The Kent University sociologist was among academics to challenge increasing interference in family life at a two-day conference at the British university. He claimed figures including TV Supernanny Jo Frost, whose discipline techniques include the "naughty step", portrayed mothers and fathers as incompetent. "They basically assume the high ground 'I am the supernanny, unlike you, the incompetent, bumbling idiot'," Professor Furedi said.
But he warned that the wealth of advice available, from Frost and others including the no-nonsense author Gina Ford, risked demoralising parents. "Parents who don't believe in themselves are not going to be very confident," he said. "The main thing is that it leads to estrangement. Mothers and fathers become estranged from each other and their children. Rather than a family developing a strong sense of itself, it is looking too much to the outside."
Professor Furedi, author of Paranoid Parenting and the Culture of Fear, went on to accuse governments, particularly the British Labour Government, of politicising parenting. "Over the past 10 years, virtually every aspect of childrearing is turned into a problem that requires their support or intervention," he said. "This undermines parents' confidence. "Targeting parents has become a national sport. New Labour politicians appear to take the view that almost every social problem is caused by bad parenting. This allows failed politicians to avoid confronting their policy failures - in health, in education and in community building."
He also criticised as patronising advice booklets published by the British Government. For example, a "Dad Pack" published last year advised men not to have affairs during their partner's pregnancy. Professor Furedi added: "Parenting has become an industry. It's no longer about the relationship with your children, it's something for politicians and professionals to have an opinion about."
Source
Britain: Comparing apples and oranges
A multiculturalism debate didn't get off the ground last week - mainly because the panellists failed to define what they were talking about
On Friday night I attended a charity fundraiser where the big draw was a debate with Trevor Phillips and Kenan Malik arguing that "multiculturalism encourages separateness", and the MP Sadiq Khan and Arun Kundnani arguing that it doesn't. When questions were invited from the floor, I castigated the panel for their failure to define "multiculturalism", which had resulted in a dog's dinner of a debate with rambling monologues at cross-purposes. The subsequent attempts by each of the panellists to define the word were rather revealing.
Reminding them of last week's Rowntree report, produced by the New Policy Institute, I raised one particular finding. The income poverty rate of the British population as a whole stands at around 20%. The same rate for Bangladeshis is about 65%. The researchers had discovered that half of the difference was due to the fact that huge numbers of Bangladeshi women were not in paid work. I asked Khan if this was because values in that community were keeping women from going out to work?
Khan's response was to enumerate a litany of complaints about racism, discrimination in employment, unfair housing policy and all the rest of it. Khan must have been very tired when he read the report (or its summary) because he evidently failed to note that the report itself states that half of the difference is the figure it arrives at after taking into account those very factors that Khan mentioned. Clearly Khan, like the other panellists, was more comfortable discussing vague terms like multiculturalism, especially when they're left undefined.
When the chair pressed them to define the term, Arun Kundnani said that multiculturalism was "ethnic pluralism recognising difference between groups within the public sphere". Sadiq Khan said multiculturalism was "mutual respect based on common ethics". Trevor Philips said that multiculturalism was "valuing the things that divide us more than the things that unite us". Finally, Kenan Malik spoke of multiculturalism as consisting of "policies of cultural diversity which require us publicly to celebrate difference".
There we have it: a plurality of definitions and no two the same. This is Babel. It's not possible for two people to have a debate about the truth of a proposition, if they are both considering different propositions: you ask me if I think apples are tasty, and I tell you that oranges are delicious. The debate was ultimately farcical, a mix-up, a fruit-salad of a debate. Philips was talking about apples, Malik about oranges, Kundnani about pears and Khan about goodness knows what.
Take Khan's definition, "mutual respect based on common ethics". Who on earth would think that "mutual respect based on common ethics" could encourage separateness? Surely not even Trevor Philips, the bane of multiculturalists? And isn't Khan's definition as far from Philips's as you can get? Khan's "common ethics" might arguably be opposed to Philips's "valuing the things that divide us more than the things that unite us". Here are two almost diametrically opposed and certainly inconsistent definitions.
Which definition is right is irrelevant: the point is that without a common definition, there's no sensible debate, just a multiculturalism debate gone mad. When pressed, we see that the panellists reached for "thin" definitions, which invariably are not robust or controversial enough for divisions to show or which, alternatively, build in the arguments their advocates seek to advance.
There is, however, a way out of these sorts of thin and unsatisfying discussions. But it requires courage, something touched on by Malik, who brought a shaft of light in an otherwise dreary debate. Multiculturalists, he said, want public affirmation of cultural difference and this undermines much of what is good about diversity as a lived experience. By affirming those differences, we limit the scope of disputes, of a healthy kind, from taking place. After all, Malik observed, what is diversity good for? "It allows us to consider alternatives and thereby enhance debate. These clashes and conflicts are what multiculturalists most fear."
We need culture clashes and conflicts, not race riots but lively debate and discussion. While we discuss abstract distended nouns of unwieldy "ismic" proportions, like multiculturalism, we must make greater space to pose challenging questions and say difficult things about "thick values". Are women being held back by your culture's values? Your culture doesn't value marriage and that's wrong. Do you value friendships with non-Pakistanis as much as you value your friendships with Pakistanis? Your culture doesn't value family enough: you abandon your elderly.
Creating space for a diversity of views means ending the state- and establishment-endorsed fetish for celebrating diversity of ethnicity and faith. But a diversity in the views we ventilate is not an end in itself. Clashes and conflicts are vital for creating the circumstances in which citizens engage in a discussion about values so that society and culture can evolve in directions that draw everyone in.
Source
Saturday, May 26, 2007
Arrogant and life-threatening British bureaucracy gets a well-deserved black eye
These walking anal orifices cared more for their precious little bureaucratic procedures than they did for the life of a distressed person. You wonder if they are really human beings
A Citizens Advice Bureau adviser who was dismissed after she broke confidentiality rules to help to save the life of a suicidal caller has won her claim for unfair dismissal. Terri King, 58, of Southampton, had acted after a distraught client called the service to say she had taken an overdose of pills because she could not deal with her debt problems. Rather than following the time-consuming procedure of contacting her manager, who would then have had to consult a committee for advice, Mrs King immediately alerted the caller's GP, who was able to get to the woman and treat her.
Despite her lifesaving actions, the divorced mother of three was dismissed from her 13,000 pound-a-year job, on the ground of breaching confidentiality. Peter Wales, her boss at the Lymington branch of the CAB in Hampshire, said that she had made an "irrational and emotional error", the hearing was told.
Delivering a judgment yesterday, the tribunal chairman, Ian Soulsby, condemned the management's attitude towards the incident, which tested the extent to which patient confidentiality should be respected in the event of an emergency. Mr Soulsby said it was ridiculous to say that Mrs King's actions had been an irrational error. "Viewed objectively, there is no criticism of the claimant to act in this way. A life may have been in imminent danger. From any point of view this was a sensible course of action to take."
Mrs King was granted damages of a little more than 18,000 pounds by the Southampton Employment Tribunal, which said she had done the right thing in phoning the caller's doctor. The hearing was told that Mrs King had worked for five years at the bureau.
Source
Appalling and unhealthy results of recycling mania in the Unhinged Kingdom
Sharon Lock, 36, has three bags of rubbish in her cluttered garage. They have accumulated there in the three days since her husband spent his Sunday morning driving to the tip seven miles away. Since February, when East Cambridgeshire District Council introduced fortnightly black-bag collections in Bottisham, he has been making the journey twice a week. "It's a real pain in the butt, to be honest with you", the mother of one said. "My son, Drew, is 2 and we can't have dirty nappies and food sitting in the garage for a fortnight. The smell is horrendous."
Lucy Baynes, who gave birth to her first child Zac only five weeks ago, tells a similar story. Two days before the fortnightly collection in leafy Bottisham, there is already a pile of black bags stacked against a post outside her garden, one of the communal collection points for the village. "Initially I thought the scheme was a good idea, but the stacks of rubbish are disgusting. That pile will be humming in the summer, and there will be more foxes and cats."
The council halved black bag collections in Bottisham only weeks ago, having already done so last summer in the village of Witchford. The pilot schemes are a response to the Government's controversial drive to push councils into cutting down on landfill and boost recycling, which Ben Bradshaw, the Environment Minister, said has resulted in 144 councils already experimenting with fortnightly collections.
Voters in many of these local authorities, including East Cambridgeshire, will be taking part in local elections next week. If sitting councillors are going to suffer as a result of their decisions to cut back on the dustmen, you would expect it to be at the hands of people such as Mrs Lock and Ms Baynes. Yet neither of these women will be voicing their frustration over refuse at the polls next week, because neither of them will be voting at all. Both cite their young children as a reason why they have not engaged with the election campaign, and both seem decidedly uninterested in whether the 17 Liberal Democrat councillors, 16 Conservatives and 6 independents will hold their seats on May 3.
Among those in the village who will vote, post office closures and council tax were both mentioned as reasons to back one party over the other, but not one person told The Times that the backlog of binbags would influence their decision. Which is perhaps why Colin McLean, the village's Conservative councillor, is relatively relaxed about the issue: "People have not been shaking hands over it on the doorstep," he said, "but nor have they been shaking fists."
Back in Bottisham, where the residents have had less time to adjust to the changes, John Humphreys expresses the mood of many people: "It is a diminution of the service which they tell us is an improvement, which gets up people's noses, and its an imposition, but compared with the big issues like the NHS it is not important. The retired teacher is less than thrilled about having to store nonrecyclable rubbish for two weeks before it is taken off his hands. But he will not be swayed by the battle of the binbag when he goes to vote. "We are the compliant people of England, and life's too short," he said. "It's not worth going to the barricades over."
Source
GREEN SPIN GOES UP IN SMOKE AS BP SCRAPS CARBON STORAGE PLANS
British government is all talk
BP has abandoned plans to build a "green" power plant in a snub to Alistair Darling on the day that the Trade and Industry Secretary unveiled a new energy strategy aimed at reducing carbon emissions. Just hours after Mr Darling announced his Energy White Paper yesterday, the oil giant halted work on a 1bn-plus carbon capture and storage facility in Scotland, blaming delays in state subsidies.
BP's decision is an embarrassment for the minister, whose White Paper is designed to underline the Government's commitment to take a global lead in cutting greenhouse gases. The oil company, in a joint venture with Scottish & Southern Energy, has spent 30m during the past 18 months preparing to build a gas-fired power plant that would generate electricity and store 90pc of the emissions created in a depleted North Sea oil field. Similar projects are planned by other power companies.
But because the advanced technology makes such plants uneconomic, the Government promised to kick-start two or three facilities with subsidies. BP said yesterday that it had hoped to get a decision on state aid by the end of 2006, but this was pushed back to the end of 2007. But the White Paper indicated that a decision might not come until well into 2008 or beyond. "That's an extension too far," said a BP spokesman. "It would have been difficult to keep the project alive when there is uncertainty about funding. We have already spent a lot of money on the project."
FULL STORY here
Alcohol and pregnancy: Bureaucracy trumps science
Lying to people as a way of getting them to behave in an approved manner is a hoary old Leftist strategy -- e.g. their patently absurd but endlessly-repeated claim that there is no such thing as race
Women who are pregnant or trying for a baby should stop drinking alcohol altogether, the Government's leading doctors give warning today. The new advice radically revises existing guidelines, which say that women can drink up to two units once or twice a week. Fiona Adshead, the deputy chief medical officer, said that the change was meant to send "a strong signal" to the thousands of women who drank more than the recommended limit that they were putting their babies at risk. But she admitted that it was not in response to any new medical evidence
Women are often confused about what drinking in moderation really means, the new guidelines say, and surveys suggest that many accidently or deliberately exceed the limit. "Our advice is simple: avoid alcohol if pregnant or trying to conceive," Dr Adshead said. "We have strengthened our advice to women to help ensure that no one underestimates the risk to the foetus." She suggested that bottles of beer, wines and spirits should carry the new warning that pregnant women give up drinking. However, it emerged yesterday that the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists intended to stick with its advice that moderate drinking was perfectly safe, which could leave many pregnant women confused. The college said that it would examine the new advice and decide whether to adopt it "in due course".
The change brings Britain into line with a growing list of countries which recommend abstinence. For years, the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand have recommended that pregnant women abstain from alcohol. France joined them last autumn, saying that research had linked moderate levels of drinking and permanent brain damage.
Research from the Office for National Statistics has shown a sharp rise in fatal drinking habits among women. The study, of "preventable mortality", found that the annual rate of alcohol-related deaths had risen by two thirds between 1993 and 2005, to 1,873. However, the statistics only refer to death certificates where alcohol-related conditions such as cirrhosis are specifically mentioned. Charities put the annual death toll for both sexes at about 22,000.
Ministers were moved to act over drinking in pregnancy after recent research found that 9 per cent of expectant mothers drink more than the recommended limit. Other data found that a quarter drink right up to the limit. The existing advice to drink in moderation has been in place for about ten years. Previously, midwives regularly told pregnant women to drink up to eight units a week, and even recommended Guinness to prevent anaemia.
Heavy drinking can cause foetal alcohol syndrome, an incurable condition resulting in retardation, poor memory and, in the worst cases, facial abnormalities. About 1 in 1,000 babies are born with the syndrome each year worldwide. But a milder condition, foetal alcohol spectrum disorder, is more common, affecting more than 6,000 children in Britain each year, and is a leading cause of learning difficulties.
Because many women do not realise that they are pregnant for the first few months, the advice was extended to those trying to conceive as well. It also states that should a pregnant woman choose to carry on drinking, she should not get drunk and keep to the previous recommendation of one to two units once or twice a week in order to minimise risks to the baby.
Source
Dumbing down Britain's doctors
The collapse of Britain's online Medical Training Application Service (MTAS) has been widely welcomed. The web-based system was designed to match junior doctors to specialist training posts, but following junior doctors' complaints about a lack of available posts, poorly designed recruitment forms and technical failures in the new online system, it has now been scrapped. However, the real threat to standards of medical practice - and ultimately patient care - comes from the Modernising Medical Careers programme, of which MTAS is merely one aspect.
`If one of my own children had been in that position', UK health secretary Patricia Hewitt told Channel 4 News on the day she finally suspended MTAS, she would have fully shared the distress of the parents of those affected by the series of scandals afflicting the new computerised application system for specialist medical training (1). This curious presentation of the issue from a parental perspective is echoed on the website of RemedyUK, the grassroots organisation of junior doctors that has led the revolt against MTAS, staging unprecedented mass demonstrations in March (2). The site prominently displays a colourful poster proclaiming `Mums4Medics' (with subsidiary slogans, `Dads4Medics', `Partners4Medics', `Everyone4Medics').
By the time they have completed five or six years of medical school and two years of the new post-qualification `foundation programme', the youngest of the doctors applying to MTAS is 25 and many are over 30. Yet it seems that these `junior' doctors are regarded by the health minister as children and that they even regard themselves in similar terms. The infantilisation of doctors implicit in these representations reflects the real threat to the medical profession and to the quality of medical practice posed by the current wave of `modernising' reforms.
Hewitt was quick to emphasise that, though doctors are angry about MTAS, the `underlying principles of Modernising Medical Careers' are widely accepted by both junior doctors and the professional bodies that have been closely involved in the development and implementation of this programme. Before looking more closely at Modernising Medical Careers (MMC), let's briefly look at the MTAS fiasco.
In many respects MTAS is just another National Health Service IT failure: an online system that is vastly expensive, badly designed, difficult to use and which crashes frequently. When the system made publicly available doctors' personal details, including religion, sexual orientation and criminal records, this was more than a breach of confidentiality. It raised questions over why a medical appointment scheme should require that candidates submit such information. Though it is these failures that have led to the collapse of MTAS, its defects go much deeper.
In its modernising zeal, MTAS gives priority to doctors' subjective `learning experiences' and downplays objective indicators of performance. It allocates 75 per cent of its points to 150-word vignettes of clinical cases, in which doctors display fashionable concerns about `reflexive learning', `team-working' and ethical dilemmas. According to critics this amounts to meaningless self-promotion as well as being open to plagiarism (which the system lacks the software to detect). Only 25 per cent of points are allocated to academic or research achievements. Extracurricular activities are marginalised, references sidelined and interviews rigidly standardised.
The elite Academy of Medical Sciences has condemned MTAS for its discrimination against talent and excellence, as `a threat to UK biomedical research and healthcare' (3). For the Academy, MTAS reflects `a mindset in which academic, educational and research achievement are seen as almost irrelevant to the future quality of healthcare'.
It is true that the old system of selection for specialist training posts was susceptible to nepotism, favouritism and discrimination against those from ethnic or other minorities. It is New Labour's signal achievement, in this as in many areas, to have replaced a corrupt and inefficient system with one that is potentially more corrupt and certainly more inefficient - and even more damaging to the morale and standards of the medical profession.
The spirit of political correctness that imbues MTAS has already established deep roots in the modern medical profession. These can be traced back to the adoption by the General Medical Council in 1993 of the document Tomorrow's Doctors, which outlined the `goals and objectives' of a new medical curriculum under the rubric `knowledge, skills and attitudes' (4). While `knowledge' was reduced to a `factual quantum', extensive and detailed attitudinal objectives `reflected the values of the culture of therapy and the demands of political correctness' (5). Launched in 2004, Modernising Medical Careers sought to extend the approach of Tomorrow's Doctors from the medical school into the world of post-graduate medical practice, in hospital and in primary care (6).
The first major MMC initiative was the replacement in 2005 of the traditional year doctors spent as `house officers' in hospitals immediately after qualification with a two-year `foundation programme' (part of which could be completed in General Practice). There can be no doubt that the old system had many flaws: many young doctors were exploited by absentee consultants, obliged to work excessive hours and received minimal supervision or training (to the detriment of both themselves and their patients). The foundation programme sought to replace the old `apprenticeship' model - celebrated in the surgical saying `see one, do one, teach one' - with a closely supervised programme of instruction in the attitudes and values deemed appropriate for the modernised doctor.
The new programme is `trainee-centred, competency-assessed, service-based, quality-assured, flexible, coached, structured and streamlined'; it is managed and structured, progressive, robust and seamless; it is `outcome-based' and evaluates `observed behaviour, skills and attributes'. No doubt some of this jargon conceals valuable educational and clinical activity, but it is difficult to believe that all the ticking of boxes reflects any improvement in the rigour of medical training. What remains unquantified in this system is the quality of doctors' clinical knowledge and their experience of taking responsibility in treating and caring for patients.
The 1858 Medical Act, which is established the General Medical Council, sought to establish a system of medical education that produced a doctor who, on qualification, was a `safe general practitioner'. This concept of an independent and competent general practitioner symbolised the confidence of the modern medical profession at the moment of its emergence in the nineteenth century. By contrast, the `never quite competent' doctor, one who requires continuous formal instruction and regulation, monitoring and mentoring, support and counselling, symbolises the abject state of the profession in the new millennium. While the junior hospital doctor of the past may have been used and abused, today's doctors appear to have lost all initiative or autonomy in relation to their own professional development and in relation to their patients. If tomorrow's doctors are reduced to the status of children, to be patronised by politicians and parents, as well as by their trainers and tutors, the future of the medical profession is in jeopardy.
For the Academy of Medical Sciences, MTAS is `an object lesson in what happens when we take medical education out of the hands of those who value objective academic achievement and put it in the hands of those who wish to create a uniform and biddable workforce unencumbered by the spirit of inquiry needed to challenge dogma and central directives'. The consequences of this lesson are not confined to MTAS, but go back through MMC to Tomorrow's Doctors, and the wider framework of medical education and training established over the past decade.
Source
The BBC still hates America: "White lynch mobs are back in the Deep South. At least according to the BBC, which is broadcasting a special program on it, headlined "Stealth Racism Stalks the Deep South." Apparently six young black men have been charged in an attack on a white student. The Bolshie Beeb knows this story line. It hasn't changed in a hundred years --- if you believe the Beeb".
These walking anal orifices cared more for their precious little bureaucratic procedures than they did for the life of a distressed person. You wonder if they are really human beings
A Citizens Advice Bureau adviser who was dismissed after she broke confidentiality rules to help to save the life of a suicidal caller has won her claim for unfair dismissal. Terri King, 58, of Southampton, had acted after a distraught client called the service to say she had taken an overdose of pills because she could not deal with her debt problems. Rather than following the time-consuming procedure of contacting her manager, who would then have had to consult a committee for advice, Mrs King immediately alerted the caller's GP, who was able to get to the woman and treat her.
Despite her lifesaving actions, the divorced mother of three was dismissed from her 13,000 pound-a-year job, on the ground of breaching confidentiality. Peter Wales, her boss at the Lymington branch of the CAB in Hampshire, said that she had made an "irrational and emotional error", the hearing was told.
Delivering a judgment yesterday, the tribunal chairman, Ian Soulsby, condemned the management's attitude towards the incident, which tested the extent to which patient confidentiality should be respected in the event of an emergency. Mr Soulsby said it was ridiculous to say that Mrs King's actions had been an irrational error. "Viewed objectively, there is no criticism of the claimant to act in this way. A life may have been in imminent danger. From any point of view this was a sensible course of action to take."
Mrs King was granted damages of a little more than 18,000 pounds by the Southampton Employment Tribunal, which said she had done the right thing in phoning the caller's doctor. The hearing was told that Mrs King had worked for five years at the bureau.
Source
Appalling and unhealthy results of recycling mania in the Unhinged Kingdom
Sharon Lock, 36, has three bags of rubbish in her cluttered garage. They have accumulated there in the three days since her husband spent his Sunday morning driving to the tip seven miles away. Since February, when East Cambridgeshire District Council introduced fortnightly black-bag collections in Bottisham, he has been making the journey twice a week. "It's a real pain in the butt, to be honest with you", the mother of one said. "My son, Drew, is 2 and we can't have dirty nappies and food sitting in the garage for a fortnight. The smell is horrendous."
Lucy Baynes, who gave birth to her first child Zac only five weeks ago, tells a similar story. Two days before the fortnightly collection in leafy Bottisham, there is already a pile of black bags stacked against a post outside her garden, one of the communal collection points for the village. "Initially I thought the scheme was a good idea, but the stacks of rubbish are disgusting. That pile will be humming in the summer, and there will be more foxes and cats."
The council halved black bag collections in Bottisham only weeks ago, having already done so last summer in the village of Witchford. The pilot schemes are a response to the Government's controversial drive to push councils into cutting down on landfill and boost recycling, which Ben Bradshaw, the Environment Minister, said has resulted in 144 councils already experimenting with fortnightly collections.
Voters in many of these local authorities, including East Cambridgeshire, will be taking part in local elections next week. If sitting councillors are going to suffer as a result of their decisions to cut back on the dustmen, you would expect it to be at the hands of people such as Mrs Lock and Ms Baynes. Yet neither of these women will be voicing their frustration over refuse at the polls next week, because neither of them will be voting at all. Both cite their young children as a reason why they have not engaged with the election campaign, and both seem decidedly uninterested in whether the 17 Liberal Democrat councillors, 16 Conservatives and 6 independents will hold their seats on May 3.
Among those in the village who will vote, post office closures and council tax were both mentioned as reasons to back one party over the other, but not one person told The Times that the backlog of binbags would influence their decision. Which is perhaps why Colin McLean, the village's Conservative councillor, is relatively relaxed about the issue: "People have not been shaking hands over it on the doorstep," he said, "but nor have they been shaking fists."
Back in Bottisham, where the residents have had less time to adjust to the changes, John Humphreys expresses the mood of many people: "It is a diminution of the service which they tell us is an improvement, which gets up people's noses, and its an imposition, but compared with the big issues like the NHS it is not important. The retired teacher is less than thrilled about having to store nonrecyclable rubbish for two weeks before it is taken off his hands. But he will not be swayed by the battle of the binbag when he goes to vote. "We are the compliant people of England, and life's too short," he said. "It's not worth going to the barricades over."
Source
GREEN SPIN GOES UP IN SMOKE AS BP SCRAPS CARBON STORAGE PLANS
British government is all talk
BP has abandoned plans to build a "green" power plant in a snub to Alistair Darling on the day that the Trade and Industry Secretary unveiled a new energy strategy aimed at reducing carbon emissions. Just hours after Mr Darling announced his Energy White Paper yesterday, the oil giant halted work on a 1bn-plus carbon capture and storage facility in Scotland, blaming delays in state subsidies.
BP's decision is an embarrassment for the minister, whose White Paper is designed to underline the Government's commitment to take a global lead in cutting greenhouse gases. The oil company, in a joint venture with Scottish & Southern Energy, has spent 30m during the past 18 months preparing to build a gas-fired power plant that would generate electricity and store 90pc of the emissions created in a depleted North Sea oil field. Similar projects are planned by other power companies.
But because the advanced technology makes such plants uneconomic, the Government promised to kick-start two or three facilities with subsidies. BP said yesterday that it had hoped to get a decision on state aid by the end of 2006, but this was pushed back to the end of 2007. But the White Paper indicated that a decision might not come until well into 2008 or beyond. "That's an extension too far," said a BP spokesman. "It would have been difficult to keep the project alive when there is uncertainty about funding. We have already spent a lot of money on the project."
FULL STORY here
Alcohol and pregnancy: Bureaucracy trumps science
Lying to people as a way of getting them to behave in an approved manner is a hoary old Leftist strategy -- e.g. their patently absurd but endlessly-repeated claim that there is no such thing as race
Women who are pregnant or trying for a baby should stop drinking alcohol altogether, the Government's leading doctors give warning today. The new advice radically revises existing guidelines, which say that women can drink up to two units once or twice a week. Fiona Adshead, the deputy chief medical officer, said that the change was meant to send "a strong signal" to the thousands of women who drank more than the recommended limit that they were putting their babies at risk. But she admitted that it was not in response to any new medical evidence
Women are often confused about what drinking in moderation really means, the new guidelines say, and surveys suggest that many accidently or deliberately exceed the limit. "Our advice is simple: avoid alcohol if pregnant or trying to conceive," Dr Adshead said. "We have strengthened our advice to women to help ensure that no one underestimates the risk to the foetus." She suggested that bottles of beer, wines and spirits should carry the new warning that pregnant women give up drinking. However, it emerged yesterday that the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists intended to stick with its advice that moderate drinking was perfectly safe, which could leave many pregnant women confused. The college said that it would examine the new advice and decide whether to adopt it "in due course".
The change brings Britain into line with a growing list of countries which recommend abstinence. For years, the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand have recommended that pregnant women abstain from alcohol. France joined them last autumn, saying that research had linked moderate levels of drinking and permanent brain damage.
Research from the Office for National Statistics has shown a sharp rise in fatal drinking habits among women. The study, of "preventable mortality", found that the annual rate of alcohol-related deaths had risen by two thirds between 1993 and 2005, to 1,873. However, the statistics only refer to death certificates where alcohol-related conditions such as cirrhosis are specifically mentioned. Charities put the annual death toll for both sexes at about 22,000.
Ministers were moved to act over drinking in pregnancy after recent research found that 9 per cent of expectant mothers drink more than the recommended limit. Other data found that a quarter drink right up to the limit. The existing advice to drink in moderation has been in place for about ten years. Previously, midwives regularly told pregnant women to drink up to eight units a week, and even recommended Guinness to prevent anaemia.
Heavy drinking can cause foetal alcohol syndrome, an incurable condition resulting in retardation, poor memory and, in the worst cases, facial abnormalities. About 1 in 1,000 babies are born with the syndrome each year worldwide. But a milder condition, foetal alcohol spectrum disorder, is more common, affecting more than 6,000 children in Britain each year, and is a leading cause of learning difficulties.
Because many women do not realise that they are pregnant for the first few months, the advice was extended to those trying to conceive as well. It also states that should a pregnant woman choose to carry on drinking, she should not get drunk and keep to the previous recommendation of one to two units once or twice a week in order to minimise risks to the baby.
Source
Dumbing down Britain's doctors
The collapse of Britain's online Medical Training Application Service (MTAS) has been widely welcomed. The web-based system was designed to match junior doctors to specialist training posts, but following junior doctors' complaints about a lack of available posts, poorly designed recruitment forms and technical failures in the new online system, it has now been scrapped. However, the real threat to standards of medical practice - and ultimately patient care - comes from the Modernising Medical Careers programme, of which MTAS is merely one aspect.
`If one of my own children had been in that position', UK health secretary Patricia Hewitt told Channel 4 News on the day she finally suspended MTAS, she would have fully shared the distress of the parents of those affected by the series of scandals afflicting the new computerised application system for specialist medical training (1). This curious presentation of the issue from a parental perspective is echoed on the website of RemedyUK, the grassroots organisation of junior doctors that has led the revolt against MTAS, staging unprecedented mass demonstrations in March (2). The site prominently displays a colourful poster proclaiming `Mums4Medics' (with subsidiary slogans, `Dads4Medics', `Partners4Medics', `Everyone4Medics').
By the time they have completed five or six years of medical school and two years of the new post-qualification `foundation programme', the youngest of the doctors applying to MTAS is 25 and many are over 30. Yet it seems that these `junior' doctors are regarded by the health minister as children and that they even regard themselves in similar terms. The infantilisation of doctors implicit in these representations reflects the real threat to the medical profession and to the quality of medical practice posed by the current wave of `modernising' reforms.
Hewitt was quick to emphasise that, though doctors are angry about MTAS, the `underlying principles of Modernising Medical Careers' are widely accepted by both junior doctors and the professional bodies that have been closely involved in the development and implementation of this programme. Before looking more closely at Modernising Medical Careers (MMC), let's briefly look at the MTAS fiasco.
In many respects MTAS is just another National Health Service IT failure: an online system that is vastly expensive, badly designed, difficult to use and which crashes frequently. When the system made publicly available doctors' personal details, including religion, sexual orientation and criminal records, this was more than a breach of confidentiality. It raised questions over why a medical appointment scheme should require that candidates submit such information. Though it is these failures that have led to the collapse of MTAS, its defects go much deeper.
In its modernising zeal, MTAS gives priority to doctors' subjective `learning experiences' and downplays objective indicators of performance. It allocates 75 per cent of its points to 150-word vignettes of clinical cases, in which doctors display fashionable concerns about `reflexive learning', `team-working' and ethical dilemmas. According to critics this amounts to meaningless self-promotion as well as being open to plagiarism (which the system lacks the software to detect). Only 25 per cent of points are allocated to academic or research achievements. Extracurricular activities are marginalised, references sidelined and interviews rigidly standardised.
The elite Academy of Medical Sciences has condemned MTAS for its discrimination against talent and excellence, as `a threat to UK biomedical research and healthcare' (3). For the Academy, MTAS reflects `a mindset in which academic, educational and research achievement are seen as almost irrelevant to the future quality of healthcare'.
It is true that the old system of selection for specialist training posts was susceptible to nepotism, favouritism and discrimination against those from ethnic or other minorities. It is New Labour's signal achievement, in this as in many areas, to have replaced a corrupt and inefficient system with one that is potentially more corrupt and certainly more inefficient - and even more damaging to the morale and standards of the medical profession.
The spirit of political correctness that imbues MTAS has already established deep roots in the modern medical profession. These can be traced back to the adoption by the General Medical Council in 1993 of the document Tomorrow's Doctors, which outlined the `goals and objectives' of a new medical curriculum under the rubric `knowledge, skills and attitudes' (4). While `knowledge' was reduced to a `factual quantum', extensive and detailed attitudinal objectives `reflected the values of the culture of therapy and the demands of political correctness' (5). Launched in 2004, Modernising Medical Careers sought to extend the approach of Tomorrow's Doctors from the medical school into the world of post-graduate medical practice, in hospital and in primary care (6).
The first major MMC initiative was the replacement in 2005 of the traditional year doctors spent as `house officers' in hospitals immediately after qualification with a two-year `foundation programme' (part of which could be completed in General Practice). There can be no doubt that the old system had many flaws: many young doctors were exploited by absentee consultants, obliged to work excessive hours and received minimal supervision or training (to the detriment of both themselves and their patients). The foundation programme sought to replace the old `apprenticeship' model - celebrated in the surgical saying `see one, do one, teach one' - with a closely supervised programme of instruction in the attitudes and values deemed appropriate for the modernised doctor.
The new programme is `trainee-centred, competency-assessed, service-based, quality-assured, flexible, coached, structured and streamlined'; it is managed and structured, progressive, robust and seamless; it is `outcome-based' and evaluates `observed behaviour, skills and attributes'. No doubt some of this jargon conceals valuable educational and clinical activity, but it is difficult to believe that all the ticking of boxes reflects any improvement in the rigour of medical training. What remains unquantified in this system is the quality of doctors' clinical knowledge and their experience of taking responsibility in treating and caring for patients.
The 1858 Medical Act, which is established the General Medical Council, sought to establish a system of medical education that produced a doctor who, on qualification, was a `safe general practitioner'. This concept of an independent and competent general practitioner symbolised the confidence of the modern medical profession at the moment of its emergence in the nineteenth century. By contrast, the `never quite competent' doctor, one who requires continuous formal instruction and regulation, monitoring and mentoring, support and counselling, symbolises the abject state of the profession in the new millennium. While the junior hospital doctor of the past may have been used and abused, today's doctors appear to have lost all initiative or autonomy in relation to their own professional development and in relation to their patients. If tomorrow's doctors are reduced to the status of children, to be patronised by politicians and parents, as well as by their trainers and tutors, the future of the medical profession is in jeopardy.
For the Academy of Medical Sciences, MTAS is `an object lesson in what happens when we take medical education out of the hands of those who value objective academic achievement and put it in the hands of those who wish to create a uniform and biddable workforce unencumbered by the spirit of inquiry needed to challenge dogma and central directives'. The consequences of this lesson are not confined to MTAS, but go back through MMC to Tomorrow's Doctors, and the wider framework of medical education and training established over the past decade.
Source
The BBC still hates America: "White lynch mobs are back in the Deep South. At least according to the BBC, which is broadcasting a special program on it, headlined "Stealth Racism Stalks the Deep South." Apparently six young black men have been charged in an attack on a white student. The Bolshie Beeb knows this story line. It hasn't changed in a hundred years --- if you believe the Beeb".
Friday, May 25, 2007
Apple Thinks it can Forbid Others from Using Silhouettes!
Back in the 80s, Apple spent a lot of money suing Microsoft with a claim that Apple had copyright to the "look and feel" of an icon-based computer operating system -- even though they did not originate that idea. They lost. They now are making an even more improbable claim -- that they have the sole right to use silhouette images in advertising. They are suing a British vendor of "adult" products:
I suppose it is slightly less absurd than the claim by chocolate manufacturer Cadbury that they own the color purple!
Maybe claims like this come out of the firms' advertising budgets -- on the grounds that there is no such thing as bad publicity. That may not be a big help, though. Back in the '90s Lotus failed in another "look and feel" lawsuit and who uses Lotus spreadsheets now? Microsoft Excel rules the roost there.
Yet more cutbacks for already-overstretched NHS maternity wards
Almost one in three maternity units in England could close because of expected cuts in doctors' working hours, the Conservative Party claims. Figures released yesterday suggest that 50 out of 176 consultant-led maternity units across the country are under threat of being downgraded or closed if guidance being used in some NHS trusts is applied nationally. Patricia Hewitt, the Health Secretary, has admitted that the number of units staffed by doctors could be cut under European rules to limit the hours doctors spend on wards.
The European Working Time Directive is set to reduce the number of hours doctors spend on wards to 48 hours a week by August 2009. The changes could lead to a reduced number of consultant-led maternity units because of a lack of staff.
Maternity units in Manchester, Teesside and other parts of the country have already been earmarked for radical overhauls, and more home births and deliveries in local units staffed by midwives are expected as a result. But the plans are proving hugely unpopular, even though they have been promoted as being in the interests of patients and NHS staff. They could mean that mothers and babies at risk of complications during delivery will have to travel farther to receive specialist care rather than transferring to the nearest hospital.
The Conservatives' estimates are based on a report issued in February by Sheila Shribman, the Government's maternity supervisor, which explained cuts to services in West Yorkshire. Two units at the Calderdale and Huddersfield NHS Foundation Trust each catered for about 2,500 births a year but, on their own, neither was big enough to justify the spend needed to retain specialist skills, she said. The average consultant-led unit currently delivers an estimated 1,800 babies a year.
The Tories suggest that if other trusts across England took Ms Shribman's recommendations as a guide, up to one in three units would close. Other guidance being circulated by NHS organisations in the East of England in turn suggests that maternity units need to deliver at least 3,000 or even 4,000 births a year to be viable.
The Tories called on the Government to delay the implementation of the European Working Time Directive in order to forestall cuts. Addressing the annual conference of the Royal College of Midwives in Brighton, Ms Hewitt said that recommendations for the potential closure of services in Manchester, for example, were "quite difficult and unpopular" but were good for babies and mothers.
Ms Shribman said yesterday that every major city and most rural communities in the country would have to consider the future of local maternity services in the light of the Working Time Directive. But she denied that there was a "one size fits all" figure for the number of births a unit had that could be applied to justify closures across England.
Source
GAME OVER: BRITAIN CONCEDES THAT EU TARGETS ARE NO LONGER ON G8 AGENDA
Britain's foreign minister on Tuesday said she expected no discussion of numerical targets for greenhouse gas emissions at a meeting of the leaders of the Group of Eight wealthy nations in Germany next month. British Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett was asked by reporters in Tokyo whether she was concerned about a possible gap in climate change policy between the European Union and Japan, ahead of the summit at Heiligendamm in Germany.
"I don't think anyone envisages the idea that there should be some discussion about setting numerical targets at Heiligendamm," she said after a meeting with her counterpart, Foreign Minister Taro Aso. "There has been a misunderstanding of the nature of the discussions that we expect," Beckett said. "What we are both anxious to see is discussions about whether there should be a further international framework and what might be an effective framework," she said, referring to hopes that a new agreement will take the place of the Kyoto protocol, which expires in 2012.
Japan is finalising a proposal for a new global framework to cut greenhouse gas emissions from 2013, and plans to unveil it later this week, Kyodo news agency said on Monday, quoting government officials. But the United States, which did not ratify the Kyoto agreement, has been pushing for a strongly worded statement on climate change to be deleted from a final communique for the June 6-6 summit.
Source
Back in the 80s, Apple spent a lot of money suing Microsoft with a claim that Apple had copyright to the "look and feel" of an icon-based computer operating system -- even though they did not originate that idea. They lost. They now are making an even more improbable claim -- that they have the sole right to use silhouette images in advertising. They are suing a British vendor of "adult" products:
"High street adult retailer Ann Summers has landed itself in a heap of trouble with Apple. The retail chain has been promoting a sex toy called the iGasm, a device which connects to any music player and offers users an erotic vibrating treat in time to the beat.
A News of the World report claims Apple is furious about Ann Summer's promotion of the device, and is demanding all posters for the gadget be taken down, under threat of court action....
Apple is claiming the ad to be an abuse of the silhouette-based images it uses in its own advertising.
Source
I suppose it is slightly less absurd than the claim by chocolate manufacturer Cadbury that they own the color purple!
Maybe claims like this come out of the firms' advertising budgets -- on the grounds that there is no such thing as bad publicity. That may not be a big help, though. Back in the '90s Lotus failed in another "look and feel" lawsuit and who uses Lotus spreadsheets now? Microsoft Excel rules the roost there.
Yet more cutbacks for already-overstretched NHS maternity wards
Almost one in three maternity units in England could close because of expected cuts in doctors' working hours, the Conservative Party claims. Figures released yesterday suggest that 50 out of 176 consultant-led maternity units across the country are under threat of being downgraded or closed if guidance being used in some NHS trusts is applied nationally. Patricia Hewitt, the Health Secretary, has admitted that the number of units staffed by doctors could be cut under European rules to limit the hours doctors spend on wards.
The European Working Time Directive is set to reduce the number of hours doctors spend on wards to 48 hours a week by August 2009. The changes could lead to a reduced number of consultant-led maternity units because of a lack of staff.
Maternity units in Manchester, Teesside and other parts of the country have already been earmarked for radical overhauls, and more home births and deliveries in local units staffed by midwives are expected as a result. But the plans are proving hugely unpopular, even though they have been promoted as being in the interests of patients and NHS staff. They could mean that mothers and babies at risk of complications during delivery will have to travel farther to receive specialist care rather than transferring to the nearest hospital.
The Conservatives' estimates are based on a report issued in February by Sheila Shribman, the Government's maternity supervisor, which explained cuts to services in West Yorkshire. Two units at the Calderdale and Huddersfield NHS Foundation Trust each catered for about 2,500 births a year but, on their own, neither was big enough to justify the spend needed to retain specialist skills, she said. The average consultant-led unit currently delivers an estimated 1,800 babies a year.
The Tories suggest that if other trusts across England took Ms Shribman's recommendations as a guide, up to one in three units would close. Other guidance being circulated by NHS organisations in the East of England in turn suggests that maternity units need to deliver at least 3,000 or even 4,000 births a year to be viable.
The Tories called on the Government to delay the implementation of the European Working Time Directive in order to forestall cuts. Addressing the annual conference of the Royal College of Midwives in Brighton, Ms Hewitt said that recommendations for the potential closure of services in Manchester, for example, were "quite difficult and unpopular" but were good for babies and mothers.
Ms Shribman said yesterday that every major city and most rural communities in the country would have to consider the future of local maternity services in the light of the Working Time Directive. But she denied that there was a "one size fits all" figure for the number of births a unit had that could be applied to justify closures across England.
Source
GAME OVER: BRITAIN CONCEDES THAT EU TARGETS ARE NO LONGER ON G8 AGENDA
Britain's foreign minister on Tuesday said she expected no discussion of numerical targets for greenhouse gas emissions at a meeting of the leaders of the Group of Eight wealthy nations in Germany next month. British Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett was asked by reporters in Tokyo whether she was concerned about a possible gap in climate change policy between the European Union and Japan, ahead of the summit at Heiligendamm in Germany.
"I don't think anyone envisages the idea that there should be some discussion about setting numerical targets at Heiligendamm," she said after a meeting with her counterpart, Foreign Minister Taro Aso. "There has been a misunderstanding of the nature of the discussions that we expect," Beckett said. "What we are both anxious to see is discussions about whether there should be a further international framework and what might be an effective framework," she said, referring to hopes that a new agreement will take the place of the Kyoto protocol, which expires in 2012.
Japan is finalising a proposal for a new global framework to cut greenhouse gas emissions from 2013, and plans to unveil it later this week, Kyodo news agency said on Monday, quoting government officials. But the United States, which did not ratify the Kyoto agreement, has been pushing for a strongly worded statement on climate change to be deleted from a final communique for the June 6-6 summit.
Source
Thursday, May 24, 2007
At last the NHS does something sensible
The NHS is turning its back on homoeopathy and other unproven alternative medicines in the face of a financial crisis and pressure from doctors. More than half of the primary care trusts (PCTs) in England are now refusing to pay for homoeopathy or severely restricting access a year after The Times revealed that 13 senior doctors had urged them to fund only therapies that were backed up by scientific evidence.
Figures obtained by Les Rose, one of the doctors, and The Times under the Freedom of Information Act show that at least 86 of the 147 trusts have either stopped sending patients to the four homoeopathic hospitals, or are introducing strict measures to limit referrals. Another 40 trusts have yet to provide data. More than 20 have taken action since receiving a letter organised a year ago today by Professor Michael Baum, a cancer specialist at University College London, which argued that "unproven or disproved treatments" such as homoeopathy and reflexology ought not to be available free to patients. The NHS should not be funding such therapies while it had to refuse or ration access to effective cancer drugs such as Herceptin and Velcade, the authors said. Financial issues have also contributed to the trend. The NHS overspent by œ547 million in 2005-06 and many trusts have made savings on homoeopathy to avoid cuts.
The move away from homoeopathy has been so significant that two homoeopathic hospitals are threatened with closure. West Kent PCT is consulting over plans to shut Tunbridge Wells Homoeopathic Hospital and the Royal London Homoeopathic Hospital (RLHH) has asked supporters to lobby trusts and MPs. London trusts have been particularly tough, partly as they have had to reduce some of the largest deficits in the country. Six trusts, including some of the RLHH's most important financial backers such as Barnet and Islington, have introduced referral management systems that will restrict spending. At least ten more from London and southeast England have cancelled their contracts.
Homoeopathy involves treating patients with substances that have been diluted so many times that there is often no active ingredient left. It is popular with members of the Royal Family but derided by most scientists. Research suggests that it has no benefits beyond being a placebo.
Doctors behind the original letter sent a second document to PCTs yesterday, providing a sample commissioning paper that many trusts have used to reduce homoeopathy funding. Gustav Born, Emeritus Professor of Pharmacology at King's College London, its lead author, said: "Progress has been slower than we'd like and there are still trusts that continue to use these unproven remedies through clinics and prescriptions. That is why we have written again to all the PCTs urging them to follow the commissioning example set by others."
Hilary Pickles, director of public health at Hillington PCT, said: "It isn't just that there is no evidence base for homoeopathy; it is also a question of spending priorities. Every time you decide to spend NHS money on one thing, something else is losing out. It is completely inappropriate to spend money on homoeopathy that is unproven, as it means less money for other treatments that are known to be effective."
One person who could benefit from a switch is Anne Fleming, 58, who had multiple myeloma diagnosed 2« years ago. She has been told that she will need treatment with Velcade, an anticancer drug that costs up to œ25,000 for eight cycles. Her primary care trust in South Cambridgeshire has diverted funds from homoeopathy to conventional medicine. She said that the NHS should also abandon non-essential treatments. "I feel very strongly about using public money on tattoo removal. Things on the national health should be about life or death," she said.
Source
The NHS is turning its back on homoeopathy and other unproven alternative medicines in the face of a financial crisis and pressure from doctors. More than half of the primary care trusts (PCTs) in England are now refusing to pay for homoeopathy or severely restricting access a year after The Times revealed that 13 senior doctors had urged them to fund only therapies that were backed up by scientific evidence.
Figures obtained by Les Rose, one of the doctors, and The Times under the Freedom of Information Act show that at least 86 of the 147 trusts have either stopped sending patients to the four homoeopathic hospitals, or are introducing strict measures to limit referrals. Another 40 trusts have yet to provide data. More than 20 have taken action since receiving a letter organised a year ago today by Professor Michael Baum, a cancer specialist at University College London, which argued that "unproven or disproved treatments" such as homoeopathy and reflexology ought not to be available free to patients. The NHS should not be funding such therapies while it had to refuse or ration access to effective cancer drugs such as Herceptin and Velcade, the authors said. Financial issues have also contributed to the trend. The NHS overspent by œ547 million in 2005-06 and many trusts have made savings on homoeopathy to avoid cuts.
The move away from homoeopathy has been so significant that two homoeopathic hospitals are threatened with closure. West Kent PCT is consulting over plans to shut Tunbridge Wells Homoeopathic Hospital and the Royal London Homoeopathic Hospital (RLHH) has asked supporters to lobby trusts and MPs. London trusts have been particularly tough, partly as they have had to reduce some of the largest deficits in the country. Six trusts, including some of the RLHH's most important financial backers such as Barnet and Islington, have introduced referral management systems that will restrict spending. At least ten more from London and southeast England have cancelled their contracts.
Homoeopathy involves treating patients with substances that have been diluted so many times that there is often no active ingredient left. It is popular with members of the Royal Family but derided by most scientists. Research suggests that it has no benefits beyond being a placebo.
Doctors behind the original letter sent a second document to PCTs yesterday, providing a sample commissioning paper that many trusts have used to reduce homoeopathy funding. Gustav Born, Emeritus Professor of Pharmacology at King's College London, its lead author, said: "Progress has been slower than we'd like and there are still trusts that continue to use these unproven remedies through clinics and prescriptions. That is why we have written again to all the PCTs urging them to follow the commissioning example set by others."
Hilary Pickles, director of public health at Hillington PCT, said: "It isn't just that there is no evidence base for homoeopathy; it is also a question of spending priorities. Every time you decide to spend NHS money on one thing, something else is losing out. It is completely inappropriate to spend money on homoeopathy that is unproven, as it means less money for other treatments that are known to be effective."
One person who could benefit from a switch is Anne Fleming, 58, who had multiple myeloma diagnosed 2« years ago. She has been told that she will need treatment with Velcade, an anticancer drug that costs up to œ25,000 for eight cycles. Her primary care trust in South Cambridgeshire has diverted funds from homoeopathy to conventional medicine. She said that the NHS should also abandon non-essential treatments. "I feel very strongly about using public money on tattoo removal. Things on the national health should be about life or death," she said.
Source
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
Allergy patients 'failed by NHS'
GPs and pharmacists do not know enough about allergies, putting patients lives at risk, campaigners say. Allergy UK said training on the subject was extremely limited and many people were going undiagnosed. And the pressure group said even when diagnoses were made, medics often had nowhere to send patients as there were limited specialist allergy clinics.
GPs agree it is an issue that needs to be addressed, but pharmacists argue they already receive enough training. Allergic reactions are caused by substances in the environment known as allergens, of which the most common are pollen from trees and grasses, house dust mites, wasps, bees and food such as milk and eggs.
The number of people suffering allergic reactions has been rising over the last 15 years with over 6,000 people a year in England admitted to hospital. A quarter of these involve anaphylaxis - a sudden, severe and potentially life-threatening reaction, which can cause dangerous swelling of the lips or face and lead to breathing problems.
After listening to the hundreds of people contacting them, Allergy UK believes doctors and pharmacists are too slow to pick up allergies, leaving people vulnerable to severe reactions. A spokeswoman said: "Doctors and other health professionals get little training about dealing with allergies. "It means patients are being put at risk."
The charity also criticised the lack of specialist allergy clinics. Many hospitals have some kind of service, but there are just six clinics in the country which deal with all types of allergy. The charity is planning to launch a website for health professionals giving information about allergies and the common symptoms. They are also offering training on allergies.
Professor Mayur Lakhani, chairman of the Royal College of GPs, said: "Allergies must be taken seriously and we would like to see a stronger emphasis on training in allergies in both undergraduate and postgraduate medical training. "At the moment we don't have the facilities to adequately investigate, manage and treat patients with allergies and we would like to see a programme of national action implemented in primary care."
But the Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain rejected the idea that pharmacists were not trained enough.
A spokeswoman said: "Pharmacists receive five years education and training, a large focus of which is on allergy."
Source
White pupils in British urban schools are failing academically: why?
Are white working class families the new victims?
In a season similar to this 30 years ago, British educationalists were preoccupied with something referred to as "the great schools debate", in which the urban comprehensive was placed under scrutiny. When the media got wind of this, one particular television crew was dispatched to the school I attended in south east London, having decided it was the epitome of an underachieving, inherently multi-racial school within a poor and neglected postcode. The documentary that emerged - Our School and Hard Times - revealed the literacy of teenage pupils was dramatically below par, truancy was high, and hope was at an all time low.
The sixties outakes on the teaching staff were steeped in theories of social engineering and hinted to the camera that surroundings and social class rather than the pupils themselves, or teaching methods, were responsible. It was an argument that appears to have been around since Aristotle was a lad, and served its purpose until the issue of academic underachievement shifted from social class to race. This occurred when it emerged that the poor performance of black pupils - notably boys - was disproportionate to the size of this particular minority.
Thirty years on, and with the new century in its infancy, the poor academic achievement of white pupils in urban schools is becoming an issue. And even additives and E-numbers can't take the flak for this one. More significantly, it's the ethnicity of this group rather than - solely - social class that is relative.
Today, London's Business and Design Centre plays host to a conference devoted to tackling the issue of white underachievement. It brings together figures said to be experts in this field, and is organized by Cambridge Education Associates. In Islington, the CEA has had some success in addressing the poor academic levels of black pupils. By shifting the focus to this trend among white pupils, and largely in urban schools in which these are the minority, the organisers are showing a nerve that is absent elsewhere.
This issue of "white underachievement" has risen to the fore sporadically over the last couple of years, but with little response or action taken. The TES previously released a report on the issue ("white working class pupils have less mobility and employment opportunities than the children of immigrants who moved to the UK in the 1960s"); the Social Policy Group, the think tank established by former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith, published its own research last year. The latter revealed that for the first time white working class boys were falling behind their black and Asian contemporaries.
Bad parenting was flagged up as the key culprit, with the high level of success of pupils from more family-based, insular, Chinese and Asian communities cited as the standard of attainment to aim for. If the response of those present at this day-long conference mimics that of the teaching staff at my own secondary school back in the punk spring of 1977, you can bet that the short-sightedness and fear around modern racial etiquette is responsible. With poor performance of black pupils the burden of blame is apportioned to those post-Macpherson fallbacks institutional racism or "unwitting prejudice". In the case of white pupils, racism can't by cited as a reason or excuse any more than the industrial revolution or the age of the child chimney sweep. However, were this any other ethnic group, cultural alienation, lack of high-profile role models and its derogatory portrayal within the media would be brought into the proceedings.
Therefore there might be an argument to suggest the fact that urban white working class communities have endured more change, dislocation and upheaval than any other over the last 40 years, added to the racial and classcist slurs targeted regularly at this group by the press, might have some small part to play. But the greater responsibility for what is very much a 21st century trend might rest with the cult of multiculturalism.
This is alluded to within the research to be revealed at Monday's conference and where the notion of nerve comes in: "in dialogues about diversity, white ethnicity and social class is often rendered invisible and as such is not included in studies of the diverse landscape of British culture". In short, the communities that have been most altered in order to create a multi-racial society and accommodate multiculturalism have been airbrushed from any discussion or literature on the subject.
By recognising this the CEA might not have the answers on why young white urbanites are getting bad exam results, but it does highlight the fault-lines in a modern "inclusive" culture that exiles them. This in itself says more about the myth of multiculturalism than secondary education: it's one thing to build a vision on a myth, it's another to build it on a lie
Source
New evidence that British blacks really are madder
Three years ago an official inquiry into the treatment of black people within Britain's mental health services concluded that the system was riddled with institutional racism and blamed the Department of Health for ignoring what it called "this festering abscess... a blot upon the good name of the NHS".
But now senior psychiatrists, some themselves from ethnic minorities, are hitting back, arguing that labelling psychiatric services as racist is both wrong and counter-productive. Professor Swaran Singh, a consultant based in Birmingham says, "the high rates of psychosis and the high rates of detention are not a result of racism", he insists.
The experiences of black people in mental health services are undoubtedly shocking: black men up to 18 times more likely to be diagnosed with psychotic illness than whites and four times more likely to find themselves locked up under the Mental Health Act. Understandably, for many within the black community the figures are powerful evidence that services are profoundly racist.
Professor Singh's view has seen him accused of setting psychiatry back 20 years, but he is adamant. He says the term "institutional racism" damages the very people it purports to help and "is erroneous and too simplistic an explanation for ethnic differences. What it does is it creates a wall of mistrust between between service users and service providers."
But in the last few months, research by the Institute of Psychiatry in London has turned the argument on its head. The largest-ever study of psychosis tested the theory that psychiatrists wittingly or unwittingly allowed their clinical judgment to be influenced by the colour of their patients' skin. Researchers removed the ethnicity of a patient from their notes and asked a doctor to assess them. What they found was that psychosis was still diagnosed nine times more often in black people from the Caribbean - almost exactly the same rate as their presence within mental health services.
Professor Robin Murray from the Institute says the evidence is remarkable. "We have pretty well excluded the possibility that this is a result of misdiagnosis", he says. In fact, the results suggested the opposite. "Psychiatrists in the UK are less likely to diagnose psychosis in somebody who is black than white with the same symptoms", argues Professor Murray.
The real explanation for so many more black people in mental health services, it is claimed, is that they suffer from higher levels of mental illness. The reasons for that are thought to be social: fractured families, exclusion, poor education, unemployment and cannabis use - all problems which particularly affect the black community.
Research also came up with an explanation for the higher rates of detention under the Mental Health Act. Black people are twice as likely as white patients to be referred to a psychiatrist by the police or a court rather than their GP. In other words, black patients arrive in the system when their condition is much more serious, requiring their detention. According to some psychiatrists, the consequence of wrongly blaming racism for black people's high representation in mental services is that the real causes of mental ill health in the black community are ignored.
Just as concerning is the claim that some dangerously ill black patients are discharged into the community because white mental health tribunals are worried they may be accused of racism. Dr Shubulade Smith, a consultant psychiatrist at the world-famous Maudsley Hospital in South London says an all-white panel wouldn't listen to her arguments about one of her black patients. "He was really at risk getting hurt because of the illness that he had, and the tribunal discharged him", she says. "I don't know what was going on in their minds other than they were too scared of thinking that they might be being racist towards him."
Dr Smith, herself a black woman, believes psychiatry needs to focus less on internal racism and more on helping deal with the real causes of mental illness out in the community. "Let's do something about those factors that increase the likelihood of people becoming unwell in this way," she says. "Let's do something about that."
Source
Immigration anger getting recognition in Britain
Established British families should be given social housing even if they need it less than new immigrants, a government minister said yesterday. Margaret Hodge said that indigenous families' "legitimate sense of entitlement" should be taken into account in deciding who was housed. Ms Hodge, an Industry Minister, has called before for the Government to do more to counter the resentments created by immigration.
Yesterday she suggested that national insurance contributions could be used as part of a points system of housing allocation. She said the Government currently "prioritised the needs of an individual migrant family over the entitlement that others feel they have to resources in the community". She added: "So a recently arrived family with four or five children living in a damp and overcrowded privately-rented flat with the children suffering from asthma will usually get priority over a family with less housing need who have lived in the area for three generations and are stuck at home with the grandparents."
Hazel Blears, Labour's chair-woman and a candidate for deputy leader, agreed that ministers had to do more to convince people that the system was equitable. "I think that people in this country have a real sense of fairness. They are prepared to do their bit but they want to know the system actually works for them. So I do think we need to tackle these tough issues."
However, Nancy Kelly, of the Refugee Council, a campaigning group, said that Ms Hodge was aping the BNP. "The way to counter some of the views that are put forward by the far-right parties is not by trying to follow their lead." Ms Kelly said that asylum-seekers were not entitled to council housing and arrivals from new EU states had restricted access to benefits. "People who are recognised as refugees are entitled to council housing but on exactly the same basis a UK national, on the basis of need," she said.
Ms Hodge, an immigrant herself - she was born in Egypt to Jewish refugee parents - said that she had seen many voters in her Barking constituency turn to the BNP because of concerns over housing allocations. She said a transparent points system, giving more weight to length of residence, citizenship and national insurance contributions, could be a better way of allocating housing.
Writing in The Observer, she said that there was widespread concern about the changing face of Britain, and people needed to be reassured. "We should look at policies where the legitimate sense of entitlement felt by the indigenous family overrides the legitimate need demonstrated by the new migrants. We must address these difficult questions."
Damian Green, the Conservative immigration spokesman, said that Ms Hodge's comments acknowledged the Government's "long-term failure" to control immigration. Andrew Stunell, the Liberal Democrat local government spokesman, said that the Government was continuing to sell council houses although there were 1« million families on the council housing waiting list.
Source
FEARS OVER LOOMING ENERGY CRISIS IN UK
Across Britain, cities are plunged into darkness. In London, the Underground grinds to a halt, leaving panicked commuters stranded in oppressively hot carriages. In office blocks, lifts stop operating and the air-conditioning shuts down. Employees swelter in stifling conditions. This is not the postapocalyptic vision of some film-maker, but a realistic scenario as Britain grapples with a looming energy crisis.
The statistics are frightening. In only eight years, demand for energy could outstrip supply by 23% at peak times, according to a study by the consultant Logica CMG. The loss to the economy could be 108 billion each year."The idea of the lights going out is not a fantasy. People seem to accept that security of energy supply is a right. It is not. The industry will have to work hard to maintain supply and for that we need a clear framework," said Simon Skillings, director of strategy and energy policy at Eon UK, Britain's largest integrated energy company.
This Wednesday, the government's delayed energy white paper will attempt to provide some answers. It is a crucial document that will determine whether Britain can deliver on its pledge to slash carbon emissions by 20% from 1990 levels by 2020. The white paper will seek to tackle a host of tough issues -- from nuclear power to energy efficiency, renewable power sources and clean-fuel projects. A planning white paper, due tomorrow, is also seen as crucial after a number of energy projects have been delayed for years or slapped down by local authorities.
The scale of the challenge is immense. By 2015, Britain's generating capacity could be cut by a third as ageing coal and nuclear power stations are closed. Britain is also moving from being self-sufficient in oil and gas as North Sea production declines. In 2005, the UK became a net importer of gas. By 2010, imports could account for 40% of British gas needs; by 2020, 80% to 90%.
The most contentious area is likely to be nuclear power. Nuclear reactors account for about 20% of Britain's electricity, but this will shrink to 6% in 20 years as ageing plants are closed down. By 2023, only Sizewell B could be in operation. Already controversial, the government's commitment to building new nuclear power stations became even more sensitive when the High Court agreed with the environmental lobby group Greenpeace that the consultation process was"seriously flawed".
The white paper is expected to give guidance on how the government would like to see new reactors built, but will have to stress that any decision will depend on a new, more detailed, consultation round. What the energy industry wants is clarity. Even so, energy companies, including RWE, Eon, Suez, EDF, General Electric and Westinghouse, have already held talks with British Energy about using the sites of its eight nuclear power stations to build new reactors.
Combining the need to secure Britain's energy supply and reduce carbon emissions will require 55 billion in investment in the next few decades, according to Logica CMG. Exactly where the money will be spent hangs in the balance. One of the big issues is how the government plans to encourage operators to build cleaner but more expensive power stations.
To make the economics work, much will depend on the price of carbon and the credits power operators need to buy if they overshoot emissions targets. This falls under the EU emissions-trading scheme. If the EU cracks down and imposes higher penalties on"dirty" power producers, the price of carbon would in theory be pushed up. Centrica believes that carbon prices would need to double from the current, 19 euros per tonne to make a1 billion clean-coal project it is considering in Teesside economically viable."If the UK is to hit tough targets on reducing CO2 emissions, it is vital that the structure of the EU emissions-trading scheme is optimised to encourage the building of really low-emitting power generation stations," said Jake Ulrich, managing director of Centrica Energy.
Another key area is carbon capture; this involves trapping carbon-dioxide emissions from coal or gas-fired stations and storing them underground, probably in old North Sea oil reservoirs. Schemes include Centrica's Teesside proposal while BP is considering building a 500m power station in Peterhead, Aberdeenshire, in partnership with Scottish & Southern Electricity. However, power-industry executives claim that each project would need several hundreds of millions of pounds in government support -- far higher than the Treasury's financing plans.
Meanwhile, the government is under pressure to encourage desperately needed new gas-storage facilities. The UK has storage capacity to cover only two weeks of gas needs against two to three months for France and Germany. New objectives for renewable energy are also expected. The renewables obligation, where suppliers are bound to source a rising percentage of electricity supply from renewable sources, will be refocused to give more support to costlier offshore wind farms and biomass projects used to co-fire coal-powered stations.
Britain is already struggling to meet its ambitious target of supplying 10% of electricity needs from renewables by 2010 and 15% by 2015. Today's figure is about 2%."The goals are very ambitious and we are currently behind the curve. Investment would have to be accelerated very substantially to have any chance of meeting those targets," said Jayesh Parmar of Ernst & Young.
Those targets are likely to get even tougher. In a little-noticed detail, the EU agreed in March to make it compulsory for 20% of all energy used to come from renewable sources by 2020. As for the British consumer, the white paper will underline the need for smart meters, which measure exact energy use and cost, to be installed in people's homes. There is also support for microgeneration projects -- small-scale wind turbines, solar panels and gas devices to create electricity. However, the sums are tiny -- "12m pounds in grants is up for grabs this month from the Department of Trade and Industry, in addition to6.8m already paid out.
The big question is whether the UK can act fast enough to tackle the looming crisis. Even if the government's nuclear plans remain intact, it could be at least 10 years before the first new nuclear station is ready. A typical coal or gas-fired project could take between three and five years to construct.
Source
For history buffs, Dan Mandel has an excellent summary of how pro-Jewish Winston Churchill was -- despite much opposition from the "practical men" of his own cabinet and staff. My own comment about Churchill's politics is here.
GPs and pharmacists do not know enough about allergies, putting patients lives at risk, campaigners say. Allergy UK said training on the subject was extremely limited and many people were going undiagnosed. And the pressure group said even when diagnoses were made, medics often had nowhere to send patients as there were limited specialist allergy clinics.
GPs agree it is an issue that needs to be addressed, but pharmacists argue they already receive enough training. Allergic reactions are caused by substances in the environment known as allergens, of which the most common are pollen from trees and grasses, house dust mites, wasps, bees and food such as milk and eggs.
The number of people suffering allergic reactions has been rising over the last 15 years with over 6,000 people a year in England admitted to hospital. A quarter of these involve anaphylaxis - a sudden, severe and potentially life-threatening reaction, which can cause dangerous swelling of the lips or face and lead to breathing problems.
After listening to the hundreds of people contacting them, Allergy UK believes doctors and pharmacists are too slow to pick up allergies, leaving people vulnerable to severe reactions. A spokeswoman said: "Doctors and other health professionals get little training about dealing with allergies. "It means patients are being put at risk."
The charity also criticised the lack of specialist allergy clinics. Many hospitals have some kind of service, but there are just six clinics in the country which deal with all types of allergy. The charity is planning to launch a website for health professionals giving information about allergies and the common symptoms. They are also offering training on allergies.
Professor Mayur Lakhani, chairman of the Royal College of GPs, said: "Allergies must be taken seriously and we would like to see a stronger emphasis on training in allergies in both undergraduate and postgraduate medical training. "At the moment we don't have the facilities to adequately investigate, manage and treat patients with allergies and we would like to see a programme of national action implemented in primary care."
But the Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain rejected the idea that pharmacists were not trained enough.
A spokeswoman said: "Pharmacists receive five years education and training, a large focus of which is on allergy."
Source
White pupils in British urban schools are failing academically: why?
Are white working class families the new victims?
In a season similar to this 30 years ago, British educationalists were preoccupied with something referred to as "the great schools debate", in which the urban comprehensive was placed under scrutiny. When the media got wind of this, one particular television crew was dispatched to the school I attended in south east London, having decided it was the epitome of an underachieving, inherently multi-racial school within a poor and neglected postcode. The documentary that emerged - Our School and Hard Times - revealed the literacy of teenage pupils was dramatically below par, truancy was high, and hope was at an all time low.
The sixties outakes on the teaching staff were steeped in theories of social engineering and hinted to the camera that surroundings and social class rather than the pupils themselves, or teaching methods, were responsible. It was an argument that appears to have been around since Aristotle was a lad, and served its purpose until the issue of academic underachievement shifted from social class to race. This occurred when it emerged that the poor performance of black pupils - notably boys - was disproportionate to the size of this particular minority.
Thirty years on, and with the new century in its infancy, the poor academic achievement of white pupils in urban schools is becoming an issue. And even additives and E-numbers can't take the flak for this one. More significantly, it's the ethnicity of this group rather than - solely - social class that is relative.
Today, London's Business and Design Centre plays host to a conference devoted to tackling the issue of white underachievement. It brings together figures said to be experts in this field, and is organized by Cambridge Education Associates. In Islington, the CEA has had some success in addressing the poor academic levels of black pupils. By shifting the focus to this trend among white pupils, and largely in urban schools in which these are the minority, the organisers are showing a nerve that is absent elsewhere.
This issue of "white underachievement" has risen to the fore sporadically over the last couple of years, but with little response or action taken. The TES previously released a report on the issue ("white working class pupils have less mobility and employment opportunities than the children of immigrants who moved to the UK in the 1960s"); the Social Policy Group, the think tank established by former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith, published its own research last year. The latter revealed that for the first time white working class boys were falling behind their black and Asian contemporaries.
Bad parenting was flagged up as the key culprit, with the high level of success of pupils from more family-based, insular, Chinese and Asian communities cited as the standard of attainment to aim for. If the response of those present at this day-long conference mimics that of the teaching staff at my own secondary school back in the punk spring of 1977, you can bet that the short-sightedness and fear around modern racial etiquette is responsible. With poor performance of black pupils the burden of blame is apportioned to those post-Macpherson fallbacks institutional racism or "unwitting prejudice". In the case of white pupils, racism can't by cited as a reason or excuse any more than the industrial revolution or the age of the child chimney sweep. However, were this any other ethnic group, cultural alienation, lack of high-profile role models and its derogatory portrayal within the media would be brought into the proceedings.
Therefore there might be an argument to suggest the fact that urban white working class communities have endured more change, dislocation and upheaval than any other over the last 40 years, added to the racial and classcist slurs targeted regularly at this group by the press, might have some small part to play. But the greater responsibility for what is very much a 21st century trend might rest with the cult of multiculturalism.
This is alluded to within the research to be revealed at Monday's conference and where the notion of nerve comes in: "in dialogues about diversity, white ethnicity and social class is often rendered invisible and as such is not included in studies of the diverse landscape of British culture". In short, the communities that have been most altered in order to create a multi-racial society and accommodate multiculturalism have been airbrushed from any discussion or literature on the subject.
By recognising this the CEA might not have the answers on why young white urbanites are getting bad exam results, but it does highlight the fault-lines in a modern "inclusive" culture that exiles them. This in itself says more about the myth of multiculturalism than secondary education: it's one thing to build a vision on a myth, it's another to build it on a lie
Source
New evidence that British blacks really are madder
Three years ago an official inquiry into the treatment of black people within Britain's mental health services concluded that the system was riddled with institutional racism and blamed the Department of Health for ignoring what it called "this festering abscess... a blot upon the good name of the NHS".
But now senior psychiatrists, some themselves from ethnic minorities, are hitting back, arguing that labelling psychiatric services as racist is both wrong and counter-productive. Professor Swaran Singh, a consultant based in Birmingham says, "the high rates of psychosis and the high rates of detention are not a result of racism", he insists.
The experiences of black people in mental health services are undoubtedly shocking: black men up to 18 times more likely to be diagnosed with psychotic illness than whites and four times more likely to find themselves locked up under the Mental Health Act. Understandably, for many within the black community the figures are powerful evidence that services are profoundly racist.
Professor Singh's view has seen him accused of setting psychiatry back 20 years, but he is adamant. He says the term "institutional racism" damages the very people it purports to help and "is erroneous and too simplistic an explanation for ethnic differences. What it does is it creates a wall of mistrust between between service users and service providers."
But in the last few months, research by the Institute of Psychiatry in London has turned the argument on its head. The largest-ever study of psychosis tested the theory that psychiatrists wittingly or unwittingly allowed their clinical judgment to be influenced by the colour of their patients' skin. Researchers removed the ethnicity of a patient from their notes and asked a doctor to assess them. What they found was that psychosis was still diagnosed nine times more often in black people from the Caribbean - almost exactly the same rate as their presence within mental health services.
Professor Robin Murray from the Institute says the evidence is remarkable. "We have pretty well excluded the possibility that this is a result of misdiagnosis", he says. In fact, the results suggested the opposite. "Psychiatrists in the UK are less likely to diagnose psychosis in somebody who is black than white with the same symptoms", argues Professor Murray.
The real explanation for so many more black people in mental health services, it is claimed, is that they suffer from higher levels of mental illness. The reasons for that are thought to be social: fractured families, exclusion, poor education, unemployment and cannabis use - all problems which particularly affect the black community.
