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24 November, 2009

They don't make them like this nowadays

The fight led to great loss of life but the spirit it showed appears to have prevented much worse

It was, on paper, one of the Second World War’s worst naval disasters, costing almost 300 British lives. But it was also an act of extraordinary heroism, which Winston Churchill said was in the great tradition of Drake and Nelson.

Seventy years ago, in the freezing waters off Iceland, the British merchant cruiser HMS Rawalpindi — armed with little more than pre-First World War guns — found itself confronting two of the deadliest battleships in the German navy.

This week, a reception will be held to commemorate the incident, which some believe should have been marked by the award of a posthumous Victoria Cross for the man who led it.

On the bridge of the British ship , on November 23, 1939, stood Captain Edward Coverley Kennedy, a 60-year-old Scot, father of the late Sir Ludovic Kennedy, with a distinguished naval career behind him, who had come out of retirement to command the Rawalpindi. Its role was to intercept merchant vessels carrying grain to Germany but, in the darkening afternoon, Captain Kennedy saw something far more threatening — the silhouette of an enemy battleship.

In fact there were two – the Scharnhorst and the Gneisenau, each weighing 32,000 tons, with a maximum speed of 31 knots, and fitted with state-of-the-art guns and armour plating. The British ship stood no chance. Kennedy took immediate evasive action but was outrun. Ordered to surrender, he faced a momentous choice — whether to give in or to fight.

Turning to his chief engineer, he remarked calmly: “We’ll fight them both, they’ll sink us, and that will be that. Goodbye.” They shook hands.

The Rawalpindi’s first salvos hit the Gneisenau but fell short of the Scharnhorst. Both ships opened fire, to devastating effect. Fifteen minutes later it was all over.

They destroyed the Rawalpindi’s bridge, wireless room, gunnery control room and engine room, plunging the ship in darkness and disabling the electric ammunition hoists. Kennedy ordered shells to be pulled up by hand and rolled to the guns, now forced to fire independently. Although the ship was on fire the guns kept firing, scoring hits on both German vessels. But as Kennedy went aft with two ratings to organise a smokescreen, they were met by another enemy salvo. All three were instantly killed.

By this stage Rawalpindi’s steering gear was out of action, her water supply had failed and her guns fell silent. As the crew took to the lifeboats, a shell the Scharnhorst penetrated Rawalpindi’s forward magazine, causing a huge explosion. The ship split in two and began to sink.

The loss of her Captain and nearly all her 300 crew was a devastating blow so early in the war. But back home, the engagement caught the public’s imagination. The press portrayed the action as a sign that the fighting spirit of the Royal Navy had not been broken. Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, spoke of Kennedy in the same breath as Drake, Hood and Nelson.

Among naval historians, controversy still surrounds Kennedy’s orders, which had been been to evade action, not seek it out. But, in fact, the circumstances of that day left him with no alternative. The Rawalpindi did its best to seek the shelter of a fog bank, and sent out smoke floats, which failed to ignite. An iceberg four miles away offered better protection, but it was too late. The outcome of Kennedy’s refusal to surrender led to the loss of his ship and most of its crew. But it was also a significant setback for the German navy. Not only did the Rawalpindi inflict damage on the two battleships but it ensured that they gave up any notion of breaking out into the Atlantic, which could have been disastrous for the Allies.

Out of a crew of 300, only 37 sailors were rescued: 26 were picked up from Rawalpindi’s lifeboats by the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, while a further ten were rescued from another lifeboat the following afternoon by Rawalpindi’s sister ship, HMS Chitral.

An eleventh man, Harry Fleming, 21, from east London, had managed to scramble on to the keel of an overturned lifeboat with three others. One by one they had slipped, exhausted, into the sea, leaving Harry on his own.

Harry’s son Michael Fleming, born in 1940, explains what happened next: “The Chitral saw the upturned lifeboat and the body on it. She steamed slowly past but my father couldn’t move, he was frozen and couldn’t get his hands off the keel. The men on the Chitral’s bridgehead thought he was dead but one signalman, who kept looking backwards, saw my father rip one hand off the keel and raise it, and the guy shouted ‘He’s still alive!’

“They turned and picked him up. He’d been in the sea 23 hours.”

SOURCE



A British Navy vessel was just 50ft away as pirates kidnapped a British yacht couple. Why didn't the navy stop the pirates? Human rights, of course...

Mid-ocean, a degree or two shy of the Equator, two ships are steaming south, apparently in convoy. One is a Singaporean flagged container vessel of 25,000 tonnes, the Kota Wajar. The other is a British military tanker, flying the blue ensign of the Royal Fleet Auxiliary Service. Neither was built for battle. Nor in normal circumstances would they be foes. But a whiff of gunpowder is palpably in the air. Aboard the tanker, RFA Wave Knight, Royal Navy gun crews have closed up for action, their 30mm cannon and machine guns primed and ready.

A few hundred yards away on the Kota Wajar, Somali pirates, who had recently hijacked the vessel, possess a variety of small arms including rocket-propelled grenades. These are high stakes, indeed, because both ships are on course to rendezvous with a British yacht drifting helplessly in the Indian Ocean. Aboard this 38ft yacht, and held at gunpoint by a pirate advance party, are Paul and Rachel Chandler, a retired couple from Tunbridge Wells, Kent.

The Kota Wajar, in its new role as a pirate ‘mother ship’, is to scoop them up and carry them back to captivity and a multi-million-pound ransom in Somalia more than 200 miles to the north-west. A burst of gunfire from the Wave Knight cuts across the bow of the hijacked container vessel in the first overtly aggressive act of the chase. Surely the Chandlers will be plucked to safety?

What happened next has been described as ‘depressing’ and ‘shameful’. And ‘hardly in the tradition of Nelson’ - which is something of an understatement. Not that any of us would have known about it if a sailor aboard the Wave Knight had not blown the official Ministry of Defence version of events out of the water. That original MoD briefing had deliberately created the impression that the meeting between Wave Knight and Kota Wajar never happened. Indeed, MoD spokesmen suggested that Wave Knight had simply come across the yacht empty and adrift on the High Seas; the Chandlers had already been taken hostage and had been whisked away before British forces arrived on the scene to answer their distress signal.

This was very definitely not the case. The Wave Knight, it seems, might even have been as close as 50ft to the Chandlers as they were taken aboard the Kota Wajar and off to Africa, under the apparently helpless gaze of 100 Royal Navy and Royal Fleet Auxiliary sailors.

The Navy’s ignominy over the incident has parallels with the infamous 2007 incident when 15 armed Royal Navy sailors and Royal Marines on small boat patrol in the Shatt al-Arab waterway near Basra were taken prisoner by Iranian seaborne forces without a shot being fired. The personnel were kept for 12 days and paraded for the world’s media, reducing what was once the finest fighting force in the world to a laughing stock. After they were freed, one sailor confessed that he had cried himself to sleep when the Iranians took his iPod.

As more facts come to light about the capture of the Chandlers - and they do so slowly, as the MoD still refuses to confirm what really happened - awkward questions about tactics against pirates in the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean have to be asked. Military personnel in the region feel that ‘their hands are tied’ by policies that prevent them from prosecuting a more aggressive campaign against the buccaneers, because of the latter’s ‘human rights’.

As British maritime security expert and former Royal Marine David Pickard of the risk mitigation firm Drum Cussac remarks: ‘There has been quite a change in British Rules of Engagement since the time of Henry VIII. ‘In his day, the law demanded the summary execution of all pirates. Recently the Home Office has been more concerned that pirates captured off Somalia would simply claim political asylum in the UK.’ The belief is that, once in Royal Navy custody, the pirates would claim it a breach of their rights to send them back to the anarchy in Somalia.

Since 1991, the country has been a failed state and local criminals are able to use the long Somali coastline as a safe base for pirate operations, hijacking passing vessels which, along with their crews, are then held for ransom. As the Gulf of Aden is one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes, the pickings are rich.

The international community had to act. United Nations resolutions were passed. But this international anti-piracy operation is fragmented and incoherent. At various times, Royal Navy ships in the area have been under the command of Nato, the EU and a third, multi-national organisation called Combined Maritime Forces Task Force 151. Each body has its own ‘subtly different’ Rules of Engagement for dealing with pirates. But it is understood that in all cases, British forces are not supposed to open fire on pirates unless in self-defence or when the lives of others are in immediate danger.

And so, unless pirates open fire first - as they did last year on Royal Marines from HMS Cumberland, with fatal consequences to themselves - the Navy cannot engage in battle. Nor can pirates be arrested unless caught in the act of taking a ship. In June, units from HMS Portland intercepted two boats full of armed Somalis, obviously on a piratical mission. But the Rules of Engagement meant that the British sailors could only throw the pirates’ weapons overboard and sink their faster boat. The Somalis were then given enough fuel to return to the mainland in the remaining boat - scot free.

And so, in the absence of any effective deterrence, the attacks continue - as the Chandlers found to their cost....

More HERE



High rates of obesity, smoking, absenteeism and poor mental health among NHS medical staff

Health trusts must do more to help doctors and nurses exercise and give up smoking and heavy drinking, says the Government. NHS organisations will be expected to improve access to intervention programmes such as counselling or gyms as part of a drive to reduce sickness absence, which costs £1.5 billion a year. The first national audit of staff habits has found that high rates of obesity, smoking, absenteeism and poor mental health were having a direct impact on the quality of patient care.

The Health Secretary is expected to accept all the recommendations of the final review, drawn up by Steve Boorman, a leading occupational health expert, in a written ministerial statement. The review found that more than 45,000 NHS workers called in sick each day — one and a half times the rate of absence in the private sector.

However, the Department of Health has suggested that health workers should be encouraged to set an example for patients and the general public when it came to promoting healthy lifestyles.

The review found that hospitals whose staff were in poorer health were less productive and had higher rates of patient mortality and superbug infection. More than three quarters of 11,000 staff polled acknowledged that the state of their health affected patient care.

Dr Boorman, a former GP and the chief medical adviser to Royal Mail, told The Times earlier this year that health awareness among NHS staff was “very inconsistent”. He said that a clear correlation had emerged between the performance of hospitals and staff health. His recommendations include cutting smoking rates in the NHS, which are the same as in the general population, and providing more time or opportunities for staff to exercise. Health workers with musculoskeletal and mental health conditions are also to be promised access to early interventions such as physiotherapy or counselling.

The review will call on trusts to appoint health and wellbeing leaders at board level to bring down rates of obesity, drinking and smoking, and on the Department of Health to devise and implement national standards and provide resources to ensure that these standards are given priority. It estimates that reducing the number of sick days taken by staff by a third would save the NHS £555 million a year.

A Department of Health spokeswoman said: “The NHS needs to be serious about the health of its staff if it is to improve the health of the nation. All NHS organisations should have a proactive and focused health and wellbeing strategy in place.”

SOURCE



British Citizenship language scam exposed

Immigrants who don’t understand English have been able to buy language certificates that give them the right to settle in Britain.

An investigation by The Sunday Times has found that staff at English language colleges in London and Birmingham have been offering migrants who speak little or no English Home Office-regulated English and Citizenship certificates for £250 each. Tests are rigged to allow almost anyone to pass.

Staff hand out crib sheets with questions and answers in English. Others let candidates write the sound of English words on the sheets in their own tongue, so the answers appear right, but they don’t know what they are saying.

At the UK Learning Academy in Birmingham, a staff assessor told an undercover reporter that candidates did not have to take any courses or speak any English to pass the tests. The assessor simply asked if the candidate knew their own name, date of birth and address. When told that they did, the assessor replied: “That’s all right then. That’s a guaranteed pass.”

Yesterday the Academy said it had sacked the assessor for “gross misconduct”. Directors at a second college under investigation said they had suspended its English course, while a third college removed the website advertising its course.

Chris Grayling, shadow home secretary, said: “These revelations are particularly alarming and reveal another major abuse of our system for immigration.” He called for the certificates to be suspended.

SOURCE



Oxbridge is clearly guilty of pursuing excellence

Oxbridge demands very high A-level passes and produces many students with good degrees, very few of whom drop out. Where is the problem, wonders Simon Heffer

Something called the Higher Education Policy Institute clearly has nothing to spend its money on. It has conducted elaborate research that concluded that Oxbridge demands very high A-level passes and produces many students with good degrees, very few of whom drop out.

Oddly enough, I thought that was the point of Oxbridge: they are the best universities in the country, and they do this by taking the best people, who are usually motivated to do well. This proof of such an apparently disgusting pursuit of excellence on behalf of our country has prompted yet more boring accusations of elitism – following recent observations by Lord Rumba of Rio that A-levels alone should not regulate admissions to universities.

The next step, no doubt, is for him to argue that intelligence should not regulate the class of degree. The point is that with state schools being run into the ground by the repulsive Ed Balls, Oxbridge has to rely on private sector products, and imports, to maintain its high standards. Whoever's fault that is, it is not Oxbridge's.

SOURCE



Hacked files of the Climatic Research Unit, Global Warming a deliberate fraud

By climatologist Dr. Tim Ball

Global Warming is often called a hoax. I disagree because a hoax has a humorous intent to puncture pomposity. In science, such as with the Piltdown Man hoax, it was done to expose those with fervent but blind belief. The argument that global warming is due to humans, known as the anthropogenic global warming theory (AGW) is a deliberate fraud. I can now make that statement without fear of contradiction because of a remarkable hacking of files that provided not just a smoking gun, but an entire battery of machine guns.

Someone hacked in to the files of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) based at the University of East Anglia. A very large file (61 mb) was downloaded and posted to the web. Phil Jones Director of the CRU has acknowledged the files are theirs. They contain papers, documents letters and emails. The latter are the most damaging and contain blunt information about the degree of manipulation of climate science in general and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in particular.

Climate science hijacked and corrupted by this small group of scientists

Dominant names involved are ones I have followed throughout my career including, Phil Jones, Benjamin Santer, Michael Mann, Kevin Trenberth, Jonathan Overpeck, Ken Briffa and Tom Wigley. I have watched climate science hijacked and corrupted by this small group of scientists. This small, elite, community was named by Professor Wegman in his report to the National Academy of Science (NAS).

I had the pleasure of meeting the founder of CRU Professor Hubert Lamb, considered the Father of Modern Climatology, on a couple of occasions. He also peer reviewed one of my early publications. I know he would be mortified with what was disclosed in the last couple of days.

Jones claims the files were obtained illegally as if that absolves the content. It doesn’t and it is enough to destroy all their careers. Jones gave a foretaste of his behavior in 2005. Warwick Hughes asked for the data and method he used for his claim of a 0.6°C temperature rise since the end of the nineteenth century. Jones responded, “We have 25 years or so invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?” He has stonewalled ever since. The main reason was because it was used as a key argument in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Reports to convince the world humans caused rapid warming in the 20th century. The emails obtained are a frightening record of arrogance, and deception far beyond his 2005 effort.

Another glimpse into what the files and emails reveal was the report by Professor Deming. He wrote, “ With publication of an article in Science (in 1995) I gained sufficient credibility in the community of scientists working on climate change. They thought I was one of them someone who would pervert science in the service of social and political causes. So one of them let his guard down. A major person working in the area of climate change and global warming sent me an astonishing email that said. “We must get rid of the Medieval Warm Period.” The person in question was Jonathan Overpeck and his even more revealing emails are part of those exposed by the hacker. It is now very clear that Deming’s charge was precise. They have perverted science in the service of social and political causes.

Professor Wegman showed how this “community of scientists” published together and peer reviewed each other’s work. I was always suspicious about why peer review was such a big deal. Now all my suspicions are confirmed. The emails reveal how they controlled the process, including manipulating some of the major journals like Science and Nature. We know the editor of the Journal of Climate, Andrew Weaver, was one of the “community”. They organized lists of reviewers when required making sure they gave the editor only favorable names. They threatened to isolate and marginalize one editor who they believed was recalcitrant.

Total Control

These people controlled the global weather data used by the IPCC through the joint Hadley and CRU and produced the HadCRUT data. They controlled the IPCC, especially crucial chapters and especially preparation of the Summary for PolicyMakers (SPM). Stephen Schneider was a prime mover there from the earliest reports to the most influential in 2001. They also had a left wing conduit to the New York Times. The emails between Andy Revkin and the community are very revealing and must place his journalistic integrity in serious jeopardy. Of course the IPCC Reports and especially the SPM Reports are the basis for Kyoto and the Copenhagen Accord, but now we know they are based on completely falsified and manipulated data and science. It is no longer a suspicion. Surely this is the death knell for the CRU, the IPCC, Kyoto and Copenhagen and the Carbon Credits shell game.

CO2 never was a problem and all the machinations and deceptions exposed by these files prove that it was the greatest deception in history, but nobody is laughing. It is a very sad day for science and especially my chosen area of climate science. As I expected now it is all exposed I find there is no pleasure in “I told you so.”

You can download the climate change fraud documents here or here.

SOURCE



The Sound Of All Hell Breaking Loose: Now Searchable!

Here's a crazy thought: What if it was Briffa who released the emails? He is known to have been depressed lately and the email below reveals him to be in great conflict over what he is doing. And the now undisputed revelation that his past work depended on the tree rings from just one tree must have hurt him -- JR

The CRU emails are now searchable. Here's one I stumbled across. (Read from bottom up.)

From: Keith Briffa To: mann@xxxxxxxxx.xxx Subject: Re: quick note on TAR Date: Sun Apr 29 19:53:16 2007

Mike

Your words are a real boost to me at the moment. I found myself questioning the whole process and being often frustrated at the formulaic way things had to be done - often wasting time and going down dead ends. I really thank you for taking the time to say these kind words. I tried hard to balance the needs of the science and the IPCC, which were not always the same. I worried that you might think I gave the impression of not supporting you well enough while trying to report on the issues and uncertainties. Much had to be removed and I was particularly unhappy that I could not get the statement into the SPM regarding the AR4 reinforcement of the results and conclusions of the TAR. I tried my best but we were basically railroaded by Susan*. I am happy to pass the mantle on to someone else next time. I feel I have basically produced nothing original or substantive of my own since this whole process started. I am at this moment having to work on the ENV submission to the forthcoming UK Research Assessment exercise , again instead of actually doing some useful research! Anyway thanks again Mike.... really appreciated when it comes from you very best wishes

Keith

Keith

At 18:14 29/04/2007, you wrote:

Keith, just a quick note to let you know I've had a chance to read over the key bits on last millennium in the final version of the chapter, and I think you did a great job. obviously, this was one of the most (if not the most) contentious areas in the entire report, and you found a way to (in my view) convey the the science accurately, but in a way that I believe will be immune to criticisms of bias or neglect--you dealt w/ all of the controversies, but in a very even-handed and fair way. bravo! I hope you have an opportunity to relax a bit now. looking forward to buying you a beer next time we have an opportunity :)

mike

(*I believe he's referring to Susan Solomon here.)

A more detailed examination of a different series of emails pertaining to Briffa's work is up at Powerline. [See below -- JR]

SOURCE



The global warming alarmists act like a gang of co-conspirators rather than respectable scientists

One of the hacked East Anglia emails that has gotten considerable play on the web indicates that several alarmist scientists deleted emails that were subject to a Freedom of Information Act request rather than produce them. That's true; here is the context.

On May 27, 2008, David Palmer, who is in charge of "data protection" at the University of East Anglia, wrote to Tim Osborn about a Freedom of Information Act request the university had received from one David Holland: "Please note the response received today from Mr. Holland. Could you provide input as to his additional questions 1, and 2, and check with Mr. Ammann in question 3 as to whether he believes his correspondence with us to be confidential? Although I fear/anticipate the response, I believe that I should inform the requester that his request will be over the appropriate limit and ask him to limit it.... I just wish to ensure that we do as much as possible 'by the book' in this instance as I am certain that this will end up in an appeal, with the statutory potential to end up with the ICO."

Thus, the same day, Tim Osborn wrote to Caspar Amman of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado: "Our university has received a request, under the UK Freedom of Information law, from someone called David Holland for emails or other documents that you may have sent to us that discuss any matters related to the IPCC assessment process. We are not sure what our university's response will be, nor have we even checked whether you sent us emails that relate to the IPCC assessment or that we retained any that you may have sent. However, it would be useful to know your opinion on this matter. In particular, we would like to know whether you consider any emails that you sent to us as confidential. Sorry to bother you with this, Tim (cc Keith & Phil)"

The point was to lay foundation for an objection to producing such emails on the ground that they were "confidential." Amman replied: "Oh MAN! will this crap ever end?? Well, I will have to properly answer in a couple days when I get a chance digging through emails. I don't recall from the top of my head any specifics about IPCC. I'm also sorry that you guys have to go through this BS."

Osborn replied: "Hi again Caspar, I don't think it is necessary for you to dig through any emails you may have sent us to determine your answer. Our question is a more general one, which is whether you generally consider emails that you sent us to have been sent in confidence. If you do, then we will use this as a reason to decline the request. Cheers, Tim"

That was followed by this more formal response from Amman on May 30: "In response to your inquiry about my take on the confidentiality of my email communications with you, Keith or Phil, I have to say that the intent of these emails is to reply or communicate with the individuals on the distribution list, and they are not intended for general 'publication'. If I would consider my texts to potentially get wider dissemination then I would probably have written them in a different style. Having said that, as far as I can remember (and I haven't checked in the records, if they even still exist) I have never written an explicit statement on these messages that would label them strictly confidential. Caspar"

In the meantime, though, Osborn and his colleagues had already taken matters into their own hands. On May 29, Phil Jones wrote to Michael Mann, with the subject heading "IPCC & FOI": "Mike, Can you delete any emails you may have with Keith re AR4? ["AR4" is common shorthand for the U.N. IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report, which was released in 2007.] Keith will do likewise. He's not in at the moment - minor family crisis. Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don't have his new email address. We will be getting Caspar to do likewise."

These emails appear to show that, when faced with a legitimate request under Britain's Freedom of Information Act, these global warming alarmists preferred to delete their emails with one another about the crucially important IPCC report --the main basis for the purported "consensus" in favor of anthropogenic global warming--rather than allow them to come to light. This is one of many instances in the East Anglia documents where the global warming alarmists act like a gang of co-conspirators rather than respectable scientists.

SOURCE



The savage battle to suppress scientific dissent

Electronic files that were stolen from a prominent climate research center and made public last week provide a rare glimpse into the behind-the-scenes battle to shape the public perception of global warming.

While few U.S. politicians bother to question whether humans are changing the world's climate -- nearly three years ago the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded the evidence was unequivocal -- public debate persists. And the newly disclosed private exchanges among climate scientists at Britain's Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia reveal an intellectual circle that appears to feel very much under attack, and eager to punish its enemies.

In one e-mail, the center's director, Phil Jones, writes Pennsylvania State University's Michael E. Mann and questions whether the work of academics that question the link between human activities and global warming deserve to make it into the prestigious IPCC report, which represents the global consensus view on climate science. "I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report," Jones writes. "Kevin and I will keep them out somehow -- even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!"

In another, Jones and Mann discuss how they can pressure an academic journal not to accept the work of climate skeptics with whom they disagree. "Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal," Mann writes. "I will be emailing the journal to tell them I'm having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor," Jones replies.

Patrick Michaels, a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute who comes under fire in the e-mails, said these same academics repeatedly criticized him for not having published more peer-reviewed papers. "There's an egregious problem here, their intimidation of journal editors," he said. "They're saying, 'If you print anything by this group, we won't send you any papers.' "

Mann, who directs Penn State's Earth System Science Center, said the e-mails reflected the sort of "vigorous debate" researchers engage in before reaching scientific conclusions. "We shouldn't expect the sort of refined statements that scientists make when they're speaking in public," he said.

Christopher Horner, a senior fellow at the libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute who has questioned whether climate change is human-caused, blogged that the e-mails have "the makings of a very big" scandal. "Imagine this sort of news coming in the field of AIDS research," he added.

The story of the hacking has ranked among the most popular on Web sites ranging from The Washington Post's to that of London's Daily Telegraph. And it has spurred a flood of e-mails from climate skeptics to U.S. news organizations, some likening the disclosure to the release of the Pentagon Papers during Vietnam.

SOURCE



Fad diets INCREASE weight

Celebrity 'fad' diets are fuelling the obesity epidemic, doctors warn. They claim such plans are actually keeping people fat, with just one in ten Britons predicted to be a healthy weight by 2050. And they say weight-watchers should curb the amount they eat, rather than follow diets which offer only a short-term solution.

Diets that recommend eating only grapefruit, for example, or fruit and seeds found in the Bible should be avoided, says Professor Chris Hawkey, president of the British Society of Gastroenterology. He also criticised the Tiger diet - which advocates uncooked food and is reportedly followed by Mel Gibson - and the apple diet, which claims to boost the body's acidity and fight disease.

A survey commissioned by the BSG shows most dieters will try anything to get thin - except follow a sensible eating and exercise plan that has been shown to work. One in 20 women said they would try the Atkins diet to lose weight - even though only 2 per cent think it is good for their health. At the same time, one in five of the 2,000 Britons questioned admitted they would use weight loss pills to help shed excess pounds.

Professor Hawkey, speaking today at the Gastro 2009 conference in London, will claim ruthless promotion of unhealthy foods and diets has fostered over-eating and the growth of pathological attitudes to eating. These include anorexia, bulimia, orthorexia - an obsession with eating 'good' foods - and malnutrition.

Professor Hawkey said: 'In food fadism the virtue of favoured foods is exaggerated and purported to cure specific diseases, while supposedly harmful foods are eliminated from the diet. 'Foods fads are often based on a well elaborated scientific or, more often, pseudo-scientific theory but such is the complexity of diet that the specific value of the nutritional content is seldom tested.' And he will tell the conference: 'The problem facing society is not the content of our diet but the quantity we are consuming.

'We need to do away with quirky diets and get people to realise what will keep them healthy. 'In the majority of cases, simply increasing physical activity levels and eating sensibly will help prevent long-term conditions.'

David Haslam, chairman of the National Obesity Forum, said: 'Diets don't work. You may lose weight in the short term, and there are a few exceptions when people manage to keep it off. 'But most people put the weight back on. The most effective way is making sustainable changes to reduce dietary intake and increase physical activity.'

SOURCE



Modern 'superdiets' based on myths, says expert

Another report of the speech mentioned above. This guy is a real truth teller. He even has some time for the hated Atkins diet

Superdiets such as drinking large amounts of grapefruit juice or eating only raw fruit and vegetables have been exposed as just food myths, a leading professor claims. Professor Chris Hawkey, president of the British Society of Gastroenterology (BSG), said some people developed a “quasi-religious” attitude towards what was the best thing to eat, based on little or no scientific evidence.

He highlighted more than a dozen famous diets including rawism, which argues that cooking food makes it less nutritious, the grapefruit diet, based on the idea that an enzyme in the juice breaks down fat, and the alkaline diet, which seeks to maintain the slightly alkaline nature of the blood by eating certain foods. “Food has been shrouded in myths and fairy tales since time immemorial," said Professor Hawkey at the Gastro 2009 conference, which is being held in London until Wednesday. “But what’s important is to recognise that, despite the popularity of fad diets, we are losing a grip on the fight with obesity.”

He said the grapefruit diet, which Kylie Minogue has reportedly used, was unlikely to have an effect because the enzyme would probably be broken down in the gut before being able to get at body fat.

Professor Hawkey also flagged up the lack of evidence for the ‘chewing movement’, which dates back to the 19th century and counsels chewing 32 times to aid digestion. “[Former Prime Minister] Gladstone was apparently very eccentrically in favour of this diet. The idea is that salivary enzymes start digestion,” he said, adding that it was based more on “theory than evidence”.

However he had mixed feelings about the controversial Atkins diet, which says people should avoid carbohydrate and eat protein. “It is not terribly healthy in the sense that you are going to have a lot of fat, but if you lose weight then it is a good thing,” Professor Hawkey said. “The theory is that it resets the metabolic rate and there is some science to back that up.”

SOURCE



Documents detail Iraq war chaos in Britain: "Leaked British government documents call into question ex-Prime Minister Tony Blair’s public statements on the buildup to the Iraq war and show plans for the U.S.-led 2003 invasion were being made more than a year earlier, a newspaper reported Sunday. Britain’s Sunday Telegraph published details of private statements made by senior British military figures claiming plans were in place months before the March 2003 invasion, but were so badly drafted they left troops poorly equipped and ill-prepared for the conflict.”





23 November, 2009

Some graphic evidence of CRU crookedness

A picture is worth ...





