Eye on Britain
Monday, March 31, 2008
Of Governors and Call Girls: Some thoughts upon Eliot Spitzer's downfall
By THEODORE DALRYMPLE
No doubt it signifies a mixture of moral frivolity and profound lack of sexual imagination, but one of the first questions that occurred to me when I read of Gov. Eliot Spitzer's involvement with a high-class (or perhaps I should say expensive) prostitution ring was: What acts does a woman perform to be worth $3,000 per hour, compared with one who charges "only" $1,000?
Of course, I have long realized that there is a hierarchy among prostitutes, as there is in all professions. My first patient with tertiary syphilis, for example, was an old prostitute, impoverished, raddled, and toothless, who still plied her trade on waste ground for the price of a cigarette. Her pimp was also her husband, and her cries of despair when he abandoned her still ring in my mind's ear. I have never encountered desolation deeper than hers.
Another of my patients was a smartly dressed black woman whom I initially took to be a business executive. She was a dominatrix. She had her own website and flew around the world flogging the prominent of many nations. She was particularly proud of her connection, if that is the word I seek, with a senior judge in one of the southern states of the U.S. She had a large house and an expensive car and was proud of her success. It was skilled work, after all, and she provided value for money, or else her clients would not have retained her services. Many of them, indeed, were in love with her. She was so amusing that I could not condemn her, even in my heart.
This reminds me that prostitutes in literature have generally been treated kindly. No literary intellectual ever won his spurs by denouncing what everyone else had already denounced with pursed lips and a tut-tut. We do not think of Mistress Quickly and Doll Tearsheet as wicked, but rather as good-time girls with hearts of gold. Maupassant's stories favor prostitutes over their respectable, bourgeois clients. In Russian literature, fallen women serve to illustrate the possibility and power of redemption (and the generosity of authors). The demand for paid sex has generally been more severely condemned in literature than the supply.
One might have supposed that in a relatively liberal sexual environment such as ours, the demand for prostitution would decline, but that does not seem to have happened. This suggests that raw, biological frustration of the sex drive is not at the root of the demand. Appetites not only grow with feeding, but diversify with it. The limits or boundaries of licit and illicit change, but the demand for the illicit remains constant.
Mr. Spitzer can hardly have been driven to act as he did by the kind of sexual frustration that is said to be common in Muslim countries, where all contact with females before and outside of marriage is forbidden. He is both rich and powerful, and in our society men of that sort do not usually have much difficulty finding someone with whom to have an affair, if they feel the need. Moreover, one might have expected a man like Mr. Spitzer - who built his career on the prosecution (or was it the persecution?) of very rich men who supposedly had broken the rules without any compelling need to do so - to behave with circumspection, if not extreme caution, with regard to breaking rules, moral or legal. He who rises by moral outrage, after all, tends to fall by moral outrage.
On the other hand, the very dangerousness of what Mr. Spitzer did may have been what made it so exciting to him. For those with such a turn of mind, there are few pleasures greater than that of breaking rules and getting away with it; it heightens the esteem in which they hold their own intellects.
But there are other advantages in resorting to a prostitute. Prostitutes exact no emotional commitment; unlike in a proper affair, the balance of power remains firmly and predictably in favor of the man who hands over the cash. Not only can he suit his tastes and indulge his fantasies, but the possibilities of blackmail, emotional and financial, are much less than with an affair of the heart. Spurned lovers are notorious for seeking vengeance, but prostitutes are professionals, to whom a reputation for discretion and the hope of future business are important. They do not recriminate when their clients no longer come to see them. So there is safety as well as excitement in the transaction.
What of the supply - that is to say, of the prostitutes? Why do they become prostitutes? If there were no necessitous women in the world, would prostitution survive?
It would. Although middle-class sentimentalists like to think that all prostitutes are driven to the profession as snowflakes before the storm, with absolutely no choice in the matter (because no one would do voluntarily what prostitutes do), a moment's reflection shows that this cannot be so. For even if some young women are brought into Europe from Africa and Latin America and forced into sexual slavery, the fact remains that most prostitutes were not forced by circumstances but chose voluntarily to ply this particular trade. No one's circumstances are so dire that they lead to prostitution as surely as life leads to death; if desperate circumstances inexorably made prostitutes, after all, we would have more prostitutes rather than fewer.
Besides, whatever the social origins of most prostitutes, by no means do all of them come from backgrounds of deprivation. Recently in England, in the small town of Ipswich, a man was convicted of murdering five prostitutes (serial killers quite often choose prostitutes, as if to avenge some terrible sexual humiliation). Two of his victims, at least, were of middle-class origin; one had spent her childhood playing the piano and riding ponies. Interestingly, prostitution disappeared from the town in the wake of the murderer's activities, suggesting that this way of earning a living was not an unavoidable reaction to circumstances.
Quite near where I once lived, by a reservoir around which I often took walks, the body of a 16-year-old girl was found. She had run away from her middle-class home to what she thought was the glamour of the streets and of prostitution; she was bored by respectability and the prospect of a normal career. Her pimps had plied her overenthusiastically with heroin; she had died, and they dumped her body in the hope that it would not be found.
The supply side of prostitution, therefore, is not to be laid wholly at the door of desperate material circumstances. How, then, is it to be ranked with mankind's other moral weaknesses? I have discussed this matter with quite a few prostitutes in my clinic, and even those who have not studied moral philosophy have been able to justify their ways to me, if not to God, with plausible and even sophisticated arguments. They would not have been prostitutes, they said, if there had been no demand for prostitutes; and many of their customers, perhaps even most, were drawn from the supposedly respectable portions of society. From what standpoint, then, did society look down on them?
For Mr. Spitzer, I suspect, they would have had nothing but contempt: a stern moralist who was no better than the pathetic traveling salesman who wants a bit of furtive fun, or sexual release, with a rather less expensive prostitute on his nights away from his wife.
"You men!" says Sadie Thompson at the end of Somerset Maugham's great story "Rain," about a Protestant missionary seduced by a prostitute in the South Sea. "You filthy, dirty pigs! You're all the same, all of you." The prostitutes would agree with her: For them, Mr. Spitzer would be the exact moral equivalent of the missionary Davidson, who is seduced by Sadie Thompson while he tries to convert her to virtue, and then kills himself by cutting his throat in the tide. He, like Mr. Spitzer, did not live up to his own standards because, in the jaundiced view of the profession, no man ever does.
Besides, asked the prostitutes, in what way is it worse to sell one's body than to sell one's soul? How many people have never done something they knew to be wrong, merely to continue in employment? How many women, not considered prostitutes, have let the material prospects of their suitors affect their decisions to marry them?
All this rationalization, however, founders on one simple question: Would you, I asked them, want your daughters to follow in your footsteps, even if they could earn a lot of money by doing so? Not a single one has ever replied yes to that question; all were vehemently against.
We can call prostitutes sex workers, and prostitution the sex industry, but the oldest profession is also the oldest subject of opprobrium. I shall never forget the immortally distasteful words of a 15-year-old patient of mine, who was very easy with her sexual favors, and who may very well one day have decided to do for money what for the moment she did for fun. "My mum," she said, "calls me a slut. But I'm good at what I do."
Source
Two tales of great heroism in the Middle East, one from Britain and one from the USA. The egotists of the Left would understand neither.
By THEODORE DALRYMPLE
No doubt it signifies a mixture of moral frivolity and profound lack of sexual imagination, but one of the first questions that occurred to me when I read of Gov. Eliot Spitzer's involvement with a high-class (or perhaps I should say expensive) prostitution ring was: What acts does a woman perform to be worth $3,000 per hour, compared with one who charges "only" $1,000?
Of course, I have long realized that there is a hierarchy among prostitutes, as there is in all professions. My first patient with tertiary syphilis, for example, was an old prostitute, impoverished, raddled, and toothless, who still plied her trade on waste ground for the price of a cigarette. Her pimp was also her husband, and her cries of despair when he abandoned her still ring in my mind's ear. I have never encountered desolation deeper than hers.
Another of my patients was a smartly dressed black woman whom I initially took to be a business executive. She was a dominatrix. She had her own website and flew around the world flogging the prominent of many nations. She was particularly proud of her connection, if that is the word I seek, with a senior judge in one of the southern states of the U.S. She had a large house and an expensive car and was proud of her success. It was skilled work, after all, and she provided value for money, or else her clients would not have retained her services. Many of them, indeed, were in love with her. She was so amusing that I could not condemn her, even in my heart.
This reminds me that prostitutes in literature have generally been treated kindly. No literary intellectual ever won his spurs by denouncing what everyone else had already denounced with pursed lips and a tut-tut. We do not think of Mistress Quickly and Doll Tearsheet as wicked, but rather as good-time girls with hearts of gold. Maupassant's stories favor prostitutes over their respectable, bourgeois clients. In Russian literature, fallen women serve to illustrate the possibility and power of redemption (and the generosity of authors). The demand for paid sex has generally been more severely condemned in literature than the supply.
One might have supposed that in a relatively liberal sexual environment such as ours, the demand for prostitution would decline, but that does not seem to have happened. This suggests that raw, biological frustration of the sex drive is not at the root of the demand. Appetites not only grow with feeding, but diversify with it. The limits or boundaries of licit and illicit change, but the demand for the illicit remains constant.
Mr. Spitzer can hardly have been driven to act as he did by the kind of sexual frustration that is said to be common in Muslim countries, where all contact with females before and outside of marriage is forbidden. He is both rich and powerful, and in our society men of that sort do not usually have much difficulty finding someone with whom to have an affair, if they feel the need. Moreover, one might have expected a man like Mr. Spitzer - who built his career on the prosecution (or was it the persecution?) of very rich men who supposedly had broken the rules without any compelling need to do so - to behave with circumspection, if not extreme caution, with regard to breaking rules, moral or legal. He who rises by moral outrage, after all, tends to fall by moral outrage.
On the other hand, the very dangerousness of what Mr. Spitzer did may have been what made it so exciting to him. For those with such a turn of mind, there are few pleasures greater than that of breaking rules and getting away with it; it heightens the esteem in which they hold their own intellects.
But there are other advantages in resorting to a prostitute. Prostitutes exact no emotional commitment; unlike in a proper affair, the balance of power remains firmly and predictably in favor of the man who hands over the cash. Not only can he suit his tastes and indulge his fantasies, but the possibilities of blackmail, emotional and financial, are much less than with an affair of the heart. Spurned lovers are notorious for seeking vengeance, but prostitutes are professionals, to whom a reputation for discretion and the hope of future business are important. They do not recriminate when their clients no longer come to see them. So there is safety as well as excitement in the transaction.
What of the supply - that is to say, of the prostitutes? Why do they become prostitutes? If there were no necessitous women in the world, would prostitution survive?
It would. Although middle-class sentimentalists like to think that all prostitutes are driven to the profession as snowflakes before the storm, with absolutely no choice in the matter (because no one would do voluntarily what prostitutes do), a moment's reflection shows that this cannot be so. For even if some young women are brought into Europe from Africa and Latin America and forced into sexual slavery, the fact remains that most prostitutes were not forced by circumstances but chose voluntarily to ply this particular trade. No one's circumstances are so dire that they lead to prostitution as surely as life leads to death; if desperate circumstances inexorably made prostitutes, after all, we would have more prostitutes rather than fewer.
Besides, whatever the social origins of most prostitutes, by no means do all of them come from backgrounds of deprivation. Recently in England, in the small town of Ipswich, a man was convicted of murdering five prostitutes (serial killers quite often choose prostitutes, as if to avenge some terrible sexual humiliation). Two of his victims, at least, were of middle-class origin; one had spent her childhood playing the piano and riding ponies. Interestingly, prostitution disappeared from the town in the wake of the murderer's activities, suggesting that this way of earning a living was not an unavoidable reaction to circumstances.
Quite near where I once lived, by a reservoir around which I often took walks, the body of a 16-year-old girl was found. She had run away from her middle-class home to what she thought was the glamour of the streets and of prostitution; she was bored by respectability and the prospect of a normal career. Her pimps had plied her overenthusiastically with heroin; she had died, and they dumped her body in the hope that it would not be found.
The supply side of prostitution, therefore, is not to be laid wholly at the door of desperate material circumstances. How, then, is it to be ranked with mankind's other moral weaknesses? I have discussed this matter with quite a few prostitutes in my clinic, and even those who have not studied moral philosophy have been able to justify their ways to me, if not to God, with plausible and even sophisticated arguments. They would not have been prostitutes, they said, if there had been no demand for prostitutes; and many of their customers, perhaps even most, were drawn from the supposedly respectable portions of society. From what standpoint, then, did society look down on them?
For Mr. Spitzer, I suspect, they would have had nothing but contempt: a stern moralist who was no better than the pathetic traveling salesman who wants a bit of furtive fun, or sexual release, with a rather less expensive prostitute on his nights away from his wife.
"You men!" says Sadie Thompson at the end of Somerset Maugham's great story "Rain," about a Protestant missionary seduced by a prostitute in the South Sea. "You filthy, dirty pigs! You're all the same, all of you." The prostitutes would agree with her: For them, Mr. Spitzer would be the exact moral equivalent of the missionary Davidson, who is seduced by Sadie Thompson while he tries to convert her to virtue, and then kills himself by cutting his throat in the tide. He, like Mr. Spitzer, did not live up to his own standards because, in the jaundiced view of the profession, no man ever does.
Besides, asked the prostitutes, in what way is it worse to sell one's body than to sell one's soul? How many people have never done something they knew to be wrong, merely to continue in employment? How many women, not considered prostitutes, have let the material prospects of their suitors affect their decisions to marry them?
All this rationalization, however, founders on one simple question: Would you, I asked them, want your daughters to follow in your footsteps, even if they could earn a lot of money by doing so? Not a single one has ever replied yes to that question; all were vehemently against.
We can call prostitutes sex workers, and prostitution the sex industry, but the oldest profession is also the oldest subject of opprobrium. I shall never forget the immortally distasteful words of a 15-year-old patient of mine, who was very easy with her sexual favors, and who may very well one day have decided to do for money what for the moment she did for fun. "My mum," she said, "calls me a slut. But I'm good at what I do."
Source
Two tales of great heroism in the Middle East, one from Britain and one from the USA. The egotists of the Left would understand neither.
Sunday, March 30, 2008
The facts that shatter British Labour's big immigration myth
By ANTHONY BROWNE (Author of Retreat of Reason. Review here)
There is a traditional pattern to any discussion about immigration. First, the Government and its supporters in the (often taxpayer-funded) immigration lobby declare various reasons the public should support their policies. Otherwise we would face a serious shortage of workers, economic growth would stagnate, there would be fewer people in the workforce to help pay the country's pension bill, the NHS would collapse or that the country would suffer without the enriching force of multi-culturalism.
These arguments are then unquestioningly trumpeted by the BBC and by much of the rest of the Press which instinctively wants to support mass immigration on the basis it is the morally decent thing to do. But then someone suddenly points to holes in the arguments, often in cold, factual ways. These critics inevitably get pilloried. In my case, when I started pointing out some of the downsides of immigration, I was denounced by the then Home Secretary David Blunkett in the Commons for "bordering on fascism."
In an earlier generation, Ray Honeyford, the Bradford headmaster, was hounded out of his job for declaring that children who are born and grow up in England should speak English. Sir Andrew Green, the chairman of Migrationwatch, has been regularly demonised for the counterarguments he has put forward. But the beauty about truth is that, in the end, it will out. Ultimately, it is realised that mass immigration's critics have many valid points, and ministers are forced to change their tune (of course, rarely with any public admission that they were wrong). And so the same government that promoted multiculturalism and attacked its critics is now having to admit that multiculturalism was wrong. In the same way, a government that once insisted the NHS would collapse without foreign workers is now having to impose curbs on foreign medical staff. And the very immigration lobbyists who previously denounced those who said people living in Britain should speak English now concede that they should for their own (and society's) good.
And so is the case with that final defence for mass immigration - the argument that it benefits the British economy. The trouble is that the claim that our economic boom was based on mass immigration (rather than a credit bubble) seems a little thin now that our economy is collapsing with immigration still at record levels. The belief that we needed Eastern Europeans to fill 600,000 vacancies in our employment market seems a tad stretched given that a million or more Eastern Europeans have come - and we still have 600,000 vacancies. The argument that we are desperately short of workers looks faintly ridiculous now that we are all increasingly aware that there are more than 5 million people of working age out of work and living on benefits - and there have been for the past ten years.
The Government's final justification was that immigration is a major boost to economic output - pumping the economy by 6 billion pounds a year. This figure is parroted so often that it has become received wisdom. But unfortunately, the argument is utterly misleading. Ignore the very serious questions about how the 6 billion figure was arrived at, and take it at its face value. The real problem is that while immigration does boost the overall size of the economy (more people working means more output), it also boosts the population. And what people really care about is not how big the economy is but how well off they are - their standard of living and quality of life.
In short, what matters is not the total Gross Domestic Product, but the GDP per capita. This is the mind-numbingly obvious flaw in the Government's argument. Although a growing population means more output it also means more people to consume that output. Almost all the resultant increase in GDP goes to the immigrants themselves (which is why they come to the UK in the first place). In fact, using the Government's own figures, the effect of immigration on GDP per capita is minimal 28p a week. That too is an average figure --while the affluent who employ immigrants tend to benefit, the poor who compete with them lose out.
When Sir Andrew Green first pointed out the 28p a week figure, he was, of course, pilloried. But, although his claims are about to be confirmed by the House of Lords committee, it is probably too soon for ministers to admit the folly of their beloved 6 billion argument. But as the truth slowly emerges, it can only be a matter of time before the Government finally abandons its policies of encouraging mass immigration to this already crowded island. Only then can we expect the level of immigration to be lowered.
Source
"Women's studies" dies in Britain
Women's studies, which came to prominence in the wake of the 1960s feminist movement, is to vanish from British universities as an undergraduate degree this summer. Dwindling interest in the subject means that the final 12 students will graduate with a BA in women's studies from London's Metropolitan University in July.
Universities offering the course, devised as the second wave of the women's rights movement peaked, attracted students in their hundreds during the late 1980s and early 1990s, but the mood on campuses has changed. Students, it seems, no longer want to immerse themselves in the sisterhood's struggle for equality or the finer points of feminist history.
The disappearance of a course that women academics fought so long and hard to have taught in universities has divided opinion on what this means for feminism. Is it irrelevant in today's world or has the quest for equality hit the mainstream? The course's critics argue that women's studies became its own worst enemy, remaining trapped in the feminist movement of the 1970s while women and society moved on. "Feminist scholarship has become predictable, tiresome and dreary, and most young women avoid it like the plague," said Christina Hoff Sommers, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute for public policy research in Washington and author of Who Stole Feminism? "British and American societies are no longer patriarchal and oppressive 'male hegemonies'. But most women's studies departments are predicated on the assumption that women in the West are under siege. What nonsense."
Others believe young women have shied away from studying feminist theory because they would rather opt for degrees that more obviously lead to jobs, especially since the introduction of tuition fees. "[Taking] women's studies as a separate course may not feel as relevant to women who go to university to help them enter the job market," said Jean Edelstein, an author and journalist. "As the feminist movement has become increasingly associated with extreme thoughts, women who may have previously been interested in women's studies may be deterred by these overtones."
Anyone ruing the degree's demise can take heart: many gender and equality issues are now dealt with by mainstream courses, from sociology and law to history and English. And many universities, including Oxford, still offer the course to postgraduates. Mary Evans, visiting fellow at the Gender Institute at the London School of Economics, said: "This final closure does not signal the end of an era: feminist ideas and literature are as lively as ever, but the institutional framework in which they are taught has changed." Ms Edelstein added: "Feminist critique should be studied by everyone. If integration into more mainstream courses means more people looking at gender theory and increases the number of people who are aware of the issues, then that is a good thing."
But Dr Irene Gedalof, who has led the London Metropolitan University women's studies course for the past 10 years, defended the discipline. "The women's movement is less visible now and many of its gains are taken for granted, which fuels the perception there is no longer a need for women's studies. But while other disciplines now 'deal' with gender issues we still need a dedicated focus by academics. Despite the gains women have made, this is just as relevant in today's world," she said, blaming the course's downfall on universities' collective failure to promote the discipline.
Given that graduate courses in women's studies are thriving in many countries, such as India and Iran, the decision to stop the course here has surprised many. Baroness Haleh Afshar, professor in politics and women's studies at the University of York, said: "In the past quarter of a century, women's studies scholars have been at the forefront of new and powerful work that has placed women at the centre but has also had echoes right across academia. In particular, it is important to note the pioneering work of Sue Lees, which began at the Metropolitan and still has a long way to go. I am desolate to see that the university has decided to close it."
Source
Class size isn't everything
Why teachers may be wrong about this class issue
"Strike threat over class sizes" is a familiar Easter headline as the teachers' unions hold their annual conferences. This year was no exception, with the National Union of Teachers demanding legislation to set a maximum limit of 20 pupils per class and delegates describing large state-school classes as a "national scandal". Their indignation acquired an extra edge when Jim Knight, the schools minister, told another union conference that classes could work well with as many as 70 pupils, provided there are sufficient teachers' assistants around.
Unfortunately for the NUT, research provides little evidence in favour of small classes. The best that can be said is that they lead to significant gains in academic test scores for pupils in the very early years of schooling, particularly if they are disadvantaged. But among children in Year 3 and upwards, class size has no measurable effect on literacy and numeracy levels. These results emerge from large-scale American studies as well as a current project at the London University Institute of Education.
The usual explanation - that schools put the less able and less well-behaved children in smaller classes - is exploded by the most recent research, which takes account of such factors as prior attainment and home background.
It is all monstrously counter-intuitive. All over the world, politicians promise smaller classes as a token of their commitment to education. Despite their outstanding past results in subjects such as maths, east Asian countries such as Taiwan, South Korea and Japan have policies to reduce class sizes. Here, parents pay thousands of pounds to fee-charging schools, where primary-age classes have 10.7 pupils on average, against 26.2 in the state sector. Given that teachers' salaries account for the lion's share of any school's costs, parents are being overcharged, if the research is correct, by something like 100 per cent. Can everybody be mad? It is surely common sense that children in small classes, whatever their age, ability and background, will get more of the teacher's attention and therefore learn more.
In fact, research proves at least part of the common sense. The latest findings from the Institute of Education project, presented to the American Educational Research Association this month, found that the larger the class, the less the pupils concentrated on their work (or engaged in "on-task behaviour", to use the jargon). This was particularly true of low attainers in secondary schools who, in a class of 30, spent twice as much time off-task as they did in a class of 15. However, class size had no effect at all on medium and high attainers in secondary school. And for children older than six, the research remains clear: the effects of small classes on test scores are nil, zero, zilch.
How do we explain it? The "progressive" lobby in education would argue that teachers do not sufficiently adapt their teaching to take advantage of small classes. They may, for example, still spend most of their time addressing the class as a whole and fail to use the greater opportunities to give individual attention. They may even use less small-group work because the class as a whole is easier to control. The "traditionalists" would argue that, on the contrary, teachers adapt their methods too much. Given a small class, they drop whole-class teaching, which, regardless of numbers, is the most effective method of instruction.
Another possibility is that, leaving aside the first year or so of primary school, the academic benefits of small classes kick in only when the pupil numbers drop well below 20, and perhaps below 15, as they do in the fee-charging sector. Dylan Wiliam, deputy director of the Institute of Education, argues that most teachers can't do anything in a class of 20 that they couldn't do in a class of 26. The individual attention they can give to children is still limited. The difference to the Treasury, however, is enormous, because the class of 20 entails an increase in teacher costs of more than 25 per cent. There are, Wiliam argues, more cost-effective ways of using public money.
To my surprise, I find myself in sympathy with Jim Knight. He is not the first minister to suggest that, with the growth of computer-aided learning and the advent of teachers' assistants, it is absurd to talk of "class size" at all. Margaret Hodge, then chairing the Commons education select committee, put forward a similar argument in the New Statesman ten years ago. There may be some occasions, in secondary schools at any rate, when children manage perfectly well in groups of 75; others where they should get half an hour of individual tuition.
Small classes serve as a convenient slogan for unions and politicians, because they are easily understood and accepted by the public as self-evidently a good thing. It is time we moved beyond them and thought more creatively about how we use educational resources.
Source
By ANTHONY BROWNE (Author of Retreat of Reason. Review here)
There is a traditional pattern to any discussion about immigration. First, the Government and its supporters in the (often taxpayer-funded) immigration lobby declare various reasons the public should support their policies. Otherwise we would face a serious shortage of workers, economic growth would stagnate, there would be fewer people in the workforce to help pay the country's pension bill, the NHS would collapse or that the country would suffer without the enriching force of multi-culturalism.
These arguments are then unquestioningly trumpeted by the BBC and by much of the rest of the Press which instinctively wants to support mass immigration on the basis it is the morally decent thing to do. But then someone suddenly points to holes in the arguments, often in cold, factual ways. These critics inevitably get pilloried. In my case, when I started pointing out some of the downsides of immigration, I was denounced by the then Home Secretary David Blunkett in the Commons for "bordering on fascism."
In an earlier generation, Ray Honeyford, the Bradford headmaster, was hounded out of his job for declaring that children who are born and grow up in England should speak English. Sir Andrew Green, the chairman of Migrationwatch, has been regularly demonised for the counterarguments he has put forward. But the beauty about truth is that, in the end, it will out. Ultimately, it is realised that mass immigration's critics have many valid points, and ministers are forced to change their tune (of course, rarely with any public admission that they were wrong). And so the same government that promoted multiculturalism and attacked its critics is now having to admit that multiculturalism was wrong. In the same way, a government that once insisted the NHS would collapse without foreign workers is now having to impose curbs on foreign medical staff. And the very immigration lobbyists who previously denounced those who said people living in Britain should speak English now concede that they should for their own (and society's) good.
And so is the case with that final defence for mass immigration - the argument that it benefits the British economy. The trouble is that the claim that our economic boom was based on mass immigration (rather than a credit bubble) seems a little thin now that our economy is collapsing with immigration still at record levels. The belief that we needed Eastern Europeans to fill 600,000 vacancies in our employment market seems a tad stretched given that a million or more Eastern Europeans have come - and we still have 600,000 vacancies. The argument that we are desperately short of workers looks faintly ridiculous now that we are all increasingly aware that there are more than 5 million people of working age out of work and living on benefits - and there have been for the past ten years.
The Government's final justification was that immigration is a major boost to economic output - pumping the economy by 6 billion pounds a year. This figure is parroted so often that it has become received wisdom. But unfortunately, the argument is utterly misleading. Ignore the very serious questions about how the 6 billion figure was arrived at, and take it at its face value. The real problem is that while immigration does boost the overall size of the economy (more people working means more output), it also boosts the population. And what people really care about is not how big the economy is but how well off they are - their standard of living and quality of life.
In short, what matters is not the total Gross Domestic Product, but the GDP per capita. This is the mind-numbingly obvious flaw in the Government's argument. Although a growing population means more output it also means more people to consume that output. Almost all the resultant increase in GDP goes to the immigrants themselves (which is why they come to the UK in the first place). In fact, using the Government's own figures, the effect of immigration on GDP per capita is minimal 28p a week. That too is an average figure --while the affluent who employ immigrants tend to benefit, the poor who compete with them lose out.
When Sir Andrew Green first pointed out the 28p a week figure, he was, of course, pilloried. But, although his claims are about to be confirmed by the House of Lords committee, it is probably too soon for ministers to admit the folly of their beloved 6 billion argument. But as the truth slowly emerges, it can only be a matter of time before the Government finally abandons its policies of encouraging mass immigration to this already crowded island. Only then can we expect the level of immigration to be lowered.
Source
"Women's studies" dies in Britain
Women's studies, which came to prominence in the wake of the 1960s feminist movement, is to vanish from British universities as an undergraduate degree this summer. Dwindling interest in the subject means that the final 12 students will graduate with a BA in women's studies from London's Metropolitan University in July.
Universities offering the course, devised as the second wave of the women's rights movement peaked, attracted students in their hundreds during the late 1980s and early 1990s, but the mood on campuses has changed. Students, it seems, no longer want to immerse themselves in the sisterhood's struggle for equality or the finer points of feminist history.
The disappearance of a course that women academics fought so long and hard to have taught in universities has divided opinion on what this means for feminism. Is it irrelevant in today's world or has the quest for equality hit the mainstream? The course's critics argue that women's studies became its own worst enemy, remaining trapped in the feminist movement of the 1970s while women and society moved on. "Feminist scholarship has become predictable, tiresome and dreary, and most young women avoid it like the plague," said Christina Hoff Sommers, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute for public policy research in Washington and author of Who Stole Feminism? "British and American societies are no longer patriarchal and oppressive 'male hegemonies'. But most women's studies departments are predicated on the assumption that women in the West are under siege. What nonsense."
Others believe young women have shied away from studying feminist theory because they would rather opt for degrees that more obviously lead to jobs, especially since the introduction of tuition fees. "[Taking] women's studies as a separate course may not feel as relevant to women who go to university to help them enter the job market," said Jean Edelstein, an author and journalist. "As the feminist movement has become increasingly associated with extreme thoughts, women who may have previously been interested in women's studies may be deterred by these overtones."
Anyone ruing the degree's demise can take heart: many gender and equality issues are now dealt with by mainstream courses, from sociology and law to history and English. And many universities, including Oxford, still offer the course to postgraduates. Mary Evans, visiting fellow at the Gender Institute at the London School of Economics, said: "This final closure does not signal the end of an era: feminist ideas and literature are as lively as ever, but the institutional framework in which they are taught has changed." Ms Edelstein added: "Feminist critique should be studied by everyone. If integration into more mainstream courses means more people looking at gender theory and increases the number of people who are aware of the issues, then that is a good thing."
But Dr Irene Gedalof, who has led the London Metropolitan University women's studies course for the past 10 years, defended the discipline. "The women's movement is less visible now and many of its gains are taken for granted, which fuels the perception there is no longer a need for women's studies. But while other disciplines now 'deal' with gender issues we still need a dedicated focus by academics. Despite the gains women have made, this is just as relevant in today's world," she said, blaming the course's downfall on universities' collective failure to promote the discipline.
Given that graduate courses in women's studies are thriving in many countries, such as India and Iran, the decision to stop the course here has surprised many. Baroness Haleh Afshar, professor in politics and women's studies at the University of York, said: "In the past quarter of a century, women's studies scholars have been at the forefront of new and powerful work that has placed women at the centre but has also had echoes right across academia. In particular, it is important to note the pioneering work of Sue Lees, which began at the Metropolitan and still has a long way to go. I am desolate to see that the university has decided to close it."
Source
Class size isn't everything
Why teachers may be wrong about this class issue
"Strike threat over class sizes" is a familiar Easter headline as the teachers' unions hold their annual conferences. This year was no exception, with the National Union of Teachers demanding legislation to set a maximum limit of 20 pupils per class and delegates describing large state-school classes as a "national scandal". Their indignation acquired an extra edge when Jim Knight, the schools minister, told another union conference that classes could work well with as many as 70 pupils, provided there are sufficient teachers' assistants around.
Unfortunately for the NUT, research provides little evidence in favour of small classes. The best that can be said is that they lead to significant gains in academic test scores for pupils in the very early years of schooling, particularly if they are disadvantaged. But among children in Year 3 and upwards, class size has no measurable effect on literacy and numeracy levels. These results emerge from large-scale American studies as well as a current project at the London University Institute of Education.
The usual explanation - that schools put the less able and less well-behaved children in smaller classes - is exploded by the most recent research, which takes account of such factors as prior attainment and home background.
It is all monstrously counter-intuitive. All over the world, politicians promise smaller classes as a token of their commitment to education. Despite their outstanding past results in subjects such as maths, east Asian countries such as Taiwan, South Korea and Japan have policies to reduce class sizes. Here, parents pay thousands of pounds to fee-charging schools, where primary-age classes have 10.7 pupils on average, against 26.2 in the state sector. Given that teachers' salaries account for the lion's share of any school's costs, parents are being overcharged, if the research is correct, by something like 100 per cent. Can everybody be mad? It is surely common sense that children in small classes, whatever their age, ability and background, will get more of the teacher's attention and therefore learn more.
In fact, research proves at least part of the common sense. The latest findings from the Institute of Education project, presented to the American Educational Research Association this month, found that the larger the class, the less the pupils concentrated on their work (or engaged in "on-task behaviour", to use the jargon). This was particularly true of low attainers in secondary schools who, in a class of 30, spent twice as much time off-task as they did in a class of 15. However, class size had no effect at all on medium and high attainers in secondary school. And for children older than six, the research remains clear: the effects of small classes on test scores are nil, zero, zilch.
How do we explain it? The "progressive" lobby in education would argue that teachers do not sufficiently adapt their teaching to take advantage of small classes. They may, for example, still spend most of their time addressing the class as a whole and fail to use the greater opportunities to give individual attention. They may even use less small-group work because the class as a whole is easier to control. The "traditionalists" would argue that, on the contrary, teachers adapt their methods too much. Given a small class, they drop whole-class teaching, which, regardless of numbers, is the most effective method of instruction.
Another possibility is that, leaving aside the first year or so of primary school, the academic benefits of small classes kick in only when the pupil numbers drop well below 20, and perhaps below 15, as they do in the fee-charging sector. Dylan Wiliam, deputy director of the Institute of Education, argues that most teachers can't do anything in a class of 20 that they couldn't do in a class of 26. The individual attention they can give to children is still limited. The difference to the Treasury, however, is enormous, because the class of 20 entails an increase in teacher costs of more than 25 per cent. There are, Wiliam argues, more cost-effective ways of using public money.
To my surprise, I find myself in sympathy with Jim Knight. He is not the first minister to suggest that, with the growth of computer-aided learning and the advent of teachers' assistants, it is absurd to talk of "class size" at all. Margaret Hodge, then chairing the Commons education select committee, put forward a similar argument in the New Statesman ten years ago. There may be some occasions, in secondary schools at any rate, when children manage perfectly well in groups of 75; others where they should get half an hour of individual tuition.
Small classes serve as a convenient slogan for unions and politicians, because they are easily understood and accepted by the public as self-evidently a good thing. It is time we moved beyond them and thought more creatively about how we use educational resources.
Source
Saturday, March 29, 2008
Brits host outspoken video about Islam
Dutch MP Geert Wilders has released his frank film about the Koran -- on a British website. Sad that it took a British site to stand up for freedom of speech after an American site backed out. No-one expected a European site to host it, of course. Excerpts from one report below:
See the video here. No doubt various deep-thinking Muslims will use violence to protest a film which claims that they are violent.
Britain's socialists make "1984" look libertartian
A new national [British] curriculum for all under-fives risks producing a "tick-box" culture in nursery schools that relies too heavily on formal learning and not enough on play, teachers' leaders will claim today.
The new Early Years Foundation Stage Framework (EYFS), which becomes law in the autumn, lays down up to 500 developmental milestones between birth and primary school and requires under-fives to be assessed on writing, problem solving and numeracy skills. It will apply to about 25,000 nurseries, plus registered childminders in England.
Steve Sinnott, general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, said that it was not yet clear how the early years curriculum would be evaluated by the schools inspectorate Ofsted. He said, however, that there was a danger that teachers could allow compliance with the new framework to become more important than creativity. "The curriculum itself is not the danger," he said. "The danger is that external examiners will develop a tick-box attitude to every aspect of the curriculum to see if staff have done it." He added that the worst thing for the early years curriculum would be for it to be a "compliance curriculum".
Source
Arbitrary NHS rules stop help for tragically infertile woman
A woman who went through the menopause in her teens has been refused fertility treatment on the NHS.
Catherine Storey was left infertile at 18 when she had a premature menopause. She is now 20 but has been refused IVF on the NHS because her boyfriend Martin Sear already has children - even though they live 300 miles away.
The couple took out a bank loan and travelled to a clinic in Barcelona. But after spending 13,000 pounds on two rounds of IVF, Miss Storey, an administrative assistant with a fire alarms company from Cramlington, Northumberland, is still not pregnant and has run out of money.
She said: "If I had fallen in love with a different man or lived in a different part of the country I could have been able to have IVF for free."
A Newcastle Primary Care Trust spokesman said: "The local NHS policy says to have access to IVF treatment, couples must have no other living children in this or any previous relationship for either partner, have had a minimum of three years unexplained infertility and no history of failed sterilisation reversal in either male or female partner."
Source
Official: Immigration into Britain "too fast"
A government minister today said that the effects of immigration were moving too quickly for some areas of the UK and local services were being put under pressure. Speaking in an interview with the BBC, Liam Byrne, the immigration minister, said that although there were some parts of the country, notably the north-east of England, and Scotland, that wanted immigration to boost their populations, generally its impact needed more control. "There have been communities in different parts of the country where the pace of change has been too fast and transitional pressure has been put on public services," he said on The World at One. "We do need a new balance in migration policy," he added.
The effects of globalisation are now being felt outside the country's main cities. Cumbria police recently revealed that its budget for interpreters had risen 386% since 2003 and schools across the country are having to provide for pupils speaking a variety of languages other than English.
A recent study compiled by the Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR) predicted that a record number of highly skilled migrant workers, such as teachers, will enter Britain over the next four years, contributing an estimated 77bn pounds to the economy. The CEBR report forecast that there would be 812,000 such migrants in the UK by 2012, a 14% increase on the 715,000 recorded last year.
Migrants added 6bn pounds to the British economy in 2006 and their impact was a net benefit to the country as a whole, said Byrne. But the minister said that the UK had no need for low-skilled workers coming from outside of the EU. A points-based system for migrants wishing to come to the UK was introduced at the beginning of this month. But the government has not said when the system for low-skilled workers will come into effect, meaning that in practice low-skilled workers from outside the EU will not be allowed entry for the foreseeable future.
The new regime involves tougher penalties for employers who employ illegal immigrants. But it also simplifies the system used to determine whether foreigners are allowed into the country to work. This, along with the economic downturn, will deter some migrants from moving to the UK, the minister said.
Source
Your government will take care of it: Not in bumbling Britain
At first glance, the Financial Services Authority's review of its own role in the Northern Rock saga reads like a brilliant self-parody. One wonders for a moment whether the author, in a mad moment of Swiftian mischief, has deliberately set out to portray her colleagues as a bunch of Pooterish pen-pushing, paperclip-counters.
There is the slavish and pedantic attention to the trivial detail. "We reviewed 129 files [lever arch or equivalent] ..." the report proudly assures us early on. There's the blizzard of confusing acronyms - MRGD, ARROW, RMPs, C&C, IRMs and HoDs. There's the reluctance to call a spade a spade. "The supervision of Northern Rock was at the extreme end of the spectrum of the supervisory practices we observed." There's the absurd faith in frequency of meetings as the FSA's measure of effective supervision. The more the better, obviously.
There's the obsession with inanimate systems and processes rather than people. Reading the executive summary (we don't get to see the full report for another month), one gets no impression at all that the FSA is staffed by 2,000 educated and thinking human beings - people, we might hope, attuned to the currents in financial markets, understanding of the temptations that might persuade bankers to make reckless decisions and capable of bringing common sense, brainpower and personal judgment to the regulatory process. And there's the bureaucrats' refusal to accept that there is anything fundamentally wrong with the organisation or its philosophy. Or at least nothing wrong that hiring a few more administrators can't solve.
The report is not a whitewash, however. Indeed, by its own lights, the FSA is brutally self-critical. It blasts itself for its lapses of officialdom - the failure to keep good records, the paucity of meetings, the glitches in line management procedures. As such, the FSA risks being accused of abject hypocrisy. These are just the failings it cannot tolerate in the firms in regulates. Poor record-keeping is high up in the FSA's hierarchy of deadly sins.
But the wider message from the report is that the FSA does not try to run a zero-failure City and that the Rock implosion and run would probably have occurred even if the FSA had been operating as it would have liked. Perhaps FSA officials could have impressed their concerns more forcibly on Rock directors, perhaps the bank would have been advised to diversify its funding a bit more, but nobody at Canary Wharf seems to be terribly convinced this would have made a difference.
FSA officials have admitted privately that they would have been unlikely to exert their powers to force Rock to change its ways in those benign, pre-2007 credit market conditions. In short, but for the shortcomings in depositor protection, Rock was, in the eyes of the FSA, just one of those unfortunate things - an inevitable rare failure, but a price worth paying for a system in which competition and innovation are allowed to flourish for the benefit of customers.
It will be a few decades before we know if this is a fair assessment. Any more bank collapses and the FSA's private view that this was a once-in-two-centuries probability event will sound very hollow. Anyway, it is much too early to argue that the price is worth paying when we don't yet know what that price (for taxpayers) will be.
Source
FRANCE AND BRITAIN TO STEP UP NUCLEAR POWER CO-OPERATION
A two-day bilateral summit is to culminate today (27 March) with the signing of a new accord that will see France help the UK develop a new generation of nuclear power stations. French President Nicolas Sarkozy and UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown are to seal the agreement on Thursday at the Emirates Stadium in North London, the home of Arsenal football club.
Speaking on Tuesday on the eve of Sarkozy's arrival, UK Business Minister John Hutton said he wanted Britain to become "the number one place in the world for companies to do business in new nuclear". "I believe that the revival of nuclear power in Britain today [.] has the potential to be the most significant opportunity for our energy economy since the exploitation of North Sea oil and gas," said Hutton, according to Reuters.
EDF, the state-controlled French power utility, said it wanted to build four new plants to help replace Britain's ageing stock of 23 nuclear power stations, which currently provide about 20% of the UK's electricity. The new reactor would be the state-of-the-art EPR model developed by French group Areva, which is also partially state-owned. The deal would allow Britain to regain the expertise in nuclear power engineering that it lost following a planned phase-out of atomic power. The last of Britain's existing nuclear plants is scheduled for closure by 2035, leaving the country with a potential energy gap.
In Brussels, the European Commission has recently backed the technology, saying it will be needed if Europe is to meet its ambitious climate change goals and reduce CO2 emissions by a quarter by 2020. "Energy consumption worldwide is likely to double between 2000 and 2050, and nuclear energy will remain a key element in future low-carbon energy systems," the Commission said in September last year, presenting its new Sustainable Nuclear Energy Technology Platform (SNETP)
Speaking in October 2007, Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said the EU must hold a "full and frank" debate on the nuclear issue. "Member states cannot avoid the question of nuclear energy," he said. Environmental groups have applauded the Commission's move to open the nuclear debate but argue that the technology is dangerous and not required to reduce CO2 emissions.
Source
Ho hum! London's new airport chaotic: "Thousands of families heading on holiday this weekend face chaos after Heathrow's new 4.3 billion pounds terminal was reduced to a shambles on its opening day by the complete failure of its baggage system. British Airways will begin today to wrestle with a huge backlog of passengers, many of them left stranded at Terminal 5 overnight, after the airline cancelled at least 34 flights. BA, the sole occupant of the new terminal, suspended baggage check-in shortly before 5pm and dozens of flights departed half-empty last night carrying only those passengers who had only hand luggage. Passengers on in-bound flights had to wait up to four hours for bags to be unloaded. The problems, which BA blamed on staff not being familiar with new systems, forced many outgoing travellers to abandon their plans and head home. The disastrous opening was a severe embarrassment for BA and BAA, the Spanish-owned company that operates Heathrow. Both had spent five years claiming that the new terminal would transform passengers' experience of Heathrow and work efficiently from Day 1." [The expected British bungling]
Dutch MP Geert Wilders has released his frank film about the Koran -- on a British website. Sad that it took a British site to stand up for freedom of speech after an American site backed out. No-one expected a European site to host it, of course. Excerpts from one report below:
"Mr Wilders, 44, who has built his political career campaigning against the alleged "Islamisation" of the West, argued that the film was a legitimate exercise in freedom of expression; however, many mainstream politicians and Muslims said that it was gratuitously insulting. Speaking just before the release of Fitna, an Arabic word meaning strife, Mr Wilders said that he understood that Muslims could be upset about the film but added: "It remains widely within the framework of the law . . . My film was not made to provoke violence."
Viewers had only a few minutes to see it on the Freedom Party website before it disappeared because of "technical difficulties". It then became available in Dutch and English on LiveLeak, a British-based video-sharing website, sparking fears that extremists could also target British interests.
The company that runs the website defended its decision to host the film last night, saying that there was no legal reason to censor it. "LiveLeak.com has a strict stance on remaining unbiased and allowing freedom of speech so far as the law and our rules allow," it said. "There was no legal reason to refuse Geert Wilders the right to post his film and it is not our place to censor people based on an emotive response." The website said that it did not endorse Mr Wilders or his views.
Even before seeing the film, demonstrators took to the streets in several countries, including Afghanistan and Indonesia, to vent their fury at the Netherlands, and the governments of Pakistan and Iran have criticised the project. Mr Wilders seemed to have rushed putting the film out after an American server withdrew and a Muslim organisation said that it would seek a court injunction today.
The film opened with a Koran being opened and the text of a sura (a verse from the Koran) which it translated from Arabic as imploring the faithful to "terrorise the enemies of Allah". It was followed by images of aircraft flying into the World Trade Centre in New York on September 11, 2001, with extracts from phone calls to the emergency services on that day. Further images of bloodstained bodies in the aftermath of the Madrid train bombings in March 2004, in which 191 people were killed, followed.
It showed statistics of the growing Muslim population and images of female genital mutilation, a hanging of suspected gay men, beheadings and bloodied children, all following the words: "The Netherlands in future?"
More here
See the video here. No doubt various deep-thinking Muslims will use violence to protest a film which claims that they are violent.
Britain's socialists make "1984" look libertartian
A new national [British] curriculum for all under-fives risks producing a "tick-box" culture in nursery schools that relies too heavily on formal learning and not enough on play, teachers' leaders will claim today.
The new Early Years Foundation Stage Framework (EYFS), which becomes law in the autumn, lays down up to 500 developmental milestones between birth and primary school and requires under-fives to be assessed on writing, problem solving and numeracy skills. It will apply to about 25,000 nurseries, plus registered childminders in England.
Steve Sinnott, general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, said that it was not yet clear how the early years curriculum would be evaluated by the schools inspectorate Ofsted. He said, however, that there was a danger that teachers could allow compliance with the new framework to become more important than creativity. "The curriculum itself is not the danger," he said. "The danger is that external examiners will develop a tick-box attitude to every aspect of the curriculum to see if staff have done it." He added that the worst thing for the early years curriculum would be for it to be a "compliance curriculum".
Source
Arbitrary NHS rules stop help for tragically infertile woman
A woman who went through the menopause in her teens has been refused fertility treatment on the NHS.
Catherine Storey was left infertile at 18 when she had a premature menopause. She is now 20 but has been refused IVF on the NHS because her boyfriend Martin Sear already has children - even though they live 300 miles away.
The couple took out a bank loan and travelled to a clinic in Barcelona. But after spending 13,000 pounds on two rounds of IVF, Miss Storey, an administrative assistant with a fire alarms company from Cramlington, Northumberland, is still not pregnant and has run out of money.
She said: "If I had fallen in love with a different man or lived in a different part of the country I could have been able to have IVF for free."
A Newcastle Primary Care Trust spokesman said: "The local NHS policy says to have access to IVF treatment, couples must have no other living children in this or any previous relationship for either partner, have had a minimum of three years unexplained infertility and no history of failed sterilisation reversal in either male or female partner."
Source
Official: Immigration into Britain "too fast"
A government minister today said that the effects of immigration were moving too quickly for some areas of the UK and local services were being put under pressure. Speaking in an interview with the BBC, Liam Byrne, the immigration minister, said that although there were some parts of the country, notably the north-east of England, and Scotland, that wanted immigration to boost their populations, generally its impact needed more control. "There have been communities in different parts of the country where the pace of change has been too fast and transitional pressure has been put on public services," he said on The World at One. "We do need a new balance in migration policy," he added.
The effects of globalisation are now being felt outside the country's main cities. Cumbria police recently revealed that its budget for interpreters had risen 386% since 2003 and schools across the country are having to provide for pupils speaking a variety of languages other than English.
A recent study compiled by the Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR) predicted that a record number of highly skilled migrant workers, such as teachers, will enter Britain over the next four years, contributing an estimated 77bn pounds to the economy. The CEBR report forecast that there would be 812,000 such migrants in the UK by 2012, a 14% increase on the 715,000 recorded last year.
Migrants added 6bn pounds to the British economy in 2006 and their impact was a net benefit to the country as a whole, said Byrne. But the minister said that the UK had no need for low-skilled workers coming from outside of the EU. A points-based system for migrants wishing to come to the UK was introduced at the beginning of this month. But the government has not said when the system for low-skilled workers will come into effect, meaning that in practice low-skilled workers from outside the EU will not be allowed entry for the foreseeable future.
The new regime involves tougher penalties for employers who employ illegal immigrants. But it also simplifies the system used to determine whether foreigners are allowed into the country to work. This, along with the economic downturn, will deter some migrants from moving to the UK, the minister said.
Source
Your government will take care of it: Not in bumbling Britain
At first glance, the Financial Services Authority's review of its own role in the Northern Rock saga reads like a brilliant self-parody. One wonders for a moment whether the author, in a mad moment of Swiftian mischief, has deliberately set out to portray her colleagues as a bunch of Pooterish pen-pushing, paperclip-counters.
There is the slavish and pedantic attention to the trivial detail. "We reviewed 129 files [lever arch or equivalent] ..." the report proudly assures us early on. There's the blizzard of confusing acronyms - MRGD, ARROW, RMPs, C&C, IRMs and HoDs. There's the reluctance to call a spade a spade. "The supervision of Northern Rock was at the extreme end of the spectrum of the supervisory practices we observed." There's the absurd faith in frequency of meetings as the FSA's measure of effective supervision. The more the better, obviously.
There's the obsession with inanimate systems and processes rather than people. Reading the executive summary (we don't get to see the full report for another month), one gets no impression at all that the FSA is staffed by 2,000 educated and thinking human beings - people, we might hope, attuned to the currents in financial markets, understanding of the temptations that might persuade bankers to make reckless decisions and capable of bringing common sense, brainpower and personal judgment to the regulatory process. And there's the bureaucrats' refusal to accept that there is anything fundamentally wrong with the organisation or its philosophy. Or at least nothing wrong that hiring a few more administrators can't solve.
The report is not a whitewash, however. Indeed, by its own lights, the FSA is brutally self-critical. It blasts itself for its lapses of officialdom - the failure to keep good records, the paucity of meetings, the glitches in line management procedures. As such, the FSA risks being accused of abject hypocrisy. These are just the failings it cannot tolerate in the firms in regulates. Poor record-keeping is high up in the FSA's hierarchy of deadly sins.
But the wider message from the report is that the FSA does not try to run a zero-failure City and that the Rock implosion and run would probably have occurred even if the FSA had been operating as it would have liked. Perhaps FSA officials could have impressed their concerns more forcibly on Rock directors, perhaps the bank would have been advised to diversify its funding a bit more, but nobody at Canary Wharf seems to be terribly convinced this would have made a difference.
FSA officials have admitted privately that they would have been unlikely to exert their powers to force Rock to change its ways in those benign, pre-2007 credit market conditions. In short, but for the shortcomings in depositor protection, Rock was, in the eyes of the FSA, just one of those unfortunate things - an inevitable rare failure, but a price worth paying for a system in which competition and innovation are allowed to flourish for the benefit of customers.
It will be a few decades before we know if this is a fair assessment. Any more bank collapses and the FSA's private view that this was a once-in-two-centuries probability event will sound very hollow. Anyway, it is much too early to argue that the price is worth paying when we don't yet know what that price (for taxpayers) will be.
Source
FRANCE AND BRITAIN TO STEP UP NUCLEAR POWER CO-OPERATION
A two-day bilateral summit is to culminate today (27 March) with the signing of a new accord that will see France help the UK develop a new generation of nuclear power stations. French President Nicolas Sarkozy and UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown are to seal the agreement on Thursday at the Emirates Stadium in North London, the home of Arsenal football club.
Speaking on Tuesday on the eve of Sarkozy's arrival, UK Business Minister John Hutton said he wanted Britain to become "the number one place in the world for companies to do business in new nuclear". "I believe that the revival of nuclear power in Britain today [.] has the potential to be the most significant opportunity for our energy economy since the exploitation of North Sea oil and gas," said Hutton, according to Reuters.
EDF, the state-controlled French power utility, said it wanted to build four new plants to help replace Britain's ageing stock of 23 nuclear power stations, which currently provide about 20% of the UK's electricity. The new reactor would be the state-of-the-art EPR model developed by French group Areva, which is also partially state-owned. The deal would allow Britain to regain the expertise in nuclear power engineering that it lost following a planned phase-out of atomic power. The last of Britain's existing nuclear plants is scheduled for closure by 2035, leaving the country with a potential energy gap.
In Brussels, the European Commission has recently backed the technology, saying it will be needed if Europe is to meet its ambitious climate change goals and reduce CO2 emissions by a quarter by 2020. "Energy consumption worldwide is likely to double between 2000 and 2050, and nuclear energy will remain a key element in future low-carbon energy systems," the Commission said in September last year, presenting its new Sustainable Nuclear Energy Technology Platform (SNETP)
Speaking in October 2007, Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said the EU must hold a "full and frank" debate on the nuclear issue. "Member states cannot avoid the question of nuclear energy," he said. Environmental groups have applauded the Commission's move to open the nuclear debate but argue that the technology is dangerous and not required to reduce CO2 emissions.
Source
Ho hum! London's new airport chaotic: "Thousands of families heading on holiday this weekend face chaos after Heathrow's new 4.3 billion pounds terminal was reduced to a shambles on its opening day by the complete failure of its baggage system. British Airways will begin today to wrestle with a huge backlog of passengers, many of them left stranded at Terminal 5 overnight, after the airline cancelled at least 34 flights. BA, the sole occupant of the new terminal, suspended baggage check-in shortly before 5pm and dozens of flights departed half-empty last night carrying only those passengers who had only hand luggage. Passengers on in-bound flights had to wait up to four hours for bags to be unloaded. The problems, which BA blamed on staff not being familiar with new systems, forced many outgoing travellers to abandon their plans and head home. The disastrous opening was a severe embarrassment for BA and BAA, the Spanish-owned company that operates Heathrow. Both had spent five years claiming that the new terminal would transform passengers' experience of Heathrow and work efficiently from Day 1." [The expected British bungling]
Friday, March 28, 2008
Another colossal British absurdity
Schools to be forced to keep quota of problem pupils. Discipline be damned!
Successful schools will be forced to take a share of disruptive pupils to prevent them from monopolising the best-behaved children, the Government announced yesterday. Ed Balls, the Children's Secretary, said that schools which excluded pupils would have to accept the same number that had been expelled by another school. This "one out, one in" policy would prevent oversubscribed schools from dumping badly behaved children on to their less successful neighbours.
Speaking at the NASUWT teaching union's annual conference, Mr Balls said that he accepted the recommendations of a behaviour review published yesterday, which said: "A school that permanently excludes a child should expect to receive a permanently excluded child on the principle of one out, one in."
Sir Alan Steer, the head teacher of a specialist school and author of the report, said: "I didn't feel we should have a situation where a school has a perverse incentive to exclude, knowing it would not have to accept a child with difficulties. We didn't want a situation where schools were exporting without accepting their responsibility to import where they could." Sir Alan said that the rules should also apply to oversubscribed and faith schools, otherwise they could use exclusion as a way of creating a space for a child on a waiting list. He said that head teachers had a social responsibility to neighbouring schools to take on challenging pupils.
New legislation requiring all secondary schools to form behaviour partnerships with neighbouring schools would be passed, Mr Balls said. More than 90 per cent of schools already belonged to one, he added. He had taken into consideration an earlier report by Sir Alan, which recommended that clusters of secondary schools pool their resources and expertise to deal with problem pupils.
In his latest report, Sir Alan questioned whether some schools were paying lip service to the partnerships. It said: "Informal soundings make me sceptical that all these schools are actually engaged in meaningful partnership working . . . Credible evidence is lacking on the impact partnerships are making where they do exist."
Mr Balls said that there would be an overhaul of "alternative provision" for children excluded from mainstream education, with a White Paper setting out his department's plans. The overall quality of pupil referral units was not good enough, the minister said, adding that he wanted more voluntary and private sector provision. This will include "studio schools", already successful in the United States, which offer vocational training for expelled pupils.
Mr Balls said: "We will launch pilots to develop new and more effective forms of alternative provision, including high-quality vocational training with a clear pathway to qualifications and a job." He added that he wanted to "shine a light" on the sector; data on the performance of excluded pupils, educated in alternative settings, would be published for the first time.
Mr Balls said that standards of behaviour continued to concern parents, teachers and children. He also announced a "root and branch" review of the school governing body system. Sir Alan said that the responsibilities of parents - as well as their rights - should be set out in the Children's Plan, published last year by Mr Balls's department. A pilot scheme that provided parent support advisers in schools was successful, he said, and should be extended across most, if not all, schools. However, the 100 million pound funding provided for the programme over the next three years was insufficient, he added.
Source
British Muslim leader accuses police of being 'over cautious' in stopping Asian gangs pimping white girls
A muslim leader has accused the police of failing to tackle Asian gangs suspected of prostituting young white girls. Officers are accused of being "over cautious" when investigating Muslim criminals because they fear being branded racist. Last night Mohammed Shafiq, director of the Ramadhan Foundation, said the police were differentiating between criminals on the basis of race. He claimed, driven by fear of race riots in places like Blackburn and Oldham, officers were "overtly sensitive" and not clamping down on the sordid practice.
His controversial comments in this week's Panorama reignite a massively controversial issue which exploded over a Channel 4 documentary in 2004. That programme which claimed Asian men in Bradford were grooming under age white girls for prostitution was pulled from C4's schedules. This was because police claimed at the time that it could provoke racial violence during the local election campaign.
Now the BBC is to risk the wrath of police officials and campaigners by airing a programme which will look at the same issue. Speaking as part of the Panorama investigation, which airs tomorrow (Thursday), Shafiq said: "I think the police are overcautious on dealing with this issue openly because they fear being branded racist and I think that is wrong." "These are criminals they should be treated as criminals. They are not Asian criminals, they are not Muslim criminals, they are not white criminals. They are criminals and they should be treated as criminals." He said that some of the criminals were Asian gangs looking to supplement their income, after the cost of drugs has fallen over the last few years.
Shafiq said "I am the only Muslim leader in the UK that speaks up against this sort of thing and I do it because these teenage girls are somebody's sisters and they are somebody's daughters. I have got two daughters and I wouldn't want that to happen to my daughters. "If there is a drug dealer grooming a white teenager into prostitution then I don't want the police service or local authority not to be open about it."
Philip Davies, MP for Shipley, also raised concerns about the issue yesterday. He said: "Everybody is affected by political correctness. The reason why it is so important is because things like this. "Young girls are having their lives threatened and ruined because people pussyfoot around and they are too scared to do anything in case they make a mistake and are accused of racism. "That's why we have to tackle the culture of political correctness everybody is affected by and I think the police are probably more affected and hamstrung by it than most organisations."