Research also came up with an explanation for the higher rates of detention under the Mental Health Act. Black people are twice as likely as white patients to be referred to a psychiatrist by the police or a court rather than their GP. In other words, black patients arrive in the system when their condition is much more serious, requiring their detention. According to some psychiatrists, the consequence of wrongly blaming racism for black people's high representation in mental services is that the real causes of mental ill health in the black community are ignored.
Just as concerning is the claim that some dangerously ill black patients are discharged into the community because white mental health tribunals are worried they may be accused of racism. Dr Shubulade Smith, a consultant psychiatrist at the world-famous Maudsley Hospital in South London says an all-white panel wouldn't listen to her arguments about one of her black patients. "He was really at risk getting hurt because of the illness that he had, and the tribunal discharged him", she says. "I don't know what was going on in their minds other than they were too scared of thinking that they might be being racist towards him."
Dr Smith, herself a black woman, believes psychiatry needs to focus less on internal racism and more on helping deal with the real causes of mental illness out in the community. "Let's do something about those factors that increase the likelihood of people becoming unwell in this way," she says. "Let's do something about that."
Source
Immigration anger getting recognition in Britain
Established British families should be given social housing even if they need it less than new immigrants, a government minister said yesterday. Margaret Hodge said that indigenous families' "legitimate sense of entitlement" should be taken into account in deciding who was housed. Ms Hodge, an Industry Minister, has called before for the Government to do more to counter the resentments created by immigration.
Yesterday she suggested that national insurance contributions could be used as part of a points system of housing allocation. She said the Government currently "prioritised the needs of an individual migrant family over the entitlement that others feel they have to resources in the community". She added: "So a recently arrived family with four or five children living in a damp and overcrowded privately-rented flat with the children suffering from asthma will usually get priority over a family with less housing need who have lived in the area for three generations and are stuck at home with the grandparents."
Hazel Blears, Labour's chair-woman and a candidate for deputy leader, agreed that ministers had to do more to convince people that the system was equitable. "I think that people in this country have a real sense of fairness. They are prepared to do their bit but they want to know the system actually works for them. So I do think we need to tackle these tough issues."
However, Nancy Kelly, of the Refugee Council, a campaigning group, said that Ms Hodge was aping the BNP. "The way to counter some of the views that are put forward by the far-right parties is not by trying to follow their lead." Ms Kelly said that asylum-seekers were not entitled to council housing and arrivals from new EU states had restricted access to benefits. "People who are recognised as refugees are entitled to council housing but on exactly the same basis a UK national, on the basis of need," she said.
Ms Hodge, an immigrant herself - she was born in Egypt to Jewish refugee parents - said that she had seen many voters in her Barking constituency turn to the BNP because of concerns over housing allocations. She said a transparent points system, giving more weight to length of residence, citizenship and national insurance contributions, could be a better way of allocating housing.
Writing in The Observer, she said that there was widespread concern about the changing face of Britain, and people needed to be reassured. "We should look at policies where the legitimate sense of entitlement felt by the indigenous family overrides the legitimate need demonstrated by the new migrants. We must address these difficult questions."
Damian Green, the Conservative immigration spokesman, said that Ms Hodge's comments acknowledged the Government's "long-term failure" to control immigration. Andrew Stunell, the Liberal Democrat local government spokesman, said that the Government was continuing to sell council houses although there were 1« million families on the council housing waiting list.
Source
FEARS OVER LOOMING ENERGY CRISIS IN UK
Across Britain, cities are plunged into darkness. In London, the Underground grinds to a halt, leaving panicked commuters stranded in oppressively hot carriages. In office blocks, lifts stop operating and the air-conditioning shuts down. Employees swelter in stifling conditions. This is not the postapocalyptic vision of some film-maker, but a realistic scenario as Britain grapples with a looming energy crisis.
The statistics are frightening. In only eight years, demand for energy could outstrip supply by 23% at peak times, according to a study by the consultant Logica CMG. The loss to the economy could be 108 billion each year."The idea of the lights going out is not a fantasy. People seem to accept that security of energy supply is a right. It is not. The industry will have to work hard to maintain supply and for that we need a clear framework," said Simon Skillings, director of strategy and energy policy at Eon UK, Britain's largest integrated energy company.
This Wednesday, the government's delayed energy white paper will attempt to provide some answers. It is a crucial document that will determine whether Britain can deliver on its pledge to slash carbon emissions by 20% from 1990 levels by 2020. The white paper will seek to tackle a host of tough issues -- from nuclear power to energy efficiency, renewable power sources and clean-fuel projects. A planning white paper, due tomorrow, is also seen as crucial after a number of energy projects have been delayed for years or slapped down by local authorities.
The scale of the challenge is immense. By 2015, Britain's generating capacity could be cut by a third as ageing coal and nuclear power stations are closed. Britain is also moving from being self-sufficient in oil and gas as North Sea production declines. In 2005, the UK became a net importer of gas. By 2010, imports could account for 40% of British gas needs; by 2020, 80% to 90%.
The most contentious area is likely to be nuclear power. Nuclear reactors account for about 20% of Britain's electricity, but this will shrink to 6% in 20 years as ageing plants are closed down. By 2023, only Sizewell B could be in operation. Already controversial, the government's commitment to building new nuclear power stations became even more sensitive when the High Court agreed with the environmental lobby group Greenpeace that the consultation process was"seriously flawed".
The white paper is expected to give guidance on how the government would like to see new reactors built, but will have to stress that any decision will depend on a new, more detailed, consultation round. What the energy industry wants is clarity. Even so, energy companies, including RWE, Eon, Suez, EDF, General Electric and Westinghouse, have already held talks with British Energy about using the sites of its eight nuclear power stations to build new reactors.
Combining the need to secure Britain's energy supply and reduce carbon emissions will require 55 billion in investment in the next few decades, according to Logica CMG. Exactly where the money will be spent hangs in the balance. One of the big issues is how the government plans to encourage operators to build cleaner but more expensive power stations.
To make the economics work, much will depend on the price of carbon and the credits power operators need to buy if they overshoot emissions targets. This falls under the EU emissions-trading scheme. If the EU cracks down and imposes higher penalties on"dirty" power producers, the price of carbon would in theory be pushed up. Centrica believes that carbon prices would need to double from the current, 19 euros per tonne to make a1 billion clean-coal project it is considering in Teesside economically viable."If the UK is to hit tough targets on reducing CO2 emissions, it is vital that the structure of the EU emissions-trading scheme is optimised to encourage the building of really low-emitting power generation stations," said Jake Ulrich, managing director of Centrica Energy.
Another key area is carbon capture; this involves trapping carbon-dioxide emissions from coal or gas-fired stations and storing them underground, probably in old North Sea oil reservoirs. Schemes include Centrica's Teesside proposal while BP is considering building a 500m power station in Peterhead, Aberdeenshire, in partnership with Scottish & Southern Electricity. However, power-industry executives claim that each project would need several hundreds of millions of pounds in government support -- far higher than the Treasury's financing plans.
Meanwhile, the government is under pressure to encourage desperately needed new gas-storage facilities. The UK has storage capacity to cover only two weeks of gas needs against two to three months for France and Germany. New objectives for renewable energy are also expected. The renewables obligation, where suppliers are bound to source a rising percentage of electricity supply from renewable sources, will be refocused to give more support to costlier offshore wind farms and biomass projects used to co-fire coal-powered stations.
Britain is already struggling to meet its ambitious target of supplying 10% of electricity needs from renewables by 2010 and 15% by 2015. Today's figure is about 2%."The goals are very ambitious and we are currently behind the curve. Investment would have to be accelerated very substantially to have any chance of meeting those targets," said Jayesh Parmar of Ernst & Young.
Those targets are likely to get even tougher. In a little-noticed detail, the EU agreed in March to make it compulsory for 20% of all energy used to come from renewable sources by 2020. As for the British consumer, the white paper will underline the need for smart meters, which measure exact energy use and cost, to be installed in people's homes. There is also support for microgeneration projects -- small-scale wind turbines, solar panels and gas devices to create electricity. However, the sums are tiny -- "12m pounds in grants is up for grabs this month from the Department of Trade and Industry, in addition to6.8m already paid out.
The big question is whether the UK can act fast enough to tackle the looming crisis. Even if the government's nuclear plans remain intact, it could be at least 10 years before the first new nuclear station is ready. A typical coal or gas-fired project could take between three and five years to construct.
Source
For history buffs, Dan Mandel has an excellent summary of how pro-Jewish Winston Churchill was -- despite much opposition from the "practical men" of his own cabinet and staff. My own comment about Churchill's politics is here.
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
Incredible Greenie intrusiveness in Britain
Ministers want a slop bucket for food waste to be placed in every kitchen under their latest plan to generate green electricity. Instead of throwing out scraps, households would be required to store them separately for at least a week until they are collected by recycling teams. The rules will oblige some homes to sort rubbish into five containers - or potentially risk fines. Some councils already insist on separating glass, metal, paper and nonrecyclable refuse.
David Miliband, the environment secretary, is expected to unveil the scheme this week as part of the government's waste strategy. Food accounts for about a fifth of domestic waste and releases greenhouse gases when dumped in landfill. Now local authorities are set to be given the power to introduce schemes whereby methane generated by decomposing food will instead be trapped and used to generate electricity.
The proposal is part of a wider shake-up of Britain's waste collection. The government also plans to give councils the power to introduce "pay per throw" charges, levied according to the weight of rubbish. Households would not be charged for recycled waste. During the recent council elections there was a backlash in some areas against the scrapping of weekly collections. Fortnightly collections were blamed for causing infestations of vermin.
However, advocates of recycled kitchen waste insist that sealed containers will provide a hygienic solution. The idea was inspired by the government's waste body, Wrap, which found that homes across Britain waste a total of 3.3m tons of food a year. He is also likely to outline a plan for giant incinerators to burn more than 20% of rubbish that cannot be recycled. This too would be used to generate energy.
Source
The A-word Now Forbidden in Britain
We read:
A defender of the indefensible
The chairman of the British Medical Association, James Johnson, has resigned after a letter he wrote to The Times defending the failed medical application system caused widespread fury and led to a number of doctors resigning from the BMA in protest. Mr Johnson, a surgeon, wrote yesterday to the BMA tendering his resignation. “My letter caused an absolute furore,” he admitted. But he was unrepentant about the letter, signed jointly with Dame Carol Black, which defended the Chief Medical Officer, Sir Liam Donaldson, regarded as the chief architect of the new medical training system.
Since the letter appeared on Wednesday, in response to one from Professor Morris Brown of Cambridge University and colleagues, a wave of anger has engulfed Mr Johnson. There has been no opportunity for the Council of the BMA, which he chairs, to meet since the letter appeared but opinions expressed on medical websites and in Times Online made clear that he had lost support. On Times Online there were by early yesterday afternoon 496 reponses to the letter, universally critical of Mr Johnson and Dame Carol, who is chair of the Academy of the Medical Royal Colleges. Many called on them both to resign.
The day after the letter appeared, a meeting of the Scottish hospital consultants condemned it unanimously. Other comments on the website include one from Richard Sidebottom, a junior doctor from London, who says: “I see the BMA and the royal colleges as traitors to those they should be looking after.” Others say that the letter is “arrogant, deluded and out of touch” while Chris Twine, a junior doctor from Cardiff, says the views expressed in it are “totally at variance with those of doctors dealing with the Medical Training Application Service (MTAS) in any capacity”.
What appears to have caused the greatest offence is a sentence in which Mr Johnson and Dame Carol “restate our support for the Chief Medical Officer and his role in improving junior doctors’ training”. Yesterday Mr Johnson was unrepentant over his defence of Sir Liam. “He’s a civil servant, he can’t defend himself,” Mr Johnson said. But his view of Modernising Medical Careers (MMC), Sir Liam’s creation, is not shared by the bulk of junior doctors. Nor, apparently, is it shared by Dame Carol’s successor as President of the Royal College of Physicians, Ian Gilmore, who last week wrote an open letter to Patricia Hewitt, the Health Secretary, saying that MMC needed to be reconsidered along with the failed application system.
A member of the BMA Council said yesterday: “Jim’s position became untenable when his letter to The Timeswas published. He did not consult senior BMA colleagues before sending it, and the letter caused substantial damage to the reputation of the association.”
Mr Johnson told The Times yesterday that he had planned to give up office at this year’s Annual Delegate Meeting in Torquay next month. The council will be chaired in the meantime by Sam Everingham, the deputy chairman. A new chairman will be elected at Torquay. Mr Johnson’s is the third resignation prompted by the MTAS fiasco. Previously two officials at MMC, Professor Alan Crockard and Professor Shelley Heard, resigned in protest at how, in their view, the MMC process was being subverted by efforts to repair the damage done by the computer failure. The High Court has yet to give judgment on the case brought by RemedyUK, the junior doctors’ pressure group, against MTAS. That is expected on Wednesday.
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The British decay
Meanwhile, in London . I open this morning's papers to find that our next prime minister Gordon Brown's first policy announcement is that he intends to build 5 environmentally-friendly `eco-towns' which are totally self sufficient in energy generated by solar and wind power.
One would have thought that Brown would have other priorities on taking over from Tony Blair at Number 10. Immigration is out of control, with bogus asylum seekers, East European ex-cons and sex offenders failing to `report back' to the immigration authorities after their initial processing on arrival. (Last month some minister came up with the daft proposal to serve these people deportation notices by SMS text!). Perhaps linked to that problem is the staggering leap in gun crime and knifings in our streets. (Jewish areas have had to enlist private security to cope with a crime wave of 30 armed raids on Jewish homes in recent weeks.) And perhaps linked to both those problems is that this country has also run out of prison cells. This means that criminals are being let out early to make way for new offenders who may expect even earlier parole as the crime wave rises even higher. All of which goes to less deterrence to criminals who are no longer afraid of being caught.
This of course assumes that the baddies are actually caught. But that's increasingly unlikely since the government has been closing police stations at breakneck speed as if it were some important target. Over 25% of local police stations have disappeared in the last 10 years.
And let's not forget that the erosion of border controls and policing is not just attracting criminals. Even more serious is the infiltration of Islamic terrorists and the free movement of the British-born Asian youths they have incited to mass killing on our streets and transit systems. The security services have admitted to the existence of dozens of terror cells under various levels of investigation. One must wonder how many may have escaped their attention.
But despite all of this, the leaders of the two biggest political parties in the UK are battling to save the planet. The vital question is: which party offers the smallest carbon footprint? Which is why I am more likely to find a council recycling inspector checking my garbage bin than a police officer checking my street.
Whilst our cuddly leaders fret over carbon and ozone, evil despots are busy with other elements in the Periodic Table. Beneath schools and hospitals in Iran, hundreds of German-built centrifuges are humming away 24/7 in reinforced bunkers, refining a new final solution to the Jewish Problem and the means to enslave the West by nuclear blackmail. Let's stop worrying about the planet and start worrying about ourselves.
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More British craziness -- BBQ police
The Primrose Hill community centre in north London has been hosting a popular annual summer festival for the past 30 years. Yet this year, in order to qualify for the 400 pound grant from Camden Council that helps to make the festival a reality, the centre is having to jump through some pretty strange hoops.
The centre is being asked to fulfil a string of new requirements. These include making sure that five per cent of festivalgoers fill in a questionnaire to say whether they enjoyed themselves; inviting `under-represented groups' to participate as stall-holders or performers; hiring only professional caterers who must be registered with their local authority; making sure all staff, artists and volunteers have a Criminal Records Bureau (CRB) check to ensure they do not have a history of harming children; and using only a gas barbeque. Under no circumstances may the Primrose Hill community festival use their traditional coal barbeque, even though it has not caused any accidents over the past three decades.
Alongside New Britain's speech police, health-and-safety police and ethnic quotas police we can now add the Barbecue Police: council officials whose job it is to ensure that only the right kind of barbecue is used in the right kind of way by the right kind of people. Another bit of fun goes up in smoke.
More here
A toxic view of working-class parents
Commentators heaped praise on Sue Palmer's Toxic Childhood. Didn't they spot its poisonous arguments about a 'dead-eyed', over-breeding underclass?
I put off reading Sue Palmer's "Toxic Childhood: How the Modern World is Damaging Our Children and What We Can Do About It" for as long as I could. But the book, which was held up as a great insight into the state of childhood today by numerous public figures, just kept on coming up.
First published in 2006, the book got good reviews everywhere. And there was that letter to the government, published in the Daily Telegraph and signed by the Archbishop of Canterbury and a hundred or so others who agree that so-called junk culture is `poisoning our children'. Indeed, Palmer could hardly have found a finer club of supporters; it included former children's laureate Anne Fine and Marion Dowling, president of the British Association of Early Childhood Education.
I was mainly put off by the book because the title bothered me. Where did this idea come from, that we're all being poisoned? The book seems to issue a challenge; first you de-toxed your diet, now it's time to de-tox your children. And once the kids are de-toxed, you still won't be able to take it easy because you'll also have to de-tox your home (the Wi-Fi is scrambling your brains, in case you didn't know). I even heard the keynote speaker at a leading early years conference a few years ago telling everyone to get their houses rewired to avoid damaging their children with electrical currents running beneath their bedrooms. Strangely, all those concerned with such dangers neglect to mention any of the real cases of toxicity today. To take just one example, the thousands of children in the developing world poisoned by the use of glycol to sweeten counterfeit medicines never even get a mention.
Once I got round to reading the book, I found that it mostly gives perfectly good, straightforward analyses and advice about the state of childhood today. Yet it left me feeling I had been held up somewhere rather unpleasant for a few hours. Underneath all the nice stuff about the importance of good fresh food, outdoor play and parents giving time, love and attention to their children, there is a nasty stench. Do right by your children, the book seems to say, but at the same time beware the savage children of the underclass - the `feral' kids who `don't have children's faces - they're pinched and angry with dead eyes'.
So you slip quickly from the spurious notion that there is something called `toxic childhood syndrome' (both `toxic' and `syndrome' have proper medical definitions, but here they are used as pseudo-medical jargon) to some far more familiar ideas. Parent-bashing by teachers, for example: the problems in school today, the argument goes, are basically the fault of an underclass of parents. What else would you expect from them - `deprived, uneducated, often scarcely more than children themselves.often junkies, alcoholics, involved in crime'?
This group of parents is seen as a lot of feckless infants. They eat the wrong food, they don't take their children out on the right trips to broaden their horizons - they don't even talk properly. There is even a dire warning about the `soaring' birth rate of these have-nots, whilst the `educated classes' fail to reproduce in comparable numbers. The reader is thus softened up for the idea that the state must step in and `detoxify other people's children' - or else there will be `serious civil unrest within a generation'.
Palmer's language is eloquently nasty. She writes about children in poor neighbourhoods who are `huge, heavily-built and lumbering', and `teenage mums devouring taxpayers' money'. It's perfectly pitched to upset and even terrify anyone who is trying their best to bring up their children well.
Palmer is more than matched by the teachers she approvingly quotes - but are these teachers always right when they blame everyone else for children's apparently poor development? If the state of childhood really is as dire as Toxic Childhood makes it out to be, then don't schools play any part in this? The image of a group of inner-city headteachers sitting around with Palmer telling her that `something really awful will happen soon' makes me think it's time to get the hysteria under control and get a grip. What hope can anyone hold for children's education and moral growth in schools if the headteachers are so cynical and brutalised?
This is not to say that Toxic Childhood is without its insights, which come from careful research and are expressed with clarity and verve. I think that Palmer is right to identify one of the fundamental problems with the nature of childhood today: society's increasing sense of fearfulness about children. Many parents are afraid to set limits and control their children's behaviour. Most of us are afraid to let our children play outdoors. Neighbours and shopkeepers are afraid to intervene to stop bad behaviour. Palmer captures this hopeless fearfulness well.
But in the end, Toxic Childhood just generates even more fear - fear for one's own children, laced with terror about other people's. It addresses the problem that parents aren't feeling authoritative, and then suggests that this should be remedied by taking away even more of their responsibility and giving it to the state. It addresses the problem of relationships between schools and families, by indulging in the sort of parent-bashing that has always characterised the staffrooms of the worst schools I have worked in or visited.
Rather than putting forward an inspiring vision of childhood, for all children, Toxic Childhood stirs up a fear of the basest kind - that other people's children are sub-human. Their existence today is nothing more than a prediction of savagery and mindless civil unrest in the future. It is an unashamedly insular book, obsessing over the supposed toxicity of texting, instant messaging and pre-teen fashion, whilst ignoring the genuine mass poisonings experienced every day by poor children around the world.
Anyone who writes about a fast-breeding, barely-human underclass that will cause the collapse of society, and then argues that we need a more interventionist and authoritarian state, is leading us somewhere we've already (and only recently) been in western Europe. We need to pause for a moment's thought.
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WiFi scare: Just another bureaucrat defending his patch and the media looking for scares
No evidence of safety will ever suffice for some in this area but we have of course noted the huge upsurge of brain cancer since a billion people got cellphones [/satire]
Sir William Stewart, chairman of the Health Protection Agency, has called for a review of the health risks of wireless technology after an investigation into its effects on children. The BBC’s investigative programme Panorama claims that wi-fi networks in schools can give off three times as much signal radiation as phone masts. Current government advice says that phone masts should not be sited near schools without consulting parents and teachers, because children are thought to be more vulnerable to radio-frequency radiation.
The programme-makers measured radiation levels from a wi-fi-enabled laptop in a classroom in Norwich. It found that the signal strength was three times higher than that of a typical phone mast. Wi-fi, or wireless fidelity, allows a computer user to connect to the internet at broadband speeds without cables. More than two thirds of secondary schools and nearly half of primary schools have wi-fi. Panoramaspoke to nearly 50 schools and only one had been alerted to possible health risks. Others had been told that there was no risk.The Government says that wi-fi poses no health risks, citing advice from the World Health Organisation.
In 2000 Sir William produced a report on the impact of mobile phone masts on health. He found that: “There may be changes, for example in cognitive function . . . There were some indications that there may be cancer inductions . . . There was some molecular biology changes within the cell. . . ”
The levels of radiation found in the Norwich classroom were 600 times lower than the levels deemed dangerous by the Government. It uses data from the International Commission on NonIonizing Radiation Protection, which bases exposure limits on a thermal effect. In other words, the radiation has to be strong enough to cause a heat effect before it is restricted. Dr Olle Johansson, of the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, has carried out experiments on radiation similar to or lower than wi-fi and found biological implications. Asked if the commission was right to set limits based on thermal effect, he said: “That’s just rubbish. You cannot put emphasis on such guidelines.”
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The current British immigration scene
"The people here are wonderful," says Jenny Sturgeon, a white Englishwoman who has lived in Slough for 30 years. "And the ethnic mix is wonderful. It's how the country should be. But we get a huge number of people coming in from all ethnic groups. A shortage of money can lead to tensions. The government has a lot to answer for." The town of Slough, which lies outside the M25 near Heathrow, has the greatest ethnic mix in the UK outside London. By comparison, even Leicester and Coventry seem blandly uniform.
Take Malinka, a Polish deli near the library. The large majority of shoppers are Polish but nonPoles go there too. One who enters to buy sausages while I'm there is Stephen Cordeiro, a Portuguese-Asian who was born in Kenya. And I notice that in the deli's window, among the job ads in Polish for nannies, waiting staff and handymen, that there's a card written in English, offering the services of an "African hair stylist".
Surveys carried out by the council show that a quarter of the town's businesses with more than 10 employees use the new migrant workforce because - businesses reported - they brought higher productivity and a better work ethic than indigenous workers. But inevitably there are tensions. One Polish woman, Aneta Kania, says she had never seen such diversity till she came to Slough. "I was very shocked by the mix. At first I thought it was a bit scary." Another Polish woman, an economist by training, told me darkly that she had recently been working in retail "for an Indian" but had stopped doing so "because they don't respect you".
A Sikh with a strong Indian accent lent credence to what that Polish woman said when he told me "there are too many immigrants in Slough". Polish drivers with no car insurance jump red lights, he muttered. And last week he'd been bothered by Bulgarians ringing his doorbell to beg for money.
Ted Cantle, who conducted the official inquiry into the cause of riots in Bradford, Burnley and Oldham in 2001, believes that migration to the UK can bring real benefits. "But building cohesive communities to harness the benefits long term takes resources. "It is important that councils like Slough are funded correctly for their population size and complexity to make sure they continue community cohesion work," he says. "Com-munity tensions are sometimes caused by the perception of competition between groups over resources and councils have to be able to demonstrate this is not the case."
Perhaps with that in mind, Slough last week formally protested to the Treasury that it had been severely underfunded because government statistics underestimated the number of immigrants coming to the town. Richard Stokes, leader of the council, describes official statistics as "not fit for purpose". "Estimates have failed to keep pace with what is happening on the ground and public services are suffering as a consequence," he says. "The migrants that come to Slough are hard-working and bring great benefit to the local economy but the council remains severely underfunded because of these poor statistics."
Andrew Blake-Herbert, Slough's strategic director for finance and property, says the council faces a 15m pound shortfall. It has managed not to cut crucial services but cannot make necessary improvements in areas such as children's services and recycling.
According to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), Slough experienced the ninth-fastest population increase of any local authority in the country between 1991 and 2001. But since then, the ONS contends, the town's population has declined by 3.3%, to a total of 117,600. Slough's own data suggests the total is nearer 130,000. To support that figure, the council puts forward an impressive array of evidence. It points to substantial increases in new housing, the rapid rise in house prices, the increasing numbers of households from which the council tax is collected, the high fertility rate among women in Slough (66 births per 1,000 women, compared with 54 in the country as a whole) and even a substantial increase in the amount of sewage flowing out of town.
Visiting Slough last week, I found plenty more evidence that the migrant population is getting bigger. I talked to officials, business figures, and residents from across the entire community - pale-skinned and dark, European, African and Asian. To start, I visited the busy road near Slough's massive trading estate - the largest in Europe - where coaches from Poland stop illegally to disgorge new arrivals. And I talked to a resident who watches that happen twice a day, sometimes more.
Tadeusz Chruscik is Polish but he's been living here since 1942, having served in the Polish Air Force. (Some 130,000 Poles settled in Britain during and after the war.) He says he's met some people who get off the coach without the slightest idea where to go, having got on after having too much to drink.
The sheer numbers arriving here simply can't be housed properly. The council is paid by central government to ensure that three-storey houses are not overcrowded but lacks the funds to check buildings with only two storeys. As a result, many migrants endure dangerously crowded conditions. Colin Rodgers, manager of the estate agency B Simmons & Son, says: "I've seen places where there are three beds in the lounge and three in the dining room. " I've also heard stories, from quite believable sources, about people using those beds in shifts."
Property, it hardly needs adding, has become unaffordable to many people. Baber Zafar is 21 and has lived in Slough all his life. In the town square, Zafar says immigrants have put so much pressure on house prices that he is moving to Spain. By a grim irony, the rising property market recently resulted in the closure of Slough's immigration counselling centre. It has now moved to Southall, west London, explains one of the counsellors, Qazi Anisud-din, because rising rents in Slough made the old premises unaffordable.
Of course, the borough council does what it can. In fact, it does more than most. In the past 18 months it has placed in schools some 900 children who arrived in Slough from overseas. In other towns, they might have had to wait weeks or months to be placed, but Slough established a special assessment centre to speed the process. But it's slow work: the centre can take only eight children a week. Last year two primary schools accepted 50 Polish children and 60 Somalis in just one term.
Not everyone welcomes the flood of pupils for whom spoken English is not easy. Aneta Kania sends her daughter to St Anthony's Roman Catholic school but says there are so many other Polish children there that seven-year-old Paulina is making slow progress in English. (Kania has poor English herself. Though trained as a nurse, she's obliged to work as a cleaner until her language skills improve. What with bringing up a child on her own, and her job, she finds it hard to fit in the lessons.) Another pioneering service set up by Slough council is devoted to dealing with Roma migrants who have been arriving by the hundreds since Romania joined the European Union in January.
Eighty-eight unaccompanied Roma children have asked for support from the town's children's services. Six have babies of their own, and seven are pregnant. To deal with these Roma children, Slough has set up a specialist team, at a cost of œ150,000 since January.
Fiona Mactaggart, Slough's MP and a former minister in the Home Office, says the flawed calculations "will not do". And the ONS itself recognises the shortcomings of its statistics. Karen Dunnell, the national statistician, wrote in May 2006: "There is now a broad recognition that available estimates of migrant numbers are inadequate for managing the economy, policies and services." Even the Poles don't relish the arrival of yet more Poles. Kania, the nurse who came to Slough just 18 months ago, says she dreads June, July and August because that's when Polish students come here for summer jobs. "There are too many people in Slough already," she says.
The legal tangle
Some days ago a newspaper published a photograph of 21 members of a Roma family. Apparently there are another 80, all relatives and all newly arrived since Romania joined the EU in January. A social worker in Slough explained she had nine teenage Roma girls, several of whom were pregnant, in her care. In theory, Romanians and Bulgarians are subject to a special regime for a transitional period of up to seven years. They can only come here to work legally if they are highly skilled, have been granted a work permit or come under a special quota for temporary agricultural workers. But there are no checks on the borders. They only have to show a valid ID card and walk in and they are entitled to stay as visitors for up to three months.
Back to our pregnant teenagers. Why can they not be sent home? The answer lies in a tangled web of legal obligations. Successive children acts have placed an obligation on local authorities to care for children in need. The Race Relations Act 1976 makes it unlawful to discriminate on the grounds of race or nationality; foreign children have to be treated as British. As for access to the NHS, pregnancy is regarded (rightly) as a medical emergency so treatment is automatic.
On top of that, the Free Movement Directive which came into force last year severely restricts the government's ability to expel EU nationals even if they have committed a crime. In expanding the EU to countries which are far poorer than our own, we have stumbled into a potential crisis. The free movement of labour has set in hand movements of workers to Britain on a greater scale than anticipated. At the same time "harmonisation" of social security has placed obligations on EU governments to provide benefits in the richer countries that greatly exceed wages in the poorer ones.
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THE RIGHT TO BE WRONG
An attempt to block the DVD release of The Great Global Warming Swindle displays contempt for free speech -- says this "Guardian" writer
A recent reaction to a climate change denial documentary broadcast on primetime TV displays contempt for free speech and political ineptitude. Bob Ward, a former press officer at the Royal Society, has published an open letter to Martin Durkin, maker of a documentary film broadcast recently on Channel 4 television that denies human influence on climate change. The letter is signed by a number of climate scientists and other academics with an interest in climate change.
I have no time for Durkin or his film, but take issue with Ward's letter, which, as reported by David Adam in the Guardian, demands that the DVD of Durkin's documentary be either withdrawn or corrected of its scientific errors. The open letter states that " ... it is in the public interest for adequate quality control to be exercised over information that is disseminated to the public to ensure that it does not include major misrepresentations of the scientific evidence and interpretations of it by researchers."
If Durkin's Great Global Warming Swindle DVD should be withdrawn or corrected, what about Al Gore's hyperbolic An Inconvenient Truth, soon to be distributed to all schools in England courtesy of Her Majesty's government? Ward complains that Wag TV, the production company responsible for Durkin's film, will not be bound by any Ofcom ruling against Channel 4. Channel 4 is restricted by a code of conduct when it comes to what may be broadcast, but Wag TV as an independent, commercial entity is free to distribute the DVD, and I'm not sure how it could be otherwise.
We are all of us surrounded by wild claims, ideological nonsense, misrepresentations and downright lies. But it is no business of the state, or assemblies of the scientific great and good, to pronounce on what may or may not be published. So challenge Durkin and show him up as the dissembler he undoubtedly is. But win the battle by force of argument. The data are on the side of those arguing that human beings are largely responsible for current climate change, and do not require backing up with bullying tactics.
Durkin is reported by Raphael Satter in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer to have acknowledged two scientific errors, and said that these will be corrected in the DVD. That is an astute move by Durkin, but Ward et al demand that all the errors be removed, and then declare that if this were done, the documentary would fall to pieces.
I'm not so sure about this. Durkin could remove all the blatant scientific errors, and still make a superficial case based on issues that are not clear-cut, and over which there remains some scholarly debate. Reality is ever thus, yet given the increasing predictive power of climate models backed by hard data, the majority view of climate change is the only credible one to take.
But try explaining that to a mass audience. It can and should be done, but not in the combative rhetorical style beloved of the media and a number of scientific protagonists. Ward is quoted in Satter's article as saying: "Free speech does not extend to misleading the public by making factually inaccurate statements. Somebody has to stand up for the public interest here."
Strong stuff, but very, very wrong. Free speech does indeed extend to coming out with any old rubbish, and people - even highly intelligent ones - frequently do. Others are free to point out factual errors, and in doing so attempt to convince the masses of the truth. Like Bob Ward, I complained to the broadcasting regulator about Durkin's documentary. I did so not because I object to the line taken by Durkin, but rather because the filmmaker offered no space for opinions contrary to his own. The documentary was pure polemic subsidised by the taxpayer.
But Ward is going much further than a complaint to Ofcom, both in his open letter and discussions surrounding it. Regarding the demand for "quality control", it is not clear who would be the adjudicators, and even if Ward et al are right about the science (I am convinced they are), this is not a proper way for scientists to behave.
My principal objection to Ward's open letter is that it shows contempt for free speech, and an unwarranted lack of confidence in the ability of the public to think critically. A secondary objection is that it displays political ineptitude, and may prove counterproductive.
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Come, friendly bombs, fall on Brown's eco-towns
With his plans to erect zero-carbon homes in zero-car suburbs, Britain's Gordon Brown builds on the Blairites' small-minded approach to housing
Britain's prime-minister-in-waiting, Gordon Brown, has announced that one of his first big initiatives will be to build `eco-towns' - that is, areas with new houses that emit little or no carbon, where there is little need for people to drive cars, and where the most a home-owner aspires to is to watch his electricity meter to ensure he isn't using up too much of the nation's energy. For all his claims to be bringing something `new' to Britain, Brown's small-scale and small-minded attitude to housing seems entirely in keeping with his predecessor's.
In the closing months of the Blair decade, Haringey Council in north London pushed through a remarkable innovation in housing policy. It wanted to check which residents were failing to claim grants to buy fuel. It also wanted to check which homes in Haringey lie empty. First and foremost, however, it wanted to indict all the local homes it deemed wasteful of energy. So the Council hired a plane, equipped it with a thermal imaging camera, and posted colour-coded street maps of the offending energy wasters on the web (1).
In terms of the direct intrusion of the government on the British house, the Blair decade has been remarkable. A recent pamphlet by the Centre for Policy Studies, a Thatcherite think-tank, could point to no fewer than 266 ways in which the state is able to enter people's homes (2). Indeed, Labour government minister Ruth Kelly's Department for Communities and Local Government (CLG), successor to John Prescott's Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (1997-2006), plans further controls. If parliament agrees, all houses in England and Wales will only ever get sold once the state rates them for their carbon emissions - from a disgusting `not environmentally friendly', rating 1 to 20, to a mystical `very environmentally friendly', rating 82 to 100 (3).
Just what physical units these ratings consist of, the new Energy Performance Certificates (EPCs) do not say. At the end of the Blair years, the CLG invokes the 2006 Stern report on climate change, which was commissioned by Gordon Brown, whenever it can; yet when some more basic science is required, Ruth Kelly's empire is silent.
Still, in a striking, therapeutic reversal of the Roman, adult commandment caveat emptor, Blair's infantilising doctrine of consumer protection has come to housing. Anyone out to sell a house in England and Wales will have to pay the state upwards of 600 pounds, just so buyers can receive mandatory Home Information Packs (HIPs), each containing an EPC, the title deeds and details of local searches.
In an Orwellian 2007, the government wants at least 7,500 Home Inspectors to knock on millions of British doors. The country now needs to build no fewer than five million new homes in the next decade (4). Instead, Haringey's spy-in-the-sky and the CLG's HIP approaches to housing confirm that displacement activities have triumphed in the Blair years.....
New Labour puts houses out of reach, but in your face
As Brown was forced to concede in statements over the weekend, Blair has left Britain with a crisis not just of housing supply, but also of affordability. The price of an average house in the UK has risen from œ77,531 in 1997 to a likely œ200,000 in 2008 (6). According to the Halifax, residential property is too expensive for people to buy in 70 per cent of British towns.
Along with first-time buyers, public sector workers - above all, nurses and firefighters - face the greatest difficulties in affording a home. Yet it is on public sector workers that much of the British economy, especially in the north of England and the devolved regions, now depends. As for those public sector workers who are searching the south of England, in vain, for property cheap enough to suit their pockets, things are now so bad that the conservative Financial Times recently came out in favour of paying such ill-starred individuals higher wages. The FT ridiculed Blair's schemes of houses built for `key workers', noting: `Those who are not eligible - young or low-paid workers in the private sector, academics, or the many key workers who cannot get into one of the subsidised schemes - are left with fewer, more expensive properties to buy, while existing homeowners prosper as the subsidies drive up prices.' (7)
Existing homeowners - the middle classes - have indeed prospered from Blair's divisive housing policies; indeed that was always a deliberate strategy on his part. Similarly, there have been only incremental annual increases in the building of new dwellings. In 1997/8, just 180,566 new homes were built in Great Britain, only for the total to go almost straight down until 2001/2. By 2005/6, the pick-up was to just 196,307. That amounted to a rise in housing output of less than nine per cent over eight years (8).
New Labour and the propertied classes conspire with rural romantics, environmentalist reaction, narcissistic architects and authoritarian planners to make new homes harder and harder to build. Despite the standardised houses made by Georgians, Victorians and inter-war builders of semi-detached suburban properties, there are no plans to emulate the Toyota Motor Company and manufacture light, airy, personalised, œ100,000 homes that are ready to receive roofs in the space of six hours (12). Instead, a homeopathic approach dominates: the more house numbers are diluted within a solution of sustainable communities and `place making', the more effective housing policy is deemed to be (13)....
It was the architect Richard Rogers who, made official adviser to John Prescott early on in Blair's premiership, first suggested that nearness makes for neighbourliness (18). Nine years after Prescott put Rogers in charge of the Urban Task Force, this inane idea continues to dominate the New Labour imagination. The urge to make housing and cities `compact' has become so deep-seated that housing minister Yvette Cooper has been forced to blame local authorities for exceeding central government's already excessive targets for the percentage of houses built on brownfield sites (19).
Zero carbon, maximum regulation
In the old days, the Prescott doctrine of `sustainable communities' was mainly a pretentious protest against sprawl, the suburbs, the working class and all that. Yet as environmentalist opinion has grown more strident, so the nuances of housing sustainababble have changed. Government continues to plead for place-making and better home design; but the dogma that British homes must save the planet trumps everything.
Over his final winter, Blair saw the CLG embark on a series of `consultations' with interested parties. By March 2007, one of the weirdest of such exercises had closed, marked by the publication, over 90 pages, of Planning Policy Statement: Planning and Climate Change - Supplement to Planning Policy Statement 1 (20). It is worth getting a flavour of the CLG's housing Newspeak at the end of a decade of Blairite managerialism. In paragraph 1.14 of the consultation document, under the heading `Transitional Arrangements', we read the following:
`The need to take steps to mitigate and adapt to climate change is not a new requirement. RPBs and LPAs should already be taking steps to ensure that development plans contribute to global sustainability by addressing the causes and potential impacts of climate change. RPBs and LPAs may, however, come under pressure or themselves consider it necessary to halt plan-making so as to allow time to absorb the full implications of the policies in Planning and Climate Change, in its draft form as well as when finalised. The Department considers that such pressure should normally be resisted, but anticipates that RPBs will consider whether the content of emerging revisions of RSS, and LPAs similarly for DPDs, is consistent with the Key Planning Objectives set out in Planning and Climate Change.'
RPBs, anyone? They are regional planning bodies, and work with unelected regional development agencies (RDAs). LPAs? Local planning authorities, offshoots of local authorities. RSS? Regional spatial strategies in England, prepared by regional assemblies, which are only indirectly elected. DPDs? Development plan documents, prepared by LPAs.
This kind of planning gobbledegook, and the unelected appointees that go with it, is not an accident. Under Blair, the purpose of planning has become to stop new houses being built. For proof, look no further than paragraph 6 of the consultation document - that on Key Planning Objectives....
In the Blair terminus, fighting climate change comes before `enabling the provision' of new homes. Reducing the need to travel and especially to drive, and sustaining biodiversity, comes before technological innovation. Indeed, regional planning bodies will have to produce `regional trajectories' for the future carbon performance of new residential and commercial development (paragraph 1.7).....
Wherever, immediately after Blair, a major housing scheme is planned, at least 10 per cent of its energy supply will have to be `gained onsite and renewably and/or from a decentralised, renewable or low-carbon, energy supply' (paragraph 22). But now, since his weekend pronouncement, PM-in-waiting Gordon Brown has shown once again that a parsimonious, small-is-beautiful approach to society's burgeoning energy needs will always take precedence over large numbers of spacious homes that people can buy and own in full.
Much more here
Israel-hating British doctors get a reply: "" We are being innudated with support..." was the reply by Esti Sherbelis, International Public Relations Officer of the Israel Medical Association in response call for physicians signatures by Scholars for Peace in the Middle East to a letter from the the IMA to the British Medical Association and World Medical Association. This initiative was in response to a call by a 135 British physicians to ban the IMA from the World Medical Assocation recently published in the Guardian."
British journalists confess to their bias against Israel: "At their annual meeting in April, Britain's National Union of Journalists passed a resolution asking for "a boycott of Israeli goods similar to those boycotts in the struggles against apartheid South Africa led by trade unions, and [for] the [Trades Union Congress] to demand sanctions be imposed on Israel by the British government." In itself, this is a remarkable display of bias by journalists covering one of the modern world's most contentious conflicts. The New York Times' ombudsman, Byron Calame, observed last year, "Keeping personal opinions out of the public realm is simply one of the obligations for those who remain committed to the importance of impartial news coverage." The NUJ also "called for the end of Israeli aggression in Gaza and other occupied territories." Since NUJ members presumably read newspapers as well as write for them, they should be aware that Israel expelled all of the Jews from Gaza in 2005. Other than kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, there are no more Jews in Gaza. Israeli troops have only returned to the Gaza Strip in response to continued attacks originating from that increasingly fortified territory. The NUJ failed to publish their resolution on their Web site, perhaps sensing their prejudice was only exceeded by their ignorance."
Statue spooks British cops: "A terrified dad was held by police for 13 hours after they mistook a dummy of Lara Croft for a gunman. Computer games fan David Williams, 42, was arrested when armed cops swooped on his home late at night. He was pinned to the ground, handcuffed and quizzed - after officers spotted his life-sized model of the gun-toting Tomb Raider star, reports The Sun. David, from Dukinfield, Greater Manchester said: "I can't believe the police could be so stupid." He had called cops, about nuisance phone calls he'd received, but when two officers arrived, one saw the limited edition 6ft statue, worth 1,000 pounds, standing in the darkness of his living room window. Fearing it was an armed crook, the officers called in support - and David was held at gunpoint. David, who runs a computer games store, said: "The back-up cops burst in through the back door and knocked me to the ground. One jabbed a gun in the back of my neck and said, 'All right - where's the gun?' "I said, 'I don't have one'. They weren't happy and searched the house. "They must have soon realised what had happened because the PC who called for help was getting a lot of stick."
More British keystone cops: "Armed police chased gunmen along a motorway and cornered them in a supermarket car park - only to find two teenage girls in fancy dress with a toy pistol. Holly Spedding and Fatima Rupp, both 19, stopped their car to find themselves surrounded by police marksmen pointing guns at them and screaming: "Put your hands up!" The girls, dressed as cowgirls, cowered in fear as two helicopters hovered overhead and van loads of police dogs snarled at them. Holly and Fatima, who were locked up for hours before they were finally released, told how they had been returning from a Cowboys and Indians night at Chester University. As they headed home to Harrogate, North Yorkshire, along the M62 they joked with passing lorry drivers who spotted Fatima's cowboy hat. She said: "The lorry drivers were pretending to shoot me with their fingers. So I pointed the toy gun back at them. Everyone was smiling and laughing." But an off-duty police officer had spotted the girls and reported them for threatening motorists. Holly, who was driving, and Fatima realised something was wrong when they noticed a half a dozen police cars on their tail. Holly said: "We were petrified when we stopped and they came screeching up and surrounded us. "There were four jeeps, two vans full of dogs, armed police, helicopters and they were screaming: 'Where's the gun?'"
Ministers want a slop bucket for food waste to be placed in every kitchen under their latest plan to generate green electricity. Instead of throwing out scraps, households would be required to store them separately for at least a week until they are collected by recycling teams. The rules will oblige some homes to sort rubbish into five containers - or potentially risk fines. Some councils already insist on separating glass, metal, paper and nonrecyclable refuse.
David Miliband, the environment secretary, is expected to unveil the scheme this week as part of the government's waste strategy. Food accounts for about a fifth of domestic waste and releases greenhouse gases when dumped in landfill. Now local authorities are set to be given the power to introduce schemes whereby methane generated by decomposing food will instead be trapped and used to generate electricity.
The proposal is part of a wider shake-up of Britain's waste collection. The government also plans to give councils the power to introduce "pay per throw" charges, levied according to the weight of rubbish. Households would not be charged for recycled waste. During the recent council elections there was a backlash in some areas against the scrapping of weekly collections. Fortnightly collections were blamed for causing infestations of vermin.
However, advocates of recycled kitchen waste insist that sealed containers will provide a hygienic solution. The idea was inspired by the government's waste body, Wrap, which found that homes across Britain waste a total of 3.3m tons of food a year. He is also likely to outline a plan for giant incinerators to burn more than 20% of rubbish that cannot be recycled. This too would be used to generate energy.
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The A-word Now Forbidden in Britain
We read:
"It’s official – there is no longer any such thing as an accident. The word ‘accident’ is to be banned from the new edition of Britain’s Highway Code, which is published by the UK Department of Transport. Instead the words ‘collision’, ‘crash’ or ‘incident’ will be used to describe events that once were known as accidents.
This adoption of new terms for everyday events does not only have linguistic significance. The banning of the A-word is a consequence of a broader cultural outlook which insists that nothing happens accidentally these days and that there is always someone to blame.
The change in terminology reflects a dramatic shift in the way that Anglo-American societies make sense of human experience. The compulsion to blame is growing all the time. That is why the word accident is being written out of existence.... writing off the A-word highlights the profound difficulty that Western societies have in accepting that misfortune is part of life.
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A defender of the indefensible
The chairman of the British Medical Association, James Johnson, has resigned after a letter he wrote to The Times defending the failed medical application system caused widespread fury and led to a number of doctors resigning from the BMA in protest. Mr Johnson, a surgeon, wrote yesterday to the BMA tendering his resignation. “My letter caused an absolute furore,” he admitted. But he was unrepentant about the letter, signed jointly with Dame Carol Black, which defended the Chief Medical Officer, Sir Liam Donaldson, regarded as the chief architect of the new medical training system.
Since the letter appeared on Wednesday, in response to one from Professor Morris Brown of Cambridge University and colleagues, a wave of anger has engulfed Mr Johnson. There has been no opportunity for the Council of the BMA, which he chairs, to meet since the letter appeared but opinions expressed on medical websites and in Times Online made clear that he had lost support. On Times Online there were by early yesterday afternoon 496 reponses to the letter, universally critical of Mr Johnson and Dame Carol, who is chair of the Academy of the Medical Royal Colleges. Many called on them both to resign.
The day after the letter appeared, a meeting of the Scottish hospital consultants condemned it unanimously. Other comments on the website include one from Richard Sidebottom, a junior doctor from London, who says: “I see the BMA and the royal colleges as traitors to those they should be looking after.” Others say that the letter is “arrogant, deluded and out of touch” while Chris Twine, a junior doctor from Cardiff, says the views expressed in it are “totally at variance with those of doctors dealing with the Medical Training Application Service (MTAS) in any capacity”.
What appears to have caused the greatest offence is a sentence in which Mr Johnson and Dame Carol “restate our support for the Chief Medical Officer and his role in improving junior doctors’ training”. Yesterday Mr Johnson was unrepentant over his defence of Sir Liam. “He’s a civil servant, he can’t defend himself,” Mr Johnson said. But his view of Modernising Medical Careers (MMC), Sir Liam’s creation, is not shared by the bulk of junior doctors. Nor, apparently, is it shared by Dame Carol’s successor as President of the Royal College of Physicians, Ian Gilmore, who last week wrote an open letter to Patricia Hewitt, the Health Secretary, saying that MMC needed to be reconsidered along with the failed application system.
A member of the BMA Council said yesterday: “Jim’s position became untenable when his letter to The Timeswas published. He did not consult senior BMA colleagues before sending it, and the letter caused substantial damage to the reputation of the association.”
Mr Johnson told The Times yesterday that he had planned to give up office at this year’s Annual Delegate Meeting in Torquay next month. The council will be chaired in the meantime by Sam Everingham, the deputy chairman. A new chairman will be elected at Torquay. Mr Johnson’s is the third resignation prompted by the MTAS fiasco. Previously two officials at MMC, Professor Alan Crockard and Professor Shelley Heard, resigned in protest at how, in their view, the MMC process was being subverted by efforts to repair the damage done by the computer failure. The High Court has yet to give judgment on the case brought by RemedyUK, the junior doctors’ pressure group, against MTAS. That is expected on Wednesday.
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The British decay
Meanwhile, in London . I open this morning's papers to find that our next prime minister Gordon Brown's first policy announcement is that he intends to build 5 environmentally-friendly `eco-towns' which are totally self sufficient in energy generated by solar and wind power.
One would have thought that Brown would have other priorities on taking over from Tony Blair at Number 10. Immigration is out of control, with bogus asylum seekers, East European ex-cons and sex offenders failing to `report back' to the immigration authorities after their initial processing on arrival. (Last month some minister came up with the daft proposal to serve these people deportation notices by SMS text!). Perhaps linked to that problem is the staggering leap in gun crime and knifings in our streets. (Jewish areas have had to enlist private security to cope with a crime wave of 30 armed raids on Jewish homes in recent weeks.) And perhaps linked to both those problems is that this country has also run out of prison cells. This means that criminals are being let out early to make way for new offenders who may expect even earlier parole as the crime wave rises even higher. All of which goes to less deterrence to criminals who are no longer afraid of being caught.
This of course assumes that the baddies are actually caught. But that's increasingly unlikely since the government has been closing police stations at breakneck speed as if it were some important target. Over 25% of local police stations have disappeared in the last 10 years.
And let's not forget that the erosion of border controls and policing is not just attracting criminals. Even more serious is the infiltration of Islamic terrorists and the free movement of the British-born Asian youths they have incited to mass killing on our streets and transit systems. The security services have admitted to the existence of dozens of terror cells under various levels of investigation. One must wonder how many may have escaped their attention.
But despite all of this, the leaders of the two biggest political parties in the UK are battling to save the planet. The vital question is: which party offers the smallest carbon footprint? Which is why I am more likely to find a council recycling inspector checking my garbage bin than a police officer checking my street.
Whilst our cuddly leaders fret over carbon and ozone, evil despots are busy with other elements in the Periodic Table. Beneath schools and hospitals in Iran, hundreds of German-built centrifuges are humming away 24/7 in reinforced bunkers, refining a new final solution to the Jewish Problem and the means to enslave the West by nuclear blackmail. Let's stop worrying about the planet and start worrying about ourselves.
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More British craziness -- BBQ police
The Primrose Hill community centre in north London has been hosting a popular annual summer festival for the past 30 years. Yet this year, in order to qualify for the 400 pound grant from Camden Council that helps to make the festival a reality, the centre is having to jump through some pretty strange hoops.
The centre is being asked to fulfil a string of new requirements. These include making sure that five per cent of festivalgoers fill in a questionnaire to say whether they enjoyed themselves; inviting `under-represented groups' to participate as stall-holders or performers; hiring only professional caterers who must be registered with their local authority; making sure all staff, artists and volunteers have a Criminal Records Bureau (CRB) check to ensure they do not have a history of harming children; and using only a gas barbeque. Under no circumstances may the Primrose Hill community festival use their traditional coal barbeque, even though it has not caused any accidents over the past three decades.
Alongside New Britain's speech police, health-and-safety police and ethnic quotas police we can now add the Barbecue Police: council officials whose job it is to ensure that only the right kind of barbecue is used in the right kind of way by the right kind of people. Another bit of fun goes up in smoke.
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A toxic view of working-class parents
Commentators heaped praise on Sue Palmer's Toxic Childhood. Didn't they spot its poisonous arguments about a 'dead-eyed', over-breeding underclass?
I put off reading Sue Palmer's "Toxic Childhood: How the Modern World is Damaging Our Children and What We Can Do About It" for as long as I could. But the book, which was held up as a great insight into the state of childhood today by numerous public figures, just kept on coming up.
First published in 2006, the book got good reviews everywhere. And there was that letter to the government, published in the Daily Telegraph and signed by the Archbishop of Canterbury and a hundred or so others who agree that so-called junk culture is `poisoning our children'. Indeed, Palmer could hardly have found a finer club of supporters; it included former children's laureate Anne Fine and Marion Dowling, president of the British Association of Early Childhood Education.
I was mainly put off by the book because the title bothered me. Where did this idea come from, that we're all being poisoned? The book seems to issue a challenge; first you de-toxed your diet, now it's time to de-tox your children. And once the kids are de-toxed, you still won't be able to take it easy because you'll also have to de-tox your home (the Wi-Fi is scrambling your brains, in case you didn't know). I even heard the keynote speaker at a leading early years conference a few years ago telling everyone to get their houses rewired to avoid damaging their children with electrical currents running beneath their bedrooms. Strangely, all those concerned with such dangers neglect to mention any of the real cases of toxicity today. To take just one example, the thousands of children in the developing world poisoned by the use of glycol to sweeten counterfeit medicines never even get a mention.
Once I got round to reading the book, I found that it mostly gives perfectly good, straightforward analyses and advice about the state of childhood today. Yet it left me feeling I had been held up somewhere rather unpleasant for a few hours. Underneath all the nice stuff about the importance of good fresh food, outdoor play and parents giving time, love and attention to their children, there is a nasty stench. Do right by your children, the book seems to say, but at the same time beware the savage children of the underclass - the `feral' kids who `don't have children's faces - they're pinched and angry with dead eyes'.
So you slip quickly from the spurious notion that there is something called `toxic childhood syndrome' (both `toxic' and `syndrome' have proper medical definitions, but here they are used as pseudo-medical jargon) to some far more familiar ideas. Parent-bashing by teachers, for example: the problems in school today, the argument goes, are basically the fault of an underclass of parents. What else would you expect from them - `deprived, uneducated, often scarcely more than children themselves.often junkies, alcoholics, involved in crime'?
This group of parents is seen as a lot of feckless infants. They eat the wrong food, they don't take their children out on the right trips to broaden their horizons - they don't even talk properly. There is even a dire warning about the `soaring' birth rate of these have-nots, whilst the `educated classes' fail to reproduce in comparable numbers. The reader is thus softened up for the idea that the state must step in and `detoxify other people's children' - or else there will be `serious civil unrest within a generation'.
Palmer's language is eloquently nasty. She writes about children in poor neighbourhoods who are `huge, heavily-built and lumbering', and `teenage mums devouring taxpayers' money'. It's perfectly pitched to upset and even terrify anyone who is trying their best to bring up their children well.
Palmer is more than matched by the teachers she approvingly quotes - but are these teachers always right when they blame everyone else for children's apparently poor development? If the state of childhood really is as dire as Toxic Childhood makes it out to be, then don't schools play any part in this? The image of a group of inner-city headteachers sitting around with Palmer telling her that `something really awful will happen soon' makes me think it's time to get the hysteria under control and get a grip. What hope can anyone hold for children's education and moral growth in schools if the headteachers are so cynical and brutalised?
This is not to say that Toxic Childhood is without its insights, which come from careful research and are expressed with clarity and verve. I think that Palmer is right to identify one of the fundamental problems with the nature of childhood today: society's increasing sense of fearfulness about children. Many parents are afraid to set limits and control their children's behaviour. Most of us are afraid to let our children play outdoors. Neighbours and shopkeepers are afraid to intervene to stop bad behaviour. Palmer captures this hopeless fearfulness well.
But in the end, Toxic Childhood just generates even more fear - fear for one's own children, laced with terror about other people's. It addresses the problem that parents aren't feeling authoritative, and then suggests that this should be remedied by taking away even more of their responsibility and giving it to the state. It addresses the problem of relationships between schools and families, by indulging in the sort of parent-bashing that has always characterised the staffrooms of the worst schools I have worked in or visited.
Rather than putting forward an inspiring vision of childhood, for all children, Toxic Childhood stirs up a fear of the basest kind - that other people's children are sub-human. Their existence today is nothing more than a prediction of savagery and mindless civil unrest in the future. It is an unashamedly insular book, obsessing over the supposed toxicity of texting, instant messaging and pre-teen fashion, whilst ignoring the genuine mass poisonings experienced every day by poor children around the world.
Anyone who writes about a fast-breeding, barely-human underclass that will cause the collapse of society, and then argues that we need a more interventionist and authoritarian state, is leading us somewhere we've already (and only recently) been in western Europe. We need to pause for a moment's thought.
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WiFi scare: Just another bureaucrat defending his patch and the media looking for scares
No evidence of safety will ever suffice for some in this area but we have of course noted the huge upsurge of brain cancer since a billion people got cellphones [/satire]
Sir William Stewart, chairman of the Health Protection Agency, has called for a review of the health risks of wireless technology after an investigation into its effects on children. The BBC’s investigative programme Panorama claims that wi-fi networks in schools can give off three times as much signal radiation as phone masts. Current government advice says that phone masts should not be sited near schools without consulting parents and teachers, because children are thought to be more vulnerable to radio-frequency radiation.
The programme-makers measured radiation levels from a wi-fi-enabled laptop in a classroom in Norwich. It found that the signal strength was three times higher than that of a typical phone mast. Wi-fi, or wireless fidelity, allows a computer user to connect to the internet at broadband speeds without cables. More than two thirds of secondary schools and nearly half of primary schools have wi-fi. Panoramaspoke to nearly 50 schools and only one had been alerted to possible health risks. Others had been told that there was no risk.The Government says that wi-fi poses no health risks, citing advice from the World Health Organisation.
In 2000 Sir William produced a report on the impact of mobile phone masts on health. He found that: “There may be changes, for example in cognitive function . . . There were some indications that there may be cancer inductions . . . There was some molecular biology changes within the cell. . . ”
The levels of radiation found in the Norwich classroom were 600 times lower than the levels deemed dangerous by the Government. It uses data from the International Commission on NonIonizing Radiation Protection, which bases exposure limits on a thermal effect. In other words, the radiation has to be strong enough to cause a heat effect before it is restricted. Dr Olle Johansson, of the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, has carried out experiments on radiation similar to or lower than wi-fi and found biological implications. Asked if the commission was right to set limits based on thermal effect, he said: “That’s just rubbish. You cannot put emphasis on such guidelines.”
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The current British immigration scene
"The people here are wonderful," says Jenny Sturgeon, a white Englishwoman who has lived in Slough for 30 years. "And the ethnic mix is wonderful. It's how the country should be. But we get a huge number of people coming in from all ethnic groups. A shortage of money can lead to tensions. The government has a lot to answer for." The town of Slough, which lies outside the M25 near Heathrow, has the greatest ethnic mix in the UK outside London. By comparison, even Leicester and Coventry seem blandly uniform.
Take Malinka, a Polish deli near the library. The large majority of shoppers are Polish but nonPoles go there too. One who enters to buy sausages while I'm there is Stephen Cordeiro, a Portuguese-Asian who was born in Kenya. And I notice that in the deli's window, among the job ads in Polish for nannies, waiting staff and handymen, that there's a card written in English, offering the services of an "African hair stylist".
Surveys carried out by the council show that a quarter of the town's businesses with more than 10 employees use the new migrant workforce because - businesses reported - they brought higher productivity and a better work ethic than indigenous workers. But inevitably there are tensions. One Polish woman, Aneta Kania, says she had never seen such diversity till she came to Slough. "I was very shocked by the mix. At first I thought it was a bit scary." Another Polish woman, an economist by training, told me darkly that she had recently been working in retail "for an Indian" but had stopped doing so "because they don't respect you".
A Sikh with a strong Indian accent lent credence to what that Polish woman said when he told me "there are too many immigrants in Slough". Polish drivers with no car insurance jump red lights, he muttered. And last week he'd been bothered by Bulgarians ringing his doorbell to beg for money.
Ted Cantle, who conducted the official inquiry into the cause of riots in Bradford, Burnley and Oldham in 2001, believes that migration to the UK can bring real benefits. "But building cohesive communities to harness the benefits long term takes resources. "It is important that councils like Slough are funded correctly for their population size and complexity to make sure they continue community cohesion work," he says. "Com-munity tensions are sometimes caused by the perception of competition between groups over resources and councils have to be able to demonstrate this is not the case."
Perhaps with that in mind, Slough last week formally protested to the Treasury that it had been severely underfunded because government statistics underestimated the number of immigrants coming to the town. Richard Stokes, leader of the council, describes official statistics as "not fit for purpose". "Estimates have failed to keep pace with what is happening on the ground and public services are suffering as a consequence," he says. "The migrants that come to Slough are hard-working and bring great benefit to the local economy but the council remains severely underfunded because of these poor statistics."
Andrew Blake-Herbert, Slough's strategic director for finance and property, says the council faces a 15m pound shortfall. It has managed not to cut crucial services but cannot make necessary improvements in areas such as children's services and recycling.
According to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), Slough experienced the ninth-fastest population increase of any local authority in the country between 1991 and 2001. But since then, the ONS contends, the town's population has declined by 3.3%, to a total of 117,600. Slough's own data suggests the total is nearer 130,000. To support that figure, the council puts forward an impressive array of evidence. It points to substantial increases in new housing, the rapid rise in house prices, the increasing numbers of households from which the council tax is collected, the high fertility rate among women in Slough (66 births per 1,000 women, compared with 54 in the country as a whole) and even a substantial increase in the amount of sewage flowing out of town.
Visiting Slough last week, I found plenty more evidence that the migrant population is getting bigger. I talked to officials, business figures, and residents from across the entire community - pale-skinned and dark, European, African and Asian. To start, I visited the busy road near Slough's massive trading estate - the largest in Europe - where coaches from Poland stop illegally to disgorge new arrivals. And I talked to a resident who watches that happen twice a day, sometimes more.
Tadeusz Chruscik is Polish but he's been living here since 1942, having served in the Polish Air Force. (Some 130,000 Poles settled in Britain during and after the war.) He says he's met some people who get off the coach without the slightest idea where to go, having got on after having too much to drink.
The sheer numbers arriving here simply can't be housed properly. The council is paid by central government to ensure that three-storey houses are not overcrowded but lacks the funds to check buildings with only two storeys. As a result, many migrants endure dangerously crowded conditions. Colin Rodgers, manager of the estate agency B Simmons & Son, says: "I've seen places where there are three beds in the lounge and three in the dining room. " I've also heard stories, from quite believable sources, about people using those beds in shifts."
Property, it hardly needs adding, has become unaffordable to many people. Baber Zafar is 21 and has lived in Slough all his life. In the town square, Zafar says immigrants have put so much pressure on house prices that he is moving to Spain. By a grim irony, the rising property market recently resulted in the closure of Slough's immigration counselling centre. It has now moved to Southall, west London, explains one of the counsellors, Qazi Anisud-din, because rising rents in Slough made the old premises unaffordable.
Of course, the borough council does what it can. In fact, it does more than most. In the past 18 months it has placed in schools some 900 children who arrived in Slough from overseas. In other towns, they might have had to wait weeks or months to be placed, but Slough established a special assessment centre to speed the process. But it's slow work: the centre can take only eight children a week. Last year two primary schools accepted 50 Polish children and 60 Somalis in just one term.
Not everyone welcomes the flood of pupils for whom spoken English is not easy. Aneta Kania sends her daughter to St Anthony's Roman Catholic school but says there are so many other Polish children there that seven-year-old Paulina is making slow progress in English. (Kania has poor English herself. Though trained as a nurse, she's obliged to work as a cleaner until her language skills improve. What with bringing up a child on her own, and her job, she finds it hard to fit in the lessons.) Another pioneering service set up by Slough council is devoted to dealing with Roma migrants who have been arriving by the hundreds since Romania joined the European Union in January.
Eighty-eight unaccompanied Roma children have asked for support from the town's children's services. Six have babies of their own, and seven are pregnant. To deal with these Roma children, Slough has set up a specialist team, at a cost of œ150,000 since January.
Fiona Mactaggart, Slough's MP and a former minister in the Home Office, says the flawed calculations "will not do". And the ONS itself recognises the shortcomings of its statistics. Karen Dunnell, the national statistician, wrote in May 2006: "There is now a broad recognition that available estimates of migrant numbers are inadequate for managing the economy, policies and services." Even the Poles don't relish the arrival of yet more Poles. Kania, the nurse who came to Slough just 18 months ago, says she dreads June, July and August because that's when Polish students come here for summer jobs. "There are too many people in Slough already," she says.
The legal tangle
Some days ago a newspaper published a photograph of 21 members of a Roma family. Apparently there are another 80, all relatives and all newly arrived since Romania joined the EU in January. A social worker in Slough explained she had nine teenage Roma girls, several of whom were pregnant, in her care. In theory, Romanians and Bulgarians are subject to a special regime for a transitional period of up to seven years. They can only come here to work legally if they are highly skilled, have been granted a work permit or come under a special quota for temporary agricultural workers. But there are no checks on the borders. They only have to show a valid ID card and walk in and they are entitled to stay as visitors for up to three months.
Back to our pregnant teenagers. Why can they not be sent home? The answer lies in a tangled web of legal obligations. Successive children acts have placed an obligation on local authorities to care for children in need. The Race Relations Act 1976 makes it unlawful to discriminate on the grounds of race or nationality; foreign children have to be treated as British. As for access to the NHS, pregnancy is regarded (rightly) as a medical emergency so treatment is automatic.
On top of that, the Free Movement Directive which came into force last year severely restricts the government's ability to expel EU nationals even if they have committed a crime. In expanding the EU to countries which are far poorer than our own, we have stumbled into a potential crisis. The free movement of labour has set in hand movements of workers to Britain on a greater scale than anticipated. At the same time "harmonisation" of social security has placed obligations on EU governments to provide benefits in the richer countries that greatly exceed wages in the poorer ones.
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THE RIGHT TO BE WRONG
An attempt to block the DVD release of The Great Global Warming Swindle displays contempt for free speech -- says this "Guardian" writer
A recent reaction to a climate change denial documentary broadcast on primetime TV displays contempt for free speech and political ineptitude. Bob Ward, a former press officer at the Royal Society, has published an open letter to Martin Durkin, maker of a documentary film broadcast recently on Channel 4 television that denies human influence on climate change. The letter is signed by a number of climate scientists and other academics with an interest in climate change.
I have no time for Durkin or his film, but take issue with Ward's letter, which, as reported by David Adam in the Guardian, demands that the DVD of Durkin's documentary be either withdrawn or corrected of its scientific errors. The open letter states that " ... it is in the public interest for adequate quality control to be exercised over information that is disseminated to the public to ensure that it does not include major misrepresentations of the scientific evidence and interpretations of it by researchers."
If Durkin's Great Global Warming Swindle DVD should be withdrawn or corrected, what about Al Gore's hyperbolic An Inconvenient Truth, soon to be distributed to all schools in England courtesy of Her Majesty's government? Ward complains that Wag TV, the production company responsible for Durkin's film, will not be bound by any Ofcom ruling against Channel 4. Channel 4 is restricted by a code of conduct when it comes to what may be broadcast, but Wag TV as an independent, commercial entity is free to distribute the DVD, and I'm not sure how it could be otherwise.
We are all of us surrounded by wild claims, ideological nonsense, misrepresentations and downright lies. But it is no business of the state, or assemblies of the scientific great and good, to pronounce on what may or may not be published. So challenge Durkin and show him up as the dissembler he undoubtedly is. But win the battle by force of argument. The data are on the side of those arguing that human beings are largely responsible for current climate change, and do not require backing up with bullying tactics.
Durkin is reported by Raphael Satter in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer to have acknowledged two scientific errors, and said that these will be corrected in the DVD. That is an astute move by Durkin, but Ward et al demand that all the errors be removed, and then declare that if this were done, the documentary would fall to pieces.
I'm not so sure about this. Durkin could remove all the blatant scientific errors, and still make a superficial case based on issues that are not clear-cut, and over which there remains some scholarly debate. Reality is ever thus, yet given the increasing predictive power of climate models backed by hard data, the majority view of climate change is the only credible one to take.
But try explaining that to a mass audience. It can and should be done, but not in the combative rhetorical style beloved of the media and a number of scientific protagonists. Ward is quoted in Satter's article as saying: "Free speech does not extend to misleading the public by making factually inaccurate statements. Somebody has to stand up for the public interest here."
Strong stuff, but very, very wrong. Free speech does indeed extend to coming out with any old rubbish, and people - even highly intelligent ones - frequently do. Others are free to point out factual errors, and in doing so attempt to convince the masses of the truth. Like Bob Ward, I complained to the broadcasting regulator about Durkin's documentary. I did so not because I object to the line taken by Durkin, but rather because the filmmaker offered no space for opinions contrary to his own. The documentary was pure polemic subsidised by the taxpayer.
But Ward is going much further than a complaint to Ofcom, both in his open letter and discussions surrounding it. Regarding the demand for "quality control", it is not clear who would be the adjudicators, and even if Ward et al are right about the science (I am convinced they are), this is not a proper way for scientists to behave.
My principal objection to Ward's open letter is that it shows contempt for free speech, and an unwarranted lack of confidence in the ability of the public to think critically. A secondary objection is that it displays political ineptitude, and may prove counterproductive.
Source
Come, friendly bombs, fall on Brown's eco-towns
With his plans to erect zero-carbon homes in zero-car suburbs, Britain's Gordon Brown builds on the Blairites' small-minded approach to housing
Britain's prime-minister-in-waiting, Gordon Brown, has announced that one of his first big initiatives will be to build `eco-towns' - that is, areas with new houses that emit little or no carbon, where there is little need for people to drive cars, and where the most a home-owner aspires to is to watch his electricity meter to ensure he isn't using up too much of the nation's energy. For all his claims to be bringing something `new' to Britain, Brown's small-scale and small-minded attitude to housing seems entirely in keeping with his predecessor's.
In the closing months of the Blair decade, Haringey Council in north London pushed through a remarkable innovation in housing policy. It wanted to check which residents were failing to claim grants to buy fuel. It also wanted to check which homes in Haringey lie empty. First and foremost, however, it wanted to indict all the local homes it deemed wasteful of energy. So the Council hired a plane, equipped it with a thermal imaging camera, and posted colour-coded street maps of the offending energy wasters on the web (1).
In terms of the direct intrusion of the government on the British house, the Blair decade has been remarkable. A recent pamphlet by the Centre for Policy Studies, a Thatcherite think-tank, could point to no fewer than 266 ways in which the state is able to enter people's homes (2). Indeed, Labour government minister Ruth Kelly's Department for Communities and Local Government (CLG), successor to John Prescott's Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (1997-2006), plans further controls. If parliament agrees, all houses in England and Wales will only ever get sold once the state rates them for their carbon emissions - from a disgusting `not environmentally friendly', rating 1 to 20, to a mystical `very environmentally friendly', rating 82 to 100 (3).