Climategate: the final nail in the coffin of 'Anthropogenic Global Warming'?

The secret emails of the CRU have got a LOT of attention in the press by now. Even the NYT has weighed in, contrary to its usual practice of ignoring news it doesn't like. So it is difficult to know what to reproduce here but I have chosen two pieces below -- JR

By James Delingpole

If you own any shares in alternative energy companies I should start dumping them NOW. The conspiracy behind the Anthropogenic Global Warming myth (aka AGW; aka ManBearPig) has been suddenly, brutally and quite deliciously exposed after a hacker broke into the computers at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (aka Hadley CRU) and released 61 megabites of confidential files onto the internet. (Hat tip: Watts Up With That)

When you read some of those files – including 1079 emails and 72 documents – you realise just why the boffins at Hadley CRU might have preferred to keep them confidential. As Andrew Bolt puts it, this scandal could well be “the greatest in modern science”. These alleged emails – supposedly exchanged by some of the most prominent scientists pushing AGW theory – suggest: " Conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organised resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more."

One of the alleged emails has a gentle gloat over the death in 2004 of John L Daly (one of the first climate change sceptics, founder of the Still Waiting For Greenhouse site), commenting: “In an odd way this is cheering news.”

But perhaps the most damaging revelations – the scientific equivalent of the Telegraph’s MPs’ expenses scandal – are those concerning the way Warmist scientists may variously have manipulated or suppressed evidence in order to support their cause. Here are a few tasters. (So far, we can only refer to them as alleged emails because – though Hadley CRU’s director Phil Jones has confirmed the break-in to Ian Wishart at the Briefing Room – he has yet to fess up to any specific contents.) But if genuine, they suggest dubious practices such as:

Manipulation of evidence: "I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline."

Private doubts about whether the world really is heating up: "The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate."

Suppression of evidence: "Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4? Keith will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment – minor family crisis. Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t have his new email address. We will be getting Caspar to do likewise."

Fantasies of violence against prominent Climate Sceptic scientists: "Next time I see Pat Michaels at a scientific meeting, I’ll be tempted to beat the crap out of him. Very tempted."

Attempts to disguise the inconvenient truth of the Medieval Warm Period (MWP): "……Phil and I have recently submitted a paper using about a dozen NH records that fit this category, and many of which are available nearly 2K back–I think that trying to adopt a timeframe of 2K, rather than the usual 1K, addresses a good earlier point that Peck made w/ regard to the memo, that it would be nice to try to “contain” the putative “MWP”, even if we don’t yet have a hemispheric mean reconstruction available that far back…."

And, perhaps most reprehensibly, a long series of communications discussing how best to squeeze dissenting scientists out of the peer review process. How, in other words, to create a scientific climate in which anyone who disagrees with AGW can be written off as a crank, whose views do not have a scrap of authority: “This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not publishing in the “peer-reviewed literature”. Obviously, they found a solution to that–take over a journal! So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering “Climate Research” as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board…What do others think?” “I will be emailing the journal to tell them I’m having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor.”“It results from this journal having a number of editors. The responsible one for this is a well-known skeptic in NZ. He has let a few papers through by Michaels and Gray in the past. I’ve had words with Hans von Storch about this, but got nowhere. Another thing to discuss in Nice!”

Hadley CRU has form in this regard. In September – I wrote the story up here as “How the global warming industry is based on a massive lie” – Hadley CRU’s researchers were exposed as having “cherry-picked” data in order to support their untrue claim that global temperatures had risen higher at the end of the 20th century than at any time in the last millenium. Hadley CRU was also the organisation which – in contravention of all acceptable behaviour in the international scientific community – spent years withholding data from researchers it deemed unhelpful to its cause. This matters because Hadley CRU, established in 1990 by the Met Office, is a government-funded body which is supposed to be a model of rectitude. Its HadCrut record is one of the four official sources of global temperature data used by the IPCC.

I asked in my title whether this will be the final nail in the coffin of Anthropenic Global Warming. This was wishful thinking, of course. In the run up to Copenhagen, we will see more and more hysterical (and grotesquely exaggerated) stories such as this in the Mainstream Media. And we will see ever-more-virulent campaigns conducted by eco-fascist activists, such as this risible new advertising campaign by Plane Stupid showing CGI polar bears falling from the sky and exploding because kind of, like, man, that’s sort of what happens whenever you take another trip on an aeroplane.

The world is currently cooling; electorates are increasingly reluctant to support eco-policies leading to more oppressive regulation, higher taxes and higher utility bills; the tide is turning against Al Gore’s Anthropogenic Global Warming theory. The so-called “sceptical” view is now also the majority view.

Unfortunately, we’ve a long, long way to go before the public mood (and scientific truth) is reflected by our policy makers. There are too many vested interests in AGW, with far too much to lose either in terms of reputation or money, for this to end without a bitter fight. But if the Hadley CRU scandal is true,it’s a blow to the AGW lobby’s credibility which is never likely to recover.

SOURCE



The Warmist conspiracy: the emails that most damn Jones

An excerpt from Andrew Bolt's latest comment:

These are the emails that should have Professor Phil Jones most worried about his future. Jones, head of the CRU unit whose emails were leaked, has been under most fire so far over one email in particular in which he boasted of using a ‘“trick" to “hide the decline” that would have otherwise spoiled his graph showing temperatures soaring ever-upward.

But far more serious - at least in a legal sense - may be his apparent boasting of destroying data to stop sceptics from checking this alarmist work. If, as some emails suggest, he destroyed it to thwart FOI requests from Professor Ross McKitrick and Steve McIntyre, who’d already exposed as fake the Michael Mann “hockey stick”, Jones, one of the most active of the IPCC lead authors, could even face criminal charges.

(Note: in saying that, I should add that these emails may simply be poorly worded, out of context or even altered by the whistleblower who leaked them. Jones may also not knowingly have done anything wrong, and there is no proof that he did anything against the law. UPDATE: Several updates on Jones below, including his “selfish” wish to see global warming “regardless of the consequences” just to be proved right.)

Whether laws were broken or not, the emails prove beyond doubt how resistant Jones and his colleagues were to having their work properly scrutinised by anyone not of their “team”. No wonder, perhaps, when the documents reveal Jones has so far attracted $25 million in grants.)

The most damning emails on this point are the following, starting with 1107454306.txt, in which Jones refers to MM - McIntyre and McKitrick:

At 09:41 AM 2/2/2005, Phil Jones wrote:

Mike, I presume congratulations are in order - so congrats etc !

Just sent loads of station data to Scott. Make sure he documents everything better this time! And don’t leave stuff lying around on ftp sites - you never know who is trawling them. The two MMs have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone. Does your similar act in the US force you to respond to enquiries within 20 days? - our does! The UK works on precedents, so the first request will test it. We also have a data protection act, which I will hide behind. Tom Wigley has sent me a worried email when he heard about it - thought people could ask him for his model code. He has retired officially from UEA so he can hide behind that. IPR should be relevant here, but I can see me getting into an argument with someone at UEA who’ll say we must adhere to it !

Jones admits he was warned by his own university against deleting data subjected to an FOI request from McIntyre - or anyone:

From: Phil Jones

To: santer1@XXXX

Subject: Re: A quick question

Date: Wed Dec 10 10:14:10 2008

Ben,

Haven’t got a reply from the FOI person here at UEA. So I’m not entirely confident the numbers are correct. One way of checking would be to look on CA, but I’m not doing that. I did get an email from the FOI person here early yesterday to tell me I shouldn’t be deleting emails - unless this was ‘normal’ deleting to keep emails manageable! McIntyre hasn’t paid his £10, so nothing looks likely to happen re his Data Protection Act email.

Anyway requests have been of three types - observational data, paleo data and who made IPCC changes and why. Keith has got all the latter - and there have been at least 4. We made Susan aware of these - all came from David Holland. According to the FOI Commissioner’s Office, IPCC is an international organization, so is above any national FOI. Even if UEA holds anything about IPCC, we are not obliged to pass it on, unless it has anything to do with our core business - and it doesn’t! I’m sounding like Sir Humphrey here!

Makes you wonder very strongly what Jones is trying to hide, doesn’t it? Also makes you laugh all over again at his claim once that the data being sought had, sadly, been ... um, lost.

In1212063122.txtm, Jones urges another colleague, Michael “Hockey Stick”, Mann, to join in the deleting - at least of emails about the IPCC’s controversial ARA report on man-made warming which Jones co-authored, and which claimed warming was “unequivocal” and “most likely” caused by humans:

From: Phil Jones To: “Michael E. Mann”

Subject: IPCC & FOI

Date: Thu May 29 11:04:11 2008

Mike,

Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4?

Keith will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment - minor family crisis.

Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t have his new email address.

We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.

I see that CA claim they discovered the 1945 problem in the Nature paper!!

Cheers

Phil:

For years Jones has made clear his determination to keep crucial data from the eyes of sceptics:

From: Phil Jones To: mann@xxx.edu

Subject: Fwd: CCNet: PRESSURE GROWING ON CONTROVERSIAL RESEARCHER TO DISCLOSE SECRET DATA

Date: Mon Feb 21 16:28:32 2005

Cc: “raymond s. bradley” , “Malcolm Hughes”

Mike, Ray and Malcolm,

The skeptics seem to be building up a head of steam here ! Maybe we can use this to our advantage to get the series updated !

Odd idea to update the proxies with satellite estimates of the lower troposphere rather than surface data !. Odder still that they don’t realise that Moberg et al used the Jones and Moberg updated series !

Francis Zwiers is till onside. He said that PC1s produce hockey sticks. He stressed that the late 20th century is the warmest of the millennium, but Regaldo didn’t bother with that. Also ignored Francis’ comment about all the other series looking similar to MBH.

The IPCC comes in for a lot of stick. Leave it to you to delete as appropriate !

Cheers

Phil

PS I’m getting hassled by a couple of people to release the CRU station temperature data.

Don’t any of you three tell anybody that the UK has a Freedom of Information Act!

And when Jones is really forced to the point of handing over his data, he considers ways to may checking it more difficult or annoying:

Options appear to be:

Send them the data

Send them a subset removing station data from some of the countries who made us pay in the normals papers of Hulme et al. (1990s) and also any number that David can remember. This should also omit some other countries like (Australia, NZ, Canada, Antarctica). Also could extract some of the sources that Anders added in (31-38 source codes in J&M 2003). Also should remove many of the early stations that we coded up in the 1980s.

Send them the raw data as is, by reconstructing it from GHCN. How could this be done? Replace all stations where the WMO ID agrees with what is in GHCN. This would be the raw data, but it would annoy them.

But Jones figures a way out:

At 04:53 AM 5/9/2008, you wrote:

Mike, Ray, Caspar,

A couple of things - don’t pass on either…

2. You can delete this attachment if you want. Keep this quiet also, but this is the person who is putting in FOI requests for all emails Keith and Tim have written and received re Ch 6 of AR4. We think we’ve found a way around this…

This message will self destruct in 10 seconds!

Cheers

Phil

Prof. Phil Jones

More HERE



Greenies partly responsible for British flood disaster

And they're not repentant. People are disposable

Furious Cockermouth residents have complained that fears over disturbing salmon spawning has made the flooding problem far worse this year. Residents had called for the river bed to be dug into by 10ft in order to prevent flooding following discussions about the problem with the authorities earlier this year. But they claim their plan was rejected by the Environment Agency because it would interfere with salmon laying their eggs in the River Derwent.

Today residents reacted with fury and complained that the authorities are treating salmon as being 'more important than people.' Jacqui White, Gote Road, Cockermouth, said: 'I attended a meeting with Natural England earlier this year when we told them we wanted to dig 10ft deeper so that the waters wouldn't flood and alleviate any flooding. 'But the officials there stood up and told the meeting that the salmon in the river were more important.' Jacqui added: 'I've been here 16 years. I know the area is prone to flooding, and it was bad in 2005, but this year is definitely the worst."

Fiona Tunstall, 38, was left in tears after her terraced home was flooded in Gote Road yesterday. She said: 'The authorities seem to think salmon is more important than people and their houses.' 'The residents of this street had a meeting with Natural England and other authorities because they wanted to dig 10ft down into the riverbed around this street. 'Natural England wouldn't let them because would be detrimental to salmon to do that.

'If it had been dug, then maybe we wouldn't be in this mess now. 'My kitchen and living room are under about 4ft of water yesterday. My carpets, and my sofa and everything else are under water now. 'We have lost everything. 'My four-year-old Ryan, just cried and cried. 'I don't know what we are going to do. We'll have no electricity and no water, I don't know how I'm going to feed us. 'Something needs to be done. It's ridiculous. I've got not contents insurance. 'I'm so angry with the Environment Agency. They didn't contact me even though I gave them my phone numbers ages ago. I gave them that because they give you a phone call or a text to warn you your house is under threat, but obviously I never got that. 'I don't want to go back to my house.'

Maggie Robinson, Natural's England's Freshwater Advisor for the North West Region, said: 'The River Derwent has been designated as a site of special scientific interest and an important area of conservation. 'It's one of the most important rivers of its kind in Europe. 'It has some of the rarest species of fish in Europe, the river has Atlantic salmon and three different species of lamprey. 'The river, although being nutrient poor, supports some important species of moss and other river fauna.

'Digging into the bed of a river isn't always the best thing to do because it can undermine the channel and riverbed which can cause more deposition cause problems. 'Atlantic salmon are considered throughout Europe to be rare. Salmon dig into reeds in the gravel on the riverbed and they lay their eggs in the reeds.

SOURCE



Sikh Rajinder Singh set to become BNP’s first non-white member

Sikhs do of course have an heroic record of defending their land and faith against Muslim attack

A Sikh who claims that Islam is based on “deception, fraud and surprise attack” is set to become the first non-white member of the British National Party. Rajinder Singh, 78, who emigrated from the Punjab region of India in 1967, said yesterday that he would be honoured to become a member of the BNP because it is the “only party who has the guts to say the word Muslim”. “It’s a natural process in the Muslim psyche, to take over. The fear of Islam is well founded, well justified,” he told The Times. “I don’t hate Muslims. By definition a Sikh is supposed to love all — even the enemy.”

The retired schoolteacher will be put forward by the far Right party’s executive as its first non-white member after it makes changes to its constitution. The BNP was forced to agree to the changes in September after the Equality and Human Rights Commission took legal action against the party claiming that its rules, which restricted membership to “indigenous Caucasians”, were a breach of the Race Relations Act. Its membership is currently frozen because of the legal action, but once BNP members agree to the changes in a national ballot, expected in the next three months, Mr Singh will be put forward as a member.

The BNP has accepted only white members since its foundation in 1982, leading to widespread accusations that it is a racist organisation. Its leader, Nick Griffin, has a conviction for inciting racial hatred. But Mr Singh, who provided a character reference for Mr Griffin at his trial, said that he was a long-term supporter and was prepared to overlook the issue of racism. “I think Britain is a lot more important than me. I have to put my own ego aside and think for Britain. They were (racist) but if they pass this bill they will not be.”

The BNP often campaigns about the “Islamification” of Britain, claiming that “colonisation” by Muslims is destroying Anglo-Saxon heritage. Mr Singh told The Times that Britain was in danger of being taken over by Muslims and the BNP was the only party prepared to do anything about it. He blames Islam for the death of his father during the partition of India in 1947, which led to the deaths of an estimated two million Sikhs, Muslims and Hindus. “I am a victim of Islamic aggression. The individual Muslim is a good guy. He is my neighbour, he is working hard. But when they are all together, everybody should be very fearful. The other parties are not standing up for the national interest.”

John Walker, a spokesman for the BNP, said that Mr Griffin was in favour of Mr Singh’s membership once the constitution was changed. “I don’t think it will make a massive change to the party. It doesn’t change our stance on immigration. People like Rajinder accept the party’s position. He’s a guest of our country: he agrees to abide by our laws and customs.”

Mr Singh said that the issue of Islam was not the only reason he supported the BNP, adding that the other parties were “covered in black paint” over the expenses saga.

SOURCE



Latest political brainwave in Britain: NHS will provide free marriage guidance

Talking therapies are generally useless but so is the NHS on many occasions so I suppose it is a fit. They already support acupuncture. Getting real medicine -- like getting diagnostic tests done -- however, is often too hard. The NHS is run by politics not science or economics

Couples are to be offered marriage guidance counselling for free on the NHS, in a move which has drawn strong condemnation from patients and doctors' groups. Couples with relationship problems will be offered free sessions for up to six months, as part of a £270 million programme to increase the provision of "talking therapies" for the public, Andy Burnham, the health secretary, will announce this week.

Doctors and patients' groups said they were "horrified" by the use of NHS resources for relationship advice when patients with cancer and dementia were being denied treatment they desperately needed.

Mr Burnham will say on Thursday that "when couples hit a rocky patch, a bit of help and support can stop it spiralling out of control". He will instruct GPs to follow new guidance which says that if relationship problems are causing depression, up to 20 sessions of couples counselling can be offered, over the course of six months. Currently, most people seeking help from services like Relate pay between £45 and £60 per session, meaning the free counselling packages will be worth around £1,000 per couple. The NHS is expected to pay existing marriage guidance services, and newly-trained counsellors to provide the therapy.

Doctors and patients groups last night attacked the recommendation, contained in guidance by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE). NICE has repeatedly come under fire for decisions to reject life-extending drugs for cancer and treatment to reduce symptoms of dementia.

On Thursday, NICE was accused by charities of "condemning patients" to an early death by rejecting the use of Nexavar, a drug which can extend the lives of liver cancer, arguing that its £9 million annual cost – £3,000 a month per patient – could not be justified.

Nick James, professor of clinical oncology at the Cancer Research UK Institute for Cancer Studies said: "I am horrified, in particular because of the way these decisions are taken without public debate. "I think most people would say treatment for those who are sick with cancer should be top of our list, and I would really question whether these kinds of efforts to preserve marriages are a matter for the state."

NICE has previously restricted the use of drugs to limit the effects of Alzheimer's, costing £2 a day, while provoking further controversy in May when it ruled in favour of alternative therapies like acupuncture for back pain, despite admitting there was little evidence they worked.

Michael Summers, Vice-President of the Patients Association, urged NICE and the Government to "get their priorities right". "If we had the luxury of untold sums of money, maybe we would think about paying for couples counselling," he said. "As things stand, people are still waiting for urgent treatment, being denied drugs for cancer, and dementia, and it seems inappropriate at the very least to start using public money in this way".

SOURCE



Can British schools be freed from the ruinous grip of the British government?

Ed Balls doesn't understand that the best engine for raising standards is not ministerial diktat, but the devolution of power to parents, says Matthew d'Ancona

Michael Gove is famous within and outside the Palace of Westminster as a man you want on your side in a quiz: so much so that he sets the questions for his fellow Tory MPs when they want to test their general knowledge. So Ed Balls was taking a serious risk in the Queen's Speech debate on Thursday when he challenged the Shadow Schools Secretary to answer a GCSE question. "Explain how a fluoride atom can change into a fluoride ion," Mr Balls raged across the Dispatch Box – an unsettling mix of Magnus Magnusson and Jake LaMotta. Did he mean "fluorine"? No matter – this was never going to fox Mr Gove, who was obviously paying attention in the lab at Robert Gordon's College, Aberdeen. "We all know that atoms, whether fluoride or otherwise, are made up of protons, neutrons and electrons," he said. "The way to transform an atom into an ion is by adding or taking away an electron."

Let the scores on the doors show that the Shadow Schools Secretary won that particular round. What is certain is that there are many more such rounds to come in this particular battle. The next general election will probably be dominated by three issues: economic competence; change versus experience; and whether the public can stand another four years of Gordon Brown (a question which, sadly for the Prime Minister, rather answers itself). But if one is looking for an area of policy that truly showcases the difference between Labour and the Conservatives, the resilient distinction between Left and Right, it is education.

In the schools Bill announced in the Queen's Speech, Mr Balls proposes a host of "pupil guarantees", "parent guarantees" and new powers for local authorities and the Secretary of State "to intervene to raise standards in schools". It is a centraliser's charter. As the Lib Dems' education spokesman, David Laws, said on Thursday, recalling Douglas Jay's famous dictum: "There is no better version of the man in Whitehall and Westminster who thinks that he knows best than the Secretary of State."

It was Nye Bevan's ambition "to be able to hear the clatter of the bedpan on the hospital ward, in the office of the minister": Mr Balls, for his part, wants to be able hear the squeak of the marker pen on the classroom whiteboard.

And, to be fair, the Schools Secretary is that most rare of creatures: an honest centraliser. "If we simply leave it to local decision-making," he asked on Thursday "or, as we know from the Conservatives, basically opting out entirely from the national curriculum of the state system and having a much more market-based free-for-all, it might work for some children, but how can we guarantee that a child from a particularly disadvantaged background, whose parents may be less engaged, will get the necessary support? How can we make sure that we deliver social justice in that way?"

There is something both extraordinary and pathetic in a Government as arthritic, broke and impotent as this one suddenly issuing an inventory of "guarantees": promissory notes to future generations. It is true that guarantees do not cost anything, and therefore have a specious appeal to ministers at a time of fiscal tightening. But that's about it. The idea that central prescription can end this country's educational crisis has been tested to destruction. Pledges, targets, a tidal wave of bureaucracy: in many cases, all this prodding and poking from Whitehall has ended up compounding the problem. This is the 12th education Bill to be published in 12 years of New Labour: indeed, little more than a week has passed since the parliamentary debate concluded on the last one (the Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Act 2009).

The instinct of the Left is to offer "guarantees" policed by the state. The instinct of the Right is – or should be – to champion freedoms. The Cameroons have embraced a fundamental principle of public service reform that became apparent to Tony Blair only in his last years as Prime Minister and has never been accepted by Brown: namely, that the best engine for raising standards is not ministerial fiat or Whitehall diktat, but the devolution of power to parents, governors and head teachers.

Mr Gove and his colleagues do not espouse the educational "free market" of Mr Balls's caricature. Rather, they claim, with good reason, that public services thrive when institutions are localised and as close to autonomous as possible: not branches of a homogeneous national system but the outcrop of each local community. This is the lesson of modern education reform, from the transformation of schools in East Harlem to the grant-maintained sector in this country during the last Tory government and the independent state schools in Sweden that are the direct inspiration of the reforms proposed by Messrs Cameron and Gove. When schools are set free, they prosper: only a few weeks ago, Harris City Academy in Crystal Palace became the first school to receive a perfect Ofsted score under the new system of inspections. Before this school became an academy, 90 per cent of its pupils failed to get five decent GCSEs.

If there is such a thing as Cameronism, it is based on an essentially optimistic view of human nature: citizens will step up to the plate, businessmen will get behind local schools, parents will become involved. This is a sharp contrast to the Left-wing pessimism embodied by the Schools Secretary: the insistence that only Whitehall and town hall can ensure educational success and social justice, that big government is the only force that stands between our children and brutish anarchy.

I know which philosophy I prefer. But I also hope that the Cameroons embark upon their reform of schools with clear sight and one eye on the lessons of history. As Kenneth Clarke and John Patten can attest, the education establishment is a vicious beast when provoked: the local education authorities, teaching unions and their allies in the schools department will do anything in their power to scupper any reform that redistributes power and threatens vested interests. Parents will be misinformed at the council taxpayer's expense. There will be strike threats, warnings of turmoil in the classroom, the risk that children will be sent home.

The recoil will be swift and ferocious. That, of course, should encourage the Cameroons and reassure them that what they are doing is real and worthwhile, rather than cosmetic. It follows that they will require serious nerve and adamantine political will as much as the right ideas. Mr Gove certainly knows his ions. But, as he well knows, the challenges ahead will test much more than his grasp of chemistry.

SOURCE



Water doesn't improve your skin, scientists say

Aside from having good genes, the one surefire way of having good skin late in life is to be born and bred in a foggy climate where you rarely see the sun -- as in England. English women look 20 years younger than they are to Australian eyes and women from sunny Australia look prematurely aged to the English

Drinking lots of water doesn't give you a clearer complexion, according to scientists who now claim fruit and vegetables are the key to good skin. The findings are contrary to the advice that has been followed by many women, including Hollywood actresses and catwalk models, for many years.

The British Nutrition Foundation has claimed that a balanced diet and sunscreen are much more effective at keeping skin looking plump and young. Its Food For Skin report highlights a lack of any robust studies backing up the popular advice that water makes the complexion glow.

Report author, Heather Yuregir, said: “Just drinking water for the sake of drinking water really has no effect on improving the appearance of skin. It is just a common misconception.”

Vitamins A, B, C and E contained in a range of fruit and vegetables are all crucial for keeping the skin cells healthy. Not eating enough of them can result in problems such as scurvy, dermatitis or dry, scaly skin.

However, the report highlights that drinking plenty of water is still essential to good health. Smoking and exposure to the sun are what ages skin the most. Mrs Yuregir said: “Fruit and veg can keep your skin functioning as it should and keep it looking healthy. “And sun cream is really recommended to prevent the signs of ageing because the majority of the signs of ageing that appear on the skin are caused by sun damage.”

SOURCE



Another British foot-shooter

We read:

"Ben Elton has been forced to apologise for his royal rant on Good News Week which enraged Brits this week. The comedian and writer's opinions on the monarchy, British sporting prowess and more have disgusted the British and led to several newspapers - including the Daily Mail, The Telegraph and The Sun - running outraged stories about his comments on the comedy show.

Displaying his vitriolic wit and sarcasm on the comedy show, Elton made a series of comments regarding the UK, calling the Queen "a sad little old lady", Prince Philip a "mad old bigot", joking about sex with Margaret Thatcher and saying Prince Charles was just a "disillusioned ex-hippy".

He said London had scored the 2012 Olympics in order to give Britons some chance at sporting success and because the rest of the world felt sorry for the British when it came to athletic prowess, and launched a royal rant against the Queen calling her "a sad little old lady who lives in state sponsored accommodation". On sex with Thatcher he said: "She sort of annoyed me because she would always want to smoke afterwards and I hated that because that was so dirty".

Source

He obviously does not want most Brits to watch his shows or buy his books -- because many won't after this.





21 November, 2009

Another Vast Jewish Conspiracy

British media and society are gripped by lies about a "secret" Israel lobby controlling foreign policy. Why such nonsense? The article below does not tell us. So let me mention one thing: The presence of Jews such as the Miliband brothers in prominent positions in the British government does feed such paranoia. Jewish prominence in all walks of life has of course long been common in any country where there are Jews but the holocaust should remind us that this provokes destructive envy. Yet seeking such prominence seems to be very Jewish. It is of course unfair but if the remarkable Miliband duo had the interests of their fellow Jews at heart, they would retire from public life -- but I suspect that is not in their genes to do so. If Jews valued their survival as they should, they would all try to lead entirely private lives -- but the lesson of history appears to be that that is not going to happen. Yet it is perfectly possible to lead a full and happy life in obscurity. Many do. I myself repeatedly turn away opportunities for personal publicity. Personal relationships and writing a few small things on the net keep me perfectly happy. As a brilliant Jewish Rabbi once said: "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth" (Matthew 5:5). And if you look about you, you will see that they are. There are very few Jews among the 6 billion people of the world

Here is a small selection of events that have taken place in Britain since the end of Israel's Operation Cast Lead in Gaza earlier this year.

The government has imposed a partial arms embargo on Israel and failed to vote against the Goldstone report in the U.N . The charities War on Want and Amnesty International U.K. have both promoted a book by the anti-Israeli firebrand Ben White, tellingly called "Israeli Apartheid: A Beginner's Guide." The Trades Union Congress at its annual conference has called for boycotts of Israeli products as well as a total arms embargo.

In the media, the Guardian newspaper has stepped up its already obsessive campaign against the Jewish state to the extent that the paper's flagship Comment is Free Web site frequently features two anti-Israeli polemics on one and the same day. The BBC continues to use its enormous influence over British public opinion to whitewash anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial in the Middle East. Its Web site, for example, features a profile of Hamas that makes no mention of the group's virulent hatred of Jews or its adherence to a "Protocols of Zion"-style belief in world-wide Jewish conspiracies.

Readers may be surprised to learn, therefore, that the British media and political establishment is apparently cowering under the sway of a secretive cabal of Zionist lobbyists who have all but extinguished critical opinions of Israel from the public domain. Such charges have been aired to mass critical acclaim this week in a landmark documentary, "Inside Britain's Israel Lobby," on Channel 4—the same outlet that offered Iran's Holocaust-denying president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, an uninterrupted, seven-minute propaganda slot on Christmas Day last year.