His comments come as Professor David Barrett of University of Bedfordshire also raised deep concerns about the issue in the BBC1 programme. He claimed evidence suggested that those operating the practice were "absolutely" likely to get away with it. The programme will controversially reveal the ethnic pattern of the crime which is largely Asian in northern England, Afro-Caribbean in the West Midlands and elsewhere white, Turkish and Kurdish.
The Government, reacting to concerns, has revealed it will introduce new crime-fighting targets aimed at specifically combating the little-publicised problem. But there are concerns that the practice, mostly operated by drug dealing gangs, has been of little priority to the various authorities. Figures suggest there are in the region of 5,000 British children being used as prostitutes.
On the programme Vernon Coaker under secretary of state with responsibility for policing reveals the new measures will be come into force next month. The government also plans to introduce a new warning video for use in schools over the issue. But despite funding a Home Office study almost ten years ago which revealed how the problem can be tackled, the police has a low prosecution rate. Coaker told Panorama that using powers under the Sexual Offences Act 2003 there have been just 44 convictions for grooming and pimping young children. Police attempts are said to be frustrated by a code of silence.
Source
THIS ORGANIC VIEW IS BANANAS
To all of the ill-effects blamed on man-made global warming, we might add one more. It appears that an obsession with climate change can make sane people warm to mad ideas. Take the Soil Association proposals to make it harder for produce from Africa to be labelled as organic, in order to cut the amount of fruit and vegetables flown into the UK. The justification is that this will reduce "food miles", CO2 emissions and man-made global warming, and thus protect the developing world from the impact of climate change. The likely effect will be to put some of the most downtrodden farmers in the world out of work.
So how do we save Africa from a possible future disaster? Apparently, by creating a real disaster in the here and now: making poor Africans even poorer. That sounds like madness - or plain badness - to me.
Air-freighted produce makes up 1 per cent of total UK organic sales - and those remain a tiny niche in the grocery market. Only a mind as sharp as an organic Kenyan banana could seriously believe that this is a big factor in Britannia's "carbon footprint". Indeed, the whole notion of "food miles" is hard to swallow. Research suggests that growing food in the sunshine of Africa and flying them to Europe produces less carbon - not to mention more taste - than growing them under glass and artificial heat in Britain or the Netherlands. Greenhouse effect, anybody?
Some of us might even suspect that, under the fresh-looking label of environmental concern, the UK organic lobby is expressing soiled Little Englander prejudices about keeping out "foreign muck". BA and Virgin Atlantic are flying in farmers' representatives from Ghana and Kenya to put their case against the new restrictions on organic air-freight. Even this old man of the Left can see that here the corporate giants are on the side of the angels, while the "radical" organic fruitcakes are flying in the face of progress and equality. We should defend the freedom of African farmers to air-lift their produce on to our plates.
Of course, in an entirely sane world, these African farmers would not have to jet around the world to demand their right to use backward and back-breaking "organic" methods which, as one village co-operative member told The Times, are simply "the way our fathers and grandfathers farmed". In a saner world they would be raising investment in the sort of industrialised and, yes, chemically assisted agricultural methods necessary to feed their people properly as well as to fly us fresh fruit and veg all year round. But in the current mad climate surrounding climate change, no doubt that will be thought bananas.
Source
'TOTALLY INSANE' BIO FOOLS IN BRITAIN
Plans to force motorists to run their cars on "green" petrol could lead to higher levels of greenhouse gases, the Government's leading environment scientist warned yesterday. Professor Robert Watson said it would be "totally insane" to promote the use of biofuels for environmental purposes if it was found that their production contributed to greater carbon emissions through the destruction of forests. He called on the Government to delay the compulsory use of "green" petrol and diesel until a review has been completed into the sustainability of their production.
From next week, 2.5 per cent of all fuel sold at British pumps must be derived from biofuels, a figure expected to rise to five per cent by 2010. The move, under the Renewable Transport Fuels Obligation (RTFO), is aimed at reducing the impact of fossil fuels, regarded as a major contributor to climate change. But scientists fear it could have the opposite effect.
Last month, a study by the Nature Conservancy and the University of Minnesota, published in Science magazine, warned that clearing forests, grassland and peatland to plant crops for biofuels released more carbon than it saved.
Prof Watson, the chief scientist at the Department for the Environment, said yesterday that it was time to heed the concerns. "It would obviously be totally insane if we had a policy to try and reduce greenhouse gas emissions through the use of biofuels that's actually leading to an increase in the greenhouse gases from biofuels," he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.
FULL STORY here
British tea advert cleared of racism
OK to imply that blacks are highly sexed, apparently! I don't think that would pass muster in the good old U.S. of A.
The unfolding superbug disaster in Britain
Superbugs kill at least 10,000 people in Britain each year - 20 times the number who die of Aids. Why is the British government funding AIDS research much more than superbug research? And why are known preventive measures not being taken?
Like many, Brian Clinch was under the impression that, despite the failures of the past, the British health service was tackling the frightening epidemic of antibiotic-resistant superbugs. That was before a visit to Norway made him realise that this record-breaking tide of resistant infections is far from under control and is also a problem of our own making. Clinch, a former RAF pilot from Dorset, has kidney failure and needs dialysis three times a week. It was only when he went for dialysis treatment in the Norwegian city of Stavanger three months ago that he discovered he was one of the tens of thousands of Britons unwittingly infected with the deadly superbug methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA).
The day after arriving in the oil-refining port on Norway's Atlantic coast, he went to the city's university hospital. Dialysis had been arranged on the understanding that he had been tested for MRSA in the UK. But a routine throat swab in Stavanger showed Clinch was carrying MRSA. "All hell broke loose," he says. "The results of the MRSA tests arrived after they'd given me one session of dialysis. They were angry and deeply unimpressed with the dialysis centre in England. "I felt like a complete pariah. I was taken into an isolation room and everyone put on gowns, masks and bootees before they came anywhere near me. It's obvious they are frightened to death of getting these infections in Norway, and are doing everything they can to keep them out."
He is right. Norway, with its population of 4.7m, had only 332 cases of MRSA in 2006, and has the lowest rate of antibiotic-resistant bacteria in Europe. About 1 in 200 of the infections found in patients' bloodstreams in Norway is caused by a treatment-resistant "superbug", while in Britain, getting on for half of all infected patients have been colonised by strains of bacteria that normal antibiotics cannot treat.
Norway, which, like Britain, runs a publicly funded health service free at the point of delivery, prides itself on its "search and destroy" policy for killer infections. But the contrast between its health services and our chaotic hospital system is a stark reflection of a difference in approach that has much more to do with attitude than money.
The public area of Stavanger's 950-bed hospital resembles nothing so much as an up-market hotel. Leather armchairs are arranged around a virtual log fire; seemingly relaxed visitors sip coffee and nibble pastries. The town is comparable to Ipswich in size and affluence, but first impressions of the hospital suggest it is wealthier. But beyond the reception, the 1970s-built wards tell a different story. Norway's cash-limited national health service is suffering exactly the same colossal pressure as our own NHS.
In the infectious-diseases unit there are 19 people on trolleys in the corridor. At least 11 more lie in the corridors of other departments. The wait may be long, and patients may end up temporarily in the wrong department as staff struggle to allocate beds. It is a sight familiar to anyone who has observed the treatment lottery of the British NHS, and the enormous battle between restricted supply and limitless demand for healthcare. But even under the pressure of winter infections, Stavanger's problems with capacity are not reflected in infection rates.
The atmosphere is busy but calm. The gleaming corridors are populated with cheery cleaners; there is a sense of belonging among the workforce that is often absent among the clock-watching agency workers who increasingly maintain large chunks of our own hospitals.
Stavanger has a policy of not moving infected patients around; if they have several conditions, doctors from different specialities come to them, not the other way round. And isolation rooms are available, complete with negative air pressure to prevent infections from being wafted outside. Barrier nursing methods involving gloves, aprons and scrupulous hand-washing are strictly applied with infectious patients.
Jon Sundal, the head of infectious diseases at Stavanger, complains of a relentless battle to keep his unit under control. "There is a shortage of nurses - the five new single rooms cannot be staffed," he says. Nevertheless, even with bed occupancy running at over 100%, conditions in his hospital offered a stark contrast to the grime of most of Britain's healthcare facilities. "We saw the writing on the wall early on with antibiotic resistance," says Olav Nataas, head of medical microbiology at Stavanger. "We had one serious outbreak in the 1980s, and since then we just haven't allowed it to happen, except when we sent some waiting-list patients to Britain for hip replacements and they came back infected. "I don't think hospital cleaning has much to do with it. What works is screening. You test everyone, and you isolate and treat everyone you find with it. In England you can't do that now because you have too many cases."
It is legitimate to ask if Britain's NHS has lurched into a ruinously expensive crisis that may yet see the entire service implode. It is also legitimate to ask how our microbial surveillance system, let alone our hospital cleaning services, has failed us so badly: why did scientists not warn us of this disaster in the making, and is it too late to do anything about it?
The global use of antibiotics since the 1940s has achieved a simple Darwinian consequence: the fittest bacteria survive. Antibiotics work by disrupting the production of components needed to create new bacterial cells. Penicillin, for example, selectively interferes with the construction of bacterial cell walls, which have a different structure to the cell tissue of humans and other mammals. By the end of the 1940s, about half of the Staphylococcus aureus strains tested in hospitals had adapted to produce an anti-penicillin toxin called penicillinase. Within months of the launch of the antibiotic methicillin in 1960, the first resistant strains of Staphylococcus aureus were emerging. Shortly after that, bacteriologists began finding strains impervious to up to four common antibiotics.
Warnings about the dangers of antibiotic overuse started to emerge from laboratories, but because relatively few patients were affected and nobody knew what to do about it, the situation was ignored. Antibiotics continued to be consumed in ever-growing quantities by sick humans and farm animals alike.
The problem took off in 1991, when Britain contributed its own supercharged strain to the world lexicon of multi-drug-resistant superbugs. MRSA-16 first appeared in Northamptonshire, rapidly infecting 400 patients and 27 staff in three hospitals. Within 18 months it had been reported in 135 more hospitals. Nobody knows how it spread. Along with another British strain, MRSA-15, it went on to infect patients around the world, a pattern that continues. A meticulous Health Protection Agency study, mapping how the new strains popped up unexpectedly in new hospitals, was published in the Journal of Clinical Microbiology in 2004. But it was too long after the event to shed any light on how the infection had carried. Now research funding is focused on firefighting - casting around for ways to damp down the effects of the pathogens.
It is not just MRSA that is sweeping across Britain like a plague. Streptococcus, enterococcus and Escherichia coli (E coli) are among a host of bugs emerging in resistant forms and causing everything from pneumonia to tuberculosis, bone destruction and lethal damage to the heart. In addition, we are facing "hyper-virulent" new strains of the bacteria Clostridium difficile (C diff), which have colonised the sites left free by the effect of antibiotics, which kill off many harmless bacterial colonies in their path. Although C diff is not resistant to treatment, its spores linger indefinitely and, until recently, NHS staff were largely unaware of how to kill them. Consequently, it is the biggest killer of the current superbugs.
In 2006 it was mentioned on the death certificates of 6,480 people, against 1,652 deaths officially attributed to MRSA. However, these figures are recognised to be underestimates, as many superbug deaths are never identified. Mandatory surveillance of MRSA bloodstream infections is a recent innovation, the number of people carrying it with no symptoms is not recorded, and the formal collection of figures for death and disease associated with C diff (which causes unstoppable diarrhoea or gut perforation) only began in April 2007. The government estimates the annual cost of treatment for such cases to be over œ1 billion.
Officially, the total number of MRSA infections is 7,000-8,000 a year, while C diff is running at an annual 55,600 cases. Many experts believe the real total for all superbug infections is nearer 300,000 - how many are fatal is believed to be vastly higher than the official figures suggest. There is no way of knowing the true figure, as relatively few people are tested.
Meanwhile, a variety of new resistant pathogens are waiting in the wings. In September 2006, a variation of Staphylococcus aureus that produces a toxin called Panton-Valentine leukocidin (PVL) claimed its first British victims. Since then, anxiety over this threat has escalated. The pathogen selectively attacks the young rather than the old; it gets into bones and joints, causing crippling damage.
A multi-drug-resistant version of a common food-poisoning bug, ESBL (extended-spectrum beta-lactamase) E coli, is also causing anxiety. First identified in the 1980s, it has spread steadily to cause an average of 30,000 cases of blood poisoning and urinary-tract infections a year. Although it has officially been blamed for 57 deaths so far, the true total is believed to be many thousands. Government scientists think the source is meat and milk, colonised by superbugs as a result of overuse of agricultural antibiotics.
Jodi Lindsay, a senior expert at St George's hospital, London, and a world authority on superbugs, says: "It is inevitable things will get much worse. We don't know enough about how these bacteria behave, because not enough research is being done. We have increasing numbers of surgical operations, elderly people with long-term serious disease, and diabetics. All these patients have compromised immune systems and are at risk. Not only that, there is potential for new, really virulent strains of bacteria, capable of attacking healthy people."
Mark Enright, professor of molecular epidemiology at Imperial College London, says the real number of deaths in the UK from MRSA and C diff is "easily more than 10,000". He shares the concern that reservoirs of superbug infection in hospitals will increasingly spill out to attack otherwise healthy people: "You could be carrying a resistant form of MRSA and it could then get in through a superficial injury."
There is evidence that such a problem is already occurring in other parts of the world. A new form of MRSA, USA300, has emerged not in hospitals but in the wider community in America. It is killing 18,000 a year - considerably more than the number killed by HIV/Aids, and, most worryingly, the victims include a number of otherwise healthy children. The latest flurry of anxiety was in Brooklyn, New York, in October, when Omar Rivera, a previously fit 12-year-old, suffered the telltale crop of pus-filled spots associated with USA300. Within days he was dead. In other parts of America, three other children, aged 4, 11 and 17, died the same month.
A team at the University of California in San Francisco has been tracking the infection. Last month they published a study showing that a variant of USA300 was spreading in gay communities on the East and West Coasts. And a new "community" strain of C diff in the US has targeted children, pregnant women and new mothers, with fatal results. There has been at least one similar death in the UK, but testing was not available to confirm if it was the same pathogen.
Europe also has a "community" MRSA: ST80. Officially it is considered less of a threat because, it is argued, levels of poverty in western Europe are not as severe as in the US. Without the immune-system damage caused by malnutrition, the infection is less likely to cause an epidemic.
All that is known about USA300, and other virulent community-acquired strains of staphylococcus, is that they generally include Panton-Valentine leukocidin, and that this lethal toxin can jump between different types of bacteria. If a PVL-carrying bacterium infects someone already carrying a cold virus, it can spur the onset of a deadly form of necrotising or tissue-killing pneumonia, which kills 60% of those who develop it. Although guidelines for GPs to alert them to this new threat to public health are being issued later this spring, Lindsay and other scientists complain that Britain persists in spending too little on basic research to tell us more about the nature of these brand-new infectious agents.
Many scientists have also attacked our slow and patchy response to the problem of antibiotic resistance. "In the early 1990s, microbiologists were divided," says Hugh Pennington, emeritus professor of bacteriology at Aberdeen University. "For everyone who argued the case for containment, there'd be many more who maintained that Staph aureus had been with us for ever, and it did not make much difference if strains were methicillin-resistant or not."
As a result, investigating how microbes developed their resistance, how infections spread, why particular resistant strains appeared in some areas but not in others, did not seem that important to healthcare planners. Microbiology began to feature less and less in medical training. According to the Royal College of Pathologists, there are now only 645 fully qualified hospital microbiologists in Britain, of whom only 387 are working in the NHS in England. Up to 10% of hospital microbiology posts are unfilled because of a shortage of qualified applicants.
At the same time that the superbugs were taking hold, those with the expertise to tackle them were keen to work instead in Aids research, with its support from glamorous figures such as Princess Diana and Elizabeth Taylor. The pattern inexplicably continues. According to the Department of Health, 3.8m pounds has been spent by the government since 2002 under the umbrella of "clinical microbial research", while 14m a year is spent on Aids, which kills fewer than 500 here annually. And it has become clear that a recently allocated 16.5m that microbiologists believed was for research into antibiotic resistance will be shared with research projects on sexually transmitted diseases and hepatitis. "Asking why we put so much money into Aids research is a very good question," said Brian Duerden, government inspector of microbiology and infection control. "Medical research is highly political and highly fashion-driven."
Dr Peter Dukes, programme manager of the Infections and Immunity Research Board at the Medical Research Council (MRC), blamed the paucity of research proposals and the shortage of researchers in the field of antibiotic resistance: "When the MRC offered to fund a research project six years ago, 20 proposals were received and only one was good enough to sponsor." Given America's sinister new USA300 infection, our persistent preoccupation with Aids may soon look very misguided indeed.
Microbiologists who have remained in the NHS are dismayed that their warnings of disaster from antibiotic resistance have been ignored by hospital managers focused on performance indicators and productivity targets, which concentrated on waiting times. "We needed to do more screening, but there were never the resources. Even now they are cutting back," said a consultant intensive-care specialist at a large provincial hospital. "There used to be two consultant microbiologists here, but one left and was not replaced. So we had no expert on intensive-care ward rounds to advise on appropriate antibiotics and infection control."
New government directives require hospitals to carry out MRSA screening on patients being admitted - though not those having outpatient or day-surgery procedures. The consultant said the extra testing burden, without any extra staff to do it, had meant that vital surveillance for other new infections was not happening.
In addition, as pressure has been ratcheted up to channel funds into meeting a range of "patient episode" productivity targets, basic hospital cleaning has been scaled back and contracted out. Those working in healthcare seem increasingly ignorant of the basics of hygiene. Healthcare workers increasingly fail to wash their hands as they race between beds, which are meant to be kept 100% occupied. Increasing numbers of patients are unnecessarily admitted to wards from accident-and-emergency departments, simply to avoid breaking the maximum four-hour permitted A&E wait. In December it was reported that the hotel costs of caring for extra patients who were not actually sick enough to need treatment had wasted 2 billion over the past five years.
Many microbiologists point to the decline of attention to hygiene as a basic function of healthcare as nurse training has become increasingly academic and classroom-based. "The only infection-control procedure proven to work is scrupulous hand-washing, a basic approach explained by Florence Nightingale during the Crimean war and seemingly lost in the intervening 150 years," said Richard Wise, former chairman of the government's specialist advisory committee on antimicrobial resistance, and adviser to the Health Protection Agency Board. "Not washing the hands between patients should be made a disciplinary offence."
Most hospitals have bottles of alcohol-based hand disinfectant by their doors, but Duerden says that until recently their inefficacy against C diff spores was "not common knowledge" outside microbiology circles - an unacceptable level of ignorance, insists Wise, who said it had been known about "for donkey's years".
Olav Nataas, however, insists the search-and-destroy process is key: "We know hand-washing is never 100%," he says. "This preoccupation with cleaning is not the main issue. It is identifying the infection as rapidly as possible and treating it in a way that does not risk others."
It is this uncertainty among Britain's scientists, healthcare administrators and politicians that has led to the latest disagreement about hospital cleaning. This month, every hospital in Britain is meant to have completed a special "deep clean", for which an extra 57m has been allocated. How exactly a deep clean is performed is less clear. There are no prescriptions for cleaning materials, training for cleaners, or methods of checking whether things are actually clean.....
Many patients have paid a high price for our confused health policies. In Britain's worst outbreak of superbug infection, there were 90 deaths and 1,170 C diff infections across three hospital sites in Maidstone, Kent, between April 2004 and September 2006. A report on the disaster by the Healthcare Commission in October described patients being left to lie in their own infection-laden excrement, a shortage of nurses and an ignorance of the risks of moving infected patients between wards. There were a further 33 avoidable deaths from C diff between 2003 and 2005 at Stoke Mandeville hospital in Buckinghamshire. An inquiry found that managers ignored advice to isolate those infected and instead concentrated on shutting down more beds to cut costs.
The cost of compensating superbug victims is also soaring. The NHS Litigation Authority has paid out 12.5m for 287 cases, plus a record-breaking 5m in January to the actress Leslie Ash, 49, whose career has been ruined. An anticipated 1m will go to Shaun Franks, 39, who underwent surgery for a broken ankle. His leg was taken over by an immovable colony of MRSA, which could only be eradicated from his body by amputation of the leg. During his treatment, staff at Northampton general hospital unwittingly used an antibiotic that accelerated the growth of the MRSA. "It has been a nightmare," said Franks. "I lost my job, my relationship - everything. Every time I thought I was getting better, it would come back again."
There is no question that ignorance of good practice has played a significant part in the spread of superbugs in Britain. A study in the late 1990s by Otto Cars, an expert in infectious diseases at Uppsala University, Sweden, compared antibiotic use across Europe. British doctors were administering over 18 daily doses per 1,000 people, compared with 13 in Germany and Sweden and 11 in Denmark. Most of the prescriptions were for coughs and colds - 90% of which are caused by viruses, not bacteria.
Duerden admits that the first comprehensive campaign to educate GPs and the public about the overuse of antibiotics only got off the ground eight years ago with the launch of a cartoon character, Andybiotic. But a survey of almost 11,000 adults published in the British Medical Journal last year indicated that most people still did not understand the risks.
Hajo Grundmann, now a senior infection-control adviser to the Dutch government, worked for seven years in Britain's NHS before returning home in 2001. He runs the Eurosurveillance database, monitoring levels of antibiotic-resistant infections in 31 countries. Britain has the highest rate in western Europe. "It is connected with the high workload," he says. "I worked in Nottingham. We were able to isolate MRSA cases at first, but when the waiting-list initiative came in, there was huge pressure on beds. As soon as the pressure goes up, hand-washing goes down. But the British problem is also due to people's attitudes. It just has not been taken seriously enough." ....
There are, however, measures being launched by the government: to increase the number of hospital matrons to 5,000 to oversee hygiene by May, and make available 270m a year for hygiene campaigns, extra infection-control nurses and pharmacists to tackle over-reliance on antibiotics.
But that does not explain why we continue to invest in areas such as Aids research, or the hypothetical risk of pandemic flu, yet hope that drugs developed in the middle of the last century will protect us against new infections that are killing thousands each year.
More here
Schools to be forced to keep quota of problem pupils. Discipline be damned!
Successful schools will be forced to take a share of disruptive pupils to prevent them from monopolising the best-behaved children, the Government announced yesterday. Ed Balls, the Children's Secretary, said that schools which excluded pupils would have to accept the same number that had been expelled by another school. This "one out, one in" policy would prevent oversubscribed schools from dumping badly behaved children on to their less successful neighbours.
Speaking at the NASUWT teaching union's annual conference, Mr Balls said that he accepted the recommendations of a behaviour review published yesterday, which said: "A school that permanently excludes a child should expect to receive a permanently excluded child on the principle of one out, one in."
Sir Alan Steer, the head teacher of a specialist school and author of the report, said: "I didn't feel we should have a situation where a school has a perverse incentive to exclude, knowing it would not have to accept a child with difficulties. We didn't want a situation where schools were exporting without accepting their responsibility to import where they could." Sir Alan said that the rules should also apply to oversubscribed and faith schools, otherwise they could use exclusion as a way of creating a space for a child on a waiting list. He said that head teachers had a social responsibility to neighbouring schools to take on challenging pupils.
New legislation requiring all secondary schools to form behaviour partnerships with neighbouring schools would be passed, Mr Balls said. More than 90 per cent of schools already belonged to one, he added. He had taken into consideration an earlier report by Sir Alan, which recommended that clusters of secondary schools pool their resources and expertise to deal with problem pupils.
In his latest report, Sir Alan questioned whether some schools were paying lip service to the partnerships. It said: "Informal soundings make me sceptical that all these schools are actually engaged in meaningful partnership working . . . Credible evidence is lacking on the impact partnerships are making where they do exist."
Mr Balls said that there would be an overhaul of "alternative provision" for children excluded from mainstream education, with a White Paper setting out his department's plans. The overall quality of pupil referral units was not good enough, the minister said, adding that he wanted more voluntary and private sector provision. This will include "studio schools", already successful in the United States, which offer vocational training for expelled pupils.
Mr Balls said: "We will launch pilots to develop new and more effective forms of alternative provision, including high-quality vocational training with a clear pathway to qualifications and a job." He added that he wanted to "shine a light" on the sector; data on the performance of excluded pupils, educated in alternative settings, would be published for the first time.
Mr Balls said that standards of behaviour continued to concern parents, teachers and children. He also announced a "root and branch" review of the school governing body system. Sir Alan said that the responsibilities of parents - as well as their rights - should be set out in the Children's Plan, published last year by Mr Balls's department. A pilot scheme that provided parent support advisers in schools was successful, he said, and should be extended across most, if not all, schools. However, the 100 million pound funding provided for the programme over the next three years was insufficient, he added.
Source
British Muslim leader accuses police of being 'over cautious' in stopping Asian gangs pimping white girls
A muslim leader has accused the police of failing to tackle Asian gangs suspected of prostituting young white girls. Officers are accused of being "over cautious" when investigating Muslim criminals because they fear being branded racist. Last night Mohammed Shafiq, director of the Ramadhan Foundation, said the police were differentiating between criminals on the basis of race. He claimed, driven by fear of race riots in places like Blackburn and Oldham, officers were "overtly sensitive" and not clamping down on the sordid practice.
His controversial comments in this week's Panorama reignite a massively controversial issue which exploded over a Channel 4 documentary in 2004. That programme which claimed Asian men in Bradford were grooming under age white girls for prostitution was pulled from C4's schedules. This was because police claimed at the time that it could provoke racial violence during the local election campaign.
Now the BBC is to risk the wrath of police officials and campaigners by airing a programme which will look at the same issue. Speaking as part of the Panorama investigation, which airs tomorrow (Thursday), Shafiq said: "I think the police are overcautious on dealing with this issue openly because they fear being branded racist and I think that is wrong." "These are criminals they should be treated as criminals. They are not Asian criminals, they are not Muslim criminals, they are not white criminals. They are criminals and they should be treated as criminals." He said that some of the criminals were Asian gangs looking to supplement their income, after the cost of drugs has fallen over the last few years.
Shafiq said "I am the only Muslim leader in the UK that speaks up against this sort of thing and I do it because these teenage girls are somebody's sisters and they are somebody's daughters. I have got two daughters and I wouldn't want that to happen to my daughters. "If there is a drug dealer grooming a white teenager into prostitution then I don't want the police service or local authority not to be open about it."
Philip Davies, MP for Shipley, also raised concerns about the issue yesterday. He said: "Everybody is affected by political correctness. The reason why it is so important is because things like this. "Young girls are having their lives threatened and ruined because people pussyfoot around and they are too scared to do anything in case they make a mistake and are accused of racism. "That's why we have to tackle the culture of political correctness everybody is affected by and I think the police are probably more affected and hamstrung by it than most organisations."
His comments come as Professor David Barrett of University of Bedfordshire also raised deep concerns about the issue in the BBC1 programme. He claimed evidence suggested that those operating the practice were "absolutely" likely to get away with it. The programme will controversially reveal the ethnic pattern of the crime which is largely Asian in northern England, Afro-Caribbean in the West Midlands and elsewhere white, Turkish and Kurdish.
The Government, reacting to concerns, has revealed it will introduce new crime-fighting targets aimed at specifically combating the little-publicised problem. But there are concerns that the practice, mostly operated by drug dealing gangs, has been of little priority to the various authorities. Figures suggest there are in the region of 5,000 British children being used as prostitutes.
On the programme Vernon Coaker under secretary of state with responsibility for policing reveals the new measures will be come into force next month. The government also plans to introduce a new warning video for use in schools over the issue. But despite funding a Home Office study almost ten years ago which revealed how the problem can be tackled, the police has a low prosecution rate. Coaker told Panorama that using powers under the Sexual Offences Act 2003 there have been just 44 convictions for grooming and pimping young children. Police attempts are said to be frustrated by a code of silence.
Source
THIS ORGANIC VIEW IS BANANAS
To all of the ill-effects blamed on man-made global warming, we might add one more. It appears that an obsession with climate change can make sane people warm to mad ideas. Take the Soil Association proposals to make it harder for produce from Africa to be labelled as organic, in order to cut the amount of fruit and vegetables flown into the UK. The justification is that this will reduce "food miles", CO2 emissions and man-made global warming, and thus protect the developing world from the impact of climate change. The likely effect will be to put some of the most downtrodden farmers in the world out of work.
So how do we save Africa from a possible future disaster? Apparently, by creating a real disaster in the here and now: making poor Africans even poorer. That sounds like madness - or plain badness - to me.
Air-freighted produce makes up 1 per cent of total UK organic sales - and those remain a tiny niche in the grocery market. Only a mind as sharp as an organic Kenyan banana could seriously believe that this is a big factor in Britannia's "carbon footprint". Indeed, the whole notion of "food miles" is hard to swallow. Research suggests that growing food in the sunshine of Africa and flying them to Europe produces less carbon - not to mention more taste - than growing them under glass and artificial heat in Britain or the Netherlands. Greenhouse effect, anybody?
Some of us might even suspect that, under the fresh-looking label of environmental concern, the UK organic lobby is expressing soiled Little Englander prejudices about keeping out "foreign muck". BA and Virgin Atlantic are flying in farmers' representatives from Ghana and Kenya to put their case against the new restrictions on organic air-freight. Even this old man of the Left can see that here the corporate giants are on the side of the angels, while the "radical" organic fruitcakes are flying in the face of progress and equality. We should defend the freedom of African farmers to air-lift their produce on to our plates.
Of course, in an entirely sane world, these African farmers would not have to jet around the world to demand their right to use backward and back-breaking "organic" methods which, as one village co-operative member told The Times, are simply "the way our fathers and grandfathers farmed". In a saner world they would be raising investment in the sort of industrialised and, yes, chemically assisted agricultural methods necessary to feed their people properly as well as to fly us fresh fruit and veg all year round. But in the current mad climate surrounding climate change, no doubt that will be thought bananas.
Source
'TOTALLY INSANE' BIO FOOLS IN BRITAIN
Plans to force motorists to run their cars on "green" petrol could lead to higher levels of greenhouse gases, the Government's leading environment scientist warned yesterday. Professor Robert Watson said it would be "totally insane" to promote the use of biofuels for environmental purposes if it was found that their production contributed to greater carbon emissions through the destruction of forests. He called on the Government to delay the compulsory use of "green" petrol and diesel until a review has been completed into the sustainability of their production.
From next week, 2.5 per cent of all fuel sold at British pumps must be derived from biofuels, a figure expected to rise to five per cent by 2010. The move, under the Renewable Transport Fuels Obligation (RTFO), is aimed at reducing the impact of fossil fuels, regarded as a major contributor to climate change. But scientists fear it could have the opposite effect.
Last month, a study by the Nature Conservancy and the University of Minnesota, published in Science magazine, warned that clearing forests, grassland and peatland to plant crops for biofuels released more carbon than it saved.
Prof Watson, the chief scientist at the Department for the Environment, said yesterday that it was time to heed the concerns. "It would obviously be totally insane if we had a policy to try and reduce greenhouse gas emissions through the use of biofuels that's actually leading to an increase in the greenhouse gases from biofuels," he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.
FULL STORY here
British tea advert cleared of racism
OK to imply that blacks are highly sexed, apparently! I don't think that would pass muster in the good old U.S. of A.
"A light-hearted TV advert for Twinings tea in which three white women flirt with a young black American has been cleared of playing on negative racial stereotypes. The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) said it had decided not to uphold a lone complaint from a viewer who believed the ad suggested black men were sexually promiscuous and existed to provide sexual services for white women.
In the plug for Earl Grey, Stephen Fry is seen behind the counter of a tea shop as the black male, named Tyrone, writes a message on a blackboard informing customers that the drink "puts the zing in your ding-a-ling".
Dismissing the claims of racial bias, an ASA panel described the innuendo used to promote the aromatic beverages as unlikely to cause widespread offence. The panel observed: "Although we acknowledged the innuendo was mildly sexual, we did not consider that it was reliant on the young man's ethnic origins or a racial stereotype.
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The unfolding superbug disaster in Britain
Superbugs kill at least 10,000 people in Britain each year - 20 times the number who die of Aids. Why is the British government funding AIDS research much more than superbug research? And why are known preventive measures not being taken?
Like many, Brian Clinch was under the impression that, despite the failures of the past, the British health service was tackling the frightening epidemic of antibiotic-resistant superbugs. That was before a visit to Norway made him realise that this record-breaking tide of resistant infections is far from under control and is also a problem of our own making. Clinch, a former RAF pilot from Dorset, has kidney failure and needs dialysis three times a week. It was only when he went for dialysis treatment in the Norwegian city of Stavanger three months ago that he discovered he was one of the tens of thousands of Britons unwittingly infected with the deadly superbug methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA).
The day after arriving in the oil-refining port on Norway's Atlantic coast, he went to the city's university hospital. Dialysis had been arranged on the understanding that he had been tested for MRSA in the UK. But a routine throat swab in Stavanger showed Clinch was carrying MRSA. "All hell broke loose," he says. "The results of the MRSA tests arrived after they'd given me one session of dialysis. They were angry and deeply unimpressed with the dialysis centre in England. "I felt like a complete pariah. I was taken into an isolation room and everyone put on gowns, masks and bootees before they came anywhere near me. It's obvious they are frightened to death of getting these infections in Norway, and are doing everything they can to keep them out."
He is right. Norway, with its population of 4.7m, had only 332 cases of MRSA in 2006, and has the lowest rate of antibiotic-resistant bacteria in Europe. About 1 in 200 of the infections found in patients' bloodstreams in Norway is caused by a treatment-resistant "superbug", while in Britain, getting on for half of all infected patients have been colonised by strains of bacteria that normal antibiotics cannot treat.
Norway, which, like Britain, runs a publicly funded health service free at the point of delivery, prides itself on its "search and destroy" policy for killer infections. But the contrast between its health services and our chaotic hospital system is a stark reflection of a difference in approach that has much more to do with attitude than money.
The public area of Stavanger's 950-bed hospital resembles nothing so much as an up-market hotel. Leather armchairs are arranged around a virtual log fire; seemingly relaxed visitors sip coffee and nibble pastries. The town is comparable to Ipswich in size and affluence, but first impressions of the hospital suggest it is wealthier. But beyond the reception, the 1970s-built wards tell a different story. Norway's cash-limited national health service is suffering exactly the same colossal pressure as our own NHS.
In the infectious-diseases unit there are 19 people on trolleys in the corridor. At least 11 more lie in the corridors of other departments. The wait may be long, and patients may end up temporarily in the wrong department as staff struggle to allocate beds. It is a sight familiar to anyone who has observed the treatment lottery of the British NHS, and the enormous battle between restricted supply and limitless demand for healthcare. But even under the pressure of winter infections, Stavanger's problems with capacity are not reflected in infection rates.
The atmosphere is busy but calm. The gleaming corridors are populated with cheery cleaners; there is a sense of belonging among the workforce that is often absent among the clock-watching agency workers who increasingly maintain large chunks of our own hospitals.
Stavanger has a policy of not moving infected patients around; if they have several conditions, doctors from different specialities come to them, not the other way round. And isolation rooms are available, complete with negative air pressure to prevent infections from being wafted outside. Barrier nursing methods involving gloves, aprons and scrupulous hand-washing are strictly applied with infectious patients.
Jon Sundal, the head of infectious diseases at Stavanger, complains of a relentless battle to keep his unit under control. "There is a shortage of nurses - the five new single rooms cannot be staffed," he says. Nevertheless, even with bed occupancy running at over 100%, conditions in his hospital offered a stark contrast to the grime of most of Britain's healthcare facilities. "We saw the writing on the wall early on with antibiotic resistance," says Olav Nataas, head of medical microbiology at Stavanger. "We had one serious outbreak in the 1980s, and since then we just haven't allowed it to happen, except when we sent some waiting-list patients to Britain for hip replacements and they came back infected. "I don't think hospital cleaning has much to do with it. What works is screening. You test everyone, and you isolate and treat everyone you find with it. In England you can't do that now because you have too many cases."
It is legitimate to ask if Britain's NHS has lurched into a ruinously expensive crisis that may yet see the entire service implode. It is also legitimate to ask how our microbial surveillance system, let alone our hospital cleaning services, has failed us so badly: why did scientists not warn us of this disaster in the making, and is it too late to do anything about it?
The global use of antibiotics since the 1940s has achieved a simple Darwinian consequence: the fittest bacteria survive. Antibiotics work by disrupting the production of components needed to create new bacterial cells. Penicillin, for example, selectively interferes with the construction of bacterial cell walls, which have a different structure to the cell tissue of humans and other mammals. By the end of the 1940s, about half of the Staphylococcus aureus strains tested in hospitals had adapted to produce an anti-penicillin toxin called penicillinase. Within months of the launch of the antibiotic methicillin in 1960, the first resistant strains of Staphylococcus aureus were emerging. Shortly after that, bacteriologists began finding strains impervious to up to four common antibiotics.
Warnings about the dangers of antibiotic overuse started to emerge from laboratories, but because relatively few patients were affected and nobody knew what to do about it, the situation was ignored. Antibiotics continued to be consumed in ever-growing quantities by sick humans and farm animals alike.
The problem took off in 1991, when Britain contributed its own supercharged strain to the world lexicon of multi-drug-resistant superbugs. MRSA-16 first appeared in Northamptonshire, rapidly infecting 400 patients and 27 staff in three hospitals. Within 18 months it had been reported in 135 more hospitals. Nobody knows how it spread. Along with another British strain, MRSA-15, it went on to infect patients around the world, a pattern that continues. A meticulous Health Protection Agency study, mapping how the new strains popped up unexpectedly in new hospitals, was published in the Journal of Clinical Microbiology in 2004. But it was too long after the event to shed any light on how the infection had carried. Now research funding is focused on firefighting - casting around for ways to damp down the effects of the pathogens.
It is not just MRSA that is sweeping across Britain like a plague. Streptococcus, enterococcus and Escherichia coli (E coli) are among a host of bugs emerging in resistant forms and causing everything from pneumonia to tuberculosis, bone destruction and lethal damage to the heart. In addition, we are facing "hyper-virulent" new strains of the bacteria Clostridium difficile (C diff), which have colonised the sites left free by the effect of antibiotics, which kill off many harmless bacterial colonies in their path. Although C diff is not resistant to treatment, its spores linger indefinitely and, until recently, NHS staff were largely unaware of how to kill them. Consequently, it is the biggest killer of the current superbugs.
In 2006 it was mentioned on the death certificates of 6,480 people, against 1,652 deaths officially attributed to MRSA. However, these figures are recognised to be underestimates, as many superbug deaths are never identified. Mandatory surveillance of MRSA bloodstream infections is a recent innovation, the number of people carrying it with no symptoms is not recorded, and the formal collection of figures for death and disease associated with C diff (which causes unstoppable diarrhoea or gut perforation) only began in April 2007. The government estimates the annual cost of treatment for such cases to be over œ1 billion.
Officially, the total number of MRSA infections is 7,000-8,000 a year, while C diff is running at an annual 55,600 cases. Many experts believe the real total for all superbug infections is nearer 300,000 - how many are fatal is believed to be vastly higher than the official figures suggest. There is no way of knowing the true figure, as relatively few people are tested.
Meanwhile, a variety of new resistant pathogens are waiting in the wings. In September 2006, a variation of Staphylococcus aureus that produces a toxin called Panton-Valentine leukocidin (PVL) claimed its first British victims. Since then, anxiety over this threat has escalated. The pathogen selectively attacks the young rather than the old; it gets into bones and joints, causing crippling damage.
A multi-drug-resistant version of a common food-poisoning bug, ESBL (extended-spectrum beta-lactamase) E coli, is also causing anxiety. First identified in the 1980s, it has spread steadily to cause an average of 30,000 cases of blood poisoning and urinary-tract infections a year. Although it has officially been blamed for 57 deaths so far, the true total is believed to be many thousands. Government scientists think the source is meat and milk, colonised by superbugs as a result of overuse of agricultural antibiotics.
Jodi Lindsay, a senior expert at St George's hospital, London, and a world authority on superbugs, says: "It is inevitable things will get much worse. We don't know enough about how these bacteria behave, because not enough research is being done. We have increasing numbers of surgical operations, elderly people with long-term serious disease, and diabetics. All these patients have compromised immune systems and are at risk. Not only that, there is potential for new, really virulent strains of bacteria, capable of attacking healthy people."
Mark Enright, professor of molecular epidemiology at Imperial College London, says the real number of deaths in the UK from MRSA and C diff is "easily more than 10,000". He shares the concern that reservoirs of superbug infection in hospitals will increasingly spill out to attack otherwise healthy people: "You could be carrying a resistant form of MRSA and it could then get in through a superficial injury."
There is evidence that such a problem is already occurring in other parts of the world. A new form of MRSA, USA300, has emerged not in hospitals but in the wider community in America. It is killing 18,000 a year - considerably more than the number killed by HIV/Aids, and, most worryingly, the victims include a number of otherwise healthy children. The latest flurry of anxiety was in Brooklyn, New York, in October, when Omar Rivera, a previously fit 12-year-old, suffered the telltale crop of pus-filled spots associated with USA300. Within days he was dead. In other parts of America, three other children, aged 4, 11 and 17, died the same month.
A team at the University of California in San Francisco has been tracking the infection. Last month they published a study showing that a variant of USA300 was spreading in gay communities on the East and West Coasts. And a new "community" strain of C diff in the US has targeted children, pregnant women and new mothers, with fatal results. There has been at least one similar death in the UK, but testing was not available to confirm if it was the same pathogen.
Europe also has a "community" MRSA: ST80. Officially it is considered less of a threat because, it is argued, levels of poverty in western Europe are not as severe as in the US. Without the immune-system damage caused by malnutrition, the infection is less likely to cause an epidemic.
All that is known about USA300, and other virulent community-acquired strains of staphylococcus, is that they generally include Panton-Valentine leukocidin, and that this lethal toxin can jump between different types of bacteria. If a PVL-carrying bacterium infects someone already carrying a cold virus, it can spur the onset of a deadly form of necrotising or tissue-killing pneumonia, which kills 60% of those who develop it. Although guidelines for GPs to alert them to this new threat to public health are being issued later this spring, Lindsay and other scientists complain that Britain persists in spending too little on basic research to tell us more about the nature of these brand-new infectious agents.
Many scientists have also attacked our slow and patchy response to the problem of antibiotic resistance. "In the early 1990s, microbiologists were divided," says Hugh Pennington, emeritus professor of bacteriology at Aberdeen University. "For everyone who argued the case for containment, there'd be many more who maintained that Staph aureus had been with us for ever, and it did not make much difference if strains were methicillin-resistant or not."
As a result, investigating how microbes developed their resistance, how infections spread, why particular resistant strains appeared in some areas but not in others, did not seem that important to healthcare planners. Microbiology began to feature less and less in medical training. According to the Royal College of Pathologists, there are now only 645 fully qualified hospital microbiologists in Britain, of whom only 387 are working in the NHS in England. Up to 10% of hospital microbiology posts are unfilled because of a shortage of qualified applicants.
At the same time that the superbugs were taking hold, those with the expertise to tackle them were keen to work instead in Aids research, with its support from glamorous figures such as Princess Diana and Elizabeth Taylor. The pattern inexplicably continues. According to the Department of Health, 3.8m pounds has been spent by the government since 2002 under the umbrella of "clinical microbial research", while 14m a year is spent on Aids, which kills fewer than 500 here annually. And it has become clear that a recently allocated 16.5m that microbiologists believed was for research into antibiotic resistance will be shared with research projects on sexually transmitted diseases and hepatitis. "Asking why we put so much money into Aids research is a very good question," said Brian Duerden, government inspector of microbiology and infection control. "Medical research is highly political and highly fashion-driven."
Dr Peter Dukes, programme manager of the Infections and Immunity Research Board at the Medical Research Council (MRC), blamed the paucity of research proposals and the shortage of researchers in the field of antibiotic resistance: "When the MRC offered to fund a research project six years ago, 20 proposals were received and only one was good enough to sponsor." Given America's sinister new USA300 infection, our persistent preoccupation with Aids may soon look very misguided indeed.
Microbiologists who have remained in the NHS are dismayed that their warnings of disaster from antibiotic resistance have been ignored by hospital managers focused on performance indicators and productivity targets, which concentrated on waiting times. "We needed to do more screening, but there were never the resources. Even now they are cutting back," said a consultant intensive-care specialist at a large provincial hospital. "There used to be two consultant microbiologists here, but one left and was not replaced. So we had no expert on intensive-care ward rounds to advise on appropriate antibiotics and infection control."
New government directives require hospitals to carry out MRSA screening on patients being admitted - though not those having outpatient or day-surgery procedures. The consultant said the extra testing burden, without any extra staff to do it, had meant that vital surveillance for other new infections was not happening.
In addition, as pressure has been ratcheted up to channel funds into meeting a range of "patient episode" productivity targets, basic hospital cleaning has been scaled back and contracted out. Those working in healthcare seem increasingly ignorant of the basics of hygiene. Healthcare workers increasingly fail to wash their hands as they race between beds, which are meant to be kept 100% occupied. Increasing numbers of patients are unnecessarily admitted to wards from accident-and-emergency departments, simply to avoid breaking the maximum four-hour permitted A&E wait. In December it was reported that the hotel costs of caring for extra patients who were not actually sick enough to need treatment had wasted 2 billion over the past five years.
Many microbiologists point to the decline of attention to hygiene as a basic function of healthcare as nurse training has become increasingly academic and classroom-based. "The only infection-control procedure proven to work is scrupulous hand-washing, a basic approach explained by Florence Nightingale during the Crimean war and seemingly lost in the intervening 150 years," said Richard Wise, former chairman of the government's specialist advisory committee on antimicrobial resistance, and adviser to the Health Protection Agency Board. "Not washing the hands between patients should be made a disciplinary offence."
Most hospitals have bottles of alcohol-based hand disinfectant by their doors, but Duerden says that until recently their inefficacy against C diff spores was "not common knowledge" outside microbiology circles - an unacceptable level of ignorance, insists Wise, who said it had been known about "for donkey's years".
Olav Nataas, however, insists the search-and-destroy process is key: "We know hand-washing is never 100%," he says. "This preoccupation with cleaning is not the main issue. It is identifying the infection as rapidly as possible and treating it in a way that does not risk others."
It is this uncertainty among Britain's scientists, healthcare administrators and politicians that has led to the latest disagreement about hospital cleaning. This month, every hospital in Britain is meant to have completed a special "deep clean", for which an extra 57m has been allocated. How exactly a deep clean is performed is less clear. There are no prescriptions for cleaning materials, training for cleaners, or methods of checking whether things are actually clean.....
Many patients have paid a high price for our confused health policies. In Britain's worst outbreak of superbug infection, there were 90 deaths and 1,170 C diff infections across three hospital sites in Maidstone, Kent, between April 2004 and September 2006. A report on the disaster by the Healthcare Commission in October described patients being left to lie in their own infection-laden excrement, a shortage of nurses and an ignorance of the risks of moving infected patients between wards. There were a further 33 avoidable deaths from C diff between 2003 and 2005 at Stoke Mandeville hospital in Buckinghamshire. An inquiry found that managers ignored advice to isolate those infected and instead concentrated on shutting down more beds to cut costs.
The cost of compensating superbug victims is also soaring. The NHS Litigation Authority has paid out 12.5m for 287 cases, plus a record-breaking 5m in January to the actress Leslie Ash, 49, whose career has been ruined. An anticipated 1m will go to Shaun Franks, 39, who underwent surgery for a broken ankle. His leg was taken over by an immovable colony of MRSA, which could only be eradicated from his body by amputation of the leg. During his treatment, staff at Northampton general hospital unwittingly used an antibiotic that accelerated the growth of the MRSA. "It has been a nightmare," said Franks. "I lost my job, my relationship - everything. Every time I thought I was getting better, it would come back again."
There is no question that ignorance of good practice has played a significant part in the spread of superbugs in Britain. A study in the late 1990s by Otto Cars, an expert in infectious diseases at Uppsala University, Sweden, compared antibiotic use across Europe. British doctors were administering over 18 daily doses per 1,000 people, compared with 13 in Germany and Sweden and 11 in Denmark. Most of the prescriptions were for coughs and colds - 90% of which are caused by viruses, not bacteria.
Duerden admits that the first comprehensive campaign to educate GPs and the public about the overuse of antibiotics only got off the ground eight years ago with the launch of a cartoon character, Andybiotic. But a survey of almost 11,000 adults published in the British Medical Journal last year indicated that most people still did not understand the risks.
Hajo Grundmann, now a senior infection-control adviser to the Dutch government, worked for seven years in Britain's NHS before returning home in 2001. He runs the Eurosurveillance database, monitoring levels of antibiotic-resistant infections in 31 countries. Britain has the highest rate in western Europe. "It is connected with the high workload," he says. "I worked in Nottingham. We were able to isolate MRSA cases at first, but when the waiting-list initiative came in, there was huge pressure on beds. As soon as the pressure goes up, hand-washing goes down. But the British problem is also due to people's attitudes. It just has not been taken seriously enough." ....
There are, however, measures being launched by the government: to increase the number of hospital matrons to 5,000 to oversee hygiene by May, and make available 270m a year for hygiene campaigns, extra infection-control nurses and pharmacists to tackle over-reliance on antibiotics.
But that does not explain why we continue to invest in areas such as Aids research, or the hypothetical risk of pandemic flu, yet hope that drugs developed in the middle of the last century will protect us against new infections that are killing thousands each year.
More here
Thursday, March 27, 2008
Britain's anti-military teachers are depriving their pupils
What is the moral distinction between allowing an accountant or a lawyer into a school to talk about career prospects to a class of 12-year-olds, and giving a military officer the same freedom to tell them about the Army? According to the National Union of Teachers, one is useful advice, the other is propaganda. Yesterday the NUT debated a motion that stated that: "Teachers and schools should not be conduits for either the dissemination of MoD propaganda or the recruitment of military personnel." The motion, not surprisingly, was passed. One should never underestimate the vacuous posturing of the NUT.
Strip away all the concern about "glamorising war" and it is clear from the debate that the very presence of military personnel in schools is anathema to the NUT. One delegate in a speech said: "Let's just try and imagine what that recruitment material would have to say were it not to be misleading. We would have material from the MoD saying, ?Join the Army and we will send you to carry out the imperialist occupation of other people's countries'."
If teachers cannot understand the difference between political opposition to the war in Iraq and the role of the Army in the defence of the realm, then pity the pupils they claim to teach. It is one thing to grandstand at an NUT conference about the so-called iniquity of an illegal invasion. It is quite another to undermine a profession, which is an essential pillar of the State, in front of a class of impressionable youngsters.
The timing is spectacularly inept. Barely a fortnight ago RAF servicemen in Peterborough were being advised to shed their uniforms before they went out on the streets, for fear of being exposed to insults and attacks. Recruitment is at a record low despite British troops in Afghanistan facing military action as intense as any since the Korean War. A recent poll suggested that only 23 per cent of the population is well informed about the Army and its role. One might have thought that, in these circumstances, teachers had a responsibility to redress the balance - to explain that the Army is there for society's protection, rather than as the unacceptable face of armed aggression, and to condemn the thugs who assault or insult young squaddies.
But if the teachers' role is questionable, what about political leaders? In Scotland last week, Alex Salmond chose the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq to send out an egregious message that suggested that British troops stationed in Basra do not believe they should be there at all. "Their views about the rights and wrongs of conflict are very similar to the rest of us," he claimed. There is a breathtaking arrogance about this - not only the assumption that his own views about the war are shared by the majority of the population, but that soldiers, whom he has never visited, have lost confidence in their role. It is also irresponsible. For the First Minister of Scotland to undermine the commitment of the UK's Armed Forces abroad does little to suggest that he has made the transition from left-wing gadfly to national leader.
This kind of view is, in truth, far closer to propaganda than anything that the earnest military officers who go into schools - always at the invitation of head teachers - seek to convey. They are there to explain the role of the Armed Forces, and these days, all too conscious of the delicacy of their position, they lay emphasis on issues such as citizenship and training for the future. They draw attention to the army values of courage, discipline, respect for order, loyalty and integrity; their motto is "inspire to achieve". You can see why the NUT wants to eject them.
What the Army is offering is precisely the kind of structure that is so often lacking in the lives of today's generation of young people. Just over a year ago, I spoke to a 22-year-old who had returned with the Black Watch from Basra. He had seen one of his comrades killed by a roadside bomb; he had been in a tank that had narrowly escaped being blown up after a sustained attack from insurgents; he had lived through the blazing heat of an Iraqi summer. He was about as far removed from the Salmond caricature as one can imagine - he was proud of what his regiment was doing, defended the presence of British troops in Iraq and talked convincingly about the dangerous vacuum that would be created if they were pulled out.
But it was what he told me about his personal circumstances that struck me most forcibly. I asked him whether he regretted the years he had been away from home and his friends in Fife. Certainly not, he said - his only regret was that his time in the Army would, inevitably, be limited. "What might you have done if you had not joined up?" I asked. "I'd be in jail, nae doubt," he said matter of factly. Among the kids he had grown up with, at least half, he reckoned, had dropped out of school early and taken to a life of crime. He had been saved by the Army, he said - it had given him not just an alternative, but also a way of rethinking his life.
Curiously, he was echoing a man who will certainly not be quoted by the NUT this week. The Duke of Wellington once explained how the Army introduced order into the chaos of young lives. "All the business of war, and indeed all the business of life, is to endeavour to find out what you don't know by what you do," he said. "That's what I call guessing what is on the other side of the hill'."
Most head teachers, who welcome service personnel into their schools, will know what he meant. They should make it clear that teachers have a duty of care towards their pupils, and that includes presenting them with an even-handed picture of the relationship between a society and its Armed Forces. In previous times the Army has saved the nation from destruction. It may be called upon to do so again. Guessing what is on the other side of the hill is part of our history and should be part of our education
Source
Government schools should be forced to open their doors to Islamic preachers teaching the Koran
This shows clearly what nuts the NUT are: They say that members of Britain's own armed forces should be kept out of schools but preachers of Jihad should be given privileged access. This shows vividly what deliberate wreckers the far-Left are. They are so filled with hatred of the world around them that they just want to smash things in any way they can. Tearing down, not building up is their thinly camouflaged aim
State schools should be forced to open their doors to Islamic preachers teaching the Koran, the largest classroom union demanded yesterday. The National Union of Teachers' conference also said existing religious schools - almost all of them Christian - should have to admit pupils from other faiths. The union's general secretary Steve Sinnott said that allowing Muslim imams to preach in schools would be a way to reunite divided communities.
But the proposals prompted immediate outrage. Conservative Party backbencher Mark Pritchard said: "This is just further appeasement for Muslim militants. "We should just follow the existing laws on religious education, which state that it should be of a predominantly Christian character. All this will do is further divide many communities that are already split on religious lines."
Speaking as delegates met at the hard-Left-dominated union's annual conference, Mr Sinnott admitted that his plan would amount to religious indoctrination inside taxpayer-backed schools rather than simple teaching of what different religions believe. He said: "This is more than simple religious education, it's religious instruction."
The proposals include providing private Muslim prayer facilities in schools. But Mr Sinnott stressed that no pupils would be forced to have any religious instruction. The union, however, also called for all daily religious assemblies, which by law are supposed to have a Christian character, to be abandoned. It also said local authorities should take control of all state school admissions, removing the right of faith schools to choose which pupils they take.
Source
No way to combat terrorism
The British government have some dangerous bedfellows in their attempt to prevent violent extremism
Should government be picking winners within Muslim communities in order to combat the threat of violent jihadism? And does it work - any more than the corporatist strategy of picking winners among big enterprises succeeded in the 1970s? This approach is a key strand of the Government's new national security strategy, launched last week. The flagship programme for delivering it is the Preventing Violent Extremism Pathfinder Fund (PVE), amounting to 45 million pounds over three years. It was created after the 7/7 bombings, reflecting Tony Blair's belief that the Muslim Council of Britain had not done enough to fight the extremists.
Blair and Ruth Kelly, the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, contended that local authorities, police and communities were best positioned to identify those grassroots Muslim groups who could challenge advocates of violent Islamism.
But key local authorities are now in revolt. According to the Local Government Chronicle, many councils are refusing to adopt a target to "build resilience to violent extremism" for fear of damaging community relations. Their Muslim constituents are said not to like PVE because they think the programme stigmatises them. And non-Muslims are said to resent the fact that Muslim groups seem to be benefiting.
A more serious point is whether local government is able to choose appropriate Muslim partners. Yes, municipalities enjoy on-the-ground expertise. But what kind of grassroots expertise? Can they really discriminate between different varieties of Islamism? If even MI5 finds difficulty drawing the line, what hope for aldermanic worthies?
Earlier this year Paul Goodman, the Shadow Communities Minister, pressed Ms Kelly's successor, Hazel Blears, to confirm that money was not falling into the hands of extremists. Blears could not supply that reassurance, though she is the least blameworthy figure in all this. More than any other Cabinet minister, she "gets" radical Islamism. But it is infernally difficult, even for her, to monitor which groups are worthy recipients and which aren't. It was symptomatic that it took her department six months to answer Goodman's previous inquiries on where the funds were going. And even if they are not going to unworthy causes, are these schemes effective?
The list of grant recipients is strange. Even Conservative councils are not very rigorous in choosing partners. For example the Channel 4 Dispatches programme exposed hate preaching at the Green Lane mosque in Birmingham. A preacher, Abu Usama, urged that homosexuals be thrown from mountains. Yet the Green Lane mosque is one of the partnership organisations approved by Birmingham City Council. Indeed, the Green Lane mosque is also a well-established interlocutor of the West Midlands Police. West Midlands Police still aver that men such as Abu Usama enjoy the "street cred" to stop radicalised young Muslim men from tipping over into violent jihadism.
Kensington & Chelsea Council has turned to the Muslim Cultural Heritage Centre to deliver a "parental empowerment programme" that aims "to foster modern, inclusive and Islamically sound relationships between parents and children. Parenting techniques are imparted and discussed from an Islamic and wider social perspective by a trained Muslim NHS psychotherapist."
Why is it the duty of a council to "foster Islamically sound relationships between parents and children"? Who defines what is "Islamically sound"? How does picking a Muslim psychotherapist - apparently on sectarian grounds - help to prevent violent extremism?
Likewise, Westminster City Council relies on the Muslim Cultural Heritage Centre (which is not even in the city) to organise a "young people's leadership and debate programme" on foreign policy. Why should Tory councils turn to them, of all people? The centre's name appeared in a statement on the website of Hizb-ut-Tahrir asserting that "the Muslim community in Britain has unequivocally denounced acts of terrorism. However, the right of people anywhere in the world to resist invasion and occupation is legitimate". The statement also denounced the proscription of Hizb-ut-Tahrir - a key objective of David Cameron.
Such partnerships are reflective of the greatest weakness in PVE - and of much the Government's "contest" strategy for combating terrorism. As its name suggests, it is largely about countering violent extremism. It isn't necessarily about countering non-violent extremism.
The interplay between violent and non-violent radicalisation lay at the heart of Mr Cameron's remarkable recent address to the Community Security Trust. Cameron believes that it is not enough simply to be against jihadism on these shores. He is deeply disturbed by the sectarianism of groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood and associates such as the Cordoba Foundation - which receive PVE funds.