Just what physical units these ratings consist of, the new Energy Performance Certificates (EPCs) do not say. At the end of the Blair years, the CLG invokes the 2006 Stern report on climate change, which was commissioned by Gordon Brown, whenever it can; yet when some more basic science is required, Ruth Kelly's empire is silent.
Still, in a striking, therapeutic reversal of the Roman, adult commandment caveat emptor, Blair's infantilising doctrine of consumer protection has come to housing. Anyone out to sell a house in England and Wales will have to pay the state upwards of 600 pounds, just so buyers can receive mandatory Home Information Packs (HIPs), each containing an EPC, the title deeds and details of local searches.
In an Orwellian 2007, the government wants at least 7,500 Home Inspectors to knock on millions of British doors. The country now needs to build no fewer than five million new homes in the next decade (4). Instead, Haringey's spy-in-the-sky and the CLG's HIP approaches to housing confirm that displacement activities have triumphed in the Blair years.....
New Labour puts houses out of reach, but in your face
As Brown was forced to concede in statements over the weekend, Blair has left Britain with a crisis not just of housing supply, but also of affordability. The price of an average house in the UK has risen from œ77,531 in 1997 to a likely œ200,000 in 2008 (6). According to the Halifax, residential property is too expensive for people to buy in 70 per cent of British towns.
Along with first-time buyers, public sector workers - above all, nurses and firefighters - face the greatest difficulties in affording a home. Yet it is on public sector workers that much of the British economy, especially in the north of England and the devolved regions, now depends. As for those public sector workers who are searching the south of England, in vain, for property cheap enough to suit their pockets, things are now so bad that the conservative Financial Times recently came out in favour of paying such ill-starred individuals higher wages. The FT ridiculed Blair's schemes of houses built for `key workers', noting: `Those who are not eligible - young or low-paid workers in the private sector, academics, or the many key workers who cannot get into one of the subsidised schemes - are left with fewer, more expensive properties to buy, while existing homeowners prosper as the subsidies drive up prices.' (7)
Existing homeowners - the middle classes - have indeed prospered from Blair's divisive housing policies; indeed that was always a deliberate strategy on his part. Similarly, there have been only incremental annual increases in the building of new dwellings. In 1997/8, just 180,566 new homes were built in Great Britain, only for the total to go almost straight down until 2001/2. By 2005/6, the pick-up was to just 196,307. That amounted to a rise in housing output of less than nine per cent over eight years (8).
New Labour and the propertied classes conspire with rural romantics, environmentalist reaction, narcissistic architects and authoritarian planners to make new homes harder and harder to build. Despite the standardised houses made by Georgians, Victorians and inter-war builders of semi-detached suburban properties, there are no plans to emulate the Toyota Motor Company and manufacture light, airy, personalised, œ100,000 homes that are ready to receive roofs in the space of six hours (12). Instead, a homeopathic approach dominates: the more house numbers are diluted within a solution of sustainable communities and `place making', the more effective housing policy is deemed to be (13)....
It was the architect Richard Rogers who, made official adviser to John Prescott early on in Blair's premiership, first suggested that nearness makes for neighbourliness (18). Nine years after Prescott put Rogers in charge of the Urban Task Force, this inane idea continues to dominate the New Labour imagination. The urge to make housing and cities `compact' has become so deep-seated that housing minister Yvette Cooper has been forced to blame local authorities for exceeding central government's already excessive targets for the percentage of houses built on brownfield sites (19).
Zero carbon, maximum regulation
In the old days, the Prescott doctrine of `sustainable communities' was mainly a pretentious protest against sprawl, the suburbs, the working class and all that. Yet as environmentalist opinion has grown more strident, so the nuances of housing sustainababble have changed. Government continues to plead for place-making and better home design; but the dogma that British homes must save the planet trumps everything.
Over his final winter, Blair saw the CLG embark on a series of `consultations' with interested parties. By March 2007, one of the weirdest of such exercises had closed, marked by the publication, over 90 pages, of Planning Policy Statement: Planning and Climate Change - Supplement to Planning Policy Statement 1 (20). It is worth getting a flavour of the CLG's housing Newspeak at the end of a decade of Blairite managerialism. In paragraph 1.14 of the consultation document, under the heading `Transitional Arrangements', we read the following:
`The need to take steps to mitigate and adapt to climate change is not a new requirement. RPBs and LPAs should already be taking steps to ensure that development plans contribute to global sustainability by addressing the causes and potential impacts of climate change. RPBs and LPAs may, however, come under pressure or themselves consider it necessary to halt plan-making so as to allow time to absorb the full implications of the policies in Planning and Climate Change, in its draft form as well as when finalised. The Department considers that such pressure should normally be resisted, but anticipates that RPBs will consider whether the content of emerging revisions of RSS, and LPAs similarly for DPDs, is consistent with the Key Planning Objectives set out in Planning and Climate Change.'
RPBs, anyone? They are regional planning bodies, and work with unelected regional development agencies (RDAs). LPAs? Local planning authorities, offshoots of local authorities. RSS? Regional spatial strategies in England, prepared by regional assemblies, which are only indirectly elected. DPDs? Development plan documents, prepared by LPAs.
This kind of planning gobbledegook, and the unelected appointees that go with it, is not an accident. Under Blair, the purpose of planning has become to stop new houses being built. For proof, look no further than paragraph 6 of the consultation document - that on Key Planning Objectives....
In the Blair terminus, fighting climate change comes before `enabling the provision' of new homes. Reducing the need to travel and especially to drive, and sustaining biodiversity, comes before technological innovation. Indeed, regional planning bodies will have to produce `regional trajectories' for the future carbon performance of new residential and commercial development (paragraph 1.7).....
Wherever, immediately after Blair, a major housing scheme is planned, at least 10 per cent of its energy supply will have to be `gained onsite and renewably and/or from a decentralised, renewable or low-carbon, energy supply' (paragraph 22). But now, since his weekend pronouncement, PM-in-waiting Gordon Brown has shown once again that a parsimonious, small-is-beautiful approach to society's burgeoning energy needs will always take precedence over large numbers of spacious homes that people can buy and own in full.
Much more here
Israel-hating British doctors get a reply: "" We are being innudated with support..." was the reply by Esti Sherbelis, International Public Relations Officer of the Israel Medical Association in response call for physicians signatures by Scholars for Peace in the Middle East to a letter from the the IMA to the British Medical Association and World Medical Association. This initiative was in response to a call by a 135 British physicians to ban the IMA from the World Medical Assocation recently published in the Guardian."
British journalists confess to their bias against Israel: "At their annual meeting in April, Britain's National Union of Journalists passed a resolution asking for "a boycott of Israeli goods similar to those boycotts in the struggles against apartheid South Africa led by trade unions, and [for] the [Trades Union Congress] to demand sanctions be imposed on Israel by the British government." In itself, this is a remarkable display of bias by journalists covering one of the modern world's most contentious conflicts. The New York Times' ombudsman, Byron Calame, observed last year, "Keeping personal opinions out of the public realm is simply one of the obligations for those who remain committed to the importance of impartial news coverage." The NUJ also "called for the end of Israeli aggression in Gaza and other occupied territories." Since NUJ members presumably read newspapers as well as write for them, they should be aware that Israel expelled all of the Jews from Gaza in 2005. Other than kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, there are no more Jews in Gaza. Israeli troops have only returned to the Gaza Strip in response to continued attacks originating from that increasingly fortified territory. The NUJ failed to publish their resolution on their Web site, perhaps sensing their prejudice was only exceeded by their ignorance."
Statue spooks British cops: "A terrified dad was held by police for 13 hours after they mistook a dummy of Lara Croft for a gunman. Computer games fan David Williams, 42, was arrested when armed cops swooped on his home late at night. He was pinned to the ground, handcuffed and quizzed - after officers spotted his life-sized model of the gun-toting Tomb Raider star, reports The Sun. David, from Dukinfield, Greater Manchester said: "I can't believe the police could be so stupid." He had called cops, about nuisance phone calls he'd received, but when two officers arrived, one saw the limited edition 6ft statue, worth 1,000 pounds, standing in the darkness of his living room window. Fearing it was an armed crook, the officers called in support - and David was held at gunpoint. David, who runs a computer games store, said: "The back-up cops burst in through the back door and knocked me to the ground. One jabbed a gun in the back of my neck and said, 'All right - where's the gun?' "I said, 'I don't have one'. They weren't happy and searched the house. "They must have soon realised what had happened because the PC who called for help was getting a lot of stick."
More British keystone cops: "Armed police chased gunmen along a motorway and cornered them in a supermarket car park - only to find two teenage girls in fancy dress with a toy pistol. Holly Spedding and Fatima Rupp, both 19, stopped their car to find themselves surrounded by police marksmen pointing guns at them and screaming: "Put your hands up!" The girls, dressed as cowgirls, cowered in fear as two helicopters hovered overhead and van loads of police dogs snarled at them. Holly and Fatima, who were locked up for hours before they were finally released, told how they had been returning from a Cowboys and Indians night at Chester University. As they headed home to Harrogate, North Yorkshire, along the M62 they joked with passing lorry drivers who spotted Fatima's cowboy hat. She said: "The lorry drivers were pretending to shoot me with their fingers. So I pointed the toy gun back at them. Everyone was smiling and laughing." But an off-duty police officer had spotted the girls and reported them for threatening motorists. Holly, who was driving, and Fatima realised something was wrong when they noticed a half a dozen police cars on their tail. Holly said: "We were petrified when we stopped and they came screeching up and surrounded us. "There were four jeeps, two vans full of dogs, armed police, helicopters and they were screaming: 'Where's the gun?'"
Monday, May 21, 2007
British exam bungle
Alan Johnson's chances of becoming Labour deputy leader take a serious blow today from a highly critical attack on one of the biggest changes to secondary education in the past 40 years. Plans for the new job-related diplomas to run alongside A levels have been described as muddled, in danger of lacking practical content and being rushed through without being properly tested. In a scathing report, the Commons Education Select Committee today accuses the Government of not being clear about the purpose of the qualification, the learning that it will involve and a failure to involve teachers and examiners in its development. Mr Johnson, the Education Secretary, is frontrunner in the race for the deputy leadership and a champion of overhauling 14-19 education to keep more teenagers in school.
The specialist diplomas, the first five of which are to be introduced in September, combine practical work experience with academic study in an attempt to offer more relevant courses for teenagers. They came about after Tony Blair refused to abandon the A-level "gold standard" in 2004 in favour of one overarching diploma to replace GCSEs, A levels and existing vocational qualifications. Instead, the Government proposed single diplomas in 14 subjects alongside A levels, from engineering to hair and beauty.
However, in spite of asking both business and universities to design the new qualification, critics have voiced fears that it will neither offer hands-on vocational training nor be sufficiently academically demanding. The MPs lay the blame for this squarely at Mr Johnson's door. "The Government describes diplomas as charting a middle course between vocational and academic learning, but it is far from clear that those in charge of developing the different diplomas share a common understanding of what they are for and what kinds of learning they will involve," they wrote.
The select committee cautioned that there was still confusion about key aspects of the plan. Work to develop the diplomas had been "uncomfortably compressed", and there were widespread concerns that they would not be ready. Teachers, lecturers and exam boards also have had too little input into them and time to prepare for their introduction in schools and colleges next year. "Too often in the past, initiatives have been rolled out in a rushed manner, with negative consequences in terms of quality," the MPs said, adding that if more problems emerged during the first pilot, the rest of the scheme should be delayed. They also raised concerns about the continuing lack of a clear grading system and content, which meant that few universities appeared prepared to take them seriously.
The comments come as a survey of 565 teachers and lecturers reveals that almost two thirds believe that the new diplomas will be seen simply as training programmes leading to low-paid, low-status jobs for nonacademic pupils. According to Edge, the educational foundation which commissioned the research, only 3 per cent of teachers think that diplomas will appeal to middle-class students. Teaching unions said that schools needed more money and training to prepare them for the qualifications, and that A levels should be brought into the structure to break down the barrier between academic and vocational qualifications
Source
More on "The Secret"
Mentioned here yesterday
PUBLISHING phenomenon The Secret has been slammed by a health expert as ridiculous and unhelpful. The book, which has sold more than five million copies worldwide, could encourage readers to be self-obsessed, greedy and deluded, some experts say.
The Secret, by former Melbourne reality show producer Rhonda Byrne, says people can get whatever they want simply by thinking positively. It also suggests that people are poor, ill, overweight and disadvantaged by not thinking positively enough. The book and accompanying DVD became a publishing sensation after US TV tastemaker Oprah Winfrey devoted two shows to it.
More than 500,000 copies of the book will be printed for Australian readers by the end of next month, according to publisher Simon and Schuster. The Secret seems certain to eclipse other top-selling New Age phenomenons including Conversations With God, The Da Vinci Code and The Law of Attraction.
"But there's nothing new in Rhonda Byrne's book," said Melbourne psychologist Dr Michael Carr-Gregg. "It's cognitive behaviour therapy taken to ludicrous extremes. "It's really not helpful."
Source
Alan Johnson's chances of becoming Labour deputy leader take a serious blow today from a highly critical attack on one of the biggest changes to secondary education in the past 40 years. Plans for the new job-related diplomas to run alongside A levels have been described as muddled, in danger of lacking practical content and being rushed through without being properly tested. In a scathing report, the Commons Education Select Committee today accuses the Government of not being clear about the purpose of the qualification, the learning that it will involve and a failure to involve teachers and examiners in its development. Mr Johnson, the Education Secretary, is frontrunner in the race for the deputy leadership and a champion of overhauling 14-19 education to keep more teenagers in school.
The specialist diplomas, the first five of which are to be introduced in September, combine practical work experience with academic study in an attempt to offer more relevant courses for teenagers. They came about after Tony Blair refused to abandon the A-level "gold standard" in 2004 in favour of one overarching diploma to replace GCSEs, A levels and existing vocational qualifications. Instead, the Government proposed single diplomas in 14 subjects alongside A levels, from engineering to hair and beauty.
However, in spite of asking both business and universities to design the new qualification, critics have voiced fears that it will neither offer hands-on vocational training nor be sufficiently academically demanding. The MPs lay the blame for this squarely at Mr Johnson's door. "The Government describes diplomas as charting a middle course between vocational and academic learning, but it is far from clear that those in charge of developing the different diplomas share a common understanding of what they are for and what kinds of learning they will involve," they wrote.
The select committee cautioned that there was still confusion about key aspects of the plan. Work to develop the diplomas had been "uncomfortably compressed", and there were widespread concerns that they would not be ready. Teachers, lecturers and exam boards also have had too little input into them and time to prepare for their introduction in schools and colleges next year. "Too often in the past, initiatives have been rolled out in a rushed manner, with negative consequences in terms of quality," the MPs said, adding that if more problems emerged during the first pilot, the rest of the scheme should be delayed. They also raised concerns about the continuing lack of a clear grading system and content, which meant that few universities appeared prepared to take them seriously.
The comments come as a survey of 565 teachers and lecturers reveals that almost two thirds believe that the new diplomas will be seen simply as training programmes leading to low-paid, low-status jobs for nonacademic pupils. According to Edge, the educational foundation which commissioned the research, only 3 per cent of teachers think that diplomas will appeal to middle-class students. Teaching unions said that schools needed more money and training to prepare them for the qualifications, and that A levels should be brought into the structure to break down the barrier between academic and vocational qualifications
Source
More on "The Secret"
Mentioned here yesterday
PUBLISHING phenomenon The Secret has been slammed by a health expert as ridiculous and unhelpful. The book, which has sold more than five million copies worldwide, could encourage readers to be self-obsessed, greedy and deluded, some experts say.
The Secret, by former Melbourne reality show producer Rhonda Byrne, says people can get whatever they want simply by thinking positively. It also suggests that people are poor, ill, overweight and disadvantaged by not thinking positively enough. The book and accompanying DVD became a publishing sensation after US TV tastemaker Oprah Winfrey devoted two shows to it.
More than 500,000 copies of the book will be printed for Australian readers by the end of next month, according to publisher Simon and Schuster. The Secret seems certain to eclipse other top-selling New Age phenomenons including Conversations With God, The Da Vinci Code and The Law of Attraction.
"But there's nothing new in Rhonda Byrne's book," said Melbourne psychologist Dr Michael Carr-Gregg. "It's cognitive behaviour therapy taken to ludicrous extremes. "It's really not helpful."
Source
Sunday, May 20, 2007
Self-help quack makes a fortune
She was named by Time as one of the world's 100 most influential people, but there are some secrets Rhonda Byrne would rather not divulge to the universe. She has amassed a $48.5 million fortune sharing The Secret with the world, but the overnight self-help guru and former Channel Nine producer, who claims simply asking the "universe" and using the "law of attraction" can do everything from cure cancer to create fortunes, has become increasingly secretive about her roots back home in Australia.
Late last month reports surfaced in Britain about Byrne's mother, Irene Izon, 74, who lives on Melbourne's outskirts. "She has made so much money that I have to pinch myself," Izon told a British journalist, David Cohen. "We talk on the phone most days. I miss her. I am so proud of her. Last week, she told me she'd made $20 million in just a few months, which just blows me away, and that she was giving away 10 per cent to charity. She said she wants to fly me over to visit her in Los Angeles in the summer. Though when I asked her last week, she said she hadn't bought the plane ticket. She is very generous giving all those millions to charity, but I have to admit she hasn't given me a single dollar, though I'm expecting she'll send me some financial help soon. That's what she told me. In the meantime, I'm OK. I get by on my state pension of $1050 a month."
Since Cohen's piece ran in London's Evening Standard and in Edinburgh's Scotsman, Izon and family have gone to ground. Izon's number has disappeared from directories and her mobile is permanently switched off. "You have to contact her publicity people ... The entire family has been instructed by Rhonda not to talk to the media," a family member told PS.
Source
THE ROYAL SOCIETY'S 'MOTTO-MORPHOSIS'
It is an ominous sign that the prestigious scientific institution has changed its motto from 'on the word of no one' to 'respect the facts'. Nullius in Verba, the motto of the prestigious Royal Society in London, is usually translated as 'on the word of no one'. When it was coined back in 1663, it was intended to distance science from the methods of the ancient universities, which relied heavily on the personal authority of the scholars. 'On the word of no one' highlighted the independent authority that empirical evidence bestowed on science; knowledge about the material universe should be based on appeals to experimental evidence rather than authority.
Lately, however, the Royal Society has dropped any mention of 'on the word of no one' from its website. Instead, it talks of the need to 'verify all statements by an appeal to facts determined by experiment'. Lord May of Oxford, erstwhile president of the Royal Society and former chief scientific adviser to the UK government, offers us a whole new translation: 'respect the facts.' This provides the title of his recent review in the Times Literary Supplement (TLS), in which he gave the scientific nod of approval to seven recent publications on climate change, including books by George Monbiot, Al Gore and Sir Nicholas Stern (1).
The Royal Society's 'motto-morphosis' - where it has gone from saying 'on the word of no one' to demanding that we 'respect the facts' - points to an important shift in the way that scientific authority is used to close down debate these days.
FULL STORY here
She was named by Time as one of the world's 100 most influential people, but there are some secrets Rhonda Byrne would rather not divulge to the universe. She has amassed a $48.5 million fortune sharing The Secret with the world, but the overnight self-help guru and former Channel Nine producer, who claims simply asking the "universe" and using the "law of attraction" can do everything from cure cancer to create fortunes, has become increasingly secretive about her roots back home in Australia.
Late last month reports surfaced in Britain about Byrne's mother, Irene Izon, 74, who lives on Melbourne's outskirts. "She has made so much money that I have to pinch myself," Izon told a British journalist, David Cohen. "We talk on the phone most days. I miss her. I am so proud of her. Last week, she told me she'd made $20 million in just a few months, which just blows me away, and that she was giving away 10 per cent to charity. She said she wants to fly me over to visit her in Los Angeles in the summer. Though when I asked her last week, she said she hadn't bought the plane ticket. She is very generous giving all those millions to charity, but I have to admit she hasn't given me a single dollar, though I'm expecting she'll send me some financial help soon. That's what she told me. In the meantime, I'm OK. I get by on my state pension of $1050 a month."
Since Cohen's piece ran in London's Evening Standard and in Edinburgh's Scotsman, Izon and family have gone to ground. Izon's number has disappeared from directories and her mobile is permanently switched off. "You have to contact her publicity people ... The entire family has been instructed by Rhonda not to talk to the media," a family member told PS.
Source
THE ROYAL SOCIETY'S 'MOTTO-MORPHOSIS'
It is an ominous sign that the prestigious scientific institution has changed its motto from 'on the word of no one' to 'respect the facts'. Nullius in Verba, the motto of the prestigious Royal Society in London, is usually translated as 'on the word of no one'. When it was coined back in 1663, it was intended to distance science from the methods of the ancient universities, which relied heavily on the personal authority of the scholars. 'On the word of no one' highlighted the independent authority that empirical evidence bestowed on science; knowledge about the material universe should be based on appeals to experimental evidence rather than authority.
Lately, however, the Royal Society has dropped any mention of 'on the word of no one' from its website. Instead, it talks of the need to 'verify all statements by an appeal to facts determined by experiment'. Lord May of Oxford, erstwhile president of the Royal Society and former chief scientific adviser to the UK government, offers us a whole new translation: 'respect the facts.' This provides the title of his recent review in the Times Literary Supplement (TLS), in which he gave the scientific nod of approval to seven recent publications on climate change, including books by George Monbiot, Al Gore and Sir Nicholas Stern (1).
The Royal Society's 'motto-morphosis' - where it has gone from saying 'on the word of no one' to demanding that we 'respect the facts' - points to an important shift in the way that scientific authority is used to close down debate these days.
FULL STORY here
Saturday, May 19, 2007
Naughty British Comedian Causes Upset in Berkeley
We read:
You can view the video concerned via the link above. Red Berkeley must be greatly peeved that it can do nothing to censor this entirely defensible evaluation of their Jihadist friends.
More deadly NHS negligence
Simple procedures that could save the lives of thousands of hospital patients every year are still not routine in Britain. More than 12,500 patients a year die in hospitals from venous thromboembolism (VTE), blood clots that form in the veins of the legs or pelvis and travel to the heart or lungs. David Fitzmaurice, of the University of Birmingham, says that the condition kills at least ten times as many hospital patients as MRSA but gets far less publicity. Nationally – counting cases both in and out of hospital – at least 25,000 people die in Britain every year from VTE. “The number of deaths from VTE in the UK each year is five times greater than the combined total number of deaths from breast cancer, Aids and road traffic accidents,” Professor Fitzmaurice says in today’s British Medical Journal.
In hospitals, about 10 per cent of all deaths are caused by VTE, and many of these could be prevented. Drugs can reduce the rate by about 65 per cent, but an investigation by the Commons Health Select Committee found that as few as 20 per cent of patients were being treated appropriately. “A combination of factors may be responsible,” Professor Fitzmaurice says. “As a result of poor education, health professionals lack awareness of this condition. Venous thromboembolism is often a silent disease and often occurs after discharge from hospital.” He adds that the cost of the drugs may also be a barrier, although this is not clear.
The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) published guidance last month that all patients undergoing major surgery should be assessed to identify their risk of developing blood clots. The formation of clots, known as deep vein thrombosis (DVT), occurs in more than 20 per cent of surgical patients and more than 40 per cent of patients undergoing major orthopaedic surgery. But it is also common in medical patients. Most of these thromboses are minor and cause no symptoms, but if the blood clot becomes loose it can travel to the lungs and cause VTE.
NICE’s suggestions for preventing blood clots include offering patients compression stockings, inflatable “boots” during operations and the use of blood-thinning medication. Professor Fitzmaurice says that NICE’s emphasis on compression stockings rather than drugs is controversial. It was not supported by a report of the Health Select Committee two years ago, which he says provided an opportunity to change practice. “Meanwhile, more than 25,000 may have died needlessly each year because of the failure to implement simple thromboprophylaxis in UK hospitals,” he concludes.
Source
Government "services" in Britain: "Ministers were accused of decimating Britain's network of post offices after it was confirmed yesterday that 2,500 will be forced to close. Almost a fifth of post offices will be shut by early 2009 under a timetable announced by Alistair Darling, the Trade and Industry Secretary. No decision has yet been taken on exactly where the cuts will fall, but the Post Office will begin drawing up plans within six to eight weeks. The Conservatives said that the announcement spelt the "near certain death of the village post office" and would leave vulnerable people, including pensioners, isolated. Campaign groups said that the closures would bring misery to rural communities and claimed that the Government's public consultation on the closures had been a sham."
We read:
"A British stand-up has been accused of spreading `racist hate speech' in California. Pat Condell has faced a barrage of criticism after links to his anti-Muslim monologue on YouTube were circulated to commissioners in the city of Berkeley.
In the five-minute video, Condell condemns Islam as a religion of war and its prophet Mohammad as `some rambling ancient desert nomad with a psychological disorder'.
He attacks fundamentalist men as `primitive pigs whose only achievement in life is to be born with a penis is one hand and a Koran in the second' and accuses women who wear veils of their own will of being `mentally ill'. ....
Commissioner Michael Sherman said Condell's views were `stunning' because of his `stereotyping and bigotry of the tone and the language'. And commissioner Elliot Cohen called the tape `insulting, degenerating and racist'.....
Condell, an atheist, has released a number of monologues on the internet, criticising all religions. The anti-Islamic video has been seen almost 16,000 times on YouTube and more than 190,000 times on another file sharing site, LiveLeak.
Source
You can view the video concerned via the link above. Red Berkeley must be greatly peeved that it can do nothing to censor this entirely defensible evaluation of their Jihadist friends.
More deadly NHS negligence
Simple procedures that could save the lives of thousands of hospital patients every year are still not routine in Britain. More than 12,500 patients a year die in hospitals from venous thromboembolism (VTE), blood clots that form in the veins of the legs or pelvis and travel to the heart or lungs. David Fitzmaurice, of the University of Birmingham, says that the condition kills at least ten times as many hospital patients as MRSA but gets far less publicity. Nationally – counting cases both in and out of hospital – at least 25,000 people die in Britain every year from VTE. “The number of deaths from VTE in the UK each year is five times greater than the combined total number of deaths from breast cancer, Aids and road traffic accidents,” Professor Fitzmaurice says in today’s British Medical Journal.
In hospitals, about 10 per cent of all deaths are caused by VTE, and many of these could be prevented. Drugs can reduce the rate by about 65 per cent, but an investigation by the Commons Health Select Committee found that as few as 20 per cent of patients were being treated appropriately. “A combination of factors may be responsible,” Professor Fitzmaurice says. “As a result of poor education, health professionals lack awareness of this condition. Venous thromboembolism is often a silent disease and often occurs after discharge from hospital.” He adds that the cost of the drugs may also be a barrier, although this is not clear.
The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) published guidance last month that all patients undergoing major surgery should be assessed to identify their risk of developing blood clots. The formation of clots, known as deep vein thrombosis (DVT), occurs in more than 20 per cent of surgical patients and more than 40 per cent of patients undergoing major orthopaedic surgery. But it is also common in medical patients. Most of these thromboses are minor and cause no symptoms, but if the blood clot becomes loose it can travel to the lungs and cause VTE.
NICE’s suggestions for preventing blood clots include offering patients compression stockings, inflatable “boots” during operations and the use of blood-thinning medication. Professor Fitzmaurice says that NICE’s emphasis on compression stockings rather than drugs is controversial. It was not supported by a report of the Health Select Committee two years ago, which he says provided an opportunity to change practice. “Meanwhile, more than 25,000 may have died needlessly each year because of the failure to implement simple thromboprophylaxis in UK hospitals,” he concludes.
Source
Government "services" in Britain: "Ministers were accused of decimating Britain's network of post offices after it was confirmed yesterday that 2,500 will be forced to close. Almost a fifth of post offices will be shut by early 2009 under a timetable announced by Alistair Darling, the Trade and Industry Secretary. No decision has yet been taken on exactly where the cuts will fall, but the Post Office will begin drawing up plans within six to eight weeks. The Conservatives said that the announcement spelt the "near certain death of the village post office" and would leave vulnerable people, including pensioners, isolated. Campaign groups said that the closures would bring misery to rural communities and claimed that the Government's public consultation on the closures had been a sham."
Friday, May 18, 2007
BBC can't take what they themselves dish out
The Beeb was doing a big report on scientology and the scientologists knew what bias they could expect from that. So they filmed the BBC team while the BBC was filming. They watched the watchers. Which of course meant that the Beeb could not do "creative" editing on what they filmed without being shown up as crooks. Filming the Beeb paid off. The Beeb could not bear being subject to scrutiny. The leader of the BBC team lost his cool:
I have no brief for the Church of Scientology but it is nice to see revealed the animus behind the anti-religious bias of the BBC.
Update:
The BBC reporter concerned had a previous history of abusing scientologists. No wonder they monitored him carefully! It tells you a lot about BBC bias, though -- a bit like sending Ulster's Rev. Ian Paisley to do a story about the Pope.
Massive closure of NHS emergency rooms in sight
Up to half of all hospital accident and emergency departments face cuts or closure under plans to improve patient care, presenting Gordon Brown with a massive dilemma as he takes over as Prime Minister. Ninety-two out of 204 A&E departments are under threat if guidance attributed to the Department of Health by NHS trusts is followed, the Conservatives claimed last night. Some NHS organisations are already using the guidance, which calls for A&E departments to serve a minimum population of 450,000 patients, to justify closures in smaller catchment areas. The average A&E unit currently serves just under 250,000 people.
But the plans are proving hugely unpopular, even though they have been promoted as in the interests of patients and NHS staff. Mr Brown, aware that the closures would come into force around the time of the next election, said last Friday that he would meet front-line NHS staff and patients to discuss health policy. It was clear last night that the Chancellor will not now face a leadership challenge as he prepares to succeed Tony Blair, having gathered a decisive 308th supporter among Labour's 353 MPs.
Last Sunday Mr Brown accepted that people were worried about the potential closure of A&E facilities and maternity services close to their homes, raising speculation that he was pondering a rethink. If so it is increasingly likely that he will move Patricia Hewitt, the Health Secretary, from her post to pave the way for changes.
The Conservative estimate of 92 nationwide cuts was based on figures in a report circulated to NHS trusts in Surrey. It states: "Current Department of Health and strategic health authority guidance suggests that, to be viable in terms of patient need, patient safety, staffing numbers and clinical training requirements, a full A&E department in the future would need to be supported by a catchment population of between 450,000 and 500,000 people." A staff briefing by Surrey Primary Care Trust in March repeated the figures, suggesting that such a catchment population was "national guidance".
Closures could mean seriously ill patients, such as those with heart problems or head injuries, having to travel longer distances to receive care in specialist treatment centres. Patients with minor injuries are expected to be treated in walk-in clinics or smaller A&E units. Such a scenario was supported by two reports published by the Government last year. These suggested that specialist high-tech centres could save 500 lives of people suffering heart attacks and result in 1,000 more stroke victims avoiding death and disability each year.
The changes are broadly supported by doctors' leaders but are fiercely opposed by patients' groups and MPs. Cuts to local NHS services have also been opposed by several senior Labour politicians in their own constituencies. The move to close A&Es comes just as demands on their facilities are rising. The number of attendances at A&E has risen by more than a million in the past three years and the average number of attendances at each is now 67,000.
A report published last year by the Royal College of Surgeons recommended that the minimum catchment population of a fully resourced A&E department should be at least 300,000. But there is debate about whether catchment areas alone should be used to allocate NHS services. Local geography, healthcare needs and staffing levels may have to be taken into account.
A Department of Health spokesman said there was no such official guidance from his department. "It is absolute rubbish to suggest that we are demanding the closure of A&E departments. "Any decisions about the shape of A&E services are taken locally so that services reflect the needs of the local population. Where local health authorities believe that patients can be better served by changing the way services should be delivered, it is right that they make those changes, and they will consult locally on any proposals."
But he admitted that the recommendations were taken from a report by the Royal College of Surgeons supported by Sir George Alberti, the former director of emergency care. He recently recommended the closure of an A&E department in North London. The remaining two A&Es serving the area will be left with catchment populations of 450,000 each.
The Tories claimed that this was evidence of central targets to close units based on the number of patients they served. Andrew Lansley, the Shadow Health Secretary, said: "Access to accident and emergency services is a vital component of the quality of NHS services. The public know that not every A&E department can provide every emergency service. But there is no clinical evidence which would justify shutting down A&E departments simply because they don't serve a catchment population in excess of 450,000. Yet that is the basis on which the Department of Health is seeking now to justify closures."
Source
Vaccine for hypertension?
It sounds most unlikely. As far as I can tell, hypertension is more a symptom than a disease. Do I detect an upcoming iatrogenic disaster here?
British scientists have developed a vaccine to control high blood pressure which could save tens of thousands of lives a year in the UK alone. Based on a protein found in limpets, it would need a course of just three jabs, with a booster every six months.
High blood pressure, which affects a third of all adults, doubles the risk of dying from heart disease or stroke and is blamed for 60,000 deaths a year in Britain. It is currently treated with pills, but they can cause side-effects and some patients simply stop taking them. Now the Cheshire-based drug firm Protherics says its vaccine will make it much easier for people to control their blood pressure. "Improving compliance in this way could save thousands from life-threatening complications such as heart attack or stroke," said the company's Dr Andrew Heath.
The jab, which has been successfully tested on people, uses the limpet protein to attack a hormone called angiotensin, which is produced by the liver. Angiotensin raises blood pressure by narrowing arteries. The vaccine, however, turns the body's immune system against the hormone.
Protherics is planning trials of an improved version of the jab, which is ten times more effective at stimulating the immune system than its original formula. People who have tried it have suffered few side-effects, although one in ten did complain of a brief, flu-like illness. A successful jab would guarantee its manufacturers a healthy share of the 12 billion pounds spent around the world annually on blood pressure medicines.
Ideally, patients would be given an initial course of three injections, with a week or fortnight between each jab. A booster shot every six months, or even once a year, would keep blood pressure low. The Swiss firm Cytos Biotechnology is developing a similar vaccine which uses an empty virus shell to spur the immune system into action. Zurich-based Cytos, which is also developing anti-smoking, obesity and flu vaccines, has already shown that its jab is effective at lowering blood pressure. But the reduction was less than that achieved by tablets already available on prescription. Further trials are due to later this year.
British heart doctors welcomed news of the jab, which should be on the market within five years. Professor Graham Mac-Gregor of the Blood Pressure Association said: "Raised blood pressure is the most important cause of death from strokes and heart attacks in the UK. "If you have to take blood pressure tablets, you have to take them for the rest of your life and some people find that difficult. "Finding other ways and better ways of trying to lower blood pressure without side- effects would be very much welcome."
Dr Mike Knapton of the British Heart Foundation said: "More than one in five heart attacks in Western Europe is caused by a history of high blood pressure. A vaccine is an interesting approach but more research will be needed."
It is not known how much the vaccines will cost but they are not expected to be much more expensive than current blood pressure tablets, some of which cost just a few pence a day. Available privately at first, the jabs will not be offered on the NHS unless the Government's drugs rationing body, the National Institute for Clinical Excellence, decides their benefits outweigh the costs. In time, the vaccine may be given to ward off problems in young men and women with a family history of heart disease.
Some blood pressure tablets already available work by targeting angiotensin, either by cutting production of the hormone or by stopping it from working properly. But many people stop taking the daily tablets simply because there are no obvious signs that they are boosting their health. Others give up after suffering side effects. Beta blockers, a major type of blood pressure pill, can cause fatigue, cold hands and feet, nausea, diarrhoea and impotence. They have also been linked to the risk of stroke.
Last month experts from the London School of Economics warned that the stress of modern life could be spawning an epidemic of heart disease, with half of Britons suffering from high blood pressure by 2025. A growing reliance on fat and salt-laden fast food, coupled with long working hours, is blamed for sending blood pressure soaring.
Source
CLIMATE MESSAGES ARE 'OFF TARGET'
Alarmist messages about global warming are counter-productive, the head of a leading climate research centre says. Professor Mike Hulme, of the UK's Tyndall Centre, has been conducting research on people's attitudes to media portrayals of a catastrophic future. He says strong messages designed to prompt people to change behaviour only seem to generate apathy. His initial findings will be shown to a meeting run by the British Association for the Advancement of Science. "There has been over-claiming or exaggeration, or at the very least casual use of language by scientists, some of whom are quite prominent," Professor Hulme told BBC News.
His concern is that these exaggerations have given the green light to the media to use the language of fear, terror and disaster when covering scientific reports - even when those reports are much more constrained in their description of the course of likely future events. He says extravagated claims simply generate a feeling of helplessness in the public. "My argument is about the dangers of science over-claiming its knowledge about the future and in particular presenting tentative predictions about climate change using words of 'disaster', 'apocalypse' and 'catastrophe'," he said.
The study compared the responses of a group of people shown sensational media coverage with those given the more sober information from scientific reports. The initial findings suggest that those shown doom-laden messages tended to believe the problem could come to a head further into the future. This group also felt there was little they could do to affect the planet's future. "Not only is this not a good way of presenting climate change science, but even in trying to effect change, it's self-defeating," Professor Hulme said.
He is speaking at the British Association's two-day Science Communication Conference in London. He will pick up themes he raised in a Green Room article on the BBC News website last November. These were subsequently echoed by two leading Royal Meteorological Society figures - Professors Paul Hardaker and Chris Collier - in March this year. They said reports of catastrophe and the "Hollywoodisation" of weather and climate were creating confusion in the public's mind. All three men hold the view that human activity lies behind the recent rise in Earth's global average temperature.
Source
The Beeb was doing a big report on scientology and the scientologists knew what bias they could expect from that. So they filmed the BBC team while the BBC was filming. They watched the watchers. Which of course meant that the Beeb could not do "creative" editing on what they filmed without being shown up as crooks. Filming the Beeb paid off. The Beeb could not bear being subject to scrutiny. The leader of the BBC team lost his cool:
"In the Scientologists' clip of the outburst, which it posted on the video-sharing website YouTube, Sweeney is heard screaming: "Now listen to me! You were not there at the beginning of the interview! You were not there! "You did not hear or record all the interview! Do you understand? "You are quoting the second half of the interview, not the first half. You cannot assert what you are saying!"
His shouting all but drowns out the Scientologist, who simply repeats over and over again: "Brainwashing is a crime against humanity."
On Sunday Sweeney said his behaviour had resulted in him having his "arse kicked" by the BBC. He said: "What I did was wrong and stupid and I am embarrassed about it. I let down the team and I let down the BBC. "It was my seventh day with the Scientologists and I snapped."
More here
I have no brief for the Church of Scientology but it is nice to see revealed the animus behind the anti-religious bias of the BBC.
Update:
The BBC reporter concerned had a previous history of abusing scientologists. No wonder they monitored him carefully! It tells you a lot about BBC bias, though -- a bit like sending Ulster's Rev. Ian Paisley to do a story about the Pope.
Massive closure of NHS emergency rooms in sight
Up to half of all hospital accident and emergency departments face cuts or closure under plans to improve patient care, presenting Gordon Brown with a massive dilemma as he takes over as Prime Minister. Ninety-two out of 204 A&E departments are under threat if guidance attributed to the Department of Health by NHS trusts is followed, the Conservatives claimed last night. Some NHS organisations are already using the guidance, which calls for A&E departments to serve a minimum population of 450,000 patients, to justify closures in smaller catchment areas. The average A&E unit currently serves just under 250,000 people.
But the plans are proving hugely unpopular, even though they have been promoted as in the interests of patients and NHS staff. Mr Brown, aware that the closures would come into force around the time of the next election, said last Friday that he would meet front-line NHS staff and patients to discuss health policy. It was clear last night that the Chancellor will not now face a leadership challenge as he prepares to succeed Tony Blair, having gathered a decisive 308th supporter among Labour's 353 MPs.
Last Sunday Mr Brown accepted that people were worried about the potential closure of A&E facilities and maternity services close to their homes, raising speculation that he was pondering a rethink. If so it is increasingly likely that he will move Patricia Hewitt, the Health Secretary, from her post to pave the way for changes.
The Conservative estimate of 92 nationwide cuts was based on figures in a report circulated to NHS trusts in Surrey. It states: "Current Department of Health and strategic health authority guidance suggests that, to be viable in terms of patient need, patient safety, staffing numbers and clinical training requirements, a full A&E department in the future would need to be supported by a catchment population of between 450,000 and 500,000 people." A staff briefing by Surrey Primary Care Trust in March repeated the figures, suggesting that such a catchment population was "national guidance".
Closures could mean seriously ill patients, such as those with heart problems or head injuries, having to travel longer distances to receive care in specialist treatment centres. Patients with minor injuries are expected to be treated in walk-in clinics or smaller A&E units. Such a scenario was supported by two reports published by the Government last year. These suggested that specialist high-tech centres could save 500 lives of people suffering heart attacks and result in 1,000 more stroke victims avoiding death and disability each year.
The changes are broadly supported by doctors' leaders but are fiercely opposed by patients' groups and MPs. Cuts to local NHS services have also been opposed by several senior Labour politicians in their own constituencies. The move to close A&Es comes just as demands on their facilities are rising. The number of attendances at A&E has risen by more than a million in the past three years and the average number of attendances at each is now 67,000.
A report published last year by the Royal College of Surgeons recommended that the minimum catchment population of a fully resourced A&E department should be at least 300,000. But there is debate about whether catchment areas alone should be used to allocate NHS services. Local geography, healthcare needs and staffing levels may have to be taken into account.
A Department of Health spokesman said there was no such official guidance from his department. "It is absolute rubbish to suggest that we are demanding the closure of A&E departments. "Any decisions about the shape of A&E services are taken locally so that services reflect the needs of the local population. Where local health authorities believe that patients can be better served by changing the way services should be delivered, it is right that they make those changes, and they will consult locally on any proposals."
But he admitted that the recommendations were taken from a report by the Royal College of Surgeons supported by Sir George Alberti, the former director of emergency care. He recently recommended the closure of an A&E department in North London. The remaining two A&Es serving the area will be left with catchment populations of 450,000 each.
The Tories claimed that this was evidence of central targets to close units based on the number of patients they served. Andrew Lansley, the Shadow Health Secretary, said: "Access to accident and emergency services is a vital component of the quality of NHS services. The public know that not every A&E department can provide every emergency service. But there is no clinical evidence which would justify shutting down A&E departments simply because they don't serve a catchment population in excess of 450,000. Yet that is the basis on which the Department of Health is seeking now to justify closures."
Source
Vaccine for hypertension?
It sounds most unlikely. As far as I can tell, hypertension is more a symptom than a disease. Do I detect an upcoming iatrogenic disaster here?
British scientists have developed a vaccine to control high blood pressure which could save tens of thousands of lives a year in the UK alone. Based on a protein found in limpets, it would need a course of just three jabs, with a booster every six months.
High blood pressure, which affects a third of all adults, doubles the risk of dying from heart disease or stroke and is blamed for 60,000 deaths a year in Britain. It is currently treated with pills, but they can cause side-effects and some patients simply stop taking them. Now the Cheshire-based drug firm Protherics says its vaccine will make it much easier for people to control their blood pressure. "Improving compliance in this way could save thousands from life-threatening complications such as heart attack or stroke," said the company's Dr Andrew Heath.
The jab, which has been successfully tested on people, uses the limpet protein to attack a hormone called angiotensin, which is produced by the liver. Angiotensin raises blood pressure by narrowing arteries. The vaccine, however, turns the body's immune system against the hormone.
Protherics is planning trials of an improved version of the jab, which is ten times more effective at stimulating the immune system than its original formula. People who have tried it have suffered few side-effects, although one in ten did complain of a brief, flu-like illness. A successful jab would guarantee its manufacturers a healthy share of the 12 billion pounds spent around the world annually on blood pressure medicines.
Ideally, patients would be given an initial course of three injections, with a week or fortnight between each jab. A booster shot every six months, or even once a year, would keep blood pressure low. The Swiss firm Cytos Biotechnology is developing a similar vaccine which uses an empty virus shell to spur the immune system into action. Zurich-based Cytos, which is also developing anti-smoking, obesity and flu vaccines, has already shown that its jab is effective at lowering blood pressure. But the reduction was less than that achieved by tablets already available on prescription. Further trials are due to later this year.
British heart doctors welcomed news of the jab, which should be on the market within five years. Professor Graham Mac-Gregor of the Blood Pressure Association said: "Raised blood pressure is the most important cause of death from strokes and heart attacks in the UK. "If you have to take blood pressure tablets, you have to take them for the rest of your life and some people find that difficult. "Finding other ways and better ways of trying to lower blood pressure without side- effects would be very much welcome."
Dr Mike Knapton of the British Heart Foundation said: "More than one in five heart attacks in Western Europe is caused by a history of high blood pressure. A vaccine is an interesting approach but more research will be needed."
It is not known how much the vaccines will cost but they are not expected to be much more expensive than current blood pressure tablets, some of which cost just a few pence a day. Available privately at first, the jabs will not be offered on the NHS unless the Government's drugs rationing body, the National Institute for Clinical Excellence, decides their benefits outweigh the costs. In time, the vaccine may be given to ward off problems in young men and women with a family history of heart disease.
Some blood pressure tablets already available work by targeting angiotensin, either by cutting production of the hormone or by stopping it from working properly. But many people stop taking the daily tablets simply because there are no obvious signs that they are boosting their health. Others give up after suffering side effects. Beta blockers, a major type of blood pressure pill, can cause fatigue, cold hands and feet, nausea, diarrhoea and impotence. They have also been linked to the risk of stroke.
Last month experts from the London School of Economics warned that the stress of modern life could be spawning an epidemic of heart disease, with half of Britons suffering from high blood pressure by 2025. A growing reliance on fat and salt-laden fast food, coupled with long working hours, is blamed for sending blood pressure soaring.
Source
CLIMATE MESSAGES ARE 'OFF TARGET'
Alarmist messages about global warming are counter-productive, the head of a leading climate research centre says. Professor Mike Hulme, of the UK's Tyndall Centre, has been conducting research on people's attitudes to media portrayals of a catastrophic future. He says strong messages designed to prompt people to change behaviour only seem to generate apathy. His initial findings will be shown to a meeting run by the British Association for the Advancement of Science. "There has been over-claiming or exaggeration, or at the very least casual use of language by scientists, some of whom are quite prominent," Professor Hulme told BBC News.
His concern is that these exaggerations have given the green light to the media to use the language of fear, terror and disaster when covering scientific reports - even when those reports are much more constrained in their description of the course of likely future events. He says extravagated claims simply generate a feeling of helplessness in the public. "My argument is about the dangers of science over-claiming its knowledge about the future and in particular presenting tentative predictions about climate change using words of 'disaster', 'apocalypse' and 'catastrophe'," he said.
The study compared the responses of a group of people shown sensational media coverage with those given the more sober information from scientific reports. The initial findings suggest that those shown doom-laden messages tended to believe the problem could come to a head further into the future. This group also felt there was little they could do to affect the planet's future. "Not only is this not a good way of presenting climate change science, but even in trying to effect change, it's self-defeating," Professor Hulme said.
He is speaking at the British Association's two-day Science Communication Conference in London. He will pick up themes he raised in a Green Room article on the BBC News website last November. These were subsequently echoed by two leading Royal Meteorological Society figures - Professors Paul Hardaker and Chris Collier - in March this year. They said reports of catastrophe and the "Hollywoodisation" of weather and climate were creating confusion in the public's mind. All three men hold the view that human activity lies behind the recent rise in Earth's global average temperature.
Source
Thursday, May 17, 2007
Britain: True immigration levels could be twice as high
The only surprise about local council complaints that immigration figures are ''flawed'' is that anyone is surprised. Figures on this subject are the least trustworthy of all government statistics, and that is saying something. How do we tell the scale of immigration to the UK?
For years, the Office for National Statistics relied upon the International Passenger Survey (IPS) which, as its name suggests, is a survey not a number check. When immigration was at fairly low levels from the early 1970s to the mid-1990s, this somewhat hit-and-miss approach was adequate. For many years, it was almost in equilibrium - showing little net immigration into the UK. But since 1997, immigration has shot up. Even measured by the (IPS) the net figure - the difference between those arriving and leaving - has averaged 180,000 or more for five years.
These figure do not include asylum seekers who have been through all their legal procedures and have been turned down but have stayed on. There could be 400,000 of these. They do not include illegal immigrants, either clandestine entrants or people who have arrived on visas and have not gone home. It is simply unknown how many there are of these. It does not include the 600,000 who have arrived from eastern Europe since the exapansion of the EU and have registered to work. And this latter figure does not include those from eastern Europe who are not required to register, for example the self-employed, or those have chosen not to.
So, the true levels of immigration could easily be twice as high as the official IPS showed. Even if the figures for arrivals are accurate there is now way of knowing how many have left because embarkation controls at the border were scrapped in 1997. Anyone who lives in London or another major city can simply see with their own eyes how the number of overseas workers has grown in recent years. Yet, this was the very moment the ONS decided to replace one suspect set of statistics with another. Instead of the IPS, they are now relying on the Labour Force Survey. This covers just 0.2 per cent of the population and asks migrants where they are actually working.
These figures are then used to calculate the funds needed by local authorities to provide essential services. Coun Mark Loveday, cabinet member for Hammersmith and Fulham, said: "I didn't think it was possible, but this new method for counting migration is actually worse than the old one - which was also a disaster. "The Government's new figures suggest that we have fewer migrants than three years ago. "This methodology will still not account for those spending less than a year in the country. The Labour Force Survey will also not pick up those staying in hostels or living in houses of multiple occupancy."
Coun Merrick Cockell, leader of Kensington and Chelsea Council, said: "We don't find the Office of National Statistics' latest figures credible - 20,800 people cannot simply have vanished." Local authorities now say that they should collect the data and tell the Government how many immigrants they have. Whether that will make them more accurate is anyone's guess.
Source
Another big NHS shortfall
A key target in the Government's health reforms - to have thousands of community nurses treating the most seriously ill patients outside hospital - has been missed, with fewer than half the promised numbers in place. A pledge made three years ago to have 3,000 experienced nurses in post by March this year has been delayed, with social workers and less qualified staff having to make up the numbers looking after patients with chronic illnesses. Cost-cutting and a recruitment freeze in the NHS have forced ministers to revise the deadline back one year in order to benefit from record funding increases in 2007-08.
The retreat has emerged as Patricia Hewitt, the Health Secretary, prepares to outline today how œ8 billion of extra NHS funding will be spent this financial year. It is the last planned annual increase, and many NHS chiefs are already preparing for a subsequent period of drastic budgeting. There are more than 17.5 million people living with chronic conditions such as diabetes, arthritis and heart failure. The Department of Health has claimed that cuts to local hospital services could be justified by having experienced senior nurses treating these patients in or close to their homes.
But The Times has learnt that unqualified social workers, physiotherapists and less experienced staff are being used to boost the total number of "case managers" who care for the most chronically ill patients outside hospital. The department's latest estimate is that there were 1,470 community matrons working in the NHS in December, with an official NHS workforce survey suggesting that fewer than 100 were recruited last year.
The target, set by John Reid, the former Health Secretary, during Labour's "Big Conversation" in 2004, aimed to respond to patients' calls for more care nearer to their homes. Ministers claimed that the 500 million pounds community matrons' policy would soon pay for itself by saving 400 million a year through reduced hospital stays.
But Mrs Hewitt admitted yesterday that community care remained poor in some areas. Treating patients with long-term chronic conditions was the "really big challenge" facing the NHS, she said, but she made no direct admission that the target had been missed. "By March next year, 220,000 of the most needy patients will be getting support and care in their homes from 3,000 community matrons and other case managers," she added.
Josie Irwin, head of employment relations at the Royal College of Nursing, said that the figures amounted to a "spectacular failure" of a government policy.
Source
UNJUST BRITISH LIBEL LAWS
The libel laws are an abomination. They favour rich, litigious bullies at the expense of free expression. Even a website for mothers to chatter on is fair game to this draconian law. Last week mumsnet.com was forced to pay a five-figure sum for comments posted on its chat site. It stood by the comments but this law is such an ass that the burden of proof rests solely with the defendant. Meanwhile, claimants can make their allegations free from evidential proof. Their opinion is all that counts. They do not have to prove the comments are false. They don't even have to show any harm to their reputation. I can think of no other area in law in which an individual's spurious opinion outweighs the greater public good of truth and justice.
The Mumsnet case makes clear how libel affects everyone, not just journalists or those working in the traditional media. More and more of us, thanks to the growing ubiquity of blogs, chat groups and web forums, are vulnerable to this nefarious law. And while big media groups have deep pockets, the individual hasn't. If the damages don't get the writer, then legal costs certainly will. Most writers are not rich people and so they must settle. Result: vibrant debate is quashed, truth inevitably suffers. The law is so heavily weighted against freedom of expression that all writers (even those hosting blogs) are being urged to buy libel insurance; the freelance chapter of the National Union of Journalists is inundated with inquiries about its new policy.
No matter that the publishers of Mumsnet didn't even write the comments that the author Gina Ford claimed defamed her. Under the Defamation Act 1996 nonauthors can be held liable if they fail to expeditiously remove comments someone thinks are defamatory. But how quick is quick? The Mumsnet founder Justine Roberts said that the comments were taken down after little more than 24 hours. Yet the vagueness of the law means she would have to go to court to prove this was a reasonable time period.
As a result we now have a culture where the default position is not free speech but censorship. After the 2001 case Godfrey v. Demon Internet Ltd, all internet service providers became vulnerable to libel lawsuits if they failed to immediately censor comments that a person claimed were defamatory. Whether or not the words are true is irrelevant.
England's libel laws have never been about protecting individuals - at least not poor or helpless individuals. They are about protecting the rich and the powerful. A fair law would be one in which the claimant has to prove falsity, harm and malicious intention, while providing a defence for truth, reasonable care and the public interest. Then both reputations and freedom of expression could be protected. Until then, mum's the word.
Source
Huge expansion of intervention in people's lives under Blair's "New Labour" government
From 'fetal ASBOs' to calorie-counting on the curriculum: the Blairites intervened in family life in ways the Tories never dreamed of
I was one of Thatcher's children. I started school in 1980 and did my GCSE exams in 1991; a childhood and adolescence spent entirely under that Tory prime minister's beaky nose, absorbing all the emotional anti-Thatcherism of the times. I remember Thatcher as a pantomime villain, like the child-catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, immortalised in the Spitting Image puppet that gave you nightmares. When she resigned, it seemed like a happy ending in the making.
But the Blair years have been worse. As a young person under Thatcher, at least you knew where you stood - you hated her, and you assumed that she hated you. Blair seems the opposite - a devoted daddy who wants to get down with the kids and help their parents, who professes to appreciate us and feel our pain. In reality, his reign has been a constant process of family-fiddling and therapeutic intervention, which has undermined parents and unsettled childhood. For example:
When Margaret Thatcher famously argued, back in 1987, that `there is no such thing as society; there are individual men and women, and there are families', this was understood as the apex of Thatcherite individualism. Forget the poor, the needy, the lonely - Eighties Britain was a place of sink or swim, and the family was seen as life-raft enough. That government's promotion of Victorian values and the virtues of home ownership, backed up by its intolerance of more `diverse' lifestyles or family forms (remember the ill-fated war on single parents?), have all entered the liberal lexicon as examples of just how bad the Tories were at looking after families. But Thatcher was more likely to leave us in peace and privacy than Blair's lot.
Blair's government had been in office a mere year when it published the consultation document Supporting Families. (One critique of the document had the apposite headline `Supporting Families like a rope supports a hanging man'.) As I have previously argued on spiked, the document's `message was clear: for too long, it has been assumed that families are best left alone to live their lives in private. Now the state should become more involved - through processes called supporting, helping and advising families - to encourage people to live their lives in the right way.' (See What future for the family?)
Under New Labour, the dynamic towards greater state involvement in everyday family life has intensified year on year. You can see this in initiatives such as the planned creation of a national database that effectively puts alls children under state surveillance (see Children: over-surveilled, under-protected), in the routine use of parenting classes and the more punitive parenting orders, and in the Sure Start scheme, which purports to be an anti-poverty childcare provision initiative but in reality is about sitting by the elbows of low-income parents and guiding them in the right way to bring up their kids (see A Sure Start for the therapeutic state). Parents under Blair are treated like irresponsible children, in need of constant guidance and monitoring by the state. If this is what is meant by society `supporting families', we'd be better off cut adrift.
One of Thatcher's most famous `nasty' moves was her decision, when education secretary in Edward Heath's government, to abolish free school milk: earning her the childish nickname `Thatcher Thatcher, Milk Snatcher'. But at least she never went down the Blairite route of demanding `Let them eat carrot sticks', and sending in a sort of Obesity Special Branch to check the contents of children's school lunchboxes.
The obsession with children's diet, formalised in New Labour's healthy schools initiative, is to me one of the most depressing aspects of bringing up children in today's society. Given a hysterically high profile by the celebrity chef Jamie `Parents Are Tossers' Oliver, the question of what children put into their mouths at breaktime is now considered of utmost political and educational importance. School prospectuses burble on about how keen they are to follow the government's healthy eating agenda and advise parents to ask themselves if their children really need a midmorning snack; reports by the schools inspection body Ofsted rate educational institutions on how well pupils are doing on their diet-and-exercise programmes and whether skinny-limbed kids come home refusing to eat their dinner because some teacher has told them that sausages are `bad foods' and chips `aren't healthy'.
Most parents are more concerned that their kids are eating enough than that they will turn into doughnuts, and we relish the enjoyment that children get out of eating the food they like. The Blair government's mean-spirited attitude to children's food is already poisoning the atmosphere around the dinner table and providing a bitter distraction from the fact that, when schools are not shoving the National Fruit Scheme down children's throats, they are filling their heads with junk. Yes, Thatcher messed about with the curriculum and got on the wrong side of most teachers. But she did not create a situation where calorie-counting was considered more important than maths.
Thatcher was hardly considered a teenager's best friend. Hers was the party of law'n'order as well as (unofficially) the party of youth unemployment, which would later, under John Major, push through the Criminal Justice Bill, widely perceived as a law against the `repetitive beats' of rave culture and other activities beloved of young people. But Thatcher never tried to give teenagers a criminal record while still in the womb.
In September 2006, Blair unveiled plans to identify and intervene in `problem families' at the earliest possible stage, to prevent their children becoming criminals later on in life. The UK media branded the scheme `fetal ASBOs' - a new extension of the Blair government's Anti-Social Behaviour Orders, which are used to whip teenagers into line for such offences as hanging out on the street. This has also been a government that issues on-the-spot fines for all manner of trivial misdemeanours and sends parents to jail if their children play hooky from school (see Parents: we are not the law). The politics of behaviour is promoted through a policy of `Respect' - as though the long arm of the law is any way to get teenagers to respect anything. (See Respect for what?)
Already it is reported that teenagers wear their ASBOS as a `badge of honour', and if they have stopped wearing hooded tops it is presumably not because of the government's sartorial advice on the subject. But it all creates a climate of conformity in which the young, typically more adventurous and energetic than the rest of society, might find themselves in counselling simply for wanting to cross the road.
Of course, none of this means that I pine for the Thatcher era. I remember it as being quite grey and bleak, with the sense of any political alternative crumbling before one's eyes. But the chrome-covered Blair years have been unable to disguise the mistrust, the lack of vision, and the narrow authoritarianism that has powered this government's regime. And now it's about to go Brown..
Source
Even thin people can be too fat!
Note the entirely unjustified assumption that all fat is bad for you
If it really is what's on the inside that counts, then a lot of thin people might be in trouble. Some doctors now think that the internal fat surrounding vital organs like the heart, liver or pancreas - invisible to the naked eye - could be as dangerous as the more obvious external fat that bulges underneath the skin. "Being thin doesn't automatically mean you're not fat," said Dr Jimmy Bell, a professor of molecular imaging at Imperial College, London. Since 1994, Bell and his team have scanned nearly 800 people with MRI machines to create "fat maps" showing where people store their fat.
According to their data, people who maintain their weight through diet instead of exercise, are likely to have major deposits of internal fat, even if they are otherwise slim. "The whole concept of being fat needs to be redefined," said Bell, whose research is funded by Britain's Medical Research Council. Without a clear warning signal - like a rounder middle - doctors worry that thin people may be lulled into falsely assuming that because they're not overweight, they're healthy. "Just because someone is lean doesn't make them immune to diabetes or other risk factors for heart disease," said Dr Louis Teichholz, chief of cardiology at Hackensack Hospital in New Jersey.
Even people with normal Body Mass Index scores - a standard obesity measure that divides your weight by the square of your height - can have surprising levels of fat deposits inside. Of the women scanned by Bell and his colleagues, as many as 45 per cent of those with normal BMI scores (20 to 25) actually had excessive levels of internal fat. Among men, the percentage was nearly 60 per cent. Relating the news to what Bell refers to as TOFIs, or people who are "thin outside, fat inside," is rarely uneventful. "The thinner people are, the bigger the surprise," he said. He said that they have even found TOFIs among people who are professional models.
According to Bell, people who are fat on the inside are essentially on the threshold of being obese. They eat too many fatty, sugary foods - and exercise too little to work it off - but they are not eating enough to actually be fat. Scientists believe we naturally accumulate fat around the belly first, but at some point, the body may start storing it elsewhere. Still, most experts believe that being of normal weight is an indicator of good health, and that BMI is a reliable measurement. "BMI won't give you the exact indication of where fat is, but it's a useful clinical tool," said Dr Toni Steer, a nutritionist at Britain's Medical Research Council.
Doctors are unsure about the exact dangers of internal fat, but some suspect it contributes to the risk of heart disease and diabetes. They theorise that internal fat disrupts the body's communication systems. The fat enveloping internal organs might be sending the body mistaken chemical signals to store fat inside organs like the liver or pancreas. This could ultimately lead to insulin resistance, type 2 diabetes, or heart disease.
Experts have long known that fat, active people can be healthier than their skinny, inactive counterparts. "Normal-weight persons who are sedentary and unfit are at much higher risk for mortality than obese persons who are active and fit," said Dr Steven Blair, an obesity expert at the University of South Carolina. For example, despite their ripples of fat, super-sized Sumo wrestlers probably have a better metabolic profile than some of their slim, seated spectators, Bell said. That's because the wrestlers' fat is primarily stored under the skin, not streaking throughout their vital organs and muscles.
The good news is that internal fat can be easily burned off through exercise or even by improving your diet. "Even if you don't see it on your bathroom scale, caloric restriction and physical exercise have an aggressive effect on visceral fat," said Dr Bob Ross, an obesity expert at Queen's University in Canada.
Because many factors contribute to heart disease, Teichholz says it's difficult to determine the precise danger of internal fat - though it certainly doesn't help. "Obesity is a risk factor, but it's lower down on the totem pole of risk factors," he said, explaining that whether or not people smoke, their family histories and blood pressure and cholesterol rates are more important determinants than both external and internal fat.
When it comes to being fit, experts say there is no short-cut. "If you just want to look thin, then maybe dieting is enough," Bell said. "But if you want to actually be healthy, then exercise has to be an important component of your lifestyle."
Source
COMMON SENSE ON THE ECONOMICS OF CLIMATE CHANGE
Nigel Lawson may be in idyllic semi-retirement in France - but, as he tells William Keegan, he still has the stomach for a battle over climate change that could keep him in the headlines alongside his celebrity offspring
[...]
Which brings us back to current preoccupations: Lawson's active membership of the high-powered House of Lords economics committee, which has already reflected his sceptical view on global warming. I got the impression that he would have liked at least half of our interview to be about global warming, but trust that he appreciates that there is still a lot of interest in the Chancellorial history of the father of Nigella.
At any rate, he expatiated enthusiastically on the way he was attracted by the 'multi-dimensional' aspects of global warming - the science, the economics and the politics. Whatever the mounting scientific evidence, he believes the economic implications - the choices, the complications, the alternatives - are not fully understood.
'It has always seemed to me that the economic dimension is very important, but also very neglected. People thought that once the science was straightened out - and it is true that there is not a lot of scope for differences in the science - all would follow. But it doesn't. It is not at all clear what makes economic sense - or what is politically feasible.'
Lawson insists that the conventional view - urgent action now to help future generations - is unfair. 'How big a sacrifice is it reasonable to ask people today to bear, in order to benefit generations 100 years hence who'll be substantially better off than we are today?' he asks.
He is fully in sympathy with the Chinese for resisting the Kyoto-type approach. 'I understand their view entirely. I've no time for the Chinese regime, but they have a huge population, most of whom are extremely poor, and the most important thing is to lift them out of poverty because otherwise they'll die in large numbers. They need the fastest possible rate of growth, and that means the cheapest energy. The point is that the Chinese are not prepared to sacrifice the present generation for the generation 100 years hence, and that is absolutely understandable.'
The old Chancellor with a new cause is insistent: 'The idea that the European Union should take the lead [over global warming] and that the UK should lead within the EU only means we suffer, because we lead and others don't follow.'
He is quite determined, and fully aware of the risks to his reputation in the face of what has become a formidable and fashionable consensus. With that familiar twinkle in his eye, he added: 'As a superannuated has-been, I've got involved because political correctness makes it damaging for anyone in politics to speak out. I don't need to worry.'
Indeed, my host went on to say that he has had a big response from the public. 'My postbag, or should I say my email bag, has been overwhelmingly favourable.' So there you are. Watch out Nigella, dad's back in town, and clearly only semi-retired in Gascony.
FULL STORY here
British university allows Leftist goons to prevent free speech
The leader of the British National party, Nick Griffin, has been barred from speaking at Bath University amid fears the event would bring chaos to the campus. Earlier this week the university had said that Monday's meeting, which Mr Griffin was due to address, would go ahead because of the institution's commitment to freedom of speech.
But as the scale of the opposition became clear yesterday the university backed down. In a statement published on its website it said many students had expressed fears for their safety if the BNP leader was allowed to appear. It added: "The university has now learned that a very large number of protesters intend to arrive on campus. This creates the likelihood of substantial public order problems and real possibility of disruption ... making it impractical for the university to allow the event to go ahead. In the light of all these considerations the university has decided to refuse permission for the event to take place."
Mr Griffin was invited to address the meeting by first-year politics student and BNP youth leader Danny Lake, who told the Guardian he wanted Mr Griffin to visit the university to explain the BNP's policies to lecturers and students. However, others said the meeting was part of an wider campaign by the BNP, which failed to make a breakthrough in this month's local elections, to establish a foothold on university campuses.
Last night Mr Lake described the university's decision as "a knee-jerk reaction to threats made by the undemocratic left - namely the unions and Unite Against Fascism who care not a jot for people's right to hold opinions". Earlier student leaders and union officials said the initial decision to allow Mr Griffin, who has a conviction for inciting racial hatred, to address the meeting was naive, describing the BNP as dangerous and divisive.
Bath students' union passed a motion at an emergency meeting condemning the BNP and criticising the university. Earlier 11 union general secretaries wrote to the university's vice-chancellor, Glynis Breakwell, calling on her to reconsider her decision. Last night Sally Hunt, joint general secretary of the University and College Union, welcomed the university's U-turn: "We feel this is the correct decision. Allowing the BNP to speak would have compromised the safety of staff and students and sent out a very worrying message about Bath University's commitment to diversity. "The millions of staff and students who cherish academic freedom ... deplore the presence in an institution of learning of Nick Griffin." Paul Jaggers, president of Bath Student Union, said the decision "sends a clear message that students do not want the BNP on university campuses".
Source
Prof. Brignell has put up a very good summary of Tony Blair's appalling legacy in Britain.
The only surprise about local council complaints that immigration figures are ''flawed'' is that anyone is surprised. Figures on this subject are the least trustworthy of all government statistics, and that is saying something. How do we tell the scale of immigration to the UK?
For years, the Office for National Statistics relied upon the International Passenger Survey (IPS) which, as its name suggests, is a survey not a number check. When immigration was at fairly low levels from the early 1970s to the mid-1990s, this somewhat hit-and-miss approach was adequate. For many years, it was almost in equilibrium - showing little net immigration into the UK. But since 1997, immigration has shot up. Even measured by the (IPS) the net figure - the difference between those arriving and leaving - has averaged 180,000 or more for five years.
These figure do not include asylum seekers who have been through all their legal procedures and have been turned down but have stayed on. There could be 400,000 of these. They do not include illegal immigrants, either clandestine entrants or people who have arrived on visas and have not gone home. It is simply unknown how many there are of these. It does not include the 600,000 who have arrived from eastern Europe since the exapansion of the EU and have registered to work. And this latter figure does not include those from eastern Europe who are not required to register, for example the self-employed, or those have chosen not to.
So, the true levels of immigration could easily be twice as high as the official IPS showed. Even if the figures for arrivals are accurate there is now way of knowing how many have left because embarkation controls at the border were scrapped in 1997. Anyone who lives in London or another major city can simply see with their own eyes how the number of overseas workers has grown in recent years. Yet, this was the very moment the ONS decided to replace one suspect set of statistics with another. Instead of the IPS, they are now relying on the Labour Force Survey. This covers just 0.2 per cent of the population and asks migrants where they are actually working.
These figures are then used to calculate the funds needed by local authorities to provide essential services. Coun Mark Loveday, cabinet member for Hammersmith and Fulham, said: "I didn't think it was possible, but this new method for counting migration is actually worse than the old one - which was also a disaster. "The Government's new figures suggest that we have fewer migrants than three years ago. "This methodology will still not account for those spending less than a year in the country. The Labour Force Survey will also not pick up those staying in hostels or living in houses of multiple occupancy."
Coun Merrick Cockell, leader of Kensington and Chelsea Council, said: "We don't find the Office of National Statistics' latest figures credible - 20,800 people cannot simply have vanished." Local authorities now say that they should collect the data and tell the Government how many immigrants they have. Whether that will make them more accurate is anyone's guess.
Source
Another big NHS shortfall
A key target in the Government's health reforms - to have thousands of community nurses treating the most seriously ill patients outside hospital - has been missed, with fewer than half the promised numbers in place. A pledge made three years ago to have 3,000 experienced nurses in post by March this year has been delayed, with social workers and less qualified staff having to make up the numbers looking after patients with chronic illnesses. Cost-cutting and a recruitment freeze in the NHS have forced ministers to revise the deadline back one year in order to benefit from record funding increases in 2007-08.
The retreat has emerged as Patricia Hewitt, the Health Secretary, prepares to outline today how œ8 billion of extra NHS funding will be spent this financial year. It is the last planned annual increase, and many NHS chiefs are already preparing for a subsequent period of drastic budgeting. There are more than 17.5 million people living with chronic conditions such as diabetes, arthritis and heart failure. The Department of Health has claimed that cuts to local hospital services could be justified by having experienced senior nurses treating these patients in or close to their homes.
But The Times has learnt that unqualified social workers, physiotherapists and less experienced staff are being used to boost the total number of "case managers" who care for the most chronically ill patients outside hospital. The department's latest estimate is that there were 1,470 community matrons working in the NHS in December, with an official NHS workforce survey suggesting that fewer than 100 were recruited last year.