The makers of the documentary —top Daily Mail columnist Peter Oborne and TV journalist James Jones—have also written about their program in the Guardian. Both furiously deny that they are peddling conspiracy theories. But the mindset we are dealing with was neatly exposed by the authors' own explanation on how their suspicions were aroused that something sinister is at work in the corridors of British power. It all transpired, they told readers ominously, during an address earlier this year by Conservative Party leader David Cameron at a dinner hosted by the Conservative Friends of Israel.

"The dominant event of the previous 12 months had been the Israeli invasion of Gaza," they wrote. "We were shocked Cameron made no reference in his speech to the massive destruction it caused, or the 1,370 deaths that resulted, or for that matter the invasion itself. Indeed, our likely future prime minister went out of his way to praise Israel because it 'strives to protect innocent life.' This remark was not intended satirically."

Since it is inconceivable, the authors obviously believe, that anyone could honestly credit Israel with anything other than the most damnable motives it must therefore follow that those who do in fact praise the Jewish state must be being paid or bullied into doing so.

If you think this all sounds familiar, you'd be right. Messrs. Oborne and Jones produced an extensive pamphlet accompanying the documentary, which openly claimed inspiration from none other than John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, authors of "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy" —another conspiracy theory alleging malign Zionist influence in the United States.

But if Messrs. Mearsheimer and Walt at least felt the need to dress up their polemic in pseudo-academic wrapping paper, the sheer amateurishness of the British documentary they inspired is breathtaking. There was the endless superimposition of the Israeli Star of David on to the British flag, which, along with some absurdly melancholic background music, was presumably designed to prepare viewers for an astonishing series of revelations. But of course such revelations actually never materialized.

It turns out from the documentary itself that the allegedly secretive Jewish donors have been quite open in declaring their interests in accordance with the law. One of them, Poju Zabludowicz, the billionaire funder of the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre (BICOM) is good friends with Madonna —not exactly the kind of company you'd choose if you were trying to hide behind a veil of obscurity.

Much is also made of the influence of Friends of Israel groupings in the British Parliament. Such allegations are, of course, rendered ridiculous with a moment's reflection on the countervailing influence of vast amounts of Arab oil money, not to mention the fact that membership in such groups for many parliamentarians is either purely formal or outright meaningless. Michael Ancram, for example, a former Northern Ireland minister and a member of Conservative Friends of Israel for more than 30 years, is famous for calling for talks with Hamas.

Given the paucity of the arguments, it would be tempting to dismiss the whole thing as unimportant. Would that we could. The documentary has already provoked a torrent of abuse against British Jews, not least on Channel 4's widely read Web site, whose moderators have seen fit to approve dozens of postings about the Zionist lobby's "seditious behavior," its "disgusting attack on British democracy," "the hand of global Zionism at work," and several along the lines of the following, which said flatly: "We want our country back. The agents of a foreign power embedded at all levels of our government and politics need flushing out."

If this sort of language takes hold, a bad situation in Britain may be about to get a whole lot worse.

Jewish leadership organizations have long feared accusations of divided loyalty between Britain and Israel and, ironically given the charges now being made against them, are frequently criticized in their own communities for failing to be sufficiently robust in Israel's defense. The risk is that some may now be panicked into silence.

Non-Jews who call for a more reasoned discussion of Israel —already a small and diminishing group in Britain— will likely face additional slanders against their integrity: Since there is supposedly no reasonable case to be made in favor of the Jewish state, we must have sold out to the "Lobby." Such calumnies cannot be allowed to stand. Now more than ever, the forces of reason and decency must continue the fight to be heard.

SOURCE



Reports critical of major British public hospital over child abuse

Whistleblower fired rather than heeded. "Rocking the boat" is the one unforgiveable sin in a bureaucracy. Too bad about the patients

Great Ormond Street Hospital failed to answer senior doctors’ justified concerns about the clinic which failed Baby P [who died of abuse from his carers], according to two secret reports. The hospital provided the doctors at the Haringey child protection clinic where Baby P was a patient, and was the “lead agency” for child abuse, running the clinic with Haringey Primary Care Trust.

The reports, seen by The Daily Telegraph, say that child safety at the clinic was a matter for “grave concern” and that Great Ormond Street managers failed to act adequately on “significant problems” identified by the most senior doctors at the clinic more than a year before Baby P’s death. Instead, the “most vocal” was removed from her job, they say. There was inadequate staffing at the clinic, and “the workload of the consultant team was excessive”.

One doctor, Michelle Zalkin, told the investigators that Great Ormond Street and Haringey managers created a “very hostile environment” which became “quite unbearable”. They communicated, she claimed, largely by “shouty emails and Post-it notes”.

In April 2006, the four most senior consultants at the clinic wrote a joint letter to managers warning of the “very high risk” of a tragedy without more staff. They said their concerns had been “trivialised”. Some action was taken, the reports say, but staffing was cut further and Dr Kim Holt, the consultant identified as “the most vocal,” complained of being “targeted” by managers. She was removed from her job and remains on “special leave” on full pay. Two other consultants resigned and the fourth, Dr Sukanta Banerjee, went off sick, though she has since returned.

By the time Baby P, identified as Peter Connolly, came to the clinic in 2007, there were no experienced consultants and he was seen by a locum, Dr Sabah al-Zayyat, who missed his broken back. Two days later, the 17 month-old was found dead in his cot with broken ribs, lacerations to his head, a finger tip missing, broken teeth, and scores of bruises.

One of the reports, commissioned by NHS London, the strategic health authority, into Dr Holt’s case, finds the consultants’ concerns were “genuine and well-founded”. It is a conclusion echoed by the other report, by Prof Jo Sibert and Dr Deborah Hodes, experts in child protection, into the appointment of Dr al-Zayyat.

The NHS London report says the concerns were “taken seriously” and some action followed but there was “no evidence” that the main worry, consultants’ workload, was “adequately addressed”. The number of consultant posts was reduced after the complaints, from four to three. Since Baby P, it has been increased to nine posts.

The report says the Great Ormond Street manager responsible for the clinic, David Elliman, claimed the problems did not affect patient safety. “We would not agree,” the investigators say. They describe Dr Holt as “highly committed” and say: “We do not consider Dr Holt has been directly targeted, but we do consider that she is entitled to feel aggrieved.”

Dr Holt, who has lodged a formal grievance against Great Ormond Street, refused to comment. A hospital spokesman denied victimisation and said they were keen to resolve any issues with her amicably but could not comment further.

SOURCE



British children get legal right to good education

Children will be legally guaranteed the right to a good education under new legislation that teachers fear will descend into a “whingers’ [whiner's] charter”. An education Bill to be unveiled will create a set of pupil and parent “guarantees” for the first time – outlining what families can expect from the state school system in England. This includes one-to-one tuition for pupils struggling in the basics, five hours of PE every week, the right to “high quality” cultural activities and a promise that all schools will promote healthy eating, active lifestyles and mental wellbeing. [And provide free apple pie, no doubt]

In a hugely contentious move, parents will be able to complain directly the Local Government Ombudsman if schools and councils fail to meet the guarantees. Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary, has already admitted that mothers and fathers could eventually take schools to court as a “last resort”. It prompted claims from head teachers’ leaders that the proposals would turn into a “whingers’ charter” and open the door to litigation. The Association of School and College Leaders also warned that the laws risked creating one of the most “centrally prescriptive” education systems in the world – stifling innovation.

Labour wants many of the new “guarantees” to be introduced by September next year, suggesting ministers will attempt to push the proposed legislation through Parliament before the forthcoming General Election.

John Dunford, ASCL general secretary, said the plans would put many head teachers’ jobs “on the line”. “Raising so many aspects of education to the status of a ‘guarantee’ will have the effect of making everything quasi-statutory. It will take statute into realms it has never previously covered,” he said. “Instead of the increasingly diverse system that the government has often said that it wants to encourage, England will have one of the most centrally prescriptive systems in the world. Researchers have stated that English heads are among the most autonomous; these ‘guarantees’ tell a very different story.

“School leaders are extremely concerned that these ‘guarantees’ will turn into a whingers’ charter for the more litigious parents to complain, first to the head, then to the governors, then to the Local Government Ombudsman service... This will create an immense amount of work for school leaders, who are currently trying, with government encouragement, to create more productive relationships with parents.”

Labour’s education Bill will set out 23 guarantees for pupils and 15 for parents that must be met. The pupils’ charter will say all primary and secondary pupils should have the “opportunity to have their say about standards of behaviour in their school” from spring 2010. Children identified as gifted and talented should have written confirmation of the extra work they need to ensure they are stretched and every pupil should eventually have the right to five hours of “cultural activities” in or out of school every week, including visits to libraries, museums and performing arts centres. Children over 11 will have a personal tutor to ensure “any learning needs or issues are quickly addressed”, while teenagers will be legally entitled to study one of the Government’s new diploma qualifications.

Under the guarantee, parents will have the right to demand information about their child's performance and overall school standards and regular face-to-face meetings with designated teachers. By 2010, they are expected to have access to a range of additional services including “information and support on parenting skills”.

Mothers and fathers can complain to head teachers if they believe schools are failing to meet the pledge. Complaints are then referred to the local authority and ultimately the Local Government Ombudsman. Mr Balls has previously admitted that – if these avenues fail to provide a resolution – a parent could take a school to court in the form of a judicial review.

A spokesman for the Department for Children, Schools and Families said: "It's absolutely right that parents are given concrete guarantees of clear discipline; close contact with teachers; intensive catch-up classes if their children are falling behind; and education and training for all 16 and 17-year-olds. "This is not telling schools to reinvent the wheel - they should already be doing this. This is about setting out in law what pupils and parents should expect from their schools and making sure that happens wherever they are in the country. "This simply will not lead to a flood of court cases against schools. There will be a clear process so teachers, heads, governing bodies and local authorities can deal with any complaint - as they already do with the vast majority of issues. "If they do not, we've now given the Local Government Ombudsman powers to hear parents' complaints and recommend that schools take remedial action. If they still will not, the Secretary of State will be able to intervene and direct schools to act."

Nick Gibb, the Tory shadow schools minister, said: “Ed Balls’s plan to see head teachers in court defending themselves against parents is expensive, time-consuming and completely misses the point about giving parents more control over their child’s education. “Far from a system of legal guarantees which would allow mainly wealthier parents to take schools to court, what we need is to give parents a genuine choice by opening up the system.”

David Laws, the Liberal Democrat children's spokesman, said: "Only an arch centraliser like Ed Balls could believe that the only way to empower parents and pupils would be to create a vast bureaucratic structure of 'rights' without the means to deliver them. "Instead of giving real freedom and rights to pupils, parents and schools, Ed Balls' proposals are likely to prove a license for litigation and will raise expectations without creating a mechanism to raise standards."

SOURCE



Floods hit UK as nation suffers heaviest rain on record

Warmists assured us for years that global warming would bring drought, so this proves ...?

The full and devastating impact of England's worst recorded day of rain was still emerging today as tributes were paid to a policeman swept away by floodwaters while trying to save others. PC Bill Barker was helping motorists stranded on a bridge over the Derwent in the Cumbrian town of Workington when it collapsed. His body was discovered hours later on a nearby beach.

The Environment Agency said that the flooding across the region was so severe that such an event was likely to happen once in 1000 years. The rainfall, on to an already saturated terrain, was the highest level measured in England since records began.

Meteorologists recorded 314mm of rain in 24 hours and flood warnings remained in place across the North West of England, parts of Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.

The bridge from which PC Barker fell to his death was one of at least four to be washed away. Cumbria County Council issued a warning to motorists and pedestrians to avoid using such crossings as they could be extremely dangerous. Hundreds of homes and businesses were evacuated, many of them ruined by floodwater and mud.

Emergency services continued to rescue those still trapped overnight. They urged anyone who had gone to see the destruction for themselves to leave because their vehicles were blocking roads and hampering efforts to reach the worst-hit areas.

The rescue operation continued overnight in Cockermouth, the town worst hit by the flooding, with people being winched to safety. The two rivers that run through the town burst their banks, blocking roads and forcing more than 200 people to be helped to safety.

SOURCE



Hadley hacked: warmist conspiracy exposed?

Andrew Bolt below digs in to the deliberate fraud exposed in the released emails from Britain's premier climate "science" organization. The post is a long one so I reproduce only the opening blast below. I have however also posted a copy of the whole thing here, "just in case"

8.15 PM UPDATE: The Hadley CRU director admits the emails seem to be genuine:

The director of Britain’s leading Climate Research Unit, Phil Jones, has told Investigate magazine’s TGIF Edition tonight ..."It was a hacker. We were aware of this about three or four days ago that someone had hacked into our system and taken and copied loads of data files and emails."…

TGIF asked Jones about the controversial email discussing “hiding the decline”, and Jones explained what he was trying to say….

So the 1079 emails and 72 documents seem indeed evidence of a scandal involving most of the most prominent scientists pushing the man-made warming theory - a scandal that is one of the greatest in modern science. I’ve been adding some of the most astonishing in updates below - emails suggesting conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organised resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more. If it is as it now seems, never again will “peer review” be used to shout down sceptics.

This is clearly not the work of some hacker, but of an insider who’s now blown the whistle. Not surprising, then, that Steve McIntyre reports:

Earlier today, CRU cancelled all existing passwords. Actions speaking loudly.

But back to the original post - and the most astonishing of the emails so far…

***************

Hackers have broken into the database of the Hadley GRU unit - one of the world’s leading alarmist centres - and put the files they stole on the Internet, on the grounds that the science is too important to be kept under wraps.

The ethics of this are dubious, to say the least. But the files suggest, on a very preliminary glance, some other very dubious practices, too, and a lot of collusion - sometimes called “peer review”. Or even conspiracy.

A warning, of course. We can only say with a 90 per cent confidence interval that these emails are real.

(ALTERNATIVE link to the files. And another link.)

UPDATE

Ethics alert! (my bolding - and I’ve update this post with the full alleged email, now):

From: Phil Jones

To: ray bradley ,mann@XXXX, mhughes@XXXX

Subject: Diagram for WMO Statement

Date: Tue, 16 Nov 1999 13:31:15 +0000

Dear Ray, Mike and Malcolm,

Once Tim’s got a diagram here we’ll send that either later today or first thing tomorrow.

I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline. Mike’s series got the annual land and marine values while the other two got April-Sept for NH land N of 20N. The latter two are real for 1999, while the estimate for 1999 for NH combined is +0.44C wrt 61-90. The Global estimate for 1999 with data through Oct is +0.35C cf. 0.57 for 1998.

Thanks for the comments, Ray.

Cheers

Phil

Prof. Phil Jones

Climatic Research Unit Telephone XXXX

School of Environmental Sciences Fax XXXX

University of East Anglia

Norwich .

Nice. This could be fun.

UPDATE 2

Surely these emails can’t be genuine. Surely the world’s most prominent alarmist scientists aren’t secretly exchanging emails like this, admitting privately they can’t find the warming they’ve been so loudly predicting?:

From: Kevin TrenberthTo: Michael MannSubject: Re: BBC U-turn on climateDate: Mon, 12 Oct 2009 08:57:37 -0600Cc: Stephen H Schneider , Myles Allen , peter stott , “Philip D. Jones” , Benjamin Santer , Tom Wigley , Thomas R Karl , Gavin Schmidt , James Hansen , Michael Oppenheimer

Hi all

Well I have my own article on where the heck is global warming ? We are asking that here in Boulder where we have broken records the past two days for the coldest days on record. We had 4 inches of snow. The high the last 2 days was below 30F and the normal is 69F, and it smashed the previous records for these days by 10F. The low was about 18F and also a record low, well below the previous record low.

This is January weather (see the Rockies baseball playoff game was canceled on saturday and then played last night in below freezing weather).

Trenberth, K. E., 2009: An imperative for climate change planning: tracking Earth’s global energy. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 1, 19-27, doi:10.1016/j.cosust.2009.06.001. [1][PDF] (A PDF of the published version can be obtained from the author.)***

The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.***

This has to be a forgery, surely. Because if it isn’t, we’re about to see the unpicking of a huge scandal. I mean, the media will follow this up, right? In the meantime, use with care.

Much more here



Welfare in Britain: how help becomes a hindrance

With the shift of emphasis from welfare to wellbeing, the state reinforces the sense that we are unable to cope with life

Writing in the Guardian recently, Madeleine Bunting argued that bankers and benefit claimants have one thing in common: ‘their capacity to provoke popular resentment’.

Certainly, the welfare state, and the dependent status that comes with it, has long been regarded by its critics as the cause of everything that is going wrong in society. It is blamed for the breakdown of community; it is blamed for the various deprivations and depravities associated with the creation of a dependent underclass, from anti-social behaviour to child abuse. It is even blamed for the failing UK economy, for unsustainable public spending, ‘hidden’ unemployment and negative growth. Yet, for all that the welfare state finds itself falsely accused of a multitude of problems, the charge of welfare dependency is fairly levelled.

While there are only 800,000 official job seekers, more than 2.5million are claiming incapacity benefit, and hundreds of thousands more are reliant on housing benefit and income support, amongst other things. In all, there are nearly five million people out of work and claiming benefits at the moment. What is perplexing is that for all the concern about public spending levels – particularly on welfare – critics do not oppose the retention of this ‘safety net’.

Instead, the question asked of this safety net is how big it should be and how far it should be cast? It is pretty clear, for instance, that the state should be stepping in right now to address the immediate needs of those most affected by the recession. But in other areas of life, especially people’s interior lives, their emotions and feelings, state intervention is far less helpful.

Take, for example, a recent report by the Mental Health Foundation. Here it is argued that the economic downturn is having an ‘adverse effect on the nation’s wellbeing’. This shift, from focusing on people’s welfare to attending to their wellbeing, brings problems of its own. The use of this term today tends to justify a more intrusive and extensive role for the state: through its appointed experts, the state can effectively manage people’s lives for them. And in doing so it assumes that people in general lack the resources to cope with life.

On all sides of the debate there is a failure to grasp just how profound this shift has already been, and how ingrained in the wider culture the problem of dependency has become. Beyond the confines of the welfare state, the micro-politics of lifestyle and therapy, ostensibly aimed at promoting our wellbeing, are in fact making us all dependent on the intervention of third parties.

‘People can’t cope’ is the underlying assumption. Hence a ‘surge in children taken into care’ is blamed on the recession, because (we are told) it is ‘inevitable’ that as people get poorer they smack their kids, suffer breakdowns, and turn to drugs and alcohol. It is acknowledged almost as an afterthought that the headline-grabbing child abuse case of Baby P (see Fixing ‘Broken Britain’?, by David Clements) may also have had something to do with this. In a similar vein, the Audit Commission has warned that local authorities need to be prepared for the ‘surge in social problems such as addiction, alcoholism and domestic violence’ that we can expect as a consequence of the ‘second wave’ of the recession.

This concern with people’s potentially troubling behaviour, about the risks they face and about their emotional and relationship needs, is unsurprisingly having an impact on welfare policy. All the political parties claim to support ‘radical’ welfare reform and issue statements about imposing tougher conditions on the workless.

The Tories, for example, say they want to protect us from ‘stifling’ big government and to end ‘state control over the lives of individuals’. But like New Labour, they still understand the lot of benefit claimants in terms of people’s needs and personal inadequacies; that is, they lack self-esteem or self-confidence. This is rather different to the traditional Tory view that the workless are lazy, bone-idle or work-shy. There is nobody telling the jobless to get on their bikes anymore, as old Tory warhorse Norman – now Lord – Tebbit once did. The new Tories might want to go along with Tebbit, but only so long as the stabilisers are left on.

Like New Labour, the Tories will lead benefit claimants down the Pathway to Work, but never quite let go. So even after a job-seeker has succeeded in getting a job, there will be ‘sustained mentoring and development advice’ from the touchy-feely Tories. Today’s official interest in the minutiae of our lives does not look like ending with the demise of New Labour; it is set to continue under David Cameron’s Tories.

So, instead of telling people that they should get married because that’s the right thing to do, a Cameron government would offer couples ‘relationship counselling at critical moments in their lives’. As if to demonstrate he has no political convictions one way or the other, self-styled ‘Red Tory’ Phillip Blond says he doesn’t object to lone parents because they are lone parents. Rather he objects to them because their children do badly at school, or get addicted to drugs and alcohol, or go on to commit crimes when they get older. Similarly, right-wing journalist, former banker and critic of the welfare state, James Bartholomew, claims that it is the damage done to children rather than the fact that they’re born out of wedlock, that he finds so objectionable.

The belief that the welfare state is to blame for Britain’s problems draws on a profound sense of people’s inability to run their own lives. If anything, the critics of the welfare state underestimate the problem of dependency by failing to recognise just how pervasive is this view of people’s incapacity. Dependency is not about the feckless few, it runs much deeper than that.

If we are to defend welfare, we need to work out how it can be a help and not a hindrance, a boost rather than a burden. Whatever the merits of the welfare state, the postwar optimism that inspired it is long gone. It is only when we challenge the pessimism of our own age, and the notion that people are essentially vulnerable, helpless and not to be trusted, rather than robust, resourceful and autonomous, that we will regain our independence.

SOURCE







Must not express a preference for Anglo names

Even in the British Conservative party

"A former Tory Parliamentary candidate was suspended by the party last night after complaining that people bidding to become an MP did not have ‘normal’ English names. Councillor Peter Hobbins is accused of sending racist emails to colleagues attacking the list of prospective Parliamentary candidates for the Orpington seat in Kent.

Mr Hobbins, who stood unsuccessfully for the Tories at the 2001 election and was shortlisted for the London mayoral race, suggested he should change his name to ‘Petrado’ to succeed in the party. One email said: ‘I have been contacted by a Mr Dilon Gumraj and a Zerha Zaidi and others who are all on the approved Conservative Parliamentary Candidates list. ‘Not one of them has a ‘normal’ English name.

‘Why are the Candidates Department so keen on these foreign names?!!!! Maybe I should change my name to something foreign – how does Petrado Indiano Hobbinso sound to you?!’

Mr Hobbins also said he was fed up with reading about ‘Africa’ on the CVs of would-be candidates.

A Tory spokesman said: ‘Councillor Hobbins has been immediately suspended from the Conservative Party and from the Conservative Group on Bromley council and he will play no part in the selection of the Parliamentary candidate. There is no room for racism in the Conservative Party.’

Source

Welfare without the state: "Although the rise of government welfare has had a similar impact on US private welfare as in the UK, the case of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormon Church) has survived the onslaught and is insightful in considering how private welfare can function outside of the state. Members of the church fund the program; on the first Sunday of every month everyone skips two meals and donates the saving from those meals. If a member loses income, becomes unemployed, etc. they meet with their local leader and together they determine the needs of that individual or family, and assistance is given accordingly.”

UK: Common sense isn’t common anymore: "The more a government legislates on our day to day activities, the less we take ownership of those activities ourselves. We begin to lose the ability of self-determination in our responsibilities, and as a consequence we have nothing else to fall back on apart from the rigid framework of state diktat. The disempowerment suffered by individuals under the thumb of the state leads to a stupefaction of social intercourse, and a learned helplessness that infects an ever increasing number of our daily interactions. These observations do not lead me to a negative conclusion in regards to the human condition and our potential for creating autonomous order in a stateless society. Far from it, the same human characteristics that lead to seemingly defeatist and subservient social patterns, are the very characteristics that will enable our liberation from this malaise.”





21 November, 2009

Obscene British "justice" again

Judge orders mother to hand over son to father he despises -- despite the best interests of the child being supposedly paramount

A judge ordered a mother to hand over her distraught young son to her ex-husband despite admitting it would be 'almost cataclysmic' for the child. The boy is happy living with his mother, is doing well at school and fiercely resists the move, a court heard. The 11-year-old child, who cannot be identified for legal reasons, warned that his father had 'ruined my life' and said he would 'punch and kick' rather than leave his mother's home.

But Lord Justice Wall, a leading family judge, gave the woman less than a week to kiss her son goodbye before he is uprooted. She now faces being without her only child at Christmas. Last night a family friend said: 'It is horrific. He has good friends, he is bright and he loves his school, and now he is going to be taken to live two hours away.' Another friend said: 'I don't know how his mother is coping. 'How can it be right to take a boy away from the mother he loves to live with a father who he doesn't even know?' It is understood that the child does not yet know what lies ahead for him.

The child is expected to be taken to his father early next week and it is unclear when his mother will next see him. Last night the boy's father, who lives in an £800,000 detached stone cottage on the edge of a West Country village, declined to comment. A family member on the father's side said: 'The mother just wouldn't let go of her son and wouldn't let him let go. 'It's a very sad situation. You could say she was possessive. They broke up soon after he was born and there had been problems for a long time. She yes'd and no'd an awful lot and sadly broke promises.

'It's been an extremely distressing time for everyone. 'The father is an excellent man who cares deeply for his son so it has been especially hard for him. 'But in a horrible situation like this we recognise that it is also very difficult for the mother so it has been no good for anyone really.' Under the 1989 Children Act, courts must consider the child's interests above all else.

The mother's barrister told the Court of Appeal in London this week that the boy is adamant he wants nothing more to do with his father - with whom he only lived for a few months after his birth before his parents separated. Jane Hoyal told Lord Justice Wall: 'A move from the happy, settled and stable home he has with his mother would be momentous for this young man. 'There is no dispute that he will be very upset, angry and defiant when this hugely disruptive move is implemented.'

But a child psychiatrist and the boy's own court-appointed guardian were unanimous that he is 'suffering emotional harm' due to his alienation from his father, who lives a two-hour drive away. The boy's move to live with his father, who has remarried, was originally ordered by Judge Bond at Bournemouth Family Court earlier this month. That ruling was 'stayed' pending the mother's bid to overturn the decision at the Appeal Court.

But Lord Justice Wall refused permission to appeal. He said the higher court could only intervene if Judge Bond's decision was 'plainly wrong'. Despite the mother's 'ostensible willingness' for the father to have contact with the son, the boy's 'long-term psychological welfare' demanded he live with his father, he added. The father, said Lord Justice Wall, claimed he had found it impossible to build any sort of relationship with his son while he lived with his mother.

Miss Hoyal said the mother had co-operated with all contact arrangements - and gave her 'unconditional support' to her son having a relationship with his father. She told the court the couple had been engaged in 'almost continuous litigation' throughout the boy's life. She said the importance of the boy's relationship with his father had been elevated above all other factors, including the child's own wishes. She said the boy's father and stepmother would often be away working, leaving the boy to be cared for by a nanny.

But Lord Justice Wall said Judge Bond had made a ' sensible, careful, well thought-out and balanced judgment'. He added: 'I appreciate this will be hard for the mother and will be very hard for the boy.'

SOURCE



Tragedy of girl, five, struck by swine flu: Three NHS GPs and a hospital doctor thought she had tonsillitis

Diagnostic tests? Never heard of them!

A five-year-old girl suffering from swine flu died after doctors took two weeks to diagnose her illness, it was claimed last night. Nida Qureshi was seen by three GPs and a hospital doctor who told her parents she may have tonsillitis. By the time doctors discovered that she had the H1N1 virus, the youngster was on a life support machine, her family said. She died eight days later.

Last night relatives said Nida's parents - Zubair, 28, and Raheela, 30, who is pregnant with their second child - believe that their daughter may have survived if swine flu had been detected earlier. Nida's uncle, Jawaid Qureshi, said: 'Her mum, herself a child carer, and dad are very angry that doctors and GPs failed to diagnose it earlier. It's devastating. She may have lived if it had been diagnosed earlier.'

Mr Qureshi said Nida - a 'bright' girl without any underlying health problems - fell ill with a temperature and vomiting on October 19. The family phoned a GP, who advised paracetamol. The next day she went to her doctor and was prescribed antibiotics. Five days later, the family took her back but were told to carry on giving the antibiotics. On November 1, after her condition worsened, the family took her to A&E at their local hospital, Wexham Park, in Slough.

Mr Qureshi said: 'When she was breathing she was in agony. She was coughing a lot as well. The doctor at hospital said it might be tonsillitis but they did not take any blood or urine samples. They prescribed her with more medicine and said: "Go back to the GP if she continues not to feel well". It was a very bad decision to allow her to go home.'

Two days later she had a seizure and never regained consciousness. She was put on a life support machine and finally diagnosed with the H1N1 virus. Nida was transferred to St Mary's Hospital in London.

A spokesman for NHS Berkshire East said: 'We can confirm that a young girl from east Berkshire died at St Mary's Hospital, London, on November 11. She had tested positive for H1N1 swine flu.'