It's as if the Government responded to a violent insurgency from the neo-Nazi terrorists of Combat 18 by turning to Nick Griffin of the BNP, on the ground that he enjoys nationalist "cred" with alienated skinheads. After all, Mr Griffin is non-violent and believes that whites should participate in the political process. Perhaps he might stop bombs from going off. But what price would he exact for it - and what kind of society would we then be living in?
Source
Scotland: NHS admits it is failing thousands suffering chronic pain
Thousands of patients living with incurable pain are being let down by the Scottish NHS, according to a hard-hitting report by the health service's own watchdog. Despite four official investigations in the past 14 years highlighting worrying gaps in care, the research reveals there has been very little improvement.
Specialist support for people who suffer chronic pain is patchy and inadequate, patients are confused and clinicians are frustrated, say the authors. They are demanding action from the Scottish Government and health boards to ensure patients, who can wait years for the treatment they need, get faster access to the right medical help.
It is estimated that 18% of the population, 900,000 people, suffer some form of chronic pain. This is discomfort from injury or disease which persists beyond the typical healing process. One-quarter of people diagnosed are unable to continue working because of the condition, yet just 3% of sufferers are sent to the specialist clinics.
NHS Quality Improvement Scotland, which monitors standards in the health service, has published the latest report. It notes the Scottish Office first described services as patchy in 1994 and further documents published by very experienced people in 2000, 2002 and 2004 raised the same issues. "Despite all of this, very little progress has been made. Access to specialist services is poor." NHS QIS found not one health board could accurately describe the services they did offer.
Dr Pete Mackenzie, who worked on the report, said: "There are major blackspots around the country where there is almost a complete lack of service. The chances of (being told there is no hope) are much greater if you live in an area like that." Dr Mackenzie said, there was frustration about the pace of progress, adding: "It is fair to say many of us, and particularly the patients with chronic pain, feel reports come and go and nothing much happens."
A Scottish Government spokeswoman said: "We are considering the recommendations relating to the Scottish Government, and the Health Secretary will use her address to the national conference organised by the Pain Association Scotland on May 20 to set out her response. "We have for a number of years been encouraging the development of a managed clinical network approach to chronic pain."
Source
Britain and France join forces on immigration
In a token sort of a way
Plans for a joint drive by Britain and France against illegal immigration could backfire by forcing "soft targets" to return to dangerous countries, refugee groups have warned. The initiative will be announced by Gordon Brown and the French President, Nicolas Sarkozy, who arrives in Britain for a two-day state visit tomorrow. The leaders will also set out plans to co-operate over the crisis threatening world money markets, nuclear power and defence.
Mr Sarkozy, who will be accompanied by his new wife, Carla Bruni, will be welcomed by the Prince of Wales. The couple will stay at Windsor Castle. The immigration package is likely to be agreed by the leaders on Thursday. It includes proposals to arrange joint charter flights to return failed asylum-seekers to their home countries. Mr Sarkozy wants international co-operation over immigration to be a theme of France's European Union presidency from July and will set the tone this week. The leaders will also promise to increase numbers of officials checking lorries at Channel ports and fresh action against people-smuggling gangs.
Donna Covey, chief executive of the Refugee Council, said: "Our leaders would do better to focus on joint initiatives to make countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan safe for people to return to - rather than forcing them to go back when it is clearly not safe." Keith Best, chief executive of the Immigration Advisory Service, urged Mr Sarkozy to be sceptical of Britain's approach to deporting asylum-seekers, which often resulted in "soft targets" being singled out for removal. [That's true. Asian kitchenhands are at risk but criminals can stay as long as they like]
Source
What is the moral distinction between allowing an accountant or a lawyer into a school to talk about career prospects to a class of 12-year-olds, and giving a military officer the same freedom to tell them about the Army? According to the National Union of Teachers, one is useful advice, the other is propaganda. Yesterday the NUT debated a motion that stated that: "Teachers and schools should not be conduits for either the dissemination of MoD propaganda or the recruitment of military personnel." The motion, not surprisingly, was passed. One should never underestimate the vacuous posturing of the NUT.
Strip away all the concern about "glamorising war" and it is clear from the debate that the very presence of military personnel in schools is anathema to the NUT. One delegate in a speech said: "Let's just try and imagine what that recruitment material would have to say were it not to be misleading. We would have material from the MoD saying, ?Join the Army and we will send you to carry out the imperialist occupation of other people's countries'."
If teachers cannot understand the difference between political opposition to the war in Iraq and the role of the Army in the defence of the realm, then pity the pupils they claim to teach. It is one thing to grandstand at an NUT conference about the so-called iniquity of an illegal invasion. It is quite another to undermine a profession, which is an essential pillar of the State, in front of a class of impressionable youngsters.
The timing is spectacularly inept. Barely a fortnight ago RAF servicemen in Peterborough were being advised to shed their uniforms before they went out on the streets, for fear of being exposed to insults and attacks. Recruitment is at a record low despite British troops in Afghanistan facing military action as intense as any since the Korean War. A recent poll suggested that only 23 per cent of the population is well informed about the Army and its role. One might have thought that, in these circumstances, teachers had a responsibility to redress the balance - to explain that the Army is there for society's protection, rather than as the unacceptable face of armed aggression, and to condemn the thugs who assault or insult young squaddies.
But if the teachers' role is questionable, what about political leaders? In Scotland last week, Alex Salmond chose the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq to send out an egregious message that suggested that British troops stationed in Basra do not believe they should be there at all. "Their views about the rights and wrongs of conflict are very similar to the rest of us," he claimed. There is a breathtaking arrogance about this - not only the assumption that his own views about the war are shared by the majority of the population, but that soldiers, whom he has never visited, have lost confidence in their role. It is also irresponsible. For the First Minister of Scotland to undermine the commitment of the UK's Armed Forces abroad does little to suggest that he has made the transition from left-wing gadfly to national leader.
This kind of view is, in truth, far closer to propaganda than anything that the earnest military officers who go into schools - always at the invitation of head teachers - seek to convey. They are there to explain the role of the Armed Forces, and these days, all too conscious of the delicacy of their position, they lay emphasis on issues such as citizenship and training for the future. They draw attention to the army values of courage, discipline, respect for order, loyalty and integrity; their motto is "inspire to achieve". You can see why the NUT wants to eject them.
What the Army is offering is precisely the kind of structure that is so often lacking in the lives of today's generation of young people. Just over a year ago, I spoke to a 22-year-old who had returned with the Black Watch from Basra. He had seen one of his comrades killed by a roadside bomb; he had been in a tank that had narrowly escaped being blown up after a sustained attack from insurgents; he had lived through the blazing heat of an Iraqi summer. He was about as far removed from the Salmond caricature as one can imagine - he was proud of what his regiment was doing, defended the presence of British troops in Iraq and talked convincingly about the dangerous vacuum that would be created if they were pulled out.
But it was what he told me about his personal circumstances that struck me most forcibly. I asked him whether he regretted the years he had been away from home and his friends in Fife. Certainly not, he said - his only regret was that his time in the Army would, inevitably, be limited. "What might you have done if you had not joined up?" I asked. "I'd be in jail, nae doubt," he said matter of factly. Among the kids he had grown up with, at least half, he reckoned, had dropped out of school early and taken to a life of crime. He had been saved by the Army, he said - it had given him not just an alternative, but also a way of rethinking his life.
Curiously, he was echoing a man who will certainly not be quoted by the NUT this week. The Duke of Wellington once explained how the Army introduced order into the chaos of young lives. "All the business of war, and indeed all the business of life, is to endeavour to find out what you don't know by what you do," he said. "That's what I call guessing what is on the other side of the hill'."
Most head teachers, who welcome service personnel into their schools, will know what he meant. They should make it clear that teachers have a duty of care towards their pupils, and that includes presenting them with an even-handed picture of the relationship between a society and its Armed Forces. In previous times the Army has saved the nation from destruction. It may be called upon to do so again. Guessing what is on the other side of the hill is part of our history and should be part of our education
Source
Government schools should be forced to open their doors to Islamic preachers teaching the Koran
This shows clearly what nuts the NUT are: They say that members of Britain's own armed forces should be kept out of schools but preachers of Jihad should be given privileged access. This shows vividly what deliberate wreckers the far-Left are. They are so filled with hatred of the world around them that they just want to smash things in any way they can. Tearing down, not building up is their thinly camouflaged aim
State schools should be forced to open their doors to Islamic preachers teaching the Koran, the largest classroom union demanded yesterday. The National Union of Teachers' conference also said existing religious schools - almost all of them Christian - should have to admit pupils from other faiths. The union's general secretary Steve Sinnott said that allowing Muslim imams to preach in schools would be a way to reunite divided communities.
But the proposals prompted immediate outrage. Conservative Party backbencher Mark Pritchard said: "This is just further appeasement for Muslim militants. "We should just follow the existing laws on religious education, which state that it should be of a predominantly Christian character. All this will do is further divide many communities that are already split on religious lines."
Speaking as delegates met at the hard-Left-dominated union's annual conference, Mr Sinnott admitted that his plan would amount to religious indoctrination inside taxpayer-backed schools rather than simple teaching of what different religions believe. He said: "This is more than simple religious education, it's religious instruction."
The proposals include providing private Muslim prayer facilities in schools. But Mr Sinnott stressed that no pupils would be forced to have any religious instruction. The union, however, also called for all daily religious assemblies, which by law are supposed to have a Christian character, to be abandoned. It also said local authorities should take control of all state school admissions, removing the right of faith schools to choose which pupils they take.
Source
No way to combat terrorism
The British government have some dangerous bedfellows in their attempt to prevent violent extremism
Should government be picking winners within Muslim communities in order to combat the threat of violent jihadism? And does it work - any more than the corporatist strategy of picking winners among big enterprises succeeded in the 1970s? This approach is a key strand of the Government's new national security strategy, launched last week. The flagship programme for delivering it is the Preventing Violent Extremism Pathfinder Fund (PVE), amounting to 45 million pounds over three years. It was created after the 7/7 bombings, reflecting Tony Blair's belief that the Muslim Council of Britain had not done enough to fight the extremists.
Blair and Ruth Kelly, the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, contended that local authorities, police and communities were best positioned to identify those grassroots Muslim groups who could challenge advocates of violent Islamism.
But key local authorities are now in revolt. According to the Local Government Chronicle, many councils are refusing to adopt a target to "build resilience to violent extremism" for fear of damaging community relations. Their Muslim constituents are said not to like PVE because they think the programme stigmatises them. And non-Muslims are said to resent the fact that Muslim groups seem to be benefiting.
A more serious point is whether local government is able to choose appropriate Muslim partners. Yes, municipalities enjoy on-the-ground expertise. But what kind of grassroots expertise? Can they really discriminate between different varieties of Islamism? If even MI5 finds difficulty drawing the line, what hope for aldermanic worthies?
Earlier this year Paul Goodman, the Shadow Communities Minister, pressed Ms Kelly's successor, Hazel Blears, to confirm that money was not falling into the hands of extremists. Blears could not supply that reassurance, though she is the least blameworthy figure in all this. More than any other Cabinet minister, she "gets" radical Islamism. But it is infernally difficult, even for her, to monitor which groups are worthy recipients and which aren't. It was symptomatic that it took her department six months to answer Goodman's previous inquiries on where the funds were going. And even if they are not going to unworthy causes, are these schemes effective?
The list of grant recipients is strange. Even Conservative councils are not very rigorous in choosing partners. For example the Channel 4 Dispatches programme exposed hate preaching at the Green Lane mosque in Birmingham. A preacher, Abu Usama, urged that homosexuals be thrown from mountains. Yet the Green Lane mosque is one of the partnership organisations approved by Birmingham City Council. Indeed, the Green Lane mosque is also a well-established interlocutor of the West Midlands Police. West Midlands Police still aver that men such as Abu Usama enjoy the "street cred" to stop radicalised young Muslim men from tipping over into violent jihadism.
Kensington & Chelsea Council has turned to the Muslim Cultural Heritage Centre to deliver a "parental empowerment programme" that aims "to foster modern, inclusive and Islamically sound relationships between parents and children. Parenting techniques are imparted and discussed from an Islamic and wider social perspective by a trained Muslim NHS psychotherapist."
Why is it the duty of a council to "foster Islamically sound relationships between parents and children"? Who defines what is "Islamically sound"? How does picking a Muslim psychotherapist - apparently on sectarian grounds - help to prevent violent extremism?
Likewise, Westminster City Council relies on the Muslim Cultural Heritage Centre (which is not even in the city) to organise a "young people's leadership and debate programme" on foreign policy. Why should Tory councils turn to them, of all people? The centre's name appeared in a statement on the website of Hizb-ut-Tahrir asserting that "the Muslim community in Britain has unequivocally denounced acts of terrorism. However, the right of people anywhere in the world to resist invasion and occupation is legitimate". The statement also denounced the proscription of Hizb-ut-Tahrir - a key objective of David Cameron.
Such partnerships are reflective of the greatest weakness in PVE - and of much the Government's "contest" strategy for combating terrorism. As its name suggests, it is largely about countering violent extremism. It isn't necessarily about countering non-violent extremism.
The interplay between violent and non-violent radicalisation lay at the heart of Mr Cameron's remarkable recent address to the Community Security Trust. Cameron believes that it is not enough simply to be against jihadism on these shores. He is deeply disturbed by the sectarianism of groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood and associates such as the Cordoba Foundation - which receive PVE funds.
It's as if the Government responded to a violent insurgency from the neo-Nazi terrorists of Combat 18 by turning to Nick Griffin of the BNP, on the ground that he enjoys nationalist "cred" with alienated skinheads. After all, Mr Griffin is non-violent and believes that whites should participate in the political process. Perhaps he might stop bombs from going off. But what price would he exact for it - and what kind of society would we then be living in?
Source
Scotland: NHS admits it is failing thousands suffering chronic pain
Thousands of patients living with incurable pain are being let down by the Scottish NHS, according to a hard-hitting report by the health service's own watchdog. Despite four official investigations in the past 14 years highlighting worrying gaps in care, the research reveals there has been very little improvement.
Specialist support for people who suffer chronic pain is patchy and inadequate, patients are confused and clinicians are frustrated, say the authors. They are demanding action from the Scottish Government and health boards to ensure patients, who can wait years for the treatment they need, get faster access to the right medical help.
It is estimated that 18% of the population, 900,000 people, suffer some form of chronic pain. This is discomfort from injury or disease which persists beyond the typical healing process. One-quarter of people diagnosed are unable to continue working because of the condition, yet just 3% of sufferers are sent to the specialist clinics.
NHS Quality Improvement Scotland, which monitors standards in the health service, has published the latest report. It notes the Scottish Office first described services as patchy in 1994 and further documents published by very experienced people in 2000, 2002 and 2004 raised the same issues. "Despite all of this, very little progress has been made. Access to specialist services is poor." NHS QIS found not one health board could accurately describe the services they did offer.
Dr Pete Mackenzie, who worked on the report, said: "There are major blackspots around the country where there is almost a complete lack of service. The chances of (being told there is no hope) are much greater if you live in an area like that." Dr Mackenzie said, there was frustration about the pace of progress, adding: "It is fair to say many of us, and particularly the patients with chronic pain, feel reports come and go and nothing much happens."
A Scottish Government spokeswoman said: "We are considering the recommendations relating to the Scottish Government, and the Health Secretary will use her address to the national conference organised by the Pain Association Scotland on May 20 to set out her response. "We have for a number of years been encouraging the development of a managed clinical network approach to chronic pain."
Source
Britain and France join forces on immigration
In a token sort of a way
Plans for a joint drive by Britain and France against illegal immigration could backfire by forcing "soft targets" to return to dangerous countries, refugee groups have warned. The initiative will be announced by Gordon Brown and the French President, Nicolas Sarkozy, who arrives in Britain for a two-day state visit tomorrow. The leaders will also set out plans to co-operate over the crisis threatening world money markets, nuclear power and defence.
Mr Sarkozy, who will be accompanied by his new wife, Carla Bruni, will be welcomed by the Prince of Wales. The couple will stay at Windsor Castle. The immigration package is likely to be agreed by the leaders on Thursday. It includes proposals to arrange joint charter flights to return failed asylum-seekers to their home countries. Mr Sarkozy wants international co-operation over immigration to be a theme of France's European Union presidency from July and will set the tone this week. The leaders will also promise to increase numbers of officials checking lorries at Channel ports and fresh action against people-smuggling gangs.
Donna Covey, chief executive of the Refugee Council, said: "Our leaders would do better to focus on joint initiatives to make countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan safe for people to return to - rather than forcing them to go back when it is clearly not safe." Keith Best, chief executive of the Immigration Advisory Service, urged Mr Sarkozy to be sceptical of Britain's approach to deporting asylum-seekers, which often resulted in "soft targets" being singled out for removal. [That's true. Asian kitchenhands are at risk but criminals can stay as long as they like]
Source
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
Amazing: Mentally ill teachers asked back to school in Britain
Is there no end to socialist "caring"?
Teachers who have been declared unfit to work in the classroom are being approached in a "desperate" recruitment drive to fill vacancies in key subject areas, the National Union of Teachers said yesterday.
Letters from the Training and Development Agency for Schools (TDA), the main schools recruitment body, have been sent to teachers who have left the profession, including those who have retired on the ground of ill health. Describing teaching as "great fun"[In British schools? What a laugh!], the letters boast that teachers now earn more and work less hard.
One letter was sent last week to John Illingworth, a former primary school head who made news headlines two years ago when he broke down in tears at the NUT annual conference and said that he was leaving the profession because of mental illness brought on by workplace stress. Mr Illingworth, a former NUT president, said that he found the letter outrageous in its lack of sensitivity towards mentally ill colleagues and in its misleading claims over teacher pay and workload. "I was forced to leave teaching two years ago because of mental illness," he told the union's annual conference in Manchester yesterday, adding that he had been declared "unfit to teach".
"I take that letter as a joke. But there are some very ill people out there who have left teaching and are still very ill. "This letter could be extremely damaging to their health. It is outrageous that a government agency is sending out such letters to ill teachers." He questioned why the agency had not found out which teachers had left the profession owing to mental health problems, adding that he would not be surprised if the letters had been sent to teachers who had died.
Mr Illingworth, originally a maths teacher, suggested that the agency could be writing to retired teachers of shortage subjects. Although there is no overall teacher recruitment crisis, there are shortages of maths, science and modern language teachers. He read delegates extracts of the letter that he had received from Graham Holley, chief executive of the agency, claiming that a lot had changed over the past two years. "Salaries are much better. Teachers are on average earning 10,000 a year more now than they did 10 years ago. "The number of teachers working part-time has increased and the workload has improved, with teachers saying they spend significantly less time working at home," the letter said.
But Mr Illingworth contested these claims. "This isn't a half-truth. It isn't even a quarter-truth: it's damned lies," he said to applause. Starting salaries for graduate teachers had increased by about 6,000 since 1997, and, in real terms, teacher salaries were less than two years ago, he said. The latest survey on primary teacher workload, published last week by Cambridge University, showed an increase in average weekly working hours by two hours to 56 hours.
"We shouldn't be trying to encourage people into teaching on the basis of lies because, if we do, half of them will leave in the first three years of teaching. I know there's a crisis among teachers. That's why desperate measures like this are being taken. But the answer to that is to reduce teacher workload, improve our pay and keep us all in the job," he said.
A number of delegates approached him after his speech to say that they knew of similar letters being sent to NUT members, including those with mental ill health. It appeared that the Teachers Pensions Agency had passed to the TDA the names and addresses of teachers who had left the profession - something that the NUT said it would investigate. About 12,000 teachers return to the profession every year, joining a workforce of approximately 440,000 in England. But between a third and a half of teachers leave within five years of starting work.
A TDA spokesman said that it was actively encouraging qualified teachers to return to the profession. "Pay progression opportunities and flexible working arrangements have significantly improved over the last five years," he said. "Teachers are now also supported by an increased wider workforce, which frees up their time to do what they do best, which is to teach."
Source
Girls' computer game condemned
Shoot-em-up games are OK but encouraging weight loss is bad??
And all the government propaganda attacking "obesity" is OK? Somebody is deeply confused here.
Anorexia is mainly an hereditary mental illness anyway, nothing to do with looking at slim actresses etc. It's a type of OCD (Obsessive-compulsive disorder).
MRSA and C difficile superbug deaths at 10,000 a year in Britain
Dirty NHS hospitals at fault
The number of patients in British hospitals dying from superbug infections has reached more than 10,000 every year, according to an expert. The new figure is about 20% higher than the official toll of 8,000 a year. Mark Enright, professor of molecular epidemiology at Imperial College London, said that the real number of those succumbing to methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and Clostridium difficile (C difficile) in the UK is higher than the government's records show. "I think it is at least 10,000 a year," he said. "A lot of people are never tested for these infections and their deaths are put down to something else."
"Antibiotic-resistant bacteria are now so well established here, we will never get rid of them," said Hugh Pennington, emeritus professor of bacteriology at Aberdeen University and a world expert.
Latest European figures show that Britain's hospitals are still teeming with treatment-resistant bacteria. While strict hygiene measures have ensured low infection rates in other countries, microbiologists here are privately admitting that Britain's problem is so out of control, it will be impossible to prevent the high level of deaths from continuing. The government's pledge to reduce rates of MRSA to half the 2004 level is unattainable, they say.
According to figures from Eurosurveillance, at least 42% of MRSA bacteria in British hospitals are "superstrains", compared with rates of 20% or lower elsewhere. In the 31-nation European antisuperbug league table, Britain lies close to the bottom, with an infection-control performance better than those of only Malta, Greece, Portugal and Romania.
Source
Cod liver oil lubricates your bones! "A regular dose of cod liver oil reduces the quantity of painkilling drugs needed by people with rheumatoid arthritis (RA), a study in Scotland has found. The finding, published in Rheumatology magazine, is significant because cod liver oil is benign, whereas nonsteroidal antiinflammatory drugs, such as ibuprofen or naproxen, which are commonly taken by RA patients, can have serious side-effects. The study was carried out over five years by researchers from rheumatology units in Dundee and Edinburgh.
Is there no end to socialist "caring"?
Teachers who have been declared unfit to work in the classroom are being approached in a "desperate" recruitment drive to fill vacancies in key subject areas, the National Union of Teachers said yesterday.
Letters from the Training and Development Agency for Schools (TDA), the main schools recruitment body, have been sent to teachers who have left the profession, including those who have retired on the ground of ill health. Describing teaching as "great fun"[In British schools? What a laugh!], the letters boast that teachers now earn more and work less hard.
One letter was sent last week to John Illingworth, a former primary school head who made news headlines two years ago when he broke down in tears at the NUT annual conference and said that he was leaving the profession because of mental illness brought on by workplace stress. Mr Illingworth, a former NUT president, said that he found the letter outrageous in its lack of sensitivity towards mentally ill colleagues and in its misleading claims over teacher pay and workload. "I was forced to leave teaching two years ago because of mental illness," he told the union's annual conference in Manchester yesterday, adding that he had been declared "unfit to teach".
"I take that letter as a joke. But there are some very ill people out there who have left teaching and are still very ill. "This letter could be extremely damaging to their health. It is outrageous that a government agency is sending out such letters to ill teachers." He questioned why the agency had not found out which teachers had left the profession owing to mental health problems, adding that he would not be surprised if the letters had been sent to teachers who had died.
Mr Illingworth, originally a maths teacher, suggested that the agency could be writing to retired teachers of shortage subjects. Although there is no overall teacher recruitment crisis, there are shortages of maths, science and modern language teachers. He read delegates extracts of the letter that he had received from Graham Holley, chief executive of the agency, claiming that a lot had changed over the past two years. "Salaries are much better. Teachers are on average earning 10,000 a year more now than they did 10 years ago. "The number of teachers working part-time has increased and the workload has improved, with teachers saying they spend significantly less time working at home," the letter said.
But Mr Illingworth contested these claims. "This isn't a half-truth. It isn't even a quarter-truth: it's damned lies," he said to applause. Starting salaries for graduate teachers had increased by about 6,000 since 1997, and, in real terms, teacher salaries were less than two years ago, he said. The latest survey on primary teacher workload, published last week by Cambridge University, showed an increase in average weekly working hours by two hours to 56 hours.
"We shouldn't be trying to encourage people into teaching on the basis of lies because, if we do, half of them will leave in the first three years of teaching. I know there's a crisis among teachers. That's why desperate measures like this are being taken. But the answer to that is to reduce teacher workload, improve our pay and keep us all in the job," he said.
A number of delegates approached him after his speech to say that they knew of similar letters being sent to NUT members, including those with mental ill health. It appeared that the Teachers Pensions Agency had passed to the TDA the names and addresses of teachers who had left the profession - something that the NUT said it would investigate. About 12,000 teachers return to the profession every year, joining a workforce of approximately 440,000 in England. But between a third and a half of teachers leave within five years of starting work.
A TDA spokesman said that it was actively encouraging qualified teachers to return to the profession. "Pay progression opportunities and flexible working arrangements have significantly improved over the last five years," he said. "Teachers are now also supported by an increased wider workforce, which frees up their time to do what they do best, which is to teach."
Source
Girls' computer game condemned
Shoot-em-up games are OK but encouraging weight loss is bad??
"A website that encourages girls as young as 9 to embrace plastic surgery and extreme dieting in the search for the perfect figure was condemned as lethal by parents' groups and healthcare experts yesterday. The Miss Bimbo internet game has attracted prepubescent girls who are told to buy their virtual characters breast enlargement surgery and to keep them "waif thin" with diet pills.
Healthcare professionals, a parents' group and an organisation representing people suffering anorexia and bulimia criticised the website for sending a dangerous message to impressionable children.
In the month since it opened the site, which is aimed at girls aged from 9 to 16, has attracted 200,000 members. Players keep a constant watch on the weight, wardrobe, wealth and happiness of their character to create "the coolest, richest and most famous bimbo in the world". Competing against other children they earn "bimbo dollars" to buy plastic surgery, diet pills, facelifts, lingerie and fashionable nightclub outfits. The website sparked controversy when it was introduced in France, where it attracted 1.2 million players.
Source
And all the government propaganda attacking "obesity" is OK? Somebody is deeply confused here.
Anorexia is mainly an hereditary mental illness anyway, nothing to do with looking at slim actresses etc. It's a type of OCD (Obsessive-compulsive disorder).
MRSA and C difficile superbug deaths at 10,000 a year in Britain
Dirty NHS hospitals at fault
The number of patients in British hospitals dying from superbug infections has reached more than 10,000 every year, according to an expert. The new figure is about 20% higher than the official toll of 8,000 a year. Mark Enright, professor of molecular epidemiology at Imperial College London, said that the real number of those succumbing to methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and Clostridium difficile (C difficile) in the UK is higher than the government's records show. "I think it is at least 10,000 a year," he said. "A lot of people are never tested for these infections and their deaths are put down to something else."
"Antibiotic-resistant bacteria are now so well established here, we will never get rid of them," said Hugh Pennington, emeritus professor of bacteriology at Aberdeen University and a world expert.
Latest European figures show that Britain's hospitals are still teeming with treatment-resistant bacteria. While strict hygiene measures have ensured low infection rates in other countries, microbiologists here are privately admitting that Britain's problem is so out of control, it will be impossible to prevent the high level of deaths from continuing. The government's pledge to reduce rates of MRSA to half the 2004 level is unattainable, they say.
According to figures from Eurosurveillance, at least 42% of MRSA bacteria in British hospitals are "superstrains", compared with rates of 20% or lower elsewhere. In the 31-nation European antisuperbug league table, Britain lies close to the bottom, with an infection-control performance better than those of only Malta, Greece, Portugal and Romania.
Source
Cod liver oil lubricates your bones! "A regular dose of cod liver oil reduces the quantity of painkilling drugs needed by people with rheumatoid arthritis (RA), a study in Scotland has found. The finding, published in Rheumatology magazine, is significant because cod liver oil is benign, whereas nonsteroidal antiinflammatory drugs, such as ibuprofen or naproxen, which are commonly taken by RA patients, can have serious side-effects. The study was carried out over five years by researchers from rheumatology units in Dundee and Edinburgh.
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
The Gurkhas have earned the right to live in Britain
This is truly amazing stuff. The Gurkhas are most highly thought of in Britain -- though not among the Leftist British government and bureaucracy, apparently. Warriors of any sort are just "incorrect" in Leftist circles
There are times when the routine irritation we all feel with the idiocies that take place daily in government is supplanted by splenetic anger caused by something truly outlandish. The sight of Gurkha ex-servicemen gathered in front of the Palace of Westminster [the British parliament] to return the medals they had received for fighting with the British Army was just such a moment. They were objecting to the fact that many of their number are denied the right to settle in Britain because they retired before 1997.
The grievances of the Gurkhas are legitimate and long-standing. You could be forgiven for imagining that they were resolved in September 2004, when Tony Blair, then prime minister, announced after an 18-month Whitehall review that Gurkhas who had served with the British Army and wanted to settle here with their families would be allowed to apply for citizenship.
The Government confirmed it would change immigration rules to let them stay. Prior to that decision, they had no pension rights, no leave to remain in the UK, and could not apply to become British citizens. David Blunkett, then the Home Secretary, said: "We have put together the best package to enable discharged Gurkhas to apply for settlement and citizenship. I hope this decision makes our gratitude clear."
But note the weasel word "discharged" in that statement; and, indeed, the devil was in the detail. The change meant that only Gurkhas who have served at least four years and were discharged after July 1, 1997 - the date at which the brigade's headquarters moved to the UK from Hong Kong - would be eligible for "fast-track" citizenship.
So an apparently generous gesture was instantly turned into something divisive. What possible moral case exists for saying that a Gurkha discharged in 1996 after 15 years' service is any less entitled to come here than one discharged a year later, after five years in the Army? For some Gurkhas falling outside the cut-off date who are already living in Britain, sometimes in penury, it means the prospect of deportation.
It is extraordinary that the authorities are prepared to deport someone who fought in our Army, yet last week the Court of Appeal ruled that under an EU directive, an Italian who served nine years for robbing a pensioner - and had a string of other convictions - could not be ejected because he did not pose a serious threat to the security of the nation.
Pre-1997 Gurkhas are not able to stay or settle because the Home Office says they cannot demonstrate "close ties" to this country. Even serving Gurkha soldiers are not treated equally. Their children are regarded as foreign students and must pay fees of up to 13,000 pounds a year if they want to attend university. Only when citizenship is granted after a lengthy application period once they leave the Army are their children regarded as home students in the UK.
All of this is particularly galling when you consider the mess the Government has made of our immigration system. Over the past 10 years, it has allowed hundreds of thousands of people who have no claim to settle here to do just that. Nepalese Gurkhas, by contrast, have been part of the British Army for nearly 200 years and about 200,000 of them fought for Britain in both world wars; some 43,000 were killed or wounded, and they have won 26 Victoria Crosses.
A few weeks ago, one of these VC winners, Havildar Bhanubhakta Gurung, died in Nepal aged 86. He was decorated with the highest award for valour when serving as a rifleman in the 3rd Battalion of the 2nd Gurkha Rifles in Burma in 1945. It is worth quoting from the citation. "On approaching the objective, one of the sections of the company was forced to the ground by heavy machine-gun, grenade and mortar fire, and owing to the severity of this fire was unable to move. "While thus pinned down, the section also came under fire from a sniper in a tree 75 yards to the south. As this sniper was inflicting casualties on the section, Rifleman Gurung stood up and, while exposed to heavy fire, calmly killed the enemy sniper with his rifle, saving his section from further casualties."
Bhanubhakta then dashed forward alone, attacking enemy positions single-handed, using grenades, smoke bombs, his rifle and, eventually, his kukri. The citation continued: "He showed outstanding bravery and a complete disregard for his own safety. His courageous clearing of five enemy positions single-handed was decisive in capturing the objective and his inspiring example to the Company contributed to the speedy consolidation of the success."
Under the current immigration rules, had Bhanubhakta, whose three sons followed their father into the Gurkhas, wanted to come to live in Britain, he would not be allowed to stay and could be facing deportation were he here already.
When a big enough fuss is made, as in the case last year of Tul Bahadur Pun VC, 85, who wanted to move from Nepal for medical reasons, an "exceptional" visa can be granted, as it was in his case. But these men should not have to beg for entry. Given the sheer scale of immigration to Britain in recent years, this is a small group of people who are rightly insulted by the suggestion that their ties to this country are "insufficiently strong" when they see so many here who have none whatsoever, including some who would do us great harm.
When Gordon Brown was asked about this injustice in the Commons at Question Time by Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader, he said the right for retired Gurkhas to live in Britain had only been granted from 1997 because that was when Hong Kong, their former principal base, was handed over to Chinese rule. So what? The fact that previous administrations failed to treat the Gurkhas properly is no excuse to continue treating them badly. The Labour Government is entitled to be congratulated for making some attempt to rectify past mistakes, especially over pension entitlements; but the decision taken in 2004 was only half right and too many anomalies remain. It is time to honour our debt to the Gurkhas.
Source
Women in labour turned away by NHS maternity units
Women in labour are being refused entry to overstretched maternity units and told to give birth elsewhere, NHS hospitals admitted yesterday in response to an application under the Freedom of Information Act. They disclosed that maternity wards in almost 10% of trusts closed their doors to new admissions on at least 10 days last year. One trust in North Yorkshire closed 39 times between October and January because it did not have enough staff to provide a safe service.
The NHS encourages mothers planning a hospital delivery to make a booking early in pregnancy and get to know about the facilities during regular check-ups with a midwife. Most mothers discuss a birth plan with a consultant obstetrician, including choice of pain relief. These preparations are made on the assumption that the hospital will have enough capacity to deal with unpredictable peaks in demand when women go into labour. But information disclosed to the Conservative party under the FoI Act showed 42% of trusts could not get through last year without turning women away at least once.
Andrew Lansley, the shadow health secretary, said the results showed large maternity units closed most often. The University Hospitals of Leicester NHS trust - the second largest unit in England, with 9,470 births last year - shut 28 times. The North Bristol NHS trust closed its doors 17 times. It said the problem was caused by a high birth rate at its Southmead hospital, the largest maternity unit in the south-west, which delivers about 5,500 babies a year. The trust that closed the maternity unit most often was Scarborough and East Yorkshire Health Care, which had only 1,615 births last year. Overwhelmingly, the trusts with most closures were dealing with double that number of births.
Lansley said: "Labour are fixated with cutting smaller, local maternity services and concentrating them in big units. But women don't want to have to travel miles to give birth. And they certainly don't want to have to travel even further because they're turned away by the hospital of their choice. Conservatives are committed to supporting smaller maternity units because the evidence shows they do better."
Lansley's disclosure coincided with a decision by an independent panel to reject NHS plans to close maternity services at Horton general hospital in Banbury. The Independent Reconfiguration Panel - set up by the government to take responsibility for unpopular decisions away from ministers - said access to services would be "seriously compromised" if Oxford Radcliffe Hospitals NHS trust went ahead with plans to centralise its paediatric, gynaecological and obstetric departments.
The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists said the increasing frequency of maternity unit closures emphasised the need for more resources. Richard Warren, the honorary secretary, said: "Our current calculation is that 400 extra consultants are immediately required across England and Wales."
Louise Silverton, deputy general secretary of the Royal College of Midwives, said: "The key issue here is what the women want. Women want to know and develop a relationship with their midwife and not feel as if they are on a production line. Midwives want to be able to deliver the best possible individualised care and not feel like they are working in a baby factory."
A spokeswoman for the Department of Health said: "It is difficult precisely to predict when a mother will go into labour and sometimes, at times of peak demand, maternity units do temporarily divert women to nearby facilities. When this does happen, it is often only for a few hours and to ensure mother and baby can receive the best care possible."
Source
The British school lottery
When Pauline Patrick had to tell her daughter that she wouldn't be starting at her chosen school in Brighton in the autumn with her friends, 11-year-old Chloe's response added to the anxiety her mother was already feeling. "She came home from school the day the letter arrived and asked, `Did I get in?'," says Patrick. "I had to say no and she just broke down, crying, `Why me, Why me?' I kept saying to her that we would appeal against the decision and we would win. But what if we don't win? What will we do then?"
The Patrick family's experience was replicated all over the country on the so-called "national offer day" earlier this month. Some families logged on after midnight to discover their child's fate; others waited for the envelope to drop through the letterbox. One way or another there was a lot of bad news: one in five families - 100,000 children - had missed out on their first choice of school place. Government ministers promptly admitted that many parents would feel "let down" by the system and urged them to make a case to local appeals panels.
But the thousands of families now caught in this predicament know that the chances of persuading a panel to throw open the gates of an oversubscribed school is stacked against them: two out of three appeals fail. So parents now face weeks of worry searching for alternatives to the sink schools that many have been offered.
With one-sixth of Britain's 3,000 secondary schools turning in appalling GCSE results, it is clear that there are simply not enough good schools to go round. National offer day 2008 seems to have condemned thousands of children to scrappy qualifications and a second-class life - at the age of 11.
Patrick, however, refused to be felled by the bad news. Within hours of learning the decision, she had shot off a letter to the appeals panel. She is now waiting for a date for a hearing where she will try to persuade them why her daughter should be given a place at Hove Park, a school close to the family's home. Instead, Chloe has been offered a place at a school several miles away, which means taking two long and, her mother says, unsafe bus journeys across the city twice a day. At this school, fewer than one in four children (23%) got five good GCSEs last summer.
In Kingston upon Thames, Surrey, dozens of parents have been left out in the cold because the Tiffin girls' school, the local grammar, accepts children from all over the country who pass the tough entrance exam, leaving local families scraping around. Among them is Tamsin McNicol's 10-year-old daughter Xanthe [above]. She was turned down at her first four choices and offered a place only at her fifth - a school in the neighbouring borough of Richmond, which was until recently failing badly. "It's bonkers," says McNicol. "The grammar school is two minutes from our home, but there are children applying from Yorkshire. Some pupils travel two hours each way to go there." Her daughter was a whisker away from achieving the marks to get a place, but lost out to children with higher marks who could be living at the other end of the country.
McNicol and other parents are campaigning for a new secondary school to be built in the north of Kingston, but in the meantime she is left high and dry. "I'm worried because I don't think the school Xanthe has been offered a place at is the right school for her," says McNicol. "It is undersubscribed because it used to be a failing school." She is appealing for a place at Tiffin girls, and will be writing to Ed Balls, the schools secretary, to point out just how unfair she feels the system is. However, McNicol's situation, to quote Monty Python's four Yorkshiremen, is "luxury" compared with that of Louis Modell, who has nowhere to go in September.
Louis was a Blair baby, born in February 1997 - three months before Tony Blair was elected - with the words "education, education, education" ringing in his ears. Eleven years on, Louis doesn't know what he will do in September after he finishes at Lauriston school in east London - ironically a primary that Gordon Brown singled out for praise in his 2007 Labour conference speech. And Louis's situation is by no means unique: he is one of 14 children out of 30 in his year 6 class in the same position. His father, David Modell, a documentary film-maker, has lived in Hackney for 13 years with his girlfriend Madeleine. The couple have two younger children in local primary schools.
Louis applied for six secondary school places - the only three in Hackney that his father said "he had a cat in hell's chance" of getting into, two schools in a neighbouring borough to hedge his bets, and one last-chance saloon: a school in Ingatestone in Essex, a 40-minute train journey away. With no offers so far, Louis has as yet no hope of any - the best the trust that runs education in Hackney could come up with was a suggestion that he consider home schooling. "We did everything we were asked to do. We were not picky - so when you get that letter saying you haven't got a place anywhere, it's shocking," says
Modell. "This year it's like carnage - all these kids and parents are walking around stunned." Three families, three unhappy unsettled children. Over the next few weeks they and their parents will have their lives turned upside down as they write letters, wait by the phone, attend appeal hearings and cross their fingers. Will Chloe avoid having to catch four buses a day? Will Xanthe be allowed to go to a better school closer to home where her friends go? And will Louis have a chance to go to school at all? Questions that, 11 years on, the Blair generation feel they should not be having to ask.
Source
Britain's coldest Easter for a decade
A bank holiday weekend that is seen as heralding the arrival of spring produced a "white Easter" thought to have been the coldest for a decade. Any hope of the glorious sunshine of last Easter, when temperatures reached 21C (71F), disappeared yesterday in snow, sleet and strong winds. Snowball fights replaced Easter-egg hunts and trips to the garden centre as snow settled over many parts of northern England and Scotland. Temperatures were between 4C and 7C yesterday, compared with the seasonal average of 7C to 11C. At Carterhouse, in the Scottish Borders, 3cm of snow was recorded. Gusts of 60mph (97kmh) hit the south Devon coast over the weekend, with winds reaching 40-50mph more generally across Britain.
The weather is forecast to warm up from today with sunny spells predicted - just as much of the country prepares to return to work. However, cloudy and damp conditions will persist while further sleet and snow showers are expected for some regions. Forecasters have said that the potential remains today for heavy snowfalls in Scotland and eastern England. Wintry showers began to spread southwards from Scotland and northeastern England in the early hours of yesterday morning. By 5am, snow was falling across northeast England, Yorkshire and Manchester, and had made its way down through the Midlands and East Anglia. Light snow was also seen in London and parts of the South East.
Motorists struggled with the frosty conditions over the weekend, with a number of road accidents reported. North Yorkshire Police described the driving conditions yesterday as "horrendous", and Durham Police said that the A66 trans-Pennine route was closed for the second night running because of heavy snow. The misery was compounded on the railways, as Network Rail planned 30 engineering projects over the four-day break, leading to cancellations and delays. More than two million passengers face problems as they try to get home today. This year's early Easter has meant that many children will return to school tomorrow. The RAC said that the knock-on effect for road users would be vast numbers of families clogging the busiest routes today for their journey home.
The record books show that a white Easter is more likely than a white Christmas. Over the past 50 years, snow has fallen on a dozen Easters, most recently in 1998, when much of North Wales was brought to a standstill by more than a foot of snow. At this time of year the seas are close to their coldest, after losing their heat over the winter. This Easter, air from deep inside the Arctic Circle swept down over hundreds of miles of cold seas, keeping the winds biting cold and full of moisture, before bursting into heavy snow showers. One saving grace is that the lengthening days and strengthening sunlight mean that the land is warming up, and snow tends to melt quickly.
March is notorious for wild mood swings. The end of the month is when cold outbreaks are feared most and folklore tells the story of the borrowed days, when March took its last three days from stormy April: "The first is frost, the second snow, and the third is cold as it can blow". This was also called blackthorn winter, when blackthorn bushes came into blossom during a warm spell mid-month only to be dashed by a cold, frosty spell later.
Source
Damage to unborn baby from smoking 'negligible' in the first five months
This is a nice bit of iconoclasm. Rather in line with the passive smoking findings, too. The authors even managed to reject the "correlation is causation" belief that seems to pervade medical research. Will wonders never cease?
Smoking in pregnancy is far less damaging to the unborn baby than commonly supposed, detailed analysis suggests. If women give up smoking by the fifth month of pregnancy, the effect on the baby is negligible, the study found. And even if they do not, the effect on birthweight is surprisingly small. The study by Emma Tominey, a research assistant at the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics, throws new light on government efforts to stop women smoking when they become pregnant. While it does not suggest that such efforts are pointless, it shows that directing advice towards the newly pregnant is worthwhile.
It also shows that the worst effects are suffered by women from the poorest backgrounds, because in their case smoking is often combined with other unhealthy activities, such as poor diet and consumption of alcohol. Middle-class women suffer almost no damaging effects, the analysis suggests, even if they continue to smoke throughout pregnancy.
The findings, published as a report by the centre, will not be welcomed by anti-smoking groups, whose message to young women is intended to make them feel guilty about damaging their babies. In Ms Tominey's view, the damage is real but relatively small, and even if all women gave up smoking, only about one in eight babies with a low birthweight would avoid being classified as such.
The report uses data from the UK National Child Development Study, which provides details of mothers and their children between 1973 and 2000 - a total of 3,368 women and 6,860 children. The information includes the mothers' smoking habits, information about their families, and the birthweight and gestation period of the children.
Analysis of the data shows that smoking throughout pregnancy reduces birthweight by 5.6 per cent, and the gestation period by just over a day. But when the results are corrected for other factors, such as diet, lifestyle and alcohol, the effect of smoking on birthweight drops to 1.8 per cent and the reduction in gestation becomes insignificant. The study also finds that, contrary to the normal belief that damage is done early in pregnancy, it is the final third that matters most, because this is when babies gain the most weight.
Another surprising finding is the strong class effect. The damage is greatest among mothers with the lowest levels of education. Those who leave school at 16 cause twice the harm to their babies with each cigarette smoked. Ms Tominey concludes: "Other behaviours of the mother play a large role . . . over and above her smoking habits." Policies intended to help babies should aim to educate mothers generally, not simply try to persuade them to stop smoking, she said.
However, she does not conclude that smoking is harmless. "We find that up to 13 per cent of children classified as low-birthweight born to smoking mothers could have been classified as healthy, had their mothers not smoked." The policy implications, however, are that stopping smoking alone is not enough to deal with inequalities in child health, she concludes. "Not only is it the low-socioeconomic-status mothers who choose to smoke, but they are also the mothers bearing the greatest burden from the smoking." She said: "Therefore, any potential solution must offer help to these mothers, to target those with the worst habits and poorest records of child health."
Source
Socialists can't run an airport: "The opening of Terminal 5 at Heathrow [Britain] last week has been hailed as a new beginning for the airport, but the four older terminals are still a disgrace, according to travellers. A list of the best and worst airports, decided by 7.8 million passengers, suggests that Heathrow's transit system is comparable with the chaos encountered at Bombay airport and that its reputation for baggage delivery is at the same level as the airport at Caracas, the Venezuelan capital. Heathrow was ranked 103rd out of 162 airports, with the main complaints regarding its snaking security queues, surly immigration officials and infuriating baggage system. The airport fell 58 places in the rankings last year, which was due partly to a luggage crisis in August, when British Airways was so overwhelmed that it had to hire a fleet of lorries to transport unclaimed bags from Heathrow to a sorting facility in Milan. Heathrow, which is operated by the British Airports Authority, has the largest number of delayed flights in Europe, with more than one in three departing at least 15 minutes late." [I advise visitors to Britain to come down in Paris and take the Eurostar (train) to London]
Nutty archbishop of doom: "The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, gave a warning yesterday against materialist greed and prophesied the collapse of civilisation. In his Easter Day sermon at Canterbury Cathedral, Dr Williams said that the luxuries we took for granted could not be sustained for ever. In our culture, thoughts of death were too painful to manage, he told worshippers. Criticising modern society's approach to mortality, Dr Williams said: "Individuals live in anxious and acquisitive ways, seizing what they can to provide a security that is bound to dissolve, because they are going to die," he said".
This is truly amazing stuff. The Gurkhas are most highly thought of in Britain -- though not among the Leftist British government and bureaucracy, apparently. Warriors of any sort are just "incorrect" in Leftist circles
There are times when the routine irritation we all feel with the idiocies that take place daily in government is supplanted by splenetic anger caused by something truly outlandish. The sight of Gurkha ex-servicemen gathered in front of the Palace of Westminster [the British parliament] to return the medals they had received for fighting with the British Army was just such a moment. They were objecting to the fact that many of their number are denied the right to settle in Britain because they retired before 1997.
The grievances of the Gurkhas are legitimate and long-standing. You could be forgiven for imagining that they were resolved in September 2004, when Tony Blair, then prime minister, announced after an 18-month Whitehall review that Gurkhas who had served with the British Army and wanted to settle here with their families would be allowed to apply for citizenship.
The Government confirmed it would change immigration rules to let them stay. Prior to that decision, they had no pension rights, no leave to remain in the UK, and could not apply to become British citizens. David Blunkett, then the Home Secretary, said: "We have put together the best package to enable discharged Gurkhas to apply for settlement and citizenship. I hope this decision makes our gratitude clear."
But note the weasel word "discharged" in that statement; and, indeed, the devil was in the detail. The change meant that only Gurkhas who have served at least four years and were discharged after July 1, 1997 - the date at which the brigade's headquarters moved to the UK from Hong Kong - would be eligible for "fast-track" citizenship.
So an apparently generous gesture was instantly turned into something divisive. What possible moral case exists for saying that a Gurkha discharged in 1996 after 15 years' service is any less entitled to come here than one discharged a year later, after five years in the Army? For some Gurkhas falling outside the cut-off date who are already living in Britain, sometimes in penury, it means the prospect of deportation.
It is extraordinary that the authorities are prepared to deport someone who fought in our Army, yet last week the Court of Appeal ruled that under an EU directive, an Italian who served nine years for robbing a pensioner - and had a string of other convictions - could not be ejected because he did not pose a serious threat to the security of the nation.
Pre-1997 Gurkhas are not able to stay or settle because the Home Office says they cannot demonstrate "close ties" to this country. Even serving Gurkha soldiers are not treated equally. Their children are regarded as foreign students and must pay fees of up to 13,000 pounds a year if they want to attend university. Only when citizenship is granted after a lengthy application period once they leave the Army are their children regarded as home students in the UK.
All of this is particularly galling when you consider the mess the Government has made of our immigration system. Over the past 10 years, it has allowed hundreds of thousands of people who have no claim to settle here to do just that. Nepalese Gurkhas, by contrast, have been part of the British Army for nearly 200 years and about 200,000 of them fought for Britain in both world wars; some 43,000 were killed or wounded, and they have won 26 Victoria Crosses.
A few weeks ago, one of these VC winners, Havildar Bhanubhakta Gurung, died in Nepal aged 86. He was decorated with the highest award for valour when serving as a rifleman in the 3rd Battalion of the 2nd Gurkha Rifles in Burma in 1945. It is worth quoting from the citation. "On approaching the objective, one of the sections of the company was forced to the ground by heavy machine-gun, grenade and mortar fire, and owing to the severity of this fire was unable to move. "While thus pinned down, the section also came under fire from a sniper in a tree 75 yards to the south. As this sniper was inflicting casualties on the section, Rifleman Gurung stood up and, while exposed to heavy fire, calmly killed the enemy sniper with his rifle, saving his section from further casualties."
Bhanubhakta then dashed forward alone, attacking enemy positions single-handed, using grenades, smoke bombs, his rifle and, eventually, his kukri. The citation continued: "He showed outstanding bravery and a complete disregard for his own safety. His courageous clearing of five enemy positions single-handed was decisive in capturing the objective and his inspiring example to the Company contributed to the speedy consolidation of the success."
Under the current immigration rules, had Bhanubhakta, whose three sons followed their father into the Gurkhas, wanted to come to live in Britain, he would not be allowed to stay and could be facing deportation were he here already.
When a big enough fuss is made, as in the case last year of Tul Bahadur Pun VC, 85, who wanted to move from Nepal for medical reasons, an "exceptional" visa can be granted, as it was in his case. But these men should not have to beg for entry. Given the sheer scale of immigration to Britain in recent years, this is a small group of people who are rightly insulted by the suggestion that their ties to this country are "insufficiently strong" when they see so many here who have none whatsoever, including some who would do us great harm.
When Gordon Brown was asked about this injustice in the Commons at Question Time by Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader, he said the right for retired Gurkhas to live in Britain had only been granted from 1997 because that was when Hong Kong, their former principal base, was handed over to Chinese rule. So what? The fact that previous administrations failed to treat the Gurkhas properly is no excuse to continue treating them badly. The Labour Government is entitled to be congratulated for making some attempt to rectify past mistakes, especially over pension entitlements; but the decision taken in 2004 was only half right and too many anomalies remain. It is time to honour our debt to the Gurkhas.
Source
Women in labour turned away by NHS maternity units
Women in labour are being refused entry to overstretched maternity units and told to give birth elsewhere, NHS hospitals admitted yesterday in response to an application under the Freedom of Information Act. They disclosed that maternity wards in almost 10% of trusts closed their doors to new admissions on at least 10 days last year. One trust in North Yorkshire closed 39 times between October and January because it did not have enough staff to provide a safe service.
The NHS encourages mothers planning a hospital delivery to make a booking early in pregnancy and get to know about the facilities during regular check-ups with a midwife. Most mothers discuss a birth plan with a consultant obstetrician, including choice of pain relief. These preparations are made on the assumption that the hospital will have enough capacity to deal with unpredictable peaks in demand when women go into labour. But information disclosed to the Conservative party under the FoI Act showed 42% of trusts could not get through last year without turning women away at least once.
Andrew Lansley, the shadow health secretary, said the results showed large maternity units closed most often. The University Hospitals of Leicester NHS trust - the second largest unit in England, with 9,470 births last year - shut 28 times. The North Bristol NHS trust closed its doors 17 times. It said the problem was caused by a high birth rate at its Southmead hospital, the largest maternity unit in the south-west, which delivers about 5,500 babies a year. The trust that closed the maternity unit most often was Scarborough and East Yorkshire Health Care, which had only 1,615 births last year. Overwhelmingly, the trusts with most closures were dealing with double that number of births.
Lansley said: "Labour are fixated with cutting smaller, local maternity services and concentrating them in big units. But women don't want to have to travel miles to give birth. And they certainly don't want to have to travel even further because they're turned away by the hospital of their choice. Conservatives are committed to supporting smaller maternity units because the evidence shows they do better."
Lansley's disclosure coincided with a decision by an independent panel to reject NHS plans to close maternity services at Horton general hospital in Banbury. The Independent Reconfiguration Panel - set up by the government to take responsibility for unpopular decisions away from ministers - said access to services would be "seriously compromised" if Oxford Radcliffe Hospitals NHS trust went ahead with plans to centralise its paediatric, gynaecological and obstetric departments.
The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists said the increasing frequency of maternity unit closures emphasised the need for more resources. Richard Warren, the honorary secretary, said: "Our current calculation is that 400 extra consultants are immediately required across England and Wales."
Louise Silverton, deputy general secretary of the Royal College of Midwives, said: "The key issue here is what the women want. Women want to know and develop a relationship with their midwife and not feel as if they are on a production line. Midwives want to be able to deliver the best possible individualised care and not feel like they are working in a baby factory."
A spokeswoman for the Department of Health said: "It is difficult precisely to predict when a mother will go into labour and sometimes, at times of peak demand, maternity units do temporarily divert women to nearby facilities. When this does happen, it is often only for a few hours and to ensure mother and baby can receive the best care possible."
Source
The British school lottery
When Pauline Patrick had to tell her daughter that she wouldn't be starting at her chosen school in Brighton in the autumn with her friends, 11-year-old Chloe's response added to the anxiety her mother was already feeling. "She came home from school the day the letter arrived and asked, `Did I get in?'," says Patrick. "I had to say no and she just broke down, crying, `Why me, Why me?' I kept saying to her that we would appeal against the decision and we would win. But what if we don't win? What will we do then?"
The Patrick family's experience was replicated all over the country on the so-called "national offer day" earlier this month. Some families logged on after midnight to discover their child's fate; others waited for the envelope to drop through the letterbox. One way or another there was a lot of bad news: one in five families - 100,000 children - had missed out on their first choice of school place. Government ministers promptly admitted that many parents would feel "let down" by the system and urged them to make a case to local appeals panels.
But the thousands of families now caught in this predicament know that the chances of persuading a panel to throw open the gates of an oversubscribed school is stacked against them: two out of three appeals fail. So parents now face weeks of worry searching for alternatives to the sink schools that many have been offered.
With one-sixth of Britain's 3,000 secondary schools turning in appalling GCSE results, it is clear that there are simply not enough good schools to go round. National offer day 2008 seems to have condemned thousands of children to scrappy qualifications and a second-class life - at the age of 11.
Patrick, however, refused to be felled by the bad news. Within hours of learning the decision, she had shot off a letter to the appeals panel. She is now waiting for a date for a hearing where she will try to persuade them why her daughter should be given a place at Hove Park, a school close to the family's home. Instead, Chloe has been offered a place at a school several miles away, which means taking two long and, her mother says, unsafe bus journeys across the city twice a day. At this school, fewer than one in four children (23%) got five good GCSEs last summer.
In Kingston upon Thames, Surrey, dozens of parents have been left out in the cold because the Tiffin girls' school, the local grammar, accepts children from all over the country who pass the tough entrance exam, leaving local families scraping around. Among them is Tamsin McNicol's 10-year-old daughter Xanthe [above]. She was turned down at her first four choices and offered a place only at her fifth - a school in the neighbouring borough of Richmond, which was until recently failing badly. "It's bonkers," says McNicol. "The grammar school is two minutes from our home, but there are children applying from Yorkshire. Some pupils travel two hours each way to go there." Her daughter was a whisker away from achieving the marks to get a place, but lost out to children with higher marks who could be living at the other end of the country.
McNicol and other parents are campaigning for a new secondary school to be built in the north of Kingston, but in the meantime she is left high and dry. "I'm worried because I don't think the school Xanthe has been offered a place at is the right school for her," says McNicol. "It is undersubscribed because it used to be a failing school." She is appealing for a place at Tiffin girls, and will be writing to Ed Balls, the schools secretary, to point out just how unfair she feels the system is. However, McNicol's situation, to quote Monty Python's four Yorkshiremen, is "luxury" compared with that of Louis Modell, who has nowhere to go in September.
Louis was a Blair baby, born in February 1997 - three months before Tony Blair was elected - with the words "education, education, education" ringing in his ears. Eleven years on, Louis doesn't know what he will do in September after he finishes at Lauriston school in east London - ironically a primary that Gordon Brown singled out for praise in his 2007 Labour conference speech. And Louis's situation is by no means unique: he is one of 14 children out of 30 in his year 6 class in the same position. His father, David Modell, a documentary film-maker, has lived in Hackney for 13 years with his girlfriend Madeleine. The couple have two younger children in local primary schools.
Louis applied for six secondary school places - the only three in Hackney that his father said "he had a cat in hell's chance" of getting into, two schools in a neighbouring borough to hedge his bets, and one last-chance saloon: a school in Ingatestone in Essex, a 40-minute train journey away. With no offers so far, Louis has as yet no hope of any - the best the trust that runs education in Hackney could come up with was a suggestion that he consider home schooling. "We did everything we were asked to do. We were not picky - so when you get that letter saying you haven't got a place anywhere, it's shocking," says
Modell. "This year it's like carnage - all these kids and parents are walking around stunned." Three families, three unhappy unsettled children. Over the next few weeks they and their parents will have their lives turned upside down as they write letters, wait by the phone, attend appeal hearings and cross their fingers. Will Chloe avoid having to catch four buses a day? Will Xanthe be allowed to go to a better school closer to home where her friends go? And will Louis have a chance to go to school at all? Questions that, 11 years on, the Blair generation feel they should not be having to ask.
Source
Britain's coldest Easter for a decade
A bank holiday weekend that is seen as heralding the arrival of spring produced a "white Easter" thought to have been the coldest for a decade. Any hope of the glorious sunshine of last Easter, when temperatures reached 21C (71F), disappeared yesterday in snow, sleet and strong winds. Snowball fights replaced Easter-egg hunts and trips to the garden centre as snow settled over many parts of northern England and Scotland. Temperatures were between 4C and 7C yesterday, compared with the seasonal average of 7C to 11C. At Carterhouse, in the Scottish Borders, 3cm of snow was recorded. Gusts of 60mph (97kmh) hit the south Devon coast over the weekend, with winds reaching 40-50mph more generally across Britain.