The target, set by John Reid, the former Health Secretary, during Labour's "Big Conversation" in 2004, aimed to respond to patients' calls for more care nearer to their homes. Ministers claimed that the 500 million pounds community matrons' policy would soon pay for itself by saving 400 million a year through reduced hospital stays.
But Mrs Hewitt admitted yesterday that community care remained poor in some areas. Treating patients with long-term chronic conditions was the "really big challenge" facing the NHS, she said, but she made no direct admission that the target had been missed. "By March next year, 220,000 of the most needy patients will be getting support and care in their homes from 3,000 community matrons and other case managers," she added.
Josie Irwin, head of employment relations at the Royal College of Nursing, said that the figures amounted to a "spectacular failure" of a government policy.
Source
UNJUST BRITISH LIBEL LAWS
The libel laws are an abomination. They favour rich, litigious bullies at the expense of free expression. Even a website for mothers to chatter on is fair game to this draconian law. Last week mumsnet.com was forced to pay a five-figure sum for comments posted on its chat site. It stood by the comments but this law is such an ass that the burden of proof rests solely with the defendant. Meanwhile, claimants can make their allegations free from evidential proof. Their opinion is all that counts. They do not have to prove the comments are false. They don't even have to show any harm to their reputation. I can think of no other area in law in which an individual's spurious opinion outweighs the greater public good of truth and justice.
The Mumsnet case makes clear how libel affects everyone, not just journalists or those working in the traditional media. More and more of us, thanks to the growing ubiquity of blogs, chat groups and web forums, are vulnerable to this nefarious law. And while big media groups have deep pockets, the individual hasn't. If the damages don't get the writer, then legal costs certainly will. Most writers are not rich people and so they must settle. Result: vibrant debate is quashed, truth inevitably suffers. The law is so heavily weighted against freedom of expression that all writers (even those hosting blogs) are being urged to buy libel insurance; the freelance chapter of the National Union of Journalists is inundated with inquiries about its new policy.
No matter that the publishers of Mumsnet didn't even write the comments that the author Gina Ford claimed defamed her. Under the Defamation Act 1996 nonauthors can be held liable if they fail to expeditiously remove comments someone thinks are defamatory. But how quick is quick? The Mumsnet founder Justine Roberts said that the comments were taken down after little more than 24 hours. Yet the vagueness of the law means she would have to go to court to prove this was a reasonable time period.
As a result we now have a culture where the default position is not free speech but censorship. After the 2001 case Godfrey v. Demon Internet Ltd, all internet service providers became vulnerable to libel lawsuits if they failed to immediately censor comments that a person claimed were defamatory. Whether or not the words are true is irrelevant.
England's libel laws have never been about protecting individuals - at least not poor or helpless individuals. They are about protecting the rich and the powerful. A fair law would be one in which the claimant has to prove falsity, harm and malicious intention, while providing a defence for truth, reasonable care and the public interest. Then both reputations and freedom of expression could be protected. Until then, mum's the word.
Source
Huge expansion of intervention in people's lives under Blair's "New Labour" government
From 'fetal ASBOs' to calorie-counting on the curriculum: the Blairites intervened in family life in ways the Tories never dreamed of
I was one of Thatcher's children. I started school in 1980 and did my GCSE exams in 1991; a childhood and adolescence spent entirely under that Tory prime minister's beaky nose, absorbing all the emotional anti-Thatcherism of the times. I remember Thatcher as a pantomime villain, like the child-catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, immortalised in the Spitting Image puppet that gave you nightmares. When she resigned, it seemed like a happy ending in the making.
But the Blair years have been worse. As a young person under Thatcher, at least you knew where you stood - you hated her, and you assumed that she hated you. Blair seems the opposite - a devoted daddy who wants to get down with the kids and help their parents, who professes to appreciate us and feel our pain. In reality, his reign has been a constant process of family-fiddling and therapeutic intervention, which has undermined parents and unsettled childhood. For example:
When Margaret Thatcher famously argued, back in 1987, that `there is no such thing as society; there are individual men and women, and there are families', this was understood as the apex of Thatcherite individualism. Forget the poor, the needy, the lonely - Eighties Britain was a place of sink or swim, and the family was seen as life-raft enough. That government's promotion of Victorian values and the virtues of home ownership, backed up by its intolerance of more `diverse' lifestyles or family forms (remember the ill-fated war on single parents?), have all entered the liberal lexicon as examples of just how bad the Tories were at looking after families. But Thatcher was more likely to leave us in peace and privacy than Blair's lot.
Blair's government had been in office a mere year when it published the consultation document Supporting Families. (One critique of the document had the apposite headline `Supporting Families like a rope supports a hanging man'.) As I have previously argued on spiked, the document's `message was clear: for too long, it has been assumed that families are best left alone to live their lives in private. Now the state should become more involved - through processes called supporting, helping and advising families - to encourage people to live their lives in the right way.' (See What future for the family?)
Under New Labour, the dynamic towards greater state involvement in everyday family life has intensified year on year. You can see this in initiatives such as the planned creation of a national database that effectively puts alls children under state surveillance (see Children: over-surveilled, under-protected), in the routine use of parenting classes and the more punitive parenting orders, and in the Sure Start scheme, which purports to be an anti-poverty childcare provision initiative but in reality is about sitting by the elbows of low-income parents and guiding them in the right way to bring up their kids (see A Sure Start for the therapeutic state). Parents under Blair are treated like irresponsible children, in need of constant guidance and monitoring by the state. If this is what is meant by society `supporting families', we'd be better off cut adrift.
One of Thatcher's most famous `nasty' moves was her decision, when education secretary in Edward Heath's government, to abolish free school milk: earning her the childish nickname `Thatcher Thatcher, Milk Snatcher'. But at least she never went down the Blairite route of demanding `Let them eat carrot sticks', and sending in a sort of Obesity Special Branch to check the contents of children's school lunchboxes.
The obsession with children's diet, formalised in New Labour's healthy schools initiative, is to me one of the most depressing aspects of bringing up children in today's society. Given a hysterically high profile by the celebrity chef Jamie `Parents Are Tossers' Oliver, the question of what children put into their mouths at breaktime is now considered of utmost political and educational importance. School prospectuses burble on about how keen they are to follow the government's healthy eating agenda and advise parents to ask themselves if their children really need a midmorning snack; reports by the schools inspection body Ofsted rate educational institutions on how well pupils are doing on their diet-and-exercise programmes and whether skinny-limbed kids come home refusing to eat their dinner because some teacher has told them that sausages are `bad foods' and chips `aren't healthy'.
Most parents are more concerned that their kids are eating enough than that they will turn into doughnuts, and we relish the enjoyment that children get out of eating the food they like. The Blair government's mean-spirited attitude to children's food is already poisoning the atmosphere around the dinner table and providing a bitter distraction from the fact that, when schools are not shoving the National Fruit Scheme down children's throats, they are filling their heads with junk. Yes, Thatcher messed about with the curriculum and got on the wrong side of most teachers. But she did not create a situation where calorie-counting was considered more important than maths.
Thatcher was hardly considered a teenager's best friend. Hers was the party of law'n'order as well as (unofficially) the party of youth unemployment, which would later, under John Major, push through the Criminal Justice Bill, widely perceived as a law against the `repetitive beats' of rave culture and other activities beloved of young people. But Thatcher never tried to give teenagers a criminal record while still in the womb.
In September 2006, Blair unveiled plans to identify and intervene in `problem families' at the earliest possible stage, to prevent their children becoming criminals later on in life. The UK media branded the scheme `fetal ASBOs' - a new extension of the Blair government's Anti-Social Behaviour Orders, which are used to whip teenagers into line for such offences as hanging out on the street. This has also been a government that issues on-the-spot fines for all manner of trivial misdemeanours and sends parents to jail if their children play hooky from school (see Parents: we are not the law). The politics of behaviour is promoted through a policy of `Respect' - as though the long arm of the law is any way to get teenagers to respect anything. (See Respect for what?)
Already it is reported that teenagers wear their ASBOS as a `badge of honour', and if they have stopped wearing hooded tops it is presumably not because of the government's sartorial advice on the subject. But it all creates a climate of conformity in which the young, typically more adventurous and energetic than the rest of society, might find themselves in counselling simply for wanting to cross the road.
Of course, none of this means that I pine for the Thatcher era. I remember it as being quite grey and bleak, with the sense of any political alternative crumbling before one's eyes. But the chrome-covered Blair years have been unable to disguise the mistrust, the lack of vision, and the narrow authoritarianism that has powered this government's regime. And now it's about to go Brown..
Source
Even thin people can be too fat!
Note the entirely unjustified assumption that all fat is bad for you
If it really is what's on the inside that counts, then a lot of thin people might be in trouble. Some doctors now think that the internal fat surrounding vital organs like the heart, liver or pancreas - invisible to the naked eye - could be as dangerous as the more obvious external fat that bulges underneath the skin. "Being thin doesn't automatically mean you're not fat," said Dr Jimmy Bell, a professor of molecular imaging at Imperial College, London. Since 1994, Bell and his team have scanned nearly 800 people with MRI machines to create "fat maps" showing where people store their fat.
According to their data, people who maintain their weight through diet instead of exercise, are likely to have major deposits of internal fat, even if they are otherwise slim. "The whole concept of being fat needs to be redefined," said Bell, whose research is funded by Britain's Medical Research Council. Without a clear warning signal - like a rounder middle - doctors worry that thin people may be lulled into falsely assuming that because they're not overweight, they're healthy. "Just because someone is lean doesn't make them immune to diabetes or other risk factors for heart disease," said Dr Louis Teichholz, chief of cardiology at Hackensack Hospital in New Jersey.
Even people with normal Body Mass Index scores - a standard obesity measure that divides your weight by the square of your height - can have surprising levels of fat deposits inside. Of the women scanned by Bell and his colleagues, as many as 45 per cent of those with normal BMI scores (20 to 25) actually had excessive levels of internal fat. Among men, the percentage was nearly 60 per cent. Relating the news to what Bell refers to as TOFIs, or people who are "thin outside, fat inside," is rarely uneventful. "The thinner people are, the bigger the surprise," he said. He said that they have even found TOFIs among people who are professional models.
According to Bell, people who are fat on the inside are essentially on the threshold of being obese. They eat too many fatty, sugary foods - and exercise too little to work it off - but they are not eating enough to actually be fat. Scientists believe we naturally accumulate fat around the belly first, but at some point, the body may start storing it elsewhere. Still, most experts believe that being of normal weight is an indicator of good health, and that BMI is a reliable measurement. "BMI won't give you the exact indication of where fat is, but it's a useful clinical tool," said Dr Toni Steer, a nutritionist at Britain's Medical Research Council.
Doctors are unsure about the exact dangers of internal fat, but some suspect it contributes to the risk of heart disease and diabetes. They theorise that internal fat disrupts the body's communication systems. The fat enveloping internal organs might be sending the body mistaken chemical signals to store fat inside organs like the liver or pancreas. This could ultimately lead to insulin resistance, type 2 diabetes, or heart disease.
Experts have long known that fat, active people can be healthier than their skinny, inactive counterparts. "Normal-weight persons who are sedentary and unfit are at much higher risk for mortality than obese persons who are active and fit," said Dr Steven Blair, an obesity expert at the University of South Carolina. For example, despite their ripples of fat, super-sized Sumo wrestlers probably have a better metabolic profile than some of their slim, seated spectators, Bell said. That's because the wrestlers' fat is primarily stored under the skin, not streaking throughout their vital organs and muscles.
The good news is that internal fat can be easily burned off through exercise or even by improving your diet. "Even if you don't see it on your bathroom scale, caloric restriction and physical exercise have an aggressive effect on visceral fat," said Dr Bob Ross, an obesity expert at Queen's University in Canada.
Because many factors contribute to heart disease, Teichholz says it's difficult to determine the precise danger of internal fat - though it certainly doesn't help. "Obesity is a risk factor, but it's lower down on the totem pole of risk factors," he said, explaining that whether or not people smoke, their family histories and blood pressure and cholesterol rates are more important determinants than both external and internal fat.
When it comes to being fit, experts say there is no short-cut. "If you just want to look thin, then maybe dieting is enough," Bell said. "But if you want to actually be healthy, then exercise has to be an important component of your lifestyle."
Source
COMMON SENSE ON THE ECONOMICS OF CLIMATE CHANGE
Nigel Lawson may be in idyllic semi-retirement in France - but, as he tells William Keegan, he still has the stomach for a battle over climate change that could keep him in the headlines alongside his celebrity offspring
[...]
Which brings us back to current preoccupations: Lawson's active membership of the high-powered House of Lords economics committee, which has already reflected his sceptical view on global warming. I got the impression that he would have liked at least half of our interview to be about global warming, but trust that he appreciates that there is still a lot of interest in the Chancellorial history of the father of Nigella.
At any rate, he expatiated enthusiastically on the way he was attracted by the 'multi-dimensional' aspects of global warming - the science, the economics and the politics. Whatever the mounting scientific evidence, he believes the economic implications - the choices, the complications, the alternatives - are not fully understood.
'It has always seemed to me that the economic dimension is very important, but also very neglected. People thought that once the science was straightened out - and it is true that there is not a lot of scope for differences in the science - all would follow. But it doesn't. It is not at all clear what makes economic sense - or what is politically feasible.'
Lawson insists that the conventional view - urgent action now to help future generations - is unfair. 'How big a sacrifice is it reasonable to ask people today to bear, in order to benefit generations 100 years hence who'll be substantially better off than we are today?' he asks.
He is fully in sympathy with the Chinese for resisting the Kyoto-type approach. 'I understand their view entirely. I've no time for the Chinese regime, but they have a huge population, most of whom are extremely poor, and the most important thing is to lift them out of poverty because otherwise they'll die in large numbers. They need the fastest possible rate of growth, and that means the cheapest energy. The point is that the Chinese are not prepared to sacrifice the present generation for the generation 100 years hence, and that is absolutely understandable.'
The old Chancellor with a new cause is insistent: 'The idea that the European Union should take the lead [over global warming] and that the UK should lead within the EU only means we suffer, because we lead and others don't follow.'
He is quite determined, and fully aware of the risks to his reputation in the face of what has become a formidable and fashionable consensus. With that familiar twinkle in his eye, he added: 'As a superannuated has-been, I've got involved because political correctness makes it damaging for anyone in politics to speak out. I don't need to worry.'
Indeed, my host went on to say that he has had a big response from the public. 'My postbag, or should I say my email bag, has been overwhelmingly favourable.' So there you are. Watch out Nigella, dad's back in town, and clearly only semi-retired in Gascony.
FULL STORY here
British university allows Leftist goons to prevent free speech
The leader of the British National party, Nick Griffin, has been barred from speaking at Bath University amid fears the event would bring chaos to the campus. Earlier this week the university had said that Monday's meeting, which Mr Griffin was due to address, would go ahead because of the institution's commitment to freedom of speech.
But as the scale of the opposition became clear yesterday the university backed down. In a statement published on its website it said many students had expressed fears for their safety if the BNP leader was allowed to appear. It added: "The university has now learned that a very large number of protesters intend to arrive on campus. This creates the likelihood of substantial public order problems and real possibility of disruption ... making it impractical for the university to allow the event to go ahead. In the light of all these considerations the university has decided to refuse permission for the event to take place."
Mr Griffin was invited to address the meeting by first-year politics student and BNP youth leader Danny Lake, who told the Guardian he wanted Mr Griffin to visit the university to explain the BNP's policies to lecturers and students. However, others said the meeting was part of an wider campaign by the BNP, which failed to make a breakthrough in this month's local elections, to establish a foothold on university campuses.
Last night Mr Lake described the university's decision as "a knee-jerk reaction to threats made by the undemocratic left - namely the unions and Unite Against Fascism who care not a jot for people's right to hold opinions". Earlier student leaders and union officials said the initial decision to allow Mr Griffin, who has a conviction for inciting racial hatred, to address the meeting was naive, describing the BNP as dangerous and divisive.
Bath students' union passed a motion at an emergency meeting condemning the BNP and criticising the university. Earlier 11 union general secretaries wrote to the university's vice-chancellor, Glynis Breakwell, calling on her to reconsider her decision. Last night Sally Hunt, joint general secretary of the University and College Union, welcomed the university's U-turn: "We feel this is the correct decision. Allowing the BNP to speak would have compromised the safety of staff and students and sent out a very worrying message about Bath University's commitment to diversity. "The millions of staff and students who cherish academic freedom ... deplore the presence in an institution of learning of Nick Griffin." Paul Jaggers, president of Bath Student Union, said the decision "sends a clear message that students do not want the BNP on university campuses".
Source
Prof. Brignell has put up a very good summary of Tony Blair's appalling legacy in Britain.
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
Empowering patients: New Labour's unhealthiest idea?
Everyone slates Blair for Iraq while praising his health reforms. Yet his interventions in the NHS have alienated patients and degraded doctors
After Tony Blair's lip-trembling resignation speech, commentators were inclined to give him credit for his public sector reforms while questioning his judgement over Iraq. But New Labour's widely approved `patient-centred' reforms are a real threat to the quality of healthcare in Britain.
When, a week earlier, Blair visited the offices of the King's Fund, New Labour's favourite health policy think tank, to give a speech commemorating a decade of National Health Service reforms, he received a generally positive response from the assembled ranks of health experts and professionals (1). King's Fund chief executive Niall Dickson set the tone in his congratulations to the prime minister on the eve of his departure for providing `unprecedented levels of funding' and `significant improvements in key areas'. Though there were some reservations about disruptive reorganisations, there was general agreement that New Labour reforms have succeeded in their key objective of making the NHS more responsive to patients. While the soundbites about `patient-centred' healthcare may appear merely banal, they reflect the corrosive cynicism of New Labour that is Tony Blair's true legacy to the NHS.
Speaking to the King's Fund conference immediately before the prime minister, David Pink, chief executive of the Long Term Medical Conditions Alliance, a consortium of more than 100 patient organisations, welcomed the government's commitment to a `patient-centred' NHS. As Pink acknowledged, the very presence on such a distinguished platform of somebody speaking from the perspective of patients was a potent symbol of the transformation of health policy under Blair. He enthusiastically endorsed a number of initiatives that, while purporting to advance patient interests, reveal the destructive consequences of the government's attempts to reform healthcare according to the rhetoric of choice and empowerment.
While many commentators have criticised the Quality and Outcomes Framework (QOF) as a crude target-driven payment-by-results system imposed on general practice, Pink welcomed `a major national programme that has turned the NHS's attention to helping people monitor and maintain their own health'. In practice, QOF operates as a financial lever to shift medical practice away from the diagnosis and treatment of disease towards intrusive and moralising interventions in patients' personal lives, justified by the dogma that this improves health and prevents disease. Far from benefiting those with chronic conditions, this shift is depriving them of continuity of care while doctors' energies are consumed with medicalising the worried well. The provision of an incentive bonus to GPs for recording patients' preferences about where they would like to die - a choice over which neither patient nor doctor is in practice able to exert much influence - aptly symbolises QOF's contribution to patient empowerment (2).
Another New Labour health initiative approved by David Pink is the Expert Patient Programme, a series of formal training sessions through which people learn to manage their own chronic illnesses. (As, according to the Long Term Medical Conditions Alliance, there are some 17million people with such conditions in Britain, at least one in four of the population is deemed eligible for this programme - though only 23,000 have so far participated.) For Pink, `the great significance of this programme is that it is an acknowledgement of the vital role that patients and their families have in improving their own health' - and he welcomed the support of the British Medical Association for the programme.
Though the Expert Patient Programme (EPP) has a commonsensical appeal, it is imbued with bad faith: it offers an illusory empowerment to patients with chronic illness and an illusory relief from the burden of caring for patients with chronic illness to doctors (3). If the EPP was widely taken up, it would affirm an identity as sufferer from chronic illness for a growing proportion of the population while imposing an increasing burden of responsibility for their own care on those with chronic disease. While patronising patients, EPP implicitly degrades doctors, devaluing medical science and professional expertise. Who benefits? Not patients, not doctors, not society; perhaps a few politicians and health policy bureaucrats.
David Pink is also a staunch advocate of `patient and public involvement' in the NHS, another of the favoured slogans of New Labour. Given the `democratic deficit' resulting from the decline in popular participation in political parties, local councils and elections, the government has sought to increase public involvement in many areas of public life, from the arts to schools to hospitals. Such initiatives inevitably have an artificial and bureaucratic character, particularly in the sphere of healthcare, which people - at least in the past - sought to avoid when they were well and to keep to a minimum when they were sick.
New Labour's promotion of `patient and public involvement' has led to the cultivation of the professional patient (together with the professional carer) who purports to express the interests of patients (and carers) in general. Of course, members of the public who are able and willing to assume these roles are inevitably unrepresentative of patients and carers in general - and, unlike local councillors and MPs, are not subject even to the episodic recall of the ballot box and hence are under no obligation or even pressure to reflect the interests of those they purport to represent.
In his enthusiasm for `patient and public involvement' David Pink personifies the defects of these initiatives. While he speaks on behalf of people with chronic illnesses to top politicians and policymakers, he was not elected by people with chronic illnesses and he is in no way answerable or accountable to them. Indeed, as the chief executive of a meta-quango, which strictly represents a number of organisations (also unrepresentative and unaccountable) rather than individuals with chronic illnesses, he is as remote from such individuals as any politician (and vastly more remote than the average GP). In fact, what emerges is that his status at the King's Fund assembly of health policymakers is conferred by government endorsement of his position rather than by any democratic mandate.
It is thus perhaps not surprising to find that, of all the assembled dignitaries, he provides the perfect warm-up man for Tony Blair on his tenth anniversary celebrations.
Source
British police madness government-driven
Police officers are being driven to make "ludicrous" arrests for trivial incidents to bolster government targets, the new Justice Secretary will be told. The leaders of 130,000 police officers have drawn up a dossier of "lunacy" on Britain's streets. They say that children are being arrested for throwing cream buns and bits of cucumber while adults are getting criminal records for offences that merit nothing more than a ticking-off. The pressure to get results is so bad, they say, that officers are criminalising and alienating their traditional supporters in Middle England and many are so disillusioned that they are considering quitting.
What police describe as a target-driven criminal justice culture will come under attack today as Lord Falconer of Thoroton, QC, who was appointed Secretary of State a week ago, faces a debate at the annual conference of the Police Federation, which represents rank-and-file officers in England and Wales. The conference in Blackpool will consider whether the drive to meet targets is destroying police officers' traditional discretion to deal with minor offences on the streets without fuss or bureaucracy. Officers say that ten years ago a minor incident involving someone without a criminal record would have led to "words of advice". Now, the federation says, performance targets mean that the people involved are becoming criminal statistics.
Jan Berry, the chairman of the federation, said: "We have police officers who are considering leaving the service over this because it is not the job they signed up to do. "These examples we have compiled are ludicrous, but when people are being pushed to show results they will use anything they can to demonstrate they are doing a good job." She added: "Just talking to people and giving them a few words of advice cannot be counted as easily as a ticket. But sometimes it is just as effective as taking someone to court."
A spokesman for the federation added: "We have got into the situation where everyone is so busy chasing targets and securing ticks in boxes we are on the verge of distancing ourselves from Middle England." He said: "The cases we have compiled show incidents where an officer has been under such pressure to deliver that it has resulted in an arrest or caution when even the officer themselves thinks it is ludicrous. Understandably, when the public hears about this they ask: `What the hell is going on?'." The spokesman added: "It is a government agenda that is going down this avenue. Officers are saying they are forced to make arrests or cautions because the Government believes they should be judged by what can be counted."
Chief constables have also complained about the increasing pressures to meet both national and local targets. Last autumn the Home Office issued 30 general targets that police must meet, as well as more specific figures. Earlier this year John Reid, the Home Secretary, who will be speaking at the conference on Wednesday, promised that he would cut some of the targets.
But last month officers in Greater Manchester were warned about issuing fixed-penalty notices to drunks for public order offences so that they would count towards their target of two detected offences a month. Home Office research last year found a nationwide increase in drunks being penalised for causing harassment, alarm or distress. Researchers concluded that the trend may have been driven by government target-setting. Notices issued for offences such as causing harassment, alarm or distress count as a "violent crime" and an "offence brought to justice" for the purposes of Home Office statistics. The alternative, lesser charge of being drunk and disorderly does not count towards police detection targets.
Source
British education failure
After 10 years of `education, education, education', Britain's teachers are drowning in paperwork, targets and banality - and the very idea of a liberal education is under threat
For over a decade, New Labour has been awash with soundbites. The party was `tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime'; there would be `an end to boom and bust'; we'd have `strong Britain, strong leadership'. And then there was the soundbite that stuck better than any, Tony Blair's 1996 pledge that the three priorities of his government would be: `Education, education, education.'
Nowhere has Blair's Orwellian approach to society been writ larger than in his translation of that bare word `education' into Newspeak. For what he has achieved during his decade-long reign has been a narrowing of the very concept of education: the abstract ambitions of pupils have been worn down, and the love and passion some teachers felt for their job have been undermined. We are left with a conveyer-belt process of tests, targets, objectives, goals, tickboxes and paperwork. The idea of the liberal education is under threat at the end of Blair's Britain, as horizons are narrowed and the classroom reduced to a bulletin space for government initiatives. Schools have become a place where the new conformism is taught and enforced.
`Go to your local school', Blair urged after his victory in the 2005 General Election. `You can see the progress in the buildings, in the computers and in the results.' To mark 10 years of education, education, education, I did just that. It's a dreary morning, in an idyllic setting. The neat school building (which I will not name, in order to protect the identity of its staff) rests on a slope, overcast by a vast country church and next to a plantation with great green trees, some of which have been cleared to make way for a playground. The children play there, building small dens and hanging off the various items of play equipment. Smatterings of pink blossom coat the grass. The church bell rings in 9am, and the children, already a little untidy in their bright, blue school uniforms, rush inside. In one classroom, the kids sit on a mat and poke at a hamster called King Alfred; they chatter above the din of an aerated fish tank.
The children's poster paint artwork is pasted on to the walls; the room is a jumble of primary-coloured equipment, books, guides and measures. The children are miniature pots of enthusiasm, fidgeting and clapping their hands and shuffling about on their bottoms until called to attention. Filing into assembly minutes later, they get on with singing hymns and learning a new story about Jesus. `Team points' are given when a child answers a question about the moral of the story correctly.
In this school, as in so many others, the various demands of Blair's Britain have been imposed, by school inspectors, county advisers and the constant tide of new guidelines, new programmes, new initiatives, new glossy booklets - which often contradict last year's glossy booklets - and new schemes for the betterment of the children within the school walls. The teachers inside tell me they feel under siege: unable to teach with freedom, many distrust themselves and their abilities. They are the fag end of Blair's education revolution. Let us consider, then, what `education, education, education' has wrought in Britain's schools.
Under Blair, the public eye has pried into the private world on an unprecedented level. Turning Thatcher's `there's no such thing as society' into `there's no such thing as a private life', schools have become one of the principal instruments for manipulating a new generation into new thought patterns. This week it was announced that schools must foster positive race relations or face closure. Fruit is provided at breaktime in order to improve children's diet because, of course, parents cannot be trusted to feed their kids well. And, under the new Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning scheme (SEAL), teachers are now responsible for shaping the emotional and social lives of the children in their care.
Increasingly, children are taught the correct ways in which to express their feelings. In some schools they participate in group massage sessions, in which they must knead each other's shoulders and send their own positive `toxins' into the air to help the emotional wellbeing of those recalcitrant youngsters who don't want to be group-massaged, or whose parents have denied permission.
This approach permeates a whole new approach to teaching, in which children (especially in the early years) must actually not be taught at all. In fact, in policy circles, teachers are teachers no more: they are `practitioners'. In indoor PE, children are not to be taught how to do a roly-poly anymore; rather they are supposed to `experiment travelling in and through'. (At the school I visited, one teacher, a worried look flickering across her face, told me: `I'm not sure I was ever supposed to teach them how to do a roly-poly..')
To try to teach a child, via the tried and tested `talk and chalk' method that has successfully educated children for generations, is now considered to be wrong. It is too elitist and judgemental apparently.
In the school I visited, the early years teacher seemed to have lost confidence in her own ability to teach, following a negative Ofsted inspection. Her paperwork had been found wanting, and then she had been found actually teaching children as she saw fit.which is the greatest crime under today's inspection regime.
Teachers, like every other public sector worker under New Labour, now drown in paperwork. There is an incessant flood of forms that need filling. They are given `PPA' time, cutting out half a day's teaching, in order to help them cope with the forms and documents. In 2006, the Education and Inspections Act revolutionised the inspections system: it brought in a system where schools have to be prepared for an inspection at any moment (only two days' notice is given) and where schools are assessed on their own internal assessment systems.
It is now all about the paperwork. Like a Soviet Five-Year Plan, if it's down on paper, it happened - if it's not, it didn't. So this school was hauled up for a `culture of bullying' - not because it had a bullying problem (it didn't), but because it did not have a government-advised system of `playground angels' and `buddy benches' to deal with any potential bullying that might arise or have already arisen without the teachers noticing.
The sheer detail in which a child's education is now charted is breathtaking. As Helene Guldberg has shown elsewhere on spiked, under New Labour infants now have `69 early learning goals' (see A tick-box attitude to toddlers, by Helene Guldberg). In this school's classrooms, as in most others, there are now 44 goals in the teaching of literacy. One teacher tells me that striving to achieve such goals often detracts from fundamental lessons that teach children how actually to read. These days while they read, young children have to explain whether a particular character is `good' or `bad', and why they are good or bad. `Instead of concentrating on what really matters, they'll be given a target, something specific, that's disembodied from enjoying reading. It doesn't lead anywhere', the teacher told me. What New Labour seems to have done is to break down reading into a set of meaningless facets, effectively `quantifying the unquantifiable', as the teacher put it.
An Ofsted report cited recently in the Daily Telegraph outlines the new teaching culture that Ofsted wishes to inculcate in our schools: `Too often, the teacher does most of the talking. It is frequently restricted to explanations and predominantly closed questions which ask for recall of previous learning.' Teaching in such a way (explaining a principle, demanding `right' or `wrong' answers to questions) is now looked upon as heresy. Instead `Ofsted prescribes "lively debate", "buzz groups", exercises in "empathy", "scope for pupils to make choices", working in groups, and "drama techniques" such as "hot seating", in which teacher and pupils exchange roles.'
As Ofsted says: `A key characteristic of the best lessons is the opportunity they provide for pupils to talk and collaborate.' This is not just a silly PC idea that we can laugh off; it fundamentally undermines the idea that teachers have something important to impart to children in favour of allowing children themselves to set the agenda by talking and playing and thinking out loud in class. It is little wonder that some teachers feel devalued.
If a teacher asks for advice on how they are supposed to do all this new stuff - how they are meant to reach their targets through drama and buzz groups - they are not likely to find any officially endorsed answer. The paperwork and the new ideas are foisted on schools from on high, and the schools are expected simply to get on with it all by the time of their next inspection.
This imposition of new rules and methods distances children from their own education. Learning programmes for individual kids are now planned out without the adviser who does the planning ever having met the children in question. `I get certificates for going to all these seminars', a teacher explains to me. `I've got them all for my portfolio. But what do they mean? We go, and when we have listened to all the new ideas, we ask for specific methods. And the advisers turn to us, and they say, "You can just do it. You're the professionals - you know how." And yes I did know. Or I thought I knew.'
Children are supposed to be au fait with all the terms their practitioners now use. So instead of `letters' and `sounds' they are encouraged to talk about `graphemes' and `phonemes'. `Tricks' that help young children to learn how to read are definitely out. Today explaining about the magic or silent `e' - which many spiked readers will understand from their own childhood education - is held to be detrimental because `you're giving them a trick to use instead of getting them to understand how various graphemes can make phonemes', the teacher explains. Imagine how baffling it must be for a young child instantly to learn about graphemes and phonemes rather than about magic letters that do certain strange things to words? `Children understand "magic" things. It's part of their world. It's much more understandable to them to see a magic thing coming along and changing a sound rather than a phoneme holding hands and pushing a grapheme out of the way', the teacher says. But no `magic' is allowed in classrooms these days.
Teachers' scepticism about new teaching methods is not appreciated. As in so many other professions today, bureaucrats have been trained up to counteract doubts among those at the frontline of teaching the nation's youth. Legions of school advisers, in every county of the land, come up with a succession of great new examples from other schools that have better Ofsted outcomes, schools that have put all the New Labour theories into practice and achieved great results: the advisers hold these schools up as models in order to force other schools to change and accept the new way of doing things.
A big buzzphrase today is `outdoor learning'. The teacher tells me that at one seminar she attended, `An early years adviser was raving about how wonderful a certain class of children had been, because they had a lesson outdoors in which they were picking up sticks and making graphemes out of them. I couldn't help thinking it would be far better for them if they had done that on paper, with a pencil. It's almost like going back to cave-man times..'
Of course, there is nothing wrong with learning outdoors, investigating and getting to know more about wildlife and the natural environment. But words and language and grammar are surely better taught indoors, in a classroom - unless that, too, is too old-fashioned an outlook for the constantly churning education system.
Attendance is paramount in New Labour's new education system. You can find the attendance stats for any school in the land, simply by typing the name of the school into a portal on the BBC's education website. Under the Blairites' target-obsessed learning system, parents are constantly warned not to take their kids on holiday during school time or to allow them to have many (if any) day absences, because the child might fall behind and prevent the class from reaching its targets.
The obsession with attendance can lead to a culture of snooping. At the school I visited, one of the pupils had a condition called `slap cheek'. It is infectious to other children, but it is not very debilitating for the child who has it and it is easily cured. The child's mother took her daughter out of school while she had the affliction, and on one of the days off school mum took her daughter to the supermarket; there was no one else to look after her at home and the shopping needed to be done. In this sleepy rural town, the child was spotted by a Community Support Officer, who reported the mother to the school. The school was instructed to keep a special eye on the child in future.
Behaviour has to be managed within schools, of course. And as you might expect, new approaches have also been brought in for this area of school life. Today teachers are advised never to be negative towards children; they should not tell a child off, but rather encourage him or her, through incentives, to behave well. In some schools, there is a new behavioural system called `golden time': this is a period of time at the end of the week where all the good children are allowed to do fun tasks but those who have been naughty are excluded. So instead of reprimanding bad behaviour when it happens, and explaining why it is a problem, schools are encouraged to reward all children except those who have done something bad.
In certain schools, `golden time' actually plays into the hands of children who misbehave. After all, the only thing that happens to them is that they miss out on golden time. In schools with big behaviour problems, it is apparently now cool to miss golden time. In this rural school, Year Six children (10- and 11-year-olds) were rewarded with a golden time of `hammer beads', which a teacher described as a `glorified colouring-in exercise, fine for Year Two children but not Year Six'. Any self-respecting 11-year-old, especially of the naughty variety, would not be overly concerned about missing out on such an exercise.....
After a decade of `education, education, education', it is surely time for the government and its myriad minions to get out of the classroom. Government should fund education and direct it, but it should not interfere with absolutely every aspect of school life, teacher-pupil relations, playtime, and children's eating habits, behaviour, weight and so on. Teachers must be allowed to refer to themselves as `teachers' again, not practitioners - and they must be allowed to `chalk and talk' if they want to. In short, they should have the freedom to teach in ways they see fit, and to invigorate the young minds in their trust with enthusiasm and ideas that are not rigidly defined by government targets and health, social, emotional and wellbeing messages.
To paraphrase another New Labour motto, which they borrowed from pop group D:Ream and danced to, excruciatingly, in 1997: `Things in teaching can only get better.' And they will, once we teach ourselves to trust our teachers once more and allow schools to go back to being centres of knowledge and learning rather than outlets for government posturing and social engineering.
Source
Everyone slates Blair for Iraq while praising his health reforms. Yet his interventions in the NHS have alienated patients and degraded doctors
After Tony Blair's lip-trembling resignation speech, commentators were inclined to give him credit for his public sector reforms while questioning his judgement over Iraq. But New Labour's widely approved `patient-centred' reforms are a real threat to the quality of healthcare in Britain.
When, a week earlier, Blair visited the offices of the King's Fund, New Labour's favourite health policy think tank, to give a speech commemorating a decade of National Health Service reforms, he received a generally positive response from the assembled ranks of health experts and professionals (1). King's Fund chief executive Niall Dickson set the tone in his congratulations to the prime minister on the eve of his departure for providing `unprecedented levels of funding' and `significant improvements in key areas'. Though there were some reservations about disruptive reorganisations, there was general agreement that New Labour reforms have succeeded in their key objective of making the NHS more responsive to patients. While the soundbites about `patient-centred' healthcare may appear merely banal, they reflect the corrosive cynicism of New Labour that is Tony Blair's true legacy to the NHS.
Speaking to the King's Fund conference immediately before the prime minister, David Pink, chief executive of the Long Term Medical Conditions Alliance, a consortium of more than 100 patient organisations, welcomed the government's commitment to a `patient-centred' NHS. As Pink acknowledged, the very presence on such a distinguished platform of somebody speaking from the perspective of patients was a potent symbol of the transformation of health policy under Blair. He enthusiastically endorsed a number of initiatives that, while purporting to advance patient interests, reveal the destructive consequences of the government's attempts to reform healthcare according to the rhetoric of choice and empowerment.
While many commentators have criticised the Quality and Outcomes Framework (QOF) as a crude target-driven payment-by-results system imposed on general practice, Pink welcomed `a major national programme that has turned the NHS's attention to helping people monitor and maintain their own health'. In practice, QOF operates as a financial lever to shift medical practice away from the diagnosis and treatment of disease towards intrusive and moralising interventions in patients' personal lives, justified by the dogma that this improves health and prevents disease. Far from benefiting those with chronic conditions, this shift is depriving them of continuity of care while doctors' energies are consumed with medicalising the worried well. The provision of an incentive bonus to GPs for recording patients' preferences about where they would like to die - a choice over which neither patient nor doctor is in practice able to exert much influence - aptly symbolises QOF's contribution to patient empowerment (2).
Another New Labour health initiative approved by David Pink is the Expert Patient Programme, a series of formal training sessions through which people learn to manage their own chronic illnesses. (As, according to the Long Term Medical Conditions Alliance, there are some 17million people with such conditions in Britain, at least one in four of the population is deemed eligible for this programme - though only 23,000 have so far participated.) For Pink, `the great significance of this programme is that it is an acknowledgement of the vital role that patients and their families have in improving their own health' - and he welcomed the support of the British Medical Association for the programme.
Though the Expert Patient Programme (EPP) has a commonsensical appeal, it is imbued with bad faith: it offers an illusory empowerment to patients with chronic illness and an illusory relief from the burden of caring for patients with chronic illness to doctors (3). If the EPP was widely taken up, it would affirm an identity as sufferer from chronic illness for a growing proportion of the population while imposing an increasing burden of responsibility for their own care on those with chronic disease. While patronising patients, EPP implicitly degrades doctors, devaluing medical science and professional expertise. Who benefits? Not patients, not doctors, not society; perhaps a few politicians and health policy bureaucrats.
David Pink is also a staunch advocate of `patient and public involvement' in the NHS, another of the favoured slogans of New Labour. Given the `democratic deficit' resulting from the decline in popular participation in political parties, local councils and elections, the government has sought to increase public involvement in many areas of public life, from the arts to schools to hospitals. Such initiatives inevitably have an artificial and bureaucratic character, particularly in the sphere of healthcare, which people - at least in the past - sought to avoid when they were well and to keep to a minimum when they were sick.
New Labour's promotion of `patient and public involvement' has led to the cultivation of the professional patient (together with the professional carer) who purports to express the interests of patients (and carers) in general. Of course, members of the public who are able and willing to assume these roles are inevitably unrepresentative of patients and carers in general - and, unlike local councillors and MPs, are not subject even to the episodic recall of the ballot box and hence are under no obligation or even pressure to reflect the interests of those they purport to represent.
In his enthusiasm for `patient and public involvement' David Pink personifies the defects of these initiatives. While he speaks on behalf of people with chronic illnesses to top politicians and policymakers, he was not elected by people with chronic illnesses and he is in no way answerable or accountable to them. Indeed, as the chief executive of a meta-quango, which strictly represents a number of organisations (also unrepresentative and unaccountable) rather than individuals with chronic illnesses, he is as remote from such individuals as any politician (and vastly more remote than the average GP). In fact, what emerges is that his status at the King's Fund assembly of health policymakers is conferred by government endorsement of his position rather than by any democratic mandate.
It is thus perhaps not surprising to find that, of all the assembled dignitaries, he provides the perfect warm-up man for Tony Blair on his tenth anniversary celebrations.
Source
British police madness government-driven
Police officers are being driven to make "ludicrous" arrests for trivial incidents to bolster government targets, the new Justice Secretary will be told. The leaders of 130,000 police officers have drawn up a dossier of "lunacy" on Britain's streets. They say that children are being arrested for throwing cream buns and bits of cucumber while adults are getting criminal records for offences that merit nothing more than a ticking-off. The pressure to get results is so bad, they say, that officers are criminalising and alienating their traditional supporters in Middle England and many are so disillusioned that they are considering quitting.
What police describe as a target-driven criminal justice culture will come under attack today as Lord Falconer of Thoroton, QC, who was appointed Secretary of State a week ago, faces a debate at the annual conference of the Police Federation, which represents rank-and-file officers in England and Wales. The conference in Blackpool will consider whether the drive to meet targets is destroying police officers' traditional discretion to deal with minor offences on the streets without fuss or bureaucracy. Officers say that ten years ago a minor incident involving someone without a criminal record would have led to "words of advice". Now, the federation says, performance targets mean that the people involved are becoming criminal statistics.
Jan Berry, the chairman of the federation, said: "We have police officers who are considering leaving the service over this because it is not the job they signed up to do. "These examples we have compiled are ludicrous, but when people are being pushed to show results they will use anything they can to demonstrate they are doing a good job." She added: "Just talking to people and giving them a few words of advice cannot be counted as easily as a ticket. But sometimes it is just as effective as taking someone to court."
A spokesman for the federation added: "We have got into the situation where everyone is so busy chasing targets and securing ticks in boxes we are on the verge of distancing ourselves from Middle England." He said: "The cases we have compiled show incidents where an officer has been under such pressure to deliver that it has resulted in an arrest or caution when even the officer themselves thinks it is ludicrous. Understandably, when the public hears about this they ask: `What the hell is going on?'." The spokesman added: "It is a government agenda that is going down this avenue. Officers are saying they are forced to make arrests or cautions because the Government believes they should be judged by what can be counted."
Chief constables have also complained about the increasing pressures to meet both national and local targets. Last autumn the Home Office issued 30 general targets that police must meet, as well as more specific figures. Earlier this year John Reid, the Home Secretary, who will be speaking at the conference on Wednesday, promised that he would cut some of the targets.
But last month officers in Greater Manchester were warned about issuing fixed-penalty notices to drunks for public order offences so that they would count towards their target of two detected offences a month. Home Office research last year found a nationwide increase in drunks being penalised for causing harassment, alarm or distress. Researchers concluded that the trend may have been driven by government target-setting. Notices issued for offences such as causing harassment, alarm or distress count as a "violent crime" and an "offence brought to justice" for the purposes of Home Office statistics. The alternative, lesser charge of being drunk and disorderly does not count towards police detection targets.
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British education failure
After 10 years of `education, education, education', Britain's teachers are drowning in paperwork, targets and banality - and the very idea of a liberal education is under threat
For over a decade, New Labour has been awash with soundbites. The party was `tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime'; there would be `an end to boom and bust'; we'd have `strong Britain, strong leadership'. And then there was the soundbite that stuck better than any, Tony Blair's 1996 pledge that the three priorities of his government would be: `Education, education, education.'
Nowhere has Blair's Orwellian approach to society been writ larger than in his translation of that bare word `education' into Newspeak. For what he has achieved during his decade-long reign has been a narrowing of the very concept of education: the abstract ambitions of pupils have been worn down, and the love and passion some teachers felt for their job have been undermined. We are left with a conveyer-belt process of tests, targets, objectives, goals, tickboxes and paperwork. The idea of the liberal education is under threat at the end of Blair's Britain, as horizons are narrowed and the classroom reduced to a bulletin space for government initiatives. Schools have become a place where the new conformism is taught and enforced.
`Go to your local school', Blair urged after his victory in the 2005 General Election. `You can see the progress in the buildings, in the computers and in the results.' To mark 10 years of education, education, education, I did just that. It's a dreary morning, in an idyllic setting. The neat school building (which I will not name, in order to protect the identity of its staff) rests on a slope, overcast by a vast country church and next to a plantation with great green trees, some of which have been cleared to make way for a playground. The children play there, building small dens and hanging off the various items of play equipment. Smatterings of pink blossom coat the grass. The church bell rings in 9am, and the children, already a little untidy in their bright, blue school uniforms, rush inside. In one classroom, the kids sit on a mat and poke at a hamster called King Alfred; they chatter above the din of an aerated fish tank.
The children's poster paint artwork is pasted on to the walls; the room is a jumble of primary-coloured equipment, books, guides and measures. The children are miniature pots of enthusiasm, fidgeting and clapping their hands and shuffling about on their bottoms until called to attention. Filing into assembly minutes later, they get on with singing hymns and learning a new story about Jesus. `Team points' are given when a child answers a question about the moral of the story correctly.
In this school, as in so many others, the various demands of Blair's Britain have been imposed, by school inspectors, county advisers and the constant tide of new guidelines, new programmes, new initiatives, new glossy booklets - which often contradict last year's glossy booklets - and new schemes for the betterment of the children within the school walls. The teachers inside tell me they feel under siege: unable to teach with freedom, many distrust themselves and their abilities. They are the fag end of Blair's education revolution. Let us consider, then, what `education, education, education' has wrought in Britain's schools.
Under Blair, the public eye has pried into the private world on an unprecedented level. Turning Thatcher's `there's no such thing as society' into `there's no such thing as a private life', schools have become one of the principal instruments for manipulating a new generation into new thought patterns. This week it was announced that schools must foster positive race relations or face closure. Fruit is provided at breaktime in order to improve children's diet because, of course, parents cannot be trusted to feed their kids well. And, under the new Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning scheme (SEAL), teachers are now responsible for shaping the emotional and social lives of the children in their care.
Increasingly, children are taught the correct ways in which to express their feelings. In some schools they participate in group massage sessions, in which they must knead each other's shoulders and send their own positive `toxins' into the air to help the emotional wellbeing of those recalcitrant youngsters who don't want to be group-massaged, or whose parents have denied permission.
This approach permeates a whole new approach to teaching, in which children (especially in the early years) must actually not be taught at all. In fact, in policy circles, teachers are teachers no more: they are `practitioners'. In indoor PE, children are not to be taught how to do a roly-poly anymore; rather they are supposed to `experiment travelling in and through'. (At the school I visited, one teacher, a worried look flickering across her face, told me: `I'm not sure I was ever supposed to teach them how to do a roly-poly..')
To try to teach a child, via the tried and tested `talk and chalk' method that has successfully educated children for generations, is now considered to be wrong. It is too elitist and judgemental apparently.
In the school I visited, the early years teacher seemed to have lost confidence in her own ability to teach, following a negative Ofsted inspection. Her paperwork had been found wanting, and then she had been found actually teaching children as she saw fit.which is the greatest crime under today's inspection regime.
Teachers, like every other public sector worker under New Labour, now drown in paperwork. There is an incessant flood of forms that need filling. They are given `PPA' time, cutting out half a day's teaching, in order to help them cope with the forms and documents. In 2006, the Education and Inspections Act revolutionised the inspections system: it brought in a system where schools have to be prepared for an inspection at any moment (only two days' notice is given) and where schools are assessed on their own internal assessment systems.
It is now all about the paperwork. Like a Soviet Five-Year Plan, if it's down on paper, it happened - if it's not, it didn't. So this school was hauled up for a `culture of bullying' - not because it had a bullying problem (it didn't), but because it did not have a government-advised system of `playground angels' and `buddy benches' to deal with any potential bullying that might arise or have already arisen without the teachers noticing.
The sheer detail in which a child's education is now charted is breathtaking. As Helene Guldberg has shown elsewhere on spiked, under New Labour infants now have `69 early learning goals' (see A tick-box attitude to toddlers, by Helene Guldberg). In this school's classrooms, as in most others, there are now 44 goals in the teaching of literacy. One teacher tells me that striving to achieve such goals often detracts from fundamental lessons that teach children how actually to read. These days while they read, young children have to explain whether a particular character is `good' or `bad', and why they are good or bad. `Instead of concentrating on what really matters, they'll be given a target, something specific, that's disembodied from enjoying reading. It doesn't lead anywhere', the teacher told me. What New Labour seems to have done is to break down reading into a set of meaningless facets, effectively `quantifying the unquantifiable', as the teacher put it.
An Ofsted report cited recently in the Daily Telegraph outlines the new teaching culture that Ofsted wishes to inculcate in our schools: `Too often, the teacher does most of the talking. It is frequently restricted to explanations and predominantly closed questions which ask for recall of previous learning.' Teaching in such a way (explaining a principle, demanding `right' or `wrong' answers to questions) is now looked upon as heresy. Instead `Ofsted prescribes "lively debate", "buzz groups", exercises in "empathy", "scope for pupils to make choices", working in groups, and "drama techniques" such as "hot seating", in which teacher and pupils exchange roles.'
As Ofsted says: `A key characteristic of the best lessons is the opportunity they provide for pupils to talk and collaborate.' This is not just a silly PC idea that we can laugh off; it fundamentally undermines the idea that teachers have something important to impart to children in favour of allowing children themselves to set the agenda by talking and playing and thinking out loud in class. It is little wonder that some teachers feel devalued.
If a teacher asks for advice on how they are supposed to do all this new stuff - how they are meant to reach their targets through drama and buzz groups - they are not likely to find any officially endorsed answer. The paperwork and the new ideas are foisted on schools from on high, and the schools are expected simply to get on with it all by the time of their next inspection.
This imposition of new rules and methods distances children from their own education. Learning programmes for individual kids are now planned out without the adviser who does the planning ever having met the children in question. `I get certificates for going to all these seminars', a teacher explains to me. `I've got them all for my portfolio. But what do they mean? We go, and when we have listened to all the new ideas, we ask for specific methods. And the advisers turn to us, and they say, "You can just do it. You're the professionals - you know how." And yes I did know. Or I thought I knew.'
Children are supposed to be au fait with all the terms their practitioners now use. So instead of `letters' and `sounds' they are encouraged to talk about `graphemes' and `phonemes'. `Tricks' that help young children to learn how to read are definitely out. Today explaining about the magic or silent `e' - which many spiked readers will understand from their own childhood education - is held to be detrimental because `you're giving them a trick to use instead of getting them to understand how various graphemes can make phonemes', the teacher explains. Imagine how baffling it must be for a young child instantly to learn about graphemes and phonemes rather than about magic letters that do certain strange things to words? `Children understand "magic" things. It's part of their world. It's much more understandable to them to see a magic thing coming along and changing a sound rather than a phoneme holding hands and pushing a grapheme out of the way', the teacher says. But no `magic' is allowed in classrooms these days.
Teachers' scepticism about new teaching methods is not appreciated. As in so many other professions today, bureaucrats have been trained up to counteract doubts among those at the frontline of teaching the nation's youth. Legions of school advisers, in every county of the land, come up with a succession of great new examples from other schools that have better Ofsted outcomes, schools that have put all the New Labour theories into practice and achieved great results: the advisers hold these schools up as models in order to force other schools to change and accept the new way of doing things.
A big buzzphrase today is `outdoor learning'. The teacher tells me that at one seminar she attended, `An early years adviser was raving about how wonderful a certain class of children had been, because they had a lesson outdoors in which they were picking up sticks and making graphemes out of them. I couldn't help thinking it would be far better for them if they had done that on paper, with a pencil. It's almost like going back to cave-man times..'
Of course, there is nothing wrong with learning outdoors, investigating and getting to know more about wildlife and the natural environment. But words and language and grammar are surely better taught indoors, in a classroom - unless that, too, is too old-fashioned an outlook for the constantly churning education system.
Attendance is paramount in New Labour's new education system. You can find the attendance stats for any school in the land, simply by typing the name of the school into a portal on the BBC's education website. Under the Blairites' target-obsessed learning system, parents are constantly warned not to take their kids on holiday during school time or to allow them to have many (if any) day absences, because the child might fall behind and prevent the class from reaching its targets.
The obsession with attendance can lead to a culture of snooping. At the school I visited, one of the pupils had a condition called `slap cheek'. It is infectious to other children, but it is not very debilitating for the child who has it and it is easily cured. The child's mother took her daughter out of school while she had the affliction, and on one of the days off school mum took her daughter to the supermarket; there was no one else to look after her at home and the shopping needed to be done. In this sleepy rural town, the child was spotted by a Community Support Officer, who reported the mother to the school. The school was instructed to keep a special eye on the child in future.
Behaviour has to be managed within schools, of course. And as you might expect, new approaches have also been brought in for this area of school life. Today teachers are advised never to be negative towards children; they should not tell a child off, but rather encourage him or her, through incentives, to behave well. In some schools, there is a new behavioural system called `golden time': this is a period of time at the end of the week where all the good children are allowed to do fun tasks but those who have been naughty are excluded. So instead of reprimanding bad behaviour when it happens, and explaining why it is a problem, schools are encouraged to reward all children except those who have done something bad.
In certain schools, `golden time' actually plays into the hands of children who misbehave. After all, the only thing that happens to them is that they miss out on golden time. In schools with big behaviour problems, it is apparently now cool to miss golden time. In this rural school, Year Six children (10- and 11-year-olds) were rewarded with a golden time of `hammer beads', which a teacher described as a `glorified colouring-in exercise, fine for Year Two children but not Year Six'. Any self-respecting 11-year-old, especially of the naughty variety, would not be overly concerned about missing out on such an exercise.....
After a decade of `education, education, education', it is surely time for the government and its myriad minions to get out of the classroom. Government should fund education and direct it, but it should not interfere with absolutely every aspect of school life, teacher-pupil relations, playtime, and children's eating habits, behaviour, weight and so on. Teachers must be allowed to refer to themselves as `teachers' again, not practitioners - and they must be allowed to `chalk and talk' if they want to. In short, they should have the freedom to teach in ways they see fit, and to invigorate the young minds in their trust with enthusiasm and ideas that are not rigidly defined by government targets and health, social, emotional and wellbeing messages.
To paraphrase another New Labour motto, which they borrowed from pop group D:Ream and danced to, excruciatingly, in 1997: `Things in teaching can only get better.' And they will, once we teach ourselves to trust our teachers once more and allow schools to go back to being centres of knowledge and learning rather than outlets for government posturing and social engineering.
Source
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
British "diversity" dogma in trouble
Since Macpherson, few institutions in British society have escaped the charge of institutional racism, with some even revelling in the charge as a kind of mea culpa. The former head of the BBC, Greg Dyke, famously declared the BBC to be `hideously white'. New Labour arts minister, David Lammy MP, has accused museums and galleries of being `too white'. Lord Patel recently accused the mental health sector of institutional racism, while the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) is currently investigating the Department of Health to see whether it is institutionally racist.
Official anti-racism has been implemented with full legal force. The Race Relations Act 1976 outlawed direct and indirect discrimination and victimisation in a range of areas such as education, housing and employment. Over 20 years later, the Race Relations Amendment Act 2000, which extended the law to cover 43,000 public authorities, was significant in that it placed a general duty on them to `have due regard to the need to eliminate unlawful discrimination, and to promote equality of opportunity and good relations between persons of different racial groups'. The main significance is that the duty requires bodies to take action to prevent acts of racial discrimination before they occur, meaning pre-emptive measures or racialisation have proliferated throughout public life.
Under New Labour, diversity management has flourished to become an effective strategy of behaviour management. The seemingly innocuous injunction to `respect diversity' has become common in workplaces, schools and hospitals, voluntary organisations and civic venues such as churches, charities and local neighbourhood associations. Most organisations in the public sector have a diversity manager in place, as do large private sector firms. Targets for making workforces more `diverse' have become accepted norms, despite the obvious drawbacks of positive discrimination. At the micro-level of workplace interaction, people have acquiesced to the regulation of their speech and behaviour towards others with little resistance, because it has been done in the name of tolerance. Diversity training - once viewed as a bizarre and probably inappropriate import from America - has now become a growth industry.
The thrust of identity politics was already strong prior to New Labour taking power in 1997, coming as it did off the back of social fragmentation and the weakening of older political and collective identities. Lobby groups and `community leaders' representing religious, ethnic and minority communities were already entering the political domain and vying against each other for resources. In 2001, the Cantle report into the northern mill town riots in Oldham, Bradford and Burnley pointed to the way in which local authorities' policies had deepened segregation in parts of Britain.
New Labour further institutionalised this trend and turned identity into the cornerstone of political engagement. Local and national state institutions developed `partnerships' with community groups and leaders, offering recognition of their supposedly different needs. This process has encouraged a demand amongst groups for recognition of their difference, and in some cases, the protection of difference.
The most obvious case is that of the Muslim lobby in the guise of the Muslim Council of Britain, which gained significant encouragement by New Labour in its early years and particularly after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. From being marginal players, the MCB leaders began to assert their importance, claiming to hold the votes of Muslims in the palm of their hands. MCB head Iqbal Sacranie was rumoured to have turned down requests to meet with lower level ministers, insisting instead on meeting with the prime minister himself.
The MCB has since fallen out of favour, but its shortlived success reflected the strategic importance of `community leaders' under New Labour, as a way to engage the citizenry. In the case of Muslims, this engagement has not led to a rise in political engagement but an exacerbation of their political alienation. Like most young people, Muslims are disillusioned with the political elite. But their cynicism has grown exponentially due to the government's engagement with unelected, and largely irrelevant community leaders who are themselves out of touch. This cynicism no doubt fuels the aggressive anti-politics of some younger Muslims.
Of course, identity politics is something that exists far beyond young Muslims - most other ethnic groups have joined the fray and demanded their own recognition and protection. New Labour's Religious Hatred Bill was supported by an alliance of religious groups who share only their sense of vulnerability and victimhood in common. These momentary alliances coexist with the moments of heated conflict, most recently between gay groups and the Catholic Church over the sexual orientation law and adoption agencies - begging the question of whose identity required the greatest protection. As the state has gradually intervened into the private world of belief and identity, so now it is called in to manage those differences and act as the arbiter.
Many of the trends discussed so far will no doubt inform the work of the new Commission for Equality and Human Rights (as the CRE is renaming itself), which starts operating this autumn. Its extended powers to bring cases and enforce anti-discrimination measures will encourage even greater regulation between individuals and groups, possibly exacerbating rather than ameliorating tensions.
More broadly, recent criticisms of multiculturalism and fears of social fragmentation have led to a new phase in New Labour's approach, already being nurtured by prime-minister-in-waiting, Gordon Brown - the call for a new national identity. But lacking any political vision and burdened with the obligation to protect its own cherished diversity policies, New Labour has struggled to show what this identity might look like. No doubt we can look forward in the coming years to various contrived measures such as `Britishness Day', the rebranding of bank notes, or the celebrations for the 2012 Olympics, in the hope of bringing national identity to life.
The word `multiculturalism' may be increasingly unpopular these days but all the things it gave rise to - as outlined above - are still in place. They need to be tackled with a more universalist approach.
More here
THE GREEN CHURCH OF EUTHANASIA
The Optimum Population Trust's claim that having a large family is an eco-crime exposes the anti-human streak in green politics
Having large families is an eco-crime according to the Optimum Population Trust (OPT). 'The greatest thing anyone in Britain could do to help the future of the planet is have one less child', the Trust says. It is actually modest compared to the more extreme versions of environmentalist hostility to humankind. 'Wildlife has more right to live on the earth than humans do', according to one group, which goes on to say: 'Humans are too great a threat to life on earth: they should be phased out.' At least that is the view of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, which hopes our will be the last generation of humans
Then there is the Church of Euthanasia, with its snappy slogan: Save the Planet, Kill Yourself. Moderate environmentalists might object that the deep ecologists are on the fringes, and not typical of the movement. But if the Church of Euthanasia is off in the sidelines, egging on lonely teenagers to top themselves while it trolls suicide websites, the OPT's message that we are the problem is mainstream. The OPT's trustees include the Green Party veterans Jonathan Porritt and Sara Parkin, the climate change diplomacy veteran Sir Crispin Tickell as well as the actress Susan Hampshire.
As the chattering classes' preoccupation with climate change reaches fever pitch, the extremists feel more confident to draw conclusions that others baulk from. That is because the extremists are only drawing out the underlying philosophy of environmentalism to make it more explicit. Indeed, the deep ecologists pre-date the more contemporary environmentalists. The current philosophy of 'sustainable development' was framed precisely because it was thought that the original aim of zero growth was too much for people to get their heads around. The underlying philosophy is that mankind is the pathological species, the scourge of the planet. Since James Lovelock coined the deeply mystical concept of Gaia - of a natural balance - mankind has been cast in the role of the disturber of the balance. At its most extreme, the misanthropism of a John Gray or a Jared Diamond looks forward to 'nature's revenge', the point where the laws of nature reassert themselves in the mass extinction of the human race.
Lots of lazily left-wing people think that they can reconcile their ambition to improve the lot of the poor with the goal of carbon reduction. South African academic and activist Patrick Bond thinks of himself as an environmentalist - though in his commitment to social redress he imagines that we can reduce world greenhouse gas emissions and get electricity supply to two billion people who currently do not get it (apparently there are some savings to be made in aluminium smelting which will help). Even American leftists imagine that they can rally to the cause of the working class and still cut greenhouse gas emissions.
Most environmentalists do not agree, thinking that any answer must involve 'horrendous costs to American industry and lifestyle'. There is a default to extremism that is written into environmentalism. And that is not surprising. If you hold that human life is worth less than the natural order, then you will have less respect for its sanctity.
The ecological outlook is an expression of middle-class rage at the masses, which from time to time becomes explicit. One example is Jon Ablewhite, currently serving time at Her Majesty's Prison Lowdham Grange for disinterring the corpse of Gladys Hammond, whose son-in-law owned Darley Oaks Farm where guinea pigs were bred. Ablewhite and his friends' six-year long hate campaign knew few restraints because the animal rights activists started with the assumption that people's interests were inferior. 'Jon is driven by the desire to right a wrong', said his mother, widow to a vicar and missionary.
Unabomber Ted Kaczynski campaigned for years against the technocratic society, posting bombs to electronics companies, while hiding out in a shack in the woods until he was arrested in the late 1990s. Environmentalism, like all political discourses that take shortage as their starting point, will tend towards misanthropic solutions. Any movement that begins with the view that mankind must be curtailed to reduce the pressure on the environment will have to start thinking how it will select those who must make sacrifices.
Source
NHS RADIOTHERAPY FAILURE
Cancer patients are being systematically let down by the radiotherapy services in England, a damning government report concludes. Lengthy waits and huge variations in service from place to place mean that tens of thousands of patients every year are receiving substandard service, reducing their chances of survival. The report to ministers from a top-level committee, whose broad conclusions were first revealed in The Times last month, calls for urgent action. "Unless action is taken without delay, the Government will lose the opportunity to save lives, and services in this country will fall further behind those of other comparable countries" the National Radiotherapy Advisory Group says.
The NHS delivers 1.5 million courses of treatment every year, when the optimum would be 2.5 million, the report says. Variations between areas are said to be "unacceptable", with the best-served areas delivering two and a half times as many courses as the worst. But it does not specify which areas are bad and which less bad.
Karol Sikora, a cancer specialist, said: "The report shows how bad things really are, but disguises just how bad the local gaps in services are. These areas which have fallen behind must be named too in order to target improvements." Since 1997 the Government has invested more money in radiotherapy, but even this increase has fallen far short. The problems arise from miscalculations made 15 to 20 years ago, when the need for radiotherapy was significantly underestimated.
It was wrongly believed that radiotherapy would not have a key role to play in future cancer treatments and that demand for it would fall. This was a gross misjudgment, as demand has increased and will continue to increase as the population ages. Radiation treatments involve large doses given by linear accelerators, given in a series of smaller doses to reduce injury to healthy tissue. Typically, an entire course might comprise 15 to 40 treatments. The most productive centres deliver more than 10,000 courses per linear accelerator (linac) per year, the least productive only about 5,000.
The report calls for a target of at least 8,000 courses a year immediately, and 8,300 a year by 2010-11. Linacs should be kept running nine hours a day on average, with some running for as long as 11.5 hours a day. They should be operated year-round, including Bank Holidays (with the exception of Christmas Day, Boxing Day, and one day at Easter), and include some treatments on Saturdays. But the report rules out seven-day working because there are insufficient staff and patients may be reluctant.
Michael Williams, Vice-President of the Royal College of Radiologists, and co-chair-man of the advisory group, said: "Radiotherapy is one of the most effective cancer treatments available, but the UK has fallen short in its provision. "This is the main finding of a second report published in the current issue of the journal Clinical Oncology. The research confirms that substantially less radiotherapy is given in the UK than is standard practice elsewhere in Europe and the USA."
Professor Janet Husband, president of the college, said, "The report will be extremely valuable in determining future development and in building on the substantial investment in modern equipment achieved as part of the Cancer Plan."
Source
NHS DOCTOR-TRAINING MELTDOWN CONTINUES
An emergency review of the appointments system for junior doctors is being dominated by government apparatchiks, leading doctors claim in a letter to The Times today. The system and attempts to rescue it are a fiasco, write Morris Brown, Professor of Clinical Pharmacology at Cambridge, and more than a dozen leading specialists, as doctors prepare to challenge the outcome of the review in court. The hearing, which begins on Wednesday, will seek to have the computer-based Medical Training Application System (MTAS) declared so unfair as to be an abuse of power. It is expected to take two days. Victory for the doctors would leave the Department of Health, which has apologised for the debacle, in confusion.
In their letter to The Times, Professor Brown and colleagues say that MTAS has so far failed every task, and the review set up to rescue it “has become top-heavy with DoH apparatchiks”. The issue, in the Times letter and later today in court, is whether it is fair to allow doctors in England, who have already spent ten years training, a single interview to determine their futures. There are about 32,000 junior doctors applying for about 20,000 posts, which they will take up in August. Nobody knows the exact figures, nor how many of the applicants come from outside the UK. The doctors are mostly in their mid to late20s, and are applying for “run-through” training posts lasting five years, which would end with them ready to apply for jobs as consultants. Hospitals that pick the wrong applicants will be stuck with them for five years, so finding the right ones is crucial.
Applicants who fail to get a run-through post will not necessarily be unemployed but their careers will stall. To get a doctor to this stage costs the state 250,000 pounds in education and training costs. The potential losses would easily exceed 1 billion if, say, 5,000 UK-trained applicants gave up medicine or decided to go abroad. One official, who did wish to be named, blamed the department for a failure to match the expansion of medical schools to an equivalent growth in training posts.
This year, the difficulties are compounded by a failed attempt by the department to exclude foreign graduates. Under European law it cannot exclude EU graduates, but relatively few of them apply. The key is graduates from outside the EU, traditionally one of the mainstays of the NHS. The department attempted to cut off these applicants by saying they would need work permits. A challenge in court by the British Association of Physicians of Indian Origin (BAPIO) was rejected, but leave to appeal was granted. Pending the result of that appeal, the department was forced to allow nonEU doctors to apply in the first round of selection.
Thousands more found another way round, by joining the “highly skilled migrant” programme. They qualified for that by virtue of already working in the NHS as, for example, senior house officers. As a result, it is estimated that between 10,000 and 11,000 of the applicants for the 20,000 posts originate from outside the UK and Europe, maybe half of them through the highly skilled migrants programme. Nobody knows quite how many, nor do the application forms enable hospitals to distinguish home from foreign applicants.
So who is in charge? “Nobody is,” said the official who spoke to The Times. “The system was developed in isolation from workforce planning. So it was impossible to find any one person who would ask: ‘Will this work?’ .” RemedyUK, the pressure group bringing the action, hopes the court will say the process is unlawful, but expects a solution to require negotiation.
Source
Since Macpherson, few institutions in British society have escaped the charge of institutional racism, with some even revelling in the charge as a kind of mea culpa. The former head of the BBC, Greg Dyke, famously declared the BBC to be `hideously white'. New Labour arts minister, David Lammy MP, has accused museums and galleries of being `too white'. Lord Patel recently accused the mental health sector of institutional racism, while the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) is currently investigating the Department of Health to see whether it is institutionally racist.
Official anti-racism has been implemented with full legal force. The Race Relations Act 1976 outlawed direct and indirect discrimination and victimisation in a range of areas such as education, housing and employment. Over 20 years later, the Race Relations Amendment Act 2000, which extended the law to cover 43,000 public authorities, was significant in that it placed a general duty on them to `have due regard to the need to eliminate unlawful discrimination, and to promote equality of opportunity and good relations between persons of different racial groups'. The main significance is that the duty requires bodies to take action to prevent acts of racial discrimination before they occur, meaning pre-emptive measures or racialisation have proliferated throughout public life.
Under New Labour, diversity management has flourished to become an effective strategy of behaviour management. The seemingly innocuous injunction to `respect diversity' has become common in workplaces, schools and hospitals, voluntary organisations and civic venues such as churches, charities and local neighbourhood associations. Most organisations in the public sector have a diversity manager in place, as do large private sector firms. Targets for making workforces more `diverse' have become accepted norms, despite the obvious drawbacks of positive discrimination. At the micro-level of workplace interaction, people have acquiesced to the regulation of their speech and behaviour towards others with little resistance, because it has been done in the name of tolerance. Diversity training - once viewed as a bizarre and probably inappropriate import from America - has now become a growth industry.
The thrust of identity politics was already strong prior to New Labour taking power in 1997, coming as it did off the back of social fragmentation and the weakening of older political and collective identities. Lobby groups and `community leaders' representing religious, ethnic and minority communities were already entering the political domain and vying against each other for resources. In 2001, the Cantle report into the northern mill town riots in Oldham, Bradford and Burnley pointed to the way in which local authorities' policies had deepened segregation in parts of Britain.
New Labour further institutionalised this trend and turned identity into the cornerstone of political engagement. Local and national state institutions developed `partnerships' with community groups and leaders, offering recognition of their supposedly different needs. This process has encouraged a demand amongst groups for recognition of their difference, and in some cases, the protection of difference.
The most obvious case is that of the Muslim lobby in the guise of the Muslim Council of Britain, which gained significant encouragement by New Labour in its early years and particularly after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. From being marginal players, the MCB leaders began to assert their importance, claiming to hold the votes of Muslims in the palm of their hands. MCB head Iqbal Sacranie was rumoured to have turned down requests to meet with lower level ministers, insisting instead on meeting with the prime minister himself.
The MCB has since fallen out of favour, but its shortlived success reflected the strategic importance of `community leaders' under New Labour, as a way to engage the citizenry. In the case of Muslims, this engagement has not led to a rise in political engagement but an exacerbation of their political alienation. Like most young people, Muslims are disillusioned with the political elite. But their cynicism has grown exponentially due to the government's engagement with unelected, and largely irrelevant community leaders who are themselves out of touch. This cynicism no doubt fuels the aggressive anti-politics of some younger Muslims.