Professor John Oxford, professor of virology at Queen Mary School of Medicine, said her death could have been caused when the swine flu virus moved into her central nervous system. Normally, the virus attacks the lungs. But in extremely rare cases, often affecting children, it can attack the nerve tissue and cause a seizure. He added: 'Diagnosing flu in a five-year-old is extremely difficult. It is also impossible to say if Tamiflu would have made any difference in this case.'

SOURCE



Warmist secrecy cracked by hacker

Hadley CRU has apparently been hacked – hundreds of files released. The details on this are still sketchy, we’ll probably never know what went on. But it appears that Hadley Climate Research Unit has been hacked and many many files have been released by the hacker or person unknown. I’m currently traveling and writing this from an aiprort, but here is what I know so far:

An unknown person put postings on some climate skeptic websites that advertsied an FTP file on a Russian FTP server, here is the message that was placed on the Air Vent today: "We feel that climate science is, in the current situation, too important to be kept under wraps. We hereby release a random selection of correspondence, code, and documents"

The file was large, about 61 megabytes, containing hundreds of files. It contained data, code, and emails from Phil Jones at CRU to and from many people. I’ve seen the file, it appears to be genuine and from CRU. Others who have seen it concur - it appears genuine. There are so many files it appears unlikely that it is a hoax. The effort would be too great.

More HERE



Revealed: The design flaw in energy saving lightbulbs means they become dimmer over time

Energy-saving lightbulbs being used in millions of homes could lose up to 40 per cent of their brightness over the next few years, engineers warned yesterday. A design flaw in compact florescent bulbs mean they become dimmer as they age, a report by the Institution of Engineering and Technology said. Millions could need replacing long before their advertised lifespan of five or six years is reached.

The Government is phasing out traditional bulbs in order to meet Europe's climate change targets. Although other types of low energy bulb are available - including halogen and LED lights - most households are being encouraged to use compact fluorescent lamps. The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs says CFLs use a fifth of the energy of traditional bulbs, saving a typical home at least £37 a year and cutting the UK's carbon dioxide emissions by five million tons.

However, independent retailers and critics say many of the low-energy alternatives are ugly, expensive and produce poor quality light. Doctors have warned that CFLs may cause rashes in light-sensitive patients.

A report in Engineering and Technology Magazine now warns that CFLs lose 'a significant amount of brightness' over time. Even a good quality bulb could lose 20 per cent of its light over its 8,000-hour lifespan - while cheaper bulbs could dim even more. The problem is made worse because some manufacturers exaggerate how much light comes from CLFs in the first place, the report says. 'Consumers could end up with a CFL nearing the end of its life that emits just 60 per cent as much light as a supposedly equivalent incandescent bulb,' the report says. That means a CFL that begins life as bright as a traditional 100watt bulb, could become as dim as a 60watt bulbs.

CFLs give off light when a current passes through a gas-filled tube. The gas glows with ultraviolet radiation which lights up a coating of white phosphor on the inside of the tube. Over time, this coating loses some of its ability to light up.

Other low-energy bulbs don't have the same problem. A halogen light - which uses 70 per cent of the energy of a conventional bulb - remains bright throughout its life. LED bulbs - which are beginning to appear in conventional bulb shapes and brightness - are also more reliable.

Editor in chief of Engineering and Technology Dickon Ross said most people were unaware that CFLs eventually lost their brightness. 'Our article goes someway to explaining consumers' dissatisfaction with CFLs and it's interesting that the major manufacturers have switched their focus to the development of LED lighting,' he said.

The Energy Saving Trust, which is funded by the Government, confirmed CFLs did lose brightness but claimed most people would not notice the difference. Trust-approved bulbs should never fall below 76 per cent of their initial brightness, it added.

SOURCE



A climate scare in Trafalgar Square

Ghost Forest, a new art installation, wants to frighten us into changing our greedy, planet-wrecking ways

A twenty-first century tribute to the Royal Family? A satirical swipe at the Labour government? A mistaken delivery address? At first, it’s difficult to know what to make of the large hunks of dead wood currently cutting a dash in London’s Trafalgar Square.

That is, until you read the info-boards positioned around the installation or encounter the press-released promotional material. At which point Ghost Forest’s meaning, or better still, its message, will become all too clear: all this modern stuff, this industrial development, has come at an environmental cost we’ve been able to ignore for too long. Why? Because it’s always been over there, in Africa, in South America. But not any more. In the form of huge tree stumps it’s been brought close, dumped in our figurative backyard. To quote its creator, the journalist-cum-artist Angela Palmer, it is an awareness-raising, visual expression of the ‘connection between deforestation and climate change’.

Featuring nine huge tree trunks (plus one injured one) which have been dragged across, and then ferried over from the Suhuma forest reserve in western Ghana, Ghost Forest is perhaps not the most appropriate name. With each trunk assigned its own slab on which to lie, a more accurate one would’ve been ‘The Tree Mortuary’. Which is certainly how it feels to walk around it. The trunks are arrayed like a body parts, their angry tangle of roots straining out like the veins and capillaries of gigantic limbs at one end, while at the other end there is just a clean, surgical, lumberjack’s cut. It’s as if you’re being encouraged to look at the results of planetary surgery, to survey the casualities of man’s open-heart conquest of nature. Palmer is clearly not insensible to the effect, judging by her anthropomorphic language. The roots are like ‘nerve-endings’, she says, the rainforests themselves, ‘the world’s “lungs”’.

This isn’t to say unsuspecting visitors were entirely clear as to what the stumps mean. Speaking on Monday, Palmer seemed unconcerned: ‘Many observers will see the stumps as beautiful sculptural objects; others will perhaps see the installation as a scene of devastation, others may see the tree stumps posited in the no-man’s land between the past and the future. For others the installation may represent an overt piece of political activism – a call to arms. I am equally comfortable with all responses.’ Beautiful sculptural objects? A no-man’s land between the past and the future? The most common response, from what I could see, was to stand next to the planet’s ripped-out lungs, and grin for the camera. After all, it’s not everyday some kindly artist leaves nine three-metre wide trunks around central London.

This surely missed Palmer’s point. Because whatever Palmer says, there was a point, a big, blunt change-your-ways point to Ghost Forest. Little wonder those reporting its opening on Monday were in no doubt as to what Ghost Forest was saying. In the words of Art Daily, ‘Ghost Forest’ is ‘a powerful visual statement about climate change’. ‘[A]s a microcosm of planetary overconsumption of expendable resources’, concluded the Londonist, ‘it’s a powerful statement’. Hence this Sunday it will leave London and head to Thorvaldsens Plads in Copenhagen to ‘raise awareness’ before the start of the UN climate change summit in December.

The reviewers had clearly read the promotional material. And this was the problem with Ghost Forest as art. In clued-up reports, in interviews on the Ghost Forest website, and on the 300-word-long, on-site info boards, the meaning of Ghost Forest was all too articulated. If the installation itself was ambiguous, a selection of barely worked-up Ghanaian tree stumps, its message was clear and overwrought. In fact the message could have done without its truncated embodiment in the wooden sculptures – the content here had no need of its form.

Overtly didactic art is nothing new, but what marks a project like the Ghost Forest out is the extent to which the hectoring content is liberated from the material in which it was to be represented. Little wonder that the UK foreign secretary’s special representative for climate change, John Ashworth, was able to praise it before it actually existed as an installation – after all it was the message, not its formal realisation, that was valuable. ‘We need to reach people in other ways as well’, he told Palmer. ‘Since the crisis we face is about who we are before it is about what we should do, the role of art will be critical. So I applaud what you are doing, and wish it success. You will in effect be confronting some of those who pass through Trafalgar Square with the consequence of their choices.’

Confront people with the consequence of their choices? This is art as behaviour-changing device. As Palmer explains on her website: ‘Its location in Trafalgar Square is key: it is one of the world’s most visited tourist sites and the epicentre of Western industrialisation over the past 200 years.’ In other words, for didactic purposes, plonking it in the centre of London allows it to tell as many people off as possible, from tourists to Christmas shoppers. It’s tricky to avoid The Message if you have to walk the long way round it.

Then there’s the element of juxtaposition, of bringing the distant near, of shoving the natural in the face of the social. In the midst of a developed society, ‘an epicentre of industrialisation’, the mortified tree stumps, symbols of the underside of industrial progress, exist to discomfit, to unsettle. They are signs that something is wrong. This is a gesture premised on the perceived complacency of the public, their selfish behaviour. And as if the distaste for the lives of modern citizens wasn’t writ large enough, Palmer is prepared to take her fetish for the primitive and animistic one step further: tomorrow, an Amazonian chief is going to bless the trees in a special ceremony.

Which does make you wonder. Perhaps Palmer is actually being subversive. After all, like Mark McGowan’s attempt to ‘raise awareness’ about water wastage by leaving the tap running in his London gallery, it took Palmer a large ship, and several tonnes of heavy haulage, to drag a symbol of excessive energy consumption to its current resting place. Add to that the power expended by the electricity generators to keep the lights blazing through the night, and Palmer’s carbon footprint must be at least the size of ten large Ghanaian trees. This must surely be one giant environmentalist wheeze, a satire of sanctimony, right?

Perhaps not: ‘The artist considered carefully the carbon footprint which would be incurred in the project’, the info-board tells us, ‘but felt its potential message to millions of people on the impacts of deforestation would outweigh the carbon “spend”. The carbon cost of “Ghost Forest” will be calculated and offset on a ClimateCare project which has introduced more energy efficient cooking stoves to Ghana, meaning fewer trees are needed to provide cooking fuel.’

This is straight-faced contemporary art all right. It is art for those who know the carbon price of everything and the value of nothing. And art without value is not really art at all.

SOURCE



British schools “ignoring needs of brightest pupils”

Too many heads are ignoring the needs of their brightest pupils, one of the country’s leading state school heads said today. Liz Allen, headmistress of Newstead Wood Girls’ School in Bromley, one of the top performing grammar schools in England, told a conference: “I find there is a huge reluctance amongst my secondary head colleagues to focus any kind of real attention, activity or resources on the most able pupils.” She criticised heads for spending too much time trying to convert D grades into C grades at GCSE, rather than helping the brightest pupils “walk on water” and get A* grades.

Mrs Allen, a former president of the Association of Maintained Girls’ Schools, which represents the majority of state girls’ schools, also attacked the Government’s focus on guaranteeing one-to-one coaching for all pupils struggling to keep up in class. “I’m concerned about that – I’m very concerned about it,” she told the Girls’ School Association conference in Harrogate yesterday. “Let’s say I’m not very good at running the 100 metres. If the Government was to pay for me to have a personal tutor to run the 100 metres, would I clip much off my time? Would it be a wise investment? I think not. “I can see huge value in investing one to one time in our independent and successful young learners, though.”

Mrs Allen added that there was far too much focus “on the rather crude stuff of league tables and the D/C grade borderline pupils, rather than on the bright child”. She cited a government-funded research study which showed that, as a result of neglect, bright pupils were often “easily bored, window-gazers, subservient, sometimes reluctant to commit pen to paper”.

She said her school, which was selective, did not receive any money from the Government’s standards fund to provide one-to-one tuition for her pupils. However, despite the lack of money she set aside time for all her pupils to receive individual coaching from the start of their secondary school career. They received the equivalent half a day a week, inserted into six weeks in the middle of each term, when they were given the whole of Thursdays to work with an individual teacher.

She added that girls’ ambitions to succeed could be “crushed” in mixed schools. “In a single sex environment, they’re very concerned about their competitiveness – but they compete to do well rather than compete against each other,” she said. “In a mixed environment, they cease to be competitive. They realise everybody else feels the same. Boys are going to be more dominant.”

SOURCE





20 November, 2009

Condemned to an early death: British rationing body tells liver cancer victims that life-prolonging drug is 'too costly'

Liver cancer sufferers are being condemned to an early death by being denied a new drug on the Health Service, campaigners warn. They criticised draft guidance that will effectively ban the drug sorafenib - which is routinely used in every other country where it is licensed. Trials show the drug, which costs £36,000 a year, can increase survival by around six months for patients who have run out of options.

The Government's rationing body, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice) said the overall cost was 'simply too high' to justify the 'benefit to patients'. However, relatively few would be eligible for the treatment - around 700, or one in four of those diagnosed each year with primary liver cancer.

Nice had claimed it was approving more drugs under End of Life policies introduced in January meant to benefit small numbers of terminally ill people. So far two drugs have been approved for three cancers. But two drugs have been banned under the rules, with a ban pending on three further drugs including sorafenib.

Its treatment of sorafenib contrasts sharply with that of breast cancer drug herceptin, which has received far more funding and attention after successful campaigns. Herceptin, under separate Nice criteria, has been judged to be cost effective. It currently costs £22,000 to administer an annual course of the drug to around 7,000 women - around £154million.

In contrast, the treatment for sorafenib would potentially cost £25million a year. Sorafenib, also called Nexavar, was assessed on different rules but still failed to meet the Nice threshold.

Kate Spall, founder of the Pamela Northcott Fund, which assists cancer patients denied new therapies, last night said cancer sufferers had been sold down the river. She said: 'These policies were specifically designed to help patients with rarer cancer such as liver to access new treatments for a previously untreatable disease. 'This decision will condemn patients to an earlier death than was necessary.' Only 20 per cent of patients with primary liver cancer - where the tumour originates in the liver - are alive one year after diagnosis.

Bayer, which makes the drug and plans to appeal the decision, had offered a scheme where it would provide every fourth packet for free. Dr Harpreet Wasan, a cancer consultant at London's Hammersmith Hospital, said: 'This cancer is not like any other cancer. There is no alternative treatment. Every other drug that has been tried fails to work. 'British doctors were heavily involved in the trials of this drug yet NICE will say we can't prescribe it.'

Nice rates the cost-effectiveness of a drug using a complicated measurement called a 'quality adjusted life year' or QALY. This determines the cost of new treatment by working out how much it improves and extends a life compared with existing treatments. Andrew Dillon, chief executive of Nice, said: 'We have recently changed our approach to appraising high cost treatments which can extend life for terminally ill patients. 'This has meant that more of them are now recommended.'

Professor Jonathan Waxman, a cancer specialist at Imperial College, London, said: 'The only reason Nice has approved any drugs under End of Life rules is because of a High Court ruling and doctors' protests. 'We must have a public debate about how it treats cancer patients.'

The Nice guidance applies to England and Wales. Scotland's equivalent body is yet to make a decision on sorafenib but tends to follow Nice.

Tony Almond, 46, went to the doctor complaining of indigestion in September. Three days later he was diagnosed with terminal liver cancer and told he had a month to live. Mr Almond, a truck driver living in Brackley, near Northampton, and his long-term partner Sharon immediately got married by special licence on October 16. He said: 'We'd been talking about getting married at Christmas but now I was told I had two to four weeks to live. 'It was pretty horrendous, especially when I found I couldn't have the only drug that would help because it was too expensive.'

Cancer specialists applied to Northamptonshire Primary Care Trust for funding, which is a necessary procedure for such drugs prior to approval by Nice, the drugs rationing body. But the request was rejected. With the backing of an NHS consultant in Birmingham, however, he appealed the decision and won. Mr Almond has been taking the drug for two weeks. He said: 'I can honestly say I no longer feel ill. It's a wonder drug and I feel angry that others may be denied the chance we had to fight so hard for.'

Could the Herceptin victory offer hope? It is three years since Ann Marie Rogers won her famous court victory which forced the Health Service to give her - and other breast cancer victims - access to the wonder drug Herceptin. The drug had been turned down by rationing watchdog Nice but Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt told trusts that they could not deny the drug on grounds of costs.

Now another group of cancer sufferers are facing a similar battle but it is unlikely that we will see Andy Burnham, the current Health Secretary, taking a similar stance --because this time the drug that has been turned down, Nexavar, is one that helps against liver cancer. The problem for campaigners is that liver cancer is not as high profile as breast cancer. This is partly down to the fact that fewer people get cancer of the liver than are diagnosed with breast cancer - around 3,000 a year compared with 45,000.

But that is not the whole story. Breast cancer has two charities fighting its corner - Breakthrough Breast Cancer and Breast Cancer Care - both of which attract millions of pounds in donations, and help boost the profile. Other cancers tend to fade into the background. There is, for example, still no prostate cancer screening programme that compares to the major screening programme for breast cancer. Yet around 10,000 of the 35,000 men in the UK diagnosed with prostate cancer each year die from their disease - a similar number to the 11,900 breast cancer victims.

SOURCE



Yes, some jokes can be offensive ... but is Britain losing its sense of humour?

A blonde asks for help with a jigsaw puzzle after struggling for hours to make the pieces fit into the shape of the farmyard rooster pictured on the front of the box. Eventually, her boyfriend says: 'Let's just put all the Cornflakes back in the box.' This is an example of the wit and wisdom of multi-millionaire financier Mark Lowe, who is being sued for sexual discrimination and unfair constructive dismissal by Jordan Wimmer, a 29-year- old Canadian former employee, who happens to be blonde.

Wimmer claims she was the target of Lowe's 'dumb blonde' jokes. She says that even after she was treated in a clinic for severe depression, Lowe continued to bombard her with inappropriate jokes. For his part, he claims he was only having a bit of a laugh, and it never occurred to him that she would take offence.

Clearly, Mark Lowe is not a man with whom many of us would choose to get stuck in a lift. Having a holiday with him would surely be a nightmare. Miss Wimmer says he took prostitutes and escorts to business meetings - charges he hotly denies. The fact that some of us might not enjoy Mark Lowe's company very much, or find his jokes very funny, is only part of the story. The case serves as a good illustration of how dangerous it can be these days to make jokes.

The late Bernard Manning used to have a joke - 'I once got the sack for laughing.' Then after a silence he admitted: 'I was driving a hearse.' It was a sad joke really, for in the end Manning really did get the sack for laughing. His brand of humour was considered too sexist, too racist, too just-about-everything-ist for today's po-faced Britain.

It was only recently, in the wake of the events of September 11 and concerns about Muslim persecution, that the then Home Secretary David Blunkett introduced his Religious Hatred Bill, intending to make it a criminal offence to poke fun at religion - even though this has been the stuff of comedy in all free countries for centuries.

Monty Python's film Life Of Brian has jokes about the Crucifixion. And one of the funniest of Peter Cook's dialogues had him, as a shepherd abiding in the fields, describing the Nativity to Dudley Moore from the Nazareth Gazette. 'Was the Holy Ghost present?' Dudley asked, to which Cook replied: 'Hard to tell.' When asked how Joseph looked in the stable, Cook, the shepherd, replied: 'Quite frankly, gobsmacked.'

Rowan Atkinson once described a scene in Not The Nine O'Clock News where a shot of worshippers bowing to the ground in a mosque was coupled with the voiceover: 'And the search for the Ayatollah's contact lens continues.'

Until Blunkett's Bill was watered down in the House of Lords, we really were about to enter a world in which such jokes might have put their perpetrators in prison.

Context is, of course, everything where humour is concerned. When in Year Six at her primary school, aged ten, my daughter and her friends all loved repeating 'blonde' jokes. No doubt they would have liked the one about the jigsaw and the cornflake-packet mix-up. I asked one of the girls who liked these jokes whether she did not think them offensive. This particular girl was, after all, a natural blonde. She just giggled. The girls were not bullying the blondes. They were enjoying the jokes. Eventually they grew out of them, and went on to some other excruciating collection of jokes.

I can imagine situations, of course, in which the blonde joke is very unfunny - especially if, beneath the veneer of humour there was bullying or cruelty. It is so easy to make remarks which are blatant racialism, for example, and then, when offence is taken, retreat behind the facade of: 'Can't you take a joke?' Making remarks or jokes which you know will be upsetting to another person in your hearing is obviously the mark of a bully and it cannot be defended. But we have gone far too far in the opposite direction. We have become a society which positively encourages people to take offence.

Some of Bernard Manning's jokes were offensive. But some were really quite good jokes: 'If you dial 999 in Bradford, you don't get the police coming round - you get the Bengal Lancers.' I think you would need to be an incredibly humourless Bangladeshi not to see that this reference to a regiment from the high days of the British Raj was quite a funny joke about immigrants. Manning was not making a mockery of people from Bengal because they were from Bengal. He was making a joke about the fact that Bradford is very full of Asians. And in so far as jokes depend upon an element of surprise, there is something picturesque about expecting the arrival of Z-cars and getting instead the Bengal Lancers on their horses, dressed in topis and turbans.

It is possible to be too sensitive, and to encourage others to be needlessly touchy. We now live in a Britain where it is expected that other people will take offence if we so much as notice differences. The 'blonde' joke is simply a variation on the classic joke about some group or category deemed to be stupid. In some contexts, these jokes are made about Irish people. In Ireland, the jokes are made about Kerry men. In other parts of Europe the same jokes are made about Poles. It would be a mad world if we really thought that Irish people or Poles were stupider than the rest of us.

The jokes would be wearisome if they were made too often. But never to make such jokes is actually very patronising to whichever group you are allegedly trying to protect. It implies that all blondes - or all Irish people, or all Kerry men - are such wimps, and so in need of protection, that you must never, in any circumstances, make jokes about them.

Life is often dull, and quite often it is painful. Jokes and laughter spring out of this fact. In places where men and women are facing harsh realities - in the Armed Forces, for example, or in hospital - jokes are the staple of conversation. "It's being so cheerful as keeps me going", as the woman used to say on the It's That Man Again comedy show on radio during World War II.

Jokes today are lavatorial, crude and vulgar while at the same time being somehow shamelessly politically correct. Many alternative comedians, and would-be funny men and women employed by the BBC, think it is perfectly OK to make jokes on prime-time TV about intimate parts of the Queen's anatomy, but they would have an attack of the vapours if you repeated on air the sort of unfunny jokes we all used to tell as children about 'An Englishman an Irishman and a Scotsman'. Only last month, BBC executives suffered a meltdown when Andrew Neil, in his late-night political show, light-heartededly compared the black Labour MP Diane Abbott to a chocolate HobNob.

I would much rather live in a world where comedians sometimes 'go too far', than in a tight-lipped dictatorship where you do not dare to make a joke because someone else will think it 'totally unacceptable' - to use that pompous phrase which is trotted out all too often nowadays by the thought police. Acceptable to whom? Laughter really is the best medicine, as they used to say in the dear old Reader's Digest. Humour should not need censorship. Jokes sometimes are cruel.

It is patronising to women, Jews, black people, Irish people, or indeed to anyone, to suggest they are too thin-skinned ever to hear a joke in which some stereotypical attitude is betrayed.

If the aim of the joke is to bully, to harass, or to enforce ugly prejudice, it is not very likely to be funny. But if the aim is to be funny - and if it succeeds in being funny (at least in some contexts) then surely we should welcome anything which brings a smile to our lives.

SOURCE



Britain lurches towards 'secret' justice as judge rules security services can give evidence in closed courts

Britain took another lurch towards 'secret' justice yesterday when a judge ruled that the state can for the first time withhold evidence from people involved in civil cases. The decision means claimants will be left unaware of the evidence the police, Government or security services are using to blacken their name as they contest a case for damages.

Lawyers described Mr Justice Silber's ruling as a 'constitutional outrage' that overturns 'the whole history of the fundamental principle that both sides must be on an equal footing'.

Justice Sibler's ruling will affect the case of Binyam Mohamed and six other British residents, who all allege the UK was complicit in his torture by overseas agents during their time at Guantanamo Bay. His finding concerns claims lodged by Binyam Mohamed and six others UK residents previously detained at the U.S. camp at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, who allege Britain was complicit in their torture by overseas agents.

The intelligence services want their evidence disputing the claims to be available only in secret hearings, using a 'special advocate' system, which has so far been restricted to immigration and terrorist control order cases. It means the information is kept hidden from the individuals involved on the grounds of 'national security'. Only a lawyer appointed on their behalf sees the intelligence, and he is not able discuss it with the accused.

But despite these 'Kafkaesque restrictions never being permitted in a civil court before, Mr Justice Silber ruled in the High Court yesterday that there there was no reason in law why a 'closed' court procedure should not be employed in a civil damages case.

The seven - Mohamed, Bisher Al Rawi, Jamil El Banna, Richard Belmar, Omar Deghayes, Moazzam Begg and Martin Mubanga - had all wanted their case to be heard under the 'public interest immunity' procedure. This prevents evidence and allegations being used as evidence by either side if the disclosure could reveal sensitive sources or pose a threat to national security.

The seven are suing the Government for unlawful acts and conspiracy. They deny any involvement in terrorism and allege that MI5 and MI6 aided and abetted their unlawful imprisonment and 'extraordinary rendition' to various places, including Guantanamo Bay, where they were subjected to inhuman treatment and to torture. The Government and security services have denied the claims. The case will now go to the appeal courts.

In addition to cases at the Special Immigration Appeals Commission and control order hearings, the Government recently passed a law to allow inquests to be replaced with secret investigations. The family courts also remain shrouded in secrecy.

Former shadow home secretary David Davis said yesterday's ruling was part of a 'very, very worrying slippery slope' towards secret hearings. He added: 'It may be victory for the intelligence services, but it is an affront to open justice'.

Louise Christian, a lawyer for some of the claimants, said the ruling overturned 'the whole history of the common law and the fundamental principle that both sides must be on an equal footing'. She added: 'The judge has sanctioned what would be a constitutional outrage.'

Tim Hancock, of Amnesty International, said: 'This ruling means alleged complicity by the UK authorities is likely to remain hidden.'

A Home Office spokesman welcomed the court's decision, saying that in closed proceedings special advocates representing the claimants would have access to the sensitive material. 'We believe this strikes the right balance - protecting the wider public interest and ensuring national security is not harmed whilst allowing cases to be tried fairly,' he added.

SOURCE



Nigerian man married his OWN daughter so she would be allowed to stay in Britain - and the British government knew about it

A Nigerian Home Office worker 'married' his own daughter to get her a British visa, the Daily Mail can reveal. The extraordinary scam was apparently executed by Jelili Adesanya while ministers turned a blind eye. Mr Adesanya, 54, has lived here for more than 30 years and holds a British passport, but wanted his daughter, her husband and their four sons to join him from Nigeria.

He faked a wedding ceremony complete with a photograph of the happy 'couple' which helped fool immigration officials that his daughter, Karimotu Adenike, was really his wife. Miss Adenike, who is in her mid-30s, was duly granted permission to live in the UK. The pair are waiting for her to be granted a permanent right to remain before they undergo a quiet divorce and attempt to bring the rest of her family here. It is expected she would try to remarry her real husband to get them all visas.

But despite being tipped off two years ago, the Home Office seems to have done nothing to stop the scam by one of their own workers. Until recently, Mr Adesanya was employed as an occupational health nurse for the Home Office, working with immigration officials at Gatwick airport.

A whistleblower sent letters to the High Commission in Lagos and the UK Border Agency including specific details such as names, addresses, passport numbers and even a copy of the wedding photograph. When there was no response, he sent emails to then Home Secretary Jacqui Smith and ministers Vernon Coaker and Phil Woolas on February 1 this year. He heard nothing.

Mr Adesanya, who came to Britain in 1976, flew back to Nigeria on May 29, 2007, and held the bogus wedding ceremony a few days later at a register office in Ikorodu, Lagos. A source said: 'They paid people to attend the wedding so that the British High Commission in Lagos would believe it was genuine. The commission then gave Karimotu Adenike a two-year settlement visa in October 2007. 'On her settlement visa application form, of course, she did not mention that she already had a husband and four children. 'The date of birth on her Nigerian passport is not her real date of birth.' Miss Adenike is believed to have aged herself by ten years on her wedding certificate to disguise the age gap with her father.

Although her settlement visa expired last month, she is hoping to be given the right to remain.

David Burrowes, the Conservative MP for Enfield Southgate and Shadow Justice Minister, was also tipped off by the whistleblower and wrote to the Home Office. This time there was a reply, but it said that although the matter was 'under investigation', no further information would be provided because it could 'breach of our obligations under the Data Protection Act'. Mr Burrowes told the Mail: 'I am very surprised and concerned that no action appears to have been taken, because the allegations are extremely serious.'

Mr Adesanya, who lives with his daughter in Dagenham, Essex, vehemently denied the plot and said he had never been questioned about the allegations. He said: 'Married my own daughter? I have never heard anything like this in my life. I deny it. She is my wife, not my daughter.' However, asked to confirm his 'wife's' date of birth, he said he did not know without checking her passport, and refused to allow her to speak for herself.