The weather is forecast to warm up from today with sunny spells predicted - just as much of the country prepares to return to work. However, cloudy and damp conditions will persist while further sleet and snow showers are expected for some regions. Forecasters have said that the potential remains today for heavy snowfalls in Scotland and eastern England. Wintry showers began to spread southwards from Scotland and northeastern England in the early hours of yesterday morning. By 5am, snow was falling across northeast England, Yorkshire and Manchester, and had made its way down through the Midlands and East Anglia. Light snow was also seen in London and parts of the South East.
Motorists struggled with the frosty conditions over the weekend, with a number of road accidents reported. North Yorkshire Police described the driving conditions yesterday as "horrendous", and Durham Police said that the A66 trans-Pennine route was closed for the second night running because of heavy snow. The misery was compounded on the railways, as Network Rail planned 30 engineering projects over the four-day break, leading to cancellations and delays. More than two million passengers face problems as they try to get home today. This year's early Easter has meant that many children will return to school tomorrow. The RAC said that the knock-on effect for road users would be vast numbers of families clogging the busiest routes today for their journey home.
The record books show that a white Easter is more likely than a white Christmas. Over the past 50 years, snow has fallen on a dozen Easters, most recently in 1998, when much of North Wales was brought to a standstill by more than a foot of snow. At this time of year the seas are close to their coldest, after losing their heat over the winter. This Easter, air from deep inside the Arctic Circle swept down over hundreds of miles of cold seas, keeping the winds biting cold and full of moisture, before bursting into heavy snow showers. One saving grace is that the lengthening days and strengthening sunlight mean that the land is warming up, and snow tends to melt quickly.
March is notorious for wild mood swings. The end of the month is when cold outbreaks are feared most and folklore tells the story of the borrowed days, when March took its last three days from stormy April: "The first is frost, the second snow, and the third is cold as it can blow". This was also called blackthorn winter, when blackthorn bushes came into blossom during a warm spell mid-month only to be dashed by a cold, frosty spell later.
Source
Damage to unborn baby from smoking 'negligible' in the first five months
This is a nice bit of iconoclasm. Rather in line with the passive smoking findings, too. The authors even managed to reject the "correlation is causation" belief that seems to pervade medical research. Will wonders never cease?
Smoking in pregnancy is far less damaging to the unborn baby than commonly supposed, detailed analysis suggests. If women give up smoking by the fifth month of pregnancy, the effect on the baby is negligible, the study found. And even if they do not, the effect on birthweight is surprisingly small. The study by Emma Tominey, a research assistant at the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics, throws new light on government efforts to stop women smoking when they become pregnant. While it does not suggest that such efforts are pointless, it shows that directing advice towards the newly pregnant is worthwhile.
It also shows that the worst effects are suffered by women from the poorest backgrounds, because in their case smoking is often combined with other unhealthy activities, such as poor diet and consumption of alcohol. Middle-class women suffer almost no damaging effects, the analysis suggests, even if they continue to smoke throughout pregnancy.
The findings, published as a report by the centre, will not be welcomed by anti-smoking groups, whose message to young women is intended to make them feel guilty about damaging their babies. In Ms Tominey's view, the damage is real but relatively small, and even if all women gave up smoking, only about one in eight babies with a low birthweight would avoid being classified as such.
The report uses data from the UK National Child Development Study, which provides details of mothers and their children between 1973 and 2000 - a total of 3,368 women and 6,860 children. The information includes the mothers' smoking habits, information about their families, and the birthweight and gestation period of the children.
Analysis of the data shows that smoking throughout pregnancy reduces birthweight by 5.6 per cent, and the gestation period by just over a day. But when the results are corrected for other factors, such as diet, lifestyle and alcohol, the effect of smoking on birthweight drops to 1.8 per cent and the reduction in gestation becomes insignificant. The study also finds that, contrary to the normal belief that damage is done early in pregnancy, it is the final third that matters most, because this is when babies gain the most weight.
Another surprising finding is the strong class effect. The damage is greatest among mothers with the lowest levels of education. Those who leave school at 16 cause twice the harm to their babies with each cigarette smoked. Ms Tominey concludes: "Other behaviours of the mother play a large role . . . over and above her smoking habits." Policies intended to help babies should aim to educate mothers generally, not simply try to persuade them to stop smoking, she said.
However, she does not conclude that smoking is harmless. "We find that up to 13 per cent of children classified as low-birthweight born to smoking mothers could have been classified as healthy, had their mothers not smoked." The policy implications, however, are that stopping smoking alone is not enough to deal with inequalities in child health, she concludes. "Not only is it the low-socioeconomic-status mothers who choose to smoke, but they are also the mothers bearing the greatest burden from the smoking." She said: "Therefore, any potential solution must offer help to these mothers, to target those with the worst habits and poorest records of child health."
Source
Socialists can't run an airport: "The opening of Terminal 5 at Heathrow [Britain] last week has been hailed as a new beginning for the airport, but the four older terminals are still a disgrace, according to travellers. A list of the best and worst airports, decided by 7.8 million passengers, suggests that Heathrow's transit system is comparable with the chaos encountered at Bombay airport and that its reputation for baggage delivery is at the same level as the airport at Caracas, the Venezuelan capital. Heathrow was ranked 103rd out of 162 airports, with the main complaints regarding its snaking security queues, surly immigration officials and infuriating baggage system. The airport fell 58 places in the rankings last year, which was due partly to a luggage crisis in August, when British Airways was so overwhelmed that it had to hire a fleet of lorries to transport unclaimed bags from Heathrow to a sorting facility in Milan. Heathrow, which is operated by the British Airports Authority, has the largest number of delayed flights in Europe, with more than one in three departing at least 15 minutes late." [I advise visitors to Britain to come down in Paris and take the Eurostar (train) to London]
Nutty archbishop of doom: "The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, gave a warning yesterday against materialist greed and prophesied the collapse of civilisation. In his Easter Day sermon at Canterbury Cathedral, Dr Williams said that the luxuries we took for granted could not be sustained for ever. In our culture, thoughts of death were too painful to manage, he told worshippers. Criticising modern society's approach to mortality, Dr Williams said: "Individuals live in anxious and acquisitive ways, seizing what they can to provide a security that is bound to dissolve, because they are going to die," he said".
Monday, March 24, 2008
African refugee brings rare and dangerous disease to Britain
Health officials are screening the close contacts of a man who has become Britain's first case of a virtually untreatable form of drug-resistant tuberculosis. The man, believed to be a Somali asylum-seeker in his thirties, has a rare strain, Extremely Drug Resistant TB (XDR-TB), which has a high mortality rate.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) says that XDR-TB accounts for possibly only 2 per cent of the 9 million cases of tuberculosis in the world, but that it poses a grave public health threat, especially in populations with high rates of HIV and where there are few healthcare resources.
Health chiefs said yesterday that close contacts of the patient, who is in isolation at Gartnavel General Hospital, Glasgow, were being screened. He has been in the hospital since January.
Dr Oliver Blatchford, consultant in public health medicine in Glasgow, said yesterday: "It is no more infectious than ordinary TB but it does require different treatment. The contacts of this case are being screened in the same way as ordinary TB contacts. They will be monitored closely to ensure that any further cases are identified early and treated quickly."
A health board spokesman added that the man had been admitted to hospital at the end of January but was unable to give any personal details or provide information about his condition. It is understood that the man arrived at Heathrow last November and when screened for infectious diseases was found to have TB scarring on his lungs.
The condition was not active, however, and the man told doctors he had recently had a six-month course of treatment for TB. After an immigration interview, he was allowed to go to Scotland, where the disease became reactivated.
XDR-TB poses a far greater challenge to doctors than MDR-TB (Multidrug Resistant TB), which is resistant to at least the two main first-line tuberculosis drugs, isoniazid and rifampicin. XDR-TB is a form of MDR-TB that is also resistant to three or more of the six classes of second-line drugs. Doctors can only try to contain the disease with a cocktail of second-line drugs. In some cases, part of the lung can be cut out. This is the first case reported in Britain since the revised definition of XDR-TB was published by the World Health Oorganisation in 2006. Recent findings from a survey of data from 2000-04 found that XDR-TB had been identified in all regions of the world but was most frequent in the former Soviet Union and Asia.
Professor Peter David, the secretary of TB Alert in Britain, said that drugs could contain the disease but not cure it. Treatment takes 12-18 months and is estimated to cost more than 100,000 pounds per patient. [AND the patient has got to comply with his treatment regime]
Source
Global cooling hits Britain
Britain is enduring its most miserable Easter for 25 years as Arctic winds sweep in, bringing snow, hail and sleet. Snow began falling in Scotland yesterday and was expected to move south over the next few days, with forecasters saying that a white Easter looked increasingly likely across much of the country.
People wrapped up warmly to take a stroll along the seven-mile promenade in Bournemouth, Dorset, as temperatures dropped to 7C. Last Easter thousands of people sunbathed on the sandy beach as temperatures topped 20C. Holidaymaker Andy Hemmings, 55, from St Albans, Herts, said: "The sun is out but the winds are very chilly. We are warming ourselves up with a hot chocolate."
Beverly White, of Bournemouth council's tourism department, said that hotels were full despite the freezing conditions. She said: "We have had a lot of last-minute bookings. The weather is pretty atrocious all over Britain but I think people have just said, 'to hell with it'."
A yachtsman was airlifted to hospital after he was tossed into the Solent from a race boat during a force-eight gale. He was suffering from hypothermia when he was hauled out of the water by the crew of another vessel.
In Hampshire a sudden heavy downpour caused a string of accidents including an eight-car pile-up near Basingstoke which, in turn, caused delays of several hours on the M3. A family of four, including two children, were taken to hospital.
Parts of the rail network were crippled by engineering works, with timetables on some of Britain's busiest routes slashed to one train per hour or fewer as operators made way for 75 million worth of track-laying and bridge repairs. The two million passengers using the rail system each day over Easter will face further problems as they try to return home on Monday. Iain Coucher, Network Rail's chief executive, said: "We are doing this for the benefit of the passengers. We never do any unnecessary work."
Police in Dover said that many travellers had been unable to catch ferries because of high winds in the Channel and heavy road traffic. About 16 million cars are expected on the roads over the weekend. Motoring organisations said that the great getaway had passed off relatively smoothly as people staggered their leaving times. But the real test will come on Monday when millions of drivers try to return home at roughly the same time. By then the weather will have worsened leading to icy road conditions. Up to four inches of snow is expected in Scotland.
Bob Syvret, a forecaster at the Met Office, said: "There are several cold fronts coming down from the Arctic, which will continue for the next few days. This will be a mixture of rain, hail, sleet and snow and most places will be at risk." Easter Sunday temperatures could drop to as low as -3C at night with a band of snow and sleet forecast to move down from the North. The bad weather is most likely to affect the Midlands but snow could even reach London, forecasters said. During Easter 1983, Scotland, the Midlands and Kent received up to four inches of snow.
Motoring groups yesterday reported jams in the South West and East Midlands, and 10-mile tailbacks on the M4 in Wales. Severe weather warnings were issued to drivers on the Taye, Skye and Erskine bridges in Scotland.
Source
Massive NHS payout for 'malingerer' mother wrongly blamed for death of her newborn baby
A grieving mother accused of contributing to the death of her newborn baby by ' malingering' during labour has been awarded hundreds of thousands of pounds in compensation. Hospital staff blamed Kerry Jones after her daughter Bron was starved of oxygen and left brain-damaged. The claims were made after life-support was removed from the day-old child following a traumatic delivery.
At a "hostile" inquest, a hospital lawyer called Miss Jones a "malingerer", criticised her for bringing a birth partner and said her failure to communicate with staff helped cause Bron's death. A midwife accused her of "burying her head in the pillows" and staff complained they "couldn't make somebody do something they don't want to".
The Royal Devon and Exeter Hospital later admitted doctors were negligent in failing to carry out a caesarean. Despite this, bosses then pulled out of a compensation meeting. But the High Court yesterday awarded 37-year-old Miss Jones compensation after hearing she had endured the "nightmare of feeling responsible" for the tragedy in 2002.
Mr Justice King said: "She suffered the trauma of hearing that Bron had severe brain damage, the trauma involved in withdrawing life-support, the trauma caused by the fact the trust felt she might be responsible for Bron's death. "Eighteen months later, the inquest she experienced was hostile, accusatory and blaming." "She was 'bright and personable' before her ordeal, he said, but had since 'shrunk in stature and personality'."
Miss Jones, of Crediton, Devon, had opted for a home birth with minimal medical intervention for her first child but agreed to go to hospital because her baby was three weeks overdue. She told staff she wanted a caesarean if necessary, but the request was ignored when there were complications. Bron was born at 4.35pm on September 8, but her mother was told she would not recover from the effects of oxygen starvation and she followed advice to turn off life-support at 6pm the following day. Within hours she was told the case would have to be reported to the coroner over "maternal matters".
At the inquest in 2004, the hospital barrister asked her more than 60 questions about decisions she took during labour. Midwives claimed they were "undermined" by the birthing attendant she had hired to provide emotional support, but the hearing heard staff had 'clear instructions' how to deal with such companions. The coroner ruled Bron could have survived if born by caesarean and recorded a verdict of accidental death, complicated by "difficulties in communication and monitoring".
Miss Jones split up from Bron's father, Marcus Bawdon, 34, after the inquest. Last night Mr Bawdon, of Exeter, said: "The ordeal was a nightmare. We were treated horrendously. "I haven't spoken to Kerry in a long time and this is something I don't want to discuss. It is still very painful."
The hospital admitted negligence in 2005 and apologised in 2006. But the case went to the High Court after it pulled out of a settlement hearing. Miss Jones's solicitor, Magi Young, said it was "one of the worst cases of injustice" she had seen in 20 years as a clinical negligence lawyer. "As a result of Bron's death and the fact she was blamed for it by the NHS, her life changed beyond recognition. "She was prevented from grieving because of the hospital's attitude towards her and because of the delay in her finally being told it was not her fault. "She developed serious problems including a pathological grief reaction. Her relationship broke up and she had to leave the job she loved as she could no longer function at work."
A hospital spokesman said: "We need to reflect on the views expressed by Mr Justice King and consider whether there are any lessons to be learned."
Source
Drinking while pregnant risks autism in babies
This report is OK as far as it goes. There is no doubt that heavy drinking during pregnancy is harmful to the fetal brain and that the damage could in part manifest as autistic symptoms is no surprise. Note however that autism sufferers are often high-functioning in some ways and that is not characteristic of fetal alcohol sufferers. These findings are not then relevant to autism research in general. All they do is add symptoms to fetal alcohol syndrome
Women who drink alcohol during pregnancy may be putting their babies at risk of developing autism, according to new research. The consultant psychiatrist who alerted the medical profession to the finding that drinking while pregnant can give babies a condition called foetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) has now found that the consumption of alcohol by expecting mothers can also cause autism. The research is the first to suggest that autism may be triggered by the child's mother drinking alcohol during pregnancy. The findings will heighten concern about the increase in alcohol consumption among women of childbearing age.
More than half of all mothers drink alcohol while pregnant, according to the Department of Health. This week the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence will issue a new warning about the dangers. A recent survey showed 8% of women aged 18 to 24 had consumed at least 35 units of alcohol, the equivalent of about 15 glasses of wine, during the previous week. Binge drinking among young women has resulted in the number of alcohol-related deaths in women aged 35 to 54 doubling between 1991 and 2005. Earlier this year, the British Medical Association warned that the increase in alcohol consumption by young women will be reflected in a rise in drinking during pregnancy and, subsequently, will put more babies at risk of being damaged by alcohol while in the womb.
Raja Mukherjee, consultant psychiatrist at Surrey Borders Partnership NHS trust, has spent the past 18 months examining children who have been damaged by their mother's drinking during pregnancy and found that a high proportion of them have autism. The research has been presented at scientific meetings. Mukherjee, who has presented his findings to medical colleagues, declined to discuss them in detail before their publication in a medical journal but said: "Genetic conditions are by far the most common cause of autism but that is not to say that other things cannot cause it, and prenatal alcohol appears, possibly, to be [a cause]. "Unlike genetic conditions, this is 100% preventable."
Mukherjee has previously warned against any drinking during pregnancy and believes that even low levels of alcohol may endanger babies. Drinking during pregnancy can cause foetal alcohol spectrum disorder, the umbrella term for a range of disorders - from minor anomalies such as low birth weight to severe FAS, the symptoms of which include mental retardation and facial abnormalities such as a short nose. The number of cases of FAS in Britain has increased in recent years. So far the government and medical bodies have given out conflicting messages about how much alcohol it is safe to drink during pregnancy.
Source
Britain's stupid Leftist government driving out hi-tech employers through high taxes: "Internet search giant Yahoo is moving its European headquarters from London's Shaftsbury Avenue to Geneva after being driven away by British taxes. Yahoo becomes the latest of a host of multinational businesses being lured away from the UK by rival countries with lower corporation taxes. The move came as a particular blow to Britain's efforts to keep technology companies here. Google, despite employing several hundred staff in London's Victoria, opted to base its European headquarters in Zurich. Video games maker Electronic Arts moved its engineering HQ from London to Zurich. EA's arch rival SCI last month announced it was moving dozens of jobs from its Wimbledon HQ to Canada. Swiss councils have been directly approaching wealthy London non-doms running hedge funds and other investment businesses to highlight the benefits of moving to the Alpine haven. Procter & Gamble and Colgate-Palmolive-the giant US companies, both elected to site their European HQs in Switzerland. Kraft recently upped sticks from offices near Kew."
Health officials are screening the close contacts of a man who has become Britain's first case of a virtually untreatable form of drug-resistant tuberculosis. The man, believed to be a Somali asylum-seeker in his thirties, has a rare strain, Extremely Drug Resistant TB (XDR-TB), which has a high mortality rate.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) says that XDR-TB accounts for possibly only 2 per cent of the 9 million cases of tuberculosis in the world, but that it poses a grave public health threat, especially in populations with high rates of HIV and where there are few healthcare resources.
Health chiefs said yesterday that close contacts of the patient, who is in isolation at Gartnavel General Hospital, Glasgow, were being screened. He has been in the hospital since January.
Dr Oliver Blatchford, consultant in public health medicine in Glasgow, said yesterday: "It is no more infectious than ordinary TB but it does require different treatment. The contacts of this case are being screened in the same way as ordinary TB contacts. They will be monitored closely to ensure that any further cases are identified early and treated quickly."
A health board spokesman added that the man had been admitted to hospital at the end of January but was unable to give any personal details or provide information about his condition. It is understood that the man arrived at Heathrow last November and when screened for infectious diseases was found to have TB scarring on his lungs.
The condition was not active, however, and the man told doctors he had recently had a six-month course of treatment for TB. After an immigration interview, he was allowed to go to Scotland, where the disease became reactivated.
XDR-TB poses a far greater challenge to doctors than MDR-TB (Multidrug Resistant TB), which is resistant to at least the two main first-line tuberculosis drugs, isoniazid and rifampicin. XDR-TB is a form of MDR-TB that is also resistant to three or more of the six classes of second-line drugs. Doctors can only try to contain the disease with a cocktail of second-line drugs. In some cases, part of the lung can be cut out. This is the first case reported in Britain since the revised definition of XDR-TB was published by the World Health Oorganisation in 2006. Recent findings from a survey of data from 2000-04 found that XDR-TB had been identified in all regions of the world but was most frequent in the former Soviet Union and Asia.
Professor Peter David, the secretary of TB Alert in Britain, said that drugs could contain the disease but not cure it. Treatment takes 12-18 months and is estimated to cost more than 100,000 pounds per patient. [AND the patient has got to comply with his treatment regime]
Source
Global cooling hits Britain
Britain is enduring its most miserable Easter for 25 years as Arctic winds sweep in, bringing snow, hail and sleet. Snow began falling in Scotland yesterday and was expected to move south over the next few days, with forecasters saying that a white Easter looked increasingly likely across much of the country.
People wrapped up warmly to take a stroll along the seven-mile promenade in Bournemouth, Dorset, as temperatures dropped to 7C. Last Easter thousands of people sunbathed on the sandy beach as temperatures topped 20C. Holidaymaker Andy Hemmings, 55, from St Albans, Herts, said: "The sun is out but the winds are very chilly. We are warming ourselves up with a hot chocolate."
Beverly White, of Bournemouth council's tourism department, said that hotels were full despite the freezing conditions. She said: "We have had a lot of last-minute bookings. The weather is pretty atrocious all over Britain but I think people have just said, 'to hell with it'."
A yachtsman was airlifted to hospital after he was tossed into the Solent from a race boat during a force-eight gale. He was suffering from hypothermia when he was hauled out of the water by the crew of another vessel.
In Hampshire a sudden heavy downpour caused a string of accidents including an eight-car pile-up near Basingstoke which, in turn, caused delays of several hours on the M3. A family of four, including two children, were taken to hospital.
Parts of the rail network were crippled by engineering works, with timetables on some of Britain's busiest routes slashed to one train per hour or fewer as operators made way for 75 million worth of track-laying and bridge repairs. The two million passengers using the rail system each day over Easter will face further problems as they try to return home on Monday. Iain Coucher, Network Rail's chief executive, said: "We are doing this for the benefit of the passengers. We never do any unnecessary work."
Police in Dover said that many travellers had been unable to catch ferries because of high winds in the Channel and heavy road traffic. About 16 million cars are expected on the roads over the weekend. Motoring organisations said that the great getaway had passed off relatively smoothly as people staggered their leaving times. But the real test will come on Monday when millions of drivers try to return home at roughly the same time. By then the weather will have worsened leading to icy road conditions. Up to four inches of snow is expected in Scotland.
Bob Syvret, a forecaster at the Met Office, said: "There are several cold fronts coming down from the Arctic, which will continue for the next few days. This will be a mixture of rain, hail, sleet and snow and most places will be at risk." Easter Sunday temperatures could drop to as low as -3C at night with a band of snow and sleet forecast to move down from the North. The bad weather is most likely to affect the Midlands but snow could even reach London, forecasters said. During Easter 1983, Scotland, the Midlands and Kent received up to four inches of snow.
Motoring groups yesterday reported jams in the South West and East Midlands, and 10-mile tailbacks on the M4 in Wales. Severe weather warnings were issued to drivers on the Taye, Skye and Erskine bridges in Scotland.
Source
Massive NHS payout for 'malingerer' mother wrongly blamed for death of her newborn baby
A grieving mother accused of contributing to the death of her newborn baby by ' malingering' during labour has been awarded hundreds of thousands of pounds in compensation. Hospital staff blamed Kerry Jones after her daughter Bron was starved of oxygen and left brain-damaged. The claims were made after life-support was removed from the day-old child following a traumatic delivery.
At a "hostile" inquest, a hospital lawyer called Miss Jones a "malingerer", criticised her for bringing a birth partner and said her failure to communicate with staff helped cause Bron's death. A midwife accused her of "burying her head in the pillows" and staff complained they "couldn't make somebody do something they don't want to".
The Royal Devon and Exeter Hospital later admitted doctors were negligent in failing to carry out a caesarean. Despite this, bosses then pulled out of a compensation meeting. But the High Court yesterday awarded 37-year-old Miss Jones compensation after hearing she had endured the "nightmare of feeling responsible" for the tragedy in 2002.
Mr Justice King said: "She suffered the trauma of hearing that Bron had severe brain damage, the trauma involved in withdrawing life-support, the trauma caused by the fact the trust felt she might be responsible for Bron's death. "Eighteen months later, the inquest she experienced was hostile, accusatory and blaming." "She was 'bright and personable' before her ordeal, he said, but had since 'shrunk in stature and personality'."
Miss Jones, of Crediton, Devon, had opted for a home birth with minimal medical intervention for her first child but agreed to go to hospital because her baby was three weeks overdue. She told staff she wanted a caesarean if necessary, but the request was ignored when there were complications. Bron was born at 4.35pm on September 8, but her mother was told she would not recover from the effects of oxygen starvation and she followed advice to turn off life-support at 6pm the following day. Within hours she was told the case would have to be reported to the coroner over "maternal matters".
At the inquest in 2004, the hospital barrister asked her more than 60 questions about decisions she took during labour. Midwives claimed they were "undermined" by the birthing attendant she had hired to provide emotional support, but the hearing heard staff had 'clear instructions' how to deal with such companions. The coroner ruled Bron could have survived if born by caesarean and recorded a verdict of accidental death, complicated by "difficulties in communication and monitoring".
Miss Jones split up from Bron's father, Marcus Bawdon, 34, after the inquest. Last night Mr Bawdon, of Exeter, said: "The ordeal was a nightmare. We were treated horrendously. "I haven't spoken to Kerry in a long time and this is something I don't want to discuss. It is still very painful."
The hospital admitted negligence in 2005 and apologised in 2006. But the case went to the High Court after it pulled out of a settlement hearing. Miss Jones's solicitor, Magi Young, said it was "one of the worst cases of injustice" she had seen in 20 years as a clinical negligence lawyer. "As a result of Bron's death and the fact she was blamed for it by the NHS, her life changed beyond recognition. "She was prevented from grieving because of the hospital's attitude towards her and because of the delay in her finally being told it was not her fault. "She developed serious problems including a pathological grief reaction. Her relationship broke up and she had to leave the job she loved as she could no longer function at work."
A hospital spokesman said: "We need to reflect on the views expressed by Mr Justice King and consider whether there are any lessons to be learned."
Source
Drinking while pregnant risks autism in babies
This report is OK as far as it goes. There is no doubt that heavy drinking during pregnancy is harmful to the fetal brain and that the damage could in part manifest as autistic symptoms is no surprise. Note however that autism sufferers are often high-functioning in some ways and that is not characteristic of fetal alcohol sufferers. These findings are not then relevant to autism research in general. All they do is add symptoms to fetal alcohol syndrome
Women who drink alcohol during pregnancy may be putting their babies at risk of developing autism, according to new research. The consultant psychiatrist who alerted the medical profession to the finding that drinking while pregnant can give babies a condition called foetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) has now found that the consumption of alcohol by expecting mothers can also cause autism. The research is the first to suggest that autism may be triggered by the child's mother drinking alcohol during pregnancy. The findings will heighten concern about the increase in alcohol consumption among women of childbearing age.
More than half of all mothers drink alcohol while pregnant, according to the Department of Health. This week the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence will issue a new warning about the dangers. A recent survey showed 8% of women aged 18 to 24 had consumed at least 35 units of alcohol, the equivalent of about 15 glasses of wine, during the previous week. Binge drinking among young women has resulted in the number of alcohol-related deaths in women aged 35 to 54 doubling between 1991 and 2005. Earlier this year, the British Medical Association warned that the increase in alcohol consumption by young women will be reflected in a rise in drinking during pregnancy and, subsequently, will put more babies at risk of being damaged by alcohol while in the womb.
Raja Mukherjee, consultant psychiatrist at Surrey Borders Partnership NHS trust, has spent the past 18 months examining children who have been damaged by their mother's drinking during pregnancy and found that a high proportion of them have autism. The research has been presented at scientific meetings. Mukherjee, who has presented his findings to medical colleagues, declined to discuss them in detail before their publication in a medical journal but said: "Genetic conditions are by far the most common cause of autism but that is not to say that other things cannot cause it, and prenatal alcohol appears, possibly, to be [a cause]. "Unlike genetic conditions, this is 100% preventable."
Mukherjee has previously warned against any drinking during pregnancy and believes that even low levels of alcohol may endanger babies. Drinking during pregnancy can cause foetal alcohol spectrum disorder, the umbrella term for a range of disorders - from minor anomalies such as low birth weight to severe FAS, the symptoms of which include mental retardation and facial abnormalities such as a short nose. The number of cases of FAS in Britain has increased in recent years. So far the government and medical bodies have given out conflicting messages about how much alcohol it is safe to drink during pregnancy.
Source
Britain's stupid Leftist government driving out hi-tech employers through high taxes: "Internet search giant Yahoo is moving its European headquarters from London's Shaftsbury Avenue to Geneva after being driven away by British taxes. Yahoo becomes the latest of a host of multinational businesses being lured away from the UK by rival countries with lower corporation taxes. The move came as a particular blow to Britain's efforts to keep technology companies here. Google, despite employing several hundred staff in London's Victoria, opted to base its European headquarters in Zurich. Video games maker Electronic Arts moved its engineering HQ from London to Zurich. EA's arch rival SCI last month announced it was moving dozens of jobs from its Wimbledon HQ to Canada. Swiss councils have been directly approaching wealthy London non-doms running hedge funds and other investment businesses to highlight the benefits of moving to the Alpine haven. Procter & Gamble and Colgate-Palmolive-the giant US companies, both elected to site their European HQs in Switzerland. Kraft recently upped sticks from offices near Kew."
Sunday, March 23, 2008
Censorship built on junk arguments
The global campaign to ban junk food ads is based on junk science: there's little evidence children 'eat what they watch'. Patrick Basham and John Luik, co-authors of Diet Nation: Exposing the Obesity Crusade, say it is folly to try to change people's diets and waistlines by banning ads for fatty foods.
A new global campaign to restrict junk food advertising to children is the public health equivalent of using a cricket bat to swat a fly. Such a ban would not just be an over-the-top, crude policy instrument - it is also deeply unscientific.
In the UK, there is currently a ban on such junk food adverts during television programmes that have a `particular appeal' to under-16s. The ban covers both programmes and channels aimed specifically at kids, and other programmes that have a relatively high audience of children. The aim of the new campaign, spearheaded by the London-based International Obesity Task Force (IOTF), is to go further than this: to ban television advertising between 6am and 9pm for foods high in fat, sugar and salt; to completely ban internet and new media advertising; and to prohibit the use of celebrities or cartoon characters, competitions and free gifts to promote `junk food'.
The IOTF's rationale rests upon a series of influential recent reports by the American Psychological Association, the US Institute of Medicine, the UK Food Standards Agency, and the UK television regulator, Ofcom. These reports claim that food advertising to children causes them to eat a diet that makes them overweight or obese. Consequently, it is alleged that restrictions on food advertising will reduce weight problems and obesity amongst young people.
If you peek behind the regulatory curtain, however, the claims about the causal influences of food advertising on children's diets and weight share a central and definitive flaw in their understanding of what counts as demonstrating causality. In order to establish an evidence-based case for food advertising as a cause of childhood overweight and obesity, one would have to demonstrate that such advertising had an independent effect on children's weight. This, in turn, would require a research study design that controlled for the multiple other risk factors (by some estimates dozens) connected with childhood obesity.
However, none of the studies purporting to demonstrate that food advertising causes childhood obesity control for more than a handful of these other risk factors. These studies therefore cannot establish an evidence-based case about the connection between food advertising and children's weight.
If food advertising caused children's weight gain and obesity, wouldn't you expect to find an increase in advertising that parallels the increase in obesity? This is not the case. UK food and drink ad spending has been falling in real terms since 1999 and is now roughly at 1982 levels, even while rates of overweight and obesity have been rising. Consider, too, that in 1982 food ads constituted 34 per cent of total television advertising, whereas in 2002 they made up only 18 per cent.
In the US, one finds a similar trend. According to the Federal Trade Commission, advertising during children's TV programming has declined by 34 per cent in recent years. Data from Nielsen surveys shows that food advertising on television has declined by 13 per cent since 1993.
If the level of advertising has not increased, perhaps the level of TV viewing has gone up? In fact, to the surprise of many, TV viewing has not increased during the period of the obesity `epidemic', and some observers suggest that it has not changed for children and adolescents for the past 40 years. There is some evidence that the time children spend watching TV has actually declined in recent years.
Furthermore, when children sit down to watch TV, they actually view a balanced presentation of foods. A unique British study looked at the food references and messages in regular programming, as opposed to those contained in food advertising. There were as many references to food within regular programming as during the adverts. Children's regular food programming contained references far more centred on so-called healthy foods. For example, fruit and vegetables were the most frequently portrayed foods in regular programming.
The IOTF will not tell you this, but there is also no proven connection between food advertising and food consumption patterns. There is a substantial econometric literature that disproves the alleged connection between advertising, diets and weight. Peter Kyle of the University of Lancaster examined the impact of food advertising on food consumption and found no evidence to support the popular myth that advertising will increase market size.
Martyn Duffy of the University of Manchester studied the impact of advertising on 11 food categories. Not only did advertising have no effect on food demand, but it also had virtually no effect on the demand for any individual food. Duffy's conclusions are hardly exceptional. Other studies into the effect of advertising of such items as breakfast cereals and biscuits, both frequently cited as bogeymen in the childhood obesity epidemic, have concluded that advertising did not affect market size in any general way or to any material extent.
Bob Eagle and Tim Ambler looked at the impact of advertising on chocolate consumption in five European countries in order to test the claim that a reduction in advertising would reduce consumption. They report no significant association between the amount of advertising and the size of the chocolate market. Eagle and Ambler's work is corroborated by evidence from the Canadian province of Quebec and from Sweden, both of which have had advertising bans on foods to children, Quebec since 1980. In both jurisdictions, however, there have not been significant reductions in childhood obesity or marked differences in obesity rates compared with other adjacent areas.
Brian Young of Exeter University studied the effects of food advertising on children's food choices for the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food. Young found that children's food acceptance patterns and eating preferences develop in infancy. Therefore, they predate the influence of advertising. If children do prefer foods that are sweet, high in fat and salty, it is not because advertising created those preferences.
Despite the highly publicised claims to the contrary, the scientific evidence fails to provide a causal link between food advertising and children's eating patterns or weight. You cannot expect parents pushing their supermarket trolleys to be aware of this inconvenient truth. But the IOTF has no excuse for hauling obesity policy into this evidence-free zone.
Source
Reaping the whirlwind
By Melanie Phillips
You couldn't avoid doing a double-take when you read it. Karen Matthews, mother of the missing schoolgirl Shannon who thankfully was discovered alive and well a few days ago, referred to her daughter and one of her other six children as `twins'. These children are actually aged nine and ten. But Ms Matthews says they are twins because she thinks that's what you call children who have the same father. With seven children by five different men, she seems to have no idea of what having the same father actually means.
This little vignette is as frightening as it is illuminating. It reveals not merely ignorance of some pretty basic facts about reproduction. Far worse, one of the most fundamental and universal features of human society - the connection between children and their fathers - is something which Ms Matthews does not appear even to register.
Cases like this expose the lethal hole at the heart of our society. There has been a great deal of criticism of Ms Matthews's household arrangements, as well as the `unconventional' lifestyle of Fiona MacKeown, mother of the 15-year-old girl murdered in Goa, who produced nine children by five different fathers. Both women have been portrayed as irresponsible or feckless mothers. Now there's a backlash with people saying they should not be blamed. But why not? Here are no fewer than 16 children (one of whom now tragically lies dead) who have been exposed to harm, risk, emotional neglect and worse as a result of the gross irresponsibility of their mothers and fathers.
Ms Matthews has been denounced as an unfit parent by her own mother, who has claimed that Shannon and her siblings have suffered an awful life at the violent hands of Ms Matthews's current boyfriend in residence, Craig Meehan - a charge he has strenuously denied. Ms MacKeown, meanwhile, has subjected her children to the anarchy of a hippy lifestyle. Herself a cannabis smoker, her eldest son has a serious drug habit and mental health problems; while her murdered daughter Scarlett's diary has revealed a confused and distressed child who was regularly stoned on drugs and got `stressy' if she went two days without sex.
Yet Ms MacKeown also deserves pity as a mother grieving for her murdered daughter. And who could not sympathise with the joy and relief of Karen Matthews at finding her child alive and well? These women have feelings no less than anyone else, after all. The problem is that these feelings have been channelled into the most twisted tributaries so that the very essence of love - putting the interests of someone else first - and the disciplines of everyday life that are essential to safeguard those interests, are to them a closed book.
The reasons this has happened go far beyond mere criticism of individuals. For these events reveal the existence of an underclass which is a world apart from the lives that most of us lead and the attitudes and social conventions that most of us take for granted. But it is an underclass which affluent, complacent, materialistic Britain has created. An underclass composed of whole communities where committed fathers are so rare that any child who actually has one risks being bullied. Where sex is reduced to an animal activity devoid of love or human dignity, and boys impregnate two, three, four girls with scarcely a second thought. Where successive generations of women have never known what it is to be loved and cherished by both their parents throughout their childhood. How can such women know how to parent their own children?
These children are simply abandoned in a twilight world where the words `family' or `relatives' lose all meaning, as the transient men passing through their mothers' lives leave them with an ever-lengthening trail of `step-fathers' or `uncles'who have no biological connection with them whatsoever.
Shannon has been found; but, tragically, with a background of such emotional chaos she will remain a lost child. Scarlett's mother, meanwhile, still sees nothing wrong in having left her cannabis-smoking teenager in Goa, in the care of strangers in an area known for its druggy circles.
To many of us, all this is hard to comprehend. But then Ms MacKeown's whole lifestyle has been one from which the words responsibility or judgment have been excluded. Our society has encouraged people to think they have an absolute right to live exactly as they want without anyone passing judgment upon them. You want lifestyle choice? This may be an extreme case, but what happened to 15-year-old Scarlett is the result.
Seventeen years ago, the alarm was first sounded about these problems by two sociologists, Norman Dennis and A.H. Halsey, who warned that the bonds of civilised society would eventually snap following the collapse of the traditional family. From that moment, well-heeled liberals denounced and vilified not just these academics but anyone who similarly pointed out that, in general, children in fractured families suffered harm in every area of their lives. Those who went to such lengths to suppress this truth are the very same people who are complaining today that criticism of Ms Matthews and Ms MacKeown is unfair.
They are people for whom the pursuit of adult desires is so all-consuming that they simply don't see the distress of the children or abandoned spouses or lovers who are the casualties of this free-for-all. They are people who think it is altogether indecent to criticise parents for negligence - but that it is not indecent to abandon children to the chaos, distress and literally life-threatening environment of fatherlessness.
Indeed, even though fractured family life vastly increases the risk of abuse, violence and murder, our deeply irresponsible overclass has put rocket fuel behind its exponential growth through tax and welfare incentives. After all, Ms MacKeown was able to travel with her children to Goa in the first place only because she had been able to save 7,000 pounds from her welfare benefits.
In that sense, it is indeed wrong to heap all the blame on women like her or, for that matter, the fathers of these poor children. The people who are really culpable are all those who, intoning the mantra of `alternative lifestyle choice', have defeated every attempt to shore up marriage and the traditional family. In its place, they have deliberately and wickedly created over the years a legal and welfare engine of mass fatherlessness and child abandonment, resulting in a degraded and dependent underclass and a lengthening toll of human wreckage.
To his great credit, David Cameron seems to have grasped much of this. He has consistently said he will support and promote marriage and has spoken strongly about the need for stable and secure family life, as he did once again at the Tories' spring conference over the weekend. What a shame, therefore, that he had to spoil it. His proposal to extend child-care leave will be unaffordable for many while putting businesses under even greater pressure - thus increasing the risk of throwing more parents out of work - just when chill economic winds are already blowing. Both this and his breakfast photo-op at home with his children just seem to be examples of opportunistic gesture politics. But the reform of family life is far too important to be jeopardised by stunts like this.
Years of social engineering have brought the British family to its knees. Today, thousands of children, like the murdered Scarlett Keeling and the rescued Shannon Matthews, are paying the price.
Source
Down with `enoughism'
Two new books claim that our blinged-up, fast-car consumer society is laying people low with compulsive acquisition disorder, harried women syndrome and various other sicknesses of the mind. Don't buy it.
When so many apparently disparate debates lead to similar conclusions, it is time to investigate what is going on.
Worried about climate change? Concerned about social inequality? Anxious about not being happy enough? The orthodox prescription for all of these problems has become predictable: curb your consumption, limit your aspirations, and exercise self-restraint in your behaviour.
From this perspective, it is striking that two such supposedly different books as "Enough" and "The Selfish Capitalist" come to such startlingly samey conclusions. John Naish, a health journalist and author of "Enough", writes broadly in the tradition of self-help. His central argument is derived from evolutionary psychology (1). He contends that, as a creation of the Stone Age, the human brain finds it hard to cope with a world of abundance. To help quell this problem, he outlines a philosophy of `enoughism' to enable his readers to deal with what he sees as consumption overload.
Oliver James, in contrast, sees himself as a radical leader and a profound thinker with wonderfully original insights. Unlike Naish, he presents himself as deeply hostile to evolutionary psychology, which he sees as a highly conservative force. Instead James develops the notion of `selfish capitalism' in which the economic logic of the marketplace has led to an explosion of mental illness in the Anglo-Saxon countries. His approach appears materialist, arguably even Marxist.
Yet despite the differences in style, the two authors end up sharing much in common. Both have a deep dislike for popular consumption and a disdain for consumerism. Both argue for the exercise of self-restraint by the public. And both see humans as fundamentally weak and feeble creatures. How can two such apparently different approaches reach the same endpoint? Let's examine their arguments in more detail.
Naish concedes that his lifestyle is a bit of a clich,. The cover of his book says: `He lives in Brighton with his wife but no mobile phone.' In the text of the book, we learn that he has never owned a television, is a vegetarian, says a secular grace before eating, drives a small Peugeot hatchback, engages in regular meditation and does Tai Chi. He describes himself as a follower of `scientific pantheism' - a religion where there is no god to worship but nature. Regular spiked readers will recognise him as a mellower cousin of Ethan Greenhart (2).
Of course Naish's chosen lifestyle does not in itself disprove his case. The argument that modern humans have essentially Stone Age brains is an influential one that needs to be challenged rather than dismissed. Early in the book, he cites Robert Trivers, an evolutionary biologist at Rutgers University in New Jersey, arguing that human brains evolved between 130,000 and 200,000 years ago in the Pleistocene era. For Naish, the Stone Age character of our brains causes us immense problems, but they can be overcome if we follow the recipe of `enoughism'. He says his book can help, `by exposing the many snares that our own Pleistocene-era minds unintentionally lay for us, and explaining how the modern world of consumption hijacks our social brains so that we step right into these traps'.
For Naish the human species should not be called homo sapiens (`wise man' or `thinking man') but homo expetens (`wanting man'): `What characterises us most is our capacity to want, to desire, to covet, to yearn for and generally lust after.' In the world of abundance this perpetual state of desire leads us, in Naish's view, to terrible problems. These include compulsive acquisition disorder, harried women syndrome, information fatigue syndrome, and oniomania (buying addiction).
There is no space to detail all of the measures Naish advocates to help us overcome our various enough-induced syndromes, but they are based on developing what he calls an `inner ration book'. For example, he proposes that individuals go on a `data diet', where they restrict the amount of information they take in, to avoid the curse of `infobesity'. He says individuals should only eat in small restaurants, avoid high variety meals and make meal times sacred. In his view, people should avoid credit and shun gadgets.
Such measures, and the many others he advocates, make perverse sense if his original premise is accepted. Yet as Kenan Malik, a British science writer, has argued, the view that humans have essentially Stone Age brains is `specious nonsense'. Malik points out that our minds are immensely flexible. Human nature is not static but develops as we interact with and transform our environment: `We humans have not simply been transported to an alien environment. We have created that environment, through a long process of historical struggle and development. It seems bizarre to hold that the brain is "wired up" to invent modernity but not to cope with it. If the brain is flexible enough to do the one, then why not the other?'
Perhaps the most interesting chapter in Enough is the one on happiness. Naish rightly suggests that there are parallels between the drive to acquire consumer goods and the contemporary rush to achieve self-fulfilment. He points to numerous book titles to illustrate the race for individual happiness, including You Can Change Your Life, You Can be Amazing and You Can have Everything You Want. In this sense, the drive to achieve happiness is a close relative of consumerism, rather than an alternative to it.
However, Naish makes the mistake of assuming that his homespun philosophy of `enoughism' is radically different from the ideas advocated by the proponents of happiness. In fact, the idea of respecting limits - Naish's main argument - is central to the current preoccupation with achieving individual happiness. For example, Richard Layard, one of the main advocates of happiness as a goal of public policy, says: `The secret is to have goals that are stretching enough, but not too stretching.' (7) Anthony Seldon, the master of Wellington College and one of the main advocates of teaching happiness in British schools, is even more explicit: `Happiness I believe lies in knowing one's own limitations, accepting oneself for what one is, and being proud of what one achieves, at whatever level that might be.' (8)
So Naish's philosophy of enoughism shares with the contemporary advocates of happiness a deeply conservative premise. Humans, they argue, must learn to accept limits. For Naish, it is about developing an elaborate `inner ration book'. For those who emphasise individual happiness, it is about accepting your limits and not stretching yourself too far.
Oliver James might appear to be miles away from such thinking, from a casual reading of his work. Although his professional background is as a clinical psychologist, much of The Selfish Capitalist is concerned with the economics of Anglo-Saxon capitalism. His aim is to explain how economic factors have led to a huge expansion of mental illness in English-speaking countries. James' style is also fundamentally different from Naish's. James sees himself as a striking original thinker who is presenting a path-breaking theory about how the economic structure of society is affecting our mental state.
Sadly, however, The Selfish Capitalist does not provide any insights. James comes across like an over-eager undergraduate who is desperate to make sweeping generalisations about important social questions. But he often seems unaware that many of the points he raises have been discussed by others, often in a much more sophisticated way, before him.
In that light, it should be remembered that The Selfish Capitalist is a sequel to Affluenza. In that earlier work, James presented himself as a `heroic mind tourist' who visited seven locations, New Zealand, Australia, Singapore, Shanghai, Moscow, Copenhagen and New York to explore the impact of the consumer society on different people's mental wellbeing (9).
His new book is meant to provide the theoretical background to the arguments put forward in Affluenza. Yet many of his claims are not properly referenced, and when they are he depends on a relatively narrow range of sources. It would be tedious to go through them all, but one of the most striking is his reference to David Harvey, whose A Brief History of Neo-Liberalism he relies on heavily for his understanding of capitalism; James refers to Harvey as `an American political scientist'.
In fact, Harvey, though based in America, is a British geographer (11). With some authors, it would be nitpicking to point out such factual errors. But James has such a high opinion of himself as a great theoretician that it is hard to resist. In any case, this mistake is not uncharacteristic. His work is riddled with inaccuracies, caricatures and half-truths.
James makes two `new assertions' which are central to his work. He argues that `Selfish Capitalism led to a massive increase in the wealth of the wealthy, with no rise in average wages', and `there has been a substantial increase in emotional distress since the 1970s'. He goes on to argue that: `These assertions are not in themselves political, they are either true or false.' (12) He then makes a secondary point: that `the peddling and acceptance of. geneticism and evolutionary psychology have been important factors in making the general population susceptible to the idea that Selfish Capitalism will be good for them.' (13)
Contrary to James' first two points, his assertions are not simple yes or no questions. Working out whether average wages have remained static since the 1970s is more difficult than it might appear to the layman. In any case, wages are only one dimension in the measurement of living standards. Nor is it clear that emotional distress has risen in the way James suggests. Some statistics appear to substantiate his claim, but there are good reasons to open the argument to question.
In relation to real wages, these are harder to establish than might be assumed. For example, in Britain there is no single series of statistics on wages that runs from the 1970s to today. The selection of the appropriate inflation measure to use - necessary if real wages are to be calculated - is also open to debate. James seems to rely heavily on the work of Avner Offer, an Anglo-Israeli economic historian based at Oxford University, from whom he mainly gleans American data (14).
But it is arguable that American society is exceptional in this respect. For James to justify such sweeping claims about all Anglo-American societies, he would need to do a much more extensive study of the data; of course, he hasn't done that. Moreover, there is more to living standards than what we earn. Even if income inequality has widened over the years, it is still the case that living standards have risen.
In other words, there can be a relative increase in inequality at the same time as an absolute improvement in living standards. This is clear in the area of consumption. In many respects, the mass of society has access to a far wider range of consumer goods than the rich did back in the 1970s. For example, in Britain the percentage of households with central heating rose from 37 per cent in 1972 to 95 per cent cent in 2006. Back in 1972, only 42 per cent of households had a telephone at all; by 2006 some 80 per cent of households had a mobile phone (15).
Of course for the likes of James and Naish, the mass ownership of such consumer goods is distasteful - but for ordinary people it represents a substantial improvement in their quality of life.
The other main reason it is wrong simply to focus on real wages is that it obscures one of the main social changes in recent decades: the achievement by women of a more equal position in the workplace. In the 1970s, it was much more common for women with children not to have a job or, if they were employed, to be in an unequal position relative to men. Today, women more often have a job, and when they do they are more likely to have equal status with men.
One consequence of this change is that household incomes have generally risen much faster than individual incomes. Forty years ago, many households would depend on the income of one man as the `breadwinner'. Today, many households have two incomes, from the man and the woman - so even if real wages have remained static, the fact that a greater number of households have two sets of wages means that they are, overall, better off.
More here
The global campaign to ban junk food ads is based on junk science: there's little evidence children 'eat what they watch'. Patrick Basham and John Luik, co-authors of Diet Nation: Exposing the Obesity Crusade, say it is folly to try to change people's diets and waistlines by banning ads for fatty foods.
A new global campaign to restrict junk food advertising to children is the public health equivalent of using a cricket bat to swat a fly. Such a ban would not just be an over-the-top, crude policy instrument - it is also deeply unscientific.
In the UK, there is currently a ban on such junk food adverts during television programmes that have a `particular appeal' to under-16s. The ban covers both programmes and channels aimed specifically at kids, and other programmes that have a relatively high audience of children. The aim of the new campaign, spearheaded by the London-based International Obesity Task Force (IOTF), is to go further than this: to ban television advertising between 6am and 9pm for foods high in fat, sugar and salt; to completely ban internet and new media advertising; and to prohibit the use of celebrities or cartoon characters, competitions and free gifts to promote `junk food'.
The IOTF's rationale rests upon a series of influential recent reports by the American Psychological Association, the US Institute of Medicine, the UK Food Standards Agency, and the UK television regulator, Ofcom. These reports claim that food advertising to children causes them to eat a diet that makes them overweight or obese. Consequently, it is alleged that restrictions on food advertising will reduce weight problems and obesity amongst young people.
If you peek behind the regulatory curtain, however, the claims about the causal influences of food advertising on children's diets and weight share a central and definitive flaw in their understanding of what counts as demonstrating causality. In order to establish an evidence-based case for food advertising as a cause of childhood overweight and obesity, one would have to demonstrate that such advertising had an independent effect on children's weight. This, in turn, would require a research study design that controlled for the multiple other risk factors (by some estimates dozens) connected with childhood obesity.
However, none of the studies purporting to demonstrate that food advertising causes childhood obesity control for more than a handful of these other risk factors. These studies therefore cannot establish an evidence-based case about the connection between food advertising and children's weight.
If food advertising caused children's weight gain and obesity, wouldn't you expect to find an increase in advertising that parallels the increase in obesity? This is not the case. UK food and drink ad spending has been falling in real terms since 1999 and is now roughly at 1982 levels, even while rates of overweight and obesity have been rising. Consider, too, that in 1982 food ads constituted 34 per cent of total television advertising, whereas in 2002 they made up only 18 per cent.
In the US, one finds a similar trend. According to the Federal Trade Commission, advertising during children's TV programming has declined by 34 per cent in recent years. Data from Nielsen surveys shows that food advertising on television has declined by 13 per cent since 1993.
If the level of advertising has not increased, perhaps the level of TV viewing has gone up? In fact, to the surprise of many, TV viewing has not increased during the period of the obesity `epidemic', and some observers suggest that it has not changed for children and adolescents for the past 40 years. There is some evidence that the time children spend watching TV has actually declined in recent years.
Furthermore, when children sit down to watch TV, they actually view a balanced presentation of foods. A unique British study looked at the food references and messages in regular programming, as opposed to those contained in food advertising. There were as many references to food within regular programming as during the adverts. Children's regular food programming contained references far more centred on so-called healthy foods. For example, fruit and vegetables were the most frequently portrayed foods in regular programming.
The IOTF will not tell you this, but there is also no proven connection between food advertising and food consumption patterns. There is a substantial econometric literature that disproves the alleged connection between advertising, diets and weight. Peter Kyle of the University of Lancaster examined the impact of food advertising on food consumption and found no evidence to support the popular myth that advertising will increase market size.
Martyn Duffy of the University of Manchester studied the impact of advertising on 11 food categories. Not only did advertising have no effect on food demand, but it also had virtually no effect on the demand for any individual food. Duffy's conclusions are hardly exceptional. Other studies into the effect of advertising of such items as breakfast cereals and biscuits, both frequently cited as bogeymen in the childhood obesity epidemic, have concluded that advertising did not affect market size in any general way or to any material extent.
Bob Eagle and Tim Ambler looked at the impact of advertising on chocolate consumption in five European countries in order to test the claim that a reduction in advertising would reduce consumption. They report no significant association between the amount of advertising and the size of the chocolate market. Eagle and Ambler's work is corroborated by evidence from the Canadian province of Quebec and from Sweden, both of which have had advertising bans on foods to children, Quebec since 1980. In both jurisdictions, however, there have not been significant reductions in childhood obesity or marked differences in obesity rates compared with other adjacent areas.
Brian Young of Exeter University studied the effects of food advertising on children's food choices for the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food. Young found that children's food acceptance patterns and eating preferences develop in infancy. Therefore, they predate the influence of advertising. If children do prefer foods that are sweet, high in fat and salty, it is not because advertising created those preferences.
Despite the highly publicised claims to the contrary, the scientific evidence fails to provide a causal link between food advertising and children's eating patterns or weight. You cannot expect parents pushing their supermarket trolleys to be aware of this inconvenient truth. But the IOTF has no excuse for hauling obesity policy into this evidence-free zone.
Source
Reaping the whirlwind
By Melanie Phillips
You couldn't avoid doing a double-take when you read it. Karen Matthews, mother of the missing schoolgirl Shannon who thankfully was discovered alive and well a few days ago, referred to her daughter and one of her other six children as `twins'. These children are actually aged nine and ten. But Ms Matthews says they are twins because she thinks that's what you call children who have the same father. With seven children by five different men, she seems to have no idea of what having the same father actually means.
This little vignette is as frightening as it is illuminating. It reveals not merely ignorance of some pretty basic facts about reproduction. Far worse, one of the most fundamental and universal features of human society - the connection between children and their fathers - is something which Ms Matthews does not appear even to register.
Cases like this expose the lethal hole at the heart of our society. There has been a great deal of criticism of Ms Matthews's household arrangements, as well as the `unconventional' lifestyle of Fiona MacKeown, mother of the 15-year-old girl murdered in Goa, who produced nine children by five different fathers. Both women have been portrayed as irresponsible or feckless mothers. Now there's a backlash with people saying they should not be blamed. But why not? Here are no fewer than 16 children (one of whom now tragically lies dead) who have been exposed to harm, risk, emotional neglect and worse as a result of the gross irresponsibility of their mothers and fathers.
Ms Matthews has been denounced as an unfit parent by her own mother, who has claimed that Shannon and her siblings have suffered an awful life at the violent hands of Ms Matthews's current boyfriend in residence, Craig Meehan - a charge he has strenuously denied. Ms MacKeown, meanwhile, has subjected her children to the anarchy of a hippy lifestyle. Herself a cannabis smoker, her eldest son has a serious drug habit and mental health problems; while her murdered daughter Scarlett's diary has revealed a confused and distressed child who was regularly stoned on drugs and got `stressy' if she went two days without sex.
Yet Ms MacKeown also deserves pity as a mother grieving for her murdered daughter. And who could not sympathise with the joy and relief of Karen Matthews at finding her child alive and well? These women have feelings no less than anyone else, after all. The problem is that these feelings have been channelled into the most twisted tributaries so that the very essence of love - putting the interests of someone else first - and the disciplines of everyday life that are essential to safeguard those interests, are to them a closed book.
The reasons this has happened go far beyond mere criticism of individuals. For these events reveal the existence of an underclass which is a world apart from the lives that most of us lead and the attitudes and social conventions that most of us take for granted. But it is an underclass which affluent, complacent, materialistic Britain has created. An underclass composed of whole communities where committed fathers are so rare that any child who actually has one risks being bullied. Where sex is reduced to an animal activity devoid of love or human dignity, and boys impregnate two, three, four girls with scarcely a second thought. Where successive generations of women have never known what it is to be loved and cherished by both their parents throughout their childhood. How can such women know how to parent their own children?
These children are simply abandoned in a twilight world where the words `family' or `relatives' lose all meaning, as the transient men passing through their mothers' lives leave them with an ever-lengthening trail of `step-fathers' or `uncles'who have no biological connection with them whatsoever.
Shannon has been found; but, tragically, with a background of such emotional chaos she will remain a lost child. Scarlett's mother, meanwhile, still sees nothing wrong in having left her cannabis-smoking teenager in Goa, in the care of strangers in an area known for its druggy circles.
To many of us, all this is hard to comprehend. But then Ms MacKeown's whole lifestyle has been one from which the words responsibility or judgment have been excluded. Our society has encouraged people to think they have an absolute right to live exactly as they want without anyone passing judgment upon them. You want lifestyle choice? This may be an extreme case, but what happened to 15-year-old Scarlett is the result.
Seventeen years ago, the alarm was first sounded about these problems by two sociologists, Norman Dennis and A.H. Halsey, who warned that the bonds of civilised society would eventually snap following the collapse of the traditional family. From that moment, well-heeled liberals denounced and vilified not just these academics but anyone who similarly pointed out that, in general, children in fractured families suffered harm in every area of their lives. Those who went to such lengths to suppress this truth are the very same people who are complaining today that criticism of Ms Matthews and Ms MacKeown is unfair.
They are people for whom the pursuit of adult desires is so all-consuming that they simply don't see the distress of the children or abandoned spouses or lovers who are the casualties of this free-for-all. They are people who think it is altogether indecent to criticise parents for negligence - but that it is not indecent to abandon children to the chaos, distress and literally life-threatening environment of fatherlessness.
Indeed, even though fractured family life vastly increases the risk of abuse, violence and murder, our deeply irresponsible overclass has put rocket fuel behind its exponential growth through tax and welfare incentives. After all, Ms MacKeown was able to travel with her children to Goa in the first place only because she had been able to save 7,000 pounds from her welfare benefits.
In that sense, it is indeed wrong to heap all the blame on women like her or, for that matter, the fathers of these poor children. The people who are really culpable are all those who, intoning the mantra of `alternative lifestyle choice', have defeated every attempt to shore up marriage and the traditional family. In its place, they have deliberately and wickedly created over the years a legal and welfare engine of mass fatherlessness and child abandonment, resulting in a degraded and dependent underclass and a lengthening toll of human wreckage.
To his great credit, David Cameron seems to have grasped much of this. He has consistently said he will support and promote marriage and has spoken strongly about the need for stable and secure family life, as he did once again at the Tories' spring conference over the weekend. What a shame, therefore, that he had to spoil it. His proposal to extend child-care leave will be unaffordable for many while putting businesses under even greater pressure - thus increasing the risk of throwing more parents out of work - just when chill economic winds are already blowing. Both this and his breakfast photo-op at home with his children just seem to be examples of opportunistic gesture politics. But the reform of family life is far too important to be jeopardised by stunts like this.