Of course, identity politics is something that exists far beyond young Muslims - most other ethnic groups have joined the fray and demanded their own recognition and protection. New Labour's Religious Hatred Bill was supported by an alliance of religious groups who share only their sense of vulnerability and victimhood in common. These momentary alliances coexist with the moments of heated conflict, most recently between gay groups and the Catholic Church over the sexual orientation law and adoption agencies - begging the question of whose identity required the greatest protection. As the state has gradually intervened into the private world of belief and identity, so now it is called in to manage those differences and act as the arbiter.
Many of the trends discussed so far will no doubt inform the work of the new Commission for Equality and Human Rights (as the CRE is renaming itself), which starts operating this autumn. Its extended powers to bring cases and enforce anti-discrimination measures will encourage even greater regulation between individuals and groups, possibly exacerbating rather than ameliorating tensions.
More broadly, recent criticisms of multiculturalism and fears of social fragmentation have led to a new phase in New Labour's approach, already being nurtured by prime-minister-in-waiting, Gordon Brown - the call for a new national identity. But lacking any political vision and burdened with the obligation to protect its own cherished diversity policies, New Labour has struggled to show what this identity might look like. No doubt we can look forward in the coming years to various contrived measures such as `Britishness Day', the rebranding of bank notes, or the celebrations for the 2012 Olympics, in the hope of bringing national identity to life.
The word `multiculturalism' may be increasingly unpopular these days but all the things it gave rise to - as outlined above - are still in place. They need to be tackled with a more universalist approach.
More here
THE GREEN CHURCH OF EUTHANASIA
The Optimum Population Trust's claim that having a large family is an eco-crime exposes the anti-human streak in green politics
Having large families is an eco-crime according to the Optimum Population Trust (OPT). 'The greatest thing anyone in Britain could do to help the future of the planet is have one less child', the Trust says. It is actually modest compared to the more extreme versions of environmentalist hostility to humankind. 'Wildlife has more right to live on the earth than humans do', according to one group, which goes on to say: 'Humans are too great a threat to life on earth: they should be phased out.' At least that is the view of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, which hopes our will be the last generation of humans
Then there is the Church of Euthanasia, with its snappy slogan: Save the Planet, Kill Yourself. Moderate environmentalists might object that the deep ecologists are on the fringes, and not typical of the movement. But if the Church of Euthanasia is off in the sidelines, egging on lonely teenagers to top themselves while it trolls suicide websites, the OPT's message that we are the problem is mainstream. The OPT's trustees include the Green Party veterans Jonathan Porritt and Sara Parkin, the climate change diplomacy veteran Sir Crispin Tickell as well as the actress Susan Hampshire.
As the chattering classes' preoccupation with climate change reaches fever pitch, the extremists feel more confident to draw conclusions that others baulk from. That is because the extremists are only drawing out the underlying philosophy of environmentalism to make it more explicit. Indeed, the deep ecologists pre-date the more contemporary environmentalists. The current philosophy of 'sustainable development' was framed precisely because it was thought that the original aim of zero growth was too much for people to get their heads around. The underlying philosophy is that mankind is the pathological species, the scourge of the planet. Since James Lovelock coined the deeply mystical concept of Gaia - of a natural balance - mankind has been cast in the role of the disturber of the balance. At its most extreme, the misanthropism of a John Gray or a Jared Diamond looks forward to 'nature's revenge', the point where the laws of nature reassert themselves in the mass extinction of the human race.
Lots of lazily left-wing people think that they can reconcile their ambition to improve the lot of the poor with the goal of carbon reduction. South African academic and activist Patrick Bond thinks of himself as an environmentalist - though in his commitment to social redress he imagines that we can reduce world greenhouse gas emissions and get electricity supply to two billion people who currently do not get it (apparently there are some savings to be made in aluminium smelting which will help). Even American leftists imagine that they can rally to the cause of the working class and still cut greenhouse gas emissions.
Most environmentalists do not agree, thinking that any answer must involve 'horrendous costs to American industry and lifestyle'. There is a default to extremism that is written into environmentalism. And that is not surprising. If you hold that human life is worth less than the natural order, then you will have less respect for its sanctity.
The ecological outlook is an expression of middle-class rage at the masses, which from time to time becomes explicit. One example is Jon Ablewhite, currently serving time at Her Majesty's Prison Lowdham Grange for disinterring the corpse of Gladys Hammond, whose son-in-law owned Darley Oaks Farm where guinea pigs were bred. Ablewhite and his friends' six-year long hate campaign knew few restraints because the animal rights activists started with the assumption that people's interests were inferior. 'Jon is driven by the desire to right a wrong', said his mother, widow to a vicar and missionary.
Unabomber Ted Kaczynski campaigned for years against the technocratic society, posting bombs to electronics companies, while hiding out in a shack in the woods until he was arrested in the late 1990s. Environmentalism, like all political discourses that take shortage as their starting point, will tend towards misanthropic solutions. Any movement that begins with the view that mankind must be curtailed to reduce the pressure on the environment will have to start thinking how it will select those who must make sacrifices.
Source
NHS RADIOTHERAPY FAILURE
Cancer patients are being systematically let down by the radiotherapy services in England, a damning government report concludes. Lengthy waits and huge variations in service from place to place mean that tens of thousands of patients every year are receiving substandard service, reducing their chances of survival. The report to ministers from a top-level committee, whose broad conclusions were first revealed in The Times last month, calls for urgent action. "Unless action is taken without delay, the Government will lose the opportunity to save lives, and services in this country will fall further behind those of other comparable countries" the National Radiotherapy Advisory Group says.
The NHS delivers 1.5 million courses of treatment every year, when the optimum would be 2.5 million, the report says. Variations between areas are said to be "unacceptable", with the best-served areas delivering two and a half times as many courses as the worst. But it does not specify which areas are bad and which less bad.
Karol Sikora, a cancer specialist, said: "The report shows how bad things really are, but disguises just how bad the local gaps in services are. These areas which have fallen behind must be named too in order to target improvements." Since 1997 the Government has invested more money in radiotherapy, but even this increase has fallen far short. The problems arise from miscalculations made 15 to 20 years ago, when the need for radiotherapy was significantly underestimated.
It was wrongly believed that radiotherapy would not have a key role to play in future cancer treatments and that demand for it would fall. This was a gross misjudgment, as demand has increased and will continue to increase as the population ages. Radiation treatments involve large doses given by linear accelerators, given in a series of smaller doses to reduce injury to healthy tissue. Typically, an entire course might comprise 15 to 40 treatments. The most productive centres deliver more than 10,000 courses per linear accelerator (linac) per year, the least productive only about 5,000.
The report calls for a target of at least 8,000 courses a year immediately, and 8,300 a year by 2010-11. Linacs should be kept running nine hours a day on average, with some running for as long as 11.5 hours a day. They should be operated year-round, including Bank Holidays (with the exception of Christmas Day, Boxing Day, and one day at Easter), and include some treatments on Saturdays. But the report rules out seven-day working because there are insufficient staff and patients may be reluctant.
Michael Williams, Vice-President of the Royal College of Radiologists, and co-chair-man of the advisory group, said: "Radiotherapy is one of the most effective cancer treatments available, but the UK has fallen short in its provision. "This is the main finding of a second report published in the current issue of the journal Clinical Oncology. The research confirms that substantially less radiotherapy is given in the UK than is standard practice elsewhere in Europe and the USA."
Professor Janet Husband, president of the college, said, "The report will be extremely valuable in determining future development and in building on the substantial investment in modern equipment achieved as part of the Cancer Plan."
Source
NHS DOCTOR-TRAINING MELTDOWN CONTINUES
An emergency review of the appointments system for junior doctors is being dominated by government apparatchiks, leading doctors claim in a letter to The Times today. The system and attempts to rescue it are a fiasco, write Morris Brown, Professor of Clinical Pharmacology at Cambridge, and more than a dozen leading specialists, as doctors prepare to challenge the outcome of the review in court. The hearing, which begins on Wednesday, will seek to have the computer-based Medical Training Application System (MTAS) declared so unfair as to be an abuse of power. It is expected to take two days. Victory for the doctors would leave the Department of Health, which has apologised for the debacle, in confusion.
In their letter to The Times, Professor Brown and colleagues say that MTAS has so far failed every task, and the review set up to rescue it “has become top-heavy with DoH apparatchiks”. The issue, in the Times letter and later today in court, is whether it is fair to allow doctors in England, who have already spent ten years training, a single interview to determine their futures. There are about 32,000 junior doctors applying for about 20,000 posts, which they will take up in August. Nobody knows the exact figures, nor how many of the applicants come from outside the UK. The doctors are mostly in their mid to late20s, and are applying for “run-through” training posts lasting five years, which would end with them ready to apply for jobs as consultants. Hospitals that pick the wrong applicants will be stuck with them for five years, so finding the right ones is crucial.
Applicants who fail to get a run-through post will not necessarily be unemployed but their careers will stall. To get a doctor to this stage costs the state 250,000 pounds in education and training costs. The potential losses would easily exceed 1 billion if, say, 5,000 UK-trained applicants gave up medicine or decided to go abroad. One official, who did wish to be named, blamed the department for a failure to match the expansion of medical schools to an equivalent growth in training posts.
This year, the difficulties are compounded by a failed attempt by the department to exclude foreign graduates. Under European law it cannot exclude EU graduates, but relatively few of them apply. The key is graduates from outside the EU, traditionally one of the mainstays of the NHS. The department attempted to cut off these applicants by saying they would need work permits. A challenge in court by the British Association of Physicians of Indian Origin (BAPIO) was rejected, but leave to appeal was granted. Pending the result of that appeal, the department was forced to allow nonEU doctors to apply in the first round of selection.
Thousands more found another way round, by joining the “highly skilled migrant” programme. They qualified for that by virtue of already working in the NHS as, for example, senior house officers. As a result, it is estimated that between 10,000 and 11,000 of the applicants for the 20,000 posts originate from outside the UK and Europe, maybe half of them through the highly skilled migrants programme. Nobody knows quite how many, nor do the application forms enable hospitals to distinguish home from foreign applicants.
So who is in charge? “Nobody is,” said the official who spoke to The Times. “The system was developed in isolation from workforce planning. So it was impossible to find any one person who would ask: ‘Will this work?’ .” RemedyUK, the pressure group bringing the action, hopes the court will say the process is unlawful, but expects a solution to require negotiation.
Source
Monday, May 14, 2007
NHS 'failing on mixed-sex wards'
The NHS is failing to ensure all non-emergency hospital patients are kept in single-sex accommodation, the government has admitted. Campaigners say mixed-sex accommodation denies patients the chance of treatment with "privacy, respect and dignity".
Ministers were insisting as recently as November that 99% of patients were being seen in single-sex wards. But the government has now announced that 28 NHS trusts - 15% of the total - need more help achieving this. The promise to end mixed-sex accommodation was first made in the 1997 general election manifesto after Tony Blair attacked the Conservatives for failing to have "the wit" to end the practice. A target was introduced in 2000 that within two years 95% of patients would be in single-sex accommodation.
The government's definition includes separate wards or bays divided by fixed partitions, which campaigners say is not enough. Patients also needed access to single-sex toilet facilities. Departments such as intensive care and A&E do not have to fully comply for practical reasons, although they are expected to make an effort.
Last year, ministers said NHS managers had reported just 1% of patients were seen in mixed wards. But the government launched an inquiry after reports from patients and a survey by the Healthcare Commission cast doubt on the claim.
Chief nursing officer Christine Beasley, who conducted the inquiry, has now concluded the NHS had to do more to keep male and female patients separate. Her report called on all hospitals to review their practices and said 28 trusts were receiving support to change their practices because they were falling a long-way short. It did not identify how many patients were staying in mixed accommodation, although campaigners said it ran into many thousands. The report also failed to explain why NHS managers had given ministers what turned out to be incorrect information.
Professor Beasley said: "I am asking the NHS to do more to ensure that when there is no choice but to mix patients, that more safeguards are taken to ensure that privacy is maintained."
Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt said: "The NHS overall has an excellent record of treating people with dignity and respect. "However, this report shows there is clearly still more work for the NHS to do to meet our commitment to eliminate mixed-sex accommodation wherever possible."
Katherine Murphy, of the Patients Association, said: "Patients have a right to be treated in a safe environment with privacy, respect and dignity. "Patients continue to complain and for years politicians have promised to rectify this problem. "After more than 10 years of promises broken by a succession of ministers, it is time for action."
The Patient Forums organisation said a survey it carried out of 2,500 patients in March this year found 25% had shared a ward or bay with members of the opposite sex. Chair Jacquie Pearce-Gervis said: "We would like to see an eradication of mixed sex wards in order for all patients to spend their time in hospital recovering and not worrying that their dignity or privacy could be compromised."
Shadow health secretary Andrew Lansley accused the government of trying to bury bad news by publishing the report on the day Tony Blair was expected to announce his resignation. "Labour will never learn that the public are fed up with their style of government instead of dealing with the problems being faced by patients."
Source
GREEN-NATIONALIST ALLIANCE TAKES SHAPE IN SCOTLAND
Alex Salmond moved a vital step closer to becoming First Minister of Scotland yesterday after his party struck a deal to work with the Greens. The agreement will ensure that the two Green members of the Scottish Parliament vote for him and support his appointments. A new presiding officer should also be in place next week after Alex Fergusson, the Conservative MSP, confirmed he will stand for the post.
In return for co-operation from the Greens, the Scottish National Party will back a climate change bill as an early measure and will nominate a Green MSP to chair a Holyrood committee. However, the Greens will not be obliged to back SNP leader Mr Salmond in a confidence vote or to support his party's budget plans. The arrangement is a relatively loose form of co-operation, but the Greens have indicated that they would be prepared to consider a more formal pact if the Liberal Democrats changed their stance and agreed to take part in government. But if, as expected, the Lib Dems and the Conservatives abstain in the vote for First Minister, the SNP will have enough votes with the Greens to appoint Mr Salmond.
Despite the agreement, Labour last night refused to concede that he now seems certain to be elected to the top job next week. But Mr Salmond said the deal would set the tone for the four years of the new parliament, adding: "The Scottish Greens represent a substantial body of opinion in Scotland, regardless of MSP numbers."
Robin Harper, the co-leader of the Greens, said the arrangement laid the foundations for "progressive new politics" in Scotland. He added: "These constructive discussions have identified many shared objectives, including blocking nuclear power, tackling climate change and extending the powers of the Scottish Parliament." In a signed statement, the two parties agreed to oppose the building of nuclear power stations and would seek to use the planning process in Scotland to block new plants. The talks between the Greens and the SNP were sparked by last week's election result, which left the Nationalists with 47 seats, one more than Labour.
Source
The NHS is failing to ensure all non-emergency hospital patients are kept in single-sex accommodation, the government has admitted. Campaigners say mixed-sex accommodation denies patients the chance of treatment with "privacy, respect and dignity".
Ministers were insisting as recently as November that 99% of patients were being seen in single-sex wards. But the government has now announced that 28 NHS trusts - 15% of the total - need more help achieving this. The promise to end mixed-sex accommodation was first made in the 1997 general election manifesto after Tony Blair attacked the Conservatives for failing to have "the wit" to end the practice. A target was introduced in 2000 that within two years 95% of patients would be in single-sex accommodation.
The government's definition includes separate wards or bays divided by fixed partitions, which campaigners say is not enough. Patients also needed access to single-sex toilet facilities. Departments such as intensive care and A&E do not have to fully comply for practical reasons, although they are expected to make an effort.
Last year, ministers said NHS managers had reported just 1% of patients were seen in mixed wards. But the government launched an inquiry after reports from patients and a survey by the Healthcare Commission cast doubt on the claim.
Chief nursing officer Christine Beasley, who conducted the inquiry, has now concluded the NHS had to do more to keep male and female patients separate. Her report called on all hospitals to review their practices and said 28 trusts were receiving support to change their practices because they were falling a long-way short. It did not identify how many patients were staying in mixed accommodation, although campaigners said it ran into many thousands. The report also failed to explain why NHS managers had given ministers what turned out to be incorrect information.
Professor Beasley said: "I am asking the NHS to do more to ensure that when there is no choice but to mix patients, that more safeguards are taken to ensure that privacy is maintained."
Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt said: "The NHS overall has an excellent record of treating people with dignity and respect. "However, this report shows there is clearly still more work for the NHS to do to meet our commitment to eliminate mixed-sex accommodation wherever possible."
Katherine Murphy, of the Patients Association, said: "Patients have a right to be treated in a safe environment with privacy, respect and dignity. "Patients continue to complain and for years politicians have promised to rectify this problem. "After more than 10 years of promises broken by a succession of ministers, it is time for action."
The Patient Forums organisation said a survey it carried out of 2,500 patients in March this year found 25% had shared a ward or bay with members of the opposite sex. Chair Jacquie Pearce-Gervis said: "We would like to see an eradication of mixed sex wards in order for all patients to spend their time in hospital recovering and not worrying that their dignity or privacy could be compromised."
Shadow health secretary Andrew Lansley accused the government of trying to bury bad news by publishing the report on the day Tony Blair was expected to announce his resignation. "Labour will never learn that the public are fed up with their style of government instead of dealing with the problems being faced by patients."
Source
GREEN-NATIONALIST ALLIANCE TAKES SHAPE IN SCOTLAND
Alex Salmond moved a vital step closer to becoming First Minister of Scotland yesterday after his party struck a deal to work with the Greens. The agreement will ensure that the two Green members of the Scottish Parliament vote for him and support his appointments. A new presiding officer should also be in place next week after Alex Fergusson, the Conservative MSP, confirmed he will stand for the post.
In return for co-operation from the Greens, the Scottish National Party will back a climate change bill as an early measure and will nominate a Green MSP to chair a Holyrood committee. However, the Greens will not be obliged to back SNP leader Mr Salmond in a confidence vote or to support his party's budget plans. The arrangement is a relatively loose form of co-operation, but the Greens have indicated that they would be prepared to consider a more formal pact if the Liberal Democrats changed their stance and agreed to take part in government. But if, as expected, the Lib Dems and the Conservatives abstain in the vote for First Minister, the SNP will have enough votes with the Greens to appoint Mr Salmond.
Despite the agreement, Labour last night refused to concede that he now seems certain to be elected to the top job next week. But Mr Salmond said the deal would set the tone for the four years of the new parliament, adding: "The Scottish Greens represent a substantial body of opinion in Scotland, regardless of MSP numbers."
Robin Harper, the co-leader of the Greens, said the arrangement laid the foundations for "progressive new politics" in Scotland. He added: "These constructive discussions have identified many shared objectives, including blocking nuclear power, tackling climate change and extending the powers of the Scottish Parliament." In a signed statement, the two parties agreed to oppose the building of nuclear power stations and would seek to use the planning process in Scotland to block new plants. The talks between the Greens and the SNP were sparked by last week's election result, which left the Nationalists with 47 seats, one more than Labour.
Source
Sunday, May 13, 2007
NHS Specialist stroke care 'lottery'
A third of stroke patients are still not treated in a specialist unit despite improvements in access, a national audit has shown. And fewer than half of patients receive brain imaging within 24 hours, a figure experts said was "unacceptably low". Welsh patients fare the worst with only nine specialist units in the country, the Royal College of Physicians found.
The government said it would publish a National Stroke Strategy this summer to "accelerate" the rate of improvement. Patients who receive care in a specialist unit have a 50% reduced risk of death and better long-term recovery. National guidelines published in 2001 recommend all patients are treated in a specialist unit but similar guidelines were not introduced in Wales until 2006.
The College said there had been significant improvements but some hospitals had failed to recognise that stroke patients needed "21st century care". The audit, funded by the Healthcare Commission, found the number of eligible hospitals in England with stroke units increased from 82% in 2004 to 97% in 2006. But only 28% of patients in Wales were treated in a stroke unit compared with 64% in England and 73% in Northern Ireland. Only 15% of patients are admitted to a stroke unit on the day they arrive at hospital. And although brain scans are needed to determine treatment, patients admitted on a weekend often have to wait until the next working day. Those with minor strokes who are in hospital for less than two days are least likely to have access to specialist services.
Dr Tony Rudd, chair of the Intercollegiate Stroke Network, said more than 90% of patients should be treated in stroke units. "And not to have done imaging by 24 hours is not really good enough. We need to differentiate between bleeds and blocked arteries."
He added: "The failure of the majority of hospitals in Wales to offer stroke unit care is scandalous and needs urgent action" Dr Rudd, who is also consultant in stroke medicine at St Thomas' Hospital in London, said the National Service Framework in the UK had successfully increased the number of specialist units but there still wasn't the capacity to deal with every patient.
Dr Jonathan Boyce, head of clinical audit at the Healthcare Commission, said the study showed welcome improvements. "But there is still too much variation, too many places and regions that are not responding as well as they could to minimise the harm done by this serious and common condition. "They now need to get their house in order."
Joe Korner, director of communications for The Stroke Association, added: "Stroke units can halve your chance of dying from a stroke, so it is a scandal that getting treated on one is a matter of luck or your postcode."
A spokesperson for Health and Social Services at the Welsh Assembly said the report showed stroke services in Wales needed improvement but there was a strategy in place. "Over the last year, NHS organisations in Wales have been required to develop more appropriate models of care for patients suffering with strokes. "Officials at the Welsh Assembly Government will work with the NHS to develop clear national priorities for action."
Professor Roger Boyle, national clinical director for stroke and heart disease, said the pace of improvement needed to accelerate. He said a national stroke strategy would be published for consultation this summer which will include a toolkit to help hospitals commission stroke services. He added: "I would also urge the NHS to use this report as a tool to examine how their stroke services."
Source
More bungling British bureaucracy: "When Kay Rumble received her pension forecast from the Government, she knew that something was wrong. The 64-year-old from Berkshire had taken time out of her working life to bring up three children, but the Pension Service had failed to account for this in its calculations. "I argued about this," she said. "I can't tell you how many times I called them. Eventually they said that they had changed computers and one said that I was entitled to a bigger state pension and one said that I wasn't." In 1999 Mrs Rumble, an office manager, was told that she was likely to qualify for a basic pension of 25.23 pounds when she turned 60 in 2003. This was based on the expectation that she would, by 2003, have 15 years of national insurance contributions out of a possible 39. The forecast underestimated her pension by nearly half. After she pointed out the discrepancy, the Pension Service revised its figures. Once Mrs Rumble's Home Responsibilities Protection entitlement was included, her weekly pension increased to 45.12 pounds."
A wonderful memorial for a personal friend of mine: "It's over a year since Chris Tame, former Director of the Libertarian Alliance, died aged 56. Chris had built up and nurtured the libertarian movement in Britain over many years. Over the years Chris had accumulated several thousand books, many of which were about liberty and its issues, and which included many classic libertarian texts. Rather than let the collection be dissipated, Sean Gabb, current Director of the Libertarian Alliance, found a good home for them at the Economic University of Prague. He organized the transport of the books, no small operation, and some friends of Chris helped defray the cost. Chris Tame's library will thus continue to spread the message of liberty for years to come, making a wholly fitting memorial to Chris and the values he stood for."
A third of stroke patients are still not treated in a specialist unit despite improvements in access, a national audit has shown. And fewer than half of patients receive brain imaging within 24 hours, a figure experts said was "unacceptably low". Welsh patients fare the worst with only nine specialist units in the country, the Royal College of Physicians found.
The government said it would publish a National Stroke Strategy this summer to "accelerate" the rate of improvement. Patients who receive care in a specialist unit have a 50% reduced risk of death and better long-term recovery. National guidelines published in 2001 recommend all patients are treated in a specialist unit but similar guidelines were not introduced in Wales until 2006.
The College said there had been significant improvements but some hospitals had failed to recognise that stroke patients needed "21st century care". The audit, funded by the Healthcare Commission, found the number of eligible hospitals in England with stroke units increased from 82% in 2004 to 97% in 2006. But only 28% of patients in Wales were treated in a stroke unit compared with 64% in England and 73% in Northern Ireland. Only 15% of patients are admitted to a stroke unit on the day they arrive at hospital. And although brain scans are needed to determine treatment, patients admitted on a weekend often have to wait until the next working day. Those with minor strokes who are in hospital for less than two days are least likely to have access to specialist services.
Dr Tony Rudd, chair of the Intercollegiate Stroke Network, said more than 90% of patients should be treated in stroke units. "And not to have done imaging by 24 hours is not really good enough. We need to differentiate between bleeds and blocked arteries."
He added: "The failure of the majority of hospitals in Wales to offer stroke unit care is scandalous and needs urgent action" Dr Rudd, who is also consultant in stroke medicine at St Thomas' Hospital in London, said the National Service Framework in the UK had successfully increased the number of specialist units but there still wasn't the capacity to deal with every patient.
Dr Jonathan Boyce, head of clinical audit at the Healthcare Commission, said the study showed welcome improvements. "But there is still too much variation, too many places and regions that are not responding as well as they could to minimise the harm done by this serious and common condition. "They now need to get their house in order."
Joe Korner, director of communications for The Stroke Association, added: "Stroke units can halve your chance of dying from a stroke, so it is a scandal that getting treated on one is a matter of luck or your postcode."
A spokesperson for Health and Social Services at the Welsh Assembly said the report showed stroke services in Wales needed improvement but there was a strategy in place. "Over the last year, NHS organisations in Wales have been required to develop more appropriate models of care for patients suffering with strokes. "Officials at the Welsh Assembly Government will work with the NHS to develop clear national priorities for action."
Professor Roger Boyle, national clinical director for stroke and heart disease, said the pace of improvement needed to accelerate. He said a national stroke strategy would be published for consultation this summer which will include a toolkit to help hospitals commission stroke services. He added: "I would also urge the NHS to use this report as a tool to examine how their stroke services."
Source
More bungling British bureaucracy: "When Kay Rumble received her pension forecast from the Government, she knew that something was wrong. The 64-year-old from Berkshire had taken time out of her working life to bring up three children, but the Pension Service had failed to account for this in its calculations. "I argued about this," she said. "I can't tell you how many times I called them. Eventually they said that they had changed computers and one said that I was entitled to a bigger state pension and one said that I wasn't." In 1999 Mrs Rumble, an office manager, was told that she was likely to qualify for a basic pension of 25.23 pounds when she turned 60 in 2003. This was based on the expectation that she would, by 2003, have 15 years of national insurance contributions out of a possible 39. The forecast underestimated her pension by nearly half. After she pointed out the discrepancy, the Pension Service revised its figures. Once Mrs Rumble's Home Responsibilities Protection entitlement was included, her weekly pension increased to 45.12 pounds."
A wonderful memorial for a personal friend of mine: "It's over a year since Chris Tame, former Director of the Libertarian Alliance, died aged 56. Chris had built up and nurtured the libertarian movement in Britain over many years. Over the years Chris had accumulated several thousand books, many of which were about liberty and its issues, and which included many classic libertarian texts. Rather than let the collection be dissipated, Sean Gabb, current Director of the Libertarian Alliance, found a good home for them at the Economic University of Prague. He organized the transport of the books, no small operation, and some friends of Chris helped defray the cost. Chris Tame's library will thus continue to spread the message of liberty for years to come, making a wholly fitting memorial to Chris and the values he stood for."
Saturday, May 12, 2007
US Cancer Care 10X better than socialized UK
Post lifted from The Anchoress . See the original for links
Gaius tells it:
"Seriously, do you really think socialized medicine is a good idea? Do you really believe that the code phrase "Universal Health Care" is anything but socialized medicine? Read this article from the Telegraph before you answer. Read it all the way through because the really important information is buried toward the end. Because it matters."
Gaius highlights a bit: "British cancer patients are substantially more likely to die of the disease than those in other western European countries because of poor access to the latest drugs, according to an authoritative report to be published today."
[...]
The proportion of colorectal cancer patients with access to the drug Avastin was 10 times higher in the US than it was in Europe, with the UK having a lower uptake than the European average."
It seems very strange to me that while Canada, Britain, France and the other countries with socialized health care systems find those systems in steady decline, the Democrats keep telling us that socialized medicine is the way to go. It's certainly the way to put an enormous amount of money and citizen control within the power of the Government.but will it save you're life? Not if there's a waiting list, and not if - as I suspect - availability of treatment will only be sanctioned by the government if you have lived your life by their standards. `Smith!' screamed the shrewish voice from the telescreen. `6079 Smith W.! Yes, you! Bend lower, please!
Money and power.I can't think of any other rational reason why the Democrats want to push us toward a health care system that clearly does not work.
The other thing that worries me about socialized medicine is that there is no incentive there for the best-and-the-brightest to undertake the arduous work (and heavy cost) of obtaining medical degrees, so that they can be under the power of the Government, rather than allowed to strike out on their own. Then who will be our next doctors? The second tier students? The third? Socialism too often is a showcase for mediocrity. It doesn't work. The private sector is imperfect, and there are certainly issues within our health care system that need addressing, particularly for the un-insured, but throwing us into this fresh hell is not the answer.
Maybe the answer is to help uninsured people, especially those with children, to buy into the same health insurance plan (or a reduced one, with reduced premiums) that our government employees tap into. Would that work?
Seems to me with all the big plans out there, already in existence, there should be a way for un-insured folks to participate for a manageable fee. People don't need to be "given" things - all that does is strip them of their dignity and their sense of self-pride [See comments section for an expansion of that thought - admin]. But there must be a way to include them in some sort of discounted participation. We need some new people in government, with new ideas. These tired, old ones need to be put to bed.
Hooray for feet and inches! "Meat, fish, fruit and vegetables can continue to be sold in pounds and ounces in Britain indefinitely, after a U-turn by the European Commission. The decision, disclosed in a letter made public last night, also means that fabrics, carpets and timber and other building materials can be sold in yards, feet or inches. Road signs can remain in miles per hour. The move delighted consumers and shopkeepers after a campaign by the Metric Martyrs that had been backed by the Conservative Party and the British Weights and Measures Association. The British Retail Consortium and other organisations representing butchers, fishmongers, greengrocers and market traders had also lobbied hard to save imperial measures.The campaigners scented victory after saving the crown on a pint glass this year. Their instincts were confirmed by Guenther Verheugen, the Industry Commissioner, who agreed that dual marking of goods in Britain in imperial and metric measures can continue indefinitely. Brussels has insisted previously that the traditional British weights and measures should disappear from labels and shop counters by 2009. Business lobbyists said that keeping pounds and ounces made it easier for British companies to sell to the United States"
Post lifted from The Anchoress . See the original for links
Gaius tells it:
"Seriously, do you really think socialized medicine is a good idea? Do you really believe that the code phrase "Universal Health Care" is anything but socialized medicine? Read this article from the Telegraph before you answer. Read it all the way through because the really important information is buried toward the end. Because it matters."
Gaius highlights a bit: "British cancer patients are substantially more likely to die of the disease than those in other western European countries because of poor access to the latest drugs, according to an authoritative report to be published today."
[...]
The proportion of colorectal cancer patients with access to the drug Avastin was 10 times higher in the US than it was in Europe, with the UK having a lower uptake than the European average."
It seems very strange to me that while Canada, Britain, France and the other countries with socialized health care systems find those systems in steady decline, the Democrats keep telling us that socialized medicine is the way to go. It's certainly the way to put an enormous amount of money and citizen control within the power of the Government.but will it save you're life? Not if there's a waiting list, and not if - as I suspect - availability of treatment will only be sanctioned by the government if you have lived your life by their standards. `Smith!' screamed the shrewish voice from the telescreen. `6079 Smith W.! Yes, you! Bend lower, please!
Money and power.I can't think of any other rational reason why the Democrats want to push us toward a health care system that clearly does not work.
The other thing that worries me about socialized medicine is that there is no incentive there for the best-and-the-brightest to undertake the arduous work (and heavy cost) of obtaining medical degrees, so that they can be under the power of the Government, rather than allowed to strike out on their own. Then who will be our next doctors? The second tier students? The third? Socialism too often is a showcase for mediocrity. It doesn't work. The private sector is imperfect, and there are certainly issues within our health care system that need addressing, particularly for the un-insured, but throwing us into this fresh hell is not the answer.
Maybe the answer is to help uninsured people, especially those with children, to buy into the same health insurance plan (or a reduced one, with reduced premiums) that our government employees tap into. Would that work?
Seems to me with all the big plans out there, already in existence, there should be a way for un-insured folks to participate for a manageable fee. People don't need to be "given" things - all that does is strip them of their dignity and their sense of self-pride [See comments section for an expansion of that thought - admin]. But there must be a way to include them in some sort of discounted participation. We need some new people in government, with new ideas. These tired, old ones need to be put to bed.
Hooray for feet and inches! "Meat, fish, fruit and vegetables can continue to be sold in pounds and ounces in Britain indefinitely, after a U-turn by the European Commission. The decision, disclosed in a letter made public last night, also means that fabrics, carpets and timber and other building materials can be sold in yards, feet or inches. Road signs can remain in miles per hour. The move delighted consumers and shopkeepers after a campaign by the Metric Martyrs that had been backed by the Conservative Party and the British Weights and Measures Association. The British Retail Consortium and other organisations representing butchers, fishmongers, greengrocers and market traders had also lobbied hard to save imperial measures.The campaigners scented victory after saving the crown on a pint glass this year. Their instincts were confirmed by Guenther Verheugen, the Industry Commissioner, who agreed that dual marking of goods in Britain in imperial and metric measures can continue indefinitely. Brussels has insisted previously that the traditional British weights and measures should disappear from labels and shop counters by 2009. Business lobbyists said that keeping pounds and ounces made it easier for British companies to sell to the United States"
Friday, May 11, 2007
NHS holds up cancer drugs
The UK has one of the worst records over access to cancer drugs as stark inequalities exist across the world, a Swedish study says. Researchers ranked the UK in the bottom group for its "slow and low" uptake of drugs after analysing the sales of 67 treatments in 25 countries. The US, Austria, France and Switzerland were the best, the Karolinska Institute and Stockholm School of Economics said. But the UK government said it had speeded up the drug approval process.
The researchers said getting new treatments to patients quickly and in large numbers was reflected in the survival rates. France had the highest five-year survival rate in Europe at 71% for women and 53% for men, compared to 53% and 43% in the UK respectively. The research was funded by drugs firm Roche, but independent experts said that did not invalidate the findings.
The greatest differences in uptake, measured by the proportion of patients given the drugs and how quickly they came on to the individual markets after being produced, was seen in bowel and lung cancer drugs. The US's uptake of bowel cancer treatment bevacizumab was 10 times the European average, the researchers said. In Europe the likes of France and German had higher than average use, compared to "very low" in Italy and the UK.
For lung cancer, uptake of erlotinib was 10 times higher than the European avearge in the US and three times higher in Germany. Uptake in Australia, the UK, Norway and Poland was slow.
In the UK, the first sale of breast cancer drug trastuzumab was in autumn 2000, nearly two years after it hit the market in the US and a full 12 months after it was given in Switzerland and France. Along with the UK, New Zealand, Poland, Czech Republic and South Africa were ranked at the bottom of the overall league.
Lead researcher Dr Bengt Jonsson said: "It is our hope that this report will inspire policy-makers and decision-makers to take action to address these imbalances so that access to new innovative cancer drugs does not become dependent on the patient's couintry of residence. "Cancer research continues to grow, with many new drugs and treatments expected to be introduced in the coming years. "Countries need to address urgently how they are going to accommodate newer drugs into health care systems and pay for them."
In the NHS, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) has responsibility for recommending if new drug treatments should be provided by the health service. The system has been heavily criticised because of a backlog in assessing treatments and for restricting access to them. But a Department of Health spokesman said NICE was essential in ensuring that the NHS used the most effective treatments. And he said measures had been taken to speed up the approval process for key drugs. "We are making good progress in ensuring cancer patients have access to the drugs they need. "For example draft guidance was available within two weeks of Herceptin for early breast cancer being licensed." [And the guidance was not to use it generally!]
Source
What a crock!
Do I really need to comment on this? Don't we all start moving our eyes at a great rate as soon as we get out of bed? We even move them when we are dreaming, in fact
Moving your eyes from side to side for 30 seconds every morning can boost memory by up to 10 per cent, a study suggests. Students who took part in the eye exercise tests found that their memory recall was boosted by a spot of eye jiggling. The exercises work, it is thought, because the eye movements cause the two hemispheres of the brain to interact more efficiently with each other.
Research led by Andrew Parker of Manchester Metropolitan University, identified the potential exam revision technique while studying false recall. “This could be important in situations where we feel uncertain, unclear or maybe even just confused about what we may have done or said,” he said. “It may help someone recall an important piece of information for an exam or for a shopping list.”
He presented 102 university students with recordings of a male voice reading 20 lists of 15 words. The subjects were then handed a list of words and asked to pick out those that they had just heard. On average, the students who had moved their eyes from side to side performed 10 per cent better than the rest. Up and down eye movement was of no use at all to recall. Contained within the lists were “lure” words that were not in the spoken list but were similar to some of those that were. Students who had moved eyes sideways were 15 per cent better at ignoring the misleading words.
Dr Parker said: “Our work shows that true memory can be improved and false memory reduced. One reason for this is that bilateral eye movements may improve our ability to monitor the source of our memories. He said that people are often confused over whether a memory is real or imagined, such as whether a bill was paid or a door locked. “The problem is to determine the source of one’s memory — real or imagined. Bilateral eye movements may help us to determine accurately the source of our memory,” he said.
He came up with the idea of testing students and getting them to move their eyes after previous research indicated that some memories are dependent on the level of activity between the brain’s two hemispheres. The researchers, who published their findings in the journal Brain and Cognition, anticipated a reduction in false memory but were taken aback to find that the eye movements assisted recall of true memories. “The effects are so counter-intuitive,” Dr Parker said. “That such a straightforward experimental manipulation can bring about enhanced memory for studied information and lower the number of memory errors is quite exciting.”
More work has to be done to establish in what contexts the technique will be effective and whether it really will help in an exam. But he added: “If one does forget something then it will do no harm to try moving one’s eyes from side to side — to see if it does make a difference.”
Source
Just the sight of a chicken can offend in Britain
A playwright has been told he must warn audiences his one-man act features a roast chicken - for fear of offending vegetarians. Doug Devaney, 41, of Roedale Road, Brighton, has toured the city for years with his play Mein Gutt, a black comedy about a man's losing battle against obesity. But the vegetarian Sanctuary Cafe in Hove has told him the show can only go on if the audience is warned beforehand that there is a dead chicken involved.
Mr Devaney said: "I phoned up as a matter of courtesy to let them know I used a chicken as an essential part of the show but they got back to me a few days later to say I would have to give the audience a warning. "I've heard of strobe lighting or nudity being cause for audience concern but never sugar-roasted chicken. "Do people really need that much protecting? I wonder what they do when they walk past the rotisserie at Asda? "I'm happy to do it - I just consider it weird. Will Shakespeareans have to warn theatre-goers about eye-gouging in King Lear from now on? It takes some of the surprise of theatre away and how sensitive are we?"
Sandra McDonagh, who organises events at the Sanctuary Cafe, said: "Essentially we just don't want to cause offence so we want to give out a warning beforehand. "I had to run it past the cafe owners and they asked for a warning in case somebody stands up and says, I wasn't told about this'. "People would definitely assume there was no meat on the premises but it will be nowhere near the kitchen or any food preparation area. "There will always be one person who will be sensitive enough to complain. I have come across staunch vegans in my time who will kick off about most things and it's better to cover yourselves."
The play, which Mr Devaney said was about "the way people change their attitude to you when you become a man of size", will be performed every Friday throughout the Brighton Festival Fringe at 9.15pm in the cellar room.
Source. (H/T Interested Participant)
A great excuse to put insurance premiums up
Lloyd's of London, the world's oldest insurer, offered a gloomy forecast of floods, droughts and disastrous storms over the next 50 years in a recently published report on impending climate changes. "These things are fact, not hypothesis," said Wendy Baker, the president of Lloyd's America in an interview on Monday. "You don't have to be a believer in global warming to recognize the climate is changing. The industry has to get ready for the changes that are coming."
In a report on catastrophe trends Lloyd's is disseminating to the insurance industry, a bevy of British climate experts, including Sir David King, chief scientist to the British government, warn of increased flooding in coastal areas and a rapid rise in sea level as ice caps melt in Greenland and Antarctica.
Northern European coastal levels could rise more than a meter (3 feet) in a few decades, particularly if the Gulf Stream currents change, the report says. Floods, which now account for about half of all deaths from natural disasters, could multiply and become more destructive, with annual flood damages in England and Wales reaching 10 times today's level, according to some studies. At the same time, drought patterns that are already forming in some parts of the world are going to get worse, particularly in southern Africa. Even the lush Amazon may dry up, and with less vegetation, more carbon dioxide will leak into the atmosphere, making the global warming problem even worse, the Lloyd's study says.
Baker said Lloyd's has formed a partnership with American International Group, the world's biggest insurer, Harvard University's Center for Health and the Global Environment and the Insurance Information Institute, a research group. The four will hold a forum in the fall of 2007 to look at the severity and consequences of future natural catastrophes
Source
Green car crashes
An electric car beloved of green-minded celebrities and promoted as the environmentally friendly alternative for city drivers may be banned after failing a basic crash test carried out by the Department for Transport. The Government is so concerned by the lack of protection offered by the G-Wiz that it rushed out a statement last night stating that it was urgently seeking a review of the European regulations covering the sale of the cars.
The tiny car, made in Bangalore, India, has enjoyed a recent surge in popularity in London because it is exempt from the congestion charge and parking fees in dozens of car parks. Several celebrities, including Jonathan Ross, Kristin Scott Thomas and Bamber Gascoigne, have bought one and have publicly praised its very low emissions and the ease of parking it in the tightest spaces. A total of 750 are already being driven in London and another 100 are about to be delivered to customers.
Reva, the Indian company which makes the G-Wiz, did not have to carry out the crash tests which are compulsory for cars because its vehicle is technically defined as a quadricycle. Until the G-Wiz was introduced, most quadricycles were four-wheel motorbikes and were considered a special case which could be exempted from minimum occupant protection standards. But Reva describes itself as a car company and markets the G-Wiz as a greener alternative to a conventional car.
The DfT decided to buy a G-Wiz and carry out its own crash test after becoming concerned by the rapid growth in sales. It found "serious safety concerns" after crashing a G-Wiz at 35mph into a deformable barrier, which is the normal test for cars.
Stephen Ladyman, the Transport Minister, said: "The safety regulations that govern this type of vehicle were designed at a time when it was thought they would cover four-wheeled motorcycles and some small, specialised commercial vehicles. Not city runabouts that resemble small cars. "But, given increasing environmental concerns, new vehicles that qualify as quadricycles have come to the market and are becoming more popular for urban use. Therefore it is right that we reconsider the regulations for this type of vehicle and whether safety regulations should be made more stringent. "Now we have the initial findings of our tests we will be taking this up with the European Commission and manufacturers, and will publish more information when the full programme of tests is complete."
The DfT carried out the test on April 24 and received the preliminary results last Friday. They were so poor that it decided to act immediately rather than wait for a few weeks until the full report was available. The Government has found itself in an awkward position because it has encouraged drivers to switch to low emission cars and has exempted the G-Wiz and other electric vehicles from paying vehicle excise duty. A DfT spokeswoman said: "We want to help people explore environmentally friendly forms of transport but they must be safe." She added that a further crash test would be carried out on another electric car classed as a quadricycle. She refused to name the model.
GoinGreen, the British company which imports the G-Wiz, said it had a very good safety record, with no reported deaths or serious injuries associated with the 2,000 vehicles sold in Britain and India to date. Keith Johnston, the company's managing director, said the G-Wiz tended to be driven short distances in cities at low speeds. It is certified to travel on motorways but has a top speed of only 45mph. He added that the review requested by the Government should consider raising the maximum weight for quadricycles to allow safety features to be added. The G-Wiz only just complies with the existing weight limit, which is 400kg without the battery. "We could add airbags but that would add to the weight," he said. Mr Johnston said that Reva had done some simulated crash tests but he did not know the details
Source
Deadly food fanaticism: "A vegan couple were sentenced to life in jail yesterday for the murder of their malnourished six-week-old son, who weighed just 3rlb (1.6kg) when he died. Jade Sanders and Lamont Thomas fed the boy, who was named Crown Shakur, a diet largely consisting of soy milk and apple juice, the Atlanta court heard. The child was born in a bath-tub in the couple's home and never taken to see a doctor. He was dead when his parents took him to a hospital across the street from their flat on April 25, 2004. He was so emaciated that doctors could count his bones through his skin. The couple maintained during the trial that they did the best they could for the boy while adhering to their vegan lifestyle, a strict form of vegetarianism that does not allow the consumption or use of any products linked to animals." [May they rot!]
The UK has one of the worst records over access to cancer drugs as stark inequalities exist across the world, a Swedish study says. Researchers ranked the UK in the bottom group for its "slow and low" uptake of drugs after analysing the sales of 67 treatments in 25 countries. The US, Austria, France and Switzerland were the best, the Karolinska Institute and Stockholm School of Economics said. But the UK government said it had speeded up the drug approval process.
The researchers said getting new treatments to patients quickly and in large numbers was reflected in the survival rates. France had the highest five-year survival rate in Europe at 71% for women and 53% for men, compared to 53% and 43% in the UK respectively. The research was funded by drugs firm Roche, but independent experts said that did not invalidate the findings.
The greatest differences in uptake, measured by the proportion of patients given the drugs and how quickly they came on to the individual markets after being produced, was seen in bowel and lung cancer drugs. The US's uptake of bowel cancer treatment bevacizumab was 10 times the European average, the researchers said. In Europe the likes of France and German had higher than average use, compared to "very low" in Italy and the UK.
For lung cancer, uptake of erlotinib was 10 times higher than the European avearge in the US and three times higher in Germany. Uptake in Australia, the UK, Norway and Poland was slow.
In the UK, the first sale of breast cancer drug trastuzumab was in autumn 2000, nearly two years after it hit the market in the US and a full 12 months after it was given in Switzerland and France. Along with the UK, New Zealand, Poland, Czech Republic and South Africa were ranked at the bottom of the overall league.
Lead researcher Dr Bengt Jonsson said: "It is our hope that this report will inspire policy-makers and decision-makers to take action to address these imbalances so that access to new innovative cancer drugs does not become dependent on the patient's couintry of residence. "Cancer research continues to grow, with many new drugs and treatments expected to be introduced in the coming years. "Countries need to address urgently how they are going to accommodate newer drugs into health care systems and pay for them."
In the NHS, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) has responsibility for recommending if new drug treatments should be provided by the health service. The system has been heavily criticised because of a backlog in assessing treatments and for restricting access to them. But a Department of Health spokesman said NICE was essential in ensuring that the NHS used the most effective treatments. And he said measures had been taken to speed up the approval process for key drugs. "We are making good progress in ensuring cancer patients have access to the drugs they need. "For example draft guidance was available within two weeks of Herceptin for early breast cancer being licensed." [And the guidance was not to use it generally!]
Source
What a crock!
Do I really need to comment on this? Don't we all start moving our eyes at a great rate as soon as we get out of bed? We even move them when we are dreaming, in fact
Moving your eyes from side to side for 30 seconds every morning can boost memory by up to 10 per cent, a study suggests. Students who took part in the eye exercise tests found that their memory recall was boosted by a spot of eye jiggling. The exercises work, it is thought, because the eye movements cause the two hemispheres of the brain to interact more efficiently with each other.
Research led by Andrew Parker of Manchester Metropolitan University, identified the potential exam revision technique while studying false recall. “This could be important in situations where we feel uncertain, unclear or maybe even just confused about what we may have done or said,” he said. “It may help someone recall an important piece of information for an exam or for a shopping list.”
He presented 102 university students with recordings of a male voice reading 20 lists of 15 words. The subjects were then handed a list of words and asked to pick out those that they had just heard. On average, the students who had moved their eyes from side to side performed 10 per cent better than the rest. Up and down eye movement was of no use at all to recall. Contained within the lists were “lure” words that were not in the spoken list but were similar to some of those that were. Students who had moved eyes sideways were 15 per cent better at ignoring the misleading words.
Dr Parker said: “Our work shows that true memory can be improved and false memory reduced. One reason for this is that bilateral eye movements may improve our ability to monitor the source of our memories. He said that people are often confused over whether a memory is real or imagined, such as whether a bill was paid or a door locked. “The problem is to determine the source of one’s memory — real or imagined. Bilateral eye movements may help us to determine accurately the source of our memory,” he said.
He came up with the idea of testing students and getting them to move their eyes after previous research indicated that some memories are dependent on the level of activity between the brain’s two hemispheres. The researchers, who published their findings in the journal Brain and Cognition, anticipated a reduction in false memory but were taken aback to find that the eye movements assisted recall of true memories. “The effects are so counter-intuitive,” Dr Parker said. “That such a straightforward experimental manipulation can bring about enhanced memory for studied information and lower the number of memory errors is quite exciting.”
More work has to be done to establish in what contexts the technique will be effective and whether it really will help in an exam. But he added: “If one does forget something then it will do no harm to try moving one’s eyes from side to side — to see if it does make a difference.”
Source
Just the sight of a chicken can offend in Britain
A playwright has been told he must warn audiences his one-man act features a roast chicken - for fear of offending vegetarians. Doug Devaney, 41, of Roedale Road, Brighton, has toured the city for years with his play Mein Gutt, a black comedy about a man's losing battle against obesity. But the vegetarian Sanctuary Cafe in Hove has told him the show can only go on if the audience is warned beforehand that there is a dead chicken involved.
Mr Devaney said: "I phoned up as a matter of courtesy to let them know I used a chicken as an essential part of the show but they got back to me a few days later to say I would have to give the audience a warning. "I've heard of strobe lighting or nudity being cause for audience concern but never sugar-roasted chicken. "Do people really need that much protecting? I wonder what they do when they walk past the rotisserie at Asda? "I'm happy to do it - I just consider it weird. Will Shakespeareans have to warn theatre-goers about eye-gouging in King Lear from now on? It takes some of the surprise of theatre away and how sensitive are we?"
Sandra McDonagh, who organises events at the Sanctuary Cafe, said: "Essentially we just don't want to cause offence so we want to give out a warning beforehand. "I had to run it past the cafe owners and they asked for a warning in case somebody stands up and says, I wasn't told about this'. "People would definitely assume there was no meat on the premises but it will be nowhere near the kitchen or any food preparation area. "There will always be one person who will be sensitive enough to complain. I have come across staunch vegans in my time who will kick off about most things and it's better to cover yourselves."
The play, which Mr Devaney said was about "the way people change their attitude to you when you become a man of size", will be performed every Friday throughout the Brighton Festival Fringe at 9.15pm in the cellar room.
Source. (H/T Interested Participant)
A great excuse to put insurance premiums up
Lloyd's of London, the world's oldest insurer, offered a gloomy forecast of floods, droughts and disastrous storms over the next 50 years in a recently published report on impending climate changes. "These things are fact, not hypothesis," said Wendy Baker, the president of Lloyd's America in an interview on Monday. "You don't have to be a believer in global warming to recognize the climate is changing. The industry has to get ready for the changes that are coming."
In a report on catastrophe trends Lloyd's is disseminating to the insurance industry, a bevy of British climate experts, including Sir David King, chief scientist to the British government, warn of increased flooding in coastal areas and a rapid rise in sea level as ice caps melt in Greenland and Antarctica.
Northern European coastal levels could rise more than a meter (3 feet) in a few decades, particularly if the Gulf Stream currents change, the report says. Floods, which now account for about half of all deaths from natural disasters, could multiply and become more destructive, with annual flood damages in England and Wales reaching 10 times today's level, according to some studies. At the same time, drought patterns that are already forming in some parts of the world are going to get worse, particularly in southern Africa. Even the lush Amazon may dry up, and with less vegetation, more carbon dioxide will leak into the atmosphere, making the global warming problem even worse, the Lloyd's study says.
Baker said Lloyd's has formed a partnership with American International Group, the world's biggest insurer, Harvard University's Center for Health and the Global Environment and the Insurance Information Institute, a research group. The four will hold a forum in the fall of 2007 to look at the severity and consequences of future natural catastrophes
Source
Green car crashes
An electric car beloved of green-minded celebrities and promoted as the environmentally friendly alternative for city drivers may be banned after failing a basic crash test carried out by the Department for Transport. The Government is so concerned by the lack of protection offered by the G-Wiz that it rushed out a statement last night stating that it was urgently seeking a review of the European regulations covering the sale of the cars.
The tiny car, made in Bangalore, India, has enjoyed a recent surge in popularity in London because it is exempt from the congestion charge and parking fees in dozens of car parks. Several celebrities, including Jonathan Ross, Kristin Scott Thomas and Bamber Gascoigne, have bought one and have publicly praised its very low emissions and the ease of parking it in the tightest spaces. A total of 750 are already being driven in London and another 100 are about to be delivered to customers.
Reva, the Indian company which makes the G-Wiz, did not have to carry out the crash tests which are compulsory for cars because its vehicle is technically defined as a quadricycle. Until the G-Wiz was introduced, most quadricycles were four-wheel motorbikes and were considered a special case which could be exempted from minimum occupant protection standards. But Reva describes itself as a car company and markets the G-Wiz as a greener alternative to a conventional car.
The DfT decided to buy a G-Wiz and carry out its own crash test after becoming concerned by the rapid growth in sales. It found "serious safety concerns" after crashing a G-Wiz at 35mph into a deformable barrier, which is the normal test for cars.
Stephen Ladyman, the Transport Minister, said: "The safety regulations that govern this type of vehicle were designed at a time when it was thought they would cover four-wheeled motorcycles and some small, specialised commercial vehicles. Not city runabouts that resemble small cars. "But, given increasing environmental concerns, new vehicles that qualify as quadricycles have come to the market and are becoming more popular for urban use. Therefore it is right that we reconsider the regulations for this type of vehicle and whether safety regulations should be made more stringent. "Now we have the initial findings of our tests we will be taking this up with the European Commission and manufacturers, and will publish more information when the full programme of tests is complete."
The DfT carried out the test on April 24 and received the preliminary results last Friday. They were so poor that it decided to act immediately rather than wait for a few weeks until the full report was available. The Government has found itself in an awkward position because it has encouraged drivers to switch to low emission cars and has exempted the G-Wiz and other electric vehicles from paying vehicle excise duty. A DfT spokeswoman said: "We want to help people explore environmentally friendly forms of transport but they must be safe." She added that a further crash test would be carried out on another electric car classed as a quadricycle. She refused to name the model.
GoinGreen, the British company which imports the G-Wiz, said it had a very good safety record, with no reported deaths or serious injuries associated with the 2,000 vehicles sold in Britain and India to date. Keith Johnston, the company's managing director, said the G-Wiz tended to be driven short distances in cities at low speeds. It is certified to travel on motorways but has a top speed of only 45mph. He added that the review requested by the Government should consider raising the maximum weight for quadricycles to allow safety features to be added. The G-Wiz only just complies with the existing weight limit, which is 400kg without the battery. "We could add airbags but that would add to the weight," he said. Mr Johnston said that Reva had done some simulated crash tests but he did not know the details
Source
Deadly food fanaticism: "A vegan couple were sentenced to life in jail yesterday for the murder of their malnourished six-week-old son, who weighed just 3rlb (1.6kg) when he died. Jade Sanders and Lamont Thomas fed the boy, who was named Crown Shakur, a diet largely consisting of soy milk and apple juice, the Atlanta court heard. The child was born in a bath-tub in the couple's home and never taken to see a doctor. He was dead when his parents took him to a hospital across the street from their flat on April 25, 2004. He was so emaciated that doctors could count his bones through his skin. The couple maintained during the trial that they did the best they could for the boy while adhering to their vegan lifestyle, a strict form of vegetarianism that does not allow the consumption or use of any products linked to animals." [May they rot!]
Thursday, May 10, 2007
Travel: the new tobacco
This one gave me a laugh. The founder of "Rough Guides" (promoting travel) now believes that our addiction to 'binge flying' is killing the planet. Sounds like a severe case of Leftist guilt syndrome
Mark Ellingham, founder of the Rough Guides and the man who encouraged a generation of travellers to pack a rucksack and explore the world, has compared the damage done by tourism to the impact of the tobacco industry.
Ellingham now says travelling is so environmentally destructive that there is no such thing as a genuinely ethical holiday. He wants the industry to educate travellers about the damage their holidays do to the environment. The development he regrets most is the public's appetite for what he calls 'binge-flying'.
'The tobacco industry fouled up the world while denying [it] as much as possible for as long as they could,' said Ellingham. 'If the travel industry rosily goes ahead as it is doing, ignoring the effect that carbon emissions from flying are having on climate change, we are putting ourselves in a very similar position to the tobacco industry.'
Although the aviation industry now accounts for just 5.5 per cent of the CO2 generated in the UK, it is one of the fastest-growing generators of the pollution. Some experts estimate that flying could treble in the next 20 years.
'Climate change is an issue that dwarfs all others and the impact of flying is key to this,' said Ellingham. 'All of us involved have a responsibility to inform travellers as clearly and honestly as possible about the environmental cost of their journeys. We must encourage travellers to travel less and neutralise their carbon footprint through offsetting. It is hard to say the positive impact travelling has can ever outweigh the damage done by simply travelling to the destination,' he said. 'Balancing all the positives and negatives, I'm not convinced there is such a thing as a "responsible" or "ethical" holiday.'
Ellingham is calling for a 100 green tax on all flights to Europe and Africa, and 250 on flights to the rest of the world. He also wants investment to create a low-carbon economy, as well as a moratorium on airport expansion.
It was 25 years ago this week when Ellingham sat down at his kitchen table and wrote his first guidebook, using his mother's typewriter. Alongside Lonely Planet, Ellingham's publications revolutionised the travel industry, particularly by encouraging young people to explore the world. 'At that time travelling, as distinct from a two-week holiday, was a niche interest. Students went InterRailing, while the more daring would go island-hopping in Greece,' he said.
In the past 25 years, he said, there has been 'a huge growth in expectation of what people think they can do on holiday. People have more money. Flights cost a fraction of what they did then.'
Last week Easyjet came under criticism from environmentalists for delaying the launch of its carbon emission offsetting scheme, blaming a market riddled with 'snake-oil salesmen'.
Alongside guides enticing travellers to fly, Ellingham also publishes environmental titles, including the Rough Guide to Climate Change which is nominated for the Royal Society Prize for Science Books award, to be announced next week. Even so, he is keenly aware of the incongruity of making pronouncements about how people should moderate their behaviour. 'I acknowledge that I'm speaking about all of this from an apparently contradictory position but it's a question of working with what's realistic: if Rough Guides was to disappear overnight, I don't think anybody would fly any less. I think it's an entirely ethical position of mine to work with what's realistic by encouraging people to moderate the amount they fly, rather than stop altogether,' he said. 'It's up to people to make up their own minds about how they live their lives.'
While determined to encourage people to reduce the number of flights they take, Ellingham admits he has no intention of stopping himself, and he does not expect others to do so either. 'As a "recovering travel writer", I fly less than I would like to, but more than I know that ethically I should. The deal I have made with myself is to limit the number of flights I take to one long-haul and two or three shorter flights each year,' he said. 'I very much respect the purist attitudes of those who say they will never fly again, but it's totally unrealistic to expect the majority to do the same.'
Ellingham is aware of another contradiction in his position. While being hugely destructive, tourism also has so many positive effects that it would be disastrous to the economies of many nations if it were to stop or even be curbed.
Encouraging people to reduce the number of flights they take, however, is no easy task. Ellingham said he has been horrified by a new travelling trend. 'If there was just one thing I could change, it would be this new British obsession for binge flying,' he said. 'We now live in a society where, if people have nothing to do on a Saturday night, they go to Budapest for 48 hours. We fly anywhere at the slightest opportunity, 10 times and upwards a year. This needs to be addressed with the greatest urgency.'
Source
Yet another proposal about how to fix the unfixable
The NHS should be run outside politics by a board appointed by Parliament, the British Medical Association says. The NHS should have its own constitution and make clear that it cannot provide everything possible, focusing instead on core services that meet the needs of the great majority of patients most of the time, it says. These changes would prevent day-to-day political meddling and let patients know what they could expect, the BMA says in a discussion paper.
The plans arise from dissatisfaction among the medical community about the Government's reforms, James Johnson, chairman of the BMA Council said. There was "intense unhappiness" in the entire workforce, with reforms that lacked logic or coherence. Professionals had been marginalised by changes over 15-20 years, and the "constant dabbling" by politicians was dividing managers from clinicians, he said.
The recommendations envisage the NHS as an organisation that is a cross between the BBC and an old-style nationalised industry: run by a board, reporting to Parliament, and governed by a constitution that would set out principles, rights, and responsibilities. Patient input would be strengthened by greater local involvement, the division between purchasers and providers eroded if not abolished, and clinical leadership given greater priority.
Mr Johnson, a surgeon, said that the current reforms were "probably just about as unpopular as you can get. They lack cohesion; they are contradictory. "It is absolutely right the politicians set the guidelines, but day-to-day dabbling when a particular topic becomes headlines is not good for the service," he said. For the Secretary of State to have to react to every local eventuality "can't be the best use of Cabinet ministers' time. We think the way forward is for the service to be vested in a board of governors. The Government would set the amount of money and the general direction of travel for the NHS without any further interference." The board of governors would ensure compliance with the NHS constitution. It would appoint an executive management board, to include the NHS Chief Executive and Chief Medical Officer.
Some rationing of services appeared inescapable, Mr Johnson said, as treatments became more costly and the population aged. The list of services provided should be decided through debate between politicians, professionals and the public. Hamish Meldrum, chairman of the BMA's GPs committee, said that this did not mean the association favoured rationing. "We will continue to press for all necessary resources, but we do believe rationing may be inevitable. What we are recommending, if rationing is to take place, is that it's done in an open manner."
Andy Burnham, the Health Minister, said: "We resist any call to make the NHS a slimmed-down, emergency service, because that's what it would become if we started rationing care. The NHS should continue to be comprehensive and universal. Further independence within the NHS should be considered only if it improves services. We are already devolving decision-making. "
Andrew Lansley, the Shadow Health Secretary, thought the BMA was too pessimistic, and that bureaucratisation and demoralisation could be reversed. "I endorse some of the principles - taking politicians out of the day-to-day running of the NHS; reengaging professionals and focusing the Secretary of State and department on public health challenges," he said.
Nigel Edwards, of the NHS Confederation, which represents most NHS organisations, said that producing a written constitution would be extremely difficult. "The NHS exists in a cash-limited system and has a multitude of competing priorities," he said. "It is extremely difficult to reach a consensus on expensive drugs and treatments that pleases everyone. "We need to confront the reality that if the public do not want cost to be a factor in NHS decisions, they may have to prepared to pay more. "The confederation agrees that the NHS should be more independent of central government control. However, the structure of this is less important than ensuring devolution of power to local trust level."
Source
British TV veteran disses the BBC: "Sir Patrick Moore has identified an alien species that threatens to destroy intelligent life - the women who have taken over the BBC. The veteran astronomer celebrated the 50th anniversary of The Sky at Night with a withering attack on the female executives he believes have dumbed down the corporation. Sir Patrick's outburst echoes criticisms raised by Alasdair Milne, a former Director-General, who provoked a furious response when he accused a female-dominated BBC of producing "terrible" programmes. Sir Patrick, 84, was asked by the Radio Times if television had got better or worse during a career spanning the medium's life. The answer was worse - "much worse". He said: "The trouble is that the BBC now is run by women and it shows: soap operas, cooking, quizzes, kitchen-sink plays. You wouldn't have had that in the golden days." They have even destroyed sci-fi, Sir Patrick's personal passion. He said: "I used to watch Doctor Who and Star Trek, but they went PC - making women commanders, that kind of thing. I stopped watching."
Mohammed Philby?: "Dozens of suspected Islamic fanatics have been weeded out after attempting to join MI5 and MI6. They were identified by the vetting process applicants go through over six to eight months. The success in exposing the moles has underlined the dangers faced by the security services as they seek to recruit more Muslims. Assuming that most of these would be Mohammed Philbys are British citizens, wouldn't trying to penetrate British intelligence agencies be considered treason? The article doesn't mention any arrests. Are they simply being let go to toddle back off to the nearest extremist mosque?"
This one gave me a laugh. The founder of "Rough Guides" (promoting travel) now believes that our addiction to 'binge flying' is killing the planet. Sounds like a severe case of Leftist guilt syndrome
Mark Ellingham, founder of the Rough Guides and the man who encouraged a generation of travellers to pack a rucksack and explore the world, has compared the damage done by tourism to the impact of the tobacco industry.
Ellingham now says travelling is so environmentally destructive that there is no such thing as a genuinely ethical holiday. He wants the industry to educate travellers about the damage their holidays do to the environment. The development he regrets most is the public's appetite for what he calls 'binge-flying'.
'The tobacco industry fouled up the world while denying [it] as much as possible for as long as they could,' said Ellingham. 'If the travel industry rosily goes ahead as it is doing, ignoring the effect that carbon emissions from flying are having on climate change, we are putting ourselves in a very similar position to the tobacco industry.'
Although the aviation industry now accounts for just 5.5 per cent of the CO2 generated in the UK, it is one of the fastest-growing generators of the pollution. Some experts estimate that flying could treble in the next 20 years.
'Climate change is an issue that dwarfs all others and the impact of flying is key to this,' said Ellingham. 'All of us involved have a responsibility to inform travellers as clearly and honestly as possible about the environmental cost of their journeys. We must encourage travellers to travel less and neutralise their carbon footprint through offsetting. It is hard to say the positive impact travelling has can ever outweigh the damage done by simply travelling to the destination,' he said. 'Balancing all the positives and negatives, I'm not convinced there is such a thing as a "responsible" or "ethical" holiday.'
Ellingham is calling for a 100 green tax on all flights to Europe and Africa, and 250 on flights to the rest of the world. He also wants investment to create a low-carbon economy, as well as a moratorium on airport expansion.
It was 25 years ago this week when Ellingham sat down at his kitchen table and wrote his first guidebook, using his mother's typewriter. Alongside Lonely Planet, Ellingham's publications revolutionised the travel industry, particularly by encouraging young people to explore the world. 'At that time travelling, as distinct from a two-week holiday, was a niche interest. Students went InterRailing, while the more daring would go island-hopping in Greece,' he said.
In the past 25 years, he said, there has been 'a huge growth in expectation of what people think they can do on holiday. People have more money. Flights cost a fraction of what they did then.'
Last week Easyjet came under criticism from environmentalists for delaying the launch of its carbon emission offsetting scheme, blaming a market riddled with 'snake-oil salesmen'.
Alongside guides enticing travellers to fly, Ellingham also publishes environmental titles, including the Rough Guide to Climate Change which is nominated for the Royal Society Prize for Science Books award, to be announced next week. Even so, he is keenly aware of the incongruity of making pronouncements about how people should moderate their behaviour. 'I acknowledge that I'm speaking about all of this from an apparently contradictory position but it's a question of working with what's realistic: if Rough Guides was to disappear overnight, I don't think anybody would fly any less. I think it's an entirely ethical position of mine to work with what's realistic by encouraging people to moderate the amount they fly, rather than stop altogether,' he said. 'It's up to people to make up their own minds about how they live their lives.'
While determined to encourage people to reduce the number of flights they take, Ellingham admits he has no intention of stopping himself, and he does not expect others to do so either. 'As a "recovering travel writer", I fly less than I would like to, but more than I know that ethically I should. The deal I have made with myself is to limit the number of flights I take to one long-haul and two or three shorter flights each year,' he said. 'I very much respect the purist attitudes of those who say they will never fly again, but it's totally unrealistic to expect the majority to do the same.'
Ellingham is aware of another contradiction in his position. While being hugely destructive, tourism also has so many positive effects that it would be disastrous to the economies of many nations if it were to stop or even be curbed.
Encouraging people to reduce the number of flights they take, however, is no easy task. Ellingham said he has been horrified by a new travelling trend. 'If there was just one thing I could change, it would be this new British obsession for binge flying,' he said. 'We now live in a society where, if people have nothing to do on a Saturday night, they go to Budapest for 48 hours. We fly anywhere at the slightest opportunity, 10 times and upwards a year. This needs to be addressed with the greatest urgency.'
Source
Yet another proposal about how to fix the unfixable
The NHS should be run outside politics by a board appointed by Parliament, the British Medical Association says. The NHS should have its own constitution and make clear that it cannot provide everything possible, focusing instead on core services that meet the needs of the great majority of patients most of the time, it says. These changes would prevent day-to-day political meddling and let patients know what they could expect, the BMA says in a discussion paper.
The plans arise from dissatisfaction among the medical community about the Government's reforms, James Johnson, chairman of the BMA Council said. There was "intense unhappiness" in the entire workforce, with reforms that lacked logic or coherence. Professionals had been marginalised by changes over 15-20 years, and the "constant dabbling" by politicians was dividing managers from clinicians, he said.
The recommendations envisage the NHS as an organisation that is a cross between the BBC and an old-style nationalised industry: run by a board, reporting to Parliament, and governed by a constitution that would set out principles, rights, and responsibilities. Patient input would be strengthened by greater local involvement, the division between purchasers and providers eroded if not abolished, and clinical leadership given greater priority.
Mr Johnson, a surgeon, said that the current reforms were "probably just about as unpopular as you can get. They lack cohesion; they are contradictory. "It is absolutely right the politicians set the guidelines, but day-to-day dabbling when a particular topic becomes headlines is not good for the service," he said. For the Secretary of State to have to react to every local eventuality "can't be the best use of Cabinet ministers' time. We think the way forward is for the service to be vested in a board of governors. The Government would set the amount of money and the general direction of travel for the NHS without any further interference." The board of governors would ensure compliance with the NHS constitution. It would appoint an executive management board, to include the NHS Chief Executive and Chief Medical Officer.
Some rationing of services appeared inescapable, Mr Johnson said, as treatments became more costly and the population aged. The list of services provided should be decided through debate between politicians, professionals and the public. Hamish Meldrum, chairman of the BMA's GPs committee, said that this did not mean the association favoured rationing. "We will continue to press for all necessary resources, but we do believe rationing may be inevitable. What we are recommending, if rationing is to take place, is that it's done in an open manner."
Andy Burnham, the Health Minister, said: "We resist any call to make the NHS a slimmed-down, emergency service, because that's what it would become if we started rationing care. The NHS should continue to be comprehensive and universal. Further independence within the NHS should be considered only if it improves services. We are already devolving decision-making. "
Andrew Lansley, the Shadow Health Secretary, thought the BMA was too pessimistic, and that bureaucratisation and demoralisation could be reversed. "I endorse some of the principles - taking politicians out of the day-to-day running of the NHS; reengaging professionals and focusing the Secretary of State and department on public health challenges," he said.
Nigel Edwards, of the NHS Confederation, which represents most NHS organisations, said that producing a written constitution would be extremely difficult. "The NHS exists in a cash-limited system and has a multitude of competing priorities," he said. "It is extremely difficult to reach a consensus on expensive drugs and treatments that pleases everyone. "We need to confront the reality that if the public do not want cost to be a factor in NHS decisions, they may have to prepared to pay more. "The confederation agrees that the NHS should be more independent of central government control. However, the structure of this is less important than ensuring devolution of power to local trust level."