Unbeknown to him, his daughter had confirmed the arrangement when she told a friend she would shortly apply for her own British passport and 'divorce daddy'.

Last night Jonathan Sedgwick, from the UK Border Agency, said: 'These individuals are already under investigation, and I want to make it clear that abuse of our immigration laws will not be tolerated. 'If we identify marriages which we believe are not genuine, we will challenge them and prosecute where appropriate. 'We are determined to send home any foreign nationals convicted of these types of crimes once they have served their sentences.' [But only if a newspaper draws attention to it]

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British regulator's pupil safety rules are impossible, say head teachers

Highly performing schools are being penalised by Ofsted for a lack of security gates, high fences and entry codes to keep out intruders. Under a new inspection regime introduced this term, schools that do not make pupils “feel safe” are judged to be failing.

Head teachers claimed yesterday that inspectors were trying to catch schools out as they scrambled to update child protection policies. They called for Ofsted to reverse the rule after one of the most improved schools in England was told that its security was inadequate. A parental survey, part of the inspection process, at Lawnswood School in Leeds indicated that 1.3 per cent of parents thought that it did not keep children safe and inspectors marked it down despite record results last year.

Another school was judged to be inadequate because inspectors deemed the fence around the playground low enough for child snatchers to reach in and grab pupils. A third failed because inspectors were offered coffee before they were asked for identification.

Mary Bousted, the general secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, said that it was important that schools were safe places but warned that they were being asked to implement unworkable safety arrangements. “We are concerned that very good schools will fail inspections because of unreasonable requirements,” she said.

Milan Davidovic, the headmaster of Lawnswood School, wrote to Ofsted complaining about its verdict. “There was a definite feeling that the inspectors were coming to grips with the framework themselves, a feeling that it wasn’t clearly understood,” he said.

Mick Brookes, the general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, said that one inspector found his way into a school through a back entrance and began talking to pupils. The school failed because he was able to gain access without being asked for identification. A single glitch in safeguarding documentation or practice was enough to put schools into an “at risk” category, he added, and he called for Ofsted to separate judgments on academic achievement from child protection.

Ofsted’s new inspection framework stipulates that “where a school is judged to be inadequate in relation to the quality of the school’s procedures for safeguarding . . . the school’s overall effectiveness is also likely to be judged inadequate”. Details of the rules were published in July, giving schools little time to make changes. Since the new framework came into place one in five schools has moved down the ranking after inspection.

A spokesman for Ofsted said: “The protection of children is of the highest priority for Ofsted across all its inspection remits and we have revised our safeguarding guidance for school inspections from September to ensure an appropriate focus on this vital area. “However, schools are not judged to be inadequate as a result of minor administrative errors or issues that are not serious. Very few schools have been judged to be inadequate for their safeguarding arrangements only since the beginning of September.”

Case Study: "We're Judged on a feeling"

Lawnswood School in Leeds holds several education awards and was one of the Top Ten most improved schools in England last year (Joanna Sugden writes). But it has just been placed in special measures by Ofsted. A survey of parents at the school, which has 1,500 pupils, yielded only 123 replies and found that 20 parents felt their children did not feel safe at the school. It has just been given notice to improve under new rules that write schools off if they fail safeguarding measures.

“We are being judged on a feeling,” said Milan Davidovic, the headmaster. “If a few parents raise that as an issue then Ofsted has to take it into account.”

Lawnswood was given the healthy schools award, which recognises that pupils are feeling safe and happy. But, Mr Davidovic said that Ofsted did not take this into account. “The framework can act like a pack of cards, one judgment can make another judgment fail. We believe it is unfair,” he said. “It’s not to do with Criminal Records Bureau checks; it’s to do with a reported feeling that we are being judged on. “The students are disappointed that Ofsted have this view. But our spirits aren’t as low as they would be if the outcome [of the inspection] did reflect the true situation.”

The headmaster has written Ofsted a letter of complaint containing 23 points of disagreement.

SOURCE



Yuk! " Talk about Washington and London's special relationship. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has admitted she has a "crush" on Britain's youthful-looking, 44-year-old Foreign Minister David Miliband, according to an interview published in US Vogue magazine. "Oh my God!" she told a Vogue journalist in the December issue. "If you saw him it would be a big crush." Ms Clinton, who is married to former US president Bill Clinton, described Mr Miliband as "vibrant, vital, attractive, smart. He's a really good guy - and he is so young!" According to Britain's Sun daily, Mr Miliband reciprocated the gushing feelings, calling Ms Clinton, 62, "delightful" and a "tease".





19 November, 2009

Big Brother quiz for new school parents: British officials launch 83-point probe into families' lives

Parents of five-year-olds starting school have been sent an 83-point questionnaire that probes personal details of their lives. It asks whether their children tell lies or bully others, and if they steal at home or from shops. Parents are questioned over whether they have friends, if they can speak freely with others in their family and how well they did at school themselves. The form also delves into family routines, questioning whether they eat takeaways and if the children drink water with their meals.

Thousands of families in Lincolnshire were sent the forms as part of trials of a 'Healthy Child Programme' being developed in Whitehall. The Department of Health wants all families in England and Wales to fill in similar forms. The information will be held indefinitely on NHS databases for the use of health workers. Planners want new forms submitted each year to build up a detailed picture of the family and their children's development. Children themselves will fill in questionnaires when they become old enough.

The aim is to 'enhance children's life chances' but critics warned of unprecedented intrusion into family life and the growth of a major new state database. Parents have been told the information is 'confidential' but it will be available to health workers who will decide whether families should be approached by health visitors offering 'support'. [In Britain "support" often means taking your kids away] It will also be used to identify districts with widespread health and social problems so officials can plan and target health campaigns.

There is no legal compulsion to fill in the School Entry Wellbeing Review forms, but parents who do not are likely to be visited by community nurses charged with identifying vulnerable families. [i.e. your kids might be taken off you]

Dylan Sharpe of the Big Brother Watch pressure group said: 'This is incredibly intrusive and asks questions which, quite frankly, Lincolnshire Community Health Services do not need to know and have no right knowing. 'Even worse, the NHS Trust has failed to make it clear that this is a voluntary questionnaire. I would advise any parent receiving this to stick it straight in the bin.'

Jill Kirby of the centre-right think tank Centre for Policy Studies said: 'This is badly wrong for a number of reasons. 'Parents are not told how the information will be used, nor that they can refuse to give it and it will create worry and suspicion among many families. 'It risks labelling children and families as problem cases when the aim should be to help children escape from difficult backgrounds. It will make families wary and those most in need of help are likely to retreat from it.'

Joy Wood, clinical team leader at Lincolnshire Community Health Services, said shorter questionnaires had been sent in previous years. This year's trial was intended to help identify vulnerable children. She said: 'The intention is that the children that need our services will be supported [i.e. taken away]. We are not keeping this information to be divulged to third parties.'

After a complaint from a parent, letters are being sent out making it clear that filling in the form is voluntary. The Department of Health said last night: 'Many local areas currently administer a questionnaire to parents as the basis for a review at school entry. 'The Healthy Child Programme includes the commitment to build on good practice to make available a standardised, evaluated version. 'We will ensure this complies with legal requirements in relation to data handling and approaches to encourage take-up. 'This questionnaire will be an additional tool to safeguard and support all children's health and wellbeing.'

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British Council forced to apologise for prosecuting parents of boy who suffered 'school phobia'

Education chiefs who prosecuted a teenager's parents for allowing him to play truant have been forced to apologise after the boy claimed he had 'school phobia'. The youngster missed months of lessons after becoming anxious about returning to his Suffolk secondary school following a viral illness. The boy said staff made sarcastic remarks when he tried to attend classes, with one saying 'on a chair' when he asked where he should sit.

The teenager's failure to regularly attend prompted his school in conjunction with Suffolk County Council to take his parents to court for condoning truancy. They could have been landed with a jail term or £2,500 fine. But magistrates dismissed the case and now a tribunal has ruled the council discriminated against the boy in launching the prosecution. They said education bosses failed to take proper account of the boy's mental health.

But the council today said it was 'disappointed' by the ruling and may appeal. It has been ordered to write to each of the parents and the boy apologising 'unreservedly' for its treatment of him.

Head teachers' leaders have previously warned that school phobia could be used as a 'classic excuse' for not attending lessons. 'You have to get to the root of the pupils' problem - it may be their relationship with teachers, bullying or just that they haven't settled in,' said David Hart, former general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers. 'Transferring the child to another school could be the solution. But school phobia is just an excuse for failure to attend.'

But the boy's parents insisted the school and council failed to understand his mental health problems and failed to properly cater for his needs. His problems began when he developed chronic anxiety after taking time off due to a virus soon after joining the east Suffolk secondary school. The teenager was diagnosed by a clinical psychologist as suffering from school phobia, a condition described as an irrational fear of going to school. It is increasingly cited by psychologists and is said to affect one to two per cent of the school population.

The youngster, now 16, would often refuse to leave the house and suffer panic attacks which would result in him rocking backward and forward and clutching his knuckles. It also led to him distancing himself from friends and social situations. His GP had told magistrates: 'He found that attending school was highly anxiety-provoking and when he attempted to attend school he found he had great difficulty with that. 'I think attending school full-time certainly caused him significant psychological problems.'

At a one-day trial in June at South East Suffolk magistrates court, the council said the boy missed 59 per cent of registration sessions over a given time period. But the court cleared the parents of allowing their son to play truant.

At the same time, the parents took the council and school to the Special Educational Needs and Disability Tribunal for unlawfully discriminating against their son by failing to acknowledge his mental health problems. The tribunal found in their favour, prompting the boy's father to declare: 'We are very pleased with the outcome and very pleased that an external body has come to the same conclusion as we have all along. 'All the people that we have come across, whether that be barristers, solicitors or doctors, they all said the same thing, that this prosecution is wrong and should not be happening.

'The judge and her colleagues listened very carefully and came to the same conclusion that we thought they would, which was that the prosecution should not have happened and if people had been better informed and better trained to understand mental health they would not have kept pushing down the line that they did.' He added: 'The decision means it will benefit other children tremendously in the long run. 'My only want is that my son grows into the person that he would have been by now if it was not for the prosecution. The whole thing has held us all back.'

In addition to letters of apology, the council has been ordered to send key officials for training on the Disability Discrimination Act 1995. The parents should invited to observe this training, the tribunal said.

Adrian Orr, a senior adviser at Suffolk's Children and Young People's Services, said: 'Both Suffolk County Council and the governing body of the school have now received the decision of the tribunal and are studying it carefully. 'We are disappointed by the decision and are currently taking legal advice on whether or not there are grounds for appeal.'

SOURCE



High dropout rates undermine stupid British plans for degree-only nursing

Plans to make nursing a degree-only profession could be thwarted by the high number of students who drop out before finishing training, the latest figures suggest. More than half of students on some nursing degree courses do not graduate because of pressures of time, money and the academic standards demanded. The figures, obtained using the Freedom of Information Act, show wide variations in attrition rates among England’s 10 strategic health authorities.

At one university, in the North West, 51 per cent of students fail to complete its degree programme in adult nursing. The highest attrition rates in London, the South West, West Midlands, Yorkshire and the Humber show more than a third of students dropping out.

The Department of Health is so concerned about the problem that it ordered an annual report on dropout rates from university nursing courses, Nursing Attrition National Aggregate. However, it has not published the findings.

The figures, obtained by Nursing Standard magazine,dropouts are even more common. One university lost 78 per cent of students on a children’s nursing degree course, and more than 54 per cent of students on a mental health nursing course failed to graduate.

The findings come a week after The Times reported on government plans to require those wishing to become a nurse to have a degree. Supporters claim that the move, which will be enforced from 2013, will improve the quality of patient care and raise the status of nursing.

Critics suggest that the changes will create an elitist profession and scare off recruits with the prospect of a long and expensive period of study. There are also concerns that some nurses would be “too clever to care” and refuse to carry out duties such as washing and feeding patients and helping them to the lavatory.

Norman Lamb, the Liberal Democrat health spokesman, said that the dropout rates cast degree-only plans into disarray. Concerns have also been raised about the millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money, given in bursaries, wasted on courses that were not completed. “These figures appear to massively undermine the Government’s new plans for nurses,” he said. “Such high dropout rates suggest there is something seriously wrong. Ministers are burying their heads in the sand by refusing to publish their own report into quit rates.”

Nursing education specialists said that financial difficulties and the high number of mature students who juggled families with their studies were among the main reasons for dropping out.

Nurses, who make up the largest part of the NHS workforce, now require the minimum of a diploma — a nursing course lasting two or three years — for trainee nursing positions. Under the new rules, candidates will require a degree in nursing or equivalent international qualification. The courses, lasting up to four years, will meet standards developed by the Nursing and Midwifery Council, the professional regulator.

Peter Carter, general secretary of the Royal College of Nursing, which helped to draw up the degree-only plans, said that losing potential nurses was “an entirely unnecessary waste of people who are willing to learn and want to care”. He added: “Of course, some people will not be suited to the demands of nursing, but with rates as high as 78 per cent, something is seriously wrong with the support offered to the nurses of the future. Financial support is very important but it is not the only kind of support that needs to be on offer.”

A Department of Health official said that an incentive scheme to pay universities with low attrition rates would start next year.

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It was the Sun wot done it. Or was it?

Interesting to see the following article in "The Times" of London

Like it or not, it will soon be time to start placing bets for a white Christmas. If most climatologists are to be believed you are almost certainly throwing your money away.

The onward march of global warming is consigning such traditional Christmas card scenes to history. No more deep and crisp and even winters for Britain, replaced instead by damp and slush and stormy.

But, if a small group of maverick scientists are right, the chances of Yuletide snow may rise dramatically over the coming decades.

The difference of opinion hinges on what role — if any — the Sun plays in climate change. The vast majority of climate scientists maintain that the solar influence is limited or even negligible, and it is the unsustainable growth of industrialised nations that is driving the climate into chaos. The mavericks contend that the Sun’s activity dwarfs the human contribution, and that there is nothing we can do except wait for the Sun to change.

The public seems to agree with the mavericks. In a recent poll for The Times, only 41 per cent of UK voters thought the case for man-made global warning had been proved. Now, by a quirk of nature, the Sun has presented us with a golden opportunity to resolve this debate once and for all.

Satellite measurements for the past 30 years show that the Sun’s energy output has remained remarkably constant. What is changing is the level of solar activity. Solar activity governs the appearance of sunspots — dark blemishes on the solar surface. Sunspots form where magnetism reaches out from the Sun into space. In times of high solar activity, sunspots pockmark the solar surface for years and the Sun’s magnetic field balloons outwards to shield the Earth from deep space particles called cosmic rays.

According to the mavericks, cosmic rays induce clouds to form when they strike our atmosphere and low-level clouds are thought to reflect sunlight, cooling the Earth. So, when solar activity is high, the Earth is protected from cosmic rays and fewer clouds are formed. Thus, more sunlight reaches Earth’s surface and the planet heats up.

But how to prove this? During the 20th century, solar activity rose steadily, as did the amount of industrial gases being pumped into the atmosphere. With both quantities rising, it has been impossible to distinguish between them. Now, that has all changed.

In the past 12 months solar activity has fallen to levels unseen since the 1920s. Sunspots have become rare sights and for three quarters of this year the Sun has been spot-free. According to one study if the trend continues at its current rate, the Sun will lose its ability to produce sunspots by 2015. That would take it back to its condition in the latter 17th century, when hardly any sunspots appeared for 70 years — and Northern Europe underwent the worst years of the so-called Little Ice Age.

Winter scenes from this period were romanticised by artists such as Brueghel painting frost fairs and hunting scenes. But was the 17th century sunspot crash responsible for the Little Ice Age or a coincidence? Could we now find ourselves plunged into a similar freeze if the sunspots do not return?

The answer to the latter is, presumably, yes if the Sun is solely responsible for climate change; no if the mainstream is correct and solar influence is negligible. With this in mind, tonight in Bruges, I am chairing a public debate for the sixth annual European Space Weather Week between world authorities on solar variability who represent all sides of this discussion and have differing opinions about the Sun’s influence on climate. Topping the agenda is the sunspot crash and the opportunity that it presents. The plunging solar activity level will effectively remove the solar influence on climate change. If we are vigilant and honest about any slowdown in warming, its amount will tell us exactly how much the Sun was contributing.

The smart money is on the level of solar contribution being somewhere between the two extremes. In other words, both solar activity and industrial gases play a role. There is credible scientific work that ascribes up to a third of current warming to solar influence. Studies show that the Earth’s temperature mirrored solar activity until the 1980s. Then the number of sunspots stabilised but the temperature continued to rise. In other words, something overtook the Sun as the primary driver of the Earth’s temperature. That is generally thought to be industrial gases.

Now the test can be made. It is time for all sides to put away the rivalry and begin to work together. Observations must be made, experiments performed and all data must be published, not cherry-picked. This golden opportunity to reach consensus must not be squandered.

Above all, we must not let any downturn in temperatures be used as an excuse by reluctant nations to wriggle out of pollution controls. Just as certainly as the solar activity has gone away, so it will return. If we have done nothing in the interim to curb man-made global warming, we will be in worse trouble than ever.

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Elevating environmentalism over ‘less worthy’ lifestyles

The legal ruling that a belief in climate change is similar to a religious conviction seriously damages science, philosophy and democracy

Some scientists are bemused that a British judge has decided that a strong belief in alarmist climate-change scenarios ought to be awarded the status of religious faith. Following a judge’s decision at a UK employment tribunal that Tim Nicholson, a sustainability officer who was sacked from a property firm, was entitled to legal protection for his ‘philosophical belief’ in climate change, scientists have been expressing their shock. ‘As a scientist who works on climate change, I find it deeply alarming’, said Myles Allen, who heads the Climate Dynamics group at the University of Oxford (1).

Allen’s concerns are entirely understandable. Since the rise of the modern era, science has prided itself on its capacity to explain the world on the basis of experimentation, research and, above all, hard evidence. Science emerged, self-consciously, as an alternative to worldviews based on faith, moral conviction and other forms of a priori thought. So it is natural that a genuine scientist would feel insulted by the judge Sir Michael Burton’s ruling that Nicholson’s concern with climate change qualified as a ‘philosophical belief’ under the Religion and Belief Regulations 2003.

One reason why Allen and some of his colleagues are concerned about this decision is that it actually serves to undermine the pre-eminent authority of science today. In the twenty-first century, science has a near monopoly on authorising claims about virtually every aspect of human experience. We are far more interested in what ‘science says’ than in what ‘God says’. Consequently, even those who are sceptical about science and the scientific method will nevertheless mobilise these things to support their arguments. Not long ago, in the 1970s and 80s, leading environmentalists insisted that science was undemocratic, that it was responsible for many of the problems facing the planet. Now, in public at least, their hostility towards science has given way to their embrace and endorsement of science. The global warming lobby depends on the legitimation provided by scientific evidence and expertise.

However, if science is recast by a legal ruling as simply a moral or religious worldview, then its pre-eminent authority is likely to be compromised. What is to distinguish science from quacks with strongly held principles?

The erosion of the line between science and moralising has not simply been brought about by one eccentric judge. In recent times more than a few scientists have found it difficult to resist the temptation to cross the line into domain of public moralising. Take the case of Professor David Nutt, the expert recently sacked from the Home Office’s Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs. As a scientist, he is entitled to point to evidence which unequivocally calls into question the government’s policy on drugs. But Nutt is not prepared to confine his role to that of a disinterested scientist; he also wants to be a moral crusader fighting against the scourge of alcohol.

‘I want parents to know alcohol will kill your kids, not ecstasy’, said Nutt last week, before insisting that the minimum drinking age should be increased to 21 (2). Nutt obviously has strong views on the subject of the minimum age of drinking, but these views are based on his personal moral attitude, not on science. The way in which Nutt can quite easily make a conceptual leap from scientific evidence to the domain of moral and political decision-making is symptomatic of a powerful trend today: the transformation of science into an ideology, if not a dogma.

Indeed, science often has the quality of a quasi-religious dogma these days, especially in the arena of climate-change alarmism. ‘The scientists have spoken’, says one British-based green campaign group, in an updated version of the religious phrase: ‘This is the Word of the Lord.’ ‘This is what the science says we must do’, many greens claim, before adding that the debate about global warming is ‘finished’.

As I have argued previously on spiked, campaigners against climate change frequently prefix the term science with the definite article, ‘the’. So Sir David Read, a former vice president of the prestigious scientific institution the Royal Society, stated: ‘The science very clearly points towards the need for us all – nations, businesses and individuals – to do as much as possible, as soon as possible, to avoid the worst consequences of climate change.’ (3) Unlike ‘science’, this new term – ‘The Science’ – is a deeply moralised and politicised category. Today, those who claim to wield the authority of The Science are really demanding unquestioning submission. The legal ruling that someone’s belief in the behaviour modification demanded by climate-change activists should have the status of a religious conviction shows how much The Science now influences Britain’s legal culture.

Although some scientists feel insulted that their views on climate change have been equated with a religion, there are many green activists who are more than happy to recruit the support of God to their cause. One blogger says ‘thinking about environmentalism as if it were a religion is an interesting way to go’. Why? Because religion ‘looks a lot more successful at achieving its aim worldwide than the environmental movement’ (4). Tim Nicholson wants to have both God and Science on his team. After the judgement he noted that ‘my moral and ethical values are similar to those promoted by many of the world’s religions’. However, he also added that ‘the difference is mine are not faith-based or spiritual, but grounded in overwhelming scientific evidence’.

Whether this ‘philosophy’ presents itself as science with a bit of religion, or as a religion based on science, appears to be a matter of personal opinion amongst campaigners, all of whom seem to believe that their cause is far too important for them to worry about opportunistic inconsistencies in argumentation.

Giving philosophy a bad name

When the law was changed to protect people from discrimination at work on the basis of their beliefs, many humanist and secular commentators believed this was a positive step forward. And some argued that philosophical beliefs ought to be accorded the same rights as religious beliefs. Unfortunately, what many supporters of the change in the law did not grasp was that if secular views were also transformed into ‘weighty and substantial’ beliefs, they would in effect become a form of pseudo-religion. This development is particularly striking in the way in which philosophy has been recast as religion-lite.

From the standpoint of Mr Justice Burton, adherence to climate-change theory is a philosophical belief because it is a view that is genuinely and deeply held. But where is the philosophy in all this? It is possible to argue that climate-change theory is inspired by a distinct epistemology and teleology and influenced by ethical and moral concerns. But in and of itself the belief in recycling and reducing consumption is not a philosophy.

Philosophy raises fundamental questions about the meaning of human existence. It engages with fundamental issues that underpin the sciences and public debate. Strictly speaking, the term ‘philosophical belief’ makes little sense, because philosophy is principally devoted to the task of asking questions and speculating about things, rather than providing answers. Philosophy is devoted to the quest for the truth in its quest for wisdom. It is not a secular form of religion. It does not rely on religious revelation for guidance, nor does it thrive when its search for answers is compromised by an adherence to a priori beliefs.

Such beliefs may arise out of a philosophical inquiry, but these beliefs do not constitute a philosophy as such. The term that Mr Justice Burton is really looking for to describe the beliefs and behaviour of climate-change crusaders is not philosophy or religion, but lifestyle.

The sacralisation of lifestyle

The decision to provide environmentalist arguments with the protection of the law, in a manner akin to that afforded to religion, demonstrates that the legal and political elites have lost their way. But it is important not to take too seriously the arguments used to support this decision. Strongly held moral views about the conduct of life have never been the essence of religions alone. In previous times, such sentiments informed political ideals and cultural movements. Today, the beliefs and practices advocated by Nicholson are part of his lifestyle. Yes, we take our lifestyles very seriously: what we eat, how we look or travel and whom we sleep with define many people’s identities. But in a world where there are a multitude of lifestyles, all of which have assumed great significance, it is not possible to treat them all as quasi-religions.

To qualify for protection under the Equality and Employment (Religion or Belief) Regulations 2003, a philosophical belief must be ‘genuinely held’, be about a ‘weighty and substantial’ aspect of human experience, possess ‘seriousness, cohesion and importance’, and be ‘worthy of respect in a democratic society’. This last point is most significant. Who decides which strongly held view is ‘worthy of respect in a democratic society’? Certainly our legal and cultural elites have clear assumptions about which views are worthy of respect, and which are not. So last week we discovered that, under new proposals from the New Labour government, parents who are hostile to the provision of sex education in schools are not ‘worthy of respect’ despite the fact that their views are informed by genuine and deeply held convictions – their ability to withdraw their children from sex-education classes will be restricted.

Some forms of lifestyles are protected, or at least sacralised, by law, while others are stigmatised. So Christians who, in keeping with their beliefs, refuse to perform same-sex marriages are unlikely to gain legal protection, even though they express traditionally recognised religious convictions. However, those whose conscience does not allow them fly on Ryanair will now enjoy legal privileges and dispensation that are not accorded to their morally inferior colleagues. The sacralisation of elite-approved lifestyles creates a double standard that directly contradicts democratic norms.

Those who hold strongly held environmentalist views even have a semi-official mandate to break the law these days. Protesters against genetically modified (GM) food or nuclear power are often represented as idealist young people who are acting on ‘everyone’s behalf’. In truth, being part of the British political oligarchy, they have the kind of freedom to protest that is usually denied to ordinary mortals. That is why such protesters who break the law often face a sympathetic court hearing and win ‘not guilty’ verdicts (see State-sanctioned radicalism, by Brendan O’Neill).

So when Lord Melchett, the aristocratic former leader of Greenpeace, was arrested for criminal damage and theft after taking part in a protest against GM crops, he was genuinely shocked by his treatment. As far as he was concerned, his action was a ‘direct expression of “people’s power”’. Greenpeace, the self-appointed voice of the British people, described its action as an exercise in ‘active citizenship’ which ‘keeps democracy healthy and responsive’.

Melchett, like many other leading lobbyists, has an elitist notion of democracy, one driven by a conviction that, if they believe that something is wrong, then waiting for an unresponsive political system to do something about it is a luxury that society cannot afford. Professional environmental protesters assume that they have the moral authority to take matters into their own hands, since they are acting on behalf of The People. They believe that their unique philosophical insights entitle them to special dispensation. Now, Mr Justice Burton has effectively agreed with them, elevating environmentalism over other, inferior, less ‘worthy’ beliefs – and democracy is all the more impoverished for it.

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Christmas could be killed off by Britain's far-Left Equality Bill

Christmas celebrations could be banned under Harriet Harman's controversial Equality Bill, Roman Catholic bishops warned yesterday. They fear the complex legislation will have the 'chilling effect' of town halls and other organisations clamping down on festivities for fear of offending other cultures.

Monsignor Andrew Summersgill, the general secretary of the Catholic Bishops' Conference, has written to MPs to say it will fuel Britain's 'risk-averse' culture. He pointed to bizarre decisions in recent years including the banning of decorations and renaming of Oxford's Christmas festival as the 'Winter Light Festival' to make it more inclusive.

The letter, part of the evidence being considered by the Parliamentary committee examining the Bill, said: 'Under existing legislation, we have seen the development of a risk-averse culture with outcomes as ridiculous as reports of a local authority instructing tenants to take down Christmas lights in case they might offend Muslim neighbours, or of authorities removing the word Christmas out of cultural sensitivity to everyone except Christians. 'If this Bill is serious about equality, everything possible must be done to avoid it having a chilling effect on religious expression and practice.'

The proposed Bill being championed by Labour deputy leader Miss Harman aims to strengthen protection for minority groups by forcing public bodies to give them more opportunities. It also contains measures aimed at closing the gender pay gap.

But senior Catholics have also complained that religious groups will be forced to accept homosexual youth workers, secretaries and other staff even if their faith holds same-sex relationships to be sinful.

Christian organisations fear that the law will undermine the integrity of churches and dilute their moral message.

The letter by the bishops adds: 'The Catholic Church has significant concerns about the practical implications of some parts of the Bill.'

A spokesman for the Government Equalities Office denied the Bill would impact on Christmas. He said: 'That's ridiculous; of course local councils can still put up Christmas tree lights or mark any other religious ceremony such as Diwali, Eid or Ramadan.'

The BBC's governing body has rejected calls to allow non-religious voices to be heard on Radio 4's Thought For The Day. Complaints had been made that banning secularists, atheists or humanists broke the corporation's impartiality guidelines and amounted to 'religious force feeding'. But yesterday the BBC Trust ruled that limiting the slot to religious views did not represent a breach of its rules. It added that Thought For The Day was properly signposted, well known for what it did, and neither misleading nor inaccurate.