Years of social engineering have brought the British family to its knees. Today, thousands of children, like the murdered Scarlett Keeling and the rescued Shannon Matthews, are paying the price.
Source
Down with `enoughism'
Two new books claim that our blinged-up, fast-car consumer society is laying people low with compulsive acquisition disorder, harried women syndrome and various other sicknesses of the mind. Don't buy it.
When so many apparently disparate debates lead to similar conclusions, it is time to investigate what is going on.
Worried about climate change? Concerned about social inequality? Anxious about not being happy enough? The orthodox prescription for all of these problems has become predictable: curb your consumption, limit your aspirations, and exercise self-restraint in your behaviour.
From this perspective, it is striking that two such supposedly different books as "Enough" and "The Selfish Capitalist" come to such startlingly samey conclusions. John Naish, a health journalist and author of "Enough", writes broadly in the tradition of self-help. His central argument is derived from evolutionary psychology (1). He contends that, as a creation of the Stone Age, the human brain finds it hard to cope with a world of abundance. To help quell this problem, he outlines a philosophy of `enoughism' to enable his readers to deal with what he sees as consumption overload.
Oliver James, in contrast, sees himself as a radical leader and a profound thinker with wonderfully original insights. Unlike Naish, he presents himself as deeply hostile to evolutionary psychology, which he sees as a highly conservative force. Instead James develops the notion of `selfish capitalism' in which the economic logic of the marketplace has led to an explosion of mental illness in the Anglo-Saxon countries. His approach appears materialist, arguably even Marxist.
Yet despite the differences in style, the two authors end up sharing much in common. Both have a deep dislike for popular consumption and a disdain for consumerism. Both argue for the exercise of self-restraint by the public. And both see humans as fundamentally weak and feeble creatures. How can two such apparently different approaches reach the same endpoint? Let's examine their arguments in more detail.
Naish concedes that his lifestyle is a bit of a clich,. The cover of his book says: `He lives in Brighton with his wife but no mobile phone.' In the text of the book, we learn that he has never owned a television, is a vegetarian, says a secular grace before eating, drives a small Peugeot hatchback, engages in regular meditation and does Tai Chi. He describes himself as a follower of `scientific pantheism' - a religion where there is no god to worship but nature. Regular spiked readers will recognise him as a mellower cousin of Ethan Greenhart (2).
Of course Naish's chosen lifestyle does not in itself disprove his case. The argument that modern humans have essentially Stone Age brains is an influential one that needs to be challenged rather than dismissed. Early in the book, he cites Robert Trivers, an evolutionary biologist at Rutgers University in New Jersey, arguing that human brains evolved between 130,000 and 200,000 years ago in the Pleistocene era. For Naish, the Stone Age character of our brains causes us immense problems, but they can be overcome if we follow the recipe of `enoughism'. He says his book can help, `by exposing the many snares that our own Pleistocene-era minds unintentionally lay for us, and explaining how the modern world of consumption hijacks our social brains so that we step right into these traps'.
For Naish the human species should not be called homo sapiens (`wise man' or `thinking man') but homo expetens (`wanting man'): `What characterises us most is our capacity to want, to desire, to covet, to yearn for and generally lust after.' In the world of abundance this perpetual state of desire leads us, in Naish's view, to terrible problems. These include compulsive acquisition disorder, harried women syndrome, information fatigue syndrome, and oniomania (buying addiction).
There is no space to detail all of the measures Naish advocates to help us overcome our various enough-induced syndromes, but they are based on developing what he calls an `inner ration book'. For example, he proposes that individuals go on a `data diet', where they restrict the amount of information they take in, to avoid the curse of `infobesity'. He says individuals should only eat in small restaurants, avoid high variety meals and make meal times sacred. In his view, people should avoid credit and shun gadgets.
Such measures, and the many others he advocates, make perverse sense if his original premise is accepted. Yet as Kenan Malik, a British science writer, has argued, the view that humans have essentially Stone Age brains is `specious nonsense'. Malik points out that our minds are immensely flexible. Human nature is not static but develops as we interact with and transform our environment: `We humans have not simply been transported to an alien environment. We have created that environment, through a long process of historical struggle and development. It seems bizarre to hold that the brain is "wired up" to invent modernity but not to cope with it. If the brain is flexible enough to do the one, then why not the other?'
Perhaps the most interesting chapter in Enough is the one on happiness. Naish rightly suggests that there are parallels between the drive to acquire consumer goods and the contemporary rush to achieve self-fulfilment. He points to numerous book titles to illustrate the race for individual happiness, including You Can Change Your Life, You Can be Amazing and You Can have Everything You Want. In this sense, the drive to achieve happiness is a close relative of consumerism, rather than an alternative to it.
However, Naish makes the mistake of assuming that his homespun philosophy of `enoughism' is radically different from the ideas advocated by the proponents of happiness. In fact, the idea of respecting limits - Naish's main argument - is central to the current preoccupation with achieving individual happiness. For example, Richard Layard, one of the main advocates of happiness as a goal of public policy, says: `The secret is to have goals that are stretching enough, but not too stretching.' (7) Anthony Seldon, the master of Wellington College and one of the main advocates of teaching happiness in British schools, is even more explicit: `Happiness I believe lies in knowing one's own limitations, accepting oneself for what one is, and being proud of what one achieves, at whatever level that might be.' (8)
So Naish's philosophy of enoughism shares with the contemporary advocates of happiness a deeply conservative premise. Humans, they argue, must learn to accept limits. For Naish, it is about developing an elaborate `inner ration book'. For those who emphasise individual happiness, it is about accepting your limits and not stretching yourself too far.
Oliver James might appear to be miles away from such thinking, from a casual reading of his work. Although his professional background is as a clinical psychologist, much of The Selfish Capitalist is concerned with the economics of Anglo-Saxon capitalism. His aim is to explain how economic factors have led to a huge expansion of mental illness in English-speaking countries. James' style is also fundamentally different from Naish's. James sees himself as a striking original thinker who is presenting a path-breaking theory about how the economic structure of society is affecting our mental state.
Sadly, however, The Selfish Capitalist does not provide any insights. James comes across like an over-eager undergraduate who is desperate to make sweeping generalisations about important social questions. But he often seems unaware that many of the points he raises have been discussed by others, often in a much more sophisticated way, before him.
In that light, it should be remembered that The Selfish Capitalist is a sequel to Affluenza. In that earlier work, James presented himself as a `heroic mind tourist' who visited seven locations, New Zealand, Australia, Singapore, Shanghai, Moscow, Copenhagen and New York to explore the impact of the consumer society on different people's mental wellbeing (9).
His new book is meant to provide the theoretical background to the arguments put forward in Affluenza. Yet many of his claims are not properly referenced, and when they are he depends on a relatively narrow range of sources. It would be tedious to go through them all, but one of the most striking is his reference to David Harvey, whose A Brief History of Neo-Liberalism he relies on heavily for his understanding of capitalism; James refers to Harvey as `an American political scientist'.
In fact, Harvey, though based in America, is a British geographer (11). With some authors, it would be nitpicking to point out such factual errors. But James has such a high opinion of himself as a great theoretician that it is hard to resist. In any case, this mistake is not uncharacteristic. His work is riddled with inaccuracies, caricatures and half-truths.
James makes two `new assertions' which are central to his work. He argues that `Selfish Capitalism led to a massive increase in the wealth of the wealthy, with no rise in average wages', and `there has been a substantial increase in emotional distress since the 1970s'. He goes on to argue that: `These assertions are not in themselves political, they are either true or false.' (12) He then makes a secondary point: that `the peddling and acceptance of. geneticism and evolutionary psychology have been important factors in making the general population susceptible to the idea that Selfish Capitalism will be good for them.' (13)
Contrary to James' first two points, his assertions are not simple yes or no questions. Working out whether average wages have remained static since the 1970s is more difficult than it might appear to the layman. In any case, wages are only one dimension in the measurement of living standards. Nor is it clear that emotional distress has risen in the way James suggests. Some statistics appear to substantiate his claim, but there are good reasons to open the argument to question.
In relation to real wages, these are harder to establish than might be assumed. For example, in Britain there is no single series of statistics on wages that runs from the 1970s to today. The selection of the appropriate inflation measure to use - necessary if real wages are to be calculated - is also open to debate. James seems to rely heavily on the work of Avner Offer, an Anglo-Israeli economic historian based at Oxford University, from whom he mainly gleans American data (14).
But it is arguable that American society is exceptional in this respect. For James to justify such sweeping claims about all Anglo-American societies, he would need to do a much more extensive study of the data; of course, he hasn't done that. Moreover, there is more to living standards than what we earn. Even if income inequality has widened over the years, it is still the case that living standards have risen.
In other words, there can be a relative increase in inequality at the same time as an absolute improvement in living standards. This is clear in the area of consumption. In many respects, the mass of society has access to a far wider range of consumer goods than the rich did back in the 1970s. For example, in Britain the percentage of households with central heating rose from 37 per cent in 1972 to 95 per cent cent in 2006. Back in 1972, only 42 per cent of households had a telephone at all; by 2006 some 80 per cent of households had a mobile phone (15).
Of course for the likes of James and Naish, the mass ownership of such consumer goods is distasteful - but for ordinary people it represents a substantial improvement in their quality of life.
The other main reason it is wrong simply to focus on real wages is that it obscures one of the main social changes in recent decades: the achievement by women of a more equal position in the workplace. In the 1970s, it was much more common for women with children not to have a job or, if they were employed, to be in an unequal position relative to men. Today, women more often have a job, and when they do they are more likely to have equal status with men.
One consequence of this change is that household incomes have generally risen much faster than individual incomes. Forty years ago, many households would depend on the income of one man as the `breadwinner'. Today, many households have two incomes, from the man and the woman - so even if real wages have remained static, the fact that a greater number of households have two sets of wages means that they are, overall, better off.
More here
Saturday, March 22, 2008
British politician glimpses the reality of class sizes
And teachers refuse to acknowledge what the evidence has long shown -- that LARGER classes are fine
A schools minister was yesterday heckled by teachers after he backed larger class sizes and suggested that it could be "perfectly acceptable" to teach maths to pupils in classes of up to 70. Jim Knight, was jeered at the Association of Teachers and Lecturers' annual conference in Torquay after using his speech to advocate teaching classes of up to 38. He went on to say he had seen successful maths classes of up to 70 children with the aid of teaching assistants. The government is planning a national scheme of one-to-one tutoring for primary pupils struggling in reading and maths and promising greater "personalisation" of teaching. Opposition MPs accused Knight of undermining his government's own policy with his comments.
Questioned by one delegate yesterday about how teachers could be expected to teach classes of 38 pupils well, Knight replied that classroom assistants could help make large classes "manageable". "Class sizes are obviously something we take seriously. If they are growing to the extent that the delegate talks about then there are some concerns attached to that," he said. "Teaching assistants and higher level teaching assistants working alongside teachers are very important to ensuring that class sizes of 38 are manageable."
The audience responded with jeers and shouts of "no!" Knight said he had seen a "perfectly acceptable" maths class in Telford of 70 pupils working well in a large room with three or four teaching assistants. "There was good learning going on," he said. Phil Jacques, ATL's executive member for Dorset, said: "Class sizes of 38 should not be made to be manageable. They just simply shouldn't exist."
In what was supposed to be a vote of thanks for the minister, Jacques called the government's national curriculum dismal, tedious, inflexible and of very little value to the majority of children. "No wonder we have large numbers of disaffected children in those schools - in schools where the disaffection results in violence," Jacques said. Knight described the reception he received as "a sort of friendly disagreement".
The government has met commitments to cut class sizes in English primary schools by 2002, though some evidence suggests numbers have crept back up again in some areas. The Scottish parliament has committed to cutting class sizes for the youngest primary children to 18. However, recent research by the Institute of Education suggests that cutting class sizes is a relatively expensive way to improve results, and only a significant benefit when there are a number of unruly children in the class. Instead teachers' assessment methods can have a cheaper positive effect on children's achievement.
Knight's comments came as a government backed review of maths in primary schools reported that teaching is being undermined because it has become "socially acceptable" to brag about being bad with numbers. Every primary school should have a specialist maths teacher and the government should revisit the requirement that new primary teachers need only a grade C in maths GCSE, Sir Peter Williams, chancellor of Leicester University, said. "The UK remains one of the few advanced nations where it is socially acceptable - fashionable, even - to profess an inability to cope with mathematics. That is hardly conducive to a home environment in which mathematics is seen by children as an essential and rewarding part of their everyday lives," he said. "The principal focus of this review is the role of teachers and practitioners, their education and training, and how society values and rewards them."
Shadow children's secretary Michael Gove said: "The government cannot simultaneously say it is going to deliver personalised learning and then support class sizes at the level Jim Knight is talking about. "We have seen a trend over the last few years towards bigger classes and bigger schools. That runs directly counter to parents' priorities and is not the right direction for education in this country."
Source
EU Rules: Violent criminal cannot be deported from Britain
A foreign criminal who attacked and robbed a pensioner cannot be deported because he is not considered dangerous enough, the Court of Appeal has ruled. The decision has rendered the Government virtually powerless to remove even the most vicious offenders if they come from within the European Union. Ministers wanted to remove the 38-year-old Italian, who lives in Newport, Gwent, at the end of a nine-year jail term imposed for violent robbery
But the Court of Appeal said there were no "imperative grounds of public security" to justify throwing him out. These were the grounds on which the Government failed last year to deport Learco Chindamo, the Italian-born killer of Philip Lawrence, the London head teacher. Under a directive, an EU national living in another member country for 10 years or more cannot be deported except under exceptional circumstances.
The criminal, whose identity was protected by the court, moved to Britain as a teenager and has five convictions. In October 2001 he was jailed for nine years for attacking and robbing a pensioner. A judge called the offence a "brutal, cowardly attack". Last year, the Asylum and Immigration Tribunal ruled that the robber should be deported on grounds of "imperative" public policy, public security or public health. It said he was a "very dangerous man" who posed a "very high risk indeed" to the public. He was also "unwilling to accept any real responsibility for the injuries to his victim".
However, the appeal judge Lady Justice Arden concluded that the tribunal had made an "error of law" and had not distinguished between "serious" and "imperative" threats to public security. The case will now be sent back to the tribunal, which will have to judge whether the offender posed an "imperative" threat - something -lawyers say applies only to terrorists
Source
Proposal for super-surgeries ‘may result in worse care’
Plans to build 152 doctors’ “super-surgeries” in England are confused and there is limited evidence that they will be effective, according to an expert in primary care. Martin Roland, director of the National Primary Care Research and Development Centre at the University of Manchester, said that primary care trusts were already being required to develop polyclinics, or multi-doctor centres, but there was “little clarity about their purpose”.
Lord Darzi of Denham, the Health Minister, has yet to produce the final report of his NHS review, but the Department of Health has indicated that it expects all 152 primary care trusts in England to have at least one poly-clinic. Private companies will provide many of them, although the department has promised GPs that they will get a level playing field in tendering for the contracts.
Professor Roland wrote in the British Medical Journal that the Government champions patient choice, but extending choice means more high-quality practices, not fewer, as the polyclinic model suggests. He said: “On average they [small practices] achieved slightly higher levels of clinical quality than the larger practices.”
Polyclinics may also have specialists working in them, but he claims that there is evidence that consultants work less efficiently outside hospitals.
Polls show that GPs are strongly opposed to polyclinics. Richard Vautrey, deputy chairman of the British Medical Association GPs’ committee, said: “This is a government plan that is potentially going to waste hundreds of millions of pounds of scarce NHS resources, creating very large health centres that many areas of the country don’t need or want.”
The medical newspaper Pulse has begun a campaign called Save Our Surgeries, and reported that polyclinics would force GP practices to close or merge, and patients to travel further.
Source
And teachers refuse to acknowledge what the evidence has long shown -- that LARGER classes are fine
A schools minister was yesterday heckled by teachers after he backed larger class sizes and suggested that it could be "perfectly acceptable" to teach maths to pupils in classes of up to 70. Jim Knight, was jeered at the Association of Teachers and Lecturers' annual conference in Torquay after using his speech to advocate teaching classes of up to 38. He went on to say he had seen successful maths classes of up to 70 children with the aid of teaching assistants. The government is planning a national scheme of one-to-one tutoring for primary pupils struggling in reading and maths and promising greater "personalisation" of teaching. Opposition MPs accused Knight of undermining his government's own policy with his comments.
Questioned by one delegate yesterday about how teachers could be expected to teach classes of 38 pupils well, Knight replied that classroom assistants could help make large classes "manageable". "Class sizes are obviously something we take seriously. If they are growing to the extent that the delegate talks about then there are some concerns attached to that," he said. "Teaching assistants and higher level teaching assistants working alongside teachers are very important to ensuring that class sizes of 38 are manageable."
The audience responded with jeers and shouts of "no!" Knight said he had seen a "perfectly acceptable" maths class in Telford of 70 pupils working well in a large room with three or four teaching assistants. "There was good learning going on," he said. Phil Jacques, ATL's executive member for Dorset, said: "Class sizes of 38 should not be made to be manageable. They just simply shouldn't exist."
In what was supposed to be a vote of thanks for the minister, Jacques called the government's national curriculum dismal, tedious, inflexible and of very little value to the majority of children. "No wonder we have large numbers of disaffected children in those schools - in schools where the disaffection results in violence," Jacques said. Knight described the reception he received as "a sort of friendly disagreement".
The government has met commitments to cut class sizes in English primary schools by 2002, though some evidence suggests numbers have crept back up again in some areas. The Scottish parliament has committed to cutting class sizes for the youngest primary children to 18. However, recent research by the Institute of Education suggests that cutting class sizes is a relatively expensive way to improve results, and only a significant benefit when there are a number of unruly children in the class. Instead teachers' assessment methods can have a cheaper positive effect on children's achievement.
Knight's comments came as a government backed review of maths in primary schools reported that teaching is being undermined because it has become "socially acceptable" to brag about being bad with numbers. Every primary school should have a specialist maths teacher and the government should revisit the requirement that new primary teachers need only a grade C in maths GCSE, Sir Peter Williams, chancellor of Leicester University, said. "The UK remains one of the few advanced nations where it is socially acceptable - fashionable, even - to profess an inability to cope with mathematics. That is hardly conducive to a home environment in which mathematics is seen by children as an essential and rewarding part of their everyday lives," he said. "The principal focus of this review is the role of teachers and practitioners, their education and training, and how society values and rewards them."
Shadow children's secretary Michael Gove said: "The government cannot simultaneously say it is going to deliver personalised learning and then support class sizes at the level Jim Knight is talking about. "We have seen a trend over the last few years towards bigger classes and bigger schools. That runs directly counter to parents' priorities and is not the right direction for education in this country."
Source
EU Rules: Violent criminal cannot be deported from Britain
A foreign criminal who attacked and robbed a pensioner cannot be deported because he is not considered dangerous enough, the Court of Appeal has ruled. The decision has rendered the Government virtually powerless to remove even the most vicious offenders if they come from within the European Union. Ministers wanted to remove the 38-year-old Italian, who lives in Newport, Gwent, at the end of a nine-year jail term imposed for violent robbery
But the Court of Appeal said there were no "imperative grounds of public security" to justify throwing him out. These were the grounds on which the Government failed last year to deport Learco Chindamo, the Italian-born killer of Philip Lawrence, the London head teacher. Under a directive, an EU national living in another member country for 10 years or more cannot be deported except under exceptional circumstances.
The criminal, whose identity was protected by the court, moved to Britain as a teenager and has five convictions. In October 2001 he was jailed for nine years for attacking and robbing a pensioner. A judge called the offence a "brutal, cowardly attack". Last year, the Asylum and Immigration Tribunal ruled that the robber should be deported on grounds of "imperative" public policy, public security or public health. It said he was a "very dangerous man" who posed a "very high risk indeed" to the public. He was also "unwilling to accept any real responsibility for the injuries to his victim".
However, the appeal judge Lady Justice Arden concluded that the tribunal had made an "error of law" and had not distinguished between "serious" and "imperative" threats to public security. The case will now be sent back to the tribunal, which will have to judge whether the offender posed an "imperative" threat - something -lawyers say applies only to terrorists
Source
Proposal for super-surgeries ‘may result in worse care’
Plans to build 152 doctors’ “super-surgeries” in England are confused and there is limited evidence that they will be effective, according to an expert in primary care. Martin Roland, director of the National Primary Care Research and Development Centre at the University of Manchester, said that primary care trusts were already being required to develop polyclinics, or multi-doctor centres, but there was “little clarity about their purpose”.
Lord Darzi of Denham, the Health Minister, has yet to produce the final report of his NHS review, but the Department of Health has indicated that it expects all 152 primary care trusts in England to have at least one poly-clinic. Private companies will provide many of them, although the department has promised GPs that they will get a level playing field in tendering for the contracts.
Professor Roland wrote in the British Medical Journal that the Government champions patient choice, but extending choice means more high-quality practices, not fewer, as the polyclinic model suggests. He said: “On average they [small practices] achieved slightly higher levels of clinical quality than the larger practices.”
Polyclinics may also have specialists working in them, but he claims that there is evidence that consultants work less efficiently outside hospitals.
Polls show that GPs are strongly opposed to polyclinics. Richard Vautrey, deputy chairman of the British Medical Association GPs’ committee, said: “This is a government plan that is potentially going to waste hundreds of millions of pounds of scarce NHS resources, creating very large health centres that many areas of the country don’t need or want.”
The medical newspaper Pulse has begun a campaign called Save Our Surgeries, and reported that polyclinics would force GP practices to close or merge, and patients to travel further.
Source
Friday, March 21, 2008
British education "Orwellian" say lazy teachers
They hate having their competence judged. They would not last 5 minutes in business
Education in England could soon become "Orwellian" under a regime of targets, testing, tables, inspections and observation, teachers' leaders warn. Julia Neal, president of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, said this was the likely outcome of over-measured, over-monitored schools. The focus is on tests and targets, not personalised learning, she told her union's annual conference in Torquay. Ms Neal imagined a sinister future with CCTV surveillance in every classroom.
Ms Neal - a history teacher in Torquay Grammar School for Girls - imagines the world in 2013, when children are tested on a rolling basis and take regular mock tests to make sure they are ready for the real ones. "Failure to demonstrate a year-on-year improvement in pass rates would be just too embarrassing," she says. The new Ministry of Trust puts so much faith in teachers' professional assessments of their pupils it deploys inspectors to visit schools, "just to help out". "Luckily for the inspectors, CCTV is now obligatory in schools so they can watch teachers in action at any time, without prior notice. "After all, inspectors are there to offer support, just like a family member, perhaps - just like a big brother."
In this vision, league tables fluctuate weekly, parents wait for the transfer window to open so they can apply for a place at the premiership schools. "What I fear is that children would continue to feel disengaged and alienated, they would behave badly, and their truancy rates would continue to rise," Ms Neal says. Her alternative vision - in which the government has listened to her union's policies - is one in which GCSEs and A-levels have been replaced by a comprehensive diploma. Assessment is carried out mostly by teachers and there are no league tables.
Curriculum flexibility gives teachers the freedom to innovate [or slack off] and schools are "buzzing" with new ways to organise learning, with a new emphasis on "a range of skills rather than a narrow range of knowledge". Talking to reporters, Ms Neal and fellow leaders of the union conceded they did not know of any widespread use of surveillance cameras or two-way mirrors in classrooms, though they said monitoring was more common in newly-built schools and academies.
They said teachers did not object to being observed teaching a class. But they wanted to have a professional dialogue about the process with a suitably qualified colleague - not "a malevolent observer" who might pick out one or two classroom interactions and draw a conclusion just from those. Excessive monitoring stifled creativity and the enjoyment of teaching and learning, Ms Neal said.
The union's deputy general secretary, Martin Johnson, said: "I think it's a sad, sad reflection on the profession at the moment that a lot of our members are quite suspicious of a lot of things." They mistrusted the motives of their managers and of the government. "As to how much that's appropriate, that's another question, but that's how they feel." The Department for Children, Schools and Families declined to comment on the union president's speech.
Source
The Jevons' Paradox
By emeritus professor Philip Stott
"It is wholly a confusion of ideas to suppose that the economical use of fuel is equivalent to a diminished consumption. The very contrary is the truth." [William Stanley Jevons (1835 - 1882)]
It is widely assumed that the more efficient use of a resource (e.g. energy or fuel) will automatically reduce both the consumption of that resource and consumption in general. This belief has fueled a widespread current trope that increasing energy efficiency is a no-brainer, whatever one thinks about global warming. But how valid is such an argument?
In 1865, the Liverpool-born logician and economist, William Stanley Jevons (1835 - 1882) [above], wrote an influential book, entitled The Coal Question; An Inquiry Concerning the Progress of the Nation, and the Probable Exhaustion of Our Coal Mines (London: Macmillan & Co). Jevons observed that the consumption of coal rose rapidly after James Watt had introduced his coal-fired steam engine, which much improved the efficiency of Thomas Newcomens earlier designs. Watts innovations made coal a more cost effective source of power, leading to an increased use of the steam engine in a wider range of industries. This in turn increased total coal consumption, even though the amount of coal required for any particular application dropped through efficiency gains.
This phenomenon has become known as Jevons Paradox, and we hear remarkably little about it these days. Indeed, somewhat paradoxically, it appears to be the last thing politicians would like us to contemplate. The basic paradox goes thus: any increase in the efficiency with which energy is employed will cause a concomitant decrease in the price or cost of that resource when measured in terms of work done. Thus, with a lower price/cost per unit of work, more work will be purchased. This additional work need not be for the same product, as it was with Jevons coal, but it may be displaced into the purchase of new product ranges or work. To put it simply: if I save money by insulating my home, I may use those savings to buy an additional computer, a patio heater, or holiday abroad. The degree of additional work, or displacement, will depend above all on the price elasticity of demand.
Thus, the more a government subsides so-called energy efficiency, the more I shall be able to use the money saved to buy further energy-using goods and services, which may well increase my overall energy demand. If my car is more energy efficient, I may well decide that I can make many more journeys.
The assumption that Homo oeconomicus will adopt energy efficiency for its own sake, and for an indeterminate good promoted by politicians, flies in the face of normal economic behaviour. Homo oeconomicus will embrace energy efficiency above all to release resources for increased overall and wider consumption.
Thus, Jevons remains highly relevant today. What is also of interest is the fact that Jevons was, fundamentally, a Malthusian, who was deeply worried about the peaking of coal, just as we are of the peaking of oil:
I must point out the painful fact that such a rate of growth will before long render our consumption of coal comparable with the total supply. In the increasing depth and difficulty of coal mining we shall meet that vague, but inevitable boundary that will stop our progress.
Yet, Jevons fell into a typical Malthusian elephant-trap, believing that petroleum would not become a significant energy source, and that coal could not be replaced by other forms of energy. Jevons was, of course, proved dramatically wrong over such energy boundaries, just as today. Neo-Malthusians will likewise be found wanting (and, highly paradoxically, it will be partly through the return of King Coal).
Nevertheless, Jevons famous Paradox could well prove the undoing of political pontificating over energy efficiency, as the money saved widens consumption yet further. Indeed, energy efficiency may increase energy use overall. What a Green paradox!
Source
The British Labour party begins to get it: "Labour needs to start urgently winning back the middle-class vote by highlighting issues such as crime and immigration if it is to win the next general election, Hazel Blears said last night. In an unashamedly Blairite new Labour speech, the Communities Secretary said it was vital that the party pitched itself as the "party of the affluent" as well as the poorest families. During a debate held by Progress, a group of modernisers, the Blairite minister Ms Blears argued that the New Labour approach had delivered three election victories by appealing to those across the social spectrum. "If we retreat into our comfort zone, and duck the tough issues such as crime and immigration our coalition will fracture." Her speech follows John Hutton's remarks earlier this month that he wanted to see "more millionaires". Mr Hutton, the Business Secretary who is also a prominent Blairite, sparked a row by urging the party not to attack huge salaries and bonuses in the City."
Hillary endorses bitchy British gold-digger: "If like me you share the twin obsessions of the Beatles and American politics, you might enjoy this example where the two "Come Together". It seems that the woman whose evidence was branded "inaccurate but also less than candid" in places "wholly exaggerated" or "make-belief", who may have attempted to defraud her husband over the mortgage on a property and has "an explosive and volatile character" and who could provide no evidence of her claim of giving 80-90% of her income to charity does have a couple of things going for her. Heather Mills has two celebrity video character witnesses proudly displayed on her website, Richard Branson and Hillary Clinton. It's been said of Senator Clinton that she reminds too many men of their first wife. Being on the side of Heather Mills won't help dispel that impression."
They hate having their competence judged. They would not last 5 minutes in business
Education in England could soon become "Orwellian" under a regime of targets, testing, tables, inspections and observation, teachers' leaders warn. Julia Neal, president of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, said this was the likely outcome of over-measured, over-monitored schools. The focus is on tests and targets, not personalised learning, she told her union's annual conference in Torquay. Ms Neal imagined a sinister future with CCTV surveillance in every classroom.
Ms Neal - a history teacher in Torquay Grammar School for Girls - imagines the world in 2013, when children are tested on a rolling basis and take regular mock tests to make sure they are ready for the real ones. "Failure to demonstrate a year-on-year improvement in pass rates would be just too embarrassing," she says. The new Ministry of Trust puts so much faith in teachers' professional assessments of their pupils it deploys inspectors to visit schools, "just to help out". "Luckily for the inspectors, CCTV is now obligatory in schools so they can watch teachers in action at any time, without prior notice. "After all, inspectors are there to offer support, just like a family member, perhaps - just like a big brother."
In this vision, league tables fluctuate weekly, parents wait for the transfer window to open so they can apply for a place at the premiership schools. "What I fear is that children would continue to feel disengaged and alienated, they would behave badly, and their truancy rates would continue to rise," Ms Neal says. Her alternative vision - in which the government has listened to her union's policies - is one in which GCSEs and A-levels have been replaced by a comprehensive diploma. Assessment is carried out mostly by teachers and there are no league tables.
Curriculum flexibility gives teachers the freedom to innovate [or slack off] and schools are "buzzing" with new ways to organise learning, with a new emphasis on "a range of skills rather than a narrow range of knowledge". Talking to reporters, Ms Neal and fellow leaders of the union conceded they did not know of any widespread use of surveillance cameras or two-way mirrors in classrooms, though they said monitoring was more common in newly-built schools and academies.
They said teachers did not object to being observed teaching a class. But they wanted to have a professional dialogue about the process with a suitably qualified colleague - not "a malevolent observer" who might pick out one or two classroom interactions and draw a conclusion just from those. Excessive monitoring stifled creativity and the enjoyment of teaching and learning, Ms Neal said.
The union's deputy general secretary, Martin Johnson, said: "I think it's a sad, sad reflection on the profession at the moment that a lot of our members are quite suspicious of a lot of things." They mistrusted the motives of their managers and of the government. "As to how much that's appropriate, that's another question, but that's how they feel." The Department for Children, Schools and Families declined to comment on the union president's speech.
Source
The Jevons' Paradox
By emeritus professor Philip Stott
"It is wholly a confusion of ideas to suppose that the economical use of fuel is equivalent to a diminished consumption. The very contrary is the truth." [William Stanley Jevons (1835 - 1882)]
It is widely assumed that the more efficient use of a resource (e.g. energy or fuel) will automatically reduce both the consumption of that resource and consumption in general. This belief has fueled a widespread current trope that increasing energy efficiency is a no-brainer, whatever one thinks about global warming. But how valid is such an argument?
In 1865, the Liverpool-born logician and economist, William Stanley Jevons (1835 - 1882) [above], wrote an influential book, entitled The Coal Question; An Inquiry Concerning the Progress of the Nation, and the Probable Exhaustion of Our Coal Mines (London: Macmillan & Co). Jevons observed that the consumption of coal rose rapidly after James Watt had introduced his coal-fired steam engine, which much improved the efficiency of Thomas Newcomens earlier designs. Watts innovations made coal a more cost effective source of power, leading to an increased use of the steam engine in a wider range of industries. This in turn increased total coal consumption, even though the amount of coal required for any particular application dropped through efficiency gains.
This phenomenon has become known as Jevons Paradox, and we hear remarkably little about it these days. Indeed, somewhat paradoxically, it appears to be the last thing politicians would like us to contemplate. The basic paradox goes thus: any increase in the efficiency with which energy is employed will cause a concomitant decrease in the price or cost of that resource when measured in terms of work done. Thus, with a lower price/cost per unit of work, more work will be purchased. This additional work need not be for the same product, as it was with Jevons coal, but it may be displaced into the purchase of new product ranges or work. To put it simply: if I save money by insulating my home, I may use those savings to buy an additional computer, a patio heater, or holiday abroad. The degree of additional work, or displacement, will depend above all on the price elasticity of demand.
Thus, the more a government subsides so-called energy efficiency, the more I shall be able to use the money saved to buy further energy-using goods and services, which may well increase my overall energy demand. If my car is more energy efficient, I may well decide that I can make many more journeys.
The assumption that Homo oeconomicus will adopt energy efficiency for its own sake, and for an indeterminate good promoted by politicians, flies in the face of normal economic behaviour. Homo oeconomicus will embrace energy efficiency above all to release resources for increased overall and wider consumption.
Thus, Jevons remains highly relevant today. What is also of interest is the fact that Jevons was, fundamentally, a Malthusian, who was deeply worried about the peaking of coal, just as we are of the peaking of oil:
I must point out the painful fact that such a rate of growth will before long render our consumption of coal comparable with the total supply. In the increasing depth and difficulty of coal mining we shall meet that vague, but inevitable boundary that will stop our progress.
Yet, Jevons fell into a typical Malthusian elephant-trap, believing that petroleum would not become a significant energy source, and that coal could not be replaced by other forms of energy. Jevons was, of course, proved dramatically wrong over such energy boundaries, just as today. Neo-Malthusians will likewise be found wanting (and, highly paradoxically, it will be partly through the return of King Coal).
Nevertheless, Jevons famous Paradox could well prove the undoing of political pontificating over energy efficiency, as the money saved widens consumption yet further. Indeed, energy efficiency may increase energy use overall. What a Green paradox!
Source
The British Labour party begins to get it: "Labour needs to start urgently winning back the middle-class vote by highlighting issues such as crime and immigration if it is to win the next general election, Hazel Blears said last night. In an unashamedly Blairite new Labour speech, the Communities Secretary said it was vital that the party pitched itself as the "party of the affluent" as well as the poorest families. During a debate held by Progress, a group of modernisers, the Blairite minister Ms Blears argued that the New Labour approach had delivered three election victories by appealing to those across the social spectrum. "If we retreat into our comfort zone, and duck the tough issues such as crime and immigration our coalition will fracture." Her speech follows John Hutton's remarks earlier this month that he wanted to see "more millionaires". Mr Hutton, the Business Secretary who is also a prominent Blairite, sparked a row by urging the party not to attack huge salaries and bonuses in the City."
Hillary endorses bitchy British gold-digger: "If like me you share the twin obsessions of the Beatles and American politics, you might enjoy this example where the two "Come Together". It seems that the woman whose evidence was branded "inaccurate but also less than candid" in places "wholly exaggerated" or "make-belief", who may have attempted to defraud her husband over the mortgage on a property and has "an explosive and volatile character" and who could provide no evidence of her claim of giving 80-90% of her income to charity does have a couple of things going for her. Heather Mills has two celebrity video character witnesses proudly displayed on her website, Richard Branson and Hillary Clinton. It's been said of Senator Clinton that she reminds too many men of their first wife. Being on the side of Heather Mills won't help dispel that impression."
Thursday, March 20, 2008
Evil British bureaucracy again
The wife of a soldier faces deportation as her husband prepares to fight in Iraq or Afghanistan. Canadian-born Samantha Crozier, 23, has been given notice by the Home Office to leave the country by April 30, when her temporary visa expires after her application for British citizenship was refused. Mrs Crozier, who has a British mother, Antoinette, claims their children, Ethan, two, and Celeb, one, will have to be put into care while her husband, Lance Corporal Andrew Crozier, is sent on a tour of duty after he completes training. Mrs Crozier says she has spoken to 15 other Army wives facing deportation.
Mrs Crozier moved to England with her husband, also 23, in October last year. She said MoD officials failed to tell her of the complicated procedure to become a British citizen. Ethan and Celeb, who were born while her husband was posted to Osnabruck, Germany, were awarded full British citizenship and Mrs Crozier applied for a Status Stamp at the British embassy in Dusseldorf. The stamp allowed her to stay in Germany at the UK base for five years. She was stopped at Newcastle ferry port by Customs and Excise and advised to apply for citizenship. She said she was told that because she her husband was born in Northumberland her application would be successful.
However, Mrs Crozier received a letter last month, the day after her birthday, from the Home Office rejecting her application. It read: "You have applied for leave to remain in the United Kingdom on the basis of your marriage to Andrew Douglas Crozier. "However, the immigration rules direct that a person seeking such leave is to be refused if they do not meet the requirements set out in the immigration rules. "This includes that the applicant has limited leave to remain in the United Kingdom other than where that leave is of six months duration or less. On 30 October 2007 you were granted limited leave to enter as a visitor for a period of six months from 30 October 2007 until 30 April 2008 therefore you do not meet the requirements. "You are not entitled to appeal this decision."
Mrs Crozier, living in Bordon, near Petersfield, Hants, said: "We rang the MoD to tell them we were coming over and they gave us no advice other then to tell us to have a nice journey. "I think it is disgraceful. I came here to start a new life with my husband and my two wonderful little boys. My husband is very patriotic and would gladly fight for his country but it seems his country won't fight for him."
A Home Office spokesman said: "Overseas nationals wishing to come to the UK on the basis of marriage should apply for entry clearance from abroad. They will be given leave to enter the UK for two years, after which they can apply for settlement."
Source
British white working-class boys 'consigned to educational scrapheap by Labour and liberal establishment'
White working-class boys are being consigned to the educational scrapheap because politically-correct ministers and officials are ignoring their poor performance, members of the ATL claimed yesterday. They said boys from low-income homes do significantly worse in exams than any other group of pupils but their plight is being "overlooked" by Labour and the liberal establishment. Initiatives to tackle under-achievement often centre on improving the performance of ethnic minorities, said London-based member John Puckrin. Fears of playing into the hands of the National Front and BNP are fuelling a widespread reluctance to speak up for the plight of the white working-classes, he claimed.
Figures showed recently that only 15 per cent of white boys qualifying for free school meals leave school having mastered the three Rs. For black boys from similar backgrounds, the figure is 22 per cent while for Asians it is 29 per cent and Chinese 52 per cent.
"All too often diversity is only thought of in terms of ethnicity or faith," Mr Puckrin told the conference. "I believe we need to restate and recognise the diversity of class. "The lowest attaining section in education today are white working-class boys; in some of our cities they are also the largest single ethnic minority. "Why have the needs of this group been overlooked? I suspect it is the law of unexpected consequences. "The Labour party has ceased to talk the language of class in order to win general elections.
"Liberal-minded people and the media ceased to highlight the particular problems of this group for fear of lending weight to the arguments of the National Front and BNP. This is a self-defeating position to my mind." He said action plans had been put in place to tackle race and gender divides but "silence then ensued on class".
Mr Puckrin's proposal for a probe into the effects of white working-class underachievement on the economy in specific regions was backed by the union. He also said schools should be given freedom to set lessons in subjects that could assist community cohesion, such as history. He added: "It is historical fact that most of the jobs lost in communities destroyed by Britain's de-industralisation have involved male workers. "It is easy to forget that we once had docks in London and Liverpool, shipyards in Belfast and Newcastle, coalmines in Nottingham and Kent, steelworkers in Sheffield and South Wales. "Investment capital may have moved on to hedge funds, but the people remain."
Studies have previously identified parental indifference and family break-ups as reasons poor white boys have slipped behind other groups. Mr Puckrin's claims underline research last year from Manchester University which found that money was being targeted at pupils with English as an additional language. "White learners from highly disadvantaged backgrounds were reportedly often overlooked," their report said
Source
GREEN TAXES WILL DRIVE BRITAIN INTO THE RED
One estimate of the cost of the 18 new green taxes announced by Alistair Darling to save the planet was 3 billion pounds a year. But this is only the start of it. We already pay out 3 billion a year through our electricity bills, for the EU's Emissions Trading Scheme and the "renewables obligation", which obliges us to pay a 100 per cent subsidy to wind turbine companies for the derisory amount of electricity they produce (and all to save not a milligram of CO2 emissions, which continue to rise EU-wide almost as fast as our taxes).
This 6 billion may seem peanuts compared with Mr Darling's terrifying 43 billion budget deficit, but it still amounts to 255 for every household in the country.
Throw in such other items as airline taxes and those fatuous Home Information Packs (required by yet another EU directive aimed at global warming), and the price we are to pay for "fighting climate change" seems set to rise as exponentially as talk about CO2 emissions. It is just as well that the last two months have shown one of the sharpest drops in global temperatures ever recorded.
But if the warming panic does turn out to be no more than a colossal scare, what justification will Darling and Co find for hoicking our taxes still higher in the future - just as the global economy seems about to plunge into its deepest recession for 70 years?
Source
COST OF MEETING EU RENEWABLE TARGET - REPORT FOR UK GOVERNMENT
An email from Jeremy Nicholson [jnicholson@eef.org.uk], Director - Energy Intensive Users Group
Readers might be interested to see this consultant's report, comissioned by the UK government, which estimates the cost of attempting to meet the EU target for 20% of energy consumption to be met by renewables by 2020. Their conclusions are sobering:
"The Central Case least cost scenario estimates the efficient annual incremental cost of meeting the target in 2020 to be EUR18.8bn, with the lifetime cost of the policy (the 'lifetime costs') being EUR259bn."
"The incremental abatement cost in 2020 is EUR49/tCO2 and EUR82/tCO2 in the UK, with the incremental cost in the transport sector being an order of magnitude higher (EUR276/tCO2 for the EU and EUR259/tCO2)"
HAS THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT COOKED ITS EMISSIONS DATA?
BRITAIN'S greenhouse gas emissions are 12% higher than claimed by Labour, according to an investigation by the National Audit Office (NAO). The report could undermine Gordon Brown's claims to be creating a low-carbon economy.
The NAO analysis, published this weekend, says Labour's figures exclude aviation, shipping, British businesses operating abroad and emissions caused by Britons holidaying overseas. This makes Britain's emission figures seem artificially low. It also warns taxpayers face a 5 billion pound bill from 2010 to 2020 because government failures in meeting greenhouse emissions reduction targets mean it will have to buy carbon credits from overseas.
The government has claimed that in 2005 Britain generated greenhouse gases equivalent to 656m tons of carbon dioxide (CO2). The NAO report suggests the real figure is closer to 733m tonnes. It also contradicts Labour's claims that CO2 emissions have fallen 6.4% since 1990.
This weekend Peter Ainsworth, the Conservative shadow environment secretary, accused the government of "Enron-style accounting" and said he would raise the issue during debates on the Climate Change Bill in parliament this week.
The NAO conducted the probe following concern over the way in which the government maintains two sets of accounts to measure changes in greenhouse gas emissions. The figures quoted publicly by Brown and other ministers are all drawn from the so-called Kyoto accounting system, allowing the government to claim the lower emissions figure. The term "equivalent" is used because the figure include CO2 plus five other greenhouse gases such as methane and nitrous oxide. They are all added together and expressed in terms of CO2 equivalents for the sake of convenience.
Since CO2 is the most important greenhouse gas, the government often focuses on it alone. The NAO report points out, however, that the Office for National Statistics (ONS) maintains its own environmental accounts which measure the same gases but use stricter Treasury accounting rules. The NAO report states: "For 2005 the environmental accounts reported total greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to 733m tonnes of CO2." Referring to CO2 alone, it added: "Our figures demonstrate that there have been no reductions in UK CO2 emissions if measured on the basis of the environmental accounts."
Dieter Helm, professor of energy policy at Oxford University, said: "It makes no sense to exclude shipping and aviation from the figures for Britain's emissions. They are vital parts of the British economy which are growing fast."
The NAO is particularly concerned about the government's decision to abandon targets for cutting domestic emissions and to rely instead on carbon credits purchased from overseas.
Last week the House of Lords passed an amendment to the Climate Change Bill to prevent the government using carbon credits to meet more than 30% of its carbon reduction targets. The government plans to reverse this amendment.
Source
Gene therapy advancing
A new way of turning genes on and off, pioneered by a Nobel prize-winning British scientist, is promising to transform treatment of conditions such as HIV/Aids, heart disease and diabetes. The technique, devised by Sir Aaron Klug, of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, allows scientists to act with unprecedented precision against genes that affect a wide range of diseases, switching them on or off permanently.
The first drugs designed to target the genes have begun clinical trials in the United States on patients with arterial disease and diabetes-induced nerve damage. A third trial, for HIV, is due to begin within months. If they are successful, scientists predict that the technique could change the way many diseases are treated, making genetic therapies a routine part of medicine for the first time. In some cases, the method will be used to switch off rogue genes that promote conditions such as heart failure or cancer. In others, it will help to activate genes that protect against nerve damage or encourage blood vessel growth.
In treating HIV, the aim is to modify T-cells from patients' immune systems so that they become immune to infection with the virus. This would leave them with some working T-cells with which to fight off other infections, which are the chief cause of Aids deaths. The technique relies on a natural process by which the activity of genes is raised or lowered by proteins called transcription factors.
In 1985 Sir Aaron discovered a new class of proteins that mimic this function and can recognise specific stretches of DNA and bind to them, boosting the activity of genes or damping them down. He named them zinc-finger proteins, after the metal that holds them together and the way in which they grasp DNA. Sangamo BioSciences, a company in California, has already developed several drugs based on the principle. A zinc-finger protein specific to a gene is loaded with an enzyme called a nuclease, which will bind to the gene and turn it on or off. Sir Aaron told The Times: "We are taking nature's own method of regulating gene activity and exploiting it for our own purposes. We can use this technique to change the function of a single gene permanently. "The beauty of zinc-finger nucleases lies in their simplicity. Where other methods are long, arduous and often messy, it is relatively easy to switch off genes using this method. The zinc-finger design allows us to target a single gene, while the nuclease disrupts the gene." Details of the technique are published today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The most advanced of Sangamo's drugs uses a zinc-finger nuclease to treat diabetic neuropathy, a common complication of diabetes that causes nerve damage and pain. The drug binds to a gene called VEGF-A, which is known to protect the nervous system, and switches it on to prevent nerve damage. Phase 2 trials of the drug are under way. The same gene is also being targeted to treat peripheral arterial disease which causes blocked arteries in the limbs. A zinc-finger drug that has started safety trials aims to stimulate VEGF-A activity, which can promote the growth of new arteries. In the longer term, a similar approach might be used to grow new blood vessels in the heart, Sir Aaron said.
Sangamo is applying for regulatory permission to start testing a zinc-finger nuclease on HIV patients as well as developing drugs to treat glioblastoma, a type of brain cancer, and single-gene disorders such as sickle-cell anaemia.
Source
Must not speak ill of Germans
We read:
More dangerous NHS hospitals
High death rates at a Staffordshire hospital trust are to be investigated by the Healthcare Commission. The watchdog said that data showed the death rates at Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust were “out of normal range”. The inquiry will focus on what appear to be higher than normal death rates for emergency admissions. The commission will also investigate the quality of care provided across the trust, in particular to older people.
The trust, which serves 300,000 people, said yesterday that it believed its death rates were normal for a trust of its size. Martin Yeates, the chief executive, said that the trust and the Strategic Health Authority had investigated the trust’s higher than average standardised mortality rate and concluded that it was due to “problems in recording and coding information about patients”. He said this had improved in the past year.
Nigel Ellis, of the Healthcare Commission, said that it was important to “bring clarity” to the situation. “If we thought the trust was unsafe we would have already taken action,” he said.
Source
More Muslim garbage: "An Arab billionaire's son listed as a Facebook friend of a murdered socialite has been named by police as a prime suspect in the blonde's death. Yemen born Farooq Abdulhak, 26, was allegedly the last person to see Martine Vik Magnussen alive after leaving the exclusive Maddox Club with her early Friday morning. The Norwegian socialite's body was found two days later, partially buried under a pile of rubble in the basement of an exclusive London apartment building where Mr Abdulhak was reportedly living. The Daily Mail reported that Magnussen was believed to have been strangled, although investigators told the newspaper that further scientific analysis was being carried out on her body. Mr Abdulhak and the 23-year-old blonde studied business together at the prestigious Regent's College in London. They were listed as friends on Magnussen's Facebook page, but Mr Abdulhak has since deleted his online profile. Associates of Mr Abdulhak tried to contact him over the weekend but he did not reply to calls or texts. Mr Abdulhak's father Shaher, a Yemeni billionaire, is a major hotelier and Pepsi-Cola executive. Farooq was born in Yemen, but has lived in London since he was a child. The Sun reported that flight records show Farooq left Britain "shortly after the time of Martine's death". Police now believe the billionaire's son has fled to Yemen - which has no extradition treaty with Britain".
The wife of a soldier faces deportation as her husband prepares to fight in Iraq or Afghanistan. Canadian-born Samantha Crozier, 23, has been given notice by the Home Office to leave the country by April 30, when her temporary visa expires after her application for British citizenship was refused. Mrs Crozier, who has a British mother, Antoinette, claims their children, Ethan, two, and Celeb, one, will have to be put into care while her husband, Lance Corporal Andrew Crozier, is sent on a tour of duty after he completes training. Mrs Crozier says she has spoken to 15 other Army wives facing deportation.
Mrs Crozier moved to England with her husband, also 23, in October last year. She said MoD officials failed to tell her of the complicated procedure to become a British citizen. Ethan and Celeb, who were born while her husband was posted to Osnabruck, Germany, were awarded full British citizenship and Mrs Crozier applied for a Status Stamp at the British embassy in Dusseldorf. The stamp allowed her to stay in Germany at the UK base for five years. She was stopped at Newcastle ferry port by Customs and Excise and advised to apply for citizenship. She said she was told that because she her husband was born in Northumberland her application would be successful.
However, Mrs Crozier received a letter last month, the day after her birthday, from the Home Office rejecting her application. It read: "You have applied for leave to remain in the United Kingdom on the basis of your marriage to Andrew Douglas Crozier. "However, the immigration rules direct that a person seeking such leave is to be refused if they do not meet the requirements set out in the immigration rules. "This includes that the applicant has limited leave to remain in the United Kingdom other than where that leave is of six months duration or less. On 30 October 2007 you were granted limited leave to enter as a visitor for a period of six months from 30 October 2007 until 30 April 2008 therefore you do not meet the requirements. "You are not entitled to appeal this decision."
Mrs Crozier, living in Bordon, near Petersfield, Hants, said: "We rang the MoD to tell them we were coming over and they gave us no advice other then to tell us to have a nice journey. "I think it is disgraceful. I came here to start a new life with my husband and my two wonderful little boys. My husband is very patriotic and would gladly fight for his country but it seems his country won't fight for him."
A Home Office spokesman said: "Overseas nationals wishing to come to the UK on the basis of marriage should apply for entry clearance from abroad. They will be given leave to enter the UK for two years, after which they can apply for settlement."
Source
British white working-class boys 'consigned to educational scrapheap by Labour and liberal establishment'
White working-class boys are being consigned to the educational scrapheap because politically-correct ministers and officials are ignoring their poor performance, members of the ATL claimed yesterday. They said boys from low-income homes do significantly worse in exams than any other group of pupils but their plight is being "overlooked" by Labour and the liberal establishment. Initiatives to tackle under-achievement often centre on improving the performance of ethnic minorities, said London-based member John Puckrin. Fears of playing into the hands of the National Front and BNP are fuelling a widespread reluctance to speak up for the plight of the white working-classes, he claimed.
Figures showed recently that only 15 per cent of white boys qualifying for free school meals leave school having mastered the three Rs. For black boys from similar backgrounds, the figure is 22 per cent while for Asians it is 29 per cent and Chinese 52 per cent.
"All too often diversity is only thought of in terms of ethnicity or faith," Mr Puckrin told the conference. "I believe we need to restate and recognise the diversity of class. "The lowest attaining section in education today are white working-class boys; in some of our cities they are also the largest single ethnic minority. "Why have the needs of this group been overlooked? I suspect it is the law of unexpected consequences. "The Labour party has ceased to talk the language of class in order to win general elections.
"Liberal-minded people and the media ceased to highlight the particular problems of this group for fear of lending weight to the arguments of the National Front and BNP. This is a self-defeating position to my mind." He said action plans had been put in place to tackle race and gender divides but "silence then ensued on class".
Mr Puckrin's proposal for a probe into the effects of white working-class underachievement on the economy in specific regions was backed by the union. He also said schools should be given freedom to set lessons in subjects that could assist community cohesion, such as history. He added: "It is historical fact that most of the jobs lost in communities destroyed by Britain's de-industralisation have involved male workers. "It is easy to forget that we once had docks in London and Liverpool, shipyards in Belfast and Newcastle, coalmines in Nottingham and Kent, steelworkers in Sheffield and South Wales. "Investment capital may have moved on to hedge funds, but the people remain."
Studies have previously identified parental indifference and family break-ups as reasons poor white boys have slipped behind other groups. Mr Puckrin's claims underline research last year from Manchester University which found that money was being targeted at pupils with English as an additional language. "White learners from highly disadvantaged backgrounds were reportedly often overlooked," their report said
Source
GREEN TAXES WILL DRIVE BRITAIN INTO THE RED
One estimate of the cost of the 18 new green taxes announced by Alistair Darling to save the planet was 3 billion pounds a year. But this is only the start of it. We already pay out 3 billion a year through our electricity bills, for the EU's Emissions Trading Scheme and the "renewables obligation", which obliges us to pay a 100 per cent subsidy to wind turbine companies for the derisory amount of electricity they produce (and all to save not a milligram of CO2 emissions, which continue to rise EU-wide almost as fast as our taxes).
This 6 billion may seem peanuts compared with Mr Darling's terrifying 43 billion budget deficit, but it still amounts to 255 for every household in the country.
Throw in such other items as airline taxes and those fatuous Home Information Packs (required by yet another EU directive aimed at global warming), and the price we are to pay for "fighting climate change" seems set to rise as exponentially as talk about CO2 emissions. It is just as well that the last two months have shown one of the sharpest drops in global temperatures ever recorded.
But if the warming panic does turn out to be no more than a colossal scare, what justification will Darling and Co find for hoicking our taxes still higher in the future - just as the global economy seems about to plunge into its deepest recession for 70 years?
Source
COST OF MEETING EU RENEWABLE TARGET - REPORT FOR UK GOVERNMENT
An email from Jeremy Nicholson [jnicholson@eef.org.uk], Director - Energy Intensive Users Group
Readers might be interested to see this consultant's report, comissioned by the UK government, which estimates the cost of attempting to meet the EU target for 20% of energy consumption to be met by renewables by 2020. Their conclusions are sobering:
"The Central Case least cost scenario estimates the efficient annual incremental cost of meeting the target in 2020 to be EUR18.8bn, with the lifetime cost of the policy (the 'lifetime costs') being EUR259bn."
"The incremental abatement cost in 2020 is EUR49/tCO2 and EUR82/tCO2 in the UK, with the incremental cost in the transport sector being an order of magnitude higher (EUR276/tCO2 for the EU and EUR259/tCO2)"
HAS THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT COOKED ITS EMISSIONS DATA?
BRITAIN'S greenhouse gas emissions are 12% higher than claimed by Labour, according to an investigation by the National Audit Office (NAO). The report could undermine Gordon Brown's claims to be creating a low-carbon economy.
The NAO analysis, published this weekend, says Labour's figures exclude aviation, shipping, British businesses operating abroad and emissions caused by Britons holidaying overseas. This makes Britain's emission figures seem artificially low. It also warns taxpayers face a 5 billion pound bill from 2010 to 2020 because government failures in meeting greenhouse emissions reduction targets mean it will have to buy carbon credits from overseas.
The government has claimed that in 2005 Britain generated greenhouse gases equivalent to 656m tons of carbon dioxide (CO2). The NAO report suggests the real figure is closer to 733m tonnes. It also contradicts Labour's claims that CO2 emissions have fallen 6.4% since 1990.
This weekend Peter Ainsworth, the Conservative shadow environment secretary, accused the government of "Enron-style accounting" and said he would raise the issue during debates on the Climate Change Bill in parliament this week.
The NAO conducted the probe following concern over the way in which the government maintains two sets of accounts to measure changes in greenhouse gas emissions. The figures quoted publicly by Brown and other ministers are all drawn from the so-called Kyoto accounting system, allowing the government to claim the lower emissions figure. The term "equivalent" is used because the figure include CO2 plus five other greenhouse gases such as methane and nitrous oxide. They are all added together and expressed in terms of CO2 equivalents for the sake of convenience.
Since CO2 is the most important greenhouse gas, the government often focuses on it alone. The NAO report points out, however, that the Office for National Statistics (ONS) maintains its own environmental accounts which measure the same gases but use stricter Treasury accounting rules. The NAO report states: "For 2005 the environmental accounts reported total greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to 733m tonnes of CO2." Referring to CO2 alone, it added: "Our figures demonstrate that there have been no reductions in UK CO2 emissions if measured on the basis of the environmental accounts."
Dieter Helm, professor of energy policy at Oxford University, said: "It makes no sense to exclude shipping and aviation from the figures for Britain's emissions. They are vital parts of the British economy which are growing fast."
The NAO is particularly concerned about the government's decision to abandon targets for cutting domestic emissions and to rely instead on carbon credits purchased from overseas.
Last week the House of Lords passed an amendment to the Climate Change Bill to prevent the government using carbon credits to meet more than 30% of its carbon reduction targets. The government plans to reverse this amendment.
Source
Gene therapy advancing
A new way of turning genes on and off, pioneered by a Nobel prize-winning British scientist, is promising to transform treatment of conditions such as HIV/Aids, heart disease and diabetes. The technique, devised by Sir Aaron Klug, of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, allows scientists to act with unprecedented precision against genes that affect a wide range of diseases, switching them on or off permanently.
The first drugs designed to target the genes have begun clinical trials in the United States on patients with arterial disease and diabetes-induced nerve damage. A third trial, for HIV, is due to begin within months. If they are successful, scientists predict that the technique could change the way many diseases are treated, making genetic therapies a routine part of medicine for the first time. In some cases, the method will be used to switch off rogue genes that promote conditions such as heart failure or cancer. In others, it will help to activate genes that protect against nerve damage or encourage blood vessel growth.
In treating HIV, the aim is to modify T-cells from patients' immune systems so that they become immune to infection with the virus. This would leave them with some working T-cells with which to fight off other infections, which are the chief cause of Aids deaths. The technique relies on a natural process by which the activity of genes is raised or lowered by proteins called transcription factors.