Source
British TV veteran disses the BBC: "Sir Patrick Moore has identified an alien species that threatens to destroy intelligent life - the women who have taken over the BBC. The veteran astronomer celebrated the 50th anniversary of The Sky at Night with a withering attack on the female executives he believes have dumbed down the corporation. Sir Patrick's outburst echoes criticisms raised by Alasdair Milne, a former Director-General, who provoked a furious response when he accused a female-dominated BBC of producing "terrible" programmes. Sir Patrick, 84, was asked by the Radio Times if television had got better or worse during a career spanning the medium's life. The answer was worse - "much worse". He said: "The trouble is that the BBC now is run by women and it shows: soap operas, cooking, quizzes, kitchen-sink plays. You wouldn't have had that in the golden days." They have even destroyed sci-fi, Sir Patrick's personal passion. He said: "I used to watch Doctor Who and Star Trek, but they went PC - making women commanders, that kind of thing. I stopped watching."
Mohammed Philby?: "Dozens of suspected Islamic fanatics have been weeded out after attempting to join MI5 and MI6. They were identified by the vetting process applicants go through over six to eight months. The success in exposing the moles has underlined the dangers faced by the security services as they seek to recruit more Muslims. Assuming that most of these would be Mohammed Philbys are British citizens, wouldn't trying to penetrate British intelligence agencies be considered treason? The article doesn't mention any arrests. Are they simply being let go to toddle back off to the nearest extremist mosque?"
Wednesday, May 09, 2007
IMA Slams British Doctors' Boycott Call
The Israel Medical Association rejected a call for a boycott of the Israel Medical Association by 130 British physicians and its expulsion from the World Medical Association, which is an umbrella organization of national medical associations that, ironically, is headed by IMA chairman Dr. Yoram Blachar.
The doctors, led by Prof. Colin Green, a surgeon at University College London, and Dr. Derek Summerfield, who has consistently attacked Israel in the British Medical Journal, claimed in a letter to The Guardian newspaper: "The IMA has forfeited its right to membership of the international medical community. [It] has a duty to protest about war crimes... but has refused to do so. Appeals to the World Medical Association and the British Medical Association have also been rebuffed," they said.
The move followed a call by 18 Palestinian health organizations that appealed to fellow professionals abroad in March to recognize that the IMA "has forfeited its right to membership of the international medical community."
The British doctors expressed "grave concern" about the health-related impact of Israeli policy on Palestinian society. "Persistent violations of medical ethics have accompanied Israel's occupation. The Israeli Defense Forces has systematically flouted the fourth Geneva Convention guaranteeing a civilian population unfettered access to medical services," they said.
They claimed that instead of being given immunity, medical staff had been killed, with hundreds of ambulances fired upon by Israeli troops, and said the passage of essential medicines like anti-cancer drugs and kidney dialysis fluids were blocked.
IMA chairman Blachar rejected all the claims, saying that his association does not serve as an arm of the government. "This is yet another in the series of fantasies in which Mr. Derek Summerfield lives," he said. He noted that dozens of Palestinian ambulances have transported explosives into Israel and that only some of them were caught in time. The IMA, Blachar continued, has always acted to ensure health services to civilians in the territories, and a document prepared by the IMA with legal experts reformulated ethical guidelines for treating civilian populations in areas of confrontation and was adopted as mandatory by the WMA.
The IMA suggested that the Palestinian Medical Association sign a joint declaration based on the document, said Blachar, but it refused.
Whenever it receives a report from Israel Physicians for Human Rights or other organizations, he continued, the IMA takes action in every case in which the right to medical treatment has allegedly been violated. Blachar added that the Palestinian Authority refused to accept from Israel drugs and dialysis solutions that it was ready to transfer.
Source
Drug for Scots only?
Nutty British health bureaucrats disagree with one-another -- too bad for patients in England
A cancer drug has been approved for prescription in Scotland that is unlikely to be obtainable for patients who live south of the Border. The Scottish Medicines Consortium (SMC) said that Sprycel was cost-effective for use in the chronic phase of myeloid leukaemia, providing a lifeline for patients who have developed resistance to the “wonder-drug” Glivec. But the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), which performs the same value-for-money assessment for England and Wales, does not have Sprycel on its list of forthcoming appraisals.
That is likely to mean that English and Welsh patients will find it difficult to get the drug on the NHS. Technically, doctors can prescribe any drug that is licensed, as Sprycel is, but in practice, primary care trusts are reluctant to pay for any that lack the imprimatur of NICE. In recent months the Scottish consortium has proved more ready to approve cancer drugs than NICE. Among these are Alimta for mesothelioma, Erbitux for head and neck cancers, Tarceva for lung cancer and Velcade for myeloma in patients who have failed on at least two prior therapies.
Sprycel, from Bristol-Myers Squibb, inhibits the growth of leukaemia cells, enabling adults with some types of leukaemia to control the disease over a sustained period. It is the first option for patients with chronic myeloid leukaemia who have developed resistance to Glivec, the drug that transformed treatment of the disease. After some time, a proportion of patients find that Glivec can no longer control the disease. Sprycel gives these patients an option. It is also useful in treating patients with some types of acute lymphoblastic leukaemia. Introduced last December, it has been reviewed by SMC, and declared cost-effective.
The number of patients who could benefit potentially is small, perhaps no more than a few hundred a year. That may enable primary care trusts to take a more lenient view, especially as patients will already have been on Glivec and Sprycel is costed at about the same price.
Tessa Holyoake, honorary consultant haematologist at Glasgow Royal Infirmary, said: “Today’s announcement is an important step forward in the management of chronic myeloid leukaemia (CML). “Dasatinib [Sprycel] offers a new option for patients in the chronic phase of the disease who have developed resistance or intolerance to prior treatment including imatinib [Glivec], who previously had a very poor prognosis due to the lack of effective alternatives.” Tony Gavin, of Leukaemia CARE, said: “We are keen to see equal and fair access to treatment for patients throughout the UK. While the SMC decision is obviously great news for Scottish CML patients, we are very concerned that patients living in other parts of the UK may be denied access because of funding constraints.”
Welcoming the announcement, Frank Pasqualone, managing director of Bristol-Myers Squibb Pharmaceuticals, said: “We are delighted with the SMC’s decision and hope that CML patients in the chronic phase with resistance or intolerance to imatinib have been given renewed optimism in their fight against this rare but life-threatening disease. “Recommendations such as this make medicines more accessible to the patients who need them. Sprycel builds on our company’s long legacy of providing innovative oncology medicines to patients.”
CML, although relatively rare, is a devastating condition that accounts for about 15 per cent of all leukaemias. About 2,600 people are currently affected by it in the whole of Britain. In Scotland, about 60 new cases are diagnosed each year.
Source
More on British teacher abuse
Teachers accused of abuse of pupils should be guaranteed anonymity while the allegations are investigated, the Lord Chancellor said yesterday. Lord Falconer of Thoroton said that teachers' reputations were being ruined by the "allegations culture" and an unfair disciplinary process that could leave their careers in tatters even if allegations proved to be completely unfounded.
The Lord Chancellor also called for a more "common sense" approach to human rights. Head teachers were perfectly justified, for example, in refusing unreasonable demands from Muslim pupils who claimed that it was their human right to wear Islamic dress in schools. He cited the decision of a Luton school to stop Shabina Begum wearing a jilbab - a long loose gown - to class.
Lord Falconer told the conference of the National Association of Head Teachers that teachers should not face automatic suspension when an allegation was made against them. False accusations should no longer be automatically reported to the local authority or appear on Criminal Records Bureau checks and job references, he said, and schools should have some means of making public statements of a teacher's innocence as soon as they were cleared of a spurious allegation.
Suspensions and investigations that lasted for years "ruin lives often utterly unfairly", he said. If teachers facing accusations were automatically suspended, regardless of the allegations' merits, that knowledge could spread very quickly, ruining reputations, Lord Falconer said. Nor was it fair that "patently false" accusations should be allowed to follow teachers through their entire career.
Teachers have long complained that allegations against them are recorded by the school and reported to the local authority. This means that the accusations appear on criminal record checks and job references, even when the teacher is cleared, blighting their chances for career advancement. "Where it's demonstrably the case that the allegation is false there should be greater discretion as to whether it's recorded," Lord Falconer said.
Mick Brookes, the association's general secretary, said that heads were sometimes able to protect teachers from false allegations by not reporting them to the local authority, yet there was nobody to protect heads when they fell victim. An accusation against a head would automatically be referred to the authority, which would suspend them at once. "If an allegation is made against a head, the cavalry come out very quickly. Social services are there in squads and there is an immediate, very high escalation," Mr Brookes said.
As a head teacher he had taken the risk of not reporting four cases in which his teachers had been accused of abuse because he had found all the cases to be unfounded. Those teachers were left to get on with their careers. He contrasted this with the case of a head who has been suspended and who attempted suicide as a result, even though the union expects him to be cleared of the claims against him.
Lord Falconer rejected the union's demands for sanctions against those who levelled false accusations against teachers and heads, arguing that this might deter those with genuine grievances from reporting them. He also ruled out changes to criminal investigations of teachers.
Public misunderstanding of human rights legislation partly explained the "allegations culture", the Lord Chancellor suggested. An overzealous interpretation of the Human Rights Act had led to claims in the name of "human rights" that were nothing of the sort.
Source
British Labour Party fading: " In the South West, where I was following the local results, the most striking trend was the virtual disappearance of the Labour Party. There are now 109 councils in England which either have only a single Labour councillor or - most of them - none at all. Four of these are in South or West Somerset; in a large number of our local Somerset wards, there was no Labour candidate. In England, Labour lost more than a quarter of its council seats; it is now in third place, 300 behind the Liberal Democrats, who are 3,000 behind the Conservatives. In Wales, Labour had its lowest share of the vote in almost 90 years
The Israel Medical Association rejected a call for a boycott of the Israel Medical Association by 130 British physicians and its expulsion from the World Medical Association, which is an umbrella organization of national medical associations that, ironically, is headed by IMA chairman Dr. Yoram Blachar.
The doctors, led by Prof. Colin Green, a surgeon at University College London, and Dr. Derek Summerfield, who has consistently attacked Israel in the British Medical Journal, claimed in a letter to The Guardian newspaper: "The IMA has forfeited its right to membership of the international medical community. [It] has a duty to protest about war crimes... but has refused to do so. Appeals to the World Medical Association and the British Medical Association have also been rebuffed," they said.
The move followed a call by 18 Palestinian health organizations that appealed to fellow professionals abroad in March to recognize that the IMA "has forfeited its right to membership of the international medical community."
The British doctors expressed "grave concern" about the health-related impact of Israeli policy on Palestinian society. "Persistent violations of medical ethics have accompanied Israel's occupation. The Israeli Defense Forces has systematically flouted the fourth Geneva Convention guaranteeing a civilian population unfettered access to medical services," they said.
They claimed that instead of being given immunity, medical staff had been killed, with hundreds of ambulances fired upon by Israeli troops, and said the passage of essential medicines like anti-cancer drugs and kidney dialysis fluids were blocked.
IMA chairman Blachar rejected all the claims, saying that his association does not serve as an arm of the government. "This is yet another in the series of fantasies in which Mr. Derek Summerfield lives," he said. He noted that dozens of Palestinian ambulances have transported explosives into Israel and that only some of them were caught in time. The IMA, Blachar continued, has always acted to ensure health services to civilians in the territories, and a document prepared by the IMA with legal experts reformulated ethical guidelines for treating civilian populations in areas of confrontation and was adopted as mandatory by the WMA.
The IMA suggested that the Palestinian Medical Association sign a joint declaration based on the document, said Blachar, but it refused.
Whenever it receives a report from Israel Physicians for Human Rights or other organizations, he continued, the IMA takes action in every case in which the right to medical treatment has allegedly been violated. Blachar added that the Palestinian Authority refused to accept from Israel drugs and dialysis solutions that it was ready to transfer.
Source
Drug for Scots only?
Nutty British health bureaucrats disagree with one-another -- too bad for patients in England
A cancer drug has been approved for prescription in Scotland that is unlikely to be obtainable for patients who live south of the Border. The Scottish Medicines Consortium (SMC) said that Sprycel was cost-effective for use in the chronic phase of myeloid leukaemia, providing a lifeline for patients who have developed resistance to the “wonder-drug” Glivec. But the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), which performs the same value-for-money assessment for England and Wales, does not have Sprycel on its list of forthcoming appraisals.
That is likely to mean that English and Welsh patients will find it difficult to get the drug on the NHS. Technically, doctors can prescribe any drug that is licensed, as Sprycel is, but in practice, primary care trusts are reluctant to pay for any that lack the imprimatur of NICE. In recent months the Scottish consortium has proved more ready to approve cancer drugs than NICE. Among these are Alimta for mesothelioma, Erbitux for head and neck cancers, Tarceva for lung cancer and Velcade for myeloma in patients who have failed on at least two prior therapies.
Sprycel, from Bristol-Myers Squibb, inhibits the growth of leukaemia cells, enabling adults with some types of leukaemia to control the disease over a sustained period. It is the first option for patients with chronic myeloid leukaemia who have developed resistance to Glivec, the drug that transformed treatment of the disease. After some time, a proportion of patients find that Glivec can no longer control the disease. Sprycel gives these patients an option. It is also useful in treating patients with some types of acute lymphoblastic leukaemia. Introduced last December, it has been reviewed by SMC, and declared cost-effective.
The number of patients who could benefit potentially is small, perhaps no more than a few hundred a year. That may enable primary care trusts to take a more lenient view, especially as patients will already have been on Glivec and Sprycel is costed at about the same price.
Tessa Holyoake, honorary consultant haematologist at Glasgow Royal Infirmary, said: “Today’s announcement is an important step forward in the management of chronic myeloid leukaemia (CML). “Dasatinib [Sprycel] offers a new option for patients in the chronic phase of the disease who have developed resistance or intolerance to prior treatment including imatinib [Glivec], who previously had a very poor prognosis due to the lack of effective alternatives.” Tony Gavin, of Leukaemia CARE, said: “We are keen to see equal and fair access to treatment for patients throughout the UK. While the SMC decision is obviously great news for Scottish CML patients, we are very concerned that patients living in other parts of the UK may be denied access because of funding constraints.”
Welcoming the announcement, Frank Pasqualone, managing director of Bristol-Myers Squibb Pharmaceuticals, said: “We are delighted with the SMC’s decision and hope that CML patients in the chronic phase with resistance or intolerance to imatinib have been given renewed optimism in their fight against this rare but life-threatening disease. “Recommendations such as this make medicines more accessible to the patients who need them. Sprycel builds on our company’s long legacy of providing innovative oncology medicines to patients.”
CML, although relatively rare, is a devastating condition that accounts for about 15 per cent of all leukaemias. About 2,600 people are currently affected by it in the whole of Britain. In Scotland, about 60 new cases are diagnosed each year.
Source
More on British teacher abuse
Teachers accused of abuse of pupils should be guaranteed anonymity while the allegations are investigated, the Lord Chancellor said yesterday. Lord Falconer of Thoroton said that teachers' reputations were being ruined by the "allegations culture" and an unfair disciplinary process that could leave their careers in tatters even if allegations proved to be completely unfounded.
The Lord Chancellor also called for a more "common sense" approach to human rights. Head teachers were perfectly justified, for example, in refusing unreasonable demands from Muslim pupils who claimed that it was their human right to wear Islamic dress in schools. He cited the decision of a Luton school to stop Shabina Begum wearing a jilbab - a long loose gown - to class.
Lord Falconer told the conference of the National Association of Head Teachers that teachers should not face automatic suspension when an allegation was made against them. False accusations should no longer be automatically reported to the local authority or appear on Criminal Records Bureau checks and job references, he said, and schools should have some means of making public statements of a teacher's innocence as soon as they were cleared of a spurious allegation.
Suspensions and investigations that lasted for years "ruin lives often utterly unfairly", he said. If teachers facing accusations were automatically suspended, regardless of the allegations' merits, that knowledge could spread very quickly, ruining reputations, Lord Falconer said. Nor was it fair that "patently false" accusations should be allowed to follow teachers through their entire career.
Teachers have long complained that allegations against them are recorded by the school and reported to the local authority. This means that the accusations appear on criminal record checks and job references, even when the teacher is cleared, blighting their chances for career advancement. "Where it's demonstrably the case that the allegation is false there should be greater discretion as to whether it's recorded," Lord Falconer said.
Mick Brookes, the association's general secretary, said that heads were sometimes able to protect teachers from false allegations by not reporting them to the local authority, yet there was nobody to protect heads when they fell victim. An accusation against a head would automatically be referred to the authority, which would suspend them at once. "If an allegation is made against a head, the cavalry come out very quickly. Social services are there in squads and there is an immediate, very high escalation," Mr Brookes said.
As a head teacher he had taken the risk of not reporting four cases in which his teachers had been accused of abuse because he had found all the cases to be unfounded. Those teachers were left to get on with their careers. He contrasted this with the case of a head who has been suspended and who attempted suicide as a result, even though the union expects him to be cleared of the claims against him.
Lord Falconer rejected the union's demands for sanctions against those who levelled false accusations against teachers and heads, arguing that this might deter those with genuine grievances from reporting them. He also ruled out changes to criminal investigations of teachers.
Public misunderstanding of human rights legislation partly explained the "allegations culture", the Lord Chancellor suggested. An overzealous interpretation of the Human Rights Act had led to claims in the name of "human rights" that were nothing of the sort.
Source
British Labour Party fading: " In the South West, where I was following the local results, the most striking trend was the virtual disappearance of the Labour Party. There are now 109 councils in England which either have only a single Labour councillor or - most of them - none at all. Four of these are in South or West Somerset; in a large number of our local Somerset wards, there was no Labour candidate. In England, Labour lost more than a quarter of its council seats; it is now in third place, 300 behind the Liberal Democrats, who are 3,000 behind the Conservatives. In Wales, Labour had its lowest share of the vote in almost 90 years
Tuesday, May 08, 2007
British bombers more Leftist than Islamic
`This grandson of a British Army Colonel loved Man Utd and fish'n'chips and dreamed of playing cricket for England. He could have picked any career.. HE CHOSE TERROR.' So says the British tabloid the Sun about Omar Khyam, the middle-class leader of the fertiliser bomb plotters from Crawley in Sussex, England who were found guilty this week of conspiring to bomb targets in the UK. Just as in the wake of 7/7, political commentators are struck by how British the plotters seem: one dreamt of overnight celebrity and becoming a male model; another loved greyhound racing. Many are now wondering out loud how these men, who seem `as British as Tizer, and queues, and Y-fronts and the Changing of the Guard', came to be warped by a killer foreign ideology.
The search for a foreign explanation for the plotters' antics misses the point about `homegrown terrorism'. Since 7/7, when three British-born Pakistanis from Leeds and their friend from Huddersfield killed themselves and 52 others on Tube trains and a bus, British society has woken up to the fact that terrorism is very often `homegrown'. But there's still too much emphasis on looking for a foreign catalyst for the twisting of Our Boys' minds. The finger of blame is pointed at wacky Islamic sects like al-Muhajiroun or Pakistani `Mr Bigs' who are said to have transformed chip-eating, cricket-playing young men from Leeds or Crawley into wannabe killers. In fact, homegrown terrorists often seem to have been shaped by trends and outlooks that are homegrown, too. Consider the Crawley plotters: they harboured prejudices that were very British indeed.
The plotters talked about attacking British civilians - and their choice of civilians is striking. They discussed blowing up nightclubs and the Bluewater shopping centre [a sort of British Wal-Mart] in Kent. They also floated the possibility of poisoning beer and burgers and selling them to unwitting football fans and setting up a bogus takeaway service which would sell poisoned food. One plotter, Jawad Akbar, suggested the gang should target the Ministry of Sound in London, one of Britain's biggest nightclubs, as `no one can turn round and say "oh they were innocent", those slags dancing around'. Another, Waheed Mahmood, preferred the idea of getting a job as a beer vendor at a football ground. `You just put poison in a syringe, injecting it in a can.[or] you could stand on street corners selling poison burgers and then just leave the area.'
The plotters would not have had to listen to a sermon by some bearded crank or travel to Pakistan to arrive at the conclusion that `slags' and football fans and big mall shoppers in Britain are somehow lesser people. It has become de rigueur recently, particularly among the chattering classes, to slate sections of the British working classes for their binge-drinking and generally bad behaviour. Officials fret over the sight of young girls in mini-skirts falling down drunk (that's `slags' to some people) while TV documentaries and newspaper articles expose the apparently seedy and violent life of `football hooligans'. For some, Bluewater has in recent years come to symbolise all that is vacant and violent about suburban Britain. When it opened a Bishop described it disparagingly as a `Temple of Consumerism'. In 2005, Bluewater became a testing ground for zero tolerance policies against anti-social behaviour when its managers, encouraged by MPs, banned the wearing of hooded tops and baseball caps and even swearing as part of a `crackdown on unacceptable behaviour'
For those who consider consumerism to be the great evil of our age - from those headline-hogging anti-Tesco campaigners to the green-leaning Buy Nothing brigade - Bluewater is pretty much the seventh circle of hell. An online publication that keeps track of `Chav Towns' describes Bluewater as being full of `Burberry-clad hordes', `the most chav-infested place on the face of the Earth': `It is not unlike the mall in the original Dawn of the Dead with chavs instead of zombies shuffling aimlessly around, making inhuman noises, looking for trainers and hoop earrings rather than human flesh.' (4) The image of shoppers as zombies is a common one these days. The Crawley plotters - one of whom was so keen to bomb Bluewater that on one occasion he said `let's do it tomorrow' - would not have had to look far for the idea that Bluewater and its inhabitants are deserving of punishment.
If you listen to radical Islamists - from those who deliver half-baked sermons in the backrooms of mosques to those who actually become, or try to become, terrorists - you'll notice that they often seem most outraged by hedonism and consumerism, those twin pillars of our apparently `decadent society' (5). In this, at least, they have much in common with mainstream thinkers and commentators. From radical Islamists to moderate Muslim groups to Tory commentators to New Labour ministers: there seems a curious consensus that sections of British society are greedy and badly behaved and in need of some sort of corrective education, or possibly even punishment.
The Muslim Council of Britain says many Muslims are concerned by a culture `which often seems to justify instant gratification, such as binge-drinking and promiscuity'. The New Labour government shares this concern. It has made tackling binge-drinking and promiscuity the main plank of its youth policy, bringing in tougher policing of town centres on Saturday nights and launching various propaganda poster campaigners warning teens of the dangers of sleeping around. In 2005, a group of six Tory MPs wrote a letter to the Spectator in which they said that Muslim clerics who describe Britain as decadent are `right': `Whether it is lawlessness, family breakdown, the menace of drugs, binge-drinking, teenage pregnancies or merely the coarse brutishness which has infested British culture.the results of years of woolly-minded liberal thinking are plain to see.' It seems there is a fine line these days between a ranting Muslim cleric and a Daily Mail-reading concerned Conservative.
The Crawley plotters may have learned bomb-making skills in Pakistan; but it was here in Britain that they would have been surrounded by messages about how uncaring and out-of-control British people have become. Should these plotters, and other homegrown terrorists who have expressed disdain for Britain's drug culture and its inhabitants' unhealthy lifestyles, be considered the extreme wing of today's obsession with anti-social behaviour? Where the government pursues the `politics of behaviour', seeking to change the way we live and think and even eat, perhaps the Crawley group's foiled plot could be considered the `terrorism of behaviour' - a planned scream of bloody rage against decadent, binge-drinking, slaggish British society, a kind of `Anti-Social Behaviour Outrage' designed to punish a feckless and stuff-obsessed population.
Many now ask how these men could have hated people so much that they planned to blow up nightclubs and shopping centres. It's a very good question. But let's not forget that many others hate those sorts of people, too.
Source
More crap from the BMJ
From the comments below, one would never guess that sugar is a natural and valuable nutrient and that NO harm from the changes mentioned below has been shown. It's just modern-day Puritanism
Manufacturers have doubled the amount of sugar in some foods in the past 30 years. The increases were seen across dozens of food types. Even fruit was not immune, with companies selecting sweeter varieties to cater for the public's changing palate. The research comes amid increasing concern over the ill-effects of sugar. Rocketing sugar levels have contributed to tooth decay and an increase in the incidence of diabetes.
A recent article in the British Medical Journal said that sugar was as dangerous as tobacco and posed a greater threat to world health. "Sugar should be classified as a hard drug, for it is addictive and harmful," it said.
The latest study, of food composition since 1978, found some of the biggest increases were in breakfast cereals and wholemeal bread. Kellogg's Special K has nearly twice the amount of sugar it did in 1978. At 17g per 100g, it contains a similar amount to vanilla ice-cream. A typical loaf of wholemeal bread had a third more sugar in 2002 than it had 1978. Hovis wholemeal bread has even more sugar, with 3.7g per 100g. Sainsbury's wholemeal bread has 3.5g sugar per 100g. This means there is a teaspoon of sugar in every three slices.
In data from a 1978 industry handbook, cans of tomato soup had 2.6g of sugar per 100g. Many soups today contain double that. Waitrose tomato soup had almost three teaspoons of sugar (6.4g) per serving. Between 1978 and 2002, the average banana's sugar level rose from 16.2g per 100g to 20.9g. Sugar in pears increased from 7.6g per 100g to 10g. Sugar in carrots rose from 5.4g per 100g to 7.4g.
The consumer group Which? revealed last month that ready-meals contained up to 23.1g of sugar per 100g. After a campaign to reduce salt intakes, the Food Standard Agency now wants to reduce added sugar. A spokesman, Ian Tokelove, said: "We naturally have a sweet tooth and manufacturers have been quick to use that to increase sales in a crowded marketplace. It's been one of the first things to be added when companies want to make a product a bit different." Experts say that sugar levels could rise further as a byproduct of the campaign against salt.
Jack Winkler, professor of nutrition policy at London Metropolitan University, said that European trade reforms were making sugar cheaper. "It's hard to think of a more irresponsible policy than cutting the price of sugar in the middle of an obesity epidemic," he told The Sunday Times.
Waitrose said that it was reducing the sugar in its tomato soup. Jenny Walton, of Kellogg's, said that extra sugar was added to some cereals because other ingredients, such as salt, had been reduced. Hovis said: "Hovis Wholemeal does contain a small amount of brown sugar. The quantities do not affect the nutritional benefits of the bread." Sainsbury's said that it was reviewing products to decide whether sugar and salt levels could be reduced.
Source
Weird British school
Another untested theory being imposed on kids
Britain's most expensive state school is being built without a playground because those running it believe that pupils should be treated like company employees and do not need unstructured play time. The authorities at the 46.4m pound Thomas Deacon city academy in Peterborough, Cambridgeshire, due to open this autumn, also believe that the absence of a playground will avoid the risk of "uncontrollable" numbers of children running around in breaks at the 2,200-pupil school. "We are not intending to have any play time," said Alan McMurdo, the head teacher. "Pupils won't need to let off steam because they will not be bored."
The absence of play time has angered some parents whose children will attend the school, designed by Lord Foster, architect of the "gherkin" office tower in London. But staff insist that it will have the added benefit of avoiding pupils falling victim to playground bullies. Miles Delap, project manager at the academy, said: "For a school of this size, a playground would have had to be huge. That would have been almost uncontrollable. We have taken away an uncontrollable space to prevent bullying and truancy."
Anne Kerrison, who has three children, said her 14-year-old son Matthew was devastated when he discovered that he would not be able to kick a football around at lunchtime. "All children need fresh air and a chance to exercise during the school day. Break times are the only unstructured time they get," she said.
Another city academy, Unity in Middlesbrough, opened in 2002 without a playground, prompting criticism from government inspectors about poor design. The school later built a playground.
Thomas Deacon, nicknamed "the blancmange" because of its rounded shape, will be one of the biggest schools in Europe. Its features will include a "wetland eco-pool" designed "for rain-water collection" planted with wild flowers. It will replace three schools in Peterborough and is one of the showcases of Tony Blair's academies programme. Academy schools remain in the state sector but are independent of local councils. They are sponsored by private sector firms which have some say in the management.
The academy's timetable will be tightly structured and exercise for pupils will take place in PE classes and organised games on adjacent playing fields. There will be a 30-minute lunch period when pupils will be taken to the dining room by their teacher, ensuring they do not sneak away to run around. McMurdo said refreshments, often taken in break periods at other schools, could be drunk during the school day. "[Pupils] will be able to hydrate during the learning experience," he said.
Other head teachers questioned the wisdom of the playground ban. Ian Andain, head at a comprehensive in Liverpool, said: "There has to be bit of open space to play football. It is important that pupils can have a run around and expend energy." However, Delap, who has run the academy project on behalf of its sponsor, Perkins Engines, and the Deacon school trust, said that playgrounds did not fit into the concept.
Source
The "People are pollution" brigade are back
The story of their incarnation of the '60s and '70s is here
HAVING large families should be frowned upon as an environmental misdemeanour in the same way as frequent long-haul flights, driving a 4x4 car and failing to reuse plastic bags, according to a report to be published tomorrow by a green think tank. The paper by the Optimum Population Trust (OPT) will say that if couples had two children instead of three they could cut their family's carbon dioxide output by the equivalent of 620 return flights a year between London and New York.
John Guillebaud, co-chairman of OPT and emeritus professor of family planning at University College London, said: "The effect on the planet of having one child less is an order of magnitude greater than all these other things we might do, such as switching off lights. An extra child is the equivalent of a lot of flights across the planet. "The greatest thing anyone in Britain could do to help the future of the planet would be to have one less child."
In his latest comments the academic says that when couples are planning a family they should be encouraged to think about the environmental consequences. "The decision to have children should be seen as a very big one and one that should take the environment into account," he added. Guillebaud says that, as a general guideline, couples should produce no more than two offspring.
The world's population is expected to increase by 2.5 billion to 9.2 billion by 2050. Almost all the population growth will take place in developing countries. The population of developed nations is expected to remain unchanged and would have declined but for migration. The British fertility rate is 1.7. The EU average is 1.5. In some countries, such as France, the government is so concerned it has introduced financial incentives for women to have more than two children.
Despite this, Guillebaud says rich countries should be the most concerned about family size as their children have higher per capita carbon dioxide emissions. The suggestion has been criticised by family rights campaigners. Eileen McCloy, a geography graduate from Glasgow with 10 children, said: "How dare they suggest how many children we should have. Who do they think are going to look after our elderly? "According to this I would have five couples' quota of children. I believe my children will be productive members of society."
Source
Doctors admit: NHS treatments must be rationed
Fertility, multiple sclerosis and migraine therapies at risk
British doctors will take the historic step of admitting for the first time that many health treatments will be rationed in the future because the NHS cannot cope with spiralling demand from patients. In a major report that will embarrass the government, the British Medical Association will say fertility treatment, plastic surgery and operations for varicose veins and minor childhood ailments, such as glue ear, are among a long list of procedures in jeopardy.
James Johnson, the BMA chairman, will warn that patients face a bleak future because they will increasingly be denied treatments. He will urge the NHS to be much more explicit about what it can realistically afford to do and ask political leaders to engage in an open, honest debate about rationing. The BMA proposes the drawing up of a new patients' charter specifying those health services to which every citizen across England should be entitled, regardless of the local health authority's financial situation. They also want to see a second list of all the treatments which the sick will get only if their primary care trust has the money, and if doctors decide they are clinically worthwhile.
Senior BMA sources say their report recognises the reality that despite record investment in the NHS, 'postcode lotteries' are rife. Primary care trusts, the local NHS organisations that commission and pay for care from hospitals on behalf of patients, are increasingly rejecting requests to pay for procedures or drugs because they are not perceived to be the best use of funds.
Some PCTs have been bitterly criticised for refusing to pay for expensive new cancer drugs; treatment to prevent older people going blind through age-related eye degeneration and operations to help obese patients lose weight through stomach-stapling. Each trust already has a committee of medical experts that takes decisions on whether to fund medication for complaints which are not covered in their basic contract with the Department of Health. These include treatments such as growth hormone for adults, neuro-stimulation for migraines, breast reduction and enlargement, treatments for incontinence and even some care for multiple sclerosis.
Johnson will use the launch on Tuesday of a BMA discussion paper on the future of the NHS in England to spell out his belief that Britain's ageing population will put ever greater pressures on local NHS organisations to decide how best to use their resources, and that the public's reluctance to put significant extra funding into the NHS means rationing will become increasingly common.
Dr Michael Wilks, one of the BMA's senior office holders, revealed the organisation's radical thinking in a recent letter to its 139,000 members updating them on the progress of the BMA working group, headed by Johnson, which has drawn up the document. He told them the group had concluded that 'while the service should remain universal, the challenges raise questions about how comprehensive the service can continue to be. This will depend on whether politicians and the taxpayer are prepared to contemplate either increasing expenditure or explicit rationing. 'Rationing of health care in one form or another has always existed but has not been discussed. While agreeing that an open and honest debate on rationing is needed, the nature of that debate needs to be clarified. It might, for instance, address whether current inequities in care caused by pressures to balance the financial books are preferable to one alternative, which is to set a limit on the availability of some procedures.'
Health Minister Andy Burnham last night welcomed the report as a useful contribution to the debate about the NHS's future. He defended the NHS as 'the right model for Britain's future'. '[It is] a system which makes the most modern treatments and medicines available and that is envied by other governments around the world as a fair and cost-effective way of providing high-quality health care to a whole population based on need alone. 'I would resist any call to make the NHS a slimmed-down, emergency service, because that's what it would become if we started saying "you can have this" and "you can't have that". It should continue to be comprehensive and universal.'
Source
Scotland a-kilter: "Last week, Britons gave the ruling Labour Party a dressing down in local elections. But the vote went further: An independence-minded nationalist party surged in the Scottish parliament, overtaking Labour. It was as if Texas voters had punished the GOP by voting for a secessionist party. The vote in Scotland was seen as largely a rebuke of Britain's three-term prime minister, Tony Blair, and his support of the Iraq war. Still, the Scottish nationalists did nearly double their seats, putting the Scottish National Party one seat ahead of traditional leader Labour ƒ_" though the vote count is being investigated. These nationalists have the goal of independence clearly before them. Three hundred years in a marriage with the United Kingdom is enough, they say. What's in it for Scots with the spoils of the British Empire long gone? Why not divorce and take their North Sea oil and gas riches with them? Look around the region, these Scots say: Scotland could mimic the success of an Ireland or Norway. If small nations such as Latvia can be members of the European Union, why not the same for Scotland? Last year, tiny Montenegro in the Balkans voted in a referendum to part from Serbia."
`This grandson of a British Army Colonel loved Man Utd and fish'n'chips and dreamed of playing cricket for England. He could have picked any career.. HE CHOSE TERROR.' So says the British tabloid the Sun about Omar Khyam, the middle-class leader of the fertiliser bomb plotters from Crawley in Sussex, England who were found guilty this week of conspiring to bomb targets in the UK. Just as in the wake of 7/7, political commentators are struck by how British the plotters seem: one dreamt of overnight celebrity and becoming a male model; another loved greyhound racing. Many are now wondering out loud how these men, who seem `as British as Tizer, and queues, and Y-fronts and the Changing of the Guard', came to be warped by a killer foreign ideology.
The search for a foreign explanation for the plotters' antics misses the point about `homegrown terrorism'. Since 7/7, when three British-born Pakistanis from Leeds and their friend from Huddersfield killed themselves and 52 others on Tube trains and a bus, British society has woken up to the fact that terrorism is very often `homegrown'. But there's still too much emphasis on looking for a foreign catalyst for the twisting of Our Boys' minds. The finger of blame is pointed at wacky Islamic sects like al-Muhajiroun or Pakistani `Mr Bigs' who are said to have transformed chip-eating, cricket-playing young men from Leeds or Crawley into wannabe killers. In fact, homegrown terrorists often seem to have been shaped by trends and outlooks that are homegrown, too. Consider the Crawley plotters: they harboured prejudices that were very British indeed.
The plotters talked about attacking British civilians - and their choice of civilians is striking. They discussed blowing up nightclubs and the Bluewater shopping centre [a sort of British Wal-Mart] in Kent. They also floated the possibility of poisoning beer and burgers and selling them to unwitting football fans and setting up a bogus takeaway service which would sell poisoned food. One plotter, Jawad Akbar, suggested the gang should target the Ministry of Sound in London, one of Britain's biggest nightclubs, as `no one can turn round and say "oh they were innocent", those slags dancing around'. Another, Waheed Mahmood, preferred the idea of getting a job as a beer vendor at a football ground. `You just put poison in a syringe, injecting it in a can.[or] you could stand on street corners selling poison burgers and then just leave the area.'
The plotters would not have had to listen to a sermon by some bearded crank or travel to Pakistan to arrive at the conclusion that `slags' and football fans and big mall shoppers in Britain are somehow lesser people. It has become de rigueur recently, particularly among the chattering classes, to slate sections of the British working classes for their binge-drinking and generally bad behaviour. Officials fret over the sight of young girls in mini-skirts falling down drunk (that's `slags' to some people) while TV documentaries and newspaper articles expose the apparently seedy and violent life of `football hooligans'. For some, Bluewater has in recent years come to symbolise all that is vacant and violent about suburban Britain. When it opened a Bishop described it disparagingly as a `Temple of Consumerism'. In 2005, Bluewater became a testing ground for zero tolerance policies against anti-social behaviour when its managers, encouraged by MPs, banned the wearing of hooded tops and baseball caps and even swearing as part of a `crackdown on unacceptable behaviour'
For those who consider consumerism to be the great evil of our age - from those headline-hogging anti-Tesco campaigners to the green-leaning Buy Nothing brigade - Bluewater is pretty much the seventh circle of hell. An online publication that keeps track of `Chav Towns' describes Bluewater as being full of `Burberry-clad hordes', `the most chav-infested place on the face of the Earth': `It is not unlike the mall in the original Dawn of the Dead with chavs instead of zombies shuffling aimlessly around, making inhuman noises, looking for trainers and hoop earrings rather than human flesh.' (4) The image of shoppers as zombies is a common one these days. The Crawley plotters - one of whom was so keen to bomb Bluewater that on one occasion he said `let's do it tomorrow' - would not have had to look far for the idea that Bluewater and its inhabitants are deserving of punishment.
If you listen to radical Islamists - from those who deliver half-baked sermons in the backrooms of mosques to those who actually become, or try to become, terrorists - you'll notice that they often seem most outraged by hedonism and consumerism, those twin pillars of our apparently `decadent society' (5). In this, at least, they have much in common with mainstream thinkers and commentators. From radical Islamists to moderate Muslim groups to Tory commentators to New Labour ministers: there seems a curious consensus that sections of British society are greedy and badly behaved and in need of some sort of corrective education, or possibly even punishment.
The Muslim Council of Britain says many Muslims are concerned by a culture `which often seems to justify instant gratification, such as binge-drinking and promiscuity'. The New Labour government shares this concern. It has made tackling binge-drinking and promiscuity the main plank of its youth policy, bringing in tougher policing of town centres on Saturday nights and launching various propaganda poster campaigners warning teens of the dangers of sleeping around. In 2005, a group of six Tory MPs wrote a letter to the Spectator in which they said that Muslim clerics who describe Britain as decadent are `right': `Whether it is lawlessness, family breakdown, the menace of drugs, binge-drinking, teenage pregnancies or merely the coarse brutishness which has infested British culture.the results of years of woolly-minded liberal thinking are plain to see.' It seems there is a fine line these days between a ranting Muslim cleric and a Daily Mail-reading concerned Conservative.
The Crawley plotters may have learned bomb-making skills in Pakistan; but it was here in Britain that they would have been surrounded by messages about how uncaring and out-of-control British people have become. Should these plotters, and other homegrown terrorists who have expressed disdain for Britain's drug culture and its inhabitants' unhealthy lifestyles, be considered the extreme wing of today's obsession with anti-social behaviour? Where the government pursues the `politics of behaviour', seeking to change the way we live and think and even eat, perhaps the Crawley group's foiled plot could be considered the `terrorism of behaviour' - a planned scream of bloody rage against decadent, binge-drinking, slaggish British society, a kind of `Anti-Social Behaviour Outrage' designed to punish a feckless and stuff-obsessed population.
Many now ask how these men could have hated people so much that they planned to blow up nightclubs and shopping centres. It's a very good question. But let's not forget that many others hate those sorts of people, too.
Source
More crap from the BMJ
From the comments below, one would never guess that sugar is a natural and valuable nutrient and that NO harm from the changes mentioned below has been shown. It's just modern-day Puritanism
Manufacturers have doubled the amount of sugar in some foods in the past 30 years. The increases were seen across dozens of food types. Even fruit was not immune, with companies selecting sweeter varieties to cater for the public's changing palate. The research comes amid increasing concern over the ill-effects of sugar. Rocketing sugar levels have contributed to tooth decay and an increase in the incidence of diabetes.
A recent article in the British Medical Journal said that sugar was as dangerous as tobacco and posed a greater threat to world health. "Sugar should be classified as a hard drug, for it is addictive and harmful," it said.
The latest study, of food composition since 1978, found some of the biggest increases were in breakfast cereals and wholemeal bread. Kellogg's Special K has nearly twice the amount of sugar it did in 1978. At 17g per 100g, it contains a similar amount to vanilla ice-cream. A typical loaf of wholemeal bread had a third more sugar in 2002 than it had 1978. Hovis wholemeal bread has even more sugar, with 3.7g per 100g. Sainsbury's wholemeal bread has 3.5g sugar per 100g. This means there is a teaspoon of sugar in every three slices.
In data from a 1978 industry handbook, cans of tomato soup had 2.6g of sugar per 100g. Many soups today contain double that. Waitrose tomato soup had almost three teaspoons of sugar (6.4g) per serving. Between 1978 and 2002, the average banana's sugar level rose from 16.2g per 100g to 20.9g. Sugar in pears increased from 7.6g per 100g to 10g. Sugar in carrots rose from 5.4g per 100g to 7.4g.
The consumer group Which? revealed last month that ready-meals contained up to 23.1g of sugar per 100g. After a campaign to reduce salt intakes, the Food Standard Agency now wants to reduce added sugar. A spokesman, Ian Tokelove, said: "We naturally have a sweet tooth and manufacturers have been quick to use that to increase sales in a crowded marketplace. It's been one of the first things to be added when companies want to make a product a bit different." Experts say that sugar levels could rise further as a byproduct of the campaign against salt.
Jack Winkler, professor of nutrition policy at London Metropolitan University, said that European trade reforms were making sugar cheaper. "It's hard to think of a more irresponsible policy than cutting the price of sugar in the middle of an obesity epidemic," he told The Sunday Times.
Waitrose said that it was reducing the sugar in its tomato soup. Jenny Walton, of Kellogg's, said that extra sugar was added to some cereals because other ingredients, such as salt, had been reduced. Hovis said: "Hovis Wholemeal does contain a small amount of brown sugar. The quantities do not affect the nutritional benefits of the bread." Sainsbury's said that it was reviewing products to decide whether sugar and salt levels could be reduced.
Source
Weird British school
Another untested theory being imposed on kids
Britain's most expensive state school is being built without a playground because those running it believe that pupils should be treated like company employees and do not need unstructured play time. The authorities at the 46.4m pound Thomas Deacon city academy in Peterborough, Cambridgeshire, due to open this autumn, also believe that the absence of a playground will avoid the risk of "uncontrollable" numbers of children running around in breaks at the 2,200-pupil school. "We are not intending to have any play time," said Alan McMurdo, the head teacher. "Pupils won't need to let off steam because they will not be bored."
The absence of play time has angered some parents whose children will attend the school, designed by Lord Foster, architect of the "gherkin" office tower in London. But staff insist that it will have the added benefit of avoiding pupils falling victim to playground bullies. Miles Delap, project manager at the academy, said: "For a school of this size, a playground would have had to be huge. That would have been almost uncontrollable. We have taken away an uncontrollable space to prevent bullying and truancy."
Anne Kerrison, who has three children, said her 14-year-old son Matthew was devastated when he discovered that he would not be able to kick a football around at lunchtime. "All children need fresh air and a chance to exercise during the school day. Break times are the only unstructured time they get," she said.
Another city academy, Unity in Middlesbrough, opened in 2002 without a playground, prompting criticism from government inspectors about poor design. The school later built a playground.
Thomas Deacon, nicknamed "the blancmange" because of its rounded shape, will be one of the biggest schools in Europe. Its features will include a "wetland eco-pool" designed "for rain-water collection" planted with wild flowers. It will replace three schools in Peterborough and is one of the showcases of Tony Blair's academies programme. Academy schools remain in the state sector but are independent of local councils. They are sponsored by private sector firms which have some say in the management.
The academy's timetable will be tightly structured and exercise for pupils will take place in PE classes and organised games on adjacent playing fields. There will be a 30-minute lunch period when pupils will be taken to the dining room by their teacher, ensuring they do not sneak away to run around. McMurdo said refreshments, often taken in break periods at other schools, could be drunk during the school day. "[Pupils] will be able to hydrate during the learning experience," he said.
Other head teachers questioned the wisdom of the playground ban. Ian Andain, head at a comprehensive in Liverpool, said: "There has to be bit of open space to play football. It is important that pupils can have a run around and expend energy." However, Delap, who has run the academy project on behalf of its sponsor, Perkins Engines, and the Deacon school trust, said that playgrounds did not fit into the concept.
Source
The "People are pollution" brigade are back
The story of their incarnation of the '60s and '70s is here
HAVING large families should be frowned upon as an environmental misdemeanour in the same way as frequent long-haul flights, driving a 4x4 car and failing to reuse plastic bags, according to a report to be published tomorrow by a green think tank. The paper by the Optimum Population Trust (OPT) will say that if couples had two children instead of three they could cut their family's carbon dioxide output by the equivalent of 620 return flights a year between London and New York.
John Guillebaud, co-chairman of OPT and emeritus professor of family planning at University College London, said: "The effect on the planet of having one child less is an order of magnitude greater than all these other things we might do, such as switching off lights. An extra child is the equivalent of a lot of flights across the planet. "The greatest thing anyone in Britain could do to help the future of the planet would be to have one less child."
In his latest comments the academic says that when couples are planning a family they should be encouraged to think about the environmental consequences. "The decision to have children should be seen as a very big one and one that should take the environment into account," he added. Guillebaud says that, as a general guideline, couples should produce no more than two offspring.
The world's population is expected to increase by 2.5 billion to 9.2 billion by 2050. Almost all the population growth will take place in developing countries. The population of developed nations is expected to remain unchanged and would have declined but for migration. The British fertility rate is 1.7. The EU average is 1.5. In some countries, such as France, the government is so concerned it has introduced financial incentives for women to have more than two children.
Despite this, Guillebaud says rich countries should be the most concerned about family size as their children have higher per capita carbon dioxide emissions. The suggestion has been criticised by family rights campaigners. Eileen McCloy, a geography graduate from Glasgow with 10 children, said: "How dare they suggest how many children we should have. Who do they think are going to look after our elderly? "According to this I would have five couples' quota of children. I believe my children will be productive members of society."
Source
Doctors admit: NHS treatments must be rationed
Fertility, multiple sclerosis and migraine therapies at risk
British doctors will take the historic step of admitting for the first time that many health treatments will be rationed in the future because the NHS cannot cope with spiralling demand from patients. In a major report that will embarrass the government, the British Medical Association will say fertility treatment, plastic surgery and operations for varicose veins and minor childhood ailments, such as glue ear, are among a long list of procedures in jeopardy.
James Johnson, the BMA chairman, will warn that patients face a bleak future because they will increasingly be denied treatments. He will urge the NHS to be much more explicit about what it can realistically afford to do and ask political leaders to engage in an open, honest debate about rationing. The BMA proposes the drawing up of a new patients' charter specifying those health services to which every citizen across England should be entitled, regardless of the local health authority's financial situation. They also want to see a second list of all the treatments which the sick will get only if their primary care trust has the money, and if doctors decide they are clinically worthwhile.
Senior BMA sources say their report recognises the reality that despite record investment in the NHS, 'postcode lotteries' are rife. Primary care trusts, the local NHS organisations that commission and pay for care from hospitals on behalf of patients, are increasingly rejecting requests to pay for procedures or drugs because they are not perceived to be the best use of funds.
Some PCTs have been bitterly criticised for refusing to pay for expensive new cancer drugs; treatment to prevent older people going blind through age-related eye degeneration and operations to help obese patients lose weight through stomach-stapling. Each trust already has a committee of medical experts that takes decisions on whether to fund medication for complaints which are not covered in their basic contract with the Department of Health. These include treatments such as growth hormone for adults, neuro-stimulation for migraines, breast reduction and enlargement, treatments for incontinence and even some care for multiple sclerosis.
Johnson will use the launch on Tuesday of a BMA discussion paper on the future of the NHS in England to spell out his belief that Britain's ageing population will put ever greater pressures on local NHS organisations to decide how best to use their resources, and that the public's reluctance to put significant extra funding into the NHS means rationing will become increasingly common.
Dr Michael Wilks, one of the BMA's senior office holders, revealed the organisation's radical thinking in a recent letter to its 139,000 members updating them on the progress of the BMA working group, headed by Johnson, which has drawn up the document. He told them the group had concluded that 'while the service should remain universal, the challenges raise questions about how comprehensive the service can continue to be. This will depend on whether politicians and the taxpayer are prepared to contemplate either increasing expenditure or explicit rationing. 'Rationing of health care in one form or another has always existed but has not been discussed. While agreeing that an open and honest debate on rationing is needed, the nature of that debate needs to be clarified. It might, for instance, address whether current inequities in care caused by pressures to balance the financial books are preferable to one alternative, which is to set a limit on the availability of some procedures.'
Health Minister Andy Burnham last night welcomed the report as a useful contribution to the debate about the NHS's future. He defended the NHS as 'the right model for Britain's future'. '[It is] a system which makes the most modern treatments and medicines available and that is envied by other governments around the world as a fair and cost-effective way of providing high-quality health care to a whole population based on need alone. 'I would resist any call to make the NHS a slimmed-down, emergency service, because that's what it would become if we started saying "you can have this" and "you can't have that". It should continue to be comprehensive and universal.'
Source
Scotland a-kilter: "Last week, Britons gave the ruling Labour Party a dressing down in local elections. But the vote went further: An independence-minded nationalist party surged in the Scottish parliament, overtaking Labour. It was as if Texas voters had punished the GOP by voting for a secessionist party. The vote in Scotland was seen as largely a rebuke of Britain's three-term prime minister, Tony Blair, and his support of the Iraq war. Still, the Scottish nationalists did nearly double their seats, putting the Scottish National Party one seat ahead of traditional leader Labour ƒ_" though the vote count is being investigated. These nationalists have the goal of independence clearly before them. Three hundred years in a marriage with the United Kingdom is enough, they say. What's in it for Scots with the spoils of the British Empire long gone? Why not divorce and take their North Sea oil and gas riches with them? Look around the region, these Scots say: Scotland could mimic the success of an Ireland or Norway. If small nations such as Latvia can be members of the European Union, why not the same for Scotland? Last year, tiny Montenegro in the Balkans voted in a referendum to part from Serbia."
Monday, May 07, 2007
Legal predators on British teachers
Lawyers who encourage parents and pupils to make speculative allegations of abuse against teachers in the hope of winning financial compensation risk are destroying the reputation of thousands of teachers, a teaching union has said. The National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT) said that lawyers working on a "no win, no fee" basis were fuelling a rise in malicious allegations against teachers, made in the knowledge that local authorities would often pay complainants without even investigating their allegations.
Mick Brookes, the union's general secretary, said that "a lottery mentality" prompted children and parents to try their luck by levelling spurious allegations to get a payout. "If it is thought that by using a `no win, no fee' solicitor some payout can be got from the local authority, parents at times don't hesitate to go there," he said at the union's annual conference in Bournemouth.
Another head teacher said that she had been astonished to learn that a parent at her school had been paid compensation by the local authority after complaining that teachers had been negligent in caring for her daughter after an accident during a PE lesson. The head, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals from the parent concerned, said that the local authority had handed over the money without informing the school or even bothering to find out whether it was true. The school's own investigation later concluded that the accusation was unfounded.
Dame Mary MacDonald, the head teacher of the Riverside Community Primary School in North Shields, Tyneside, who has been the victim of a false allegation, said that she knew of an insurance company that advised local education authorities to settle claims that might exceed 12,000 pounds if they were to reach court. "Parents know they can put in a claim for anything up to 12,000 and it will never go to court," she said. Dame Mary said that nothing in her three decades as a teacher prepared her for the day the mother of a 3-year-old girl nearly destroyed her career by accusing her of slapping the child. Even though both the police and the local authority - who were called in by Dame Mary that same day to investigate - completely exonerated her, a story soon began circulating on the local housing estate that Dame Mary had kicked the child all around the school hall. This was overheard by a social worker and reported to another branch of the police. Soon calls for Dame Mary's resignation were being made.
"No matter what kind of reputation you have, mud sticks. The problem is that the minute you are accused you are assumed guilty," she said. Dame Mary said that schools should have the right to sue parents who make false allegations against head teachers and their staff and to exclude pupils who do the same.
The NAHT wants teachers who are accused of harming a child to be given anonymity while their cases are investigated - a position that has been rejected by the Government, but that is supported by the Conservatives. The union also wants accused teachers who are cleared to have the right to make a public statement clearing their names. Research conducted by the union among 25 local authorities suggested that the problem of false allegations was not as rare as the Government has indicated. One local authority had suspended 50 teachers in the past five years. But the survey also found that, in some areas, in nearly four cases in ten involving a teacher who had been suspended following an allegation, the accused was later exonerated.
Source
NEW SCIENTIST: IT'S COST-FREE, IF YOU KNOW HOW TO SPIN THE FIGURES
Climate scientists, economists and policy researchers are all in agreement: limiting long-term global warming is achievable at a "negligible" cost. Now, the responsibility for action lies in the hands of politicians, they say.
The cost estimates for stabilising greenhouse gases in the atmosphere were released on Friday in the latest chapter of the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report: it will cost between 0.2% and 3.0% of global GDP by 2030 (see Price placed on limiting global warming).
The IPCC cost estimates can be put in perspective by comparing them with what the average voter would have to contribute, says Ralf Martin of the London School of Economics, UK. In 2005, UK households had an average weekly income of 350 pounds ($700). Reducing that by 0.2% to achieve the smallest greenhouse gas reduction considered by the IPCC would cost each household 36 pounds ($72) a year. At 3% per year, achieving the greatest reduction considered would cost 546 ($1092).
"The cheaper scenario would mean going out to dinner one time less a year, whereas the higher figure gets into the range of having or not having a car," says Martin. "The higher figure might be a hard sell. However, I would suggest that whether either figure is acceptable depends largely on how it will be sold to voters."
Benito Mueller, a climate policy researcher at Oxford University in the UK agrees: "All these things are open to spin. If you put it in so many trillions, everyone gets frightened. But once you put the numbers into perspective they must become politically acceptable. If not, we are being totally irrational."
FULL SPIN here
Blindness cure for some?
A British hospital has made the world's first attempt to treat blindness with a revolutionary gene therapy. Surgeons at the Moorfields Eye Hospital in London operated on Robert Johnson, who was born with a rare sight disorder known as Leber's congenital amaurosis (LCA), which deteriorates with age. Mr Johnson, 23, who had genes inserted into one eye, could see only outlines during the day and very little at night before having the procedure yesterday. He is one of a dozen young patients selected for the first clinical trial to test the new therapy, which has already proved successful at restoring the sight of dogs in tests.
It will be months before the researchers know whether their work has been a success, but it is thought that the therapy could be used to treat a wide range of inherited sight disorders in adults and children. The LCA disorder is caused by a defect in a gene called RPE65, which prevents the light-sensitive layer of cells in the retina at the back of the eye from working properly. Usually these are cells that detect light, but in Mr Johnson's case they are damaged and prevent him from seeing properly.
The operation, conceived by researchers from University College London, involved injecting working copies of the defective gene into the back of the eye. Surgeons used a harmless virus or "vector" to carry the gene into the cells. It is hoped that the replacement genes will enable the retina to detect light - and eventually restore Mr Johnson's sight. The trial, funded by the Department of Health, involves 12 adults and children with LCA, for which there are currently no effective treatments.
During preliminary studies, the vision of dogs with the defect was restored to the extent that they were able to walk through a maze without difficulty; something they could not do before the treatment. The purpose of the Moorfields trial is to find out how safe and effective the intervention is for humans. The researchers hope that their work could lead to ways to treat more common sight problems, such as age-related macular degeneration, which affects about 250,000 Britons. Most previous gene therapies have been developed in an attempt to treat different types of cancer.
Before surgery, Mr Johnson told the BBC that he had mixed feelings. He said: "It's very difficult to say how I'm feeling. I keep ranging from extreme nervousness to a bit of excitement."
Professor Robin Ali, the lead researcher, based at the Institute of Ophthalmology, has spent 15 years working with colleagues developing the technique. He said yesterday: "I can't help feeling somewhat apprehensive. There is so much riding on it and we have all been waiting for a very long time." His colleague, James Bainbridge, who carried out the surgery, said that there was no guarantee that it would be a success. However, he added: "It is very encouraging that we can deliver genes to an extremely fragile site in the eye without complications."
The surgery required incredible precision. Robert Maclaren, the assistant surgeon, said yesterday that he was pleased with how things went. "We couldn't have asked for a better result," he said. Professor Ali added: "There are many forms of retinal degeneration, meaning the use of gene therapy treatments must be individually developed, then tested in a separate clinical trial specifically for that disease. "However, the results from this first human trial are likely to provide an important basis for many more gene therapy protocols in the future."
Source
Lawyers who encourage parents and pupils to make speculative allegations of abuse against teachers in the hope of winning financial compensation risk are destroying the reputation of thousands of teachers, a teaching union has said. The National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT) said that lawyers working on a "no win, no fee" basis were fuelling a rise in malicious allegations against teachers, made in the knowledge that local authorities would often pay complainants without even investigating their allegations.
Mick Brookes, the union's general secretary, said that "a lottery mentality" prompted children and parents to try their luck by levelling spurious allegations to get a payout. "If it is thought that by using a `no win, no fee' solicitor some payout can be got from the local authority, parents at times don't hesitate to go there," he said at the union's annual conference in Bournemouth.
Another head teacher said that she had been astonished to learn that a parent at her school had been paid compensation by the local authority after complaining that teachers had been negligent in caring for her daughter after an accident during a PE lesson. The head, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals from the parent concerned, said that the local authority had handed over the money without informing the school or even bothering to find out whether it was true. The school's own investigation later concluded that the accusation was unfounded.
Dame Mary MacDonald, the head teacher of the Riverside Community Primary School in North Shields, Tyneside, who has been the victim of a false allegation, said that she knew of an insurance company that advised local education authorities to settle claims that might exceed 12,000 pounds if they were to reach court. "Parents know they can put in a claim for anything up to 12,000 and it will never go to court," she said. Dame Mary said that nothing in her three decades as a teacher prepared her for the day the mother of a 3-year-old girl nearly destroyed her career by accusing her of slapping the child. Even though both the police and the local authority - who were called in by Dame Mary that same day to investigate - completely exonerated her, a story soon began circulating on the local housing estate that Dame Mary had kicked the child all around the school hall. This was overheard by a social worker and reported to another branch of the police. Soon calls for Dame Mary's resignation were being made.
"No matter what kind of reputation you have, mud sticks. The problem is that the minute you are accused you are assumed guilty," she said. Dame Mary said that schools should have the right to sue parents who make false allegations against head teachers and their staff and to exclude pupils who do the same.
The NAHT wants teachers who are accused of harming a child to be given anonymity while their cases are investigated - a position that has been rejected by the Government, but that is supported by the Conservatives. The union also wants accused teachers who are cleared to have the right to make a public statement clearing their names. Research conducted by the union among 25 local authorities suggested that the problem of false allegations was not as rare as the Government has indicated. One local authority had suspended 50 teachers in the past five years. But the survey also found that, in some areas, in nearly four cases in ten involving a teacher who had been suspended following an allegation, the accused was later exonerated.
Source
NEW SCIENTIST: IT'S COST-FREE, IF YOU KNOW HOW TO SPIN THE FIGURES
Climate scientists, economists and policy researchers are all in agreement: limiting long-term global warming is achievable at a "negligible" cost. Now, the responsibility for action lies in the hands of politicians, they say.
The cost estimates for stabilising greenhouse gases in the atmosphere were released on Friday in the latest chapter of the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report: it will cost between 0.2% and 3.0% of global GDP by 2030 (see Price placed on limiting global warming).
The IPCC cost estimates can be put in perspective by comparing them with what the average voter would have to contribute, says Ralf Martin of the London School of Economics, UK. In 2005, UK households had an average weekly income of 350 pounds ($700). Reducing that by 0.2% to achieve the smallest greenhouse gas reduction considered by the IPCC would cost each household 36 pounds ($72) a year. At 3% per year, achieving the greatest reduction considered would cost 546 ($1092).
"The cheaper scenario would mean going out to dinner one time less a year, whereas the higher figure gets into the range of having or not having a car," says Martin. "The higher figure might be a hard sell. However, I would suggest that whether either figure is acceptable depends largely on how it will be sold to voters."
Benito Mueller, a climate policy researcher at Oxford University in the UK agrees: "All these things are open to spin. If you put it in so many trillions, everyone gets frightened. But once you put the numbers into perspective they must become politically acceptable. If not, we are being totally irrational."
FULL SPIN here
Blindness cure for some?
A British hospital has made the world's first attempt to treat blindness with a revolutionary gene therapy. Surgeons at the Moorfields Eye Hospital in London operated on Robert Johnson, who was born with a rare sight disorder known as Leber's congenital amaurosis (LCA), which deteriorates with age. Mr Johnson, 23, who had genes inserted into one eye, could see only outlines during the day and very little at night before having the procedure yesterday. He is one of a dozen young patients selected for the first clinical trial to test the new therapy, which has already proved successful at restoring the sight of dogs in tests.
It will be months before the researchers know whether their work has been a success, but it is thought that the therapy could be used to treat a wide range of inherited sight disorders in adults and children. The LCA disorder is caused by a defect in a gene called RPE65, which prevents the light-sensitive layer of cells in the retina at the back of the eye from working properly. Usually these are cells that detect light, but in Mr Johnson's case they are damaged and prevent him from seeing properly.
The operation, conceived by researchers from University College London, involved injecting working copies of the defective gene into the back of the eye. Surgeons used a harmless virus or "vector" to carry the gene into the cells. It is hoped that the replacement genes will enable the retina to detect light - and eventually restore Mr Johnson's sight. The trial, funded by the Department of Health, involves 12 adults and children with LCA, for which there are currently no effective treatments.
During preliminary studies, the vision of dogs with the defect was restored to the extent that they were able to walk through a maze without difficulty; something they could not do before the treatment. The purpose of the Moorfields trial is to find out how safe and effective the intervention is for humans. The researchers hope that their work could lead to ways to treat more common sight problems, such as age-related macular degeneration, which affects about 250,000 Britons. Most previous gene therapies have been developed in an attempt to treat different types of cancer.
Before surgery, Mr Johnson told the BBC that he had mixed feelings. He said: "It's very difficult to say how I'm feeling. I keep ranging from extreme nervousness to a bit of excitement."
Professor Robin Ali, the lead researcher, based at the Institute of Ophthalmology, has spent 15 years working with colleagues developing the technique. He said yesterday: "I can't help feeling somewhat apprehensive. There is so much riding on it and we have all been waiting for a very long time." His colleague, James Bainbridge, who carried out the surgery, said that there was no guarantee that it would be a success. However, he added: "It is very encouraging that we can deliver genes to an extremely fragile site in the eye without complications."
The surgery required incredible precision. Robert Maclaren, the assistant surgeon, said yesterday that he was pleased with how things went. "We couldn't have asked for a better result," he said. Professor Ali added: "There are many forms of retinal degeneration, meaning the use of gene therapy treatments must be individually developed, then tested in a separate clinical trial specifically for that disease. "However, the results from this first human trial are likely to provide an important basis for many more gene therapy protocols in the future."
Source
Sunday, May 06, 2007
WHY I DON'T BELIEVE GOD IS GREEN
The Church of England is once again fulfilling its historic role as an object of ridicule
Please stand now for the hymn: "Switch off, switch off for Jesus". You will not have heard the vicar say that in church this morning - but you soon might. Last week the Church of England published what has been described as a set of "green commandments" in a booklet entitled How Many Light Bulbs Does It Take To Change A Christian? The booklet (4.99 pounds at all good Christian bookshops) is part of the CofE's Shrinking The Footprint campaign.
That's right: the established Church is now fully signed up to the view that man-made CO2 emissions are destroying the planet and, therefore, humanity. Meanwhile David Miliband, the Environment Secretary, travelled to the Vatican last Thursday and called on Pope Benedict to use his "global reach and influence that individual governments do not have" to fight the good fight against global warming. The Pope responded that "we should all respect God's creation".
Official Christian doctrine, however, remains rooted in the idea that the Earth was created for Man's benefit. As God told Adam and Eve (Genesis 1:28): "Be fruitful and multiply and fill the Earth and subdue it; have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air and over every living thing." This is as far removed as can be from what we might describe as the green gospel, which regards birth control as the greatest of all moral obligations and which abhors the idea that Man should be master of the planet, instead of nature itself.
In fact, the new green gospel is far closer in its appeal to the primitive cults that preceded the monotheistic faith of Jews, Christians and Muslims. It regards nature itself as a supreme deity whose wrath must be appeased. This, certainly, is the view of the Catholic Archbishop of Sydney, George Pell, who last year declared: "In the past, pagans sacrificed animals and even humans in vain attempts to placate capricious and cruel gods. Today, they demand a reduction in carbon dioxide emissions."
The Church of England would, I suspect, bitterly resent this accusation. In its booklet it is not calling for human sacrifices. Its suggestions are altogether more comfortable: we should use a toaster rather than a grill on our daily bread. We should holiday locally rather than abroad. We should use a car-sharing system for our trip to Sunday worship.
These might seem as clear as the Ten Commandments, but they are not. Suppose you can't find anyone to share your car on the way to church. Should you stay at home and save the environment instead of your soul? Is it actually morally better to holiday here and hand over your money to a comfortably-off Cornishman selling pub food at London prices, instead of taking your family on safari to Zimbabwe and putting some desperately needed hard currency into that wretched and suffering country?
Since the days of the missionaries, the Church of England has always had a deep concern for Africa, and rightly so. Indeed, Africa is at the heart of the whole issue of global warming. Despite what you might have read, global warming is, on balance, beneficial to the Northern Hemisphere. It will be a big boost for agricultural production as the corn belt moves northwards and old people will have less reason to fear the winters. (It's worth reminding ourselves that carbon dioxide is not itself a form of pollution. Or, if it is, then we are all polluting the Earth simply by breathing, which would be a fantastically bleak philosophy by which to live.)
If there is to be a victim of global warming, it is most likely to be Sub-Saharan Africa. Yet your decision - having read and digested How Many Light Bulbs Does It Take To Change A Christian? - not to travel there will not save a single African life. Even if you believe there is a direct link between CO2 emissions and global temperature, man-made emissions are a tiny part of the total, and carbon dioxide itself is only a small component within the full range of greenhouse gases.
Besides which, the plane will take off without you. Yes, you can argue that if hundreds of thousands take the same decision, those flights might be cancelled - but is boosting the British tourism industry at the expense of those in less wealthy countries actually a virtuous act, however well-meaning the intentions?
Recently, Tesco announced that as part of its plan to be a responsible corporate citizen and save the planet, it had dramatically cut the amount of fresh produce it would fly in from Africa, and buy more locally. Do you think the Africans were grateful? What guidance might we expect on this from the Church of England?
Perhaps we should consult the Bishop of London, the Rt Rev Richard Chartres, who chairs the bishops' panel on the environment. Last July, Dr Chartres declared that flying was 'a symptom of sin'. That made the headlines. Unfortunately for this most pompous of prelates, what also made the headlines a few months earlier was that he had deserted his flock in Holy Week so that he and his wife could enjoy a free ocean-liner cruise for which other holidaymakers would have paid about 7,000 pounds. (To be fair to the Bishop, he was giving them the benefits of his views, as "a guest lecturer", on the rise and fall of Egypt, Rome and Carthage.)
Even though Dr Chartres had left his parishioners during the most important week in the Christian calendar, at least, say his defenders, he wasn't using a plane to get away. I suggest they consult green campaign group Climate Care, which points out that "a cruise liner such as Queen Mary 2 emits 0.43kg of CO2 per passenger mile, compared with 0.257kg for a long-haul flight (even allowing for the further damage of emissions being produced in the upper atmosphere). It is far greener to fly than cruise."
So the Bishop looks like either a hypocrite or a fool - or quite possibly both. This is not an argument against the Church of England using its authority to protect the environment. I can't help feeling, however, that it is behaving a little bit like the Conservative Party - after all, it used to be described as "the Conservative Party at prayer". Just as the Tories have jumped on the issue of global warming as a means to impress younger voters, so the Church of England is in danger of becoming an ideological fashion victim - and thus end up looking ridiculous.
Above all, I worry that it is encouraging people into forms of ritual - using the toaster instead of the grill, switching off the light in the porch - which may do no good to anyone, but which allow the performer to imagine that by acting in this way he or she has become a better person. This, after all, was exactly the objection that Jesus had to the Pharisees.
Source
How the British police protect you from gun crime
They systematically ignore most complaints -- and people die helplessly
A teenage gunman was jailed for 25 years yesterday for shooting a young father who had been subjected to a campaign of violence and threats after confronting local thugs. Bradley Tucker, 18, aimed eight shots at Peter Woodhams, a 22-year-old satellite television repairman, and left him bleeding to death in front of his fiancée, Jane Bowden, and their three-year-old son Sam.
Mr Woodhams died in a final confrontation with Tucker and a gang of youths close to his home in Custom House, East London, last August. Seven months earlier he was stabbed in the neck, and slashed across the face after confronting teenagers who had thrown stones at his car.
Nine officers now face a misconduct inquiry into allegations that they failed to investigate the assault. Miss Bowden called the police every day for five weeks after the stabbing but officers did not take a statement and youngsters regularly taunted the family.
Sentencing Tucker, who was convicted in March, the Recorder of London, Judge Peter Beaumont, QC, ordered that he should not be released until he has served a minimum of 25 years. The judge told Tucker: “There are in my judgment no mitigating matters. You were not provoked in any legal or real sense to do what you did. “You perceived disrespect. You feared the loss of face in a challenge that you perceived from the man you killed, a challenge to the standing that you felt you had in the eyes of those around you.”
Ms Bowden, 24, was in tears as she left court. In a statement to the court on the impact of the murder she said her son was convinced his father was a star in heaven and looked up at the sky, saying: “Look, there is daddy looking down on me.”
Outside the Old Bailey the dead man’s father, Peter Woodhams, said: “We have got to bring out to the public that parents need to be responsible for their children." He said his family were “contented” to know that for 25 years Tucker would not be able to inflict what he had done to them on anyone else.