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British government advisers rethink calorie counting

Once again what was wisdom yesterday is wrong today

Slimmers, rejoice — those forbidden sweet treats or extra bags of crisps may no longer be off-limits. Scientists advising the Government say that the calorie counts used as the basis of diet plans and healthy-eating advice for the past 18 years may be wrong.

According to a draft report by the Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition (SACN), the recommended daily intake of calories — currently 2,000 for women and 2,500 for men — could be increased by up to 16 per cent, suggesting that some adults could safely consume an extra 400 calories a day (equivalent to an average-sized cheeseburger, or two bags of ready-salted crisps).

The committee, made up of some of Britain’s leading nutritional experts, says that its report provides a much more accurate assessment of how energy can be burnt off through physical activity.

However, health campaigners and consumer experts warned that the Department of Health and the Food Standards Agency (FSA) could seek to “sweep this report under the carpet”, as it could send out mixed messages in the middle of a [non-existent] obesity epidemic.

Ministers are considering the introduction of new food-labelling schemes that would highlight the calorie content of foods relative to guideline daily amounts (GDAs). Industry sources expressed concern that revising figures and estimates on which the GDAs were based could cause confusion among consumers and mistrust of scientific advice. The FSA has been evaluating for two years new methods of labelling, including a “traffic light” scheme to colour-code unhealthy food. Existing guidelines on energy intake required for good health have formed the basis of food labelling and dietary advice from doctors and nutritionists since 1991. If the committee’s proposals are accepted some foods would be upgraded to a healthier rating.

The draft proposals, seen by The Times and The Grocer magazine, are due to go out for a 14-week consultation before final recommendations are made. The report comes two weeks after the Government’s chief drugs advisor was sacked by the Home Secretary for “crossing a line” by publicly criticising existing policy.

About 60 per cent of British adults are overweight or obese, with growth in the nation’s waistlines being blamed on sedentary lifestyles as well as excessive eating. The cost of overweight and obese individuals to the NHS is estimated to be £4.2 billion a year [Rubbish! People of middling weight are healthier than either skinnies or fatties] and the Department of Health has pledged to cut levels of childhood obesity partly through its £375 million “Change4Life” strategy.

Tam Fry, of the National Obesity Forum, said it was a “dangerous assumption” to say that adults could safely consume an extra 400 calories a day. “This is not a green light to eat yourself silly,” he said.

The last significant study on energy use, carried out by the Committee on the Medical Aspects of Food and Nutrition Policy in 1991, was based on observational studies, with students being shut in a room for a week having their breathing measured, a method prone to underestimating “normal” levels of physical activity. SACN assessed studies using the Double Labelled Water technique, which measures how much carbon dioxide the body has produced converted into equivalent values of energy.

Adam Leyland, editor of The Grocer, said: “The ramifications for the industry are significant, to say the least. All the UK’s labelling schemes, including GDAs and traffic lights, are based around the 1991 energy report.”

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British gun madness: "A former soldier who handed a discarded shotgun in to police faces at least five years imprisonment for "doing his duty". Paul Clarke, 27, was found guilty of possessing a firearm at Guildford Crown Court on Tuesday – after finding the gun and handing it personally to police officers on March 20 this year. The jury took 20 minutes to make its conviction, and Mr Clarke now faces a minimum of five year's imprisonment for handing in the weapon. In a statement read out in court, Mr Clarke said: "I didn't think for one moment I would be arrested. I thought it was my duty to hand it in and get it off the streets." The court heard how Mr Clarke was on the balcony of his home in Nailsworth Crescent, Merstham, when he spotted a black bin liner at the bottom of his garden. In his statement, he said: "I took it indoors and inside found a shorn-off shotgun and two cartridges. "I didn't know what to do, so the next morning I rang the Chief Superintendent, Adrian Harper, and asked if I could pop in and see him. "At the police station, I took the gun out of the bag and placed it on the table so it was pointing towards the wall." Mr Clarke was then arrested immediately for possession of a firearm at Reigate police station, and taken to the cells. The legal explanation for this fiasco is that possession of a gun without a permit is a 'strict liability' offense (ie there are no excuses) which carries a mandatory (ah yes, those mandatory minimums again...) sentence of at least five years. The real explanation is, of course, that the law is insane."

British speed camera INCREASES crashes: "A motorway speed camera responsible for raking in more than a million dollars in fines has been blamed for increasing accidents since it was installed. The camera, which monitors a busy stretch of the M11 near London, results in 9000 tickets a year, but figures released by police show crashes have risen by a quarter at the site. A Freedom of Information request made by campaigners who oppose what they see as revenue-based penalty tickets also showed casualties have almost doubled since 2001 when the camera was set up. Paul Pearson, who runs motoring website penaltychargenotice.co.uk, said: 'No wonder they haven't removed the camera that is causing these accidents. 'It is just raising too much money and they clearly want to keep it there.' The data showed that in the five years before the camera was installed, there were 13 accidents and 14 casualties in the area. In the following five years, the number of accidents rose to 16 and casualties to 24." [In the usual British way "safety" is the rationale for such cameras but that is clearly not the real motive]



British rail travel: "A tour of the worst stations in the country was never going to be a glamorous or uplifting assignment. Pretty soon it turned into an exercise in extreme travel. Mine was an odyssey of wind-swept platforms and urine-soaked floors. Old ladies struggled over footbridges, travellers shivered in the elements as they waited to get home. They talked of parking rage and waiting for taxis in the rain. Many refused to use the fetid facilities. It became a journey of headaches and hunger; inedible food provided from vending machines. There was the stench of disinfectant, rubber floors that gave the feel of hospital waiting rooms, peeling paint and pigeons picking through litter. Disgrace, dismal, dreadful, dingy: just some of the words my companions used to describe the stations. Britain deserves better. Surely the country that developed the first railways should aspire to an infrastructure worthy of the 21st century, not a dilapidated relic of what it had 100 years ago? Anyone who spends enough time on our trains runs the risk of falling out of love with the railway."





18 November, 2009

Fury as immigrant baby killer is paid £4,500 'bribe' to quit Britain

An immigrant convicted of the horrific killing of a 17-month-old baby has been given £4,500 by the Government as a 'bribe' to leave the country. Malaysian Agnes Wong, 29, was jailed for five years in 2008 for the brutal manslaughter of a toddler she was supposed to be child-minding. She was let out of prison in July this year, and two weeks ago was put on a plane at Heathrow and sent to Malaysia with a 'voucher' worth £4,500 to spend when she got there.

Wong was jailed after a court heard how she had swung the boy, Hugo Wang, by his ankles and smashed his head. He died of brain injuries.

Wong's payment has sparked disbelief and outrage, coming just days after the Prime Minister said he understood the public's mounting concerns over immigration.

Tory immigration spokesman Damian Green said: 'Only last week, Gordon Brown said he "gets it" on immigration but this is proof he doesn't get it. For an immigrant who killed a child to get taxpayers' money to help with her future life is nothing short of appalling.' Mr Green demanded to know why Wong had not been automatically deported without a penny of public money. 'Even while Labour repeatedly boasted about introducing automatic deportation for people like this, it now appears they have been using public money to help people get round that very system,' he said.

The horrific story of Hugo's last hours caused national revulsion when Wong's sadistic behaviour was exposed in court. The unregistered childminder, who came to the UK in 2003, was paid £120 a week to look after Hugo in her home in Salford, Greater Manchester, while the boy's parents worked 16 to 20 hours a day to make ends meet. She was accused of waging a 'regime of terror' against him, torturing him with a hairdryer and hitting him so hard with a ruler that it snapped. Hugo died in January 2007, a day after he was taken, unconscious, to hospital where he underwent emergency surgery. He had been struck with such force that his brain had shifted in his skull and caused internal bleeding. Doctors also found bite and burn marks on his body.

Wong, who denied murder, was found guilty of manslaughter but was sentenced in May 2008 to just five years in prison. The Mail on Sunday has now learned that Wong served only the minimum jail term of two-and-half years, including her time in custody before and during the trial.

Just two weeks ago, she was deported to Malaysia under a controversial 'Facilitated Returns Scheme' under which foreign prisoners are paid up to £5,000 if they agree to leave the UK as early as possible without fighting their deportation using human-rights laws or by claiming asylum. So far, around 1,000 have left the UK and been given the money.

It is not known for certain whether Wong - who used the anglicised name Agnes, although her Malaysian name is Siew Teng - entered Britain legally or illegally. However, any immigrant who commits a serious crime can forfeit their right to remain in Britain and can be deported.

David Wood, the UK Border Agency's director of criminality and detention, defended the scheme, saying: 'We don't want foreign criminals in the UK. Every day that we can get these individuals out of the country early removes the risk they present to UK citizens and saves our taxpayers more than £100 a night in detention costs as well as administrative and court costs.'

As Wong boarded a plane at Heathrow on November 2 bound for Kuala Lumpur, immigration officials handed her a letter confirming that she was entitled to a 'reintegration fund' payout of up to £4,500. The letter informed her that the money, provided by UK taxpayers but administered by an international migration organisation, could be 'invested' in training for a new job, housing, education, medical treatment or to help set up a small business. The letter - seen by The Mail on Sunday - also advised Wong, who was kept in an immigration detention centre between her release from jail in July and her deportation earlier this month, how to claim the money.

Hugo's parents, who were immigrants from China, both worked at the China City restaurant in Southport, where Liverpool football star Steven Gerrard is a regular. Friends have now spoken of how Hugo's father, Jian Lin Situ, never got over the death of his son and how he had taken the baby's ashes back to China. They also voiced their anger that the boy's killer would get thousands of pounds of public money to build a new life. One said: 'It is an absolute disgrace that she has got this money. That sort of money will go a long way in Malaysia.'

The friend recalled how Hugo's father had been distraught to learn that some of his son's body parts were initially retained by the coroner in case Wong appealed against her conviction. 'When Hugo died it was big in all the newspapers in China. We followed the proceedings and were all horrified by what happened to that poor boy,' said the friend. 'Jian and Hugo's mother Zhen split up soon after. I think they both blamed each other for their son's death.

'I think Zhen went back to China. Jian never got over Hugo's death. He was absolutely devastated. He took Hugo's ashes back to China, to the Canton district, the family's ancestral home. After that, Jian moved on to a restaurant in Liverpool. From there he went to another restaurant in Blackburn and we lost touch.'

The friend added that Mr Situ would be 'horrified' to learn that Wong had already been returned home, especially as he protested that she should originally have been given a 15-year jail sentence. 'Jian thought five years was too lenient. This is just an insult to Hugo's memory. What are they playing at, letting her out so early? They should have thrown away the key.'

Sir Andrew Green, chairman of the Migrationwatch think-tank, said: 'It is absolutely wrong in principle that criminals who thoroughly deserve to be deported should be paid for going. This should not happen at all.'

A Home Office official confirmed there were two other voluntary schemes offering illegal immigrants incentives to return: one for individuals in the asylum system paying up to £4,000; and one for immigrants who have no right to be here but have not claimed asylum, paying out a maximum of £1,000.

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British Alzheimer’s patients neglected and come out of hospital 'worse than when they went in'

Half of Alzheimer’s patients come out of hospital in worse health than when they went in because of poor care, a hard-hitting new report warns. One in three never go back to their own homes and are discharged to a nursing home instead, the Alzheimer’s Society found. More than three-quarters of relatives say that they are dissatisfied with the treatment dementia patients receive in hospital and one in three has made an official complaint.

Poor care leads them to spend weeks or even months longer than necessary in hospital, according to the charity, which called for a target to cut the average time to discharge by a week.

The report come just days after an independent investigation found that almost 2,000 dementia patients a year are being killed by ‘chemical cosh’ drugs given to keep them quiet. A survey of relatives and NHS staff shows that almost half, 47 per cent, of dementia patients left hospital in worse physical health than when they went in. In an even greater number of cases, 54 per cent, the patients’ dementia was judged to have deteriorated while in hospital.

The charity warned that patients were being left unfed, with nothing to drink or sitting in their own urine because staff did not realise Alzheimer’s patients need extra help with simple tasks. Patients suffered weight loss, dehydration, pressure sores, incontinence and were even left unable to walk because they had been confined to bed for too long. One distressed patient was found beside a written note telling her “Don’t bang the table”, despite the fact that her condition meant she could no longer read.

Neil Hunt, chief executive of the Alzheimer’s Society, said: “We are talking about an issue that is vast and staring the NHS in the face. “We believe that the NHS is failing disgracefully on this. “And it is creating very serious outcomes for people with dementia and their families.”

People with dementia occupy up to one in four NHS hospital beds at any one time, the charity estimates. Cutting the average length of hospital stay by one week could save the NHS at least £80 million a year.

Official figures show that while the average length of stay for a hip fracture was one week, almost one in eight dementia patients with hip fractures stayed in hospital for more than two months.

The charity insisted that while in some cases it was right that patients with the condition should spend longer in hospital in many there were being delayed unnecessarily, harming their health. The charity surveyed 1,291 friends and relatives caring for a patient with dementia, 657 nursing staff and 479 ward managers.

Around 700,000 people in Britain have dementia, 400,000 with Alzheimer’s, the most common for, of the condition. That figure is predicted to increase to 1.7 million by 2051, in part because of an ageing population.

Dr Peter Carter, general secretary of the Royal College of Nursing, said: “For the majority of patients with dementia to leave hospital in a worse condition than when they arrived is simply unacceptable. "It is vital that the government invests in better dementia training for all healthcare staff to ensure these patients receive good quality care."

Rebecca Wood, chief executive of the Alzheimer’s Research Trust, said: “This is a wake-up call for a health system that has failed to take the challenge of dementia seriously. “We must tackle dementia by investing in research to find new preventions, treatments and cures, as well as reforming the way hospitals deal with dementia patients.”

A spokesman for the Patients' Association said: "The findings in this report are scandalous. "Not enough help with eating. Not enough help with drinking. Not enough help with personal hygiene. Not enough help with continence. “There is now an overwhelming amount of evidence that elderly patients are being neglected in hospitals across the NHS. "Whether they have dementia or not, if they are in need of help with personal care many of them won’t get it. “Ensuring patients receive essential personal care doesn’t tick any of the target boxes. Is it any surprise that it has slipped so dramatically?”

Phil Hope, the care services minister, said: "We have set priority areas for all hospitals to take urgent action, including appointing a senior member of staff to improve quality of care for people with dementia, proper training for all staff, and specialist older people's mental health teams working in hospitals.”

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Bureaucratic madness: British IVF couples face disease tests before each cycle

Couples undergoing IVF could face higher bills after European regulators said they should be screened for diseases between each treatment cycle. The EU Commission wants couples to be screened before each treatment cycle instead of just when they start their course. British doctors said it was extremely unlikely new cases of infections like HIV and syphilis would be picked up between cycles and it will add to the cost of treatment, which is currently around £4,000 for IVF. The move could mean couples needing to be tested every one or two months for HIV, hepatitis, Human T-lymphotropic virus and syphilis.

Dr Luca Gianaroli, chairman of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology (ESHRE), said that at a recent meeting, the EU Commission had said all patients must be tested before each treatment and that all European countries "must comply with this and that it was not open for national interpretation". He has written to ESHRE members urging them to take action over the "quite alarming signals" over interpretation of its 2004 tissue and cell directive.

He said after 30 years of IVF, 15 million treatments and around three million children born, there had been no examples of viruses being transmitted in the areas covered by the directive. In Dr Gianaroli's letter he added: "All in all, this implies a major additional allocation of resources. "The consequence of this testing practice is that many couples living intimately together at home will have to be tested every one to two months."

At present, couples are generally tested for HIV and hepatitis before they undergo their first treatment but are then considered virus-free for the rest of their course.

Professor Peter Braude, head of the Department of Women's Health at King's College London, said: "This new interpretation of the EU directive is of extreme concern to fertility practitioners, as it will have substantial implications for the costs of fertility treatment to individual patients and for the NHS.

"Whilst we already comply with the bizarre EU idea that sperm samples from couples who have been married or cohabiting for many years are treated as 'partner donation', and men have to have infection screens done at least annually, this interpretation would mean that both partners in the relationship would now have to be tested for HIV, hepatitis, HTLV and syphilis every time they underwent an IVF or even an IUI (insemination) procedure, which could be two or three times a year or even more often. "Repeat infection or new infection during or between treatments would be extremely rare, if ever."

Dr Allan Pacey, secretary of the British Fertility Society and senior lecturer in andrology at the University of Sheffield, said: "The British Fertility Society (BFS) has some concerns about this interpretation of the EU directive and the impact it may have on infertility treatments within the UK and across Europe. "Whilst there are a number of reasons to screen patients for some infectious agents, including HIV, it is important that the timing, frequency and screening strategy is evidence-based. "A blanket screening policy applied uncritically is unhelpful and inappropriate."

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A new iteration of "blame the parents"

Crap research in support of interventionist conclusions. The fact that one type of parenting is associated with one type of child behaviour proves nothing. Both phenomena could be caused by a third factor -- genetic factors in particular. Genetics are very strongly related to personality (See here, for instance), so the utter ignoring of genetics in the report discussed below reveals it to be an ideological guided missile, not a work of science

A new report by the British think-tank Demos has hit the headlines, with its claim that ‘Parents are the principal architects of a fairer society’. Based on research from the Millennium Cohort Study, the report argues that how children are parented has a more significant impact upon their future life chances than just about anything else, including poverty and the social class into which they are born (1).

You might wonder whether the world really needs another report blaming particular parenting styles for every evident problem in late capitalist society. Across the British political spectrum, policy continually seeks to clobber parents over the head with the assertion that the future of Britain rests or falls according to whether they feed their children too many sweets or read to them for the requisite number of minutes at bedtime.

So when Jen Lexmond and Richard Reeves, authors of the Demos report, respond to concerns about interference by the ‘nanny state’ by arguing that ‘if there is one area where government intervention is justified, it is in precisely the area of life signalled by the term “nannying” – the development of children’s capabilities’, they are pushing at doors opened by New Labour, and held open by the Tories. Nothing new there.

However, Lexmond and Reeves at least try to go beyond the emotional blackmail that informs most parenting policy, which simply asserts that if you don’t adopt the right kind of parenting behaviours with your children they will die of obesity or end up on the social scrapheap, with no qualifications and a million mental disorders. Their report, Building Character, is an attempt to wrestle with the problem of how we bring up children with a sense of self and agency, who can achieve things in life and develop a responsibility to people and projects outside of themselves.

This is an important question, and one that preoccupies parents as much as policy-wonks. I have often found myself ploughing through the latest piece of official parenting advice and wondering to what end it all leads. The idea that rearing children is just about maximising their ‘happiness’, or stopping them from becoming fat, or enabling them to take a few calculated risks, might all make some sense on a personal, daily level, but it seems thoroughly inadequate in terms of a generational project.

When we say ‘children are the future’, we don’t just mean that they will outlive us, but that they will be the ones running society and making history. To that extent, it really is not enough that they are happy or that they have high self-esteem – they have to be able to cope with adversity and think outside of themselves, in order to shape the world around them. This is where character comes into play, and where adults’ role in helping to ‘build character’ is crucially important.

Unfortunately, while Demos’ enthusiasm for addressing this issue is refreshing, its narrow focus on parenting styles and outcomes among young children means that the report ends up peddling the same old mixture of common sense and nonsense. On the common sense front, it finds that more authoritative parents have better-behaved children and that more confident parents are more authoritative. On the nonsense front, it speculates that better-behaved children with more confident parents will get to be middle class when they reach adulthood – which leads to the conclusion that training parents on low incomes to be confident and authoritative will magic some social mobility into their children. Or, as Jen Lexmond told The Sunday Times, ‘when it comes to parenting, it is not what you are, but what you do that’s important’ (2).

What is striking about this is not only the blithe assertion that all manner of social inequalities and life problems can be obliterated by parents simply setting a few house rules for their toddlers. It is the reduction of a child’s moral development, the building of character that takes place over the course of childhood within a distinct cultural context, to a particular parenting style that results in clearly observable attributes amongst five-year-olds.

Building Character starts with a discussion of Aristotle; eight pages later it presents us with a table showing how three ‘key character capabilities’ are exhibited by the behaviour of five-year-olds studied by the Millennium Cohort Study. So we find that a child who ‘cannot sit still, is constantly fidgeting or squirming’ shows something about ‘application’, a child who is kind to younger children shows something about ‘empathy and attachment’, and a child who ‘often argues with adults’ shows something about ‘self-regulation’. The child who exhibits the good behaviours is presumed to be a product of authoritative parenting, and will go far in life; the restless hypochondriac tantrummer is presumed to be lacking boundaries and will end up socially immobile.

An expert in survey methodology could no doubt find several holes in this research. I was struck by the admission, in the appendix, that for all the authors argued that confident parents make better-behaved (or more character-ful) children, ‘It is possible that the association between parental perceived competence and child behaviour outcomes is spurious’ – as the data was based on parents’ reports of their children’s behaviour, and less confident parents tend to report more bad behaviour in their children than do more confident parents. It seems equally possible that the report’s entire evidence base is ‘spurious’.

But aside from that, why do we think we can measure something so complex and human as ‘character’ by looking at the behaviour of five-year-olds? Can human agency really be reduced to an ability to concentrate and a willingness to share toys?

As a parent, I worry about the development of my children’s characters. I worry about the impact of a purportedly child-centred therapy culture, which encourages children to think that that they should never be criticised and that their feelings are the most important ones. I worry that children who are over-protected, who are not allowed to take risks or work through problems for themselves, are profoundly ill-equipped to become adults capable of running the world. I worry that the educational direction taken by ‘personalised learning’ and methods that make everything fun and relevant to children limits their capacity to apply themselves to things.

I worry about the way that anti-bullying initiatives actively discourage children from developing empathy, by presenting bullying as the use of certain bad words or particular actions, rather than encouraging children to think about what it means to be kind or unkind, how to roll with the blows and how to maintain friendships. I worry that precisely the model of ‘good parenting’ that is advocated by policymakers is that of the active consumer – the parent who elbows everybody else out of the way to achieve the best for his or her child, who is obsessively anxious about the individuals within his or her family to the exclusion of thinking about what’s best for the school, the community, even other friends and family members. And I worry about lots of other things as well.

But, as the parent of a five-year-old and a three-year-old, I know that their characters are not yet fully formed. There are several years and many experiences left in order to inspire and shape young children into the kind of adults we hope they will become. As children gain the ability to read, reason and expand their world beyond the home, we can engage them in questions of agency and morality, and trust them to work things out for themselves but in relation to other people.

The idea that parents alone can – even should – short-circuit these processes by seeking to ‘develop character’ by the end of five, and that we can measure our children’s worth as moral, responsible beings according to whether they sit still at the dinner table, displays a narrow and deterministic view. Character is not an ‘outcome measure’, and obedience is not what makes us human.

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Does Britain's Green craziness ever stop?

Greenies used to LIKE trees once

Britain is set to plunder the lungs of the world to feed its growing hunger for wood to burn in power stations. A series of biomass-fired plants are being built in the UK that will trigger a 150 per cent surge in timber imports from 20 million tonnes today to 50 million tonnes by 2015, according to the Forestry Commission. British power plants are already shipping wood from Canada, Brazil, Scandinavia and South Korea.

Just one of the new biomass plants at Port Talbot, South Wales, will consume three million tonnes of wood per year — equivalent to 30 per cent of the UK’s domestic annual wood harvest of ten million tonnes. But the plant, which is due to open in 2012, will generate only 300 megawatt hours of electricity, or about 0.4 per cent of the UK's current power-generating capacity. At least four more 300-megawatt plants are planned, including three in Yorkshire that have been proposed by Drax, operator of Britain’s largest coal-fired power station. Another company, MGT, plans to build one on Teesside.

A spokesman for Prenergy, which is behind the Port Talbot plant, said 90 per cent of its wood supplies would be imported, although he insisted that all of it would be sourced from proven sustainable sources.

Nevertheless, environmental campaigners have raised concerns about the carbon emissions involved in shipping the wood such large distances, while to meet UK pest control laws the timber will need to be baked before it can be shipped to the UK.

Wood industry officials have warned that British families could face soaring prices for a range of wood-based products, including furniture, wood panels and even wallpaper because of its impact on low-grade timber and wood pulp prices. “It’s going to push timber prices through the roof,” said Gavin Adkins, chairman of the Wood Panel Industry Federation. He is concerned that large parts of the £1 billion industry that rely on wood as its main raw material will be forced offshore.

Although wood prices have moderated during the recession, rapid growth in demand had led to a 25 per cent rise since 2007, Mr Adkins said. “We operate in a low-margin industry and our ability to absorb such increases in raw material costs is limited. Inevitably these costs will have to be passed on to the consumer. Obviously, the timing could not be worse for the construction industry, which has been seriously hit in this recession.”

He said the number of jobs that may be lost was causing concerns for companies in the saw-milling, wood-panel and paper and pulp industries. The federation is lobbying for the biomass industry, which is supported by a government subsidy regime, to be given extra incentives to use waste wood instead of virgin timber for fuel. An estimated 4.5 million tonnes of waste wood are landfilled in the UK each year, according to government estimates.

A recent report from the Environment Agency stated that shipping timber from overseas could halve the potential carbon dioxide savings from biomass power.

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Girls ‘can follow fashion without compromising intelligence’

Comments from the Head of a British private school

Young women can dress provocatively and be interested in fashion without compromising their intelligence or feminist principles, a leading head teacher said yesterday. Jill Berry, president of the Girls’ Schools Association, defended Cambridge undergraduates who posed in their underwear for an online student magazine last month. “Girls can be highly intelligent and interested in being seen to be attractive — the two aren’t mutually exclusive,” Mrs Berry told a conference of girls’ school head teachers. “Caring about physical appearance and fashion and wanting to feel good about how you look doesn’t have to be a betrayal of some feminist ideal. I love new shoes but it doesn’t make me shallow.”

One of the Cambridge students who posed in a bikini asked last month for her photograph to be removed from The Tab, a student internet site, after the student union women’s officer said that they reinforced harmful attitudes towards women. But Mrs Berry said: “I don’t think that has to be a conflict. I am saying it is about balance and not pigeonholing us.”

She also spoke up for Cambridge students who have formed a cheerleading team, saying that she had started a cheerleading team at her own school, Dame Alice Harpur School in Bedford. “It is really quite skilful — it involves gymnastics and dance. And they are loving it,” she said.

Mrs Berry, who said last week that girls should not feel guilty if they opted out of a high-flying career to focus on having a family , admitted that there were other head teachers who disagreed but said she welcomed the “raging debate” triggered by her remarks. “I am absolutely sure that there will be people who say we have to be careful about this message,” she said. “There should be women at the top of every profession and should be more women as managing directors at FTSE level. “I think sometimes women choose not to have these things. It is not that they can’t, or that they have tried and failed. There are women who say, ‘At this stage of my life that is not what I want for myself, for my family, for my life’.”

Addressing the annual conference of the Girls’ Schools Association, she said that schools were increasingly having to deal with the obsessive use of social networking sites and online bullying. Coping with the addictive nature of online networking sites, internet safety and cyber bullying had overtaken conventional parental concerns such as homework, friendships and exam stress, she said.

A straw poll of issues of concern among the association’s 187 independent girls’ schools put online networking, internet dangers and online bullying top “by some margin”. They had overtaken problems in face-to-face relationships at school. Websites where girls could post abusive and anonymous messages about their peers were a particular problem, she told the conference in Harrogate. “The reason these are such issues for girls is that they care so much more about relationships with their peers than boys generally do,” Mrs Berry said....

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British view: Not enough censorship of climate debate in Australia

It's all about double standards and fashions. When Tom Schieffer, the former US ambassador to Australia, interfered in the domestic debate by criticising Labor's Mark Latham in 2003, he was rebuked by some commentators for undiplomatic behaviour. Fair enough.

Last week Baroness Valerie Amos, who recently became Britain's high commissioner, also intervened in Australian politics. She expressed surprise that there was a debate in Australia about whether humans are the principal cause of climate change and added: "In the UK there is a degree of political consensus about what in broad terms needs to be done … You would certainly not see on a daily basis … the kind of negative reporting that you have here."

Amos evoked a modern cliche and suggested that it was time, on this matter, that Australia "moved on". Put simply, Amos wants there to be no debate whatsoever about human-induced climate change and, to the extent to which this takes place, she wants the media to refrain from reporting it. It seems that platitudes are handed down in the British high commission in Canberra.