In 1985 Sir Aaron discovered a new class of proteins that mimic this function and can recognise specific stretches of DNA and bind to them, boosting the activity of genes or damping them down. He named them zinc-finger proteins, after the metal that holds them together and the way in which they grasp DNA. Sangamo BioSciences, a company in California, has already developed several drugs based on the principle. A zinc-finger protein specific to a gene is loaded with an enzyme called a nuclease, which will bind to the gene and turn it on or off. Sir Aaron told The Times: "We are taking nature's own method of regulating gene activity and exploiting it for our own purposes. We can use this technique to change the function of a single gene permanently. "The beauty of zinc-finger nucleases lies in their simplicity. Where other methods are long, arduous and often messy, it is relatively easy to switch off genes using this method. The zinc-finger design allows us to target a single gene, while the nuclease disrupts the gene." Details of the technique are published today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The most advanced of Sangamo's drugs uses a zinc-finger nuclease to treat diabetic neuropathy, a common complication of diabetes that causes nerve damage and pain. The drug binds to a gene called VEGF-A, which is known to protect the nervous system, and switches it on to prevent nerve damage. Phase 2 trials of the drug are under way. The same gene is also being targeted to treat peripheral arterial disease which causes blocked arteries in the limbs. A zinc-finger drug that has started safety trials aims to stimulate VEGF-A activity, which can promote the growth of new arteries. In the longer term, a similar approach might be used to grow new blood vessels in the heart, Sir Aaron said.
Sangamo is applying for regulatory permission to start testing a zinc-finger nuclease on HIV patients as well as developing drugs to treat glioblastoma, a type of brain cancer, and single-gene disorders such as sickle-cell anaemia.
Source
Must not speak ill of Germans
We read:
"The captain of the Oceana had enough. "We don't want that kind of Germanic behavior," Christopher Wells joked to his mostly British passengers about the squabbling over deck chairs on his cruise ship. In today's politically ber-correct days, such staples of British humor are verboten. Mr. Wells now stands accused of racism.
The two-week Caribbean cruise almost ended in a brawl last month. Some holidaymakers infuriated other guests by using towels to reserve deck chairs, otherwise empty, for hours. Such behavior is, in the British holiday imagination, firmly associated with Germans, who are reputed (fairly or not) to have pioneered this use of the towel to hog prime suntanning spots....
The Oceana's captain must by now regret what he probably considered an innocent jest but for which he was forced to apologize. Some of the passengers reported the skipper (who has a German wife) to the U.K. Human Rights Commission.
Source
More dangerous NHS hospitals
High death rates at a Staffordshire hospital trust are to be investigated by the Healthcare Commission. The watchdog said that data showed the death rates at Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust were “out of normal range”. The inquiry will focus on what appear to be higher than normal death rates for emergency admissions. The commission will also investigate the quality of care provided across the trust, in particular to older people.
The trust, which serves 300,000 people, said yesterday that it believed its death rates were normal for a trust of its size. Martin Yeates, the chief executive, said that the trust and the Strategic Health Authority had investigated the trust’s higher than average standardised mortality rate and concluded that it was due to “problems in recording and coding information about patients”. He said this had improved in the past year.
Nigel Ellis, of the Healthcare Commission, said that it was important to “bring clarity” to the situation. “If we thought the trust was unsafe we would have already taken action,” he said.
Source
More Muslim garbage: "An Arab billionaire's son listed as a Facebook friend of a murdered socialite has been named by police as a prime suspect in the blonde's death. Yemen born Farooq Abdulhak, 26, was allegedly the last person to see Martine Vik Magnussen alive after leaving the exclusive Maddox Club with her early Friday morning. The Norwegian socialite's body was found two days later, partially buried under a pile of rubble in the basement of an exclusive London apartment building where Mr Abdulhak was reportedly living. The Daily Mail reported that Magnussen was believed to have been strangled, although investigators told the newspaper that further scientific analysis was being carried out on her body. Mr Abdulhak and the 23-year-old blonde studied business together at the prestigious Regent's College in London. They were listed as friends on Magnussen's Facebook page, but Mr Abdulhak has since deleted his online profile. Associates of Mr Abdulhak tried to contact him over the weekend but he did not reply to calls or texts. Mr Abdulhak's father Shaher, a Yemeni billionaire, is a major hotelier and Pepsi-Cola executive. Farooq was born in Yemen, but has lived in London since he was a child. The Sun reported that flight records show Farooq left Britain "shortly after the time of Martine's death". Police now believe the billionaire's son has fled to Yemen - which has no extradition treaty with Britain".
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Britain tries to gag judges
Resorting to censorship is a kneejerk for Leftist officials: It's their first response to criticism:
Must not criticize government failures? Whither democracy?
British "equality" law could bar white men from jobs
White men could be legally blocked from getting jobs under new anti-discrimination laws being considered by Labour. Employers would be able to give jobs to women or ethnic minority candidates in preference to other applicants, under the plans unveiled by equalities minister Harriet Harman. If two candidates were equally qualified for a position, employers would be able to reject the white person or the man in favour of a black person or a woman. But the plans are due to be criticised by business leaders and last night, even equalities campaigners expressed doubt.
Miss Harman - known as Harriet Harperson for her politically correct views - wants to look at how to bring U.S.-style "positive action" to Britain, saying it is vital to ensure the workforce more accurately reflects the demographic make-up of the population. [Why?] She says too many women and people from ethnic minorities are being held back because they cannot break through the "glass ceiling".
The new laws would only come into play where two equally qualified candidates had applied for the same post, allowing the employer to tip the balance in favour of minority candidates. Businesses would not be compelled to favour the female or black candidate but the law would be changed to ensure they could not be sued for turning down a white man. The proposals would also allow universities to select more female students in male-dominated subjects such as science.
But equal rights campaigners said the new rules would have a limited effect, and that action should be targeted on equal pay. Katherine Rake of the Fawcett Society, which campaigns on equal pay, said: "How you would really hold that up in a court of law is not clear and, if it isn't, employers may be reluctant to use it. "You are probably talking about a handful of cases." The present law says employers are allowed to say they welcome applications from minority candidates, and they are allowed to promote jobs to specific groups.
Theresa May, Conservative spokesperson for women, said: "One of the real problems facing women today is the gender pay gap. "If Harriet Harman really wants to help women in the work place she should strengthen the existing laws on equal pay. We have recently put forward proposals to do just that and our proposals would have a real impact on women's lives."
A spokesman for Harriet Harman said: "This is under discussion but no decisions have yet been made." The changes would be included in the new equalities Bill, which will also give new rights to mothers to breast-feed in public. Golf clubs would have to give female players equal access. Miss Harman also wants to force companies to conduct "pay audits", reviewing staff salaries to ensure they are not underpaying women.
But she is facing opposition from within the Cabinet on this from ministers who are worried about antagonising business yet further. Last year Miss Harman called for all-black shortlists in constituencies with high ethnic-minority populations. She said that unless action was taken, it would take decades for the make-up of the Commons to accurately reflect the make-up of British society. But the plan immediately came under attack from ethnic minority MPs on the Labour backbenchers - saying black people should be selected on merit.
Source
Compared with British and French affairs, the Spitzer mess is a bit of a disappointment
By the inimitable Theodore Dalrymple. A bit lighthearted (in an understated British way) for this blog but there is no harm in a bit of fun
Men of exceptional ambition or ability, it is often said, are more highly sexed than others, though perhaps it is just that their sex lives are more closely examined than those of others. Can there really be a man living, after all, who would relish the idea that every detail of his sex life, past and present, would be revealed to the public and those whom he loves?
But if, as Henry Kissinger once said, power is the most powerful aphrodisiac, former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer's extracurricular sexual activities seem pathetic and furtive, almost adolescent, rather than deeply wicked. Resorting to prostitutes is sex without the trouble, uncertainty or potential humiliation attendant on attempted seduction. In other words, it's a crude shortcut preferred by those who are uncertain of their allures unaided by financial inducements. It is pornography elevated -- or descending -- to the level of practice.
We in Britain are certainly familiar with political scandals of a sexual nature. In 1994, for instance, a Tory member of Parliament, the brother of a clergyman, was found hanged dressed only in women's underwear. This is the kind of thing that we expect of our politicians in Britain.
It used to be that scandals involving the Labor Party mainly concerned financial irregularities and those involving the Conservative Party were predominantly sexual. Labor politicians, being socialists who detested the rich, were avid for money, however ill-gotten. Conservatives, being moralists who lamented the passing of the old order of personal restraint, were deeply attracted to sexual vice. Now that the two parties are virtually indistinguishable, from a policy perspective, they are each financially corrupt and sexually incontinent. I suppose a Hegelian would call this a dialectical synthesis that overcame contradictions.
While he was home secretary from 2001 to 2004, David Blunkett, a blind Labor politician, was discovered not only to have had an affair with, but an illegitimate child by, the U.S.-born publisher of the famous conservative anti-Labor magazine the Spectator. From the public reaction, at least as expressed in the media, one might have supposed that Britain was peopled by a mixture of anchorites in the Syrian desert, subsisting on honey and locusts, and vestal virgins -- who would commit suicide rather than indulge in sexual intercourse -- rather than a country in which 42% of births are out of wedlock, and in which sexual promiscuity is now the rule rather than the exception. Outrage, nevertheless, was unconfined. A public that demanded, as a matter of inalienable right, complete sexual freedom for itself demanded Victorian levels of propriety from its political leaders. Blunkett resigned in late 2004.
The fact that sexual scandal has spread to the Labor Party does not mean that we have given up on the expectation that the Conservative Party will titillate us. It just means that the bar of public notice has been raised a few notches. We demand the equivalent of the Fosbury Flop of sexual perversion (if one is permitted to use that term at all in these days of universal tolerance). Thus, a Conservative member of Parliament was found dead in the course of his practice of autoerotic asphyxia -- hanging yourself to achieve heightened sexual excitement brought about by decreasing oxygen to the brain, while looking at erotic pictures or having erotic fantasies. An article describing 117 such cases was recently published by the British Journal of Psychiatry.
It is generally agreed that they order these things better in France. The French are more mature about sex, though they are terrible hypocrites about money. I remember having lunch with a French author who was writing a comparative study of serial killers in France and Anglo-Saxonia. English speakers, it seems, murder serially for sex, or rather some version of it, and the French murder for money or even for furniture (one has only to remember Landru and Dr. Petiot). Which is better or morally preferable? Well, to be honest, Je ne sais pas.
The French expect their politicians to have colorful, though discreet, sex lives. No one found it at all shocking that Francois Mitterrand maintained two households, complete with an illegitimate daughter, throughout his presidency. More significant, perhaps, was that no one either found his past Petainism, or his then-current protection of high-level Petainists, shocking. French and Anglo-Saxon forms of hypocrisy are very different.
What the French find objectionable in the antics of their current president, Nicolas Sarkozy, is not their moral impropriety but their vulgarity. No sooner was he divorced (for the second time) than he was seen cavorting on an Egyptian beach with his glamorous new love, Carla Bruni, with whom he exchanged very expensive presents. The fact that Bruni, now his third wife, is very rich does not mollify the French in the slightest. Sarkozy has behaved not like a mature man but like an adolescent.
The 15-year-old daughter of a French friend explained what was wrong with him. Someone in a crowd refused to shake Sarkozy's hand and called him a fool. He replied in kind, insulting him. By contrast, when someone in a similar situation had shouted "Fool!" at Jacques Chirac when he was president, Chirac shook his hand and said, "And me, I'm Chirac." Now that, according to the 15-year-old, was class, and everything may be forgiven such a man, including, no doubt, sexual peccadilloes.
Of course, Spitzer's downfall is particularly delightful to the generality of mankind because of his almost terminal self-righteousness. It is the gulf between what he has preached and what he has practiced that so appeals to the rest of us, who know our feet are of clay. Spitzer is the Jim Bakker of public prosecution.
I wish I could say that I felt sorry for Spitzer, but I don't. His statement that "I have disappointed and failed to live up to the standard I expected of myself" makes him sound like the disgraced member of a politburo indulging in self-criticism before being sent into exile in Siberia or Kazakhstan. On the other hand, I don't want to be too hard on him, just in case someone investigates me one day. The fact is that I too have failed to live up to the standard I expected of myself.
Source
"Racist" for British puppet to allude to the past
We read:
I guess that all allusions to the past are suspect, then. Leftists would like that. History is a major inconvenience for them.
Resorting to censorship is a kneejerk for Leftist officials: It's their first response to criticism:
"Des Browne, the Defence Secretary, is trying to prevent coroners from being highly criticical of the Ministry of Defence over the deaths of British troops killed in action. In a highly unusual move, Mr Browne began legal moves yesterday to prevent coroners from using language prejudicial to the MoD when issuing verdicts on the deaths of troops who die on active service.
Lawyers for Mr Browne went to the High Court to challenge comments made by a coroner in Oxfordshire after an inquest of a Territorial Army soldier in Iraq. Private Jason Smith, 32, died of heatstroke in 2003.
Andrew Walker, the assistant deputy coroner of Oxfordshire, recorded at his inquest in November 2006 that Private Smith’s death was caused “by a serious failure to recognise and take appropriate steps to address the difficulty that he had in adjusting to the climate”.
Source
Must not criticize government failures? Whither democracy?
British "equality" law could bar white men from jobs
White men could be legally blocked from getting jobs under new anti-discrimination laws being considered by Labour. Employers would be able to give jobs to women or ethnic minority candidates in preference to other applicants, under the plans unveiled by equalities minister Harriet Harman. If two candidates were equally qualified for a position, employers would be able to reject the white person or the man in favour of a black person or a woman. But the plans are due to be criticised by business leaders and last night, even equalities campaigners expressed doubt.
Miss Harman - known as Harriet Harperson for her politically correct views - wants to look at how to bring U.S.-style "positive action" to Britain, saying it is vital to ensure the workforce more accurately reflects the demographic make-up of the population. [Why?] She says too many women and people from ethnic minorities are being held back because they cannot break through the "glass ceiling".
The new laws would only come into play where two equally qualified candidates had applied for the same post, allowing the employer to tip the balance in favour of minority candidates. Businesses would not be compelled to favour the female or black candidate but the law would be changed to ensure they could not be sued for turning down a white man. The proposals would also allow universities to select more female students in male-dominated subjects such as science.
But equal rights campaigners said the new rules would have a limited effect, and that action should be targeted on equal pay. Katherine Rake of the Fawcett Society, which campaigns on equal pay, said: "How you would really hold that up in a court of law is not clear and, if it isn't, employers may be reluctant to use it. "You are probably talking about a handful of cases." The present law says employers are allowed to say they welcome applications from minority candidates, and they are allowed to promote jobs to specific groups.
Theresa May, Conservative spokesperson for women, said: "One of the real problems facing women today is the gender pay gap. "If Harriet Harman really wants to help women in the work place she should strengthen the existing laws on equal pay. We have recently put forward proposals to do just that and our proposals would have a real impact on women's lives."
A spokesman for Harriet Harman said: "This is under discussion but no decisions have yet been made." The changes would be included in the new equalities Bill, which will also give new rights to mothers to breast-feed in public. Golf clubs would have to give female players equal access. Miss Harman also wants to force companies to conduct "pay audits", reviewing staff salaries to ensure they are not underpaying women.
But she is facing opposition from within the Cabinet on this from ministers who are worried about antagonising business yet further. Last year Miss Harman called for all-black shortlists in constituencies with high ethnic-minority populations. She said that unless action was taken, it would take decades for the make-up of the Commons to accurately reflect the make-up of British society. But the plan immediately came under attack from ethnic minority MPs on the Labour backbenchers - saying black people should be selected on merit.
Source
Compared with British and French affairs, the Spitzer mess is a bit of a disappointment
By the inimitable Theodore Dalrymple. A bit lighthearted (in an understated British way) for this blog but there is no harm in a bit of fun
Men of exceptional ambition or ability, it is often said, are more highly sexed than others, though perhaps it is just that their sex lives are more closely examined than those of others. Can there really be a man living, after all, who would relish the idea that every detail of his sex life, past and present, would be revealed to the public and those whom he loves?
But if, as Henry Kissinger once said, power is the most powerful aphrodisiac, former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer's extracurricular sexual activities seem pathetic and furtive, almost adolescent, rather than deeply wicked. Resorting to prostitutes is sex without the trouble, uncertainty or potential humiliation attendant on attempted seduction. In other words, it's a crude shortcut preferred by those who are uncertain of their allures unaided by financial inducements. It is pornography elevated -- or descending -- to the level of practice.
We in Britain are certainly familiar with political scandals of a sexual nature. In 1994, for instance, a Tory member of Parliament, the brother of a clergyman, was found hanged dressed only in women's underwear. This is the kind of thing that we expect of our politicians in Britain.
It used to be that scandals involving the Labor Party mainly concerned financial irregularities and those involving the Conservative Party were predominantly sexual. Labor politicians, being socialists who detested the rich, were avid for money, however ill-gotten. Conservatives, being moralists who lamented the passing of the old order of personal restraint, were deeply attracted to sexual vice. Now that the two parties are virtually indistinguishable, from a policy perspective, they are each financially corrupt and sexually incontinent. I suppose a Hegelian would call this a dialectical synthesis that overcame contradictions.
While he was home secretary from 2001 to 2004, David Blunkett, a blind Labor politician, was discovered not only to have had an affair with, but an illegitimate child by, the U.S.-born publisher of the famous conservative anti-Labor magazine the Spectator. From the public reaction, at least as expressed in the media, one might have supposed that Britain was peopled by a mixture of anchorites in the Syrian desert, subsisting on honey and locusts, and vestal virgins -- who would commit suicide rather than indulge in sexual intercourse -- rather than a country in which 42% of births are out of wedlock, and in which sexual promiscuity is now the rule rather than the exception. Outrage, nevertheless, was unconfined. A public that demanded, as a matter of inalienable right, complete sexual freedom for itself demanded Victorian levels of propriety from its political leaders. Blunkett resigned in late 2004.
The fact that sexual scandal has spread to the Labor Party does not mean that we have given up on the expectation that the Conservative Party will titillate us. It just means that the bar of public notice has been raised a few notches. We demand the equivalent of the Fosbury Flop of sexual perversion (if one is permitted to use that term at all in these days of universal tolerance). Thus, a Conservative member of Parliament was found dead in the course of his practice of autoerotic asphyxia -- hanging yourself to achieve heightened sexual excitement brought about by decreasing oxygen to the brain, while looking at erotic pictures or having erotic fantasies. An article describing 117 such cases was recently published by the British Journal of Psychiatry.
It is generally agreed that they order these things better in France. The French are more mature about sex, though they are terrible hypocrites about money. I remember having lunch with a French author who was writing a comparative study of serial killers in France and Anglo-Saxonia. English speakers, it seems, murder serially for sex, or rather some version of it, and the French murder for money or even for furniture (one has only to remember Landru and Dr. Petiot). Which is better or morally preferable? Well, to be honest, Je ne sais pas.
The French expect their politicians to have colorful, though discreet, sex lives. No one found it at all shocking that Francois Mitterrand maintained two households, complete with an illegitimate daughter, throughout his presidency. More significant, perhaps, was that no one either found his past Petainism, or his then-current protection of high-level Petainists, shocking. French and Anglo-Saxon forms of hypocrisy are very different.
What the French find objectionable in the antics of their current president, Nicolas Sarkozy, is not their moral impropriety but their vulgarity. No sooner was he divorced (for the second time) than he was seen cavorting on an Egyptian beach with his glamorous new love, Carla Bruni, with whom he exchanged very expensive presents. The fact that Bruni, now his third wife, is very rich does not mollify the French in the slightest. Sarkozy has behaved not like a mature man but like an adolescent.
The 15-year-old daughter of a French friend explained what was wrong with him. Someone in a crowd refused to shake Sarkozy's hand and called him a fool. He replied in kind, insulting him. By contrast, when someone in a similar situation had shouted "Fool!" at Jacques Chirac when he was president, Chirac shook his hand and said, "And me, I'm Chirac." Now that, according to the 15-year-old, was class, and everything may be forgiven such a man, including, no doubt, sexual peccadilloes.
Of course, Spitzer's downfall is particularly delightful to the generality of mankind because of his almost terminal self-righteousness. It is the gulf between what he has preached and what he has practiced that so appeals to the rest of us, who know our feet are of clay. Spitzer is the Jim Bakker of public prosecution.
I wish I could say that I felt sorry for Spitzer, but I don't. His statement that "I have disappointed and failed to live up to the standard I expected of myself" makes him sound like the disgraced member of a politburo indulging in self-criticism before being sent into exile in Siberia or Kazakhstan. On the other hand, I don't want to be too hard on him, just in case someone investigates me one day. The fact is that I too have failed to live up to the standard I expected of myself.
Source
"Racist" for British puppet to allude to the past
We read:
"A popular children's TV puppet show starring Basil Brush has been accused of racially abusing gypsies.
British police have launched an investigation into claims that an episode of the Basil Brush Show that screened on the BBC was racially offensive because it showed a gypsy woman trying to sell the puppet fox wooden pegs and a bunch of heather.
"This sort of thing happens quite regularly and we are fed up with making complaints about stereotypical comments about us in words that we find racist or offensive," Joseph Jones, vice-chairman of the Southern England Romany Gipsy and Irish Traveller Network, told the Mail on Sunday newspaper.
"Travellers have historically sold heather and pegs, but they don't do it anymore for a living.
Source
I guess that all allusions to the past are suspect, then. Leftists would like that. History is a major inconvenience for them.
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Lifesaving drugs to be "cut" by the NHS
Only 4,000 people are affected so who cares? Not the NHS
A two-year-old boy suffering from a rare heart and lung condition is being kept alive by Viagra. Oliver Sherwood takes the drug four times a day to control pulmonary hypertension (PH), a condition that causes chronic high blood pressure. Viagra improves blood flow and can help open veins and capillaries to aid circulation in cases such as Oliver's. However, his future health is under threat because of proposed cuts by the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (Nice), the Government's drug rationing agency. As Oliver grows up he will need to switch to more expensive treatments to control his condition, such as Epoprostenol and Iloprost, which may not be available if the cuts go ahead.
His mother, Sarah, 34, has launched a petition to keep funding for PH treatments on the NHS. Mrs Sherwood, a part-time nurse who lives in Hucclecote, Glos, with her husband Howard, 43, and older son William, five, said: "Viagra is an expensive drug but it's actually one of the cheapest to treat PH. "When he started taking it the change was fantastic - I had my little boy back. "Cutting any of these treatments to save money is scandalous when lives are at stake."
PH causes the blood pressure in the arteries in the lungs to rise, putting strain on the heart and reducing blood oxygen levels. Oliver cannot walk more than a few steps without getting out of breath and a simple chest infection could kill him. Only 4,000 people in Britain have the condition and the survival rate for most patients is about five years. Only five children a year are diagnosed with PH - which usually affects middle-aged women and can lead to heart failure and damage to the lungs.
Source
Muslims attack Christians in BRITAIN
No longer just in the Middle East
The wife of a clergyman beaten up in a faith-hate attack outside his church described the community's shock and distress yesterday after taking the Palm Sunday service on her husband's behalf. Canon Michael Ainsworth is expected to be released from hospital early this week after being attacked 12 days ago in East London. The attack has led to fears of an increasing number of religiously aggravated attacks on Christian clergy and concerns that the problem is overlooked by police and prosecutors.
Speaking after giving the service at St George's-in-the-East Church in Shadwell, the Rev Janina Ainsworth, 57, who is also a priest in the Church of England, said that the couple had taken much strength from the support offered from around the country. "There is a lot of shock and distress around the congregation and the area," she said. "We're so grateful for all the messages of support and love from friends and the wider community. Quite clearly, there are mindless individuals in every community under the influence of drink and drugs who will engage in random acts of violence."
Canon Ainsworth, 57, who was wearing his clerical collar, was punched and kicked by two Asian youths while another shouted religious abuse outside St George's on March 5. He suffered cuts, bruises and two black eyes. He was discharged from St Bartholomew's hospital but later readmitted following complications to an injury.
Canon Ainsworth moved to St George's at the end of last year after his wife was appointed as the first female chief education officer for the Church of England. Mrs Ainsworth said: "Normally community relations here are very good. We have had very strong messages of support from the East London Mosque and Tower Hamlets Mosque, with whom we've got good relations. "Clearly, the Muslim community is very shocked. These individuals were under the influence and this was a random act, but it may well be that some good can come out of it. "Michael is making a good recovery and he should be back home early next week. He doesn't want to castigate the whole community, he feels this is an isolated incident. "We do know that in this area there is no concerted campaign against Christians and Christian buildings."
The church has been targeted in the past, with bricks thrown through the windows of the 18th-century building. On Good Friday last year, worshippers were showered with glass during a service. Allan Ramanoop, an Asian member of the parochial church council, said that parishioners were often too scared to challenge the gangs. "I've been physically threatened and verbally abused on the steps of the church," he said. "On one occasion, youths shouted: `This should not be a church, this should be a mosque, you should not be here'. "I just walked away from it - you are too frightened to challenge them. We have church windows smashed two to three times a month. The youths are antiChristian. It's terrible what they have done to Canon Ainsworth."
It was feared that the incident might inflame tension in the area, which is in the heart of Tower Hamlets where more than half the residents are from ethnic minority groups. A third are of Bangladeshi origin.
In January one of the Church of England's most senior bishops said that Islamic extemists had created "no-go" areas across Britain where it was too dangerous for nonMuslims to enter. The Bishop of Rochester, Dr Michael Nazir-Ali, the Church's only Asian bishop, said that people of a different race or faith face physical attack if they live or work in communities dominated by a strict Muslim ideology.
Worshippers at St George's suggested that youth thuggery, rather than religious bigotry, may be more to blame. Thomas Beckett, 50, said: "I have heard that this church is an island in the middle of a Muslim community. But you don't expect this sort of attack to happen - you don't expect Muslims to be attacked either."Michael Saward, 75, the former vicar, said: "Nothing like this has happened in this area before, although I have been attacked in the past so I can understand what he's going through. "We have had windows smashed here but we don't know by who."
Nick Tolson, a former police officer who set up the National Churchwatch safety scheme, said that there had been an increase in faith hate attacks on clergy. "The harassment is usually coming from young Asian men - often, but not exclusively, Muslim," he said. "The police and prosecutors will classify an attack on a mosque or Muslim as a hate crime but not if it is a church or a vicar. These aren't targeted attacks, they are spontaneous, but [the victims] are being singled out because of their faith and should be dealt with in the same way as other members of the community."
The Crown Prosecution Service reported last month that cases aggravated by religious factors had fallen by 37.2 per cent, with reports of 27 prosecutions in the past year. In the 23 cases where the religion was known, 17 victims were Muslim, three as Christian, two as Jewish and one as Sikh. Scotland Yard said that allegations of faith hate crimes had fallen by a half between 2005-06 and 2006-07 to 417. [Because people are too scared to report them]
Source
Royal college warns abortions can lead to mental illness
Women may be at risk of mental health breakdowns if they have abortions, a medical royal college has warned. The Royal College of Psychiatrists says women should not be allowed to have an abortion until they are counselled on the possible risk to their mental health. This overturns the consensus that has stood for decades that the risk to mental health of continuing with an unwanted pregnancy outweighs the risks of living with the possible regrets of having an abortion.
MPs will shortly vote on a proposal to reduce the upper time limit for abortions "for social reasons" from 24 weeks to 20 weeks, a move not backed by the government. A Sunday Times poll today shows 59% of women would support such a reduction, with only 28% backing the status quo. Taken together, just under half (48%) of men and women want a reduction to 20 weeks, while 35% want to retain 24 weeks. Some MPs also want women to have a "cooling off" period in which they would be made aware of the possible consequences of the abortion, including the impact on their mental health, before they could go ahead.
More than 90% of the 200,000 terminations in Britain every year are believed to be carried out because doctors believe that continuing with the pregnancy would cause greater mental strain.
The Royal College of Psychiatrists recommends updating abortion information leaflets to include details of the risks of depression. "Consent cannot be informed without the provision of adequate and appropriate information," it says. Several studies, including research published in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry in 2006, concluded that abortion in young women might be associated with risks of mental health problems.
The controversy intensified earlier this year when an inquest in Cornwall heard that a talented artist hanged herself because she was overcome with grief after aborting her twins. Emma Beck, 30, left a note saying: "Living is hell for me. I should never have had an abortion. I see now I would have been a good mum. I want to be with my babies; they need me, no one else does."
The college's revised stance was welcomed by Nadine Dorries, a Conservative MP campaigning for a statutory cooling-off period: "For doctors to process a woman's request for an abortion without providing the support, information and help women need at this time of crisis I regard almost as a form of abuse," she said.
Dawn Primarolo, the health minister, will this week appeal to MPs to ignore attempts to reduce the time limit on abortion when new laws on fertility treatment and embryo research come before parliament.
Dr Peter Saunders, general secretary of the Christian Medical Fellowship, said: "How can a doctor now justify an abortion [on mental health grounds] if psychiatrists are questioning whether there is any clear evidence that continuing with the pregnancy leads to mental health problems."
Source
British classrooms have become war zones, battered and threatened teachers say
Violence in the classroom is on the increase, but it is not only the pupils who are the victims, according to a survey that has found that nearly a third of teachers have been punched, kicked, bitten or pinched by children or attacked with weapons or missiles. More than half of teachers say that their school’s policy on pupils’ poor behaviour is not tough enough and two thirds have considered leaving the profession because of physical aggression, verbal abuse and threats.
The survey, published today by the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, suggests that excluding the most violent youngsters does not help because they will repeat the pattern of violence at neighbouring schools. Mary Bousted, the union’s general secretary, said that no teacher should have to put up with the behaviour seen in schools today. “Not only is poor behaviour driving teaching staff away at an alarming rate, it is also damaging the chances of other pupils during lessons by causing major disruptions,” she said.
Speaking ahead of the union’s annual conference in Torquay today, Ms Bousted said that one in ten teachers had received physical injuries in the classroom. Twelve per cent said that they had needed to visit a doctor and eight per cent had taken leave from teaching as a result of pupils’ aggression. Three per cent of teachers said that they had been involved in incidents involving knives, two thirds had been punched, nearly a half kicked and a third had been threatened.
The survey follows news last month that airport-style metal detectors are to be installed at hundreds of school gates. Official figures also suggest that schools are finding it increasingly difficult to exclude violent pupils because of the growing tendency by governors and appeal panels to overturn the head’s decision. Between 1997 and 2007 permanent exclusions fell by 25 per cent to 9,170 cases nationwide. But over the same period the proportion of expulsions overruled by panels rose from 20 to 24 per cent.
Jean Roberts took early retirement from her post as a deputy head of a primary school in West London because she could no longer stand having to restrain children physically. “Over the years, we are increasingly seeing children who are disturbed, with very little ability to communicate other than through biting or pulling hair. Some are barely socialised when they arrive,” she said. “They kick or they throw things when they are in an extreme state of anger.”
Most teachers said that pupil behaviour had worsened in the last two years and many said that low-level disruption – such as pupils talking, not paying attention and refusing requests to turn off mobile phones – was now the norm in classrooms. The findings coincide with comments from Jim Rose, the Government’s adviser on the primary curriculum, who said that part of the role of primary schools was to socialise children and teach them how to behave. “Where else would they get it if they don’t get it at home?” he said.
Source
WELCOME TO THE DARK AGES AS THE LIGHTS GO OUT IN BRITAIN
Street lights in suburban areas are to be switched off after midnight as part of council plans to save energy. A series of trial blackouts will be carried out over the next few weeks by local authorities in the Home Counties, Hampshire and Essex among others. Buckinghamshire council is reported to be switching off more than 1,700 lights along 25 miles of road in an attempt to meet energy targets. It says the scheme will save 100,000 pounds and reduce CO2 emissions by nearly 600 tons a year. If the trials are successful, all street lamps across the country could be turned off between midnight and 5am.
Other areas taking part in the scheme include Maldon and Uttlesford in Essex, while parts of Hampshire have already carried out pilots.
Residents' groups, police organisations and motoring groups have expressed fear that the darkness could cause increases in crime and road traffic accidents. A spokesman for the Local Government Association said: "The councils are considering these schemes to both reduce their energy budget and cut down on emissions. "Areas where street lights will be turned off will be on routes there is little need for them."
Source
An example of inherited politics in Britain: "He was given up for adoption at birth. He never knew his biological parents. And for 36 years he knew nothing of his personal and political roots, or what drove him from youth to pursue the Liberal tradition. Now Matthew Taylor, the Liberal Democrat MP, has revealed the extraordinary story of how he discovered his real mother - and that he is descended from a prominent Liberal who served in the House of Commons for almost 30 years. Finding his mother was shock enough; discovering that politics really is in his blood was almost more overwhelming. "The odds on my having followed in my great-grandfather's footsteps as a Liberal MP were minuscule," he said. "In that moment I felt everything I thought I knew about why I am who I am was turned upside-down. In the battle between nature and nurture, nature seemed to be having a laugh."
Only 4,000 people are affected so who cares? Not the NHS
A two-year-old boy suffering from a rare heart and lung condition is being kept alive by Viagra. Oliver Sherwood takes the drug four times a day to control pulmonary hypertension (PH), a condition that causes chronic high blood pressure. Viagra improves blood flow and can help open veins and capillaries to aid circulation in cases such as Oliver's. However, his future health is under threat because of proposed cuts by the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (Nice), the Government's drug rationing agency. As Oliver grows up he will need to switch to more expensive treatments to control his condition, such as Epoprostenol and Iloprost, which may not be available if the cuts go ahead.
His mother, Sarah, 34, has launched a petition to keep funding for PH treatments on the NHS. Mrs Sherwood, a part-time nurse who lives in Hucclecote, Glos, with her husband Howard, 43, and older son William, five, said: "Viagra is an expensive drug but it's actually one of the cheapest to treat PH. "When he started taking it the change was fantastic - I had my little boy back. "Cutting any of these treatments to save money is scandalous when lives are at stake."
PH causes the blood pressure in the arteries in the lungs to rise, putting strain on the heart and reducing blood oxygen levels. Oliver cannot walk more than a few steps without getting out of breath and a simple chest infection could kill him. Only 4,000 people in Britain have the condition and the survival rate for most patients is about five years. Only five children a year are diagnosed with PH - which usually affects middle-aged women and can lead to heart failure and damage to the lungs.
Source
Muslims attack Christians in BRITAIN
No longer just in the Middle East
The wife of a clergyman beaten up in a faith-hate attack outside his church described the community's shock and distress yesterday after taking the Palm Sunday service on her husband's behalf. Canon Michael Ainsworth is expected to be released from hospital early this week after being attacked 12 days ago in East London. The attack has led to fears of an increasing number of religiously aggravated attacks on Christian clergy and concerns that the problem is overlooked by police and prosecutors.
Speaking after giving the service at St George's-in-the-East Church in Shadwell, the Rev Janina Ainsworth, 57, who is also a priest in the Church of England, said that the couple had taken much strength from the support offered from around the country. "There is a lot of shock and distress around the congregation and the area," she said. "We're so grateful for all the messages of support and love from friends and the wider community. Quite clearly, there are mindless individuals in every community under the influence of drink and drugs who will engage in random acts of violence."
Canon Ainsworth, 57, who was wearing his clerical collar, was punched and kicked by two Asian youths while another shouted religious abuse outside St George's on March 5. He suffered cuts, bruises and two black eyes. He was discharged from St Bartholomew's hospital but later readmitted following complications to an injury.
Canon Ainsworth moved to St George's at the end of last year after his wife was appointed as the first female chief education officer for the Church of England. Mrs Ainsworth said: "Normally community relations here are very good. We have had very strong messages of support from the East London Mosque and Tower Hamlets Mosque, with whom we've got good relations. "Clearly, the Muslim community is very shocked. These individuals were under the influence and this was a random act, but it may well be that some good can come out of it. "Michael is making a good recovery and he should be back home early next week. He doesn't want to castigate the whole community, he feels this is an isolated incident. "We do know that in this area there is no concerted campaign against Christians and Christian buildings."
The church has been targeted in the past, with bricks thrown through the windows of the 18th-century building. On Good Friday last year, worshippers were showered with glass during a service. Allan Ramanoop, an Asian member of the parochial church council, said that parishioners were often too scared to challenge the gangs. "I've been physically threatened and verbally abused on the steps of the church," he said. "On one occasion, youths shouted: `This should not be a church, this should be a mosque, you should not be here'. "I just walked away from it - you are too frightened to challenge them. We have church windows smashed two to three times a month. The youths are antiChristian. It's terrible what they have done to Canon Ainsworth."
It was feared that the incident might inflame tension in the area, which is in the heart of Tower Hamlets where more than half the residents are from ethnic minority groups. A third are of Bangladeshi origin.
In January one of the Church of England's most senior bishops said that Islamic extemists had created "no-go" areas across Britain where it was too dangerous for nonMuslims to enter. The Bishop of Rochester, Dr Michael Nazir-Ali, the Church's only Asian bishop, said that people of a different race or faith face physical attack if they live or work in communities dominated by a strict Muslim ideology.
Worshippers at St George's suggested that youth thuggery, rather than religious bigotry, may be more to blame. Thomas Beckett, 50, said: "I have heard that this church is an island in the middle of a Muslim community. But you don't expect this sort of attack to happen - you don't expect Muslims to be attacked either."Michael Saward, 75, the former vicar, said: "Nothing like this has happened in this area before, although I have been attacked in the past so I can understand what he's going through. "We have had windows smashed here but we don't know by who."
Nick Tolson, a former police officer who set up the National Churchwatch safety scheme, said that there had been an increase in faith hate attacks on clergy. "The harassment is usually coming from young Asian men - often, but not exclusively, Muslim," he said. "The police and prosecutors will classify an attack on a mosque or Muslim as a hate crime but not if it is a church or a vicar. These aren't targeted attacks, they are spontaneous, but [the victims] are being singled out because of their faith and should be dealt with in the same way as other members of the community."
The Crown Prosecution Service reported last month that cases aggravated by religious factors had fallen by 37.2 per cent, with reports of 27 prosecutions in the past year. In the 23 cases where the religion was known, 17 victims were Muslim, three as Christian, two as Jewish and one as Sikh. Scotland Yard said that allegations of faith hate crimes had fallen by a half between 2005-06 and 2006-07 to 417. [Because people are too scared to report them]
Source
Royal college warns abortions can lead to mental illness
Women may be at risk of mental health breakdowns if they have abortions, a medical royal college has warned. The Royal College of Psychiatrists says women should not be allowed to have an abortion until they are counselled on the possible risk to their mental health. This overturns the consensus that has stood for decades that the risk to mental health of continuing with an unwanted pregnancy outweighs the risks of living with the possible regrets of having an abortion.
MPs will shortly vote on a proposal to reduce the upper time limit for abortions "for social reasons" from 24 weeks to 20 weeks, a move not backed by the government. A Sunday Times poll today shows 59% of women would support such a reduction, with only 28% backing the status quo. Taken together, just under half (48%) of men and women want a reduction to 20 weeks, while 35% want to retain 24 weeks. Some MPs also want women to have a "cooling off" period in which they would be made aware of the possible consequences of the abortion, including the impact on their mental health, before they could go ahead.
More than 90% of the 200,000 terminations in Britain every year are believed to be carried out because doctors believe that continuing with the pregnancy would cause greater mental strain.
The Royal College of Psychiatrists recommends updating abortion information leaflets to include details of the risks of depression. "Consent cannot be informed without the provision of adequate and appropriate information," it says. Several studies, including research published in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry in 2006, concluded that abortion in young women might be associated with risks of mental health problems.
The controversy intensified earlier this year when an inquest in Cornwall heard that a talented artist hanged herself because she was overcome with grief after aborting her twins. Emma Beck, 30, left a note saying: "Living is hell for me. I should never have had an abortion. I see now I would have been a good mum. I want to be with my babies; they need me, no one else does."
The college's revised stance was welcomed by Nadine Dorries, a Conservative MP campaigning for a statutory cooling-off period: "For doctors to process a woman's request for an abortion without providing the support, information and help women need at this time of crisis I regard almost as a form of abuse," she said.
Dawn Primarolo, the health minister, will this week appeal to MPs to ignore attempts to reduce the time limit on abortion when new laws on fertility treatment and embryo research come before parliament.
Dr Peter Saunders, general secretary of the Christian Medical Fellowship, said: "How can a doctor now justify an abortion [on mental health grounds] if psychiatrists are questioning whether there is any clear evidence that continuing with the pregnancy leads to mental health problems."
Source
British classrooms have become war zones, battered and threatened teachers say
Violence in the classroom is on the increase, but it is not only the pupils who are the victims, according to a survey that has found that nearly a third of teachers have been punched, kicked, bitten or pinched by children or attacked with weapons or missiles. More than half of teachers say that their school’s policy on pupils’ poor behaviour is not tough enough and two thirds have considered leaving the profession because of physical aggression, verbal abuse and threats.
The survey, published today by the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, suggests that excluding the most violent youngsters does not help because they will repeat the pattern of violence at neighbouring schools. Mary Bousted, the union’s general secretary, said that no teacher should have to put up with the behaviour seen in schools today. “Not only is poor behaviour driving teaching staff away at an alarming rate, it is also damaging the chances of other pupils during lessons by causing major disruptions,” she said.
Speaking ahead of the union’s annual conference in Torquay today, Ms Bousted said that one in ten teachers had received physical injuries in the classroom. Twelve per cent said that they had needed to visit a doctor and eight per cent had taken leave from teaching as a result of pupils’ aggression. Three per cent of teachers said that they had been involved in incidents involving knives, two thirds had been punched, nearly a half kicked and a third had been threatened.
The survey follows news last month that airport-style metal detectors are to be installed at hundreds of school gates. Official figures also suggest that schools are finding it increasingly difficult to exclude violent pupils because of the growing tendency by governors and appeal panels to overturn the head’s decision. Between 1997 and 2007 permanent exclusions fell by 25 per cent to 9,170 cases nationwide. But over the same period the proportion of expulsions overruled by panels rose from 20 to 24 per cent.
Jean Roberts took early retirement from her post as a deputy head of a primary school in West London because she could no longer stand having to restrain children physically. “Over the years, we are increasingly seeing children who are disturbed, with very little ability to communicate other than through biting or pulling hair. Some are barely socialised when they arrive,” she said. “They kick or they throw things when they are in an extreme state of anger.”
Most teachers said that pupil behaviour had worsened in the last two years and many said that low-level disruption – such as pupils talking, not paying attention and refusing requests to turn off mobile phones – was now the norm in classrooms. The findings coincide with comments from Jim Rose, the Government’s adviser on the primary curriculum, who said that part of the role of primary schools was to socialise children and teach them how to behave. “Where else would they get it if they don’t get it at home?” he said.
Source
WELCOME TO THE DARK AGES AS THE LIGHTS GO OUT IN BRITAIN
Street lights in suburban areas are to be switched off after midnight as part of council plans to save energy. A series of trial blackouts will be carried out over the next few weeks by local authorities in the Home Counties, Hampshire and Essex among others. Buckinghamshire council is reported to be switching off more than 1,700 lights along 25 miles of road in an attempt to meet energy targets. It says the scheme will save 100,000 pounds and reduce CO2 emissions by nearly 600 tons a year. If the trials are successful, all street lamps across the country could be turned off between midnight and 5am.
Other areas taking part in the scheme include Maldon and Uttlesford in Essex, while parts of Hampshire have already carried out pilots.
Residents' groups, police organisations and motoring groups have expressed fear that the darkness could cause increases in crime and road traffic accidents. A spokesman for the Local Government Association said: "The councils are considering these schemes to both reduce their energy budget and cut down on emissions. "Areas where street lights will be turned off will be on routes there is little need for them."
Source
An example of inherited politics in Britain: "He was given up for adoption at birth. He never knew his biological parents. And for 36 years he knew nothing of his personal and political roots, or what drove him from youth to pursue the Liberal tradition. Now Matthew Taylor, the Liberal Democrat MP, has revealed the extraordinary story of how he discovered his real mother - and that he is descended from a prominent Liberal who served in the House of Commons for almost 30 years. Finding his mother was shock enough; discovering that politics really is in his blood was almost more overwhelming. "The odds on my having followed in my great-grandfather's footsteps as a Liberal MP were minuscule," he said. "In that moment I felt everything I thought I knew about why I am who I am was turned upside-down. In the battle between nature and nurture, nature seemed to be having a laugh."
Monday, March 17, 2008
THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT DOESN'T REALLY BELIEVE IN THE THREAT OF CLIMATE CHANGE
By Dominic Lawson
It's a brave reporter who challenges Arnold Schwarzenegger face to face. Who knows what physical retribution the former Terminator might wreak? Yet one man was brave enough to trade (verbal) blows with the Governor of California last week. It followed the revelation by the Los Angeles Times that Schwarzenegger - who after Al Gore is the US politician most identified with the "battle against climate change" - had been commuting almost every day by private jet. Let me share with you this extract from a transcript of a news conference, as released by Schwarzenegger's office:
Schwarzenegger might be a hypocrite, but at least he is not charging the public: It's his own private jet and he's paying all the bills. In Britain, where the New Labour government vies with the Governor of California to be seen as a "leader in the battle against global warming", such moral inconsistency is entirely funded by the taxpayer.
Yesterday it was disclosed that two Cabinet ministers, Ed Balls and Shaun Woodward, used chauffeur-driven ministerial cars to travel 150 yards from Downing Street to a dinner party for Labour donors. The chauffeurs waited outside and then after dinner drove the pair, separately, a further 300 yards to the House of Commons. This has come to light because the Conservative MP Justine Greening has written to the Cabinet Secretary arguing that since the event was a Labour Party fundraiser, official limousines should not have been made available - at least for the first 150 yards of this 450-yard round trip.
The more obvious, but less party-political point, is that if ministers truly believe what they say about the dire threat of irreversible and murderous climate change through man-made carbon emissions, how could they simultaneously behave in such a casually wasteful manner? Surely they cannot be so wicked as knowingly to condemn another African to a premature death through thirst - or whatever the latest climate-catastrophe theory insists - in order to avoid walking for a quarter of a mile down Whitehall?
I think it is more likely that the ministers, deep down, don't really believe the conventional wisdom that such consequences flow from being driven everywhere in limousines - but of course they would do anything rather than confess that: better even to be thought a monumental hypocrite than a "climate change denier".
If I am right, it would explain quite a lot about Alistair Darling's first Budget, which was pre-sold as being "The Greenest Budget in history". The allegedly passionless Darling emoted impressively about the scale of the problems posed by man-made climate change: "We need to do more and we need to do it now. There will be catastrophic economic and social consequences if we fail to act." So he deferred the increase in duty on petrol that had been originally scheduled for this Budget; instead he promised that from 2010 cars with the biggest engines would face a one off levy - amounting to o950 for top-of-the-range 4x4s.
This is, of course, not rational if you really believe that unpredictable weather is caused by the consumption of petrol. In that case you would continue to concentrate solely (and proportionately) on the actual use of petrol, through excise charged at the pump, rather than on the size of a car's engine. The new levy, however, qualifies as an "eye-catching initiative", just as does Mr Darling's threat to make retailers charge the public for disposable bags, even though this will do nothing to reduce carbon emissions.
Mr Darling's promised measures to make homes "greener" amount to a similar exercise in spectacular tokenism. Under all the rhetoric about "zero-carbon" houses, the Chancellor's actual commitment was for grants of o26m for such improvements as loft insulation, solar panels and roof-top wind turbines. This means that if every household in England and Wales were to implement such measures, each of them would get an additional grant of one pound. Since a wind turbine costs thousands of pounds to install ( assuming you get the planning permission), and takes more than 50 years to recover those costs through fuel bill reductions, I fear that Mr Darling's solitary pound will not have a decisive influence.
So the Green lobby has been united in denouncing Mr Darling for failing to deliver on his promise to deliver a Budget which would help to save the planet. To be fair to the Chancellor, to have satisfied them would have been politically suicidal. He is clearly - and rightly - concerned with the rise in "fuel poverty", as energy costs have soared.
Ministers have even waved the (probably illegal) threat of some form of statutory price controls at electricity and gas suppliers, and have - not so very long ago - bleated to Saudi Arabia to bring down the price of oil by increasing the supply of crude to the market.
Yet if the Government really believed that the planet was being brought to premature extinction through the consumption of fossil fuels, it would be encouraging the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Counties (Opec) to keep on squeezing the consumer, and thus choking off demand. It would be happy that, partly as a result of the Saudis' refusal to boost production, domestic fuel bills could rise to the level at which people might decide to keep the central heating switched off and instead wear balaclavas and mittens indoors.
It would, admittedly, be a brave Government - and a short-lived one - which told voters that a bit more shivering in the cold is the price we must all pay to ensure that the inhabitants of the Southern Hemisphere don't have to endure even hotter weather than they do already. It would be an even more bizarre Government which implemented such policies even though its members couldn't quite believe the stories of catastrophic man-made climate change in the first place. This Government is not actually deranged and neither does it have a death wish: so it will continue to ensure that its policies don't match its rhetoric.
Source
British equality watchdog fails its own test
But it's headed by a black, so that's OK
Britain's anti-discrimination quango had to be bailed out by ministers to avoid its breaching the law over its own internal equality scheme, The Times has learnt. The disclosure comes as the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), chaired by Trevor Phillips, last week began its first inquiry into human rights in Britain. The commission was set up last year to replace the Commission for Racial Equality, the Disability Rights Commission and the Equal Opportunities Commission.
Along with all other public bodies it was meant to implement an overarching equality scheme, setting out its position for its staff on race, gender, disability and other potential areas of discrimination by January 1 this year. It failed to do so, prompting ministers to lay a statutory instrument before Parliament, extending the deadline to April 1 this year.
Last night opposition MPs expressed astonishment at the failure. Lynne Featherstone, the Liberal Democrat spokesman for youth and equality, said: "What authority will the commission have in cracking the whip to other public bodies when they fail to comply with their own legal responsibilities with such impunity from ministers?"
According to its mandate, part of" the commission's responsibility is to "reduce inequality, eliminate discrimination, strengthen good relations between people and protect human rights". It must also assess compliance with the statutory duties applicable to public authorities as well as take "enforcement action when necessary and appropriate".
The commission maintains that its scheme was very ambitious and that the three-month period that it had to meet the deadline set by the Government's Equality Office was unrealistic. A spokeswoman for the commission confirmed that the deadline had been revised but said this was necessary because of the size of the job. "We take this task very seriously. We are attempting something much more ambitious than merely complying with the duty to set up equality schemes . . . we want a single integrated scheme, which obviously takes time to do properly."
Source
Racial anxiety rules in Britannia
In Britain there has been mounting concern about the country "sleepwalking" into segregation. A government report last year showed schools increasingly dividing along racial lines, particularly in the old industrial north of England. Jack Straw, the respected former foreign secretary and now Justice Secretary, has warned about white and non-white Britons "breathing the same air but walking past each other".
For Britons, the issue has particular potency this year, which marks the 40th anniversary of the "Rivers of Blood" speech given by the Conservative politician Enoch Powell. Then the shadow defence secretary, Powell warned that if immigration wasn't stopped, there would be strife in the years to come: "As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see the River Tiber foaming with much blood." Powell's speech has since been inscribed into British political culture, a reference to "Rivers of Blood" shorthand for white racism.
Yet Powellite concerns about race are slowly being reassessed. Last week BBC TV screened the first program of its controversial White season, a series of films and documentaries looking at white working-class Britain. Immigration and race feature heavily in the series (titles include White Girl, All White In Barking and The Poles Are Coming). Its commissioning editor, Richard Klein, says the white working class has been ignored by the political classes, the victim of political correctness. "The way in which they see the world may come across as extremist," Klein continues, "but that's not how they see it." Already, the BBC has been accused of indulging racist fears of immigrants.
There is much public hostility towards immigration. An ICM poll in January found that 78 per cent of Britons thought immigration policy should be tightened, with 56 per cent believing that British Muslims need to integrate more into British culture. Support for the xenophobic British Nationalist Party continues to grow in the lead-up to municipal elections later this year.
Some of this is the fallout from the July 7, 2005, London bombings and their demonstration of the dangers of militant Islamism from within. British politicians have acknowledged the need for a better defined sense of national solidarity. The Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, has led the way with his push for "British values" to be enshrined in an official statement of the rights and responsibilities of citizenship.
Yet the difficulties of articulating a national identity that appeals to a white ethnic majority as well as to immigrants are profound. It isn't easy to say what such a thing must involve, as the Culture Minister, Margaret Hodge, found out after a speech last week. Hodge had criticised annual Prom concerts for failing to be inclusive enough of people from minority backgrounds. It was a clumsy intervention. All she managed was to estrange white Britons for whom the Proms (especially the "Last Night Of" concerts featuring pieces such as Land Of Hope And Glory, Jerusalem and Rule Britannia) represent a healthy dose of patriotism.
The bottom line is that cultural marginalisation, for natives and immigrants alike, must be avoided at all cost. Even if such discontent doesn't spill into rivers of blood, it certainly leaves a society on edge.
Source
Blood clot pill approved in Britain
A daily pill that could help to prevent tens of thousands of deaths due to blood clots will be available to hospitals within weeks. The condition, venous thrombo-embolism (VTE), causes one in ten fatalities in hospital and kills at least 25,000 people in England every year, more than 20 times the number of deaths attributed to the superbug MRSA.
Pradaxa, the first new blood-thinning treatment in more than 50 years, is set to receive its licence next month. It will be used initially after hip and knee replacement surgery when the risk of blood clotting is high. But doctors hope that the anticoagulant pill could also be used to treat thousands of other patients at risk from heart conditions and strokes.
As many as half of all patients going into hospital risk developing VTE, which occurs when part of a deep-vein thrombosis or blood clot migrates to the lungs, heart or brain, with potentially deadly consequences. Such clotting is common after surgery, especially in the elderly, the overweight or those confined to bed for more than three days.
Last year the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) issued guidelines recommending that all patients should be assessed on admission to hospital for their risk of developing VTE but an audit by the all-party parliamentary thrombosis group in November found that less than a third of hospitals were doing so. Of those who were screened, only half the patients deemed at risk were receiving preventive treatment, a study published in The Lancet last month suggested.
A report by Sir Liam Donaldson, the Chief Medical Officer, admitted that "there was no systematic approach to identifying and treating those patients at risk from blood clots in hospitals and that there was significant room for improvement". At present, many hospital patients at risk of blood clots are given warfarin, which was licensed in the 1950s. Warfarin is effective but can trigger excessive internal bleeding. An alternative drug, heparin, involves a lengthy course of injections.
Preliminary results from a trial involving 34,000 patients suggest that Pradaxa is as effective in preventing clotting as existing treatments but it should be cheaper and easier to take. It works by reversing and inhibiting the effects of thrombin, a protein that allows clots to form after surgery.
Produced by the German company Boehringer Ingelheim, the drug is being evaluated by NICE and if approved it could be available to NHS patients within weeks. Another anticoagulant, Xarelto, is in development by Bayer, with preliminary results suggesting that it could be even more effective than Pradaxa.
Simon Frostick, a specialist in orthopaedics at the University of Liverpool, said: "These new drugs will revolutionise the way we prevent and treat blood clots. "Given the new trend for shorter hospital stays following joint replacement surgery, it is becoming increasingly important to have anticoagulant treatments available which are well tolerated and easy to use."
Beverley Hunt, medical director of the UK thrombosis charity Lifeblood, said: "The number of deaths from VTE is nothing short of a public health emergency. "The development of new drugs to treat this problem is terribly exciting. The potential benefit to the NHS is enormous."
Between 1995 and 2003, the NHS Litigation Authority handled more than 450 claims of negligence after patients developed VTE in hospital. It paid out almost 19 million pounds in compensation to sufferers or their bereaved families.
Professor Frostick added: "If these drugs reduce the number of deaths, the requirement for injections and community nurses, as well as other burdens - and if the proper sums are done - they should work out to be cost-effective for the NHS."
Source
A mocking look at British school insanity
Re: Ed Balls's astonishing revelation, based on unverified research (ooh, my favourite kind) that some state schools are charging parents admission fees
The good ones, obviously, where the children come out the other end largely uninjured. Not the ones where the body-piercing is done with scissors. One school in North London admitted that it was asking for 50 pounds to fund extracurricular activities. It gives you the money back if your kid doesn't get in, though, sadly missing the opportunity to almost define the notion of adding insult to injury.
The schools admissions procedure is mesmerising, even to the childless. Every part of it seems designed to induce the worst aspects of humanity. Some schools are brilliant, some are dreadful, and your child could end up in either. It's like the scene in Flash Gordon where Peter Duncan has to shut his eyes and put his arm in a tree stump to see if he gets bitten by a lethal space-crab.
Not liking their odds in many parts of the country (and let's not forget that Duncan gets the venom), parents play the system - moving house, finding God, assassinating the children next door. O'Brien has to hold a cage of rats over Winston's eyes to make him shriek: “Do it to Julia.” We just have to offer a schools lottery.
I think the new-found religion one is the most chilling, though. If I'd seen my parents acquire a sudden and unexpected fondness for the Pope, I would have thought they'd gone quite mad. And that was before the Vatican issued a new list of seven deadly sins this week, which puts contraception on a par with murder, and prohibits “morally debatable scientific experiments”. I was going to pack up my laboratory and stop trying to build that robot boy, but as an ardent fan of the contraceptive Pill, I guess I'm going to hell already.
But after all the mud slung at pushy parents, now it turns out that the schools themselves may not be without corruption. Some apparently ask for an admission fee, others for compulsory donations. Which, to anyone but an accountant, sounds a lot like a fee. Actually, my accountant thinks it's a fee too. There's something rather brilliant about most of the schools that stand accused of these practices being faith schools. With the faith in Arthur Daley, rather than an omnipotent being, I suppose. Perhaps they could specialise in teaching bribery, and add blackmail, extortion and fraud to the curriculum too. When Ronald Searle invented St Trinian's, he can't have imagined that its moral values would one day seem perfectly reasonable.
The admissions code for schools is a baffling mishmash - you can admit children for aptitude, but not for ability. You can let them in if they have a sibling at the school, but not if it's a cousin. Children in care take precedence and special needs children must be given priority. In other words, the best thing you can do for your children's future is to abandon them, after making sure they have a dyslexic older brother.
But why should schools be the only ones to make money in this whole grotty business? Parents of children who are already at desirable schools should start auctioning off the right to adopt them, thus providing next year's intake with a handy set of older siblings in situ. And why just auction them off once? Each child could sustain at least five new brothers and sisters, surely. And if it's a Roman Catholic school you're trying to get into, that would probably earn you double points.
Source
By Dominic Lawson
It's a brave reporter who challenges Arnold Schwarzenegger face to face. Who knows what physical retribution the former Terminator might wreak? Yet one man was brave enough to trade (verbal) blows with the Governor of California last week. It followed the revelation by the Los Angeles Times that Schwarzenegger - who after Al Gore is the US politician most identified with the "battle against climate change" - had been commuting almost every day by private jet. Let me share with you this extract from a transcript of a news conference, as released by Schwarzenegger's office:
"Governor, there have been reports coming out that you're flying up and down the state on a daily basis in a [private] jet...How do you reconcile your public rhetoric on global warming versus your personal lifestyle choices?".