Tucker, from Canning Town, East London, left school at 13 with no qualifications and was thrown out of the family home when he was convicted of dangerous driving at the age of 16. In January last year Mr Woodhams was driving past a group of shops when a gang of teenagers pelted his car with stones. When he stopped, one of the youths grabbed hold of him while a boy said to answer the description of Tucker shouted: “Hold him, hold him. I’m going to do him.” He pulled out a knife and slashed Mr Woodhams’s face before stabbing him in the neck, narrowly missing his jugular vein.
In August Mr Woodhams was driving home when he saw Tucker hanging around near his home smoking cannabis with other youths. Mr Woodhams chased the youths away and went home as Tucker shouted: “F***ing tosser, if he wants it he can have it. If he comes back round he will get it. I will have him”. Tucker armed himself with a pistol, put his hood up and sprinted towards Mr Woodhams, who had left his house to confront him. The teenager’s shots penetrated Mr Woodhams’s chest, piercing the heart and both lungs and causing massive blood loss.
Tucker ran away from the scene but later gave himself up to police. He was captured on CCTV wearing a distinctive high-visibility jacket he had put on while working at a construction site in Shadwell earlier that day. Tucker admitted pulling the trigger and pleaded guilty to manslaughter but denied murder, claiming he thought the gun fired blanks. He said that a 14-year-old friend supplied him with the gun but was told: “It just makes a bang”. A 17-year-old said to have acted as his lookout was cleared.
Source
More NHS superbug deaths
A virulent strain of the Clostridium difficile superbug has been linked to the recent deaths of 17 elderly patients at a hospital. A further eleven who have the bug are being treated and five more sufferers have had bowel surgery at the James Paget University Hospital in Gorleston, Norfolk. Health experts at the hospital said yesterday that they had not identified the source of the 027 strain of Clostridium difficile, commonly known as C.diff, and could not say whether patients contracted it in the hospital or in the outside community.
The bug was a contributory factor in the deaths of the patients between December 1 and March 28 and not the actual cause of death, experts said. Of the 17 patients who died, the majority were over 65 and some in their 80s. Of the five who had surgery to alleviate the worst symptoms, several are said to have recovered and left the hospital.
Medics said that the fit and healthy had little to fear from the bug but those patients in hospital or outside who had been taking antibiotics were at risk because of imbalances in the gut brought on by taking the drugs. To prevent more cases developing, different antibiotics were being given to patients in the hospital and the outside community. The hospital has also spent 400,000 pounds on new health precautions.
A statement from the James Paget University Hospitals NHS Trust said: “At the beginning of December 2006 we became increasingly concerned about a rise in our normally low background rate of C.diff. “Our concerns were heightened by the increasing severity of illness which led us to believe that a new strain was present in the hospital. “We immediately responded to these changes in the patterns of patients’ illness by putting in place a wide range of additional infection-control measures.”
Precautions include putting patients suspected of having the bug in isolation rooms, revising antibiotic prescribing policy, upgrading cleaning procedures and introducing new deep-cleaning techniques, involving the recruitment of 15 new staff. Visitors to the hospital are being asked to wash their hands with soap and water as an extra precaution as the usual alcohol gel is not a protection against the bug.
Mr Nick Coveney, director of nursing and patient services at the hospital, said: “This strain of C.diff is much more virulent than any strain we have experienced previously.” It was not yet possible to say whether all the patients who died had the 027 strain of the bug as more tests were being carried out. In the two years prior to December 2006 the hospital had 11 patients who had experienced C.diff complications that had contributed to their deaths.
Source
Sharia courts already operating in Britain: "Muslim radicals have established their own draconian court systems in Britain. Controversial Sharia courts have been set up in major towns and cities to impose Islamic law and enable Muslims to shun the legitimate British legal system. Last night religious leaders and politicians expressed outrage that Sharia law is gaining an increasing foothold in our society. Critics insisted that the Govern-ment is allowing a two-tier legal system to flourish in the name of political correctness and that the authority of UK justice is being undermined. The Daily Express can reveal that one of the controversial courts has been set up in the home town of the 7/7 London bombings ringleader. The Dewsbury court is called the Sharee Council - another term for Sharia - and operates as a Muslim judiciary making decisions by which attendees must abide. Non-Muslims are excluded from the secretive court which is registered as a charity to receive British tax benefits. Although the court has no official legal standing, scales of justice adorn a sign outside a former pub building which has been converted by the Islamic Institute of Great Britain."
Maggots cure superbug: "Maggots are being used to help successfully treat MRSA patients in record time, according to a study by the University of Manchester. Researchers used green bottle fly larvae to treat 13 diabetics whose foot ulcers were contaminated with MRSA. All but one were cured within a mean period of three weeks, instead of the usual 28 for conventional treatment. Professor Andrew Boulton, who published the results in Diabetes Care, will now do further tests, funded by Diabetes UK. Maggots eat dead tissue and bacteria, leaving healthy tissue to heal. The group of diabetics, aged between 18 and 80, had sterile larvae applied between two and eight times - depending on the size of foot ulcer - for four days at a time. All but one was cleared of the superbug. "This is very exciting," Professor Boulton said yesterday. "If confirmed in a randomised controlled trial, larval treatment would offer the first noninvasive and risk-free treatment of this problem."
The Church of England is once again fulfilling its historic role as an object of ridicule
Please stand now for the hymn: "Switch off, switch off for Jesus". You will not have heard the vicar say that in church this morning - but you soon might. Last week the Church of England published what has been described as a set of "green commandments" in a booklet entitled How Many Light Bulbs Does It Take To Change A Christian? The booklet (4.99 pounds at all good Christian bookshops) is part of the CofE's Shrinking The Footprint campaign.
That's right: the established Church is now fully signed up to the view that man-made CO2 emissions are destroying the planet and, therefore, humanity. Meanwhile David Miliband, the Environment Secretary, travelled to the Vatican last Thursday and called on Pope Benedict to use his "global reach and influence that individual governments do not have" to fight the good fight against global warming. The Pope responded that "we should all respect God's creation".
Official Christian doctrine, however, remains rooted in the idea that the Earth was created for Man's benefit. As God told Adam and Eve (Genesis 1:28): "Be fruitful and multiply and fill the Earth and subdue it; have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air and over every living thing." This is as far removed as can be from what we might describe as the green gospel, which regards birth control as the greatest of all moral obligations and which abhors the idea that Man should be master of the planet, instead of nature itself.
In fact, the new green gospel is far closer in its appeal to the primitive cults that preceded the monotheistic faith of Jews, Christians and Muslims. It regards nature itself as a supreme deity whose wrath must be appeased. This, certainly, is the view of the Catholic Archbishop of Sydney, George Pell, who last year declared: "In the past, pagans sacrificed animals and even humans in vain attempts to placate capricious and cruel gods. Today, they demand a reduction in carbon dioxide emissions."
The Church of England would, I suspect, bitterly resent this accusation. In its booklet it is not calling for human sacrifices. Its suggestions are altogether more comfortable: we should use a toaster rather than a grill on our daily bread. We should holiday locally rather than abroad. We should use a car-sharing system for our trip to Sunday worship.
These might seem as clear as the Ten Commandments, but they are not. Suppose you can't find anyone to share your car on the way to church. Should you stay at home and save the environment instead of your soul? Is it actually morally better to holiday here and hand over your money to a comfortably-off Cornishman selling pub food at London prices, instead of taking your family on safari to Zimbabwe and putting some desperately needed hard currency into that wretched and suffering country?
Since the days of the missionaries, the Church of England has always had a deep concern for Africa, and rightly so. Indeed, Africa is at the heart of the whole issue of global warming. Despite what you might have read, global warming is, on balance, beneficial to the Northern Hemisphere. It will be a big boost for agricultural production as the corn belt moves northwards and old people will have less reason to fear the winters. (It's worth reminding ourselves that carbon dioxide is not itself a form of pollution. Or, if it is, then we are all polluting the Earth simply by breathing, which would be a fantastically bleak philosophy by which to live.)
If there is to be a victim of global warming, it is most likely to be Sub-Saharan Africa. Yet your decision - having read and digested How Many Light Bulbs Does It Take To Change A Christian? - not to travel there will not save a single African life. Even if you believe there is a direct link between CO2 emissions and global temperature, man-made emissions are a tiny part of the total, and carbon dioxide itself is only a small component within the full range of greenhouse gases.
Besides which, the plane will take off without you. Yes, you can argue that if hundreds of thousands take the same decision, those flights might be cancelled - but is boosting the British tourism industry at the expense of those in less wealthy countries actually a virtuous act, however well-meaning the intentions?
Recently, Tesco announced that as part of its plan to be a responsible corporate citizen and save the planet, it had dramatically cut the amount of fresh produce it would fly in from Africa, and buy more locally. Do you think the Africans were grateful? What guidance might we expect on this from the Church of England?
Perhaps we should consult the Bishop of London, the Rt Rev Richard Chartres, who chairs the bishops' panel on the environment. Last July, Dr Chartres declared that flying was 'a symptom of sin'. That made the headlines. Unfortunately for this most pompous of prelates, what also made the headlines a few months earlier was that he had deserted his flock in Holy Week so that he and his wife could enjoy a free ocean-liner cruise for which other holidaymakers would have paid about 7,000 pounds. (To be fair to the Bishop, he was giving them the benefits of his views, as "a guest lecturer", on the rise and fall of Egypt, Rome and Carthage.)
Even though Dr Chartres had left his parishioners during the most important week in the Christian calendar, at least, say his defenders, he wasn't using a plane to get away. I suggest they consult green campaign group Climate Care, which points out that "a cruise liner such as Queen Mary 2 emits 0.43kg of CO2 per passenger mile, compared with 0.257kg for a long-haul flight (even allowing for the further damage of emissions being produced in the upper atmosphere). It is far greener to fly than cruise."
So the Bishop looks like either a hypocrite or a fool - or quite possibly both. This is not an argument against the Church of England using its authority to protect the environment. I can't help feeling, however, that it is behaving a little bit like the Conservative Party - after all, it used to be described as "the Conservative Party at prayer". Just as the Tories have jumped on the issue of global warming as a means to impress younger voters, so the Church of England is in danger of becoming an ideological fashion victim - and thus end up looking ridiculous.
Above all, I worry that it is encouraging people into forms of ritual - using the toaster instead of the grill, switching off the light in the porch - which may do no good to anyone, but which allow the performer to imagine that by acting in this way he or she has become a better person. This, after all, was exactly the objection that Jesus had to the Pharisees.
Source
How the British police protect you from gun crime
They systematically ignore most complaints -- and people die helplessly
A teenage gunman was jailed for 25 years yesterday for shooting a young father who had been subjected to a campaign of violence and threats after confronting local thugs. Bradley Tucker, 18, aimed eight shots at Peter Woodhams, a 22-year-old satellite television repairman, and left him bleeding to death in front of his fiancée, Jane Bowden, and their three-year-old son Sam.
Mr Woodhams died in a final confrontation with Tucker and a gang of youths close to his home in Custom House, East London, last August. Seven months earlier he was stabbed in the neck, and slashed across the face after confronting teenagers who had thrown stones at his car.
Nine officers now face a misconduct inquiry into allegations that they failed to investigate the assault. Miss Bowden called the police every day for five weeks after the stabbing but officers did not take a statement and youngsters regularly taunted the family.
Sentencing Tucker, who was convicted in March, the Recorder of London, Judge Peter Beaumont, QC, ordered that he should not be released until he has served a minimum of 25 years. The judge told Tucker: “There are in my judgment no mitigating matters. You were not provoked in any legal or real sense to do what you did. “You perceived disrespect. You feared the loss of face in a challenge that you perceived from the man you killed, a challenge to the standing that you felt you had in the eyes of those around you.”
Ms Bowden, 24, was in tears as she left court. In a statement to the court on the impact of the murder she said her son was convinced his father was a star in heaven and looked up at the sky, saying: “Look, there is daddy looking down on me.”
Outside the Old Bailey the dead man’s father, Peter Woodhams, said: “We have got to bring out to the public that parents need to be responsible for their children." He said his family were “contented” to know that for 25 years Tucker would not be able to inflict what he had done to them on anyone else.
Tucker, from Canning Town, East London, left school at 13 with no qualifications and was thrown out of the family home when he was convicted of dangerous driving at the age of 16. In January last year Mr Woodhams was driving past a group of shops when a gang of teenagers pelted his car with stones. When he stopped, one of the youths grabbed hold of him while a boy said to answer the description of Tucker shouted: “Hold him, hold him. I’m going to do him.” He pulled out a knife and slashed Mr Woodhams’s face before stabbing him in the neck, narrowly missing his jugular vein.
In August Mr Woodhams was driving home when he saw Tucker hanging around near his home smoking cannabis with other youths. Mr Woodhams chased the youths away and went home as Tucker shouted: “F***ing tosser, if he wants it he can have it. If he comes back round he will get it. I will have him”. Tucker armed himself with a pistol, put his hood up and sprinted towards Mr Woodhams, who had left his house to confront him. The teenager’s shots penetrated Mr Woodhams’s chest, piercing the heart and both lungs and causing massive blood loss.
Tucker ran away from the scene but later gave himself up to police. He was captured on CCTV wearing a distinctive high-visibility jacket he had put on while working at a construction site in Shadwell earlier that day. Tucker admitted pulling the trigger and pleaded guilty to manslaughter but denied murder, claiming he thought the gun fired blanks. He said that a 14-year-old friend supplied him with the gun but was told: “It just makes a bang”. A 17-year-old said to have acted as his lookout was cleared.
Source
More NHS superbug deaths
A virulent strain of the Clostridium difficile superbug has been linked to the recent deaths of 17 elderly patients at a hospital. A further eleven who have the bug are being treated and five more sufferers have had bowel surgery at the James Paget University Hospital in Gorleston, Norfolk. Health experts at the hospital said yesterday that they had not identified the source of the 027 strain of Clostridium difficile, commonly known as C.diff, and could not say whether patients contracted it in the hospital or in the outside community.
The bug was a contributory factor in the deaths of the patients between December 1 and March 28 and not the actual cause of death, experts said. Of the 17 patients who died, the majority were over 65 and some in their 80s. Of the five who had surgery to alleviate the worst symptoms, several are said to have recovered and left the hospital.
Medics said that the fit and healthy had little to fear from the bug but those patients in hospital or outside who had been taking antibiotics were at risk because of imbalances in the gut brought on by taking the drugs. To prevent more cases developing, different antibiotics were being given to patients in the hospital and the outside community. The hospital has also spent 400,000 pounds on new health precautions.
A statement from the James Paget University Hospitals NHS Trust said: “At the beginning of December 2006 we became increasingly concerned about a rise in our normally low background rate of C.diff. “Our concerns were heightened by the increasing severity of illness which led us to believe that a new strain was present in the hospital. “We immediately responded to these changes in the patterns of patients’ illness by putting in place a wide range of additional infection-control measures.”
Precautions include putting patients suspected of having the bug in isolation rooms, revising antibiotic prescribing policy, upgrading cleaning procedures and introducing new deep-cleaning techniques, involving the recruitment of 15 new staff. Visitors to the hospital are being asked to wash their hands with soap and water as an extra precaution as the usual alcohol gel is not a protection against the bug.
Mr Nick Coveney, director of nursing and patient services at the hospital, said: “This strain of C.diff is much more virulent than any strain we have experienced previously.” It was not yet possible to say whether all the patients who died had the 027 strain of the bug as more tests were being carried out. In the two years prior to December 2006 the hospital had 11 patients who had experienced C.diff complications that had contributed to their deaths.
Source
Sharia courts already operating in Britain: "Muslim radicals have established their own draconian court systems in Britain. Controversial Sharia courts have been set up in major towns and cities to impose Islamic law and enable Muslims to shun the legitimate British legal system. Last night religious leaders and politicians expressed outrage that Sharia law is gaining an increasing foothold in our society. Critics insisted that the Govern-ment is allowing a two-tier legal system to flourish in the name of political correctness and that the authority of UK justice is being undermined. The Daily Express can reveal that one of the controversial courts has been set up in the home town of the 7/7 London bombings ringleader. The Dewsbury court is called the Sharee Council - another term for Sharia - and operates as a Muslim judiciary making decisions by which attendees must abide. Non-Muslims are excluded from the secretive court which is registered as a charity to receive British tax benefits. Although the court has no official legal standing, scales of justice adorn a sign outside a former pub building which has been converted by the Islamic Institute of Great Britain."
Maggots cure superbug: "Maggots are being used to help successfully treat MRSA patients in record time, according to a study by the University of Manchester. Researchers used green bottle fly larvae to treat 13 diabetics whose foot ulcers were contaminated with MRSA. All but one were cured within a mean period of three weeks, instead of the usual 28 for conventional treatment. Professor Andrew Boulton, who published the results in Diabetes Care, will now do further tests, funded by Diabetes UK. Maggots eat dead tissue and bacteria, leaving healthy tissue to heal. The group of diabetics, aged between 18 and 80, had sterile larvae applied between two and eight times - depending on the size of foot ulcer - for four days at a time. All but one was cleared of the superbug. "This is very exciting," Professor Boulton said yesterday. "If confirmed in a randomised controlled trial, larval treatment would offer the first noninvasive and risk-free treatment of this problem."
Saturday, May 05, 2007
British decay discredits mainstream parties
In a very British way, the article below is a reluctant endorsement of the anti-immigrant British National Party -- the only distinctly conservative party left in Britain today. As the BNP is well outside the current British consensus, however, an outright endorsement of it would simply not have been published in "The Times"
Today some in my town will cast a vote for the Epping Community Action Group. Sounds reasonable enough. Run from a flat near the station, ECAG wants to rejuvenate the high street and save small shops by relaxing our parking laws, it opposes fortnightly collection of household rubbish and would not build on green belt land. All for that. It has campaigned for the Co-op to smarten itself up (it was an eyesore), for the local adult learning centre to reopen and to stop town centre premises becoming an endless parade of chain coffeehouses and takeaways. My kind of people. And, yes, ECAG is run by a former chairman of the National Front but, hey, you can't have it all ways.
Ian Anderson, a man whose commitment to neighbourhood issues would seem the perfect antidote to disillusionment with party politics, was chairman of the NF from 1990 to 1995. Something more then a juvenile dalliance, it would appear. He says he has had no connection with extreme right-wing politics in ten years, a statement that is open to debate, not least because he stood for an NF splinter group at the Uxbridge by-election in 1997. Anderson's dubious background is known locally but is increasingly considered not to matter in an area where six British National Party members sit on the local council.
In a part of the world that should be the happiest, clappiest little market town this side of all the other cosy corners of southern England, the mismanagement, incompetence, mediocre thinking and muddled priorities of modern-day life have created a situation in which descendants of the far Right can thrive. I have election literature from all the main parties saying they support the green belt, and a school playing field at the bottom of my garden, half of which has been sold for housing. At the door, every activist said his candidate was opposed to it, yet none, if elected, can do anything about it.
And I am not saying I could ever bring one fibre of my being to consider voting for a former fascist reinvented as a green-belt conservationist; but I'm saying I understand.
Saw my first rat last Sunday. That was a thrill. I remember them from third-year biology, white and clean in a glass case in the science lab. This, however, was mangy and diseased and in something of a free-range situation close to the house. It looked quite startled. We both did. Not as startled as my 70-year-old mother would have been, mind you, had it chosen to take a bow at her surprise birthday party that afternoon. What a bash that would have been. We jump out; then the rat jumps out; then two ambulancemen jump out and cart her off to the nearest cardiac unit. Now that's what you call a surprise.
We don't get rats, you see, even in a relatively rural area, because we have cats. Not our cats, but Ebony next door and Ginger's brother from over the road and the mean cat from a few doors down and assorted others that have kept our property pest-free for more than ten years. We don't even get mice, the gateway rodents forming the advance party for heavy-duty vermin. Then again, until last summer, we had not been cut to fortnightly rubbish collection with the resulting stench and maggot infestations; which could explain why some folk are considering supporting a man who has stood for election on a ticket that advocated a different form of recycling involving humans and known as repatriation.
And I'm not saying I could bring myself to place an X next to that name on a ballot paper, even at gunpoint; but I'm saying I understand.
Then there was the swarm of bees (I know what you're thinking, in which ward does this man vote, Epping Biblical?) that settled in an adjacent tree while the couple were out, at the funeral of Frank, a good old boy from down the road who had died at the age of 92. A decent innings, one might say, except Frank was not delivered to hospital on death's door. He went in to have a pacemaker fitted and died of MRSA. Frank performed volunteer work at the local hospital where he was entrusted to clean the theatre until you could eat your dinner off the operating table. Maybe someone did. In the coroner's report it will probably say he died of irony.
Then, on Sunday, we saw another old friend, Peter, who has not been well lately. He fell from a ladder and badly injured his back and, after contracting MRSA and septicaemia in hospital, is back on his feet after seven operations. The last was to find out why he kept getting MRSA and septicaemia. It is intriguing that so many NHS trusts will not operate on the overweight because, looking at Peter, if you want to shed a stone or five, hospital is the place to be. Not that Peter was large to begin with but you could fit two of him in the suit he was wearing at the weekend. He pulled out a cigarette and said he had started smoking again, and all things considered it was a shame he gave up, because if the hospital had refused to operate on him for having a puff they might not then have had the chance to half-kill him seven times over. He has been advised to sue but says that action would only divert more money from an overstretched NHS. That is the inherent decency of mankind.
So I would love to be one of the people on these pages who thinks our world is wonderful. I would love to be the guy that sneers at the negativity in the Daily Mail, with its scares and its rats and its MRSA. I would love to be wiping a sentimental tear at the memory of ten years of Tony Blair; but the school playing field was sold and I did see the rat and Frank is dead and Peter is lucky to be alive and in my part of the world the far Right is winning. And I am not saying I would not implore you to set fire to your ballot paper and run screaming from the hall rather than cast a vote for National Front extremism, in any form; but I'm saying I understand.
Source
Publicity forces some humanity onto the NHS
There's nothing like those "caring" socialists to look after you. You can go blind for all they care. The fact that you have paid for your government health insurance does not at all mean that you will get the cover you have paid for
An elderly couple who faced having to choose which of them should go blind because they could not both afford sight-saving drugs have finally been saved by the NHS. Olive Roberts, 79, and her husband, Ron, 81, both suffer from wet age-related macular degeneration (AMD), the most common form of blindness in Britain. They were told that the only way to treat their condition quickly enough was to go private. However, the treatment would have cost them more than 14,000 pounds each. They could afford only one course and decided that Mrs Roberts should have it as her sight was deteriorating faster.
Yesterday Wiltshire Primary Care Trust announced that it would fund Mrs Roberts’s treatment. The trust denied accusations of a U-turn, but was criticised by campaigners for allowing the couple’s condition to deteriorate by taking more than two months to decide. The couple are among tens of thousands of people with AMD who urgently need sight-saving treatment but who say that they have been let down by local health authorities refusing to fund new and effective drugs to treat the condition.
The Royal National Institute for the Blind, which supported the couple’s case, said that four out of five NHS trusts were denying patients prompt treatment with sight-saving drugs.
Mr and Mrs Roberts had AMD diagnosed after sudden onsets of blindness last year. Mr Roberts, a retired civil servant who served with the RAF and the Royal Navy during the Second World War, was disappointed that the trust had not contacted them directly with the news. “While we are delighted that Olive can receive the treatment she needs, we have been through hell in the past three months, and this highlights the fact that many other people are not getting the help they need.”
AMD damages the part of the retina responsible for precise vision. Treatments are approved for use on the NHS in only a quarter of cases and can merely slow the disease’s onset. The Roberts were advised that only prompt treatment with the drug Lucentis could prevent blindness. However, it is not approved for widespread use on the NHS. Mr and Mrs Roberts, of Malmesbury, asked Wiltshire Primary Care Trust to fund the treatment, but were told that they would have to wait up to three months for a decision.
Advised to undergo treatment within that time, the couple decided to buy Mrs Roberts a course of the bowel cancer drug Avastin, a cheaper alternative. However, clinical trials have not proved its safety and efficacy in AMD. Paul Jakeman, medical director for Wiltshire trust, said that the NHS would fund Mrs Roberts’s treatment with Lucentis. Mr Roberts said that he could now afford to pay for Avastin for himself. “It seems that only those who shout loudest will get this treatment,” he said.
Source
Britain: Exodus from government schools
A very similar situation to Australia -- except that the proportion of teens going to private schools is much higher in Australia -- around 40%. Note that parents choose schools which offer HARDER (more difficult) subjects
Nearly 40,000 more children are now being educated privately than when Tony Blair came to power, new figures reveal today. Despite increasing government spending by two thirds, in real terms, since 1997, record numbers of parents are turning their backs on state education and paying up to 25,000 pounds a year for private education. Average private day-school fees have more than doubled in this period, according to a report from the Independent Schools Council.
Almost a quarter of sixth-formers now attend a private school while, in London, one in seven pupils is privately educated; in Edinburgh it is one in four. Overall 509,093 children attend Independent Schools Council (ISC) member schools, where the average pupil:staff ratio is the lowest ever, and there is one teacher for every 9.7 pupils. This compares with a ratio of 17:1 pupils to staff in state schools.
Despite average fees of 8,790 pounds and a drop in the number of British children of school age, there has been no let-up in the number of parents opting for private education. Head teachers say that this is not only because society is getting richer and families are having fewer children, but because parents are also better informed and more concerned about education. Pat Langham, president of the Girls' Schools Association, said: "A lot of parents cannot find a school that matches their requirements in the state system. That awareness is what is making more people prepared to pay for independent education. They know what they are getting and they know it's good."
Mounting pressures of commuting and long working hours have also persuaded more parents to turn to independent schools to give their children the care and attention they cannot always provide at home. At the same time, low teacher turnover provides stability and smaller class sizes mean pupils receive more attention and are better disciplined, Nigel Richardson, chairman of the Headmasters' and Headmistresses' Conference of elite schools, said. "A lot of parents are both working very long hours and they increasingly value knowing that they will meet the same teachers three or four years running who will know their children."
Jonathan Shepherd, general secretary of the ISC, said that public schools had also bucked the demographic trend because they offered a broader education and wider range of subjects, including modern languages, classics and the sciences at A level. "The Government did make one quite major mistake in making languages optional after Key Stage 3," he added. "That has led to a huge decline in language teaching in the maintained sector. Parents talk to parents. They are the best recruiting agents for any school."
In 2004, the Government made languages optional for pupils over 14. As a result, only 51 per cent of teenagers now take a GCSE in a foreign language, compared with 80 per cent in 2000. Languages are now compulsory in only 17 per cent of state schools at this level. Critics suggest that schools are being motivated by their place in the league tables and tend to guide pupils away from studying languages towards easier subjects. As a result, independent school pupils account for more than half the A grades at A level in French, German, Spanish and other foreign languages. In chemistry, they make up 46 per cent of A grades at A level, 44 per cent in physics and 54 per cent of A level further maths A grades.
The Independent Schools Council covers 1,276 schools from nursery to sixth-form level, including Britain's most elite, of a total of 2,500 independent schools. Fourteen schools now charge more than 25,000 a year and the average boarding school fee at secondary level is 20,000. Of the half a million pupils, just 67,335 are boarders.
The annual census also reveals that 20,852 overseas pupils attend public school in Britain, the majority from Hong Kong and China. Although the number of boarders has dropped slightly, Britain's military commitments in Afghanistan and Iraq may account for a surge in the number of Armed Forces families sending children to private schools.
Source
Cure for osteoporosis?
Millions of women could be protected against life-threatening hip fractures by a once-a-year treatment with a new drug. More than 14,000 women die every year in Britain after breaking their hips as a result of the bone-thinning disease osteoporosis, which affects up to three million people. The new treatment cuts the risk of such fractures by more than 40 per cent. Almost half a million women, mostly aged over 50, are prescribed drugs for the disease. Well-known sufferers include Rosalind Shand, the mother of the Duchess of Cornwall, Elizabeth Taylor and Doris Lessing. the novelist.
The 15-minute treatment means that women can be protected against developing brittle bones without having to remember to take pills regularly. Poor adherence to treatment is a major problem in the development of osteoporosis. The new drug, zoledronic acid (Aclasta) has been tested on almost 8,000 women in a trial that included patients from Aberdeen, Sheffield, Liverpool and Glasgow. They were given annual infusions of either Aclasta or a placebo, and followed for three years. The results, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, showed a 70 per cent reduction in fractures of the vertebrae of the spine, and a 41 per cent reduction in hip fractures. Breaks elsewhere in the body, such as the wrist, were reduced by 25 per cent.
There are more than 60,000 hip and 120,000 vertebral fractures every year in Britain, according to the National Osteoporosis Society. One in five of those who suffer a hip fracture dies within three months. Drugs for the disease, including the class called bisphosphonates to which Aclasta belongs, are given normally as pills that are taken daily or weekly. They are effective but do not always achieve their full potential because women stop taking them. One study in the US of bisphosphonate users who were followed for two years, found that only 43 per cent took the full course prescribed to them.
Professor Dennis Black, of the University of California, who led the new study, and his co-authors concluded: "A regimen of infusions once a year appears to ensure that patients will have a full treatment effect for at least 12 months. In contrast, many patients who receive prescriptions for oral bisphosphonates stop treatment, and most appear to be taking less than 80 per cent of their prescribed pills by 12 months." The National Osteoporosis Society welcomed this "exciting new treatment", saying that when it is available, it will add to the choice of drug treatments available for people at risk of breaking a bone due to osteoporosis. "An annual intravenous preparation may prove to be a convenient, cost-effective strategy," the society said.
Richard Eastell, Professor of Bone Metabolism at the University of Sheffield and a co-author of the study, said that the findings provided potential good news for thousands of women. "The ability to only have the treatment once a year does mean that it simplifies the whole regimen. There is no doubt that Aclasta reduces vertebral fracture, hip fracture and other breaks," he said.
David Reid, of the University of Aberdeen and a co-author, said that the hip fracture data was particularly relevant. "Preventing hip fractures remains the holy grail of treating osteoporosis, as we know that six months after a hip fracture, nearly a fifth of patients will be dead. Reducing hip fractures by 41 per cent is therefore highly clinically significant."
Professor Juliet Compston of Cambridge University, a specialist in osteoporosis, said that the intravenous administration of Aclasta ensured that treatment was delivered correctly. The side-effects of the infusion appeared to be manageable, although Professor Compston was concerned about a rise in atrial fibrillation (a heart rhythm disturbance) in some patients, but this could be due to chance, she said.
Aclasta is made by Novartis, which funded the study. It is currently licensed for use in Britain in the treatment of Paget's disease of the bone, and a 100ml infusion containing 5mg of the drug (the dose in the trial) costs the NHS 284 pounds.
Source
Marijuana both good and bad?
A chemical found in cannabis could be used to treat schizophrenia with fewer side-effects than existing antipsychotic drugs, research suggests. Though cannabis can provoke psychotic symptoms, these effects appear to be caused chiefly by one of its components; and another compound that damps down its effects has potential as a medicine, scientists said.
The findings, to be announced at a conference that opens in London today, offer a possible explanation for anecdotal reports of increasing cases of psychosis and schizophrenia triggered by the drug. As concentrations of tetra-hydracannabinol (THC), the main psychoactive element that can provoke psychosis, have risen, levels of the beneficial chemical, cannabidiol (CBD) have fallen. This could mean that users are being exposed to higher doses of the damaging chemical, while receiving less CBD, which tends to balance THC's effects.
"There is a possibility that there are good guys and bad guys in cannabis," said Markus Leweke, of the University of Cologne. "THC is the bad guy, but there is a small body of literature that suggests CBD may prevent the induction of psychotic symptoms. Our study supports that view." There are no official statistics on how cannabis use is affecting levels of mental illness, but there is growing evidence that the drug can induce psychosis and schizophrenia.
Scientists also report anecdotal evidence that more young people are developing schizophrenia as a result of using the drug. Robin Murray of the Institute of Psychiatry, said: "There is no robust evidence on cannabis-induced psychosis, but there are a lot of anecdotal reports it is increasing. Psychiatrists specialising in adolescence who used to have no interest in psychosis are now holding clinics with lots of patients with psychosis related to drug use." Comparisons of US drugs seizures in the 1960s and the 1990s show that THC levels have increased significantly as growers breed plants with more powerful psychoactive effects, and it is known that CBD content goes down as THC increases.
In the research, which will be presented at the Institute of Psychiatry's international conference on cannabis and mental health, Dr Leweke investigated the effects of CBD on 42 patients with acute schizophrenia. Some were given CBD, while others received a standard anti-psychotic drug called amisulpride. Both groups had fewer psychotic symptoms, but the CBD group also experienced fewer side-effects. Common side-effects of amisulpride include weight gain, sexual dys-function and liver problems.
In two studies to be presented to the conference, scientists have found new evidence linking THC to psychosis. Philip McGuire and Zerrin Atakan, of the Institute of Psychiatry, used functional magnetic resonance imaging to scan the brains of patients who took THC, and found that it reduced activity in a region involved in inhibiting inappropriate behav-iour. As activity in this region dropped, the subjects became progressively more paranoid. A second study, by Deepak Cyril D'Souza, of Yale University, found that THC administered intravenously worsened the symptoms of patients with schizophrenia.
Source
Englishman's castle no longer exists: "The state now has 266 powers to draw upon when its agents want to enter homes, according to research. A report from the Centre for Policy Studies says that an Englishman's home is less his castle and more "a right of way'' for police, local government officials and other bureaucrats. In the 1950s just 10 new powers of entry were granted by statute. In the 1980s and 1990s an extra 60 were added. For the first time, Harry Snook, a barrister and the author of the study, Crossing the Threshold, has drawn together the full list of entry powers in the state's possession. Force can be used in most cases. The research comes at a time of heightened concern over the lengthening arm of the state, with ID cards around the corner and more sophisticated surveillance equipment being used to watch people. One of the most powerful bodies is HM Revenue and Customs whose officers can exercise a "writ of assistance" with almost unlimited rights of access. Its holders can break into any private house to seize any goods which the customs officers believes are liable to be forfeit without seeking prior judicial approval."
In a very British way, the article below is a reluctant endorsement of the anti-immigrant British National Party -- the only distinctly conservative party left in Britain today. As the BNP is well outside the current British consensus, however, an outright endorsement of it would simply not have been published in "The Times"
Today some in my town will cast a vote for the Epping Community Action Group. Sounds reasonable enough. Run from a flat near the station, ECAG wants to rejuvenate the high street and save small shops by relaxing our parking laws, it opposes fortnightly collection of household rubbish and would not build on green belt land. All for that. It has campaigned for the Co-op to smarten itself up (it was an eyesore), for the local adult learning centre to reopen and to stop town centre premises becoming an endless parade of chain coffeehouses and takeaways. My kind of people. And, yes, ECAG is run by a former chairman of the National Front but, hey, you can't have it all ways.
Ian Anderson, a man whose commitment to neighbourhood issues would seem the perfect antidote to disillusionment with party politics, was chairman of the NF from 1990 to 1995. Something more then a juvenile dalliance, it would appear. He says he has had no connection with extreme right-wing politics in ten years, a statement that is open to debate, not least because he stood for an NF splinter group at the Uxbridge by-election in 1997. Anderson's dubious background is known locally but is increasingly considered not to matter in an area where six British National Party members sit on the local council.
In a part of the world that should be the happiest, clappiest little market town this side of all the other cosy corners of southern England, the mismanagement, incompetence, mediocre thinking and muddled priorities of modern-day life have created a situation in which descendants of the far Right can thrive. I have election literature from all the main parties saying they support the green belt, and a school playing field at the bottom of my garden, half of which has been sold for housing. At the door, every activist said his candidate was opposed to it, yet none, if elected, can do anything about it.
And I am not saying I could ever bring one fibre of my being to consider voting for a former fascist reinvented as a green-belt conservationist; but I'm saying I understand.
Saw my first rat last Sunday. That was a thrill. I remember them from third-year biology, white and clean in a glass case in the science lab. This, however, was mangy and diseased and in something of a free-range situation close to the house. It looked quite startled. We both did. Not as startled as my 70-year-old mother would have been, mind you, had it chosen to take a bow at her surprise birthday party that afternoon. What a bash that would have been. We jump out; then the rat jumps out; then two ambulancemen jump out and cart her off to the nearest cardiac unit. Now that's what you call a surprise.
We don't get rats, you see, even in a relatively rural area, because we have cats. Not our cats, but Ebony next door and Ginger's brother from over the road and the mean cat from a few doors down and assorted others that have kept our property pest-free for more than ten years. We don't even get mice, the gateway rodents forming the advance party for heavy-duty vermin. Then again, until last summer, we had not been cut to fortnightly rubbish collection with the resulting stench and maggot infestations; which could explain why some folk are considering supporting a man who has stood for election on a ticket that advocated a different form of recycling involving humans and known as repatriation.
And I'm not saying I could bring myself to place an X next to that name on a ballot paper, even at gunpoint; but I'm saying I understand.
Then there was the swarm of bees (I know what you're thinking, in which ward does this man vote, Epping Biblical?) that settled in an adjacent tree while the couple were out, at the funeral of Frank, a good old boy from down the road who had died at the age of 92. A decent innings, one might say, except Frank was not delivered to hospital on death's door. He went in to have a pacemaker fitted and died of MRSA. Frank performed volunteer work at the local hospital where he was entrusted to clean the theatre until you could eat your dinner off the operating table. Maybe someone did. In the coroner's report it will probably say he died of irony.
Then, on Sunday, we saw another old friend, Peter, who has not been well lately. He fell from a ladder and badly injured his back and, after contracting MRSA and septicaemia in hospital, is back on his feet after seven operations. The last was to find out why he kept getting MRSA and septicaemia. It is intriguing that so many NHS trusts will not operate on the overweight because, looking at Peter, if you want to shed a stone or five, hospital is the place to be. Not that Peter was large to begin with but you could fit two of him in the suit he was wearing at the weekend. He pulled out a cigarette and said he had started smoking again, and all things considered it was a shame he gave up, because if the hospital had refused to operate on him for having a puff they might not then have had the chance to half-kill him seven times over. He has been advised to sue but says that action would only divert more money from an overstretched NHS. That is the inherent decency of mankind.
So I would love to be one of the people on these pages who thinks our world is wonderful. I would love to be the guy that sneers at the negativity in the Daily Mail, with its scares and its rats and its MRSA. I would love to be wiping a sentimental tear at the memory of ten years of Tony Blair; but the school playing field was sold and I did see the rat and Frank is dead and Peter is lucky to be alive and in my part of the world the far Right is winning. And I am not saying I would not implore you to set fire to your ballot paper and run screaming from the hall rather than cast a vote for National Front extremism, in any form; but I'm saying I understand.
Source
Publicity forces some humanity onto the NHS
There's nothing like those "caring" socialists to look after you. You can go blind for all they care. The fact that you have paid for your government health insurance does not at all mean that you will get the cover you have paid for
An elderly couple who faced having to choose which of them should go blind because they could not both afford sight-saving drugs have finally been saved by the NHS. Olive Roberts, 79, and her husband, Ron, 81, both suffer from wet age-related macular degeneration (AMD), the most common form of blindness in Britain. They were told that the only way to treat their condition quickly enough was to go private. However, the treatment would have cost them more than 14,000 pounds each. They could afford only one course and decided that Mrs Roberts should have it as her sight was deteriorating faster.
Yesterday Wiltshire Primary Care Trust announced that it would fund Mrs Roberts’s treatment. The trust denied accusations of a U-turn, but was criticised by campaigners for allowing the couple’s condition to deteriorate by taking more than two months to decide. The couple are among tens of thousands of people with AMD who urgently need sight-saving treatment but who say that they have been let down by local health authorities refusing to fund new and effective drugs to treat the condition.
The Royal National Institute for the Blind, which supported the couple’s case, said that four out of five NHS trusts were denying patients prompt treatment with sight-saving drugs.
Mr and Mrs Roberts had AMD diagnosed after sudden onsets of blindness last year. Mr Roberts, a retired civil servant who served with the RAF and the Royal Navy during the Second World War, was disappointed that the trust had not contacted them directly with the news. “While we are delighted that Olive can receive the treatment she needs, we have been through hell in the past three months, and this highlights the fact that many other people are not getting the help they need.”
AMD damages the part of the retina responsible for precise vision. Treatments are approved for use on the NHS in only a quarter of cases and can merely slow the disease’s onset. The Roberts were advised that only prompt treatment with the drug Lucentis could prevent blindness. However, it is not approved for widespread use on the NHS. Mr and Mrs Roberts, of Malmesbury, asked Wiltshire Primary Care Trust to fund the treatment, but were told that they would have to wait up to three months for a decision.
Advised to undergo treatment within that time, the couple decided to buy Mrs Roberts a course of the bowel cancer drug Avastin, a cheaper alternative. However, clinical trials have not proved its safety and efficacy in AMD. Paul Jakeman, medical director for Wiltshire trust, said that the NHS would fund Mrs Roberts’s treatment with Lucentis. Mr Roberts said that he could now afford to pay for Avastin for himself. “It seems that only those who shout loudest will get this treatment,” he said.
Source
Britain: Exodus from government schools
A very similar situation to Australia -- except that the proportion of teens going to private schools is much higher in Australia -- around 40%. Note that parents choose schools which offer HARDER (more difficult) subjects
Nearly 40,000 more children are now being educated privately than when Tony Blair came to power, new figures reveal today. Despite increasing government spending by two thirds, in real terms, since 1997, record numbers of parents are turning their backs on state education and paying up to 25,000 pounds a year for private education. Average private day-school fees have more than doubled in this period, according to a report from the Independent Schools Council.
Almost a quarter of sixth-formers now attend a private school while, in London, one in seven pupils is privately educated; in Edinburgh it is one in four. Overall 509,093 children attend Independent Schools Council (ISC) member schools, where the average pupil:staff ratio is the lowest ever, and there is one teacher for every 9.7 pupils. This compares with a ratio of 17:1 pupils to staff in state schools.
Despite average fees of 8,790 pounds and a drop in the number of British children of school age, there has been no let-up in the number of parents opting for private education. Head teachers say that this is not only because society is getting richer and families are having fewer children, but because parents are also better informed and more concerned about education. Pat Langham, president of the Girls' Schools Association, said: "A lot of parents cannot find a school that matches their requirements in the state system. That awareness is what is making more people prepared to pay for independent education. They know what they are getting and they know it's good."
Mounting pressures of commuting and long working hours have also persuaded more parents to turn to independent schools to give their children the care and attention they cannot always provide at home. At the same time, low teacher turnover provides stability and smaller class sizes mean pupils receive more attention and are better disciplined, Nigel Richardson, chairman of the Headmasters' and Headmistresses' Conference of elite schools, said. "A lot of parents are both working very long hours and they increasingly value knowing that they will meet the same teachers three or four years running who will know their children."
Jonathan Shepherd, general secretary of the ISC, said that public schools had also bucked the demographic trend because they offered a broader education and wider range of subjects, including modern languages, classics and the sciences at A level. "The Government did make one quite major mistake in making languages optional after Key Stage 3," he added. "That has led to a huge decline in language teaching in the maintained sector. Parents talk to parents. They are the best recruiting agents for any school."
In 2004, the Government made languages optional for pupils over 14. As a result, only 51 per cent of teenagers now take a GCSE in a foreign language, compared with 80 per cent in 2000. Languages are now compulsory in only 17 per cent of state schools at this level. Critics suggest that schools are being motivated by their place in the league tables and tend to guide pupils away from studying languages towards easier subjects. As a result, independent school pupils account for more than half the A grades at A level in French, German, Spanish and other foreign languages. In chemistry, they make up 46 per cent of A grades at A level, 44 per cent in physics and 54 per cent of A level further maths A grades.
The Independent Schools Council covers 1,276 schools from nursery to sixth-form level, including Britain's most elite, of a total of 2,500 independent schools. Fourteen schools now charge more than 25,000 a year and the average boarding school fee at secondary level is 20,000. Of the half a million pupils, just 67,335 are boarders.
The annual census also reveals that 20,852 overseas pupils attend public school in Britain, the majority from Hong Kong and China. Although the number of boarders has dropped slightly, Britain's military commitments in Afghanistan and Iraq may account for a surge in the number of Armed Forces families sending children to private schools.
Source
Cure for osteoporosis?
Millions of women could be protected against life-threatening hip fractures by a once-a-year treatment with a new drug. More than 14,000 women die every year in Britain after breaking their hips as a result of the bone-thinning disease osteoporosis, which affects up to three million people. The new treatment cuts the risk of such fractures by more than 40 per cent. Almost half a million women, mostly aged over 50, are prescribed drugs for the disease. Well-known sufferers include Rosalind Shand, the mother of the Duchess of Cornwall, Elizabeth Taylor and Doris Lessing. the novelist.
The 15-minute treatment means that women can be protected against developing brittle bones without having to remember to take pills regularly. Poor adherence to treatment is a major problem in the development of osteoporosis. The new drug, zoledronic acid (Aclasta) has been tested on almost 8,000 women in a trial that included patients from Aberdeen, Sheffield, Liverpool and Glasgow. They were given annual infusions of either Aclasta or a placebo, and followed for three years. The results, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, showed a 70 per cent reduction in fractures of the vertebrae of the spine, and a 41 per cent reduction in hip fractures. Breaks elsewhere in the body, such as the wrist, were reduced by 25 per cent.
There are more than 60,000 hip and 120,000 vertebral fractures every year in Britain, according to the National Osteoporosis Society. One in five of those who suffer a hip fracture dies within three months. Drugs for the disease, including the class called bisphosphonates to which Aclasta belongs, are given normally as pills that are taken daily or weekly. They are effective but do not always achieve their full potential because women stop taking them. One study in the US of bisphosphonate users who were followed for two years, found that only 43 per cent took the full course prescribed to them.
Professor Dennis Black, of the University of California, who led the new study, and his co-authors concluded: "A regimen of infusions once a year appears to ensure that patients will have a full treatment effect for at least 12 months. In contrast, many patients who receive prescriptions for oral bisphosphonates stop treatment, and most appear to be taking less than 80 per cent of their prescribed pills by 12 months." The National Osteoporosis Society welcomed this "exciting new treatment", saying that when it is available, it will add to the choice of drug treatments available for people at risk of breaking a bone due to osteoporosis. "An annual intravenous preparation may prove to be a convenient, cost-effective strategy," the society said.
Richard Eastell, Professor of Bone Metabolism at the University of Sheffield and a co-author of the study, said that the findings provided potential good news for thousands of women. "The ability to only have the treatment once a year does mean that it simplifies the whole regimen. There is no doubt that Aclasta reduces vertebral fracture, hip fracture and other breaks," he said.
David Reid, of the University of Aberdeen and a co-author, said that the hip fracture data was particularly relevant. "Preventing hip fractures remains the holy grail of treating osteoporosis, as we know that six months after a hip fracture, nearly a fifth of patients will be dead. Reducing hip fractures by 41 per cent is therefore highly clinically significant."
Professor Juliet Compston of Cambridge University, a specialist in osteoporosis, said that the intravenous administration of Aclasta ensured that treatment was delivered correctly. The side-effects of the infusion appeared to be manageable, although Professor Compston was concerned about a rise in atrial fibrillation (a heart rhythm disturbance) in some patients, but this could be due to chance, she said.
Aclasta is made by Novartis, which funded the study. It is currently licensed for use in Britain in the treatment of Paget's disease of the bone, and a 100ml infusion containing 5mg of the drug (the dose in the trial) costs the NHS 284 pounds.
Source
Marijuana both good and bad?
A chemical found in cannabis could be used to treat schizophrenia with fewer side-effects than existing antipsychotic drugs, research suggests. Though cannabis can provoke psychotic symptoms, these effects appear to be caused chiefly by one of its components; and another compound that damps down its effects has potential as a medicine, scientists said.
The findings, to be announced at a conference that opens in London today, offer a possible explanation for anecdotal reports of increasing cases of psychosis and schizophrenia triggered by the drug. As concentrations of tetra-hydracannabinol (THC), the main psychoactive element that can provoke psychosis, have risen, levels of the beneficial chemical, cannabidiol (CBD) have fallen. This could mean that users are being exposed to higher doses of the damaging chemical, while receiving less CBD, which tends to balance THC's effects.
"There is a possibility that there are good guys and bad guys in cannabis," said Markus Leweke, of the University of Cologne. "THC is the bad guy, but there is a small body of literature that suggests CBD may prevent the induction of psychotic symptoms. Our study supports that view." There are no official statistics on how cannabis use is affecting levels of mental illness, but there is growing evidence that the drug can induce psychosis and schizophrenia.
Scientists also report anecdotal evidence that more young people are developing schizophrenia as a result of using the drug. Robin Murray of the Institute of Psychiatry, said: "There is no robust evidence on cannabis-induced psychosis, but there are a lot of anecdotal reports it is increasing. Psychiatrists specialising in adolescence who used to have no interest in psychosis are now holding clinics with lots of patients with psychosis related to drug use." Comparisons of US drugs seizures in the 1960s and the 1990s show that THC levels have increased significantly as growers breed plants with more powerful psychoactive effects, and it is known that CBD content goes down as THC increases.
In the research, which will be presented at the Institute of Psychiatry's international conference on cannabis and mental health, Dr Leweke investigated the effects of CBD on 42 patients with acute schizophrenia. Some were given CBD, while others received a standard anti-psychotic drug called amisulpride. Both groups had fewer psychotic symptoms, but the CBD group also experienced fewer side-effects. Common side-effects of amisulpride include weight gain, sexual dys-function and liver problems.
In two studies to be presented to the conference, scientists have found new evidence linking THC to psychosis. Philip McGuire and Zerrin Atakan, of the Institute of Psychiatry, used functional magnetic resonance imaging to scan the brains of patients who took THC, and found that it reduced activity in a region involved in inhibiting inappropriate behav-iour. As activity in this region dropped, the subjects became progressively more paranoid. A second study, by Deepak Cyril D'Souza, of Yale University, found that THC administered intravenously worsened the symptoms of patients with schizophrenia.
Source
Englishman's castle no longer exists: "The state now has 266 powers to draw upon when its agents want to enter homes, according to research. A report from the Centre for Policy Studies says that an Englishman's home is less his castle and more "a right of way'' for police, local government officials and other bureaucrats. In the 1950s just 10 new powers of entry were granted by statute. In the 1980s and 1990s an extra 60 were added. For the first time, Harry Snook, a barrister and the author of the study, Crossing the Threshold, has drawn together the full list of entry powers in the state's possession. Force can be used in most cases. The research comes at a time of heightened concern over the lengthening arm of the state, with ID cards around the corner and more sophisticated surveillance equipment being used to watch people. One of the most powerful bodies is HM Revenue and Customs whose officers can exercise a "writ of assistance" with almost unlimited rights of access. Its holders can break into any private house to seize any goods which the customs officers believes are liable to be forfeit without seeking prior judicial approval."
Friday, May 04, 2007
The crisis in NHS maternity wards
Killing babies through being too busy is accepted as normal and many mothers are treated worse than farm animals
When my daughter was born, I did not think she was alive. She came out of her mother with a chest striped blue and purple, and failed to move. She lay motionless on the mat in the delivery room and the blue disappeared, rapidly replaced by more purple. Then the purple darkened and contracted as fast as the pupil of an eye. Now, at the ripe old age of ten seconds, my baby was white as a sheet with dark blotches. And still not moving.
My wife Rachel had tapped me on the shoulder barely two hours before. We were in bed. The clock radio blinked 1.30. In the dark, she had told me: "I think I'm in labour." It was all more rapid than I could ever have imagined. Zooming down dark London backstreets, I thought the baby was about to be born in the footwell of our car. And by the time we reached the nearest maternity unit, the poor child was trying to get a glimpse of the corridor. We were shown to a room. Midwife and baby emerged simultaneously.
Now, looking at my daughter lying there on the blue plastic mat, I remember two things clearly: assuming something terrible might have gone wrong, but deciding not to panic unless the staff did. I looked to the midwife for reassurance. "Show me your notes," she said - not shouting, but urgent all the same. "Hold up your wife's notes." I was grabbing at the file. "Last-but-one page." Everything had happened so fast, she had not been able even to glance them over. "Are you Rhesus Negative?" she asked Rachel. "I don't know, don't think so," my wife replied. I was still staring at the little scrap on the floor. Baby motionless; midwife worried.
Then a miracle happened. Our NHS angel, the midwife, took a towel and rubbed the lifeless baby to get the circulation flowing, and suddenly the white and the purple disappeared and the skin shone with glorious red, like a farmer's cheeks on harvest day. Then she started bawling her eyes out - the noise might have tried our patience in the weeks since, but that morning it was as welcome as wedding bells.
The midwife, a sparky fortysomething whom I shall not embarrass by naming, had been about to go off shift when we arrived. She had stayed on from a sense of duty, thank goodness, and congratulated us heartily. "Blimey, I thought she was a goner," I confessed over the sound of my newborn screaming. "I even thought you thought she was." "My rule," said the midwife, "is never panic in the first minute."
I wrote my anxiety down to new-father nerves and inexperience. But had I known what I now know - thanks to working on Panorama's undercover investigation of other maternity units - I might have approached the day of my daughter's birth with rather more trepidation. We sent a reporter, Hayley Cutts, to work as an unpaid volunteer in maternity wards at hospitals in Barnet and Manchester. Some of the footage she came back with was truly frightening.
In one excerpt, filmed in January at Barnet Hospital, Hayley watched as a midwife was called away to a crisis elsewhere. That left an astonishing 24 women in the care of just two qualified midwives and one student. Picture the scene. As Hayley's camera whirrs, concealed in her blouse, the phone goes. It's a call from the delivery suite, where mothers actually give birth. They're saying they're full - they have to send a patient over to the maternity ward.
Hayley passes the news on to her more experienced colleagues. "There's a woman coming over in two minutes." "For what?" asks one. Hayley explains, "She's from the delivery suite." "She's here and there's no beds," murmurs a midwife ruefully. When, seconds later, the labouring woman appears, your first impression is of a terrible misjudgment: how can a woman so deep into labour be sent packing from the unit where she is supposed to be having her baby? The nearest midwife tells her to sit in the corridor.
The scene is awkward enough watching it on tape - it must have been a dozen times worse for the mother-to-be herself, labouring on a hard plastic chair in full view of janitors and any passing visitor. When Hayley points out to the midwife in charge that the woman is crying, she replies: "Tell her to get a life." We showed the tape to Mavis Kirkham, professor of midwifery at Sheffield Hallam University, who was shocked. "I think that's really tragic, that poor woman in strong labour in a public corridor," she said. "These are Third World conditions. No farmer would let an animal they valued labour with that degree of stress and anxiety in a tense public place."
After 50 minutes in the corridor, the woman was eventually taken to a bay in the ward, but when she got there, there was no bed for her. So she had to wait again on a plastic chair. The hospital authorities later informed us the staff's 'mistake' was not to have shifted the woman to another hospital. But the nearest alternative maternity unit was six miles away, and the poor woman was about to give birth.
I wish I could say that the overload on the ward was a one-off. But often the wards at Barnet are so choc-a-bloc they have to close temporarily. It happened eight times in the four weeks Hayley was there. When she asked a midwife why the doors were shut to new arrivals, she got the reply: 'We're dangerous at that stage. It gets to the point we've got so many women and not enough staff to look after them that we could miss things.' If that is not a warning sign to expectant mothers, what is?
At one point the Barnet staff are caught in conversation about how things won't change unless something terrible happens. 'I tell you what it's going to take,' one midwife says, 'a baby dying.' Another disagrees, saying it 'needs a mother' to die. The exchange happens casually, across an admissions desk. It is all the more shocking for that. 'We've killed off babies before now, deaths you can push under the carpet,' says a midwife on our tape. 'To kill a baby is cheap, but to damage a baby is more expensive. To kill the mother - that will actually give us the results we need, but God help the poor midwife involved in that.'
The chief executive of Barnet And Chase Farm Hospital Trust, Averil Dongworth, was suitably appalled by this conversation on her premises. But when she blamed the midwives I wondered if she had missed the point: staff shortages, missing equipment and rota chaos are surely not their fault.
So what has the Government promised? In 2004, there was a pledge that every woman in full-blown labour should have access to 'a designated midwife 100 per cent of the time'. And only last month, Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt promised every mother would have the right to opt for a home birth, overseen by a midwife. Yet the Royal College Of Midwives says the system is 3,000 midwives short and one-third of maternity units had their budgets cut last year.
All of this while Britain's birth-rate goes up. Small wonder that a report from Oxford University into maternity care in Britain found that two-thirds of mothers said they felt they had been abandoned too soon after giving birth.
If only the scenes we'd witnessed at Barnet Hospital were an exception. But they were not. North, south, east and west we found all manner of horror stories about the pressure on maternity services. I went to see Ben Harman and Katie McKay at their swish terrace home in Battersea - young, professionals with loving families and lots of friends. Eight months ago, when her labour began, Katie was told by Chelsea & Westminster Hospital that their maternity unit was too busy to take them at present and she should 'have another bath' while her labour progressed. So she did. This was her first child; why argue with the experts? After the bath she rang back - the unit was still full and there was no space at any other hospital. 'I freaked out,' Katie told me. Still they told her to hang on. After two hours Ben drove her to Chelsea & Westminster, but still the staff were too busy for her. 'It was only after my waters had broken, one hour and ten minutes after I'd actually been on the ward that I was given my first internal examination,' she told me.
The baby was lying the wrong way round, in the breech position, and in distress. Instead of an emergency caesarean they tried to deliver the baby normally. She was starved of oxygen and baby Ella died five days later. 'From our point of view,' Katie said, 'It was just too many red lights. If you go through one red light you might get away with it. If you go through five you're going to have an accident. 'The first red light we went through was when the position of the baby wasn't picked up, the second red light was the hospital being closed to admissions, the third red light, not being examined for an hour-and-a-half. Unfortunately, for us it resulted in our baby's death.'
This was the wisest single thing anybody told us in the course of filming. How terrible that Katie had to find it out through her own personal tragedy. Sitting in their front room, I leafed through their photograph album. Picture after picture showed Ella being hugged, so cherished by her mum and dad in those five short days of life. Her parents found the explanation that midwives weren't available to provide better care because of a "change of shift" was little short of an insult.
Our reporter, Hayley, also did work experience at St Mary's hospital in Manchester, inside the city's biggest maternity unit. Secretly recording there for weeks, she kept hearing stories from stressed-out midwives and mums who said the care they received was unsatisfactory. Hayley was at the bedside of Lili, who was 16 days overdue but had not been induced because of a lack of beds in the delivery unit. Finally, staff did induce her. But then they turfed her out of the delivery ward because they said they needed the room for someone else. With no access to any pain relief beyond gas and air, she begged to be examined. When it turned out she was in the late stages of labour, Lili was rushed to delivery to have her baby. Then, in one of the film's most chaotic scenes, Hayley is sent to fetch a CTG, the monitor which picks up a baby's heartbeat when pressed to the mother's stomach.
From ward to ward she goes. Here is a sample of the exchanges: Hayley: "Hiya, I was wondering if we could borrow a CTG monitor." Staff member: "Oh - er - that'll be a matter of finding one." Staff member two: "I doubt it. The place is full." Ward clerk: "I can't actually find one anywhere, love." Hayley: "Really? Do you know when one will be available or not?" Staff member: "I couldn't say, no. Unless they might have one over there. Have you tried over on MDU, maybe." Hayley: "OK, I'll go and ask - thanks." And the reply from the next unit when she asks if they've got a precious CTG? "We haven't. They're all in use." Such scenes would be comic if they were happening anywhere but in a hospital.
And when Hayley - who is totally upfront about her lack of training - is asked to monitor a baby's heartbeat by a midwife too busy to do it herself, you realise just how disturbing the problems on Britain's maternity wards have become. It brought me back to those chaotic moments in December when our Anna was born - which was, after all, a normal if somewhat rapid delivery. In those precious moments you realise a life is in the balance; and the whole future of your family. You don't want to leave the hospital counting yourself lucky that a midwife turned up for the birth.
Source
THE SHAME OF BRITISH SCIENCE
WHAT NEXT, A COMMITTEE ON UN-SCIENTIFIC ACTIVITIES?
The experts demanding that a film on climate change be 'corrected' before it is released on DVD are behaving more like Stalinists than scientists. A group of scientists and science communicators has written an open letter to WAG, a TV production company, insisting that it make changes to its film The Great Global Warming Swindle before releasing it on DVD.
The 38 signatories include Bob Ward, the former spokesman for the prestigious Royal Society in London, as well as former heads of Britain's academy of sciences and the weather office. They argue that Martin Durkin's film, which claims that global warming is not man-made and which caused a storm of controversy when it was shown on Channel 4 in Britain in March, contains a 'long catalogue of fundamental and profound mistakes', and these 'major misrepresentations' should be removed before the film hits the DVD shelves later this year. 'Free speech does not extend to misleading the public by making factually inaccurate statements', the letter-writers claim.
What next, a "House Committee on Un-Scientific Activities", where this self-selected group of scientists and communicators could officially sit in judgement on anyone who says the 'wrong thing' about global warming? Last year, when he was working at the Royal Society, Bob Ward wrote a letter to ExxonMobil demanding in hectoring fashion that the oil giant cut off its funding to groups that have 'misrepresented the science of climate change by outright denial of the evidence'; now he says films that go against the 'truth' of global warming should be chopped and changed before release.
Perhaps any new House Committee on Un-Scientific Activities could begin by forcing those who appear in its hallowed halls to swear 'I am not, and never have been, funded by oil companies', before instructing them on what is the correct thing to say in public about climate change. All others shall be silenced.
These scientists ought to be ashamed of themselves. They are behaving in a fashion that does not befit intellectual scientific debate. When they claim that they are not being censorious, but rather are standing up for facts and 'for the public interest', they protest way too much. From Torquemada to McCarthy, virtually every censorious group in society has claimed merely to be protecting what is true or right or correct, and thus saving the public from allegedly dangerous ideas.
Torquemada wanted to save humanity from religious heresy; McCarthy said he was protecting Americans from reds under the bed. Now some want to shield our eyes from allegedly oil-funded 'climate change deniers' lest they warp our minds and make us behave in a carbon-irresponsible fashion.
Even worse, the scientists' demand that information be 'corrected' from on high so that it does not sow confusion and controversy amongst the public speaks to a profoundly anti-intellectual outlook. They seem not to appreciate how important controversy is. Controversy is not, as they seem to believe, a bad idea; nor is it, as others argue, something that's simply fun or sexy, a 'good idea' in a democratic society. Rather, controversy is crucial to the development of human thought - especially in the realm of science.
You don't have to look very far to see where the 38 scientists might have got the outrageous notion that they have the authority to write to a TV production company and insist that it change the content of one of its films. As I have argued before on spiked, there is a censorious streak in debates about climate change today, where those who question the scientific consensus on global warming are frequently written off as 'deniers', a term which seems designed to link them with Holocaust deniers (see Global warming: the chilling effect on free speech, by Brendan O'Neill).
Many argue that those who kick against the climate change consensus should be denied funding, sacked from university posts and kept off the airwaves. Those who call for such censorship always claim to be protecting scientific facts from pseudo-scientific charlatans. That might be more believable if they took a consistent approach towards opposing the publication of strange scientific claims.
The 38 scientists say they want to protect the public from a factually inaccurate DVD. During a recent quick trip to my local HMV I saw a DVD of the TV series Jamie's School Dinners in which our eponymous hero - Jamie Oliver - dressed up various scare stories in medical scientific garb. He said today's children are so unhealthy that they will die before their parents, and claimed that some kids are so fat they are puking up their own faeces. There were also DVDs on alternative health and acupuncture and how 'yoga can improve your self-esteem'. In all good bookshops there are shelves that groan almost audibly under the weight of books that make junk scientific claims.
Our brave protectors of the public interest don't seem to mind about all that. Indeed, it was striking that around the same time that the 38 scientists wrote to WAG to complain about The Great Global Warming Swindle, the British government announced plans to send a copy of Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth to every secondary school in the country.
Some very serious scientists have raised questions about the scientific accuracy of Gore's movie. Don J Easterbrook, emeritus professor of geology at Western Washington University, said: ' I don't want to pick on Al Gore... But there are a lot of inaccuracies in the statements we are seeing, and we have to temper that with real data.'
Yet Gore's allegedly inaccurate claims will be used to 'stimulate debate about climate change' amongst schoolchildren (in the words of UK education secretary Alan Johnson) while Durkin's allegedly inaccurate claims are labelled unfit for public consumption. This is really about the moral message of the films rather than their scientific underpinnings. Because Gore's movie has the 'correct' moral outlook (global warming is manmade, and we must all take individual responsibility for changing our behaviour and lowering our horizons), it is sanctioned by the authorities and even used to reshape children's understanding of humanity and our relationship with the planet. Because Durkin's movie has the 'incorrect' moral outlook (global warming is not manmade, and demands that we limit carbon emissions are proving disastrous for the developing world), it is vilified.
Some are in effect using claims of scientific authority to copperfasten what is in fact a deeply moralistic campaign dictating what people should expect from life today. The consequences of using science in this way are as ominous as they are far-reaching. It is bad for political debate because when certain positions are said to be scientifically verified then they are also considered to be beyond interrogation. It is bad for science, too, because the use of scientific data to confer authority on explicitly political positions will surely pollute the morally neutral aim of science to discover new things, while also potentially firing up public cynicism with science.
Perhaps the most shocking thing about the 38 scientists' call for a film on global warming to be 'corrected' is just how anti-intellectual such a demand is. Ideas are developed, indeed facts are established, only through the most rigorous debate possible. As John Stuart Mill wrote nearly 150 years ago: 'Complete liberty of contradicting and disproving our opinion is the very condition which justifies us in assuming its truth for purposes of action; and on no other terms can a being with human faculties have any rational assurance of being right.'
In short, the only way to test out ideas - to prove them or improve them, to see if they're right or true or useful or nonsense - is by submitting them to free and open debate. Restricting the communication or publication of certain ideas damages intellectual debate across the board because it limits our ability to weigh things up and work things out. This is especially true of science. Science thrives on hypotheses being verified or falsified. Its lifeblood is the sharing of ideas and findings and claims, both amongst scientists and also between scientists and the public - findings which scientists discuss and explore, seeking to prove or disprove them through research and interrogation.
In this sense, controversy, including the kind of controversy stirred up by The Great Global Warming Swindle, should not be seen as a negative thing; controversy should be viewed as a crucial component of scientific and intellectual development; it can excite people, intensify debate, and allow us to reach a firmer conclusion about what we believe to be true and what is right.
Perhaps more than any other area of life, science develops through a self-corrective process. In demanding that something be corrected from on high, and before being fully submitted for public consideration, the 38 scientists complaining to WAG have violated the very spirit of their vocation. They have behaved less like scientists, and more like Stalinists.
Source
9/11 Conspiracy Film on Virgin Airlines: "This qualifies as one of the outrages of the year: Virgin Atlantic Airlines is showing the evil, dishonest 9/11 conspiracy film Loose Change as inflight entertainment. Are these people insane? Maybe next they can have a retrospective of the works of Leni Riefenstahl."
Killing babies through being too busy is accepted as normal and many mothers are treated worse than farm animals
When my daughter was born, I did not think she was alive. She came out of her mother with a chest striped blue and purple, and failed to move. She lay motionless on the mat in the delivery room and the blue disappeared, rapidly replaced by more purple. Then the purple darkened and contracted as fast as the pupil of an eye. Now, at the ripe old age of ten seconds, my baby was white as a sheet with dark blotches. And still not moving.
My wife Rachel had tapped me on the shoulder barely two hours before. We were in bed. The clock radio blinked 1.30. In the dark, she had told me: "I think I'm in labour." It was all more rapid than I could ever have imagined. Zooming down dark London backstreets, I thought the baby was about to be born in the footwell of our car. And by the time we reached the nearest maternity unit, the poor child was trying to get a glimpse of the corridor. We were shown to a room. Midwife and baby emerged simultaneously.
Now, looking at my daughter lying there on the blue plastic mat, I remember two things clearly: assuming something terrible might have gone wrong, but deciding not to panic unless the staff did. I looked to the midwife for reassurance. "Show me your notes," she said - not shouting, but urgent all the same. "Hold up your wife's notes." I was grabbing at the file. "Last-but-one page." Everything had happened so fast, she had not been able even to glance them over. "Are you Rhesus Negative?" she asked Rachel. "I don't know, don't think so," my wife replied. I was still staring at the little scrap on the floor. Baby motionless; midwife worried.
Then a miracle happened. Our NHS angel, the midwife, took a towel and rubbed the lifeless baby to get the circulation flowing, and suddenly the white and the purple disappeared and the skin shone with glorious red, like a farmer's cheeks on harvest day. Then she started bawling her eyes out - the noise might have tried our patience in the weeks since, but that morning it was as welcome as wedding bells.
The midwife, a sparky fortysomething whom I shall not embarrass by naming, had been about to go off shift when we arrived. She had stayed on from a sense of duty, thank goodness, and congratulated us heartily. "Blimey, I thought she was a goner," I confessed over the sound of my newborn screaming. "I even thought you thought she was." "My rule," said the midwife, "is never panic in the first minute."
I wrote my anxiety down to new-father nerves and inexperience. But had I known what I now know - thanks to working on Panorama's undercover investigation of other maternity units - I might have approached the day of my daughter's birth with rather more trepidation. We sent a reporter, Hayley Cutts, to work as an unpaid volunteer in maternity wards at hospitals in Barnet and Manchester. Some of the footage she came back with was truly frightening.
In one excerpt, filmed in January at Barnet Hospital, Hayley watched as a midwife was called away to a crisis elsewhere. That left an astonishing 24 women in the care of just two qualified midwives and one student. Picture the scene. As Hayley's camera whirrs, concealed in her blouse, the phone goes. It's a call from the delivery suite, where mothers actually give birth. They're saying they're full - they have to send a patient over to the maternity ward.
Hayley passes the news on to her more experienced colleagues. "There's a woman coming over in two minutes." "For what?" asks one. Hayley explains, "She's from the delivery suite." "She's here and there's no beds," murmurs a midwife ruefully. When, seconds later, the labouring woman appears, your first impression is of a terrible misjudgment: how can a woman so deep into labour be sent packing from the unit where she is supposed to be having her baby? The nearest midwife tells her to sit in the corridor.
The scene is awkward enough watching it on tape - it must have been a dozen times worse for the mother-to-be herself, labouring on a hard plastic chair in full view of janitors and any passing visitor. When Hayley points out to the midwife in charge that the woman is crying, she replies: "Tell her to get a life." We showed the tape to Mavis Kirkham, professor of midwifery at Sheffield Hallam University, who was shocked. "I think that's really tragic, that poor woman in strong labour in a public corridor," she said. "These are Third World conditions. No farmer would let an animal they valued labour with that degree of stress and anxiety in a tense public place."
After 50 minutes in the corridor, the woman was eventually taken to a bay in the ward, but when she got there, there was no bed for her. So she had to wait again on a plastic chair. The hospital authorities later informed us the staff's 'mistake' was not to have shifted the woman to another hospital. But the nearest alternative maternity unit was six miles away, and the poor woman was about to give birth.
I wish I could say that the overload on the ward was a one-off. But often the wards at Barnet are so choc-a-bloc they have to close temporarily. It happened eight times in the four weeks Hayley was there. When she asked a midwife why the doors were shut to new arrivals, she got the reply: 'We're dangerous at that stage. It gets to the point we've got so many women and not enough staff to look after them that we could miss things.' If that is not a warning sign to expectant mothers, what is?