Helen Liddell, Amos' immediate predecessor, delivered a similar lecture at the National Press Club in April 2007 - not long before the federal election of that year in which climate change was a matter of contention.

How come, then, that Schieffer's comments on Australian politics caused offence whereas those by Liddell and Amos passed virtually without criticism? Well, Schieffer is not only a conservative but a friend of George Bush who supported American policy in Iraq. Liddell was a Labour MP from 1994 to 2005 and became a minister in Tony Blair's government. And Amos was appointed to the House of Lords by Blair in 1997 becoming a minister and, later, leader of the House of Lords. Moreover, both Liddell and Amos believe in the most fashionable cause of the modern age - namely that human behaviour is responsible for global warming.

So it seems that there is one rule for conservative Americans Down Under who want to talk publicly about Iraq. And quite another rule for social democratic Brits who want to talk publicly about climate change. Last September, shortly before she left Australia, Liddell appeared on ABC1's Q&A program and used the occasion to lecture the audience about emission trading schemes. It is most unlikely that the Australian high commissioner in London would appear on the BBC Question Time program and lecture the British on, say, how to run an economy.

The British high commission's lecture-at-large to the Australian population invariably overlooks two central facts. First, British carbon emissions are low because, when Margaret Thatcher was conservative prime minister in the 1980s, the coalmines were allowed to close down. This policy was not continued when John Major succeeded Thatcher.

This was done in the face of opposition from British Labour, the radical leftist National Union of Mineworkers and assorted Guardian-New Statesman reading inner-city luvvies. Had this lot had their way, the British taxpayer would have been forced to subsidise dirty British coal and Australians would have been spared the subsequent moralising of such former Labour parliamentarians as Liddell and Amos. At the meeting of the United Kingdom-Australia Leadership Forum in Canberra in 2006, John Howard mentioned that on his first flight to Britain as prime minister he had watched the film Brassed Off, which depicted the anger at the wind-up of the British coal industry, and joked that he had been impressed by the impassioned speeches delivered by Thatcher's opponents at the time. Tony Blair joined in the humour, declaring that he might have delivered one of these orations himself. By then, of course, Blair was more interested in the reduction of carbon pollution.

The second reason why Britain has relatively low carbon emissions turns on the fact that it has a nuclear power industry. As its Energy and Climate Change Secretary, Ed Miliband, announced recently, Gordon Brown's Government intends to begin the construction of up to 10 nuclear power stations.

It is true that there is little debate in the Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties in Britain about the cause of climate change. Perhaps this explains why it is not as high profile an issue as in Australia. Meanwhile, the Americans seemed subsumed in the debates on health insurance and the war in Afghanistan. That's why - contrary to many predictions - President Barack Obama will not take a firm carbon pollution reduction proposal to the Copenhagen conference early next month. Within the OECD, the Australian economy most resembles that of the US and Canada. The US did not ratify the Kyoto Agreement - not even when Al Gore was vice president in Bill Clinton's administration. Canada signed up to Kyoto - but never got close to meeting its targets. Australia did not ratify Kyoto under Howard, but met its targets.

Quite a few members of the European Union have not met their Kyoto targets. Perhaps the likes of Liddell and Amos might have more effect by taking their climate change diplomatic advocacy to Ottawa or Brussels.

The Rudd Government is attempting to get a carbon pollution reduction scheme through the Senate before Copenhagen. If he does, well and good. If he doesn't, Australia's situation will be no different from that of the US. In his surprisingly strident speech to the Lowy Institute on November 6, the Prime Minister acknowledged that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had found that it was "90 per cent probable" that humans were responsible for climate change. While there is a 10 per cent doubt, it is unlikely that this debate will be silenced in Australia - irrespective of the views of British diplomats in the Antipodes.

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British Labour Party candidate who described the Queen as 'vermin' and a 'parasite who milks the country' is forced to apologise

We read:

"A Labour candidate has been forced to apologise after describing the Queen as 'vermin' and a 'parasite'. Peter White, who is standing in next year's local elections, posted the republican diatribe on the social networking site Facebook.

Last night Mr White was forced to issue a humiliating apology by Labour high command, and was threatened with deselection as election candidate.

The comments met with a furious reaction from other visitors to the web page, and Mr White later deleted his comments. But they had already been saved by Mr Rosindell.

Mr Rosindell said: 'People are absolutely furious that someone in such a position would publicly describe the Queen as vermin and a parasite. It is outrageous: a disgusting thing to say about the head of state. 'If he is republican, he has the right to state his case. But the use such foul and nasty language against the Queen is simply offensive. Even most republicans respect the fact that she has been an excellent head of state.'

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He has every right to say what he thinks but this was just plain dumb. The Queen is very highly regarded in Britain. He is just handing the election to his political opponents with comments like that. All British political parties support the Monarchy, even the Scottish Nationalists.





17 November, 2009

The British Labour party’s heartland won’t be fooled on immigration again

There is something a little pitiful watching Gordon Brown tell the country how worried he is about immigration, and how it must not be a taboo issue. Like watching a paralytic drunk explaining in slurred tones how he will never touch another drop, and all the while you can smell the paint-stripper on his breath.

There is no issue — with the possible exception of Iraq — on which Labour has been more deceitful to the public at large, or has more egregiously betrayed its core working-class support. The only reason Brown is addressing the issue now is that we are six months away from an election and he fears that the troglodyte BNP thickoes will chew away great big gobfuls of angry working-class voters across a diagonal swathe of supposedly Labour country, from the white-flight satellite towns of Essex to the old mill towns of east Lancashire.

It is little more than lip service from the prime minister and, worse, unaccompanied by even the vaguest admission that his government has let its people down.

We know from the Labour backbencher Chris Mullin’s diaries that ministers would not address the issue of immigration because they were terrified of being called racist: so they did nothing. More recently, the former home office adviser Andrew Neather suggested that the Labour government threw open the doors to vast numbers of immigrants precisely in order to create a truly multicultural Britain, whether or not the British public wanted such a thing (every opinion poll suggests that they did not).

Labour ministers insist that the previous Conservative government was lax on immigration, too — but that is a specious argument. In 2006 nearly 600,000 immigrants entered Britain, more than 10 times the number who arrived in the last year of John Major’s government; the scale of difference has been beyond reasonable comparison. We should be clear: immigration is primarily Labour’s mess, and it was a deliberate policy.

Even now the argument will be queered by the usual platitudinous drivel; that while addressing this important issue we must all nonetheless embrace the vibrancy of multicultural diversity. The people who always preface their answers with this sort of statement tend not to have lost their jobs to cut-price plumbers, electricians, fruit pickers and so on.

You cannot have it both ways: Brown wishes to capture the votes of the white working class by talking about immigration but not actually doing anything about it. They in turn resent, rightly or wrongly, the fact that their communities have been changed beyond recognition; that street crime figures are up exponentially; that it’s harder to acquire social housing; and that they are priced out of jobs. This is unpalatable to many, but it is how a lot of people feel.

It would be far more honest of the government if it said: tough luck, Labour voters — we want a cheaper unskilled and semi-skilled workforce and we have no moral or intellectual objection to your towns and cities being transformed by huge numbers of people who may not share your cultural values. That, after all, has been the policy of the government for the past 12 years, even if it is one it has not dared to articulate but has instead pursued by a sort of cack-handed stealth.

Nor, aside from the carefully nuanced rhetoric, is there very much in the prime minister’s speech which offers a solution to the problem. For example, he wishes councils to look more kindly on social housing applications from long-term local residents — but of course the councils are statutorily required to offer housing first to the homeless and an awful lot of immigrants are, de facto, homeless when they arrive.

None of this is the fault of the recent immigrants themselves, of course, who are behaving much as we would all behave in similar circumstances; and in the main, I don’t believe those working-class voters blame the immigrants either. They know who to blame — and crocodile tears shed a few months before polling day tend to confirm, rather than dissipate, that blame.

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Thousands of British Parkinson's disease sufferers wrongly diagnosed

Around 6,300 people in the UK who believe they are suffering from Parkinson's disease could have been wrongly diagnosed, a new study has claimed. Researchers in Scotland, who assessed patients on anti-Parkinson's medication, found that five per cent had little more than stiffness or hand tremors.

A report published in the Movement Disorders journal warned that millions of pounds was being wasted on unnecessary drugs each year. While the wrongly prescribed medication was not thought to have any adverse side effects, patients were subjected to years of anxiety.

Dr Keiran Breen, one of the authors of the report said Parkinson's was a notoriously difficult disease to diagnose accurately in its early stages, but recommended all suspected sufferers should be referred to specialists regularly. He said: "No two people with Parkinson's disease will have the same diagnosis. The three main characteristics are tremors, slowness of movement and stiffness, but not everyone will have all three symptoms. The patients should be referred to neurologists with more expertise and they will make a much more accurate diagnosis."

There are around 120,000 sufferers in the UK but during the study more than five per cent were found to have been misdiagnosed. Dr Breen said: "We didn't find evidence that taking drugs caused harm to the patients without Parkinson's but it could mean people were denied the correct drugs to improve their actual condition."

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Controversial electronic medical records to be rolled out across Britain

Anybody who trusts the British bureaucracy with their personal information has not been listening. There have been dozens of instances of "lost" records -- and the computer system concerned has long been full of bugs

Every patient in the country will have sensitive medical information uploaded to a controversial central database within two years. Ministers insist that the records will allow patients to be treated more efficiently no matter where they are in the country. But critics have warned that the centralised database could be open to abuse.

Experts said that patients could also feel “forced” to allow highly sensitive material on the system because ministers have decided to include all patients across the country unless they specifically opt out. Patients in London will have their confidential records uploaded by the end of next year on to the NHS computer network known as the Spine. Family doctor practices across every party of the country will be transmitting the data by the end of 2011.

The records will contain vital basic medical information including illnesses, medications and vaccination history. They could also include past conditions patients had suffered and previous medication they were given. Age and address would also be included but not other personal information, such as marital status. Ministers have admitted that extra medical information could also be added in the future, including controversial do not resuscitate orders.

In May, the Government performed a u-turn when they announced that patients would be allowed to delete electronic summaries of their treatment records from the new database. Previously, they had insisted that to do so would be too costly. Doctors have to ask a patients’ permission every time they wish to view their records, except in emergency circumstances, such as when they feel a patient may be at risk. Only medical staff directly involved in a patient’s care will be allowed to look at the information. But all patients will be added on to the database unless they specifically refuse.

Ministers insist that the records will improve care as doctors no longer have to rely on patient’s memories, which can often be incomplete or inaccurate. They claim that elderly and more vulnerable patients, including those who do not have English as a first second language will benefit the most. Pilot projects trialling the Summary Care Records scheme have taken place across the country in recent years and more than 700,000 patients currently have their records uploaded.

Mike O’Brien, the Health Minister, said: “Having the right information at the right time can make all the difference to patients’ experience of urgent care. “Summary Care Records can improve the quality and safety of treatment provided as well as increasing people’s comfort and reassurance. “We are particularly interested in the experience at Bury which has incorporated End of Life wishes for a substantial number of patients. “Moving the NHS from good to great needs improvements such as this.” Ruth Carnall, chief executive of NHS London, said: “Getting hold of health records for London’s highly mobile population often presents real challenges to doctors and nurses when patients need out-of-hours and emergency care.”

But Dr Grant Ingrams, chair of the British Medical Association's GP IT committee, warned that patients could feel that they were being forced to put highly confidential information on the system. He said: “Electronic Summary Care Records have the potential to improve both quality and safety of patient care but it is critical for the programme’s success that all patients receive balanced information and are made aware of their option to opt out. “If patients feel they are being coerced, or have a summary care record created without their knowledge or understanding, it will damage the credibility of the project.”

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Oxford and Cambridge universities relying more on their own entrance exams

The inevitable result of dumbed down High Schools and grade inflation

Students are facing a battery of new tests to get into Oxford and Cambridge amid continuing fears that A-levels fail to mark out the best candidates. More than 70 per cent of Oxford applicants are required to sit an entrance exam in subjects such as history, English, languages, mathematics and science this term, compared with 50 per cent just two years ago.

The development has fuelled a dramatic rise in demand for private tutors set up to help teenagers negotiate the admissions process. One company reported a doubling in the number of enquiries for coaching specifically to pass Oxbridge entrance tests.

It comes as record numbers of school-leavers attempt to get into the two universities in 2010. Oxford has already announced a 12 per cent rise in applications, with a similar increase expected at Cambridge.

An increase in entrance tests – sat by thousands of candidates this month – will fuel fears that tutors are finding it increasingly difficult to select the best candidates from record numbers of pupils leaving school with at least three As at A-level. In the mid-1980s, fewer than half of Oxbridge applicants gained straight As, but this year every candidate is expected to achieve the feat.

Earlier this month, the Government announced a major review of university admissions, suggesting that A-levels should not dictate entry to the most sought-after courses.

Mike Nicholson, Oxford’s director of admissions, said: “Without aptitude tests as part of the admissions process, it would be impossible for Oxford to effectively shortlist candidates for interview in the subjects that are most over-subscribed. “When we are presented with 17,000 candidates for around 3,200 places, all of whom have glowing references and excellent academic records, aptitude tests and interviews allow us to differentiate between the very best and the very good.”

Applications to Oxford and Cambridge close in October – before the deadline for other universities. Both institutions largely abolished entrance exams in most subjects in the mid-90s under pressure from state schools which claimed they discriminated in favour of pupils from the private sector. But tests have been slowly reintroduced over the last decade. Students applying for 36 different subjects at Oxford are now required to take a pre-interview aptitude test. Subjects such as experimental psychology and PPP (philosophy, psychology and physiology) were added for the first time this year.

At Cambridge, students take a generic “thinking skills” tests after applying to study computer science, economics, engineering, land economy, natural sciences and PPS (politics, psychology and sociology) at some colleges. For the first time this year, Cambridge is also running its own law exam after dropping the Law National Admissions Test, which is used to dictate entry to many courses across the country. Most exams are taken in the first week of November or early December.

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British university students betrayed by mindless Labour Party hype

Education, education, education. The almost half a million undergraduates who started at university this autumn probably don't remember Tony Blair's pre-election clarion call. And why should they? They were most likely only six or seven years of age when he promised to put their learning at the top of a Labour government's priorities; one rather suspects that their priorities at the time were eating sweets, watching cartoons and avoiding Nitty Nora the head explorer.

But back to that lovely little mantra. It probably doesn't cross Mr Blair's mind much now that he is raking in millions around the globe as a public speaker. Yet this week, 12 years on, the results of all that education, education, education were laid bare when the Office for National Statistics revealed that 746,000 18- to 24-year-olds are unemployed – a record rate of 18 per cent. It is thought that about 100,000 of those are university-leavers who, despite their degrees, cannot find jobs.

All those years of education, education, education and then they graduate around £20,000 in debt into a world where there are precious few opportunities for them, partly because Labour let the banks run wild and then run off with all of our money as a reward. (Oh, were it that the Government pumped even a fraction of that money into this country's academic institutions. But nah, let's make the students pay through the nose for their degrees that will probably end up being about as useful to them as their 50-metre swimming badge.)

It's nothing short of scandalous. David Blanchflower, an economist who used to help the Bank of England set interest rates, has even gone as far as to call it a "national crisis". In an interview last weekend, he said that "two groups have been affected in this recession. One is those that made foolish decisions and bought houses and racked up debt. I don't feel sorry for them. The other group is the young. They did all the right things. They paid for their degrees and now they have come out into the big world and there are no jobs for them."

But let us speak to the students themselves. My friend Ed, bright as a button, graduated from Cambridge with a 2:1 in English – yet as the nights draw in so, he feels, do his chances of gainful employment. Then there is Hannah, who left Warwick University in 2008, went on to complete a law conversion course this summer, and is now used to receiving "thank you, but no thank you" letters from companies. "I am struggling to earn the minimum wage in London," she says.

One of the people Hannah is now competing against for jobs in law is Catriona, who tells me that she has been doing voluntary work since graduating last year. "It's very depressing," she says. "I'm worried that once firms start recruiting again I'll be left behind, as by then there will be several years of graduates competing for the jobs."

Here I feel the need to question the Government's obsession with getting so many people into university. Designed to create opportunities for more people, it has instead produced disappointments, and for some people crushing ones – this, they say, could be a lost generation who never get jobs.

A degree used to get you employed because of the simple fact that there were fewer people with them. Now that everyone has one, their worth has been diminished. Indeed, perhaps it is time to accept that many people would have more success not going to university. Tom Mursell certainly believes that to be true. The 20-year-old set up notgoingtouni.co.uk, a website which he describes as an alternative Ucas. "I was quite militant about it when I left school," he says. "There was all this pressure to go – your parents, they want to be able to say in social circles that their child is going to university – but I wanted to look at the alternatives." He says that there is a snobbery around apprenticeships that should not exist. "There are all sorts of things you can do without a degree."

Are we really better educated than we were before Labour came to power? Perhaps a more appropriate mantra for Blair would have been this: qualifications, qualifications, qualifications. Qualifying for what, I am not sure.

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There is a new lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- on his usual vastly "incorrect" themes of race, genes, IQ etc.





16 November, 2009

British health and safety snoops to enter family homes

This will be abused within weeks. British bureaucrats are already a nightmare of intrusiveness

Health and safety inspectors are to be given unprecedented access to family homes to ensure that parents are protecting their children from household accidents. New guidance drawn up at the request of the Department of Health urges councils and other public sector bodies to “collect data” on properties where children are thought to be at “greatest risk of unintentional injury”.

Council staff will then be tasked with overseeing the installation of safety devices in homes, including smoke alarms, stair gates, hot water temperature restrictors, oven guards and window and door locks.

The draft guidance by a committee at the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice) has been criticised as intrusive and further evidence of the “creeping nanny state”. Until now, councils have made only a limited number of home inspections to check on building work and in extreme cases where the state of a house is thought to pose a serious risk to public health.

Nice also recommends the creation of a new government database to allow GPs, midwives and other officials who visit homes to log health and safety concerns they spot. The guidance aims to “encourage all practitioners who visit families and carers with children and young people aged under 15 to provide home safety advice and, where necessary, conduct a home risk assessment”. It continues: “If possible, they should supply and install home safety equipment.” The proposals have been put out to consultation and, if approved, will be implemented next year.

Matthew Elliott, of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, said: “It is a huge intervention into family life which will be counter-productive. “Good parents will feel the intrusion of the state in their homes and bad parents will now have someone else to blame if they don’t bring up their children in a sensible, safe environment.” About 100,000 children are admitted to hospital each year for home injuries at a cost of £146m. [All the snoops in the world won't stop childhood accidents]

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Name, age... are you gay? British census may get personal

As well as being an assault on privacy, this would certainly have a bad effect on compliance and truthfulness. People already tend to give mocking answers to many questionnaires. The results would be totally unreliable

EVERYONE in Britain could be asked if they are gay, straight or bisexual under controversial plans being examined by the government. Ministers working for Harriet Harman, who is in charge of equality policy, are considering including a question about sexual orientation in the 2011 census.

The move is opposed by the Office for National Statistics (ONS), which is responsible for drawing up the census questionnaire. Officials believe the question would be unlikely to provide a true picture because sexuality is so complex, while religious groups and other critics view the question as an unwarranted invasion of privacy.

Ann Widdecombe, Conservative MP for Maidstone and the Weald, said the question, although optional, would be intrusive. “It is people’s own business,” said Widdecombe. “It is not anyone else’s business and I don’t see why anyone should be asked to declare it.”

However, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), the government watchdog chaired by Trevor Phillips, has argued that it is vital to know how many gays, lesbians and bisexuals there are in Britain, where they live and what jobs they do so the progress of equality legislation can be measured. Failure to include a question, according to a paper by the commission, would be “an indicator of invisibility” and “a major obstacle to measuring progress on tackling discrimination”. This week the EHRC will tell a committee of MPs that it does not make sense to exclude the question when people are already asked about disability, race and religion. The government has previously ruled out the question, deeming it too controversial.

A draft of the 2011 census, which by law will have to be completed by every household, does not include a question on sexual identity. However, Michael Foster, a minister in Harman’s department, said: “We are being asked to look at it again.” Some ministers support the inclusion of a question, but only if it is not compulsory. One said: “You can’t demand that people tell us if they are gay or not.”

The ONS is opposed, partly because of research showing that people were against answering questions about their sexual behaviour. A spokesman added that sexual orientation was too complex to be accurately assessed by a single question. “A suite of questions would be necessary to collect data on the different dimensions of sexual orientation, including attraction, behaviour and identity,” he said.

There is also disagreement over the optional religious question, which first appeared in the 2001 census. Ministers are considering re-phrasing it, partly because of arguments from secular groups that “what is your religion?” overestimated the number of people following particular faiths because it was a leading question. Ministers are now looking at replacing it with “Do you regard yourself as belonging to a religion?”. Those answering “yes” would then be asked to identify that religion.

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Free Britons from constant suspicion

Under the cloak of "safety", the British Left is degrading the treatment of children. They know what they are doing. They seize every opportunity to destroy the society they live in

David Cameron gets it. Last week he had the good sense to say what many people know to be true, but fear to articulate: that all too often the government’s bureaucratic schemes to protect children have so many unintended consequences that they end up making children more vulnerable and society less strong.

In his Scott Trust speech, Cameron picked up on the themes that this newspaper has been highlighting: the hidden damage being caused by the government’s vetting and barring regimes. He was unequivocal about the malign effect that the new Independent Safeguarding Authority (ISA), with its plans to monitor at least a quarter of the adult population, would have on our lives.

Many responsible adults would, the Tory leader said, rather abandon volunteering than go through the rigmarole of a vetting procedure. That mass withdrawal would actually reduce the amount of care and love in children’s lives. This is already happening, although no one in government appears willing to recognise it. Ministers are so busy mouthing platitudes, both in public and in private, about “safeguarding children being our most important priority”, that they don’t want to hear or think about what it means for children when grown-ups decide it’s too risky to spend time with them. Ask them about sports or drama groups closing down for fear of breaking regulations, or of teachers deciding it’s too hazardous to organise school trips, and they say blandly that protection must come first.

They don’t want to know about all the quiet and disastrous ways in which society is being reshaped by the constant message that adults can’t be trusted. Evidence has poured into this paper since the issue was raised here two weeks ago. Some came from professionals who cannot afford any misinterpretation of their interaction with children because of what it means for their jobs.

A paediatric nurse told me that until this autumn she was a volunteer at a local mother and toddler group. She stopped on the day a baby tumbled off a low slide. She realised then that if the mother concerned had accused her of negligence, that accusation could put an end to her career. She will no longer volunteer at any activity where children might be present.

A school governor talked of her distress at seeing a six-year-old child screaming after a bad fall in a playground and of no adults going to comfort her. The teacher standing beside her, watching woodenly, said it was more than his job was worth to touch a child. A children’s social worker said he made it a rule never to take out his godchildren, or to be alone in a room with the children of friends, in case he was ever accused of abuse.

If it seems perverse that the people who are trained to relate to children now have a particular reason to avoid them, some of the consequences outlined by other adults seem sadder still. A couple in their seventies wrote to say that their small dog was so attractive to children that every time they went out with him children wanted to stroke him and talk to them. The couple were so worried about how this might be seen that they now walked the dog only when children were in school.

A company director, fit, wealthy and about to retire, said that what he really wanted to do was to change deprived children’s lives, as he had done by running football teams for them in his thirties and forties. But he didn’t want to do so in a climate of such suspicion, so all his energy and experience would go to waste.

A fiftysomething grandmother wrote to say that on Hallowe’en she had stopped in the street to compliment three nine-year-olds on their costumes and, in the midst of a lively conversation, had felt such sudden panic that she might be accused of grooming the girls that she had cut it short and hurried off.

This is the reality of what pervasive suspicion is doing to us all. The government and its agencies may prefer to be wilfully blind to it. The Conservatives can’t afford to be. Their vision of a better Britain is built on the idea that people and communities should come together to take more responsibility for one another. They want to build links between people and generations, not erode them. That’s why they intend to rethink the way the ISA operates.

It is delicate territory and they know it. Demanding more protection for children is the politically easy option; talking about why mass monitoring won’t achieve it, and what will be lost in the ruthless and misguided pursuit of it, is harder and needs a more sophisticated argument.

Everyone notices, and recoils, when a child is atrociously abused or dies; the absence of thousands of voluntary activities, or untold acts of kindness, warmth and concern between children and adults never registers. It is to the Tories’ credit that they are willing to open up this argument.

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Catch 22 in Britain

Woman too fat for operation is too thin for weight loss surgery. Expect similar bureaucratic catches to affect YOU under Obamacare

A woman who was considered too fat for a hernia operation has now been told she is not heavy enough to be given weight loss surgery. Jo Thompson, who is 5ft tall and weighs nearly 18 stone, has found herself in the Catch 22 situation after years of failed dieting. “I have always had a problem with my size,” she said today. “I have tried every diet going to lose weight. “In the last two years I’ve cut down on my portions, and although I can’t afford to go to the gym I do a lot of walking.”

Miss Thompson, 37, from Parson Cross, Sheffield, recently complained to her doctor about heartburn and indigestion. He referred her to a specialist at the city’s Royal Hallamshire Hospital, telling her he thought she needed a hernia operation. However, the consultant there said she was too big to undergo the procedure and instead recommended the gastric bypass. This, he said, would help her lose weight and thereby ease the hernia problem.

“But when I saw another doctor I was told I could not have the bypass surgery because I am not heavy enough. “It’s a crazy situation and I just don’t know what to do. I’m not obese enough to have a gastric bypass, but I’m too big to have the hernia operation. Miss Thompson, whose body mass index is 46, went on: “It seems I must reduce my body mass index to 40 to have the hernia operation or increase it to 50 to have gastric bypass surgery. It’s a crazy situation and I seem to be caught in the middle”.

The refusal by staff at Royal Hallamshire to carry out the bypass operation while Miss Thompson’s BMI remains below 50 has been criticised by a specialist health group. Dr Matt Capehorn, of the National Obesity Forum, said: "Under National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) guidelines, patients who have unsuccessfully tried other weight loss methods should be considered for surgery if their BMI is above 40. "Sheffield NHS have been very short-sighted in their view of the funding for this operation because the surgery would pay for itself within three years.” He added: “They are not following NICE guidelines and are therefore leaving this woman in a state of limbo."

A spokesman for NHS Sheffield confirmed that the trust had turned down Miss Thompson’s request to have the operation. Its criteria on the issue had been set by the Yorkshire and Humber Specialised Commissioning Group and was therefore in line with the rest of the county. The procedure was always used as a last resort “because it is a very serious operation.”

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British High School exams to cover grammar of mobile phone texting

A section on the grammar of mobile phone texting is to appear in GCSE exams. A new English exam that includes a section on the grammar of mobile-phone texting has been slammed as the ultimate dumbing down of the subject. Next year pupils will be tested on text messaging as part of their English GCSEs. They will have to write an essay on the etiquette and grammar of texting, using their own messages as examples – earning up to ten per cent of their overall English GCSE mark.

The subject is being introduced by the Assessment Qualifications Alliance (AQA), the country's largest exam board.

Last night Nick Seaton, chairman of the Campaign for Real Education, said it was a 'shameful betrayal of the subject'. He said: 'Surely, with all the great literature that could be studied, it is a tragedy that pupils are being asked to do this as part of an English qualification. 'It is hardly believable and such a waste of time and effort. It is difficult to see what they will learn – it's the ultimate dumbing down.'

The subject of 'text language' will be taught from next September under the guise of 'Studying Spoken Language'. It has been introduced as part of a reform of GCSEs designed to make the qualification tougher. [TOUGHER???] Coursework has been taken off the curriculum over concerns that parents were helping their children cheat.

The new subject of study has been described by the AQA as the 'newest and potentially most exciting area of the new GCSE'. An AQA spokeswoman said: 'Texting is a prevalent form of language in the 21st Century and it is right that it is given its place alongside other forms of language.' [But do they need to go to school to learn it?]

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Propaganda failure: Global warming is not our fault, say most British voters

Less than half the population believes that human activity is to blame for global warming, according to an exclusive poll for The Times.

The revelation that ministers have failed in their campaign to persuade the public that the greenhouse effect is a serious threat requiring urgent action will make uncomfortable reading for the Government as it prepares for next month’s climate change summit in Copenhagen.

Only 41 per cent accept as an established scientific fact that global warming is taking place and is largely man-made. Almost a third (32 per cent) believe that the link is not yet proved; 8 per cent say that it is environmentalist propaganda to blame man and 15 per cent say that the world is not warming.