"Are you always that positive? What a positive guy! To me it's very important that I serve the people of California but also at the same time that I serve my family... do the homework with the kids, spend time with my wife and everything."
"So global warming is for other people to worry about, as long as you can afford carbon offsetting?"
"You're absolutely correct. Global warming is very important and that's why we're fighting global warming... in all kinds of things we are promoting."
Schwarzenegger might be a hypocrite, but at least he is not charging the public: It's his own private jet and he's paying all the bills. In Britain, where the New Labour government vies with the Governor of California to be seen as a "leader in the battle against global warming", such moral inconsistency is entirely funded by the taxpayer.
Yesterday it was disclosed that two Cabinet ministers, Ed Balls and Shaun Woodward, used chauffeur-driven ministerial cars to travel 150 yards from Downing Street to a dinner party for Labour donors. The chauffeurs waited outside and then after dinner drove the pair, separately, a further 300 yards to the House of Commons. This has come to light because the Conservative MP Justine Greening has written to the Cabinet Secretary arguing that since the event was a Labour Party fundraiser, official limousines should not have been made available - at least for the first 150 yards of this 450-yard round trip.
The more obvious, but less party-political point, is that if ministers truly believe what they say about the dire threat of irreversible and murderous climate change through man-made carbon emissions, how could they simultaneously behave in such a casually wasteful manner? Surely they cannot be so wicked as knowingly to condemn another African to a premature death through thirst - or whatever the latest climate-catastrophe theory insists - in order to avoid walking for a quarter of a mile down Whitehall?
I think it is more likely that the ministers, deep down, don't really believe the conventional wisdom that such consequences flow from being driven everywhere in limousines - but of course they would do anything rather than confess that: better even to be thought a monumental hypocrite than a "climate change denier".
If I am right, it would explain quite a lot about Alistair Darling's first Budget, which was pre-sold as being "The Greenest Budget in history". The allegedly passionless Darling emoted impressively about the scale of the problems posed by man-made climate change: "We need to do more and we need to do it now. There will be catastrophic economic and social consequences if we fail to act." So he deferred the increase in duty on petrol that had been originally scheduled for this Budget; instead he promised that from 2010 cars with the biggest engines would face a one off levy - amounting to o950 for top-of-the-range 4x4s.
This is, of course, not rational if you really believe that unpredictable weather is caused by the consumption of petrol. In that case you would continue to concentrate solely (and proportionately) on the actual use of petrol, through excise charged at the pump, rather than on the size of a car's engine. The new levy, however, qualifies as an "eye-catching initiative", just as does Mr Darling's threat to make retailers charge the public for disposable bags, even though this will do nothing to reduce carbon emissions.
Mr Darling's promised measures to make homes "greener" amount to a similar exercise in spectacular tokenism. Under all the rhetoric about "zero-carbon" houses, the Chancellor's actual commitment was for grants of o26m for such improvements as loft insulation, solar panels and roof-top wind turbines. This means that if every household in England and Wales were to implement such measures, each of them would get an additional grant of one pound. Since a wind turbine costs thousands of pounds to install ( assuming you get the planning permission), and takes more than 50 years to recover those costs through fuel bill reductions, I fear that Mr Darling's solitary pound will not have a decisive influence.
So the Green lobby has been united in denouncing Mr Darling for failing to deliver on his promise to deliver a Budget which would help to save the planet. To be fair to the Chancellor, to have satisfied them would have been politically suicidal. He is clearly - and rightly - concerned with the rise in "fuel poverty", as energy costs have soared.
Ministers have even waved the (probably illegal) threat of some form of statutory price controls at electricity and gas suppliers, and have - not so very long ago - bleated to Saudi Arabia to bring down the price of oil by increasing the supply of crude to the market.
Yet if the Government really believed that the planet was being brought to premature extinction through the consumption of fossil fuels, it would be encouraging the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Counties (Opec) to keep on squeezing the consumer, and thus choking off demand. It would be happy that, partly as a result of the Saudis' refusal to boost production, domestic fuel bills could rise to the level at which people might decide to keep the central heating switched off and instead wear balaclavas and mittens indoors.
It would, admittedly, be a brave Government - and a short-lived one - which told voters that a bit more shivering in the cold is the price we must all pay to ensure that the inhabitants of the Southern Hemisphere don't have to endure even hotter weather than they do already. It would be an even more bizarre Government which implemented such policies even though its members couldn't quite believe the stories of catastrophic man-made climate change in the first place. This Government is not actually deranged and neither does it have a death wish: so it will continue to ensure that its policies don't match its rhetoric.
Source
British equality watchdog fails its own test
But it's headed by a black, so that's OK
Britain's anti-discrimination quango had to be bailed out by ministers to avoid its breaching the law over its own internal equality scheme, The Times has learnt. The disclosure comes as the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), chaired by Trevor Phillips, last week began its first inquiry into human rights in Britain. The commission was set up last year to replace the Commission for Racial Equality, the Disability Rights Commission and the Equal Opportunities Commission.
Along with all other public bodies it was meant to implement an overarching equality scheme, setting out its position for its staff on race, gender, disability and other potential areas of discrimination by January 1 this year. It failed to do so, prompting ministers to lay a statutory instrument before Parliament, extending the deadline to April 1 this year.
Last night opposition MPs expressed astonishment at the failure. Lynne Featherstone, the Liberal Democrat spokesman for youth and equality, said: "What authority will the commission have in cracking the whip to other public bodies when they fail to comply with their own legal responsibilities with such impunity from ministers?"
According to its mandate, part of" the commission's responsibility is to "reduce inequality, eliminate discrimination, strengthen good relations between people and protect human rights". It must also assess compliance with the statutory duties applicable to public authorities as well as take "enforcement action when necessary and appropriate".
The commission maintains that its scheme was very ambitious and that the three-month period that it had to meet the deadline set by the Government's Equality Office was unrealistic. A spokeswoman for the commission confirmed that the deadline had been revised but said this was necessary because of the size of the job. "We take this task very seriously. We are attempting something much more ambitious than merely complying with the duty to set up equality schemes . . . we want a single integrated scheme, which obviously takes time to do properly."
Source
Racial anxiety rules in Britannia
In Britain there has been mounting concern about the country "sleepwalking" into segregation. A government report last year showed schools increasingly dividing along racial lines, particularly in the old industrial north of England. Jack Straw, the respected former foreign secretary and now Justice Secretary, has warned about white and non-white Britons "breathing the same air but walking past each other".
For Britons, the issue has particular potency this year, which marks the 40th anniversary of the "Rivers of Blood" speech given by the Conservative politician Enoch Powell. Then the shadow defence secretary, Powell warned that if immigration wasn't stopped, there would be strife in the years to come: "As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see the River Tiber foaming with much blood." Powell's speech has since been inscribed into British political culture, a reference to "Rivers of Blood" shorthand for white racism.
Yet Powellite concerns about race are slowly being reassessed. Last week BBC TV screened the first program of its controversial White season, a series of films and documentaries looking at white working-class Britain. Immigration and race feature heavily in the series (titles include White Girl, All White In Barking and The Poles Are Coming). Its commissioning editor, Richard Klein, says the white working class has been ignored by the political classes, the victim of political correctness. "The way in which they see the world may come across as extremist," Klein continues, "but that's not how they see it." Already, the BBC has been accused of indulging racist fears of immigrants.
There is much public hostility towards immigration. An ICM poll in January found that 78 per cent of Britons thought immigration policy should be tightened, with 56 per cent believing that British Muslims need to integrate more into British culture. Support for the xenophobic British Nationalist Party continues to grow in the lead-up to municipal elections later this year.
Some of this is the fallout from the July 7, 2005, London bombings and their demonstration of the dangers of militant Islamism from within. British politicians have acknowledged the need for a better defined sense of national solidarity. The Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, has led the way with his push for "British values" to be enshrined in an official statement of the rights and responsibilities of citizenship.
Yet the difficulties of articulating a national identity that appeals to a white ethnic majority as well as to immigrants are profound. It isn't easy to say what such a thing must involve, as the Culture Minister, Margaret Hodge, found out after a speech last week. Hodge had criticised annual Prom concerts for failing to be inclusive enough of people from minority backgrounds. It was a clumsy intervention. All she managed was to estrange white Britons for whom the Proms (especially the "Last Night Of" concerts featuring pieces such as Land Of Hope And Glory, Jerusalem and Rule Britannia) represent a healthy dose of patriotism.
The bottom line is that cultural marginalisation, for natives and immigrants alike, must be avoided at all cost. Even if such discontent doesn't spill into rivers of blood, it certainly leaves a society on edge.
Source
Blood clot pill approved in Britain
A daily pill that could help to prevent tens of thousands of deaths due to blood clots will be available to hospitals within weeks. The condition, venous thrombo-embolism (VTE), causes one in ten fatalities in hospital and kills at least 25,000 people in England every year, more than 20 times the number of deaths attributed to the superbug MRSA.
Pradaxa, the first new blood-thinning treatment in more than 50 years, is set to receive its licence next month. It will be used initially after hip and knee replacement surgery when the risk of blood clotting is high. But doctors hope that the anticoagulant pill could also be used to treat thousands of other patients at risk from heart conditions and strokes.
As many as half of all patients going into hospital risk developing VTE, which occurs when part of a deep-vein thrombosis or blood clot migrates to the lungs, heart or brain, with potentially deadly consequences. Such clotting is common after surgery, especially in the elderly, the overweight or those confined to bed for more than three days.
Last year the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) issued guidelines recommending that all patients should be assessed on admission to hospital for their risk of developing VTE but an audit by the all-party parliamentary thrombosis group in November found that less than a third of hospitals were doing so. Of those who were screened, only half the patients deemed at risk were receiving preventive treatment, a study published in The Lancet last month suggested.
A report by Sir Liam Donaldson, the Chief Medical Officer, admitted that "there was no systematic approach to identifying and treating those patients at risk from blood clots in hospitals and that there was significant room for improvement". At present, many hospital patients at risk of blood clots are given warfarin, which was licensed in the 1950s. Warfarin is effective but can trigger excessive internal bleeding. An alternative drug, heparin, involves a lengthy course of injections.
Preliminary results from a trial involving 34,000 patients suggest that Pradaxa is as effective in preventing clotting as existing treatments but it should be cheaper and easier to take. It works by reversing and inhibiting the effects of thrombin, a protein that allows clots to form after surgery.
Produced by the German company Boehringer Ingelheim, the drug is being evaluated by NICE and if approved it could be available to NHS patients within weeks. Another anticoagulant, Xarelto, is in development by Bayer, with preliminary results suggesting that it could be even more effective than Pradaxa.
Simon Frostick, a specialist in orthopaedics at the University of Liverpool, said: "These new drugs will revolutionise the way we prevent and treat blood clots. "Given the new trend for shorter hospital stays following joint replacement surgery, it is becoming increasingly important to have anticoagulant treatments available which are well tolerated and easy to use."
Beverley Hunt, medical director of the UK thrombosis charity Lifeblood, said: "The number of deaths from VTE is nothing short of a public health emergency. "The development of new drugs to treat this problem is terribly exciting. The potential benefit to the NHS is enormous."
Between 1995 and 2003, the NHS Litigation Authority handled more than 450 claims of negligence after patients developed VTE in hospital. It paid out almost 19 million pounds in compensation to sufferers or their bereaved families.
Professor Frostick added: "If these drugs reduce the number of deaths, the requirement for injections and community nurses, as well as other burdens - and if the proper sums are done - they should work out to be cost-effective for the NHS."
Source
A mocking look at British school insanity
Re: Ed Balls's astonishing revelation, based on unverified research (ooh, my favourite kind) that some state schools are charging parents admission fees
The good ones, obviously, where the children come out the other end largely uninjured. Not the ones where the body-piercing is done with scissors. One school in North London admitted that it was asking for 50 pounds to fund extracurricular activities. It gives you the money back if your kid doesn't get in, though, sadly missing the opportunity to almost define the notion of adding insult to injury.
The schools admissions procedure is mesmerising, even to the childless. Every part of it seems designed to induce the worst aspects of humanity. Some schools are brilliant, some are dreadful, and your child could end up in either. It's like the scene in Flash Gordon where Peter Duncan has to shut his eyes and put his arm in a tree stump to see if he gets bitten by a lethal space-crab.
Not liking their odds in many parts of the country (and let's not forget that Duncan gets the venom), parents play the system - moving house, finding God, assassinating the children next door. O'Brien has to hold a cage of rats over Winston's eyes to make him shriek: “Do it to Julia.” We just have to offer a schools lottery.
I think the new-found religion one is the most chilling, though. If I'd seen my parents acquire a sudden and unexpected fondness for the Pope, I would have thought they'd gone quite mad. And that was before the Vatican issued a new list of seven deadly sins this week, which puts contraception on a par with murder, and prohibits “morally debatable scientific experiments”. I was going to pack up my laboratory and stop trying to build that robot boy, but as an ardent fan of the contraceptive Pill, I guess I'm going to hell already.
But after all the mud slung at pushy parents, now it turns out that the schools themselves may not be without corruption. Some apparently ask for an admission fee, others for compulsory donations. Which, to anyone but an accountant, sounds a lot like a fee. Actually, my accountant thinks it's a fee too. There's something rather brilliant about most of the schools that stand accused of these practices being faith schools. With the faith in Arthur Daley, rather than an omnipotent being, I suppose. Perhaps they could specialise in teaching bribery, and add blackmail, extortion and fraud to the curriculum too. When Ronald Searle invented St Trinian's, he can't have imagined that its moral values would one day seem perfectly reasonable.
The admissions code for schools is a baffling mishmash - you can admit children for aptitude, but not for ability. You can let them in if they have a sibling at the school, but not if it's a cousin. Children in care take precedence and special needs children must be given priority. In other words, the best thing you can do for your children's future is to abandon them, after making sure they have a dyslexic older brother.
But why should schools be the only ones to make money in this whole grotty business? Parents of children who are already at desirable schools should start auctioning off the right to adopt them, thus providing next year's intake with a handy set of older siblings in situ. And why just auction them off once? Each child could sustain at least five new brothers and sisters, surely. And if it's a Roman Catholic school you're trying to get into, that would probably earn you double points.
Source
Sunday, March 16, 2008
British schools pander to Muslim thuggery
Schools in areas feared to have high rates of forced marriage are refusing to display posters on the issue because they are too hard-hitting, according to a government report. Headteachers are unwilling to put up the posters for fear that they might offend some parents. The disclosure came in findings from the Department for Children, Schools and Families showing that 2,089 pupils were absent from school without explanation in 14 areas of England believed to have a high incidence of forced marriage.
A paper from the department released by the Commons Home Affairs Select Committee found that in Luton cards had been issued rather than posters while in Derby most schools were unaware of the poster produced by the forced marriage unit. “In Birmingham, the poster had not been displayed as schools felt that the graphics are ‘too hard-hitting’. “Some schools in Leeds are displaying the posters but others are concerned that they may offend some of their parents,” the paper said.
The areas highlighted by the forced marriage unit as having a “high incidence” of forced marriage are Derby, Leicester, Luton, Tower Hamlets, Newham, Waltham Forest, Middlesbrough, Manchester, Blackburn with Darwen, Bristol, Birmingham, Leeds, Bradford and Lancashire. The report found that 2,089 children were “not in receipt of suitable education” including 250 in Birmingham, 155 in Bristol, 121 in Derby, 520 in Leeds, 294 in Leicester, 385 in Manchester and 66 in Luton.
But it is not clear how many of these children might have been taken out of school and forced into marriage. Some are being educated at home, some families have moved without leaving a forwarding address and other children are truants. MPs on the committee are now to seek extra information.
Margaret Moran described schools’ resistance to displaying the posters as shocking. She said: “People just don’t want to talk about it. “This can involve violence, rape, kidnap — what more important issue can there be? The cultural thing is just a big smokescreen.”
Martin Salter, another Labour member of the committee, said that the problem was “much bigger than people realise. There has been a culture of silence for far too long. There are far too many local authorities being lily-livered about addressing this issue.”
The department said that it was up to schools to decide what posters to display depending on circumstances but urged them to make such material available. “Posters are just one mechanism to get the message across.”
Source
Buffoonery in "The Guardian"
Writing about David Mamet's rejection of "brain-dead liberalism" in the Guardian (commented on yesterday in Media Blog), columnist Michael Billington offers this groaner on Glenngary Glen Ross:
Given his new-found conservatism, I doubt he could ever write a play riddled with such moral ambiguity
For the brain-dead leftist, it is carved in stone that conservatives are immune to moral ambiguity. This is pure jackassery. Is there anybody walking the Earth who is more morally assured of himself than Al Gore? Anybody who suffers from more moral certitude than Mr. Gore's slavish followers, who insist that their program-and that alone-is the necessary condition of human survival? Anybody remember progressive hero Peter Gabriel singing "I get so tired, working so hard for our survival?" Name Hillary Clinton ring a bell? Ever walked across a U.S. college campus? Read the Guardian? Checked out the latest cover of Rolling Stone?
There's no irony on that cover or in the article. Only hagiography.
In my experience, every red-diaper baby socialist patchouli sponge worth his organic tofu dreadlocks acts, talks, and thinks as though he is in a battle against Absolute Evil. Not the least of these is Mr. Billington himself, who begins his column: "I am depressed to read that David Mamet has swung to the right" and ends it with a lament that Mamet's political beliefs are apt to corrupt his literary talent. Which is to say that he is bothered by the fact that a man he does not know does not share his political beliefs, and he regards beliefs contrary to his own as so corrosive that they will untalent a talented writer. He suffers from no moral ambiguity in his assessment of Mamet's politics.
Conservatism assumes that the world is necessarily imperfect, that our institutions are imperfect, and that mankind is inescapably morally compromised. These brain-dead leftists have, apparently, never heard of T.S. Eliot, Russell Kirk, Evelyn Waugh, Burke, Tom Wolfe, Disraeli, or V.S. Naipaul, no doubt having immersed themselves in the finely shaded realism of Marx and Foucault.
Anybody who ever had a single serious thought about U.S. foreign policy under Reagan or George W. Bush ought to appreciate that conservatives are intimately familiar with moral ambiguity. I know, it's the Guardian, and I shouldn't take it seriously. But conservatives shouldn't allow cartoon versions of our ideas to displace our actual ideas.
Source. See Ace for more.
NHS misdiagnoses woman for 23 years
A woman who was called lazy because she fainted during exercise is recovering after an operation to repair a hole in her heart that was described by cardiologists as one of the biggest they had seen. Despite Louise Banks’s suspicions that she might be suffering from a heart problem – which appeared to worsen dramatically when she tried to exercise – doctors repeatedly misdiagnosed her condition throughout her teenage years. Ms Banks, now 23, even resorted to joining a gym to prove that she was not lazy, as her school PE teacher claimed. While running on the treadmill she discovered that her heart rate went down instead of up.
However, it was only this January, seven years later, that her condition was finally identified after a new GP recorded an irregular heartbeat during a 24-hour monitoring test. The scan revealed a tear 4cm (1½in) long in the partition between the right and left side of her heart that enlarged when more blood was being pumped through. The result was lack of oxygen in the blood reaching her brain, causing her to faint. The condition could have killed her at any time in the previous 23 years.
Heart surgeons at Southampton General Hospital have now repaired the gap. She has been left with no lasting effects apart from a 25cm scar on her chest and a temporarily enlarged right side of the heart. Ms Banks is now back at her home in Exeter, Devon, with her partner Matthew Folland, 30, and their son Ben, 4, and is looking forward to catching up on all the things that she could not enjoy as a teenager, including sports and dancing. She said: “I always knew there was something wrong because I could feel my heart start and stop like a baby wriggling in my chest. I’m looking forward to my new life. It will be great to be able to dance with my friends without collapsing.”
At the age of 8 she was described as a “fainty child” after passing out at school. When it happened again she was told that she was epileptic. At 14 she complained of having palpitations up to 70 times a day. At 16, fed up with the taunts, she joined a gym. Her condition was once again misdiagnosed when she complained that her heart rate was falling instead of rising as she tried to work up a sweat. When she was 19 she almost died in childbirth when her heart started fluttering.
An ultrasound test revealed an atrial septal defect, or hole in the heart, between the two main chambers, or atria. Cathy Ross, a senior cardiac nurse with the British Heart Foundation, said that a hole in the heart just 9mm long was considered large and Ms Banks’s was more than four times that size. Mrs Ross said: “She is incredibly lucky. I’ve never heard of anyone having a hole in their heart that large.”
Ms Banks does not harbour any grudges against the doctors who misdiagnosed her condition. She said: “I don’t feel angry with the doctors for missing it. I would rather have been operated on now than 23 years ago when science wasn’t so advanced.”
Source
Schools in areas feared to have high rates of forced marriage are refusing to display posters on the issue because they are too hard-hitting, according to a government report. Headteachers are unwilling to put up the posters for fear that they might offend some parents. The disclosure came in findings from the Department for Children, Schools and Families showing that 2,089 pupils were absent from school without explanation in 14 areas of England believed to have a high incidence of forced marriage.
A paper from the department released by the Commons Home Affairs Select Committee found that in Luton cards had been issued rather than posters while in Derby most schools were unaware of the poster produced by the forced marriage unit. “In Birmingham, the poster had not been displayed as schools felt that the graphics are ‘too hard-hitting’. “Some schools in Leeds are displaying the posters but others are concerned that they may offend some of their parents,” the paper said.
The areas highlighted by the forced marriage unit as having a “high incidence” of forced marriage are Derby, Leicester, Luton, Tower Hamlets, Newham, Waltham Forest, Middlesbrough, Manchester, Blackburn with Darwen, Bristol, Birmingham, Leeds, Bradford and Lancashire. The report found that 2,089 children were “not in receipt of suitable education” including 250 in Birmingham, 155 in Bristol, 121 in Derby, 520 in Leeds, 294 in Leicester, 385 in Manchester and 66 in Luton.
But it is not clear how many of these children might have been taken out of school and forced into marriage. Some are being educated at home, some families have moved without leaving a forwarding address and other children are truants. MPs on the committee are now to seek extra information.
Margaret Moran described schools’ resistance to displaying the posters as shocking. She said: “People just don’t want to talk about it. “This can involve violence, rape, kidnap — what more important issue can there be? The cultural thing is just a big smokescreen.”
Martin Salter, another Labour member of the committee, said that the problem was “much bigger than people realise. There has been a culture of silence for far too long. There are far too many local authorities being lily-livered about addressing this issue.”
The department said that it was up to schools to decide what posters to display depending on circumstances but urged them to make such material available. “Posters are just one mechanism to get the message across.”
Source
Buffoonery in "The Guardian"
Writing about David Mamet's rejection of "brain-dead liberalism" in the Guardian (commented on yesterday in Media Blog), columnist Michael Billington offers this groaner on Glenngary Glen Ross:
Given his new-found conservatism, I doubt he could ever write a play riddled with such moral ambiguity
For the brain-dead leftist, it is carved in stone that conservatives are immune to moral ambiguity. This is pure jackassery. Is there anybody walking the Earth who is more morally assured of himself than Al Gore? Anybody who suffers from more moral certitude than Mr. Gore's slavish followers, who insist that their program-and that alone-is the necessary condition of human survival? Anybody remember progressive hero Peter Gabriel singing "I get so tired, working so hard for our survival?" Name Hillary Clinton ring a bell? Ever walked across a U.S. college campus? Read the Guardian? Checked out the latest cover of Rolling Stone?
There's no irony on that cover or in the article. Only hagiography.
In my experience, every red-diaper baby socialist patchouli sponge worth his organic tofu dreadlocks acts, talks, and thinks as though he is in a battle against Absolute Evil. Not the least of these is Mr. Billington himself, who begins his column: "I am depressed to read that David Mamet has swung to the right" and ends it with a lament that Mamet's political beliefs are apt to corrupt his literary talent. Which is to say that he is bothered by the fact that a man he does not know does not share his political beliefs, and he regards beliefs contrary to his own as so corrosive that they will untalent a talented writer. He suffers from no moral ambiguity in his assessment of Mamet's politics.
Conservatism assumes that the world is necessarily imperfect, that our institutions are imperfect, and that mankind is inescapably morally compromised. These brain-dead leftists have, apparently, never heard of T.S. Eliot, Russell Kirk, Evelyn Waugh, Burke, Tom Wolfe, Disraeli, or V.S. Naipaul, no doubt having immersed themselves in the finely shaded realism of Marx and Foucault.
Anybody who ever had a single serious thought about U.S. foreign policy under Reagan or George W. Bush ought to appreciate that conservatives are intimately familiar with moral ambiguity. I know, it's the Guardian, and I shouldn't take it seriously. But conservatives shouldn't allow cartoon versions of our ideas to displace our actual ideas.
Source. See Ace for more.
NHS misdiagnoses woman for 23 years
A woman who was called lazy because she fainted during exercise is recovering after an operation to repair a hole in her heart that was described by cardiologists as one of the biggest they had seen. Despite Louise Banks’s suspicions that she might be suffering from a heart problem – which appeared to worsen dramatically when she tried to exercise – doctors repeatedly misdiagnosed her condition throughout her teenage years. Ms Banks, now 23, even resorted to joining a gym to prove that she was not lazy, as her school PE teacher claimed. While running on the treadmill she discovered that her heart rate went down instead of up.
However, it was only this January, seven years later, that her condition was finally identified after a new GP recorded an irregular heartbeat during a 24-hour monitoring test. The scan revealed a tear 4cm (1½in) long in the partition between the right and left side of her heart that enlarged when more blood was being pumped through. The result was lack of oxygen in the blood reaching her brain, causing her to faint. The condition could have killed her at any time in the previous 23 years.
Heart surgeons at Southampton General Hospital have now repaired the gap. She has been left with no lasting effects apart from a 25cm scar on her chest and a temporarily enlarged right side of the heart. Ms Banks is now back at her home in Exeter, Devon, with her partner Matthew Folland, 30, and their son Ben, 4, and is looking forward to catching up on all the things that she could not enjoy as a teenager, including sports and dancing. She said: “I always knew there was something wrong because I could feel my heart start and stop like a baby wriggling in my chest. I’m looking forward to my new life. It will be great to be able to dance with my friends without collapsing.”
At the age of 8 she was described as a “fainty child” after passing out at school. When it happened again she was told that she was epileptic. At 14 she complained of having palpitations up to 70 times a day. At 16, fed up with the taunts, she joined a gym. Her condition was once again misdiagnosed when she complained that her heart rate was falling instead of rising as she tried to work up a sweat. When she was 19 she almost died in childbirth when her heart started fluttering.
An ultrasound test revealed an atrial septal defect, or hole in the heart, between the two main chambers, or atria. Cathy Ross, a senior cardiac nurse with the British Heart Foundation, said that a hole in the heart just 9mm long was considered large and Ms Banks’s was more than four times that size. Mrs Ross said: “She is incredibly lucky. I’ve never heard of anyone having a hole in their heart that large.”
Ms Banks does not harbour any grudges against the doctors who misdiagnosed her condition. She said: “I don’t feel angry with the doctors for missing it. I would rather have been operated on now than 23 years ago when science wasn’t so advanced.”
Source
Saturday, March 15, 2008
Huge damage to children at NHS hospital
The surgeons just didn't care that their patients were dying or damaged -- and none of the many "administrators" stopped them
Families of patients with severe brain damage after heart surgery as children are preparing to sue the NHS after a profoundly disabled woman won her case for compensation in the wake of the Bristol heart babies scandal. The NHS has abandoned attempts to appeal against a landmark ruling in favour of Marianna Telles, who suffered brain damage after undergoing surgery as a newborn baby more than twenty years ago. Ms Telles, 22, is now set to receive at least a seven-figure sum in compensation. Her family solicitor said that the ruling was highly significant as there were at least seven more cases “waiting in the wings” of adults who were brain-damaged as children.
The cases all relate to the Bristol Royal Infirmary and associated hospitals from 1984 to 1995, where surgeons carried out complex heart procedures despite warnings that death and brain-damage rates of children who underwent such surgery were twice the national average.
The scandal resulted in the largest public inquiry in the history of the NHS, which in 2001 identified at least 300 families whose children died or had suffered severe injury as a result of the incompetence of surgeons at Bristol. Up to 80 families who lost a child after surgery at Bristol have previously settled legal cases out of court, in return for about 20,000 pounds compensation plus costs. Ms Telles, who suffers from severe mobility and psychiatric problems which require 24-hour care, is the first of those who survived operations to go to trial.
In 1998 the General Medical Council found two surgeons, James Wisheart and Janardan Dhasmana, guilty of serious professional misconduct. Mr Wisheart was struck off and Mr Dhasmana was banned from operating on children for four years. Both surgeons had operated on Ms Telles. Her family took the South West Strategic Health Authority to the High Court last month, claiming that doctors at the hospital were clinically negligent when treating her. After a seven-day trial, the judge ruled in Ms Telles’s favour and refused permission for the NHS Litigation Agency (NHSLA), acting for the health authority, to appeal. For two weeks the NHSLA considered applying directly to the Court of Appeal but on Wednesday confirmed it has abandoned this plan. A hearing next month will now determine an initial payment to the family to cover immediate costs of Ms Telles’s care, and set a timetable for reaching a decision on final damages.
Laurence Vick, who acted for the family and first served papers for the case in 2005, said: “We have a young woman with severe brain damage whose mother has supported her with only limited help from the NHS and local authority. We’ve attempted to negotiate for a very long time, but without success. You can only imagine what this family has gone through. “At last Marianna and her family know they will get the financial support she needs. I am confident we’ll be able to negotiate a settlement.”
Ms Telles’s mother, Anna Redman, previously gave evidence to the Bristol inquiry, which was highly critical of the clinical standards of the hospital’s paediatric heart surgery. Many more patients continue to live with severe brain injuries more than a decade after the botched surgery, Mr Vick, of the law firm Michelmores, said. He added: “We’ve settled several cases out of court and there are still seven more waiting in the wings.”
A leaked memo suggested in September that the NHS as a whole was facing 4.5 billion pounds of compensation claims over alleged blunders by midwives and doctors that have left babies suffering severe brain damage. The Corporate Manslaughter Act, due to come into force next month, is also likely to enable more compensation cases by making it easier to prosecute companies or public bodies. In a statement, the NHSLA said that it was committed to dealing with claims relating to the Bristol scandal on their individual merits.
Source
Britain wants Indian cooks to have academic qualifications
More bureaucratic rigidity. It just encourages illegality
The curry industry will die if action is not taken to address tough new immigration laws, restaurant bosses have warned the Scottish Parliament. They claim food quality will deteriorate and up to half of the Indian restaurants currently in business could shut. The comments came as 100 restaurateurs staged a protest at Holyrood over the changes to immigration rules. They claim a shortage of kitchen staff has been created as a result.
Restaurant owners said legislation which came in at the end of February makes it harder for them to bring in staff from outside the European Union. Foysol Choudhury, general secretary of the Bangladesh Samity Association in Edinburgh, criticised new rules requiring immigrants to speak English and have an academic qualification. "Our chefs don't need to speak English. Their curry talks," he said. [And most Brits like what they hear!]
"Whoever comes into my restaurant for a job will have to start as a kitchen porter and then he will have to climb the ladder. "A kitchen porter gets a minimum wage. Somebody with academic qualifications is not going to accept that. "The Indian restaurant industry contributes 3.2 billion pounds to the British economy. What is the British Government doing to save this industry?"
Asked about the consequences if action was not taken to tackle the issue, he said: "Half of the restaurants will close and we'll lose the food quality. "Eventually this industry will die." Edinburgh entrepreneur Tommy Miah, who is involved in the International Indian Chef of the Year Competition, added: "We're going to suffer big time. You guys won't be able to have chicken tikka masala anymore. "I've been offered a couple of other restaurants to take but I've said I can't do it because I'm struggling with one restaurant."
Immigration laws are reserved to Westminster, but Thursday's protest was about urging MSPs to lobby politicians in London on the issue. First Minister Alex Salmond, a well-known curry fan, said the issue was "really serious". Speaking as he met demonstrators, he said he would continue to draw the UK Government's attention to the matter. He said: "If people can't get the skilled staff then they can't operate their restaurants, and if they can't operate their restaurants then that's damaging for the economy and the social life of Scotland. It's something we feel very strongly about. "Ideally, the new system shouldn't have discriminated and prevented people coming in with key skills."
Source
The surgeons just didn't care that their patients were dying or damaged -- and none of the many "administrators" stopped them
Families of patients with severe brain damage after heart surgery as children are preparing to sue the NHS after a profoundly disabled woman won her case for compensation in the wake of the Bristol heart babies scandal. The NHS has abandoned attempts to appeal against a landmark ruling in favour of Marianna Telles, who suffered brain damage after undergoing surgery as a newborn baby more than twenty years ago. Ms Telles, 22, is now set to receive at least a seven-figure sum in compensation. Her family solicitor said that the ruling was highly significant as there were at least seven more cases “waiting in the wings” of adults who were brain-damaged as children.
The cases all relate to the Bristol Royal Infirmary and associated hospitals from 1984 to 1995, where surgeons carried out complex heart procedures despite warnings that death and brain-damage rates of children who underwent such surgery were twice the national average.
The scandal resulted in the largest public inquiry in the history of the NHS, which in 2001 identified at least 300 families whose children died or had suffered severe injury as a result of the incompetence of surgeons at Bristol. Up to 80 families who lost a child after surgery at Bristol have previously settled legal cases out of court, in return for about 20,000 pounds compensation plus costs. Ms Telles, who suffers from severe mobility and psychiatric problems which require 24-hour care, is the first of those who survived operations to go to trial.
In 1998 the General Medical Council found two surgeons, James Wisheart and Janardan Dhasmana, guilty of serious professional misconduct. Mr Wisheart was struck off and Mr Dhasmana was banned from operating on children for four years. Both surgeons had operated on Ms Telles. Her family took the South West Strategic Health Authority to the High Court last month, claiming that doctors at the hospital were clinically negligent when treating her. After a seven-day trial, the judge ruled in Ms Telles’s favour and refused permission for the NHS Litigation Agency (NHSLA), acting for the health authority, to appeal. For two weeks the NHSLA considered applying directly to the Court of Appeal but on Wednesday confirmed it has abandoned this plan. A hearing next month will now determine an initial payment to the family to cover immediate costs of Ms Telles’s care, and set a timetable for reaching a decision on final damages.
Laurence Vick, who acted for the family and first served papers for the case in 2005, said: “We have a young woman with severe brain damage whose mother has supported her with only limited help from the NHS and local authority. We’ve attempted to negotiate for a very long time, but without success. You can only imagine what this family has gone through. “At last Marianna and her family know they will get the financial support she needs. I am confident we’ll be able to negotiate a settlement.”
Ms Telles’s mother, Anna Redman, previously gave evidence to the Bristol inquiry, which was highly critical of the clinical standards of the hospital’s paediatric heart surgery. Many more patients continue to live with severe brain injuries more than a decade after the botched surgery, Mr Vick, of the law firm Michelmores, said. He added: “We’ve settled several cases out of court and there are still seven more waiting in the wings.”
A leaked memo suggested in September that the NHS as a whole was facing 4.5 billion pounds of compensation claims over alleged blunders by midwives and doctors that have left babies suffering severe brain damage. The Corporate Manslaughter Act, due to come into force next month, is also likely to enable more compensation cases by making it easier to prosecute companies or public bodies. In a statement, the NHSLA said that it was committed to dealing with claims relating to the Bristol scandal on their individual merits.
Source
Britain wants Indian cooks to have academic qualifications
More bureaucratic rigidity. It just encourages illegality
The curry industry will die if action is not taken to address tough new immigration laws, restaurant bosses have warned the Scottish Parliament. They claim food quality will deteriorate and up to half of the Indian restaurants currently in business could shut. The comments came as 100 restaurateurs staged a protest at Holyrood over the changes to immigration rules. They claim a shortage of kitchen staff has been created as a result.
Restaurant owners said legislation which came in at the end of February makes it harder for them to bring in staff from outside the European Union. Foysol Choudhury, general secretary of the Bangladesh Samity Association in Edinburgh, criticised new rules requiring immigrants to speak English and have an academic qualification. "Our chefs don't need to speak English. Their curry talks," he said. [And most Brits like what they hear!]
"Whoever comes into my restaurant for a job will have to start as a kitchen porter and then he will have to climb the ladder. "A kitchen porter gets a minimum wage. Somebody with academic qualifications is not going to accept that. "The Indian restaurant industry contributes 3.2 billion pounds to the British economy. What is the British Government doing to save this industry?"
Asked about the consequences if action was not taken to tackle the issue, he said: "Half of the restaurants will close and we'll lose the food quality. "Eventually this industry will die." Edinburgh entrepreneur Tommy Miah, who is involved in the International Indian Chef of the Year Competition, added: "We're going to suffer big time. You guys won't be able to have chicken tikka masala anymore. "I've been offered a couple of other restaurants to take but I've said I can't do it because I'm struggling with one restaurant."
Immigration laws are reserved to Westminster, but Thursday's protest was about urging MSPs to lobby politicians in London on the issue. First Minister Alex Salmond, a well-known curry fan, said the issue was "really serious". Speaking as he met demonstrators, he said he would continue to draw the UK Government's attention to the matter. He said: "If people can't get the skilled staff then they can't operate their restaurants, and if they can't operate their restaurants then that's damaging for the economy and the social life of Scotland. It's something we feel very strongly about. "Ideally, the new system shouldn't have discriminated and prevented people coming in with key skills."
Source
Friday, March 14, 2008
Tory peer vindicated after Norovirus shuts three wards at 'grubby' NHS hospital he attacked
Lord Mancroft: The peer, who says he is lucky to have left the Royal United hospital alive, feels he might have 'lifted the lid on something'. When a Tory peer launched a stinging attack on the "grubby and drunken" nurses he encountered in the NHS, the hospital employing them defended them to the hilt. It demanded evidence of Lord Mancroft's damning allegations and still says it has found not a shred of truth in his complaints. But yesterday it had to defend its standards once more as it dealt with its third disease outbreak in five months.
Another bout of the norovirus - the winter vomiting bug - has forced three wards to close at the Royal United Hospital in Bath. Last November, the bug forced two wards to close, and a second bout last month shut nine wards. The highly infectious virus, which causes diarrhoea and vomiting, spreads through closed communities rapidly if patients and staff fail to wash their hands.
Last month, Lord Mancroft, the 50-year-old vice-chairman of the Countryside Alliance, spoke of how appalled he had been by the "filthy" state of the wards at the Royal United, during his treatment there for gastroenteritis. He said he was dismayed at the heartless attitude of "lazy and promiscuous" staff and that apart from "one or two wonderful ones" the nurses were "mostly grubby with dirty fingernails and hair".
In a Lords debate on patient care, he said: "It is a miracle that I am still alive. The wards are filthy. "The wards, the tables, the beds and the bathrooms were not cleaned." The peer, who hunts with Prince Charles, said a splash of blood in the bathroom and a piece of dirty cotton wool under a neighbouring bed were there for the entire seven days he was in hospital. The Royal United said staff were left "extremely distressed and upset" by the peer's account, in which he said he heard a nurse say: "I really shouldn't be here because I had so much to drink last night and I feel like I'm going to be sick."
The Royal United is one of at least 40 hospital trusts to be hit by the norovirus this year. Relatives ringing the hospital or visiting its website have been told that visiting is banned unless strictly necessary, and reminded to wash their hands at all times. Last night, a spokesman for the hospital, Helen Robinson-Gordon, said: "Norovirus is extremely prevalent in the community at the moment and other hospitals have been affected by it. "Of course it is linked to hygiene and cleanliness in that we should all have clean hands at all times but it is coming into the hospital from the community. "Because it is so highly infectious, once it is here it passes from person to person very easily. "We recently had two spot checks at the hospital for cleanliness and passed both with flying colours. "We still have no factual basis for Lord Mancroft's evidence whatsoever. We have asked him for a meeting which he has agreed to but we are still awaiting a date from him."
Lord Mancroft said last night: "I am not the person to comment on this because I am the amateur - it is up to them to sort themselves out. "But I can say that subsequent to speaking out I have had the biggest postbag I have ever had since I have been in the House of Lords. "Quite a lot of those letters are relating similar stories in the same hospital. Some relate to other hospitals. "I suspect I have inadvertently uncovered or lifted the lid on something."
Source
British bureaucrats lose yet more ID data: "The Ministry of Defence is at the centre of a new security row, after the disclosure that 11,000 military ID cards have been lost or stolen in two years. Opposition parties said that the scale of the losses cast fresh doubt on plans for a national ID card scheme. The MoD said that it took the issue very seriously and steps were being taken to improve general security awareness. The cards have photographic ID on them "so it would be difficult for them to be used by individuals they have not been assigned to." MoD figures released in a Commons written answer said 4,433 cards disappeared in 2006 and 6,812 last year. Gerald Howarth, Tory defence spokesman, said: "This is another example of the Government's scandalous disregard for the security of our citizens and another reason why the public has no confidence in the Government's ID card plans."
Lord Mancroft: The peer, who says he is lucky to have left the Royal United hospital alive, feels he might have 'lifted the lid on something'. When a Tory peer launched a stinging attack on the "grubby and drunken" nurses he encountered in the NHS, the hospital employing them defended them to the hilt. It demanded evidence of Lord Mancroft's damning allegations and still says it has found not a shred of truth in his complaints. But yesterday it had to defend its standards once more as it dealt with its third disease outbreak in five months.
Another bout of the norovirus - the winter vomiting bug - has forced three wards to close at the Royal United Hospital in Bath. Last November, the bug forced two wards to close, and a second bout last month shut nine wards. The highly infectious virus, which causes diarrhoea and vomiting, spreads through closed communities rapidly if patients and staff fail to wash their hands.
Last month, Lord Mancroft, the 50-year-old vice-chairman of the Countryside Alliance, spoke of how appalled he had been by the "filthy" state of the wards at the Royal United, during his treatment there for gastroenteritis. He said he was dismayed at the heartless attitude of "lazy and promiscuous" staff and that apart from "one or two wonderful ones" the nurses were "mostly grubby with dirty fingernails and hair".
In a Lords debate on patient care, he said: "It is a miracle that I am still alive. The wards are filthy. "The wards, the tables, the beds and the bathrooms were not cleaned." The peer, who hunts with Prince Charles, said a splash of blood in the bathroom and a piece of dirty cotton wool under a neighbouring bed were there for the entire seven days he was in hospital. The Royal United said staff were left "extremely distressed and upset" by the peer's account, in which he said he heard a nurse say: "I really shouldn't be here because I had so much to drink last night and I feel like I'm going to be sick."
The Royal United is one of at least 40 hospital trusts to be hit by the norovirus this year. Relatives ringing the hospital or visiting its website have been told that visiting is banned unless strictly necessary, and reminded to wash their hands at all times. Last night, a spokesman for the hospital, Helen Robinson-Gordon, said: "Norovirus is extremely prevalent in the community at the moment and other hospitals have been affected by it. "Of course it is linked to hygiene and cleanliness in that we should all have clean hands at all times but it is coming into the hospital from the community. "Because it is so highly infectious, once it is here it passes from person to person very easily. "We recently had two spot checks at the hospital for cleanliness and passed both with flying colours. "We still have no factual basis for Lord Mancroft's evidence whatsoever. We have asked him for a meeting which he has agreed to but we are still awaiting a date from him."
Lord Mancroft said last night: "I am not the person to comment on this because I am the amateur - it is up to them to sort themselves out. "But I can say that subsequent to speaking out I have had the biggest postbag I have ever had since I have been in the House of Lords. "Quite a lot of those letters are relating similar stories in the same hospital. Some relate to other hospitals. "I suspect I have inadvertently uncovered or lifted the lid on something."
Source
British bureaucrats lose yet more ID data: "The Ministry of Defence is at the centre of a new security row, after the disclosure that 11,000 military ID cards have been lost or stolen in two years. Opposition parties said that the scale of the losses cast fresh doubt on plans for a national ID card scheme. The MoD said that it took the issue very seriously and steps were being taken to improve general security awareness. The cards have photographic ID on them "so it would be difficult for them to be used by individuals they have not been assigned to." MoD figures released in a Commons written answer said 4,433 cards disappeared in 2006 and 6,812 last year. Gerald Howarth, Tory defence spokesman, said: "This is another example of the Government's scandalous disregard for the security of our citizens and another reason why the public has no confidence in the Government's ID card plans."
Thursday, March 13, 2008
Brainless Brits: Illegal immigrants vanish after being given rail tickets and told to 'make their way to detention centre'
Blundering police officers put a group of illegal immigrants on a train, gave each of them free tickets and told them to make their way to a detention centre 80 miles away under their own steam. Unsurprisingly, none of the nine reported to the centre and all nine disappeared on their journey from Cambridge to Croydon. But police have defended their actions, claiming they were only acting on the advice of immigration officials and the decision was out of their hands.
James Paice MP for South-East Cambridgeshire where the men of Afghan origin were found under a lorry last week, has hit out at officials who co-ordinated the men's travel. "This is a ludicrous policy and bound to lead to increased numbers of illegal immigrants. As the police have made clear, the buck clearly stops with the Home Office," he said.
The nine men, who were found at Fordham, near Newmarket, were given the train tickets at Cambridge and the name of the immigration facility in Croydon and told to report there without supervision. DI Alan Savile, of Cambs Police, said: "In matters of this nature, the police are led by the UK Immigration Service which in turns follows the Home Office instruction. "In this instance, the Immigration Service in St Ives was consulted and the decision taken to direct individuals to the immigration facility at Croydon, which is accepted practice."
Mr Paice, who has now raised the matter with Immigration Minister Liam Byrne, said: "If this is the action that the Immigration Service actually encourages, it is hardly surprising that we have vast numbers of illegal immigrants in this country. "Surely when they are apprehended, as in this case, they ought not then be released into the community without any trace of where they may go. "It is naive in the extreme to expect nine illegal immigrants found in Fordham to voluntarily report to a facility in Croydon."
The men are thought to have boarded a lorry owned by well-known haulage company Turners in Europe. When the men were discovered at the firm's base at Fordham, staff at Turners informed police. Staff said police arrived with a minibus, took the men straight to the train station in Cambridge, then gave them tickets and allowed them on their way.
Source
A collusive silence in the British media
Today, I ask a simple, but immensely serious, question: "Why has the UK media, in pretty well all its forms, failed to report `The Manhattan Declaration on Climate Change', signed in New York on March 4, 2008?" The meeting at which the `Declaration' was agreed [`The 2008 International Conference on Climate Change', March 2 - March 4] was attended by over 500 people (scientists, economists, policy makers, etc.), with over 100 speakers delivering keynote addresses, or participating in panel discussions. Sadly, I think we know the answer, and it is one that reflects very badly on our supine UK media [the only exception of note appears to be The Sunday Telegraph, March 9: `Climate dissent grows hotter as chill deepens']. If ever evidence were needed of the dangerous `control' of our media by pernicious grand narratives, then this is surely it. Luckily, we bloggers can break the deafening silence. Here, then, is the `Declaration' for you to read for yourself, unadorned, unedited, and unfiltered by any media:
I should also like to leave you with the following interesting commentary on the proceedings: `NY Climate Conference: Journey to the Center of Warming Sanity' (American Thinker, March 6), which begins with the seminal point:
Now you know - but no thanks indeed to our UK media. We should be asking some urgent questions about media independence and balance.
Source
In Britain Christianity must not be erotic
Sad for Christians. "GHD" is a British company that makes hair-curling and straightening gadgets
More details here
Pregnant woman injected with cleaning fluid by NHS
A BRITISH hospital that gave a woman anaesthetic contaminated with cleaning fluid as she gave birth is likely to face a multimillion-pound legal action. Angelique Sutcliffe, 47, was left paralysed after being injected in the spine with the fluid before her daughter Abigail's birth in January 2001. The anaesthetic was contaminated with chlorhexidine, which is used to clean patients before surgery. Following a caesarian, Mrs Sutcliffe went into a convulsion. She also suffered neurological damage. The incident caused a rare condition called chronic adhesive arachnoiditis - debilitating pain in the back, neck and other limbs.
Judges at London's High Court overnight rejected an appeal by Aintree Hospital in Liverpool, against a ruling it was negligent, the British Press Association reported.
Mrs Sutcliffe, who cannot use her legs, has limited use of her hands and requires around-the-clock care, welcomed the legal decision. She is now preparing to sue. The hospital's decision to appeal an April 2007 ruling increased the pressure on her family, she said. "You think you've won because the court finds in your favour and then you find that it may be taken away from you because the NHS (National Health Service) decides to appeal," she said. "I hope that today's finding will ensure that procedures in operating theatres are tightened up. "I would not want this to happen to anyone else."
Source
Many Brits 'driven' to treatment abroad
Avoiding infections such as MRSA and NHS waiting lists are driving people abroad for medical treatment, according to a poll. A survey of 648 patients who had treatments overseas found that 83% also wanted to save money on the cost of private procedures in the UK. Most (97%) had a good experience and would be willing to go abroad for treatment again. Saving cash was the main motivating factor, but 63% of those having elective procedures wanted to avoid NHS waiting lists while 56% were worried about infections like MRSA.
The poll was carried out for the website www.treatmentabroad.com, which estimated that 100,000 people travelled abroad for surgery and dental treatment in 2007. Around 6% of those questioned for the survey had spent more than œ10,000 on treatment. Nine out of 10 (92%) of cosmetic surgery patients were women, while 69% of those having elective surgery and scans were men. More than half of people choosing to have treatment abroad were aged between 40 and 59.
The top destinations for treatment include Hungary, mostly for dental treatment, Cyprus for cosmetic surgery, and India for surgery and scans. Spain, Belgium and the Czech Republic were also among the most popular destinations, according to the poll.
Source
The big bang implosion of Physics
In cutting their funding of the physical sciences, and devaluing science education, the US and UK governments are committing `scientific vandalism'.
We are on the cusp of some of the biggest breakthroughs in physics in over three decades. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a massive particle collider built deep beneath the Swiss/French border, is nearing completion. Together with Fermilab's Tevatron, a proton-antiproton collider near Chicago, the European and US facilities are in a race to discover the Higg's Boson. This is the gaping hole in our theory of everything, the standard model of matter. Predicted by Peter Higgs in Edinburgh in 1964, the Higgs Boson is our best bet at explaining the nature of mass, that ubiquitous property of matter that has evaded explanation to date.
Now, particle physics is about to be kicked out of its speculative doldrums by the influx of long-awaited experimental data that may result in the revelation of a new fundamental force of nature, and could even allow us to create mini black holes here on Earth. But just as physics is about to receive a massive shot in the arm, its political masters seem prepared to pull the plug on fundamental research, introducing massive budget cutbacks both in the UK and in the US. Is this the beginning of the end for Big Physics?
Both Fermilab and the Standford Linear Accelerator (SLAC) in California, the two big particle physics labs in the US, are in near meltdown. Fermilab is cutting 10 per cent of its staff and has had the budgets for both its next generation projects cut to zero this year. SLAC looks likely to lose 300 staff at its facility. As Pier Oddone, Fermilab's director put it: `The greatest impact is on the future of the lab, we have no ability now to develop our future.' (1)
In the UK, the budget cuts imposed by the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) are even more detrimental. In removing o80million from the physics budget, the UK faces losing its participation in the next generation particle physics projects to which it has already committed; it is also pulling out of two telescope collaborations: the Isaac Newton facility in the Canary Islands and the new o8million Gemini telescope in Hawaii. There are no equivalent facilities for UK astronomers to use in the northern hemisphere. Brian Foster, professor of experimental physics at Oxford University, described the cuts as `scientific vandalism' (2).
There has been considerable discussion within the scientific community as to whether the swingeing cutbacks occurring on both sides of the Atlantic are the product, in the words of Manchester University's Dr Brian Cox, of `accident, design or just sheer incompetence'. But even if you believe that, given better financial circumstances, things will right themselves in the future, we should be aware that something significant has changed.
Big Physics no longer has the same kudos with our political rulers as it once did. In the UK, the recent Sainsbury Review of the government's science and innovation policies made it clear that the days of universities focusing on basic research are numbered. The key emphasis is now on `knowledge transfer'. The government is now only interested in the capacity of university research departments to kickstart high-end product development or `useful' spin-offs from basic research. As Lord Sainsbury put it: `Today, we are seeing a transformation in the purpose and self-image of universities. Politicians, industrialists and economists are beginning to see universities as major agents of economic growth as well as creators of knowledge, developers of young minds and transmitters of culture.' (3)
Over the past two or three decades, the era of backing for knowledge for its own sake has been dispensed with, both on economic and educational grounds. So even though US President George W Bush has promised increased spending in the physical sciences in 2009, no one is holding their breath in the US; the president promised the same in 2007 and 2008, but it did not materialise.
In truth, in the US Big Physics no longer has the political protection it once had when it comes to pushing a budget through Congress. In Britain, scientists have been promised a review of current spending priorities in the summer, but there is little chance that the STFC will rescind its decision to withdraw from the major international collaborations.
A petition on the Downing Street website to `reverse the decision to cut vital UK contributions to Particle Physics and Astronomy' has attracted 17,380 signatures (4). But the petition has somewhat missed the point, since the writing has been on the wall for some time: physics just isn't a vital priority for the political class. The UK government has happily turned our school science curriculum into a course on scientific literacy for the masses, allowed numerous university physics departments to close, and sponsored the creation of physics degrees that don't require mathematics.
In the US, this is not the first time that funding priorities have forced drastic cuts in investment in fundamental physics research. In 1993, despite protestations from then president Bill Clinton, Congress cancelled the proposed Superconducting Super Collider, which would have challenged the dominance of the LHC in Europe.
Britain has until now retained its participation at the front-end of particle physics with its contribution to the LHC. The International Linear Collider was to be the next big step forward beyond the LHC. It would be able to explore matter at a finer detail than the LHC. The UK initially contributed to this project, yet it now seems stillborn: the UK pulled out last month, and the US is removing any further funding for it.
Even more perplexing is the American decision to cancel its funding for ITER, the new international fusion reactor to be built in France. This is the next stage in the project to develop commercial fusion power which will potentially produce energy from water by mimicking the action of the sun. This clean nuclear energy could replace the more conventional nuclear fission reactors in 30 years time.
Robert Wilson, Fermilab's first director, when asked by a congressional committee if the lab would aid national defence, famously responded: `No, but it will help keep the nation worth defending.' Today, such a strident belief in the quest for knowledge does not fit well within the constraints of an education system orientated towards skills, not knowledge, and access, not excellence. The political class does not think young people are interested enough in science to believe that any youngster could aspire to an understanding of the nature of the universe without somehow making it relevant to their everyday lives.
Even the physicists at the European Programme for Nuclear Research (CERN) and Fermilab are prone to justify their work feebly in terms of the potential spin-offs to medical research. That is like trying to justify the Apollo space programme because it gave us Teflon non-stick saucepans. Rationalising fundamental research on the basis of a few spin-offs just won't wash. As Martin Rees, president of the Royal Society, put it, the discovery of magnetic resonance imaging, a powerful way of identifying cancers, was discovered by a physicist `whose work would never have been possible without funding or basic physics' (5).
In truth, fundamental research is a necessity, not a luxury. Most of the technological developments made in the past 100 years have been fuelled by fundamental research into science. Albert Einstein famously dismissed Enrico Fermi's idea that massive amounts of energy could be released by splitting the atom. The unintended consequences of the theory of relativity gave us nuclear power. Similarly, from the esoteric beauty of the theory of quantum mechanics has emerged electronics, computing and laser optics, to name but a few developments.
We cannot foretell where research into the fundamental constituents of matter will take us, but to not travel down that path is to shut the door on the future. Our ability to understand and control nature is what gives us the capacity to carve out a different future not constrained by the fetters of the immediate problems of finite resources. It is our lack of vision and our preoccupation with the limitations of our society that holds us back from venturing further.
As a society, if we relinquish our quest to understand the universe within which we live, we curtail our ambition. This reflects a lesser view of humanity, capable at best of patching up the damage we have done to the planet, rather than seeking to expand our horizons. It seems that in a world dominated by the politics of eco-doom and sustainable development, there is little room for the ambition of Big Physics and the capacity it gives us to transform our future destiny. Now, more than ever, scientists need to argue for the vision to allow such research to continue.
Source
More British bungling: "A disciplinary inquiry was under way last night after a report found that thousands of convicted offenders had not been listed on the Police National Computer because of a catalogue of court errors, while hundreds of other suspects had escaped trial. Jack Straw, the Justice Secretary, announced that an investigation would take place into the "lamentable" failings at Leeds Magistrates' Court, possibly leading to criminal charges against court staff involved. Up to 555 defendants who had their warrants to appear in court withdrawn may now be recalled over the 1,709 charges that they faced. Most were for motoring or other minor matters, but 115 were for serious offences that should be recorded on the Police National Computer." [If a bureaucracy cannot even keep records, what the hell is it good for?]
Blundering police officers put a group of illegal immigrants on a train, gave each of them free tickets and told them to make their way to a detention centre 80 miles away under their own steam. Unsurprisingly, none of the nine reported to the centre and all nine disappeared on their journey from Cambridge to Croydon. But police have defended their actions, claiming they were only acting on the advice of immigration officials and the decision was out of their hands.
James Paice MP for South-East Cambridgeshire where the men of Afghan origin were found under a lorry last week, has hit out at officials who co-ordinated the men's travel. "This is a ludicrous policy and bound to lead to increased numbers of illegal immigrants. As the police have made clear, the buck clearly stops with the Home Office," he said.
The nine men, who were found at Fordham, near Newmarket, were given the train tickets at Cambridge and the name of the immigration facility in Croydon and told to report there without supervision. DI Alan Savile, of Cambs Police, said: "In matters of this nature, the police are led by the UK Immigration Service which in turns follows the Home Office instruction. "In this instance, the Immigration Service in St Ives was consulted and the decision taken to direct individuals to the immigration facility at Croydon, which is accepted practice."
Mr Paice, who has now raised the matter with Immigration Minister Liam Byrne, said: "If this is the action that the Immigration Service actually encourages, it is hardly surprising that we have vast numbers of illegal immigrants in this country. "Surely when they are apprehended, as in this case, they ought not then be released into the community without any trace of where they may go. "It is naive in the extreme to expect nine illegal immigrants found in Fordham to voluntarily report to a facility in Croydon."
The men are thought to have boarded a lorry owned by well-known haulage company Turners in Europe. When the men were discovered at the firm's base at Fordham, staff at Turners informed police. Staff said police arrived with a minibus, took the men straight to the train station in Cambridge, then gave them tickets and allowed them on their way.