At one point the Barnet staff are caught in conversation about how things won't change unless something terrible happens. 'I tell you what it's going to take,' one midwife says, 'a baby dying.' Another disagrees, saying it 'needs a mother' to die. The exchange happens casually, across an admissions desk. It is all the more shocking for that. 'We've killed off babies before now, deaths you can push under the carpet,' says a midwife on our tape. 'To kill a baby is cheap, but to damage a baby is more expensive. To kill the mother - that will actually give us the results we need, but God help the poor midwife involved in that.'
The chief executive of Barnet And Chase Farm Hospital Trust, Averil Dongworth, was suitably appalled by this conversation on her premises. But when she blamed the midwives I wondered if she had missed the point: staff shortages, missing equipment and rota chaos are surely not their fault.
So what has the Government promised? In 2004, there was a pledge that every woman in full-blown labour should have access to 'a designated midwife 100 per cent of the time'. And only last month, Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt promised every mother would have the right to opt for a home birth, overseen by a midwife. Yet the Royal College Of Midwives says the system is 3,000 midwives short and one-third of maternity units had their budgets cut last year.
All of this while Britain's birth-rate goes up. Small wonder that a report from Oxford University into maternity care in Britain found that two-thirds of mothers said they felt they had been abandoned too soon after giving birth.
If only the scenes we'd witnessed at Barnet Hospital were an exception. But they were not. North, south, east and west we found all manner of horror stories about the pressure on maternity services. I went to see Ben Harman and Katie McKay at their swish terrace home in Battersea - young, professionals with loving families and lots of friends. Eight months ago, when her labour began, Katie was told by Chelsea & Westminster Hospital that their maternity unit was too busy to take them at present and she should 'have another bath' while her labour progressed. So she did. This was her first child; why argue with the experts? After the bath she rang back - the unit was still full and there was no space at any other hospital. 'I freaked out,' Katie told me. Still they told her to hang on. After two hours Ben drove her to Chelsea & Westminster, but still the staff were too busy for her. 'It was only after my waters had broken, one hour and ten minutes after I'd actually been on the ward that I was given my first internal examination,' she told me.
The baby was lying the wrong way round, in the breech position, and in distress. Instead of an emergency caesarean they tried to deliver the baby normally. She was starved of oxygen and baby Ella died five days later. 'From our point of view,' Katie said, 'It was just too many red lights. If you go through one red light you might get away with it. If you go through five you're going to have an accident. 'The first red light we went through was when the position of the baby wasn't picked up, the second red light was the hospital being closed to admissions, the third red light, not being examined for an hour-and-a-half. Unfortunately, for us it resulted in our baby's death.'
This was the wisest single thing anybody told us in the course of filming. How terrible that Katie had to find it out through her own personal tragedy. Sitting in their front room, I leafed through their photograph album. Picture after picture showed Ella being hugged, so cherished by her mum and dad in those five short days of life. Her parents found the explanation that midwives weren't available to provide better care because of a "change of shift" was little short of an insult.
Our reporter, Hayley, also did work experience at St Mary's hospital in Manchester, inside the city's biggest maternity unit. Secretly recording there for weeks, she kept hearing stories from stressed-out midwives and mums who said the care they received was unsatisfactory. Hayley was at the bedside of Lili, who was 16 days overdue but had not been induced because of a lack of beds in the delivery unit. Finally, staff did induce her. But then they turfed her out of the delivery ward because they said they needed the room for someone else. With no access to any pain relief beyond gas and air, she begged to be examined. When it turned out she was in the late stages of labour, Lili was rushed to delivery to have her baby. Then, in one of the film's most chaotic scenes, Hayley is sent to fetch a CTG, the monitor which picks up a baby's heartbeat when pressed to the mother's stomach.
From ward to ward she goes. Here is a sample of the exchanges: Hayley: "Hiya, I was wondering if we could borrow a CTG monitor." Staff member: "Oh - er - that'll be a matter of finding one." Staff member two: "I doubt it. The place is full." Ward clerk: "I can't actually find one anywhere, love." Hayley: "Really? Do you know when one will be available or not?" Staff member: "I couldn't say, no. Unless they might have one over there. Have you tried over on MDU, maybe." Hayley: "OK, I'll go and ask - thanks." And the reply from the next unit when she asks if they've got a precious CTG? "We haven't. They're all in use." Such scenes would be comic if they were happening anywhere but in a hospital.
And when Hayley - who is totally upfront about her lack of training - is asked to monitor a baby's heartbeat by a midwife too busy to do it herself, you realise just how disturbing the problems on Britain's maternity wards have become. It brought me back to those chaotic moments in December when our Anna was born - which was, after all, a normal if somewhat rapid delivery. In those precious moments you realise a life is in the balance; and the whole future of your family. You don't want to leave the hospital counting yourself lucky that a midwife turned up for the birth.
Source
THE SHAME OF BRITISH SCIENCE
WHAT NEXT, A COMMITTEE ON UN-SCIENTIFIC ACTIVITIES?
The experts demanding that a film on climate change be 'corrected' before it is released on DVD are behaving more like Stalinists than scientists. A group of scientists and science communicators has written an open letter to WAG, a TV production company, insisting that it make changes to its film The Great Global Warming Swindle before releasing it on DVD.
The 38 signatories include Bob Ward, the former spokesman for the prestigious Royal Society in London, as well as former heads of Britain's academy of sciences and the weather office. They argue that Martin Durkin's film, which claims that global warming is not man-made and which caused a storm of controversy when it was shown on Channel 4 in Britain in March, contains a 'long catalogue of fundamental and profound mistakes', and these 'major misrepresentations' should be removed before the film hits the DVD shelves later this year. 'Free speech does not extend to misleading the public by making factually inaccurate statements', the letter-writers claim.
What next, a "House Committee on Un-Scientific Activities", where this self-selected group of scientists and communicators could officially sit in judgement on anyone who says the 'wrong thing' about global warming? Last year, when he was working at the Royal Society, Bob Ward wrote a letter to ExxonMobil demanding in hectoring fashion that the oil giant cut off its funding to groups that have 'misrepresented the science of climate change by outright denial of the evidence'; now he says films that go against the 'truth' of global warming should be chopped and changed before release.
Perhaps any new House Committee on Un-Scientific Activities could begin by forcing those who appear in its hallowed halls to swear 'I am not, and never have been, funded by oil companies', before instructing them on what is the correct thing to say in public about climate change. All others shall be silenced.
These scientists ought to be ashamed of themselves. They are behaving in a fashion that does not befit intellectual scientific debate. When they claim that they are not being censorious, but rather are standing up for facts and 'for the public interest', they protest way too much. From Torquemada to McCarthy, virtually every censorious group in society has claimed merely to be protecting what is true or right or correct, and thus saving the public from allegedly dangerous ideas.
Torquemada wanted to save humanity from religious heresy; McCarthy said he was protecting Americans from reds under the bed. Now some want to shield our eyes from allegedly oil-funded 'climate change deniers' lest they warp our minds and make us behave in a carbon-irresponsible fashion.
Even worse, the scientists' demand that information be 'corrected' from on high so that it does not sow confusion and controversy amongst the public speaks to a profoundly anti-intellectual outlook. They seem not to appreciate how important controversy is. Controversy is not, as they seem to believe, a bad idea; nor is it, as others argue, something that's simply fun or sexy, a 'good idea' in a democratic society. Rather, controversy is crucial to the development of human thought - especially in the realm of science.
You don't have to look very far to see where the 38 scientists might have got the outrageous notion that they have the authority to write to a TV production company and insist that it change the content of one of its films. As I have argued before on spiked, there is a censorious streak in debates about climate change today, where those who question the scientific consensus on global warming are frequently written off as 'deniers', a term which seems designed to link them with Holocaust deniers (see Global warming: the chilling effect on free speech, by Brendan O'Neill).
Many argue that those who kick against the climate change consensus should be denied funding, sacked from university posts and kept off the airwaves. Those who call for such censorship always claim to be protecting scientific facts from pseudo-scientific charlatans. That might be more believable if they took a consistent approach towards opposing the publication of strange scientific claims.
The 38 scientists say they want to protect the public from a factually inaccurate DVD. During a recent quick trip to my local HMV I saw a DVD of the TV series Jamie's School Dinners in which our eponymous hero - Jamie Oliver - dressed up various scare stories in medical scientific garb. He said today's children are so unhealthy that they will die before their parents, and claimed that some kids are so fat they are puking up their own faeces. There were also DVDs on alternative health and acupuncture and how 'yoga can improve your self-esteem'. In all good bookshops there are shelves that groan almost audibly under the weight of books that make junk scientific claims.
Our brave protectors of the public interest don't seem to mind about all that. Indeed, it was striking that around the same time that the 38 scientists wrote to WAG to complain about The Great Global Warming Swindle, the British government announced plans to send a copy of Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth to every secondary school in the country.
Some very serious scientists have raised questions about the scientific accuracy of Gore's movie. Don J Easterbrook, emeritus professor of geology at Western Washington University, said: ' I don't want to pick on Al Gore... But there are a lot of inaccuracies in the statements we are seeing, and we have to temper that with real data.'
Yet Gore's allegedly inaccurate claims will be used to 'stimulate debate about climate change' amongst schoolchildren (in the words of UK education secretary Alan Johnson) while Durkin's allegedly inaccurate claims are labelled unfit for public consumption. This is really about the moral message of the films rather than their scientific underpinnings. Because Gore's movie has the 'correct' moral outlook (global warming is manmade, and we must all take individual responsibility for changing our behaviour and lowering our horizons), it is sanctioned by the authorities and even used to reshape children's understanding of humanity and our relationship with the planet. Because Durkin's movie has the 'incorrect' moral outlook (global warming is not manmade, and demands that we limit carbon emissions are proving disastrous for the developing world), it is vilified.
Some are in effect using claims of scientific authority to copperfasten what is in fact a deeply moralistic campaign dictating what people should expect from life today. The consequences of using science in this way are as ominous as they are far-reaching. It is bad for political debate because when certain positions are said to be scientifically verified then they are also considered to be beyond interrogation. It is bad for science, too, because the use of scientific data to confer authority on explicitly political positions will surely pollute the morally neutral aim of science to discover new things, while also potentially firing up public cynicism with science.
Perhaps the most shocking thing about the 38 scientists' call for a film on global warming to be 'corrected' is just how anti-intellectual such a demand is. Ideas are developed, indeed facts are established, only through the most rigorous debate possible. As John Stuart Mill wrote nearly 150 years ago: 'Complete liberty of contradicting and disproving our opinion is the very condition which justifies us in assuming its truth for purposes of action; and on no other terms can a being with human faculties have any rational assurance of being right.'
In short, the only way to test out ideas - to prove them or improve them, to see if they're right or true or useful or nonsense - is by submitting them to free and open debate. Restricting the communication or publication of certain ideas damages intellectual debate across the board because it limits our ability to weigh things up and work things out. This is especially true of science. Science thrives on hypotheses being verified or falsified. Its lifeblood is the sharing of ideas and findings and claims, both amongst scientists and also between scientists and the public - findings which scientists discuss and explore, seeking to prove or disprove them through research and interrogation.
In this sense, controversy, including the kind of controversy stirred up by The Great Global Warming Swindle, should not be seen as a negative thing; controversy should be viewed as a crucial component of scientific and intellectual development; it can excite people, intensify debate, and allow us to reach a firmer conclusion about what we believe to be true and what is right.
Perhaps more than any other area of life, science develops through a self-corrective process. In demanding that something be corrected from on high, and before being fully submitted for public consideration, the 38 scientists complaining to WAG have violated the very spirit of their vocation. They have behaved less like scientists, and more like Stalinists.
Source
9/11 Conspiracy Film on Virgin Airlines: "This qualifies as one of the outrages of the year: Virgin Atlantic Airlines is showing the evil, dishonest 9/11 conspiracy film Loose Change as inflight entertainment. Are these people insane? Maybe next they can have a retrospective of the works of Leni Riefenstahl."
Thursday, May 03, 2007
When will we British learn to stop appeasing terror?
By Melanie Phillips
The ending of the Al Qaeda fertiliser bomb plot trial has posed crucial questions about the competence of MI5. In particular, the assurances we were given after the 7/7 bombings, that the perpetrators had been unknown to the security service, have been shown to be utterly false.
Disturbing as that is by itself, the case also raises yet more pressing questions about whether Britain is even now acting effectively enough against the threat to this country from Islamist terrorism. The fact is that Al Qaeda now sees Britain as both its principal target and its principal recruiting ground. By its own admission, MI5 is monitoring no fewer than 200 terrorist networks, 1,600 identified individual terrorists and 30 known terrorist plots. It says British Muslims are being indoctrinated with horrifying speed, and more terrorists are being recruited every day.
In truth, as our leading counterterrorist police officer, Peter Clarke, said last week, this country is facing a terrorist threat of a nature and scale it has simply never seen before. This terrorism is part of a global holy war - and the dreadful thing is that it is recruiting British-born boys as its foot-soldiers against their own fellow citizens. When my book Londonistan was published a year ago, my claim that we were in a state of denial about the unprecedented emergency we were facing from home-grown terrorism and extremism was dismissed in some quarters as unwarranted alarmism. Since then, public opinion has shifted. Many have realised that what I wrote was, if anything, an understatement of the true position.
But our official class is still failing to take the action that is necessary to defeat this threat to our whole way of life. Certainly, it is now aware of the enormous scale of the terror threat. But it is still fighting it with both hands tied behind its back. In particular, the Human Rights Act continues to make effective anti-terror policy almost impossible. Only last week, the Government was prevented from deporting two Libyan terrorist suspects, even though they came here illegally and are deemed to pose a serious threat to our lives, because our judges have said no one can be sent anywhere that might not uphold their human rights.
The Government was originally begged by our security services not to pass the Human Rights Act precisely because of the danger it would pose to national security by tying us in such knots. Ministers merely dismissed their concerns. Now the same security services face the nightmare that Islamist terrorists will obtain a nuclear or other dirty bomb to use against Britain, with a human rights law that makes it more difficult to thwart such a terrible outcome.
Even worse than this, ministers seem to have no idea about the need to attack the ideology driving all this. It is simply not enough to flush out the terrorist cells, vital though that clearly is. We have to defeat the ideas driving some British Muslims to commit these acts in the first place. The Government has started paying lip service to this. It has spoken against the extremism of the Muslim Council of Britain, and is encouraging a wider range of truly moderate Muslims to speak up. And a few more extremists are being arrested. But at the same time, it is still appeasing radicalism.
It has become a cliche to say that most British Muslims are moderate. Certainly, most of them undoubtedly would have no truck with terrorism or violence and encouragingly, a growing number are speaking out against Islamist extremism. But extremist views are not confined to a few rogue elements. Opinion polls suggest that more than 100,000 of our Muslim citizens think the July 2005 attacks in London were justified. A report by the Policy Exchange think-tank revealed that around one third of British Muslims thought that if Muslims left the faith, they should be killed; and 37 per cent of 16-to-24-year-olds wanted to live in Britain under Sharia rather than English law. These numbers subscribing to such extremist views are deeply disturbing. They swell the sea in which terrorism swims.
If this tide is to be held back, Islamist extremism in Britain must be stopped and British values reasserted and stoutly upheld. To defeat such extremism, we have to make it abundantly clear that we will not give an inch to those who want to destroy our values. But we appear instead to be doing nothing to stop the spread of radical Islamism. Indeed, in a myriad different ways we are giving out the lethal message that we have neither the will nor the courage to defend our way of life. British Muslims are being recruited in large numbers to terror because next to nothing is being done to stop it.
Last January, a Channel Four television Dispatches programme revealed that at certain mosques which were assumed to be moderate and which were even prominent in talking to other faiths, material was being preached and disseminated advocating such horrors as the murder of homosexuals, the beating of women and hatred of Christians and Jews. Despite the Prime Minister's promise to outlaw the radical group Hizb ut Tahrir (which believes that Britain should be an Islamic state), the Government refuses to do so. Yet, Ed Husain, an extremely brave former radical who has recanted, chillingly documents in his new book The Islamist the enormous influence of this group in telling countless British Muslims it's their duty to wage holy war, and that Muslims have a corresponding duty "to be prepared to launch attacks on Britain from within".
Not only are we failing to halt the spread of such lethally extremist views, we are also failing to hold the line for our own values. Above all else, we should absolutely refuse to countenance the spread of Sharia law, which is not only inimical to our own deepest principles but aims to supplant our own laws. Yet we are turning a blind eye to the steady Sharia-isation of our country. We have ignored the development of informal parallel Sharia jurisdictions, enforced by Sharia courts, in areas heavily populated by Muslims. We have not only turned a blind eye to the polygamous marriages they sanction in Britain, but now give extra welfare benefits to husbands settling here with multiple wives - even though bigamy is a crime.
Despite the fact that thousands of Muslim women are terrorised by the threat of "honour killings", only a few of these horrific cases result in prosecutions - because our police are terrified of being accused of "racism" if they pursue them.
Now Gordon Brown has said Britain should become the centre of global Islamic banking. But this is heavily backed by Saudi Arabia which will use it to further its objective of Islamising the West - and may even provide a cover for the financing of further terror. This craven appeasement of extremism gives Islamists the unmistakable message that Britain is theirs for the taking. Thus truly moderate Muslims are betrayed, and all of us are put in infinitely greater danger - not just from terrorism, but from a culture that still seems to be sleepwalking to oblivion.
Source
US health executive offered top NHS role
British politicians are getting desperate to fix the NHS
An American executive with a lifetime's experience of paying for care in the US health system has been offered the job of commercial director at the Department of Health, overseeing the purchase of care for NHS patients. But the appointment of R. Channing Wheeler, who is in the final stage of negotiations ahead of an expected announcement this week, is likely to be controversial as he has been caught up in the scandal of backdated stock options in the US.
The appointment of a US big-hitter with extensive healthcare purchasing experience is seen within the department as a clear signal of its continued commitment to market-based reforms and to the use of the private sector to treat and commission care for NHS patients. His selection has been approved by Tony Blair, the prime minister, from a short list that included other experienced US candidates. The department has been encouraged by their apparent belief that there is a job worth doing in the NHS.
Mr Wheeler, 55, was an executive vice-president of UnitedHealth Group, which is still being investigated by the US Securities and Exchange Commission over the alleged granting of backdated share options. The scandal has brought down William McGuire, the former longstanding chairman and chief executive of UnitedHealth, one of the largest US managed-care providers. Mr McGuire resigned after it was discovered that he and other executives had repeatedly received stock options, meant to incentivise future performance, that were granted at or near the lowest point of the share price in each year they received them.
Mr Wheeler, who until 2004 was chief executive of Uniprise, the UnitedHealth subsidiary that deals with some of the biggest US companies, is alleged to have received grants of more than 409,000 options on similar dates to Mr McGuire between 1998 and 2002, according to court papers filed in the US. A civil action has been filed by public sector union shareholders in UnitedHealth seeking $5.5m in damages from him over the share options.
The UK's health department is understood to have done due diligence on the appointment and accepted that Mr Wheeler was unaware at the time that the way the options were granted was questionable. Mr Wheeler held executive positions with US health plans, while running UnitedHealth's north-east region, before becoming chief executive of Uniprise in 1998. and 2004.
Karen Jennings, head of health for Unison, said: "The American health system is riddled with fraud and we must protect our NHS from that sort of corruptioon. "UnitedHealth is trying to infiltrate the NHS, and it is worrying that someone from that organisation is being favoured over an NHS or civil service appointee." Mr Wheeler did not return calls to his listed home address.
Source
The stupid Brits deserve this guy: "One of Britain's most infamous Islamist extremists is seeking three more wives through the internet. Omar Brooks, who described the 7/7 suicide bombers as "completely praiseworthy" and heckled Home Secretary John Reid in a high-profile confrontation last week, has signed up to a Muslim marriage website. Although already married with three children and reportedly living off 700 pounds a month in state benefits, the 31-year-old is seeking more wives, with the intention of fathering more than nine children."
Slap on the wrist for fatally negligent British cops: "Two police officers have been disciplined for "unacceptable failings" after they failed to arrest a man who went on to commit murder. Paul Cooper, 42, complained to Greater Manchester Police in March 2005 that he had been attacked several times by Neil Read, who had mistakenly thought him to be a paedophile. At the end of an "horrendous campaign of violence", Read murdered Mr Cooper. Read, of Heywood, Greater Manchester, was convicted and ordered to be detained at Ashworth Hospital, Merseyside. The case was referred to the Independent Police Complaints Commission, which recommended that the two officers should receive formal written warnings. Naseem Malik, IPCC Commissioner for the North West, said: "It is clear that there were unacceptable failings by those officers once the suspect was identified, which meant clear opportunities to facilitate Read's arrest were missed."
By Melanie Phillips
The ending of the Al Qaeda fertiliser bomb plot trial has posed crucial questions about the competence of MI5. In particular, the assurances we were given after the 7/7 bombings, that the perpetrators had been unknown to the security service, have been shown to be utterly false.
Disturbing as that is by itself, the case also raises yet more pressing questions about whether Britain is even now acting effectively enough against the threat to this country from Islamist terrorism. The fact is that Al Qaeda now sees Britain as both its principal target and its principal recruiting ground. By its own admission, MI5 is monitoring no fewer than 200 terrorist networks, 1,600 identified individual terrorists and 30 known terrorist plots. It says British Muslims are being indoctrinated with horrifying speed, and more terrorists are being recruited every day.
In truth, as our leading counterterrorist police officer, Peter Clarke, said last week, this country is facing a terrorist threat of a nature and scale it has simply never seen before. This terrorism is part of a global holy war - and the dreadful thing is that it is recruiting British-born boys as its foot-soldiers against their own fellow citizens. When my book Londonistan was published a year ago, my claim that we were in a state of denial about the unprecedented emergency we were facing from home-grown terrorism and extremism was dismissed in some quarters as unwarranted alarmism. Since then, public opinion has shifted. Many have realised that what I wrote was, if anything, an understatement of the true position.
But our official class is still failing to take the action that is necessary to defeat this threat to our whole way of life. Certainly, it is now aware of the enormous scale of the terror threat. But it is still fighting it with both hands tied behind its back. In particular, the Human Rights Act continues to make effective anti-terror policy almost impossible. Only last week, the Government was prevented from deporting two Libyan terrorist suspects, even though they came here illegally and are deemed to pose a serious threat to our lives, because our judges have said no one can be sent anywhere that might not uphold their human rights.
The Government was originally begged by our security services not to pass the Human Rights Act precisely because of the danger it would pose to national security by tying us in such knots. Ministers merely dismissed their concerns. Now the same security services face the nightmare that Islamist terrorists will obtain a nuclear or other dirty bomb to use against Britain, with a human rights law that makes it more difficult to thwart such a terrible outcome.
Even worse than this, ministers seem to have no idea about the need to attack the ideology driving all this. It is simply not enough to flush out the terrorist cells, vital though that clearly is. We have to defeat the ideas driving some British Muslims to commit these acts in the first place. The Government has started paying lip service to this. It has spoken against the extremism of the Muslim Council of Britain, and is encouraging a wider range of truly moderate Muslims to speak up. And a few more extremists are being arrested. But at the same time, it is still appeasing radicalism.
It has become a cliche to say that most British Muslims are moderate. Certainly, most of them undoubtedly would have no truck with terrorism or violence and encouragingly, a growing number are speaking out against Islamist extremism. But extremist views are not confined to a few rogue elements. Opinion polls suggest that more than 100,000 of our Muslim citizens think the July 2005 attacks in London were justified. A report by the Policy Exchange think-tank revealed that around one third of British Muslims thought that if Muslims left the faith, they should be killed; and 37 per cent of 16-to-24-year-olds wanted to live in Britain under Sharia rather than English law. These numbers subscribing to such extremist views are deeply disturbing. They swell the sea in which terrorism swims.
If this tide is to be held back, Islamist extremism in Britain must be stopped and British values reasserted and stoutly upheld. To defeat such extremism, we have to make it abundantly clear that we will not give an inch to those who want to destroy our values. But we appear instead to be doing nothing to stop the spread of radical Islamism. Indeed, in a myriad different ways we are giving out the lethal message that we have neither the will nor the courage to defend our way of life. British Muslims are being recruited in large numbers to terror because next to nothing is being done to stop it.
Last January, a Channel Four television Dispatches programme revealed that at certain mosques which were assumed to be moderate and which were even prominent in talking to other faiths, material was being preached and disseminated advocating such horrors as the murder of homosexuals, the beating of women and hatred of Christians and Jews. Despite the Prime Minister's promise to outlaw the radical group Hizb ut Tahrir (which believes that Britain should be an Islamic state), the Government refuses to do so. Yet, Ed Husain, an extremely brave former radical who has recanted, chillingly documents in his new book The Islamist the enormous influence of this group in telling countless British Muslims it's their duty to wage holy war, and that Muslims have a corresponding duty "to be prepared to launch attacks on Britain from within".
Not only are we failing to halt the spread of such lethally extremist views, we are also failing to hold the line for our own values. Above all else, we should absolutely refuse to countenance the spread of Sharia law, which is not only inimical to our own deepest principles but aims to supplant our own laws. Yet we are turning a blind eye to the steady Sharia-isation of our country. We have ignored the development of informal parallel Sharia jurisdictions, enforced by Sharia courts, in areas heavily populated by Muslims. We have not only turned a blind eye to the polygamous marriages they sanction in Britain, but now give extra welfare benefits to husbands settling here with multiple wives - even though bigamy is a crime.
Despite the fact that thousands of Muslim women are terrorised by the threat of "honour killings", only a few of these horrific cases result in prosecutions - because our police are terrified of being accused of "racism" if they pursue them.
Now Gordon Brown has said Britain should become the centre of global Islamic banking. But this is heavily backed by Saudi Arabia which will use it to further its objective of Islamising the West - and may even provide a cover for the financing of further terror. This craven appeasement of extremism gives Islamists the unmistakable message that Britain is theirs for the taking. Thus truly moderate Muslims are betrayed, and all of us are put in infinitely greater danger - not just from terrorism, but from a culture that still seems to be sleepwalking to oblivion.
Source
US health executive offered top NHS role
British politicians are getting desperate to fix the NHS
An American executive with a lifetime's experience of paying for care in the US health system has been offered the job of commercial director at the Department of Health, overseeing the purchase of care for NHS patients. But the appointment of R. Channing Wheeler, who is in the final stage of negotiations ahead of an expected announcement this week, is likely to be controversial as he has been caught up in the scandal of backdated stock options in the US.
The appointment of a US big-hitter with extensive healthcare purchasing experience is seen within the department as a clear signal of its continued commitment to market-based reforms and to the use of the private sector to treat and commission care for NHS patients. His selection has been approved by Tony Blair, the prime minister, from a short list that included other experienced US candidates. The department has been encouraged by their apparent belief that there is a job worth doing in the NHS.
Mr Wheeler, 55, was an executive vice-president of UnitedHealth Group, which is still being investigated by the US Securities and Exchange Commission over the alleged granting of backdated share options. The scandal has brought down William McGuire, the former longstanding chairman and chief executive of UnitedHealth, one of the largest US managed-care providers. Mr McGuire resigned after it was discovered that he and other executives had repeatedly received stock options, meant to incentivise future performance, that were granted at or near the lowest point of the share price in each year they received them.
Mr Wheeler, who until 2004 was chief executive of Uniprise, the UnitedHealth subsidiary that deals with some of the biggest US companies, is alleged to have received grants of more than 409,000 options on similar dates to Mr McGuire between 1998 and 2002, according to court papers filed in the US. A civil action has been filed by public sector union shareholders in UnitedHealth seeking $5.5m in damages from him over the share options.
The UK's health department is understood to have done due diligence on the appointment and accepted that Mr Wheeler was unaware at the time that the way the options were granted was questionable. Mr Wheeler held executive positions with US health plans, while running UnitedHealth's north-east region, before becoming chief executive of Uniprise in 1998. and 2004.
Karen Jennings, head of health for Unison, said: "The American health system is riddled with fraud and we must protect our NHS from that sort of corruptioon. "UnitedHealth is trying to infiltrate the NHS, and it is worrying that someone from that organisation is being favoured over an NHS or civil service appointee." Mr Wheeler did not return calls to his listed home address.
Source
The stupid Brits deserve this guy: "One of Britain's most infamous Islamist extremists is seeking three more wives through the internet. Omar Brooks, who described the 7/7 suicide bombers as "completely praiseworthy" and heckled Home Secretary John Reid in a high-profile confrontation last week, has signed up to a Muslim marriage website. Although already married with three children and reportedly living off 700 pounds a month in state benefits, the 31-year-old is seeking more wives, with the intention of fathering more than nine children."
Slap on the wrist for fatally negligent British cops: "Two police officers have been disciplined for "unacceptable failings" after they failed to arrest a man who went on to commit murder. Paul Cooper, 42, complained to Greater Manchester Police in March 2005 that he had been attacked several times by Neil Read, who had mistakenly thought him to be a paedophile. At the end of an "horrendous campaign of violence", Read murdered Mr Cooper. Read, of Heywood, Greater Manchester, was convicted and ordered to be detained at Ashworth Hospital, Merseyside. The case was referred to the Independent Police Complaints Commission, which recommended that the two officers should receive formal written warnings. Naseem Malik, IPCC Commissioner for the North West, said: "It is clear that there were unacceptable failings by those officers once the suspect was identified, which meant clear opportunities to facilitate Read's arrest were missed."
Wednesday, May 02, 2007
In preparation for an event that may possibly happen
I got the post below from Norm Geras. For an expert on Marx, Norm is a rather jocular soul. The point he makes below is a fun one but it assumes that you can read Italian. Being a bit of a language freak, I can (sort of) do that but very few denizens of the Anglosphere could. Assuming that readers have command of various foreign languages (from Greek to French) is an old trick of Britain's educated elite that I rather miss. Why? Because educational standards have so declined that younger writers would simply be unable to play that little one-upmanship game. The Italian below translates literally as "Ring only in case of necessity". Because I read the Italian first and thus understood what was intended, I did not get the point of Norm's post straight away but I eventually got it
Sign beneath a bell in a public lavatory at a tourist site in Florence:
Sonare solo in caso di necessita.
Underneath it, this English translation:
Please ring just in case of emergency
Which isn't quite the same thing, is it? Though 'just' can often be substituted for 'only', the substitution doesn't work for 'only in case'.
"Universal" healthcare not so universal
A ban on smokers and the obese getting certain NHS treatments in some parts of the country was defended by Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt today. She said it was "perfectly legitimate" for primary care trusts (PCTs) to set a collective policy to deny operations to certain patients. Ms Hewitt was responding to a Sky News survey which found nine PCTs refused joint replacements to obese patients and four blocked orthopaedic surgery for smokers.
The areas concerned cover six million people, but Ms Hewitt said it was common practice in individual cases in other parts of the country. Ms Hewitt told Sky's Sunday Live: "Primary care trusts are absolutely entitled to get together with their doctors on any particular area of clinical judgment and say `these are the guidelines we are putting in place for this particular kind of treatment'. "Those decisions are being made by individual doctors all over the country. In a few places doctors have come together collectively through the primary care trusts to put in place guidelines for all of their patients. "This isn't a matter for managers or indeed Government ministers to decide who gets what operation - it's a matter for doctors and always has been.
"The NHS will treat you with help to stop smoking if the doctor's advice is that you shouldn't have the operation until you've stopped smoking. "That is a perfectly legitimate clinical decision. I support doctors making clinical decisions in the interests of their patients."
Ms Hewitt - who will tomorrow appear alongside Prime Minister Tony Blair to celebrate 10 years of the Government's NHS policies - has faced a turbulent few weeks. Junior doctors yesterday backed a call for her to quit over botched training reforms and major industrial action is in the pipeline over moves to stagger a pay rise. But she insisted surveys of patients proved reforms were working.
Source
EU threat to British universities
The independence of Britain's world-ranking universities is under threat from European Commission plans, MPs say. Moves to create an educational "eurozone" by 2010 risk undermining the institutions' autonomy and rendering one-year British masters and new fast-track degrees virtually worthless.
An investigation by the Commons Education Select Committtee into the so-called Bologna process also concludes that the European credit system, based on hours studied, not achievement, is "not fit for purpose". Barry Sheerman, the chairman of the committee, said: "I am deeply concerned about the expanding influence of the European Commission. The role of the Commission must be constrained if the Bologna process is to be successful." The MPs backed the aims of the process but said it must continue to be voluntary and should not standardise the European university system.
Source
British education at work
Britons have a bewildering lack of knowledge about their country, a survey suggests. Stonehenge was built by the Romans, and Hadrian's Wall is in China - these are two of the misconceptions in the poll of 3,000 people commissioned by UKTV History. Nearly four in ten say that the bulldog is the animal that symbolises this country. That, of course, is the lion, part of the Royal Arms since the Plantagenets.
A quarter say that the Lost Gardens of Heligan, Cornwall, are among the Seven Wonders of the World, confusing them with the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. According to one in five, the Pennines are between France and Spain; and for 18 per cent, Stonehenge was built when the Romans were here - rather than dating back to three millennia previously.
Adrian Wills, of UKTV History, said that the survey showed how little people knew about Britain, "from traditions to landmarks". Viewers are being asked to vote for a favourite historical site.
Some popular erroneous beliefs:
1 Official UK animal is bulldog 39%
2 Leeds Castle is in Leeds 34%
3 White Cliffs of Dover made of sandstone 28%
4 Lost Gardens of Heligan, in Cornwall, are one of Seven Wonders of the World 23%
5 Pennines are between France and Spain 21%
6 Do not know who is on back of 10 pound note 20%
7 Stonehenge was built during Roman Empire 18%
8 Hadrian's Wall is not in UK 15%
9 Nelson's Column is not in Trafalgar Square 12%
10 Lake District has an entrance fee 7%
Source
PC demands on the Queen
One hopes that the organizers realize that the Queen does not involve herself in politics
The Queen is being urged to apologise for the slaughter of American Indians and the introduction of slavery when she visits Virginia this week as guest of honour to mark the 400th anniversary of the first English settlement in the New World at Jamestown. She will be landing in the middle of a row over political correctness after officials in Virginia banned the use of the word "celebration" for the anniversary. It is being called a "commemoration" out of respect for the suffering of native Americans, who were attacked after the colonists arrived in 1607.
Africans begin to appear in the English settlement's records as indentured servants in 1619 and were later codified in Virginia's statutes as slaves. Virginia passed a resolution earlier this year expressing "profound regret" for the enslavement of millions of Africans. "Leaders and heads of state have a responsibility to set the tone and it would be a welcome move for the Queen to express regret," said Virginia state representative Donald McEachin, a descendant of slaves, who sponsored the resolution. The Queen is to meet survivors of the Virginia Tech massacre in Richmond, and will refer to the shootings of 32 students and teachers in her speech to the state assembly on Thursday.
A Buckingham Palace spokesman said she would also meet "native Americans and representatives of the African American community to recognise that they formed part of the early history of America and not necessarily in a particularly constructive way". He added: "It is not an entirely backwards looking gesture but is one that recognises the diversity of Virginia today."
From Richmond, the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh will travel to the Jamestown settlement where Captain John Smith's life was saved by Pocahontas, the daughter of an Indian chief who was portrayed in a Disney film. Dr Linwood Custalow, author of The True Story of Pocahontas and a descendent of Indian chiefs from the Mattaponi tribe - part of the Powhatan nation - hopes to be introduced to the Queen. "She should definitely apologise," he said. "The first Americans were very welcoming to the colonists, but they launched a war against them." Mary Wade, a native American member of the Virginia Council on Indians, said: "You can't celebrate an invasion. Whole tribes were annihilated."
The Jamestown exhibition portrays the Indians as "in harmony with the life that surrounds them" while Britain is described as a land of "limited opportunity" ravaged by unemployment and low wages and run by a "small elite" of aristocrats. The first 107 colonists arrived in three small ships in the midst of a drought. By the end of a year, disease and starvation had reduced their numbers to 38 and they fought the native Americans for scarce resources. By 1609, full-scale war had broken out.
Jim Horn, a British historian at Colonial Williamsburg, who helped to organise the exhibition, said: "The English wanted to develop fair trade with the Indians but they quickly resorted to violence when they needed to." Rex Ellis, vice-president of Colonial Williamsburg, added: "Jamestown is the birthplace for America and the birthplace for chattel slavery in America."
Source
Motherhood trumps feminism in Britain
The first evidence of an end to the "have-it-all" generation of women emerges today with thousands of nursery places empty because mothers are choosing to care for young children themselves. Almost a quarter of nursery places are now vacant. The ideal of a woman juggling a full-time career with the demands of motherhood is going out of fashion as a new era of flexible parenting rights takes root.
At least a million parents have taken up their "right to request" part-time work instead of leaving their babies to return to the work-place full-time after it was introduced four years ago. The trend is expected to develop as mothers take advantage of their new right to a year's maternity leave.
The first concrete evidence that parents are choosing to care for babies themselves emerges in a report about nurseries by the leading market analysts Laing & Buisson. Their study showed that there were 160,000 vacancies in nurseries last year. That amounts to 22.5 per cent of all places, compared with a vacancy rate of 11 per cent in 2002. The total number of nursery places has nearly doubled over the same period as demand was overanticipated. The Government still plans to create thousands more. The soaring vacancies are all the more striking as the birthrate has risen to its highest level since 1992, with 1.79 children per woman.
The term "have-it-all woman" is attributed to Helen Gurley Brown, the editor of Cosmopolitan magazine, in her 1982 book Having It All. The aspiration for women to juggle their lives came from Nicola Horlick, the financial expert, who explained her superwoman philosophy in a 1997 book. "I timed the conception of my children so that my maternity leave could include the Christmas holidays," she explained.
Susan Anderson, director of human resources policy at the CBI, pointed to a new culture of flexible working introduced by employers over the past decade. "There are certainly far more choices for women now," she said. "Previously you were either at home full-time or at work. Women can now have longer periods off when the child is first born. "Employers should claim the credit because they are providing a lot of flexitime, nine-day fortnights and teleworking [using computers to work away from the office]. There has been a long-term shift towards women having a choice." Ninety per cent of requests for part-time work are being accepted.
The days of mothers rushing back to work the moment that a child is born are over. Only 18 per cent of nursery places are full time and only 7 per cent of children in day care are now under a year old.
As well as better maternity packages, parents have been alarmed by warnings that putting young children in full-time nursery care can make them antisocial and anxious. A government evaluation of nurseries found that toddlers spending more than seven hours a day in daycare were more likely to be bossy, tease other children, stamp their feet, and get anxious when toys or refreshments were handed round.
Despite surplus places, however, the Government plans to create thousands more [How unsurprising!] as it nears its goal of building 3,500 children's centres for the under5s by 2010. Laing & Buisson found that fees remained stubbornly high for parents, especially in London and the Home Counties, where they are charged an average of 168 pounds a week.
Source
Oxfam coffee 'harms' poor farmers
Some Australian conservatives are copying Leftist tactics and getting the legal system into the act
TWO Melbourne academics have lodged formal complaints against Oxfam Australia over the sale of Fairtrade coffee, saying it should not be promoted as helping to lift Third World producers out of poverty because growers are paid very little for their beans. Tim Wilson, a research fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs, and Sinclair Davidson, professor of institutional economics at RMIT University, have asked the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission to investigate Oxfam, saying it is guilty of misleading or deceptive conduct under the Trade Practices Act.
Mr Wilson said there was evidence that Fairtrade products could do more harm than good for coffee producers in undeveloped nations. He cited reports alleging producers had been charged thousands of dollars to become certified Fairtrade providers and some labourers received as little as $3 a day. In order to lodge the complaint, Mr Wilson purchased a 250g pack of Fairtrade organic decaf ground coffee from the online Oxfam shop. "We purchased this product in good faith, with the aim of lifting people out of poverty while enjoying our favourite brew," Mr Wilson said, in his letter to ACCC chairman Graeme Samuel.
Mr Wilson and Professor Davidson have long held doubts about whether Fairtrade products help coffee, tea and cocoa producers in undeveloped nations. Sales of such products in Australia total about $8million. The complaint to the ACCC refers to an article published in the Financial Times last September, which said Fairtrade coffee beans were "picked by workers paid below minimum wage". It claimed workers received the equivalent of $3 a day. The coffee is sold at a premium to people concerned about Third World poverty.
The academics quote an analysis of Fairtrade, published in the US-based Cato journal, which says coffee producers in poor nations are charged $3200 to become certified Fairtrade providers. The producers' costs are therefore higher than on the open market. The Fairtrade campaign aims to manage the international coffee trade by fixing prices at $US1.26 ($1.64) per pound (454g) and eventually fixing supply.
"Oxfam says the Fairtrade coffee allows growers in developing countries to sell coffee 'at a decent price' but we don't accept that the Fairtrade system can work," Mr Wilson said. "Our primary complaint is that this is an unsustainable system. The only sustainable mechanism is through free trade. They are artificially cooking up the international coffee trade, to promote the interests of the Fairtrade brand and the people who sign up to it." Fairtrade coffee is stocked by Coles and the Hudson coffee chain. Origin Energy and Orica make Fairtrade coffee available to staff in their Australian offices.
Oxfam rejected the academics' claims. It is this week promoting a Fairtrade Fortnight. To mark the event, Oxfam Australia invited Costa Rican coffee farmer Guillermo Vargas to a series of lectures on Fairtrade. Oxfam's Neil Bowker rejected criticism of the Fairtrade coffee project, saying: "It's all audited and monitored, from beginning to end, and we've got no doubts about the effectiveness."
Source
YOU DON'T SAY: CARBON TRADING IS A GIANT RACKET
Companies and individuals rushing to go green have been spending millions on "carbon credit" projects that yield few if any environmental benefits. A Financial Times investigation has uncovered widespread failings in the new markets for greenhouse gases, suggesting some organisations are paying for emissions reductions that do not take place. Others are meanwhile making big profits from carbon trading for very small expenditure and in some cases for clean-ups that they would have made anyway.
The growing political salience of environmental politics has sparked a "green gold rush", which has seen a dramatic expansion in the number of businesses offering both companies and individuals the chance to go "carbon neutral", offsetting their own energy use by buying carbon credits that cancel out their contribution to global warming. The burgeoning regulated market for carbon credits is expected to more than double in size to about $68.2bn by 2010, with the unregulated voluntary sector rising to $4bn in the same period.
The FT investigation found:
* Widespread instances of people and organisations buying worthless credits that do not yield any reductions in carbon emissions.
* Industrial companies profiting from doing very little - or from gaining carbon credits on the basis of efficiency gains from which they have already benefited substantially.
* Brokers providing services of questionable or no value.
* A shortage of verification, making it difficult for buyers to assess the true value of carbon credits.
* Companies and individuals being charged over the odds for the private purchase of European Union carbon permits that have plummeted in value because they do not result in emissions cuts.
Francis Sullivan, environment adviser at HSBC, the UK's biggest bank that went carbon-neutral in 2005, said he found "serious credibility concerns" in the offsetting market after evaluating it for several months. "The police, the fraud squad and trading standards need to be looking into this. Otherwise people will lose faith in it," he said. These concerns led the bank to ignore the market and fund its own carbon reduction projects directly.
Some companies are benefiting by asking "green" consumers to pay them for cleaning up their own pollution. For instance, DuPont, the chemicals company, invites consumers to pay $4 to eliminate a tonne of carbon dioxide from its plant in Kentucky that produces a potent greenhouse gas called HFC-23. But the equipment required to reduce such gases is relatively cheap. DuPont refused to comment and declined to specify its earnings from the project, saying it was at too early a stage to discuss.
The FT has also found examples of companies setting up as carbon offsetters without appearing to have a clear idea of how the markets operate. In response to FT inquiries about its sourcing of carbon credits, one company, carbonvoucher.com, said it had not taken payments for offsets. Blue Source, a US offsetting company, invites consumers to offset carbon emissions by investing in enhanced oil recovery, which pumps carbon dioxide into depleted oil wells to bring up the remaining oil. However, Blue Source said that because of the high price of oil, this process was often profitable in itself, meaning operators were making extra revenues from selling "carbon credits" for burying the carbon.
There is nothing illegal in these practices. However, some companies that are offsetting their emissions have avoided such projects because customers may find them controversial. BP said it would not buy credits resulting from improvements in industrial efficiency or from most renewable energy projects in developed countries.
Source
I got the post below from Norm Geras. For an expert on Marx, Norm is a rather jocular soul. The point he makes below is a fun one but it assumes that you can read Italian. Being a bit of a language freak, I can (sort of) do that but very few denizens of the Anglosphere could. Assuming that readers have command of various foreign languages (from Greek to French) is an old trick of Britain's educated elite that I rather miss. Why? Because educational standards have so declined that younger writers would simply be unable to play that little one-upmanship game. The Italian below translates literally as "Ring only in case of necessity". Because I read the Italian first and thus understood what was intended, I did not get the point of Norm's post straight away but I eventually got it
Sign beneath a bell in a public lavatory at a tourist site in Florence:
Sonare solo in caso di necessita.
Underneath it, this English translation:
Please ring just in case of emergency
Which isn't quite the same thing, is it? Though 'just' can often be substituted for 'only', the substitution doesn't work for 'only in case'.
"Universal" healthcare not so universal
A ban on smokers and the obese getting certain NHS treatments in some parts of the country was defended by Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt today. She said it was "perfectly legitimate" for primary care trusts (PCTs) to set a collective policy to deny operations to certain patients. Ms Hewitt was responding to a Sky News survey which found nine PCTs refused joint replacements to obese patients and four blocked orthopaedic surgery for smokers.
The areas concerned cover six million people, but Ms Hewitt said it was common practice in individual cases in other parts of the country. Ms Hewitt told Sky's Sunday Live: "Primary care trusts are absolutely entitled to get together with their doctors on any particular area of clinical judgment and say `these are the guidelines we are putting in place for this particular kind of treatment'. "Those decisions are being made by individual doctors all over the country. In a few places doctors have come together collectively through the primary care trusts to put in place guidelines for all of their patients. "This isn't a matter for managers or indeed Government ministers to decide who gets what operation - it's a matter for doctors and always has been.
"The NHS will treat you with help to stop smoking if the doctor's advice is that you shouldn't have the operation until you've stopped smoking. "That is a perfectly legitimate clinical decision. I support doctors making clinical decisions in the interests of their patients."
Ms Hewitt - who will tomorrow appear alongside Prime Minister Tony Blair to celebrate 10 years of the Government's NHS policies - has faced a turbulent few weeks. Junior doctors yesterday backed a call for her to quit over botched training reforms and major industrial action is in the pipeline over moves to stagger a pay rise. But she insisted surveys of patients proved reforms were working.
Source
EU threat to British universities
The independence of Britain's world-ranking universities is under threat from European Commission plans, MPs say. Moves to create an educational "eurozone" by 2010 risk undermining the institutions' autonomy and rendering one-year British masters and new fast-track degrees virtually worthless.
An investigation by the Commons Education Select Committtee into the so-called Bologna process also concludes that the European credit system, based on hours studied, not achievement, is "not fit for purpose". Barry Sheerman, the chairman of the committee, said: "I am deeply concerned about the expanding influence of the European Commission. The role of the Commission must be constrained if the Bologna process is to be successful." The MPs backed the aims of the process but said it must continue to be voluntary and should not standardise the European university system.
Source
British education at work
Britons have a bewildering lack of knowledge about their country, a survey suggests. Stonehenge was built by the Romans, and Hadrian's Wall is in China - these are two of the misconceptions in the poll of 3,000 people commissioned by UKTV History. Nearly four in ten say that the bulldog is the animal that symbolises this country. That, of course, is the lion, part of the Royal Arms since the Plantagenets.
A quarter say that the Lost Gardens of Heligan, Cornwall, are among the Seven Wonders of the World, confusing them with the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. According to one in five, the Pennines are between France and Spain; and for 18 per cent, Stonehenge was built when the Romans were here - rather than dating back to three millennia previously.
Adrian Wills, of UKTV History, said that the survey showed how little people knew about Britain, "from traditions to landmarks". Viewers are being asked to vote for a favourite historical site.
Some popular erroneous beliefs:
1 Official UK animal is bulldog 39%
2 Leeds Castle is in Leeds 34%
3 White Cliffs of Dover made of sandstone 28%
4 Lost Gardens of Heligan, in Cornwall, are one of Seven Wonders of the World 23%
5 Pennines are between France and Spain 21%
6 Do not know who is on back of 10 pound note 20%
7 Stonehenge was built during Roman Empire 18%
8 Hadrian's Wall is not in UK 15%
9 Nelson's Column is not in Trafalgar Square 12%
10 Lake District has an entrance fee 7%
Source
PC demands on the Queen
One hopes that the organizers realize that the Queen does not involve herself in politics
The Queen is being urged to apologise for the slaughter of American Indians and the introduction of slavery when she visits Virginia this week as guest of honour to mark the 400th anniversary of the first English settlement in the New World at Jamestown. She will be landing in the middle of a row over political correctness after officials in Virginia banned the use of the word "celebration" for the anniversary. It is being called a "commemoration" out of respect for the suffering of native Americans, who were attacked after the colonists arrived in 1607.
Africans begin to appear in the English settlement's records as indentured servants in 1619 and were later codified in Virginia's statutes as slaves. Virginia passed a resolution earlier this year expressing "profound regret" for the enslavement of millions of Africans. "Leaders and heads of state have a responsibility to set the tone and it would be a welcome move for the Queen to express regret," said Virginia state representative Donald McEachin, a descendant of slaves, who sponsored the resolution. The Queen is to meet survivors of the Virginia Tech massacre in Richmond, and will refer to the shootings of 32 students and teachers in her speech to the state assembly on Thursday.
A Buckingham Palace spokesman said she would also meet "native Americans and representatives of the African American community to recognise that they formed part of the early history of America and not necessarily in a particularly constructive way". He added: "It is not an entirely backwards looking gesture but is one that recognises the diversity of Virginia today."
From Richmond, the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh will travel to the Jamestown settlement where Captain John Smith's life was saved by Pocahontas, the daughter of an Indian chief who was portrayed in a Disney film. Dr Linwood Custalow, author of The True Story of Pocahontas and a descendent of Indian chiefs from the Mattaponi tribe - part of the Powhatan nation - hopes to be introduced to the Queen. "She should definitely apologise," he said. "The first Americans were very welcoming to the colonists, but they launched a war against them." Mary Wade, a native American member of the Virginia Council on Indians, said: "You can't celebrate an invasion. Whole tribes were annihilated."
The Jamestown exhibition portrays the Indians as "in harmony with the life that surrounds them" while Britain is described as a land of "limited opportunity" ravaged by unemployment and low wages and run by a "small elite" of aristocrats. The first 107 colonists arrived in three small ships in the midst of a drought. By the end of a year, disease and starvation had reduced their numbers to 38 and they fought the native Americans for scarce resources. By 1609, full-scale war had broken out.
Jim Horn, a British historian at Colonial Williamsburg, who helped to organise the exhibition, said: "The English wanted to develop fair trade with the Indians but they quickly resorted to violence when they needed to." Rex Ellis, vice-president of Colonial Williamsburg, added: "Jamestown is the birthplace for America and the birthplace for chattel slavery in America."
Source
Motherhood trumps feminism in Britain
The first evidence of an end to the "have-it-all" generation of women emerges today with thousands of nursery places empty because mothers are choosing to care for young children themselves. Almost a quarter of nursery places are now vacant. The ideal of a woman juggling a full-time career with the demands of motherhood is going out of fashion as a new era of flexible parenting rights takes root.
At least a million parents have taken up their "right to request" part-time work instead of leaving their babies to return to the work-place full-time after it was introduced four years ago. The trend is expected to develop as mothers take advantage of their new right to a year's maternity leave.
The first concrete evidence that parents are choosing to care for babies themselves emerges in a report about nurseries by the leading market analysts Laing & Buisson. Their study showed that there were 160,000 vacancies in nurseries last year. That amounts to 22.5 per cent of all places, compared with a vacancy rate of 11 per cent in 2002. The total number of nursery places has nearly doubled over the same period as demand was overanticipated. The Government still plans to create thousands more. The soaring vacancies are all the more striking as the birthrate has risen to its highest level since 1992, with 1.79 children per woman.
The term "have-it-all woman" is attributed to Helen Gurley Brown, the editor of Cosmopolitan magazine, in her 1982 book Having It All. The aspiration for women to juggle their lives came from Nicola Horlick, the financial expert, who explained her superwoman philosophy in a 1997 book. "I timed the conception of my children so that my maternity leave could include the Christmas holidays," she explained.
Susan Anderson, director of human resources policy at the CBI, pointed to a new culture of flexible working introduced by employers over the past decade. "There are certainly far more choices for women now," she said. "Previously you were either at home full-time or at work. Women can now have longer periods off when the child is first born. "Employers should claim the credit because they are providing a lot of flexitime, nine-day fortnights and teleworking [using computers to work away from the office]. There has been a long-term shift towards women having a choice." Ninety per cent of requests for part-time work are being accepted.
The days of mothers rushing back to work the moment that a child is born are over. Only 18 per cent of nursery places are full time and only 7 per cent of children in day care are now under a year old.
As well as better maternity packages, parents have been alarmed by warnings that putting young children in full-time nursery care can make them antisocial and anxious. A government evaluation of nurseries found that toddlers spending more than seven hours a day in daycare were more likely to be bossy, tease other children, stamp their feet, and get anxious when toys or refreshments were handed round.
Despite surplus places, however, the Government plans to create thousands more [How unsurprising!] as it nears its goal of building 3,500 children's centres for the under5s by 2010. Laing & Buisson found that fees remained stubbornly high for parents, especially in London and the Home Counties, where they are charged an average of 168 pounds a week.
Source
Oxfam coffee 'harms' poor farmers
Some Australian conservatives are copying Leftist tactics and getting the legal system into the act
TWO Melbourne academics have lodged formal complaints against Oxfam Australia over the sale of Fairtrade coffee, saying it should not be promoted as helping to lift Third World producers out of poverty because growers are paid very little for their beans. Tim Wilson, a research fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs, and Sinclair Davidson, professor of institutional economics at RMIT University, have asked the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission to investigate Oxfam, saying it is guilty of misleading or deceptive conduct under the Trade Practices Act.
Mr Wilson said there was evidence that Fairtrade products could do more harm than good for coffee producers in undeveloped nations. He cited reports alleging producers had been charged thousands of dollars to become certified Fairtrade providers and some labourers received as little as $3 a day. In order to lodge the complaint, Mr Wilson purchased a 250g pack of Fairtrade organic decaf ground coffee from the online Oxfam shop. "We purchased this product in good faith, with the aim of lifting people out of poverty while enjoying our favourite brew," Mr Wilson said, in his letter to ACCC chairman Graeme Samuel.
Mr Wilson and Professor Davidson have long held doubts about whether Fairtrade products help coffee, tea and cocoa producers in undeveloped nations. Sales of such products in Australia total about $8million. The complaint to the ACCC refers to an article published in the Financial Times last September, which said Fairtrade coffee beans were "picked by workers paid below minimum wage". It claimed workers received the equivalent of $3 a day. The coffee is sold at a premium to people concerned about Third World poverty.
The academics quote an analysis of Fairtrade, published in the US-based Cato journal, which says coffee producers in poor nations are charged $3200 to become certified Fairtrade providers. The producers' costs are therefore higher than on the open market. The Fairtrade campaign aims to manage the international coffee trade by fixing prices at $US1.26 ($1.64) per pound (454g) and eventually fixing supply.
"Oxfam says the Fairtrade coffee allows growers in developing countries to sell coffee 'at a decent price' but we don't accept that the Fairtrade system can work," Mr Wilson said. "Our primary complaint is that this is an unsustainable system. The only sustainable mechanism is through free trade. They are artificially cooking up the international coffee trade, to promote the interests of the Fairtrade brand and the people who sign up to it." Fairtrade coffee is stocked by Coles and the Hudson coffee chain. Origin Energy and Orica make Fairtrade coffee available to staff in their Australian offices.
Oxfam rejected the academics' claims. It is this week promoting a Fairtrade Fortnight. To mark the event, Oxfam Australia invited Costa Rican coffee farmer Guillermo Vargas to a series of lectures on Fairtrade. Oxfam's Neil Bowker rejected criticism of the Fairtrade coffee project, saying: "It's all audited and monitored, from beginning to end, and we've got no doubts about the effectiveness."
Source
YOU DON'T SAY: CARBON TRADING IS A GIANT RACKET
Companies and individuals rushing to go green have been spending millions on "carbon credit" projects that yield few if any environmental benefits. A Financial Times investigation has uncovered widespread failings in the new markets for greenhouse gases, suggesting some organisations are paying for emissions reductions that do not take place. Others are meanwhile making big profits from carbon trading for very small expenditure and in some cases for clean-ups that they would have made anyway.
The growing political salience of environmental politics has sparked a "green gold rush", which has seen a dramatic expansion in the number of businesses offering both companies and individuals the chance to go "carbon neutral", offsetting their own energy use by buying carbon credits that cancel out their contribution to global warming. The burgeoning regulated market for carbon credits is expected to more than double in size to about $68.2bn by 2010, with the unregulated voluntary sector rising to $4bn in the same period.
The FT investigation found:
* Widespread instances of people and organisations buying worthless credits that do not yield any reductions in carbon emissions.
* Industrial companies profiting from doing very little - or from gaining carbon credits on the basis of efficiency gains from which they have already benefited substantially.
* Brokers providing services of questionable or no value.
* A shortage of verification, making it difficult for buyers to assess the true value of carbon credits.
* Companies and individuals being charged over the odds for the private purchase of European Union carbon permits that have plummeted in value because they do not result in emissions cuts.
Francis Sullivan, environment adviser at HSBC, the UK's biggest bank that went carbon-neutral in 2005, said he found "serious credibility concerns" in the offsetting market after evaluating it for several months. "The police, the fraud squad and trading standards need to be looking into this. Otherwise people will lose faith in it," he said. These concerns led the bank to ignore the market and fund its own carbon reduction projects directly.
Some companies are benefiting by asking "green" consumers to pay them for cleaning up their own pollution. For instance, DuPont, the chemicals company, invites consumers to pay $4 to eliminate a tonne of carbon dioxide from its plant in Kentucky that produces a potent greenhouse gas called HFC-23. But the equipment required to reduce such gases is relatively cheap. DuPont refused to comment and declined to specify its earnings from the project, saying it was at too early a stage to discuss.
The FT has also found examples of companies setting up as carbon offsetters without appearing to have a clear idea of how the markets operate. In response to FT inquiries about its sourcing of carbon credits, one company, carbonvoucher.com, said it had not taken payments for offsets. Blue Source, a US offsetting company, invites consumers to offset carbon emissions by investing in enhanced oil recovery, which pumps carbon dioxide into depleted oil wells to bring up the remaining oil. However, Blue Source said that because of the high price of oil, this process was often profitable in itself, meaning operators were making extra revenues from selling "carbon credits" for burying the carbon.
There is nothing illegal in these practices. However, some companies that are offsetting their emissions have avoided such projects because customers may find them controversial. BP said it would not buy credits resulting from improvements in industrial efficiency or from most renewable energy projects in developed countries.
Source
Tuesday, May 01, 2007
Regulation-mad Britain
Even Mussolini was more permissive than this
A baker has been forced to rename her novelty pig tarts - because they don't contain any pork. Val Temple, who runs Sgt Bun Bakery, Weymouth, says officers from Dorset's trading standards department also told her she must swap the name of robin tarts as they are not made from robins. And she claims she was instructed to rename her paradise slice because ... it's not from paradise.
Mrs Temple has made the novelty cakes in the shape of pigs and robins as a treat for her customers for years. She said: "It's a joke. "The officers came in and said they had had a complaint [From a Muslim?] and I must change the names because they didn't contain pork, robin or paradise. "It's an insult to the public. Of course they don't contain pig, robin or paradise.
"The trading standards officers have been coming into this shop for 26 years and now the name has been picked up. "It's absolutely ridiculous. Are they going to start banning Christmas cake because it doesn't have Jesus in it? "You could apply it to everything. It's so silly. "And as for the paradise slice, that recipe is 120 years old and it's always been known as Paradise Slice. "They said they were going to come back in and check, so I've changed the names now. "But people are still coming in and calling them by their proper names." Mrs Temple said she had swapped the name of her animal-inspired tarts to novelty tarts with jam and fondant and the paradise slice to almond, fruit and nut slice.
Ivan Hancock, the county's trading standards manager, said: "The fact is that piece of food needs to be properly described so that the consumer can tell what it is. "There's nothing wrong with using other names but it must be accompanied by the true name of the food. "Consumers have the right to know what is in food."
But Mrs Temple, who runs the bakers with her husband Ian, denied she was told this. She said: "The way they came in and said the names had to be changed didn't give me the impression you could keep the names. "I'm sure other places haven't been told they should list all the ingredients. It's ridiculous having a long list of ingredients - of course customers are not going to think I put robin and pork in a cake."
Source
NHS dentists in trouble
Crazy rules
Dentists may have to pay back millions of pounds to the NHS because they have failed to reach their targets in the first year of a new contract. Some dentists face repayments of tens of thousands of pounds, and in a few cases more than 100,000 pounds. The impact on dental practices will be even greater because their income next year will be reduced, and it is feared that the problems may lead to even more dentists leaving the NHS.
The problem is the latest to hit the troubled NHS dental contract, which rewards dentists for the “units of dental activity” (UDAs) that they complete. Many dentists – nobody yet knows how many – have failed to achieve the UDA targets that were set by primary care trusts, and for which they have already been paid. One dentist said that the contract had turned him into “a UDA factory”, working flat-out to achieve the targets. Others said that the only way to reach the targets was to take on quick jobs such as extracting teeth, rather than root-canal surgery to save the tooth, which earns the same UDA score.
A survey by the British Dental Association (BDA) found that 61 per cent of practices expected to miss their targets. There are about 20,000 NHS dentists, so as many as 12,000 could face financial penalties. In practice the number is likely to be smaller, because as long as a dentist achieves 96 per cent or more of the target, the money owing can be paid off in the next year.
The BDA fgures are backed by a smaller survey by Denplan, a company that provides dental payment plans. This found that 53 per cent of the 122 dentists that it approached expected to miss their targets by enough for their PCTs to insist on “clawing back” money, and that they would receive a smaller contract next year. Another 13 per cent said that they expected to be asked to return money, but to be given the same contract. At least one dentist who spoke to Denplan said that he had been served a “notice of intent” by his PCT to reclaim 100,000 pounds for underdelivered UDAs. The dentist was still in negotiations with the PCT over the amount.
Susie Sanderson, chairman of the BDA executive board, said that the final figures would not be collated until the end of June. “It throws a real threat on the viability of many practices,” she said. “Dentists own their practices and have to invest very heavily in them. They need a high standard of equipment, and good training for their staff. They’ve invested the money in the practice, and they are pretty resentful.” Stephen Gates, managing director of Denplan, said: “Many dentists are beginning to think very carefully about their future. They have looked at the contract and said, ‘We can’t run a business on this basis’.”
David McBride, a dentist in Norfolk, said that he knew dentists who had not managed well under the new system. “Perhaps I shouldn’t say this,” he said, “but I think if you haven’t done the work, you shouldn’t be paid for it.” He agreed, however, that the UDA system was defective. “If a patient comes in and needs more than two crowns, it costs me more to do the work than I get paid,” he said. “So there is a temptation not to do things that need doing. There is a huge potential for supervised neglect.”
The BDA has told the Government that alternative ways of monitoring dental contracts must be found. “UDAs are fundamentally unfit for purpose,” Lester Ellman, chairman of the BDA general dental practice committee, said in a letter to the chief dental officer for England, Barry Cockroft.
A spokeswoman for the Department of Health said: “Practices have up to two months after the end of the year to finish reporting courses of treatment, so PCTs and practices will not yet know the final position. But if a practice has not carried out the agreed level of patient care, the PCT will have to discuss why this has happened and, if appropriate, adjust the amount paid to the practice to reflect the level of service delivered."
Source
BIAS IN CLIMATE SCIENCE REPORTING EVEN IN THE ECONOMIST
The April 21, 2007 issue of "The Economist" had an interesting article entitled "Dengue Fever: A deadly scourge"
The article starts with "Millions at risk as a new outbreak of dengue fever sweeps Latin America" "There is no vaccine. There is also no good way to treat it""just fluids and the hope that the fever will break. At first it seems like a case of severe flu, but then the fever rises, accompanied by headaches, excruciating joint pain, nausea and rashes. In its most serious form, known as dengue haemorrhagic fever (DHF), it involves internal and external bleeding and can result in death.
Fuelled by climate change, dengue fever is on the rise again throughout the developing world, particularly in Latin America. Mexico identified 27,000 cases of dengue fever last year, more than four times the number in 2001. In El Salvador, whose population is not much more than 6% of Mexico's, the number soared to 22,000 last year, a 20-fold increase on five years earlier. Uruguay recently reported its first case in 90 years. In Brazil, 135,000 cases were diagnosed in the first three months of this year, a rise of about a third over the same period last year. Paraguay, the country worst affected in relation to population size, has reported more than 25,000 cases so far this year, six times the total for the whole of last year""and even thi
Even Mussolini was more permissive than this
A baker has been forced to rename her novelty pig tarts - because they don't contain any pork. Val Temple, who runs Sgt Bun Bakery, Weymouth, says officers from Dorset's trading standards department also told her she must swap the name of robin tarts as they are not made from robins. And she claims she was instructed to rename her paradise slice because ... it's not from paradise.
Mrs Temple has made the novelty cakes in the shape of pigs and robins as a treat for her customers for years. She said: "It's a joke. "The officers came in and said they had had a complaint [From a Muslim?] and I must change the names because they didn't contain pork, robin or paradise. "It's an insult to the public. Of course they don't contain pig, robin or paradise.
"The trading standards officers have been coming into this shop for 26 years and now the name has been picked up. "It's absolutely ridiculous. Are they going to start banning Christmas cake because it doesn't have Jesus in it? "You could apply it to everything. It's so silly. "And as for the paradise slice, that recipe is 120 years old and it's always been known as Paradise Slice. "They said they were going to come back in and check, so I've changed the names now. "But people are still coming in and calling them by their proper names." Mrs Temple said she had swapped the name of her animal-inspired tarts to novelty tarts with jam and fondant and the paradise slice to almond, fruit and nut slice.
Ivan Hancock, the county's trading standards manager, said: "The fact is that piece of food needs to be properly described so that the consumer can tell what it is. "There's nothing wrong with using other names but it must be accompanied by the true name of the food. "Consumers have the right to know what is in food."
But Mrs Temple, who runs the bakers with her husband Ian, denied she was told this. She said: "The way they came in and said the names had to be changed didn't give me the impression you could keep the names. "I'm sure other places haven't been told they should list all the ingredients. It's ridiculous having a long list of ingredients - of course customers are not going to think I put robin and pork in a cake."
Source
NHS dentists in trouble
Crazy rules
Dentists may have to pay back millions of pounds to the NHS because they have failed to reach their targets in the first year of a new contract. Some dentists face repayments of tens of thousands of pounds, and in a few cases more than 100,000 pounds. The impact on dental practices will be even greater because their income next year will be reduced, and it is feared that the problems may lead to even more dentists leaving the NHS.
The problem is the latest to hit the troubled NHS dental contract, which rewards dentists for the “units of dental activity” (UDAs) that they complete. Many dentists – nobody yet knows how many – have failed to achieve the UDA targets that were set by primary care trusts, and for which they have already been paid. One dentist said that the contract had turned him into “a UDA factory”, working flat-out to achieve the targets. Others said that the only way to reach the targets was to take on quick jobs such as extracting teeth, rather than root-canal surgery to save the tooth, which earns the same UDA score.
A survey by the British Dental Association (BDA) found that 61 per cent of practices expected to miss their targets. There are about 20,000 NHS dentists, so as many as 12,000 could face financial penalties. In practice the number is likely to be smaller, because as long as a dentist achieves 96 per cent or more of the target, the money owing can be paid off in the next year.
The BDA fgures are backed by a smaller survey by Denplan, a company that provides dental payment plans. This found that 53 per cent of the 122 dentists that it approached expected to miss their targets by enough for their PCTs to insist on “clawing back” money, and that they would receive a smaller contract next year. Another 13 per cent said that they expected to be asked to return money, but to be given the same contract. At least one dentist who spoke to Denplan said that he had been served a “notice of intent” by his PCT to reclaim 100,000 pounds for underdelivered UDAs. The dentist was still in negotiations with the PCT over the amount.
Susie Sanderson, chairman of the BDA executive board, said that the final figures would not be collated until the end of June. “It throws a real threat on the viability of many practices,” she said. “Dentists own their practices and have to invest very heavily in them. They need a high standard of equipment, and good training for their staff. They’ve invested the money in the practice, and they are pretty resentful.” Stephen Gates, managing director of Denplan, said: “Many dentists are beginning to think very carefully about their future. They have looked at the contract and said, ‘We can’t run a business on this basis’.”
David McBride, a dentist in Norfolk, said that he knew dentists who had not managed well under the new system. “Perhaps I shouldn’t say this,” he said, “but I think if you haven’t done the work, you shouldn’t be paid for it.” He agreed, however, that the UDA system was defective. “If a patient comes in and needs more than two crowns, it costs me more to do the work than I get paid,” he said. “So there is a temptation not to do things that need doing. There is a huge potential for supervised neglect.”
The BDA has told the Government that alternative ways of monitoring dental contracts must be found. “UDAs are fundamentally unfit for purpose,” Lester Ellman, chairman of the BDA general dental practice committee, said in a letter to the chief dental officer for England, Barry Cockroft.
A spokeswoman for the Department of Health said: “Practices have up to two months after the end of the year to finish reporting courses of treatment, so PCTs and practices will not yet know the final position. But if a practice has not carried out the agreed level of patient care, the PCT will have to discuss why this has happened and, if appropriate, adjust the amount paid to the practice to reflect the level of service delivered."
Source
BIAS IN CLIMATE SCIENCE REPORTING EVEN IN THE ECONOMIST
The April 21, 2007 issue of "The Economist" had an interesting article entitled "Dengue Fever: A deadly scourge"
The article starts with "Millions at risk as a new outbreak of dengue fever sweeps Latin America" "There is no vaccine. There is also no good way to treat it""just fluids and the hope that the fever will break. At first it seems like a case of severe flu, but then the fever rises, accompanied by headaches, excruciating joint pain, nausea and rashes. In its most serious form, known as dengue haemorrhagic fever (DHF), it involves internal and external bleeding and can result in death.
Fuelled by climate change, dengue fever is on the rise again throughout the developing world, particularly in Latin America. Mexico identified 27,000 cases of dengue fever last year, more than four times the number in 2001. In El Salvador, whose population is not much more than 6% of Mexico's, the number soared to 22,000 last year, a 20-fold increase on five years earlier. Uruguay recently reported its first case in 90 years. In Brazil, 135,000 cases were diagnosed in the first three months of this year, a rise of about a third over the same period last year. Paraguay, the country worst affected in relation to population size, has reported more than 25,000 cases so far this year, six times the total for the whole of last year""and even thi