Tory voters are more likely to doubt the scientific evidence that man is to blame. Only 38 per cent accept it, compared with 45 per cent of Labour supporters and 47 per cent of Liberal Democrat voters.

The high level of scepticism underlines the difficulty the Government will have in persuading the public to accept higher green taxes to help to meet Britain’s legally binding targets to cut carbon emissions by 34 per cent by 2020 and 80 per cent by 2050.

The recession appears to have made tackling climate change less of a priority for many people. Only just over a quarter (28 per cent) think that it is happening and is “far and away the most serious problem we face as a country and internationally”, while just over half (51 per cent) think it is “a serious problem, but other problems are more serious”.

Vicky Pope, head of climate change advice at the Met Office, said that growing awareness of the scale of the problem appeared to be resulting in people taking refuge in denial. “Being confronted with the possibility of higher energy bills, wind farms down the road and new nuclear power stations encourages people to question everything about climate change,” she said. “There is a resistance to change and some people see the problem being used as an excuse to charge them more taxes.”

Ed Miliband, the Energy and Climate Change Secretary, said: “The overwhelming body of scientific information is stacked up against the deniers and shows us that climate change is man-made and is happening now. We know that we still have a way to go in informing people about climate change and that is why we make no apologies about pushing forward with our new Act on CO2 campaign.”

SOURCE



Terrorists smuggle fatwas out of "secure" British prisons: "Some of Britain’s most dangerous Al-Qaeda leaders are promoting jihad from inside high-security prisons by smuggling out propaganda for the internet and finding recruits. In an authoritative report, Quilliam, a think tank funded by the Home Office, claims “mismanagement” by the Prison Service is helping AlQaeda gain recruits and risks “strengthening jihadist movements”. Abu Qatada, described by MI5 as “Osama Bin Laden’s right-hand man in Europe”, has published fatwas — religious rulings — on the internet from Long Lartin prison, in Worcestershire, calling for holy war and the murder of moderate Muslims, it reveals."





15 November, 2009

NHS whistleblower 'sacked for revealing dumped x-ray scans'

A NHS whistleblower who claims that he was sacked because he revealed a leading hospital was dumping x-ray scans will take his case to an employment tribunal next week. Dr Otto Chan, a consultant radiologist, believes that he was labelled a troublemaker after the revelations about the Royal London. He claims that hospital bosses decided to get rid of him and that his dismissal has left him unable to get another job in the health service. He is suing the hospital for loss of earnings, future earnings and pension. But he says that he also want to set a precedent that could help protect future NHS whistleblowers.

Dr Chan, 52, said that problems began after he warned that 10,000 packets of films and scans had built up because the Barts and the London Trust, which runs the Royal London, had neither the people nor the money to analyse them. He also raised concerns about junior doctors treating patients unsupervised. “After that the Trust decided they were going to get rid of me,” he said. He claims he was then accused of causing “disharmony” within the department and was dismissed by the hospital in 2006.

Since then he has been unable to find a permanent job in the NHS since. Dr Chan said that he hoped his case would offer greater protection to other NHS whistleblowers, who he said had a responsibility to expose problems in the health service. He said: “As doctors we have a responsibility to protect our patients. If we do not report them then theoretically we should be taken to the GMC.”

The case, which will start in Stratford on Monday, is being supported by the Medical Protection Society and is already estimated to have already cost between £2 and £3 million.

A spokesman for the trust said: “Dr Chan worked as a consultant radiologist at Barts and The London NHS Trust between January 1993 and his dismissal in June 2006. His dismissal is now the subject of an industrial tribunal. “It would be inappropriate, therefore, to comment further until the conclusion of that process. Dr Chan’s dismissal followed a 19-month investigation, which included a formal hearing by an independent panel. "The panel concluded that there were grounds for dismissal. The dismissal was in no way connected with issues with our radiology processes."

SOURCE



NHS hospitals treat Alzheimer’s patients so badly 'one in three carers complain'

Hospitals are treating Alzheimer’s patients so badly that one in three sufferer’s families have complained about their loved one's care. Even greater numbers of relatives and friends said they wanted to complain but had not, a new report by the Alzheimer’s Society shows. The figures are released just days after an independent review warned that 1,800 dementia patients are being killed every year by controversial ‘chemical cosh’ drugs given to keep them quiet.

Carers told the charity of sufferers left to sit in their own urine and nurses who complained that they had too many patients to look after. The report also heard of patients going hungry because they were not helped to eat or drink and many were generally treated with a lack of basic dignity and respect. One carer said that when nurses were asked for help with cleaning her mother they responded “that’s someone else’s job”.

The charity said that the situation was a “disgrace”. The study also found that almost eight in 10 carers, 77 per cent, were dissatisfied with the quality of dementia care in hospitals. The same number think that hospital staff do not understand the illness. Yet figures show that people with dementia occupy up to one in four hospital beds in England at any one time.

Neil Hunt, chief executive of Alzheimer’s Society, said: “It is a complete disgrace that so many families are receiving such poor care that they are being forced to complain. “People expect and deserve better but these new figures suggest that is far from the case. “As the numbers of people with dementia increase almost exponentially pressure on the NHS will also increase – we need to sort this problem out now.”

Earlier this week an independent report warned that four in five of the 180,000 dementia patients in hospitals and care homes on antipsychotic drugs were being wrongly prescribed the medications, which kill many of them.

Ministers have announced plans to try to cut the number of the drugs prescribed by two-thirds within three years.

More than 700,000 people in Britain suffer from dementia, of which around 400,000 have Alzheimer’s, the most common type. Experts warn that one in three people currently aged over 65 will die with dementia. The disease is also predicted to become increasingly more common in coming decades, as the population ages.

More than 1200 carers of people with dementia took part in the survey, which forms part of a major report the Society will launch next week on the huge variation of treatment of dementia patients on hospital wards across the country. A spokesman for the Patients Association said: "This survey confirms our fears that there is a widespread and disturbing failure in the hospital care of elderly patients."

A spokesman for the Department of Health said: "We have set priority areas for all hospitals to take urgent action, including appointing a senior member of staff to improve quality of care for people with dementia, proper training for all staff, and specialist older people's mental health teams working in hospitals."

SOURCE



Britain's National Health Service Denied Sight-Saving Medicine to Its Own Employee

An employee of Britain's government-run National Health Service was denied medication that could save her from going blind in one eye. Sylvie Webb, a widow from Salisbury, England, worked for 18 years as a secretary at Salisbury District Hospital. Yet, despite her situation, Webb discovered that medical treatment under the public health service is anything but universal.

In February 2007, doctors diagnosed Webb, then 58, with the "wet" type of age-related macular degeneration (ARMD) in her left eye. If not treated in a timely manner, wet ARMD "can lead to blindness in as little as three months and people need prompt treatment if they are to minimize the risk of permanent sight loss," according to a statement by the Royal National Institute of Blind People in London. As such, Webb's medical consultant sought rapid treatment for Webb because her sight was "deteriorating 'day by day,'" as Webb explained, and an infection in one eye can spread to the other good eye.

But to Webb's dismay, for nearly a year her local public health authority, Dorset Primary Care Trusts, refused to provide Webb with the expensive "anti-VEGF" drugs she desperately needed to save her sight. Though two such effective drugs, Macugen and Lucentis, are licensed for general NHS use, the Dorset Trust, which controls funding prescriptions, dragged its feet. Dorset Trust said it has yet to formulate a policy in a "fair and equitable way" to treat Webb's condition and thus it could not provide her with the VEGF drugs.

As Webb explained at the time, "At the time, the PCT [Dorset Primary Care Trusts] said it hadn't got a policy and it would address the situation in April [2007] - but it has now postponed this until June. I'm extremely worried that time is running out for me and other patients." The prospect of going blind terrified Webb:

"I'm a young woman and want to carry on working, and then I'd like to do all the things I had planned for my retirement. I'm also worried about the health of my other eye. I know I'm at increased risk of getting wet AMD in that eye and this could mean I end up losing my sight. The women in my family live into their 90s; I can't accept the possibility of being blind unnecessarily for the next 35 years."

In May 2007, the Trust agreed to review Webb's case on an urgent basis. But for Tom Bremridge, CEO of the Macular Disease Society in Andover, UK, there is no excuse for Webb being without the available sight-saving drugs she needs. "It is outrageous that in this day and age Mrs. Webb faces losing her sight owing to bureaucratic idleness," he said. Steve Winyard of RNIB echoed Bremridge's outrage:

"This is disgraceful... It's little comfort for Mrs. Webb that she can't get treatment simply because her PCT has yet to decide a policy. The PCT needs to get its act together and ensure these drugs are available to patients now and without a struggle... There is a moral imperative to save the sight of people where we can."

Finally, in 2008 new health guidelines permitted Dorset Trusts to prescribe Lucentis for Webb. The guidelines published by the National Institute for Clinical Excellence, the government's health advisory authority, allow for funding for the first 14 injections of Lucentis once wet ARMD is diagnosed in one eye. If additional injections are necessary, the drug's manufacturer, Novartis, will pay for additional treatment.

Webb was delighted that she would at last receive the sight-saving drug. "I'm so relieved that Dorset PCT has finally realized the long-term benefit to me of this treatment and has agreed funding," she said. "I only hope that all patients are given treatment to help save their sight because while this is good news for me, there may be hundreds of others with wet AMD who cannot get the funding they desperately need."

SOURCE



British childcare watchdog deliberately hid evidence in court case

Secrecy is deeply ingrained into everyone involved in British child-protection -- it is their only protection against revelations of their vast incompetence and injustice. See an example of their mindless oppressiveness here

The childcare watchdog has admitted withholding crucial evidence that could potentially hand Sharon Shoesmith, the former head of children’s services at Haringey Council, hundreds of thousands of pounds in compensation. Ms Shoesmith was sacked after a damning Ofsted report into how her department was run in the aftermath of the Baby P case. A High Court judge has taken the extraordinary step of reopening her case so dozens of pages of handwritten notes, e-mails and draft reports can be examined. Mr Justice Foskett also ordered Ofsted to pay for all extra legal costs incurred at the penal “indemnity” rate — a bill that could cost taxpayers £50,000.

Ofsted issued a humiliating apology for its handling of Ms Shoesmith’s legal challenge, admitting a “serious and deeply regrettable error”.

The latest unexpected twist in the case of Baby Peter, the 17-month-old boy who died from repeated abuse, has placed in doubt Ofsted’s competence to oversee child protection.

Last month Ms Shoesmith launched judicial review proceedings against Ofsted, Ed Balls, the Children’s Secretary, and Haringey Council over her dismissal from the £130,000 a year job after the Baby Peter tragedy. She accused Mr Balls of putting pressure on Haringey to sack her with no compensation after a media campaign. Her lawyers have argued that a devastating Ofsted report used by Mr Balls and Haringey to justify their actions was deeply flawed and failed to follow proper procedures. That hearing ended a month ago and all parties were expecting the judge to make his ruling this week.

Ms Shoesmith’s lawyers had repeatedly tried to get hold of handwritten notes and various early drafts of the devastating Ofsted report into Haringey children’s services that cost her her job. Ms Shoesmith was told first the notes were not relevant, then that they “did not exist”. However, they were found several weeks ago by a lawyer new to Ofsted’s legal department who was following up a freedom of information request. Of the five key witnesses in Ofsted’s defence, three have produced new material. The judge was alerted on November 6.

Last night the Conservatives said that the court case had called into question Ofsted’s competence. “Ofsted has come out very badly from this tragic affair. An inspection in 2007 gave Haringey three stars, just days after Baby P has died. Their second inspection completely reversed that judgment. Now someone’s incompetence means we’re faced with the risible prospect of the taxpayer shelling out for Sharon Shoesmith’s legal costs,” Tim Loughton, the Shadow Children’s Minister, said. “Ofsted has to get its act together. Inspectors of children’s services need to be spending much more time talking to professionals and less time checking ticked boxes.”

Ofsted has been given two weeks to produce any other documents that could be relevant to the case.

In the emergency High Court hearing yesterday, Mr Justice Foskett also ordered it to give “a full explanation” of how it was that a series of requests from Ms Shoesmith’s lawyers for information on draft reports “was dealt with in the way it was”. He said that they were at first “batted away”, then turned down on the basis that the draft reports did not exist, “and now they do”. “I want chapter and verse on that,” he said.

Among the material are copies of drafts of transcripts of the Ofsted report into Haringey. There had been allegations that earlier drafts of the Ofsted report had been altered, or the assessments that they contained were altered in some way, he said. The reopening of the case means that a judgment is now unlikely until the new year.

Ofsted admitted that it had made a “serious and deeply regrettable error” in failing to disclose potential evidence. “We very much regret that this has happened. We have apologised unreservedly to the court and other parties. Unfortunately, mistakes sometimes happen and, while this is a serious one and deeply regrettable, we have nothing to hide,” it said in a statement.

Ms Shoesmith, 56, was dismissed in December.

During the judicial review it emerged that there were two key phone calls made to Haringey Council from a senior minister and senior official at the Department for Children, Schools and Families after a bruising Prime Minister’s Questions. It also emerged that Christine Gilbert, the Chief Inspector, made special arrangements for Mr Balls to have the Ofsted report before Haringey and gave him a personal briefing on the morning when Ms Shoesmith was suspended.

SOURCE



Classroom rewards 'do not work'

Bribing pupils to work hard and behave in the classroom can backfire, according to research. The use of rewards such as points, stickers and treats causes pupils to lose motivation and has little effect on overall school performance, it was claimed.

A study said that incentives rarely produced long-term results because it reduced the perception that pupils were “doing that task of their own free will”. It comes despite claims from Ofsted that prizes were a “powerful incentive” for students who struggled at school.

Last year, the Telegraph told how some of the Government’s academy schools were spending up to £30,000 a year on extravagant reward schemes to improve discipline, attendance and pupils’ work. In some cases, children could win plasma televisions, games consoles, iPods, lap-tops and even flights abroad for turning up on time and working hard.

But Emma Dunmore, head of psychology at Harrogate Grammar School, North Yorkshire, who carried out the latest study, said reward schemes “reduced intrinsic motivation”. “Receiving the reward may reduce the individual’s sense that they were doing the task because they chose to,” she said. “Instead, they felt that they were doing it for a reward and so were being controlled by someone else.”

The study – quoted in the Times Educational Supplement – was compiled following a review of research into school reward schemes. Dr Dunmore said that even verbal praise such as “excellent, keep up the good work” could reduce children’s motivation. She said some messages could prompt children believe "this task pleases the teacher" rather than "this task pleases me".

"Rewards may strengthen behaviour in the short term but... they can undermine motivation in the long run because they reduce the individual's perception that they are doing that task of their own free will," the study said.

SOURCE



Britain's Warmist fairytale

Britain has no chance of meeting its main carbon-reduction target because it lacks the engineering and manufacturing capacity to deliver the required renewable energy, a study has found.

The Government has made a legally binding commitment to cut emissions by 80 per cent by 2050 but has failed to set out how this could be achieved.

The study by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers says that the target, the central plank of Britain’s negotiating position at the UN climate change summit in Copenhagen next month, is “an act of faith” with no grounding in reality. Britain would need to build the equivalent of 30 nuclear power stations by 2015 to be on course to meet the target, the study says. On Monday the Government said it hoped that private companies would build ten by 2025.

The institution calls on the Government to accept the “uncomfortable reality” that the 80 per cent target, mandated in the Climate Change Act, is unachieveable. It says: “Given the magnitude of the engineering challenge and the pace of action required, the institution concludes that the Climate Change Act has failed even before it has started. It seems likely that the Act will have to be revisited by Parliament or simply ignored by policymakers.”

The study estimates that, even using optimistic assumptions about annual rates of carbon reduction, the earliest the target for 2050 could be achieved is 2100.

Emissions per unit of GDP, known as carbon intensity, would have to fall by 5 per cent a year for the next 40 years to meet the target. Britain’s highest rate of carbon intensity reduction was 2.3 per cent a year in the mid-1990s when several coal-fired power stations were replaced by more efficient gas-fired ones. In recent years, carbon intensity has been falling by about 1.3 per cent a year.

The institution accuses the Government of ignoring its own evidence about how long it takes to deliver infrastructure. It dismisses the idea that Britain could recruit engineers from abroad. It also says that private companies, on which the Government is relying to deliver low-carbon infrastructure, are “simply not that interested”.

Stephen Tetlow, the institution’s chief executive, said Britain needed to adopt a “wartime mentality”, with people as acutely aware of their energy consumption as they were of food consumption during the Second World War.

SOURCE



Brits to pay up big in pursuit of a Greenie fantasy

Families will pay a new levy on electricity bills for at least the next 20 years to fund technology designed to capture the carbon from coal-fired power stations. The Government is planning to raise £9.5 billion from the levy to subsidise up to four carbon capture and storage (CCS) demonstration plants. Details of the first plant will be announced early next year. The Department for Energy and Climate Change said yesterday that uncertainty over the commercial viability of CCS meant that public support might have to continue beyond 2030.

The Government is promoting CCS to justify approving new coal plants to replace the eight due to close by 2015 under European rules on air pollution. Burning coal produces far more carbon than burning gas for the same amount of electricity but ministers want to build new coal plants to reduce Britain’s dependence on imported gas.

E.On announced last month that it was delaying its plan for a new coal station with CCS at Kingsnorth, Kent, for at least three years. However, the Kingsnorth plant may yet go ahead and, along with a proposed plant at Longannet in Scotland, is competing to be the first subsidised CCS demonstration project.

The department said the CCS levy, likely to start in 2011, would be about £17 a year per household. It said that the cost could be higher if its assumptions about the cost of CCS proved too optimistic. The initial levy, which will be imposed on electricity suppliers but passed on to consumers, will run for 15 years. This will pay for the first phase of CCS, under which new coal plants will have to capture the carbon from only about a quarter of their generating capacity.

Ed Miliband, the Energy and Climate Change Secretary, said that the levy could be continued beyond the 15-year period to subsidise CCS for the entire output of the four plants.

An official from the department said it was possible that the levy could remain in place for an additional 15 years, but this would depend on the price of permits to emit carbon. If the price remained at the present low level, CCS would continue to need huge subsidies because it would be cheaper for generators to buy permits for their carbon emissions than to invest in technology to reduce them.

Mr Miliband admitted that further regulations or financial incentives might be needed to encourage the development of CCS. He ordered a “rolling review” of progress on CCS and said it would report by 2018 on whether it was “technically or economically viable”. The department said its ambition was for any coal plant opening after 2020 to have CCS covering its full capacity from the outset. Its draft policy on “clean coal” said it hoped that the four demonstration projects would allow CCS to be applied to existing coal plants from 2020. “Our ambition is for CCS to be ready for widespread deployment from 2020.”

It admitted that there was a risk that CCS, which has yet to be shown to work commercially anywhere in the world, might prove unviable. “In the event that CCS is not on track to become technically or commercially viable, preventing retrofit, an appropriate regulatory approach for managing emissions will be needed.”

Keith Allott, head of climate change at the environmental group WWF-UK, said: “The acknowledgement that we need a safety net in place, in case carbon capture and storage technology doesn’t work or costs too much, is a sensible step forward. However, waiting until the 2020s to put such a plan into action is foolhardy. “It gives us no guarantee that the advice of the Committee on Climate Change, which urges the UK to decarbonise the power sector by 2030, will be met. “It would also do nothing to stop the building of largely unabated coal power stations in the interim.”

SOURCE



Only uneducated "asylum-seeker" scum now welcome in Britain

Highly qualified people like doctors are to be kept out. ALL the "asylum seekers" who reach Britain have gone through other countries first so were already safe from whatever persecution they claim. They are country shoppers, not asylum seekers. So the Labour government's new policy in fact steps up the national suicide that it is doing its best to bring about. If they had Britain's interests at heart they would say that Britain has now done its bit for refugees and is no longer a nation of refuge for asylum seekers

PROFESSIONAL workers from Australia and other countries outside the European Union wanting to find a job in Britain will face even tougher restrictions from 2010. Prime Minister Gordon Brown has outlined a series of proposed reforms to Britain's points-based immigration system, which is based on the one developed in Australia. Under the latest crackdown, Mr Brown wants professionals - including doctors, engineers and hospital consultants, skilled chefs and care workers - to be removed from the list of workers eligible to apply for jobs.

Rules for foreign students applying for visas to study in the UK will also be tightened.

Mr Brown said that while immigrants had brought immeasurable benefits to Britain, changes to the system were needed in order to protect jobs for local workers. The changes come after the government earlier this year dumped 30,000 occupations from its list of jobs eligible skilled migrants could apply for in Britain. "Over the coming months we will remove more occupations and thousands more posts from the list of those eligible for entry under the points-based system," Mr Brown said in a speech in London. "As (economic) growth returns I want to see rising levels of skills, wages and employment among those resident here rather than employers having to recruiting from abroad."

Mr Brown said foreign students would also be subject to the latest crackdown. He announced a review of foreign student visas by government agencies to determine whether there was a case for "raising the minimum level of (a study) course for which they can obtain a visa". Mandatory English language tests for foreign students signing up for courses other than English ones are also to be considered along with new rules for those with part-time jobs.

Mr Brown said he was concerned about foreign students on lower-qualification courses working part-time in jobs that ``would be better filled by young, British workers''.

The planned changes to student visas were attacked by the Immigration Advisory Service's head Keith Best. He said many British universities and colleges relied on half their income from fees paid by foreign students and could be "in very serious trouble'' if that income stream was cut off. He told the BBC that Britain already faced stiff competition from universities in countries such as Australia, which were actively recruiting foreign students.

The changes announced by the prime minister come amid growing debate in Britain over its immigration levels while the country remains mired in recession. In an interview with the Daily Mail newspaper before he gave his speech, Mr Brown said he understood people's concerns about the impact of a rising population on employment, wages and housing costs. "I know people worry about whether immigration undermines their wages and the job prospects of their children and they also worry about whether they will get a decent home for their families," he said. "They want to be assured that the system is tough and fair. "They want to be assured that newcomers to the country will accept their responsibilities ... obey all the laws, speaking English is important, making a contribution."

SOURCE



British police banned from saying 'gang rape' as it is 'too emotive'

We read:

"Politically correct Scotland Yard chiefs have stopped using the term 'gang rape' because it is too 'emotive', the Mail can reveal. Instead officers have been advised to use the long-winded phrase 'multi-perpetrator rape' when describing sex attacks involving three or more culprits.

Critics branded the move by the Metropolitan Police an 'affront' to the victims of appalling sex crimes and are preparing to launch a campaign on the issue.

Six years ago the Met was at the centre of a similar row over its choice of language to describe 'gang rapes' after a senior officer referred to them as 'group rapes' during an interview on BBC Radio 4's Today programme. Some community activists had previously suggested the phrase 'gang rape' had racist connotations.

Details of the latest police terminology are contained in an official Scotland Yard report which reveals a sharp increase in the number of gang rapes in the capital.

Source

Stories from a very strange place. Not even Kafka could have envisaged a country where only 2.5% of the police force are actually available to assist the public -- but that is modern Britain. Yes: 2.5%, not 25%.


Postings from Brisbane, Australia by John Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.) -- former member of the Australia-Soviet Friendship Society, former anarcho-capitalist and former member of the British Conservative party.


Some TERMINOLOGY for non-British readers: The British "A Level" exam is roughly equivalent to a U.S. High School diploma. Rather confusingly, you can get As, Bs or Cs in your "A Level" results. Entrance to the better universities normally requires several As in your "A Levels".


Again for American readers: A "pensioner" is a retired person living on Social Security


Consensus. Margaret Thatcher in a 1981 speech: "For me, pragmatism is not enough. Nor is that fashionable word "consensus."... To me consensus seems to be the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies in search of something in which no one believes, but to which no one objects—the process of avoiding the very issues that have to be solved, merely because you cannot get agreement on the way ahead. What great cause would have been fought and won under the banner "I stand for consensus"?


For my sins I have always loved G.B. Shaw's witty comment: "No Englishman can open his mouth without causing another Englishman to despise him". But Shaw was Irish, of course.


Britain has enormous claims to fame -- most of which the Labour goverment has been doing its best to destroy. But one glory no-one can destroy is British humour. And if you don't "get" British humour, your life is a dreary desert indeed. A superb sample here


Here is a link to my favourite British political speech since WWII. It is by Nigel Farage, the Leader of the UK Independence Party. He is referring to the Fascistic decision by the EU parliament to act as if their huge new "constitution" had been approved by the voters when in fact majorities in France, Ireland and Nederland (Holland) have rejected it at the ballot box. He points out that abuse is all they have to offer when he points out the impropriety of their actions.

Farage's expression, "A complete shower" is British slang meaning a group of completely incompetent and useless failures. It originated in the British armed forces where its unabbreviated version was "A complete shower of sh*t".


Britain appears to be the first country where anti-patriotism gained strong hold. Even Friedich Engels (the co-worker with Karl Marx who died in 1895) was a furious German patriot. Much of the British elite were anti-patriotic from the early 20th century onwards, however. The "Cambridge spies" (from one of Britain's two most prestigious universities) are a good example of that. Although Cambridge appears to have been the chief nest of spies-to-be in Britain of the 30s, however, Oxford was also very Leftist. In 1933 (9th Feb.) the Oxford Union debated the motion: "This House will in no circumstances fight for King and Country". The motion was overwhelmingly carried (275 to 153).


I have an abiding fascination with the Church of England. It is the sort of fascination one might have for a once-distinguished elderly relative who has gone bad and become a slave to the bottle. But nothing I can say about the C of E (which these days seems to stand for The Church of the Environment) could surpass what the whole of English literature says of it -- which ranges from seeing it as a collection of nincompoops and incompetents to seeing it as comprised of evil hypocrites. Yet its 39 "Articles of Religion" of 1562 are an abiding and eloquent statement of Protestant faith. But I guess that 1562 is a long time ago.


Links about antisemitism in 21st century Britain here and here and here


The intellectual Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius (AD 121-180) could well have been thinking of modern Britain when he said: "The object in life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane."


On all my blogs, I express my view of what is important primarily by the readings that I select for posting. I do however on occasions add personal comments in italicized form at the beginning of an article.


I am rather pleased to report that I am a lifelong conservative. Out of intellectual curiosity, I did in my youth join organizations from right across the political spectrum so I am certainly not closed-minded and am very familiar with the full spectrum of political thinking. Nonetheless, I did not have to undergo the lurch from Left to Right that so many people undergo. At age 13 I used my pocket-money to subscribe to the "Reader's Digest" -- the main conservative organ available in small town Australia of the 1950s. I have learnt much since but am pleased and amused to note that history has since confirmed most of what I thought at that early age.

I imagine that the RD are still sending mailouts to my 1950s address


The kneejerk response of the Green/Left to people who challenge them is to say that the challenger is in the pay of "Big Oil", "Big Business", "Big Pharma", "Exxon-Mobil", "The Pioneer Fund" or some other entity that they see, in their childish way, as a boogeyman. So I think it might be useful for me to point out that I have NEVER received one cent from anybody by way of support for what I write. As a retired person, I live entirely on my own investments. I do not work for anybody and I am not beholden to anybody. And I have NO investments in oil companies, mining companies or "Big Pharma"


UPDATE: Despite my (statistical) aversion to mining stocks, I have recently bought a few shares in BHP -- the world's biggest miner, I gather. I run the grave risk of becoming a speaker of famous last words for saying this but I suspect that BHP is now so big as to be largely immune from the risks that plague most mining companies. I also know of no issue affecting BHP where my writings would have any relevance. The Left seem to have a visceral hatred of miners. I have never quite figured out why.


I am an army man. Although my service in the Australian army was chiefly noted for its un-notability, I DID join voluntarily in the Vietnam era, I DID reach the rank of Sergeant, and I DID volunteer for a posting in Vietnam. So I think I may be forgiven for saying something that most army men think but which most don't say because they think it is too obvious: The profession of arms is the noblest profession of all because it is the only profession where you offer to lay down your life in performing your duties. Our men fought so that people could say and think what they like but I myself always treat military men with great respect -- respect which in my view is simply their due.


Although I have been an atheist for all my adult life, I have no hesitation in saying that the single book which has influenced me most is the New Testament. And my Scripture blog will show that I know whereof I speak.


Many people hunger and thirst after righteousness. Some find it in the hatreds of the Left. Others find it in the love of Christ. I don't hunger and thirst after righteousness at all. I hunger and thirst after truth. How old-fashioned can you get?