Source
A collusive silence in the British media
Today, I ask a simple, but immensely serious, question: "Why has the UK media, in pretty well all its forms, failed to report `The Manhattan Declaration on Climate Change', signed in New York on March 4, 2008?" The meeting at which the `Declaration' was agreed [`The 2008 International Conference on Climate Change', March 2 - March 4] was attended by over 500 people (scientists, economists, policy makers, etc.), with over 100 speakers delivering keynote addresses, or participating in panel discussions. Sadly, I think we know the answer, and it is one that reflects very badly on our supine UK media [the only exception of note appears to be The Sunday Telegraph, March 9: `Climate dissent grows hotter as chill deepens']. If ever evidence were needed of the dangerous `control' of our media by pernicious grand narratives, then this is surely it. Luckily, we bloggers can break the deafening silence. Here, then, is the `Declaration' for you to read for yourself, unadorned, unedited, and unfiltered by any media:
The Manhattan Declaration on Climate Change
`Global warming' is not a global crisis
We, the scientists and researchers in climate and related fields, economists, policymakers, and business leaders, assembled at Times Square, New York City, participating in the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change,
Resolving that scientific questions should be evaluated solely by the scientific method;
Affirming that global climate has always changed and always will, independent of the actions of humans, and that carbon dioxide (CO2) is not a pollutant but rather a necessity for all life;
Recognising that the causes and extent of recently observed climatic change are the subject of intense debates in the climate science community and that oft-repeated assertions of a supposed `consensus' among climate experts are false;
Affirming that attempts by governments to legislate costly regulations on industry and individual citizens to encourage CO2 emission reduction will slow development while having no appreciable impact on the future trajectory of global climate change. Such policies will markedly diminish future prosperity and so reduce the ability of societies to adapt to inevitable climate change, thereby increasing, not decreasing, human suffering;
Noting that warmer weather is generally less harmful to life on Earth than colder:
Hereby declare:
That current plans to restrict anthropogenic CO2 emissions are a dangerous misallocation of intellectual capital and resources that should be dedicated to solving humanity's real and serious problems.
That there is no convincing evidence that CO2 emissions from modern industrial activity has in the past, is now, or will in the future cause catastrophic climate change.
That attempts by governments to inflict taxes and costly regulations on industry and individual citizens with the aim of reducing emissions of CO2 will pointlessly curtail the prosperity of the West and progress of developing nations without affecting climate.
That adaptation as needed is massively more cost-effective than any attempted mitigation and that a focus on such mitigation will divert the attention and resources of governments away from addressing the real problems of their peoples.
That human-caused climate change is not a global crisis.
Now, therefore, we recommend -
That world leaders reject the views expressed by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as well as popular, but misguided works such as An Inconvenient Truth.
That all taxes, regulations, and other interventions intended to reduce emissions of CO2 be abandoned forthwith.
Agreed at New York, 4 March 2008.
I should also like to leave you with the following interesting commentary on the proceedings: `NY Climate Conference: Journey to the Center of Warming Sanity' (American Thinker, March 6), which begins with the seminal point:
"If you rely solely on the mainstream media to keep informed, you may not have heard that the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change concluded in New York City on Tuesday. And if you have heard anything - this being primarily a forum of skeptics - it was likely of a last gasp effort by `flat-Earthers' sponsored by right-wingers in the pockets of big-oil to breathe life into their dying warming denial agenda. Well, having just returned from the 3 day event, I'm happy to report that the struggle against the ravages of warming alarmism is not only alive, but healthier than ever."
Now you know - but no thanks indeed to our UK media. We should be asking some urgent questions about media independence and balance.
Source
In Britain Christianity must not be erotic
Sad for Christians. "GHD" is a British company that makes hair-curling and straightening gadgets
"A series of hair-styler adverts has been banned after 'eroticising' religious symbols such as rosary beads and the Lord's Prayer. The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) said three adverts for GHD should not be shown again as they caused "serious offence" to Christians. The Archdeacon of Liverpool was among 23 people who complained after the ads were broadcast on television.
In one advert, a woman wearing lingerie was shown sitting on a bed holding what appeared to be rosary beads. Her inner monologue was heard in Italian while on-screen text provided a translation. "May my new curls make her feel choked with jealousy," the text read. "GHD IV thy Will Be Done," it continued, with the letter T appearing as a Christian cross.
"GHD. A new religion for hair," the text concluded. Complainants criticised the lifting of "thy will be done" from the Lord's Prayer and said the transposing of the letter T into a cross was offensive to the Christian faith.
In response, GHD owner Jemella said it "had not intended to cause offence". It claimed the use of the word 'thy' was to "add drama and weight to the intensity of the girls' wishes". The firm insisted "thy will be done" had been accepted into common usage in a similar way to other biblical phrases such as "turning the other cheek", "give us today our daily bread" and "lead me not into temptation".
Source
More details here
Pregnant woman injected with cleaning fluid by NHS
A BRITISH hospital that gave a woman anaesthetic contaminated with cleaning fluid as she gave birth is likely to face a multimillion-pound legal action. Angelique Sutcliffe, 47, was left paralysed after being injected in the spine with the fluid before her daughter Abigail's birth in January 2001. The anaesthetic was contaminated with chlorhexidine, which is used to clean patients before surgery. Following a caesarian, Mrs Sutcliffe went into a convulsion. She also suffered neurological damage. The incident caused a rare condition called chronic adhesive arachnoiditis - debilitating pain in the back, neck and other limbs.
Judges at London's High Court overnight rejected an appeal by Aintree Hospital in Liverpool, against a ruling it was negligent, the British Press Association reported.
Mrs Sutcliffe, who cannot use her legs, has limited use of her hands and requires around-the-clock care, welcomed the legal decision. She is now preparing to sue. The hospital's decision to appeal an April 2007 ruling increased the pressure on her family, she said. "You think you've won because the court finds in your favour and then you find that it may be taken away from you because the NHS (National Health Service) decides to appeal," she said. "I hope that today's finding will ensure that procedures in operating theatres are tightened up. "I would not want this to happen to anyone else."
Source
Many Brits 'driven' to treatment abroad
Avoiding infections such as MRSA and NHS waiting lists are driving people abroad for medical treatment, according to a poll. A survey of 648 patients who had treatments overseas found that 83% also wanted to save money on the cost of private procedures in the UK. Most (97%) had a good experience and would be willing to go abroad for treatment again. Saving cash was the main motivating factor, but 63% of those having elective procedures wanted to avoid NHS waiting lists while 56% were worried about infections like MRSA.
The poll was carried out for the website www.treatmentabroad.com, which estimated that 100,000 people travelled abroad for surgery and dental treatment in 2007. Around 6% of those questioned for the survey had spent more than œ10,000 on treatment. Nine out of 10 (92%) of cosmetic surgery patients were women, while 69% of those having elective surgery and scans were men. More than half of people choosing to have treatment abroad were aged between 40 and 59.
The top destinations for treatment include Hungary, mostly for dental treatment, Cyprus for cosmetic surgery, and India for surgery and scans. Spain, Belgium and the Czech Republic were also among the most popular destinations, according to the poll.
Source
The big bang implosion of Physics
In cutting their funding of the physical sciences, and devaluing science education, the US and UK governments are committing `scientific vandalism'.
We are on the cusp of some of the biggest breakthroughs in physics in over three decades. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a massive particle collider built deep beneath the Swiss/French border, is nearing completion. Together with Fermilab's Tevatron, a proton-antiproton collider near Chicago, the European and US facilities are in a race to discover the Higg's Boson. This is the gaping hole in our theory of everything, the standard model of matter. Predicted by Peter Higgs in Edinburgh in 1964, the Higgs Boson is our best bet at explaining the nature of mass, that ubiquitous property of matter that has evaded explanation to date.
Now, particle physics is about to be kicked out of its speculative doldrums by the influx of long-awaited experimental data that may result in the revelation of a new fundamental force of nature, and could even allow us to create mini black holes here on Earth. But just as physics is about to receive a massive shot in the arm, its political masters seem prepared to pull the plug on fundamental research, introducing massive budget cutbacks both in the UK and in the US. Is this the beginning of the end for Big Physics?
Both Fermilab and the Standford Linear Accelerator (SLAC) in California, the two big particle physics labs in the US, are in near meltdown. Fermilab is cutting 10 per cent of its staff and has had the budgets for both its next generation projects cut to zero this year. SLAC looks likely to lose 300 staff at its facility. As Pier Oddone, Fermilab's director put it: `The greatest impact is on the future of the lab, we have no ability now to develop our future.' (1)
In the UK, the budget cuts imposed by the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) are even more detrimental. In removing o80million from the physics budget, the UK faces losing its participation in the next generation particle physics projects to which it has already committed; it is also pulling out of two telescope collaborations: the Isaac Newton facility in the Canary Islands and the new o8million Gemini telescope in Hawaii. There are no equivalent facilities for UK astronomers to use in the northern hemisphere. Brian Foster, professor of experimental physics at Oxford University, described the cuts as `scientific vandalism' (2).
There has been considerable discussion within the scientific community as to whether the swingeing cutbacks occurring on both sides of the Atlantic are the product, in the words of Manchester University's Dr Brian Cox, of `accident, design or just sheer incompetence'. But even if you believe that, given better financial circumstances, things will right themselves in the future, we should be aware that something significant has changed.
Big Physics no longer has the same kudos with our political rulers as it once did. In the UK, the recent Sainsbury Review of the government's science and innovation policies made it clear that the days of universities focusing on basic research are numbered. The key emphasis is now on `knowledge transfer'. The government is now only interested in the capacity of university research departments to kickstart high-end product development or `useful' spin-offs from basic research. As Lord Sainsbury put it: `Today, we are seeing a transformation in the purpose and self-image of universities. Politicians, industrialists and economists are beginning to see universities as major agents of economic growth as well as creators of knowledge, developers of young minds and transmitters of culture.' (3)
Over the past two or three decades, the era of backing for knowledge for its own sake has been dispensed with, both on economic and educational grounds. So even though US President George W Bush has promised increased spending in the physical sciences in 2009, no one is holding their breath in the US; the president promised the same in 2007 and 2008, but it did not materialise.
In truth, in the US Big Physics no longer has the political protection it once had when it comes to pushing a budget through Congress. In Britain, scientists have been promised a review of current spending priorities in the summer, but there is little chance that the STFC will rescind its decision to withdraw from the major international collaborations.
A petition on the Downing Street website to `reverse the decision to cut vital UK contributions to Particle Physics and Astronomy' has attracted 17,380 signatures (4). But the petition has somewhat missed the point, since the writing has been on the wall for some time: physics just isn't a vital priority for the political class. The UK government has happily turned our school science curriculum into a course on scientific literacy for the masses, allowed numerous university physics departments to close, and sponsored the creation of physics degrees that don't require mathematics.
In the US, this is not the first time that funding priorities have forced drastic cuts in investment in fundamental physics research. In 1993, despite protestations from then president Bill Clinton, Congress cancelled the proposed Superconducting Super Collider, which would have challenged the dominance of the LHC in Europe.
Britain has until now retained its participation at the front-end of particle physics with its contribution to the LHC. The International Linear Collider was to be the next big step forward beyond the LHC. It would be able to explore matter at a finer detail than the LHC. The UK initially contributed to this project, yet it now seems stillborn: the UK pulled out last month, and the US is removing any further funding for it.
Even more perplexing is the American decision to cancel its funding for ITER, the new international fusion reactor to be built in France. This is the next stage in the project to develop commercial fusion power which will potentially produce energy from water by mimicking the action of the sun. This clean nuclear energy could replace the more conventional nuclear fission reactors in 30 years time.
Robert Wilson, Fermilab's first director, when asked by a congressional committee if the lab would aid national defence, famously responded: `No, but it will help keep the nation worth defending.' Today, such a strident belief in the quest for knowledge does not fit well within the constraints of an education system orientated towards skills, not knowledge, and access, not excellence. The political class does not think young people are interested enough in science to believe that any youngster could aspire to an understanding of the nature of the universe without somehow making it relevant to their everyday lives.
Even the physicists at the European Programme for Nuclear Research (CERN) and Fermilab are prone to justify their work feebly in terms of the potential spin-offs to medical research. That is like trying to justify the Apollo space programme because it gave us Teflon non-stick saucepans. Rationalising fundamental research on the basis of a few spin-offs just won't wash. As Martin Rees, president of the Royal Society, put it, the discovery of magnetic resonance imaging, a powerful way of identifying cancers, was discovered by a physicist `whose work would never have been possible without funding or basic physics' (5).
In truth, fundamental research is a necessity, not a luxury. Most of the technological developments made in the past 100 years have been fuelled by fundamental research into science. Albert Einstein famously dismissed Enrico Fermi's idea that massive amounts of energy could be released by splitting the atom. The unintended consequences of the theory of relativity gave us nuclear power. Similarly, from the esoteric beauty of the theory of quantum mechanics has emerged electronics, computing and laser optics, to name but a few developments.
We cannot foretell where research into the fundamental constituents of matter will take us, but to not travel down that path is to shut the door on the future. Our ability to understand and control nature is what gives us the capacity to carve out a different future not constrained by the fetters of the immediate problems of finite resources. It is our lack of vision and our preoccupation with the limitations of our society that holds us back from venturing further.
As a society, if we relinquish our quest to understand the universe within which we live, we curtail our ambition. This reflects a lesser view of humanity, capable at best of patching up the damage we have done to the planet, rather than seeking to expand our horizons. It seems that in a world dominated by the politics of eco-doom and sustainable development, there is little room for the ambition of Big Physics and the capacity it gives us to transform our future destiny. Now, more than ever, scientists need to argue for the vision to allow such research to continue.
Source
More British bungling: "A disciplinary inquiry was under way last night after a report found that thousands of convicted offenders had not been listed on the Police National Computer because of a catalogue of court errors, while hundreds of other suspects had escaped trial. Jack Straw, the Justice Secretary, announced that an investigation would take place into the "lamentable" failings at Leeds Magistrates' Court, possibly leading to criminal charges against court staff involved. Up to 555 defendants who had their warrants to appear in court withdrawn may now be recalled over the 1,709 charges that they faced. Most were for motoring or other minor matters, but 115 were for serious offences that should be recorded on the Police National Computer." [If a bureaucracy cannot even keep records, what the hell is it good for?]
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
Britain: Restaurant reviewers now allowed to say what they think (Maybe)
We read:
New British restrictions on blogging
We read:
I suppose it was inevitable. Any control that they can exert, they will.
Pre-emptive censorship is a cross we all bear
London Underground has banned posters for the play Fat Christ, just in case they cause offence. This safety-first attitude is crucifying free speech
There is no undisputed depiction of Jesus, who in the past has been portrayed variously as black, Chinese, alien and gay. Over the years, unconventional representations of Christ and far-flung speculations about his true identity have attracted the ire of the devout and the sensitive. The latest depiction of Jesus to be deemed offensive is the promotional poster for Fat Christ, Gavin Davis' comedic play, which opened in London last night. The poster was refused advertising spots on the London Underground. Perhaps suggesting that Jesus suffered from slow metabolism or indulged in fatty food is the ultimate form of blasphemy these days, when obesity is seen as a mortal sin.
Fat Christ is the story of Jack Taylor, a chubby man looking for his big break in life. His endeavours so far have left him and his pregnant wife so poor that he has to support them by cleaning windows. Jack makes a deal with a top London art dealer to crucify himself. The promotional poster shows Jack tied to a wooden cross, wearing pink-striped boxer shorts and sporting a beer belly. A trickle of fake blood is running down his check and he has a sullen look on his face.
Davis' play doesn't seem to make any serious claims about the way Jesus led his life - it's about a chubby loser-type who ends up portraying Jesus. Other, more notorious cases of `Jesus controversies' involve claims about Christ himself. A well-known example is Dan Brown's smash hit novel The Da Vinci Code, which claimed Jesus was really just a regular human being who married and had non-immaculately conceived kids with Mary Magdalene. This row was topped in 2005, when the BBC televised the musical Jerry Springer: The Opera, in which Jesus appears as a singing talkshow guest. The BBC received 55,000 complaints from a wide spectrum of Christians, censorious media watchdogs, sensitive souls and upholders of politically correct standards. Then there was the `Mullet Jesus' t-shirt, showing Christ with a bad haircut, and, of course, Cosimo Cavallaro's `My Sweet Lord', a nude statue made out of chocolate, which was removed from The Lab Gallery in Manhattan last year.
It is not just `cranky Christians' who are upset by fantastical and playful representations of the Son of God. Others, who believe we all have the right to be protected from offence, come out in their support, even on their behalf. This was the case with the Fat Christ poster, as officials at Transport for London (TfL), which is apparently committed to avoiding offending members of the public, stopped it from being viewed by commuters.
But what exactly did TfL see as potentially offensive in a comic image of a chubby man tied to a cross? Today, when the mullet is unfortunately back in fashion and when it's broadly considered rude to claim that being compared to blacks, gays or Chinese (and, in some circles, aliens) is an insult, what counts as really unacceptable when it comes to portraying Jesus Christ?
Well, the promoters of Fat Christ, who applied for five advertising spots in just one underground station, found out that drawing parallels between Jesus and unhealthy lifestyles is beyond the pale. Davis has said that the poster accurately reflects his play's content and theme and that he doesn't believe it to be blasphemous. Didn't he realise that simultaneously evoking the images of Jesus and all those anti-social slobs who are dragging down the National Health Service, supporting `evil' fast-food outlets and fuelling the food industry's carbon footprint is pure sacrilege?
Perhaps if Davis chooses to do a follow-up play that is less offensive to TfL officials, he could have Jack Taylor look to Jesus for inspiration on how to lose weight. That is what Don Colbert, a Florida doctor, has done. Apparently concerned about the `obesity epidemic' in the US, he advocated the `Jesus diet' in his bestselling book What Would Jesus Eat?. We're told that Jesus was primarily into `natural foods in their natural states - lots of vegetables, especially beans and lentils.He would have eaten wheat bread, a lot of fruit, drunk a lot of water and also red wine.And he would only eat meat on special occasions.' (1) Anyway, who needs fast food when you're able to feed thousands of hungry people with just five loaves of bread and two fish?
As for now, TfL has decided that the public does not share Davis' sense of humour and so it took a precautionary measure, a pre-emptive strike against hurt feelings. As a TfL spokesman said: `Millions of people travel on the London Underground each day and they have no choice but to view whatever adverts are posted there. We have to take account of every passenger and endeavour not to cause offence in the advertising we display.' (2) In other words, the TfL officials censored the Fat Christ poster in accordance with the contemporary commandment `thou shalt not potentially offend anybody, anywhere - ever'.
spiked has on several occasions criticised the prevailing `tyranny of the minority', where it is now enough for a handful of individuals - sometimes even just one person - to cry offence in order for official guardians of etiquette to ban ads, posters and television shows (3). But the Underground ban of the Fat Christ poster displayed the tyranny of no one. Here, no complaint was necessary for TfL to decide that people would be offended before they even had been offended.
This pre-emptive censorship in the name of protecting the public is a worrying display of restriction on artistic expression. And it's not just quirky, fringe theatre plays that get such a treatment. Earlier this month, London Underground refused to allow a poster for a Royal Academy of Arts show on the sixteenth-century German artist, Lucas Cranach the Elder. It showed the artist's nude painting of Venus. London Underground justified the ban in exactly the same terms as its decision to censor the Fat Christ poster (4), and argued that the poster breached guidelines barring advertisements which `depict men, women or children in a sexual manner, or display nude or semi-nude figures in an overtly sexual context' (5). Eventually, after widespread media coverage ridiculing the decision, TfL admitted it had made a mistake and retracted the ban.
So far, Fat Christ hasn't been so lucky. But wouldn't Jesus have agreed that a bunch of TfL chiefs censoring comical and artistic posters in the name of no one is not really kosher?
Source
Hatred of ancestral ties from Britain's bureaucrats
A while ago I was on a plane from Helsinki to London. On one side was a Finnish businessman reading a newspaper written in a script utterly baffling to anyone brought up speaking a Latin or Anglo-Saxon language. On the other sat a young man from New Zealand. He was travelling in Europe and on his way to visit relatives in Lincolnshire, where his grandparents had lived before emigrating.
He was travelling on an ancestry visa that entitled him to come to Britain for five years without having to show he had a job waiting for him. This visa was available to him because he had at least one grandparent born in Britain. At Heathrow, the Finn and I move effortlessly though the gates for EU citizens. The last I saw of the young Kiwi, he was queuing up at immigration control for overseas aliens.
Until 1973, when Britain joined the EEC, Commonwealth citizens were able to move relatively freely in and out of the country. The ancestry visa was introduced to allow those who retained close connections with Britain a straightforward entry route after nationality laws introduced in the 1971 Immigration Act threatened to make this more difficult.
Recently, the Government published a Green Paper on immigration and citizenship that raised the question of whether the ancestry visa should be abolished. This is a consultation document and is not final policy; but since it is the second time in four years that the Home Office has suggested scrapping the ancestry visa, someone in Whitehall clearly considers it to be expendable.
The Green Paper states: "Given that the proposed immigration system provides explicit routes to the UK for those coming as economic migrants, family members or refugees, we need to decide whether a Commonwealth national's ancestral connections to the UK are sufficient to allow them to come here to work without the need to satisfy a resident labour market test. We are therefore asking this question as part of the consultation contained within this paper."
This consultation continues until May 14 so here, for what it's worth, is my contribution. No. It should, emphatically, not be scrapped. How can it be possible to allow, for instance, 800,000 east Europeans - or Finns, for that matter - to come here as they choose, as they are entitled to under EU law, yet deny a similar right to people who share a head of state and carry the insignia of the Union on their own flags?
It is not as though many people actually use this route into the country and most go home in any case. In 2006, only 8,490 ancestry visa holders came to the UK, mainly from Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. Most of them are youngsters visiting the "old country" to work for a few years before going home. Recently, the Edinburgh executive has been encouraging some of the four million Canadians of Scottish heritage to move to Scotland to offset the declining population and birthrate.
Yet the Government in London seems intent upon making this much more difficult. Under the new points-based system for immigrants, which started operating at the beginning of this month, non-EU nationals will be unable to get into the country legally to work or to settle here permanently unless they are highly qualified or wealthy. There are few Aussie students who will fall into that category.
Labour is happy to invoke our history when it wants to make a song and dance about its commitment to Britishness; yet it is content to dispense with one of its most potent manifestations. The ancestry visa is, after all, a symbol of that historic legacy.
You would have expected a mighty outburst of indignation from Parliament about this, yet there has hardly been a squeak. Only Austin Mitchell, the Labour MP for Great Grimsby, who once worked in New Zealand as a university lecturer, has tabled a Commons motion expressing "shock" at the proposal. So far it has been signed by 43 MPs. As Mr Mitchell points out: "The dominions sprang to our aid when we needed them in two world wars and since. Their inhabitants are of British descent. They are keen to maintain Commonwealth ties and associations with this country."
For good or ill, we are members of the EU and it is part of the deal that all its citizens have an unfettered right to travel to this country, as we do to theirs, to work and settle permanently. But we are so keen on emphasising our European credentials that we are in danger of turning our backs on our own people, who twice in the last century helped rescue Europe from the tyrants who wished to run it.
The cemeteries of France and Belgium are the final resting places for many Commonwealth citizens who lost their lives in defence of this country. Does that count for anything in the Government's "consultation" or is this just outdated, old-fashioned thinking? Mr Mitchell's motion puts this well. The ancestry visa, it says, is a historic and a moral obligation and "even to consider getting rid of it will produce shock, anger and dismay in Commonwealth countries which fought two world wars shoulder to shoulder with the United Kingdom, and have maintained close relations since".
Mr Mitchell says that New Zealand officials inquiring about the proposal were left in no doubt that civil servants and ministers in the Home Office "did not consider themselves bound to New Zealand by historical ties". He adds: "This is an amazing betrayal of the Commonwealth, a failure to understand history, and a brutal incomprehension of loyalties, totally unworthy of officials who claim to be 'putting British values at the heart of the immigration system'." Perhaps at some point on Commonwealth Day, a senior member of the Government could set aside a few minutes to ensure this wretched idea is buried, this time with a stake through its heart.
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Britain deliberately creates more dependants on the State
More of that lovely CONTROL!
We all know that governments never do anything just for its own sake. They like to "send a message". It might be about smoking, fatness, booze, driving, community - they've gotta send it. We can't be trusted to know how to behave (unlike ministers, who have no vices). So messages are sent. In Budget week they come thick and fast. Don't drink, shun plastic bags, recycle, drive less. But there is a core message, an important one, directed ever more stridently at the poorest people in Britain and designed to deny hope and resourcefulness. If you are poor, the Government's message is simple: "You are not in charge of your life and prosperity. We are. Trust us. Keep on voting for us or you're stuffed."
The means by which the message is transmitted is the creaking tax and benefit system. Looming changes in income tax mean that those earning more than 18,500 a year, which is lowish but not too uncomfortable, will be better off when the basic tax rate drops by 2 per cent. But given the abolition of the 10 per cent tax rate, coupled with the continuing feebleness of the personal allowance (you can earn 104.51 a week before you start paying a fifth of it to the exchequer - whoopee!), the lowest earners are hit. Those on 10,000 a year will now pay two or three quid a week more in tax. However, says the message, that's OK because they can promptly apply for "working tax credits", "family credits" and other benefits.
However doughtily and responsibly you work for your 200 quid a week, even if you need every penny of it to survive, the Government will make you hand over a lump and then give it back, ceremoniously, via its huge and expensive bureaucracy. The message is that if you are poor, you must be kept in the status of client and petitioner. It would presumably save billions in administration if you just let low earners hang on to their wages; it would also fortify that sense of personal and family responsibility that government claims to like. Applying for state benefits as a fit person of working age makes everyone feel lousy, unless - or until - they are so desensitised and deprived of pride that they no longer care. But the abolition of the low tax band and the feeble personal allowance has made benefit-claiming inevitable for more people, for longer.
In the financial-Sunday-section jungle I noticed something else. It was a warning to buy-to-let landlords with tenants on housing benefit. They are usually paid directly, the money bypassing the tenant's pocket. Now an experiment is being run in nine authorities in which the tenant handles the rent money. Cries of dismay from landlords: "We envisage some, used to surviving on 55 pounds per week... being tempted to use the funds for other purposes."
The author cites problems in Blackpool where "insiders are blaming the scheme for intensifying the local drink and drugs problem". Another difficulty is that many would-be responsible tenants still can't find a "basic bank account" if there is the slightest irregularity in their desperate past. Meanwhile, the effect of this small attempt to trust individuals is, the piece says, panicking landlords in deprived areas into selling and making property prices fall. Well, hoorah; why should poorer people pay your mortgage while you watch your investment soar? Let housing associations buy them.
But to me the mystery is that for so long we have happily lived with this presumption that the poorer you are, the less you are to be trusted handling money. Which can only be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Housing benefit - in this expensive country - is a necessity for many. But being expected to conserve and ring-fence the rent yourself has to be better than being babied by the pretence that your rent is not your business. In the same way it is better to keep your own proud earnings - right up to a liveable level - than to hand chunks over and immediately beg nanny government to give them back.
Designers of welfare may contest all this as impractical, romantic, a recipe for chaos. They hug their barely hidden assumption that if you are poor you are ipso facto feckless: drugged, drunk, dumb or spendthrift. A few indeed are, and need special treatment. But in the wider human context the opposite has generally proved true. The poor are not feckless by nature, but careful. Ask any of the vastly successful organisations that offer "microcredit" in developing countries. They lend tiny sums to families, often women, to start businesses; they charge stiff interest yet their repayment record is extraordinarily high - better than many mainstream banks. History and anthropology do not throw up many examples of poor people wasting money. If we have indeed grown a feckless, helpless client population who can't be trusted, it is state messages that have made them that way.
We hear a great deal about the perils of taxing rich "non-doms", these weird creatures who may abandon London if asked to pay a bit more tax, having apparently chosen Britain as their home not out of affection or friendship but just to save a few quid of disposable income. It is wrong, say the experts, to send the poor non-doms the "message" that they aren't loved. In which case, why is it right to send poor Britons the message that they can't trust themselves but only the State? Alistair Darling could ramp up the personal allowance, make it transferable and turn his mind to ways of letting people keep earnings rather than claim benefits. Pigs could fly.
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Britain returns to coal power
The Government will today anger environmentalists by signalling its support for a controversial new generation of coal-fired power stations and warning that Britain needs to burn more fossil fuels to prevent power cuts. John Hutton, the Secretary of State for Business, will say that "clean coal" has a crucial role to play in filling Britain's energy gap for the future. He will accuse the green lobby of "gesture politics" by opposing any coal-fired plants, putting energy supplies at risk and presenting a false "black and white" choice to the public over coal. Mr Hutton, the cabinet minister responsible for energy, will speak about the future of coal for the first time at a speech to the free market Adam Smith Institute in London.
But his speech is bound to raise questions about government environmental policy just two days before the the Chancellor, Alistair Darling, tries to reassure the green lobby by raising taxes on gas-guzzling vehicles. Mr Hutton's remarks will be seen as a clear sign that the Government will approve plans to build Britain's first coal-fired power station since 1984 at Kingsnorth, Kent. Green campaigners view the 1 billion pound proposal as a vital test of the Government's commitment to the environment. The energy company E.ON UK wants to demolish an outdated plant and replace it with two units using cleaner coal to supply 1.5 million homes by 2012. The firm claimed it would cut carbon emissions by nearly two million tones a year and could be a ground-breaking "clean coal" plant, with the carbon emitted stored under the North Sea.
Critics are worried the new technology remains unproved and a new coal programme would undermine efforts to secure a new worldwide agreement to combat global warming. A further seven coal-fired plants are in the pipeline if, as expected, ministers give the go-ahead to Kingsnorth. Other possible sites include Blyth, Northumberland; Tilbury, Essex; Ferrybridge, West Yorkshire; High Marnham, Nottinghamshire; Longannet, Fife and Cockenzie, East Lothian.
Ministers insisted they recognised the environmental concerns, claiming Britain was taking a global lead on clean coal power generation. They argued the Government could not afford to play fast and loose with energy supplies and must ensure "the lights stay on". Mr Hutton will tell the Government's critics that its commitment to "decarbonise" Britain's electricity mix by the middle of the century remains "non-negotiable". "But over this period, as we develop low-carbon technologies, we should be under no illusion - generation from fossil fuels will continue to play a key role," he will add.
Mr Hutton will say that nuclear and renewable sources jointly account for just over 20 per cent of UK electricity at present. By 2020, the nation may need to secure about 15 per cent of the total from renewables in order to meet its EU target. A new generation of nuclear plants might maintain or increase the nuclear contribution. But that would still leave a significant proportion of electricity, and the majority of overall energy, coming from fossil fuels, he will argue.
Mr Hutton will declare: "As a country we have to accept the reality that, even in meeting our EU 2020 renewables target, fossil fuels will still play a major part for the next couple of decades at the very least. And there is nothing wrong with that - provided we are meeting our international obligations to reduce our carbon emissions. "For critics, there's a belief that coal-fired power stations undermine the UK's leadership position on climate change. In fact the opposite is true. Developing economies need to be able to see by the actions that we are taking that it is possible to use indigenous energy reserves and decarbonise your economy.
"Leadership isn't about forcing people into making binary choices. Low carbon energy production or fossil fuels, particularly when the primary goal - substantial emission reductions - can be achieved without having to make binary choices in the short term. The world will use a mix of energy sources for the foreseeable future. Our leadership role is best promoted by the actions we take on capping emissions, carbon pricing and supporting the development of new CCS (carbon capture and storage) technology. Not by gesture politics that could put our future energy security at risk."
Environmental groups last night denied that they would be playing "gesture politics". Russell Marsh, director of policy at the Green Alliance, said: "The reason UK emissions have risen for the past 10 years is because we have increased our reliance on coal-fired generation. The Government cannot expect to meet its legally binding targets, soon to be imposed through the Climate Change Bill, if it sanctions a new fleet of unabated coal-fired power stations." Mr Marsh said that this week's Budget could only be viewed as "tinkering" on green issues if the Government went ahead with an expansion of both aviation and coal.
The minister will argue that fossil fuels will also play an important role in ensuring the flexibility of the electricity generation system for which demand fluctuates, particularly in winter. Neither wind nor nuclear power could fulfil this role, so back-up from fossil fuels will be needed, with coal seen as the most reliable source. Although gas is cleaner than coal, Mr Hutton will warn that an over-reliance on gas would leave us more exposed to the international gas market as Britain's own resources decline.
Within seven years one of the world's first commercial-scale clean coal demonstrator plants could be up and running in the UK, generating electricity from coal with up to 90 per cent less carbon emitted.
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The honey cure
At 42 British pounds for a 120g jar, the world’s most expensive honey recently went on sale in Harrods. Life Mel has a list of purported health benefits as long as your arm ? the scientists who created it claim the usual nutritional advantages associated with honey are maximised because the bees that produce it gather pollen from herbs such as Siberian ginseng, echinacea and Uncaria tomentosa that boost the immune system. They say that 2 tsp of Life Mel honey a day, on an empty stomach, sucked slowly, will supply a shot of antioxidants that leave you better able to fight illness and disease.
Life Mel has already established a reputation as something of a miracle nectar: a study published in the respected Medical Oncology journal last year showed that 12 out of 30 cancer patients given the honey after chemotherapy did not experience the usual plummeting white blood-cell count; other patients reported improvements in their quality of life. However, even the researchers, at Sieff hospital in Israel, where the honey is produced, and Oldchurch Hospital in Romford, Essex, admit the sample was small, and that the proven benefits are slight.
But haven’t we heard it all before? Is honey really a cureall, or is this just a load of hype? Trials conducted at the honey research centre at Waikato University, New Zealand, look more promising. The director of the centre, Professor Peter Molan, has focused his investigations on another super-honey, manuka, which is produced by bees that collect pollen from the manuka bush, which grows wild in New Zealand.
According to Molan, all types of honey contain hydrogen peroxide -- once used in hospitals as a disinfectant for wounds because of its antibacterial properties -- which is produced from an enzyme, glucose oxidase, which the bees add to nectar. Manuka honey appears to contain other beneficial ingredients, yet to be identified, which help it to fight bacteria. Molan has found that eating 3 tsp manuka honey a day can help fight throat infections and reduce gum disease, as well as maintain good digestive health. He has also shown that, when eaten regularly, manuka also aids memory and reduces feelings of anxiety.
At Aintree Hospital in Liverpool and at the University of Wales, manuka honey has been shown to combat MRSA when applied to wounds; other researchers have suggested it may also be useful as a dressing for eczema, sunburn and acne.
Despite these benefits, experts are not convinced that we should all be dipping a spoon into the jar every day. Lisa Miles, a nutrition scientist with the British Nutrition Foundation, points out that while honey may have its uses in specific medical settings, it contains 16 more calories (64) per tbsp than sugar (48). “It is just liquid sugar,” she says. “It has a reputation as being healthier than sugar, but, nutritionally, there are few advantages. Honey is 75% sugar and counts as added sugar in the diet, so don’t be fooled.” The only thing guaranteed to happen when you eat more of it, she says, is that you will put on weight.
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We read:
"Restaurant critics, and newspaper proprietors, were celebrating yesterday after a judge upheld their rights to publish unflattering reviews of bad food and lousy service. Sir Brian Kerr, the Northern Ireland Lord Chief Justice, overturned the award of 25,000 pounds to Goodfellas pizza restaurant in West Belfast against The Irish News. Ciarnan Convery, the pizzeria owner, sued the newspaper for libel over a highly critical review of his restaurant in August 2000.
Sir Brian's appeal court decision had been keenly awaited, with implications around the world for publishers of restaurant reviews. Sitting with two appeal court judges, he ruled that the jury that decided that the restaurant had been defamed had been misdirected by the trial judge. He ordered a retrial, adding that while he thought a properly directed jury would have found in favour of The Irish News he could not be certain. It will now be up to Mr Convery to decide whether he wishes to pursue the case farther.
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New British restrictions on blogging
We read:
"Sir Gus O'Donnell, the Cabinet Secretary, is to set out new guidance to civil servants to cover blogging and online social networks following the demise of the "Civil Serf" blogger, The Times has learnt. Sir Gus will shortly issue guidelines to tell officials whether they can start up blogs or use social networking websites such as Facebook and YouTube, and even if they can change details on Wikipedia.
A Cabinet Office spokesman denied that the move was directly linked with the Civil Serf blogger, believed to work for the Department for Work and Pensions, who has embarrassed Westminster with her revelations about officials and ministers. The 33-year-old Londoner, who has yet be named, has ridiculed Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister, and Alistair Darling, the Chancellor, as well as accusing the Government of recycling old policies and creating "cheap headlines"....
The new code is likely to restrict information disclosed on blogs or social networks and limit the individuals who can interact with them.
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I suppose it was inevitable. Any control that they can exert, they will.
Pre-emptive censorship is a cross we all bear
London Underground has banned posters for the play Fat Christ, just in case they cause offence. This safety-first attitude is crucifying free speech
There is no undisputed depiction of Jesus, who in the past has been portrayed variously as black, Chinese, alien and gay. Over the years, unconventional representations of Christ and far-flung speculations about his true identity have attracted the ire of the devout and the sensitive. The latest depiction of Jesus to be deemed offensive is the promotional poster for Fat Christ, Gavin Davis' comedic play, which opened in London last night. The poster was refused advertising spots on the London Underground. Perhaps suggesting that Jesus suffered from slow metabolism or indulged in fatty food is the ultimate form of blasphemy these days, when obesity is seen as a mortal sin.
Fat Christ is the story of Jack Taylor, a chubby man looking for his big break in life. His endeavours so far have left him and his pregnant wife so poor that he has to support them by cleaning windows. Jack makes a deal with a top London art dealer to crucify himself. The promotional poster shows Jack tied to a wooden cross, wearing pink-striped boxer shorts and sporting a beer belly. A trickle of fake blood is running down his check and he has a sullen look on his face.
Davis' play doesn't seem to make any serious claims about the way Jesus led his life - it's about a chubby loser-type who ends up portraying Jesus. Other, more notorious cases of `Jesus controversies' involve claims about Christ himself. A well-known example is Dan Brown's smash hit novel The Da Vinci Code, which claimed Jesus was really just a regular human being who married and had non-immaculately conceived kids with Mary Magdalene. This row was topped in 2005, when the BBC televised the musical Jerry Springer: The Opera, in which Jesus appears as a singing talkshow guest. The BBC received 55,000 complaints from a wide spectrum of Christians, censorious media watchdogs, sensitive souls and upholders of politically correct standards. Then there was the `Mullet Jesus' t-shirt, showing Christ with a bad haircut, and, of course, Cosimo Cavallaro's `My Sweet Lord', a nude statue made out of chocolate, which was removed from The Lab Gallery in Manhattan last year.
It is not just `cranky Christians' who are upset by fantastical and playful representations of the Son of God. Others, who believe we all have the right to be protected from offence, come out in their support, even on their behalf. This was the case with the Fat Christ poster, as officials at Transport for London (TfL), which is apparently committed to avoiding offending members of the public, stopped it from being viewed by commuters.
But what exactly did TfL see as potentially offensive in a comic image of a chubby man tied to a cross? Today, when the mullet is unfortunately back in fashion and when it's broadly considered rude to claim that being compared to blacks, gays or Chinese (and, in some circles, aliens) is an insult, what counts as really unacceptable when it comes to portraying Jesus Christ?
Well, the promoters of Fat Christ, who applied for five advertising spots in just one underground station, found out that drawing parallels between Jesus and unhealthy lifestyles is beyond the pale. Davis has said that the poster accurately reflects his play's content and theme and that he doesn't believe it to be blasphemous. Didn't he realise that simultaneously evoking the images of Jesus and all those anti-social slobs who are dragging down the National Health Service, supporting `evil' fast-food outlets and fuelling the food industry's carbon footprint is pure sacrilege?
Perhaps if Davis chooses to do a follow-up play that is less offensive to TfL officials, he could have Jack Taylor look to Jesus for inspiration on how to lose weight. That is what Don Colbert, a Florida doctor, has done. Apparently concerned about the `obesity epidemic' in the US, he advocated the `Jesus diet' in his bestselling book What Would Jesus Eat?. We're told that Jesus was primarily into `natural foods in their natural states - lots of vegetables, especially beans and lentils.He would have eaten wheat bread, a lot of fruit, drunk a lot of water and also red wine.And he would only eat meat on special occasions.' (1) Anyway, who needs fast food when you're able to feed thousands of hungry people with just five loaves of bread and two fish?
As for now, TfL has decided that the public does not share Davis' sense of humour and so it took a precautionary measure, a pre-emptive strike against hurt feelings. As a TfL spokesman said: `Millions of people travel on the London Underground each day and they have no choice but to view whatever adverts are posted there. We have to take account of every passenger and endeavour not to cause offence in the advertising we display.' (2) In other words, the TfL officials censored the Fat Christ poster in accordance with the contemporary commandment `thou shalt not potentially offend anybody, anywhere - ever'.
spiked has on several occasions criticised the prevailing `tyranny of the minority', where it is now enough for a handful of individuals - sometimes even just one person - to cry offence in order for official guardians of etiquette to ban ads, posters and television shows (3). But the Underground ban of the Fat Christ poster displayed the tyranny of no one. Here, no complaint was necessary for TfL to decide that people would be offended before they even had been offended.
This pre-emptive censorship in the name of protecting the public is a worrying display of restriction on artistic expression. And it's not just quirky, fringe theatre plays that get such a treatment. Earlier this month, London Underground refused to allow a poster for a Royal Academy of Arts show on the sixteenth-century German artist, Lucas Cranach the Elder. It showed the artist's nude painting of Venus. London Underground justified the ban in exactly the same terms as its decision to censor the Fat Christ poster (4), and argued that the poster breached guidelines barring advertisements which `depict men, women or children in a sexual manner, or display nude or semi-nude figures in an overtly sexual context' (5). Eventually, after widespread media coverage ridiculing the decision, TfL admitted it had made a mistake and retracted the ban.
So far, Fat Christ hasn't been so lucky. But wouldn't Jesus have agreed that a bunch of TfL chiefs censoring comical and artistic posters in the name of no one is not really kosher?
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Hatred of ancestral ties from Britain's bureaucrats
A while ago I was on a plane from Helsinki to London. On one side was a Finnish businessman reading a newspaper written in a script utterly baffling to anyone brought up speaking a Latin or Anglo-Saxon language. On the other sat a young man from New Zealand. He was travelling in Europe and on his way to visit relatives in Lincolnshire, where his grandparents had lived before emigrating.
He was travelling on an ancestry visa that entitled him to come to Britain for five years without having to show he had a job waiting for him. This visa was available to him because he had at least one grandparent born in Britain. At Heathrow, the Finn and I move effortlessly though the gates for EU citizens. The last I saw of the young Kiwi, he was queuing up at immigration control for overseas aliens.
Until 1973, when Britain joined the EEC, Commonwealth citizens were able to move relatively freely in and out of the country. The ancestry visa was introduced to allow those who retained close connections with Britain a straightforward entry route after nationality laws introduced in the 1971 Immigration Act threatened to make this more difficult.
Recently, the Government published a Green Paper on immigration and citizenship that raised the question of whether the ancestry visa should be abolished. This is a consultation document and is not final policy; but since it is the second time in four years that the Home Office has suggested scrapping the ancestry visa, someone in Whitehall clearly considers it to be expendable.
The Green Paper states: "Given that the proposed immigration system provides explicit routes to the UK for those coming as economic migrants, family members or refugees, we need to decide whether a Commonwealth national's ancestral connections to the UK are sufficient to allow them to come here to work without the need to satisfy a resident labour market test. We are therefore asking this question as part of the consultation contained within this paper."
This consultation continues until May 14 so here, for what it's worth, is my contribution. No. It should, emphatically, not be scrapped. How can it be possible to allow, for instance, 800,000 east Europeans - or Finns, for that matter - to come here as they choose, as they are entitled to under EU law, yet deny a similar right to people who share a head of state and carry the insignia of the Union on their own flags?
It is not as though many people actually use this route into the country and most go home in any case. In 2006, only 8,490 ancestry visa holders came to the UK, mainly from Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. Most of them are youngsters visiting the "old country" to work for a few years before going home. Recently, the Edinburgh executive has been encouraging some of the four million Canadians of Scottish heritage to move to Scotland to offset the declining population and birthrate.
Yet the Government in London seems intent upon making this much more difficult. Under the new points-based system for immigrants, which started operating at the beginning of this month, non-EU nationals will be unable to get into the country legally to work or to settle here permanently unless they are highly qualified or wealthy. There are few Aussie students who will fall into that category.
Labour is happy to invoke our history when it wants to make a song and dance about its commitment to Britishness; yet it is content to dispense with one of its most potent manifestations. The ancestry visa is, after all, a symbol of that historic legacy.
You would have expected a mighty outburst of indignation from Parliament about this, yet there has hardly been a squeak. Only Austin Mitchell, the Labour MP for Great Grimsby, who once worked in New Zealand as a university lecturer, has tabled a Commons motion expressing "shock" at the proposal. So far it has been signed by 43 MPs. As Mr Mitchell points out: "The dominions sprang to our aid when we needed them in two world wars and since. Their inhabitants are of British descent. They are keen to maintain Commonwealth ties and associations with this country."
For good or ill, we are members of the EU and it is part of the deal that all its citizens have an unfettered right to travel to this country, as we do to theirs, to work and settle permanently. But we are so keen on emphasising our European credentials that we are in danger of turning our backs on our own people, who twice in the last century helped rescue Europe from the tyrants who wished to run it.
The cemeteries of France and Belgium are the final resting places for many Commonwealth citizens who lost their lives in defence of this country. Does that count for anything in the Government's "consultation" or is this just outdated, old-fashioned thinking? Mr Mitchell's motion puts this well. The ancestry visa, it says, is a historic and a moral obligation and "even to consider getting rid of it will produce shock, anger and dismay in Commonwealth countries which fought two world wars shoulder to shoulder with the United Kingdom, and have maintained close relations since".
Mr Mitchell says that New Zealand officials inquiring about the proposal were left in no doubt that civil servants and ministers in the Home Office "did not consider themselves bound to New Zealand by historical ties". He adds: "This is an amazing betrayal of the Commonwealth, a failure to understand history, and a brutal incomprehension of loyalties, totally unworthy of officials who claim to be 'putting British values at the heart of the immigration system'." Perhaps at some point on Commonwealth Day, a senior member of the Government could set aside a few minutes to ensure this wretched idea is buried, this time with a stake through its heart.
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Britain deliberately creates more dependants on the State
More of that lovely CONTROL!
We all know that governments never do anything just for its own sake. They like to "send a message". It might be about smoking, fatness, booze, driving, community - they've gotta send it. We can't be trusted to know how to behave (unlike ministers, who have no vices). So messages are sent. In Budget week they come thick and fast. Don't drink, shun plastic bags, recycle, drive less. But there is a core message, an important one, directed ever more stridently at the poorest people in Britain and designed to deny hope and resourcefulness. If you are poor, the Government's message is simple: "You are not in charge of your life and prosperity. We are. Trust us. Keep on voting for us or you're stuffed."
The means by which the message is transmitted is the creaking tax and benefit system. Looming changes in income tax mean that those earning more than 18,500 a year, which is lowish but not too uncomfortable, will be better off when the basic tax rate drops by 2 per cent. But given the abolition of the 10 per cent tax rate, coupled with the continuing feebleness of the personal allowance (you can earn 104.51 a week before you start paying a fifth of it to the exchequer - whoopee!), the lowest earners are hit. Those on 10,000 a year will now pay two or three quid a week more in tax. However, says the message, that's OK because they can promptly apply for "working tax credits", "family credits" and other benefits.
However doughtily and responsibly you work for your 200 quid a week, even if you need every penny of it to survive, the Government will make you hand over a lump and then give it back, ceremoniously, via its huge and expensive bureaucracy. The message is that if you are poor, you must be kept in the status of client and petitioner. It would presumably save billions in administration if you just let low earners hang on to their wages; it would also fortify that sense of personal and family responsibility that government claims to like. Applying for state benefits as a fit person of working age makes everyone feel lousy, unless - or until - they are so desensitised and deprived of pride that they no longer care. But the abolition of the low tax band and the feeble personal allowance has made benefit-claiming inevitable for more people, for longer.
In the financial-Sunday-section jungle I noticed something else. It was a warning to buy-to-let landlords with tenants on housing benefit. They are usually paid directly, the money bypassing the tenant's pocket. Now an experiment is being run in nine authorities in which the tenant handles the rent money. Cries of dismay from landlords: "We envisage some, used to surviving on 55 pounds per week... being tempted to use the funds for other purposes."
The author cites problems in Blackpool where "insiders are blaming the scheme for intensifying the local drink and drugs problem". Another difficulty is that many would-be responsible tenants still can't find a "basic bank account" if there is the slightest irregularity in their desperate past. Meanwhile, the effect of this small attempt to trust individuals is, the piece says, panicking landlords in deprived areas into selling and making property prices fall. Well, hoorah; why should poorer people pay your mortgage while you watch your investment soar? Let housing associations buy them.
But to me the mystery is that for so long we have happily lived with this presumption that the poorer you are, the less you are to be trusted handling money. Which can only be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Housing benefit - in this expensive country - is a necessity for many. But being expected to conserve and ring-fence the rent yourself has to be better than being babied by the pretence that your rent is not your business. In the same way it is better to keep your own proud earnings - right up to a liveable level - than to hand chunks over and immediately beg nanny government to give them back.
Designers of welfare may contest all this as impractical, romantic, a recipe for chaos. They hug their barely hidden assumption that if you are poor you are ipso facto feckless: drugged, drunk, dumb or spendthrift. A few indeed are, and need special treatment. But in the wider human context the opposite has generally proved true. The poor are not feckless by nature, but careful. Ask any of the vastly successful organisations that offer "microcredit" in developing countries. They lend tiny sums to families, often women, to start businesses; they charge stiff interest yet their repayment record is extraordinarily high - better than many mainstream banks. History and anthropology do not throw up many examples of poor people wasting money. If we have indeed grown a feckless, helpless client population who can't be trusted, it is state messages that have made them that way.
We hear a great deal about the perils of taxing rich "non-doms", these weird creatures who may abandon London if asked to pay a bit more tax, having apparently chosen Britain as their home not out of affection or friendship but just to save a few quid of disposable income. It is wrong, say the experts, to send the poor non-doms the "message" that they aren't loved. In which case, why is it right to send poor Britons the message that they can't trust themselves but only the State? Alistair Darling could ramp up the personal allowance, make it transferable and turn his mind to ways of letting people keep earnings rather than claim benefits. Pigs could fly.
Source
Britain returns to coal power
The Government will today anger environmentalists by signalling its support for a controversial new generation of coal-fired power stations and warning that Britain needs to burn more fossil fuels to prevent power cuts. John Hutton, the Secretary of State for Business, will say that "clean coal" has a crucial role to play in filling Britain's energy gap for the future. He will accuse the green lobby of "gesture politics" by opposing any coal-fired plants, putting energy supplies at risk and presenting a false "black and white" choice to the public over coal. Mr Hutton, the cabinet minister responsible for energy, will speak about the future of coal for the first time at a speech to the free market Adam Smith Institute in London.
But his speech is bound to raise questions about government environmental policy just two days before the the Chancellor, Alistair Darling, tries to reassure the green lobby by raising taxes on gas-guzzling vehicles. Mr Hutton's remarks will be seen as a clear sign that the Government will approve plans to build Britain's first coal-fired power station since 1984 at Kingsnorth, Kent. Green campaigners view the 1 billion pound proposal as a vital test of the Government's commitment to the environment. The energy company E.ON UK wants to demolish an outdated plant and replace it with two units using cleaner coal to supply 1.5 million homes by 2012. The firm claimed it would cut carbon emissions by nearly two million tones a year and could be a ground-breaking "clean coal" plant, with the carbon emitted stored under the North Sea.
Critics are worried the new technology remains unproved and a new coal programme would undermine efforts to secure a new worldwide agreement to combat global warming. A further seven coal-fired plants are in the pipeline if, as expected, ministers give the go-ahead to Kingsnorth. Other possible sites include Blyth, Northumberland; Tilbury, Essex; Ferrybridge, West Yorkshire; High Marnham, Nottinghamshire; Longannet, Fife and Cockenzie, East Lothian.
Ministers insisted they recognised the environmental concerns, claiming Britain was taking a global lead on clean coal power generation. They argued the Government could not afford to play fast and loose with energy supplies and must ensure "the lights stay on". Mr Hutton will tell the Government's critics that its commitment to "decarbonise" Britain's electricity mix by the middle of the century remains "non-negotiable". "But over this period, as we develop low-carbon technologies, we should be under no illusion - generation from fossil fuels will continue to play a key role," he will add.
Mr Hutton will say that nuclear and renewable sources jointly account for just over 20 per cent of UK electricity at present. By 2020, the nation may need to secure about 15 per cent of the total from renewables in order to meet its EU target. A new generation of nuclear plants might maintain or increase the nuclear contribution. But that would still leave a significant proportion of electricity, and the majority of overall energy, coming from fossil fuels, he will argue.
Mr Hutton will declare: "As a country we have to accept the reality that, even in meeting our EU 2020 renewables target, fossil fuels will still play a major part for the next couple of decades at the very least. And there is nothing wrong with that - provided we are meeting our international obligations to reduce our carbon emissions. "For critics, there's a belief that coal-fired power stations undermine the UK's leadership position on climate change. In fact the opposite is true. Developing economies need to be able to see by the actions that we are taking that it is possible to use indigenous energy reserves and decarbonise your economy.
"Leadership isn't about forcing people into making binary choices. Low carbon energy production or fossil fuels, particularly when the primary goal - substantial emission reductions - can be achieved without having to make binary choices in the short term. The world will use a mix of energy sources for the foreseeable future. Our leadership role is best promoted by the actions we take on capping emissions, carbon pricing and supporting the development of new CCS (carbon capture and storage) technology. Not by gesture politics that could put our future energy security at risk."
Environmental groups last night denied that they would be playing "gesture politics". Russell Marsh, director of policy at the Green Alliance, said: "The reason UK emissions have risen for the past 10 years is because we have increased our reliance on coal-fired generation. The Government cannot expect to meet its legally binding targets, soon to be imposed through the Climate Change Bill, if it sanctions a new fleet of unabated coal-fired power stations." Mr Marsh said that this week's Budget could only be viewed as "tinkering" on green issues if the Government went ahead with an expansion of both aviation and coal.
The minister will argue that fossil fuels will also play an important role in ensuring the flexibility of the electricity generation system for which demand fluctuates, particularly in winter. Neither wind nor nuclear power could fulfil this role, so back-up from fossil fuels will be needed, with coal seen as the most reliable source. Although gas is cleaner than coal, Mr Hutton will warn that an over-reliance on gas would leave us more exposed to the international gas market as Britain's own resources decline.
Within seven years one of the world's first commercial-scale clean coal demonstrator plants could be up and running in the UK, generating electricity from coal with up to 90 per cent less carbon emitted.
Source
The honey cure
At 42 British pounds for a 120g jar, the world’s most expensive honey recently went on sale in Harrods. Life Mel has a list of purported health benefits as long as your arm ? the scientists who created it claim the usual nutritional advantages associated with honey are maximised because the bees that produce it gather pollen from herbs such as Siberian ginseng, echinacea and Uncaria tomentosa that boost the immune system. They say that 2 tsp of Life Mel honey a day, on an empty stomach, sucked slowly, will supply a shot of antioxidants that leave you better able to fight illness and disease.
Life Mel has already established a reputation as something of a miracle nectar: a study published in the respected Medical Oncology journal last year showed that 12 out of 30 cancer patients given the honey after chemotherapy did not experience the usual plummeting white blood-cell count; other patients reported improvements in their quality of life. However, even the researchers, at Sieff hospital in Israel, where the honey is produced, and Oldchurch Hospital in Romford, Essex, admit the sample was small, and that the proven benefits are slight.
But haven’t we heard it all before? Is honey really a cureall, or is this just a load of hype? Trials conducted at the honey research centre at Waikato University, New Zealand, look more promising. The director of the centre, Professor Peter Molan, has focused his investigations on another super-honey, manuka, which is produced by bees that collect pollen from the manuka bush, which grows wild in New Zealand.
According to Molan, all types of honey contain hydrogen peroxide -- once used in hospitals as a disinfectant for wounds because of its antibacterial properties -- which is produced from an enzyme, glucose oxidase, which the bees add to nectar. Manuka honey appears to contain other beneficial ingredients, yet to be identified, which help it to fight bacteria. Molan has found that eating 3 tsp manuka honey a day can help fight throat infections and reduce gum disease, as well as maintain good digestive health. He has also shown that, when eaten regularly, manuka also aids memory and reduces feelings of anxiety.
At Aintree Hospital in Liverpool and at the University of Wales, manuka honey has been shown to combat MRSA when applied to wounds; other researchers have suggested it may also be useful as a dressing for eczema, sunburn and acne.
Despite these benefits, experts are not convinced that we should all be dipping a spoon into the jar every day. Lisa Miles, a nutrition scientist with the British Nutrition Foundation, points out that while honey may have its uses in specific medical settings, it contains 16 more calories (64) per tbsp than sugar (48). “It is just liquid sugar,” she says. “It has a reputation as being healthier than sugar, but, nutritionally, there are few advantages. Honey is 75% sugar and counts as added sugar in the diet, so don’t be fooled.” The only thing guaranteed to happen when you eat more of it, she says, is that you will put on weight.
Source
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
The British Labour Party deserts the British working class
Wibsey Working Men's Club in Bradford was the focus of the opening film in the BBC's new season of programmes about white working-class Britain. Pinch yourself, and the documentary could have been mistaken for a Play for Today from the late 1970s or the 1980s - one of those searing dramas, beautifully made, about being poor and left behind.
Time and tide have bypassed Wibsey, and with it the members of the club, all of them tough northerners who in their prime were the engine room of Britain. Their way of life is endangered. The heavy industry that gave them status has gone; their sons did not choose to join them in the club; and their city, one of Happy Eid and unhappy ethnic tension, is now an alien place to them.
The men, most of them unemployed or retired, held futile committee meetings to discuss their financial crisis, and faced the fact there was little that could be done to keep the club open. Not enough people came any more. It was as simple as that. "We're oop shit creek," muttered one. And it struck me, as they sat in the gloom, rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic, that one of the ironies of Britain today is that if these white working-class men were an ethnic minority group - Asian elders, say, or Polish unmarried mothers - their club could have applied to Bradford council for a support grant and had ethnic minorities co-ordinators swarming around them immediately.
If we provide Muslim women-only swimming clubs, Asian football groups, or Ukrainian festivals, then surely we could also spare some local authority cash for a group of relics from our industrial past. Living history, isn't it? Social cohesion. Shoulders of giants, and all that. Give them a grant at once. It's only fair. Now the whole point of this poignant film, of course, was precisely that: to suggest unfairness. Remember the title of the BBC theme: White. To make it apparent that in the rush to multiculturalism, someone forgot to remember that white working-class males are disenfranchised and discriminated against too.
Thus the BBC season, which continues this week, makes a brave leap. It theorises that immigration is to blame for the plight of the working class; for its sense of alienation within its own heritage. Multiculturalism, that state-sponsored form of ethnic diversity, has created dangerous inequalities and segregation.
But is it true? I wonder. Much as I find the BBC's theme fascinating, I think perhaps it is chasing the wrong hare. Many things have made life difficult for the working classes, but most of them relate to global economics, snobbery and the death of heavy industry, rather than to skin colour. That is not to say that we do not discriminate. Of course we do. We are ruder, in public, to the white working class than we would dare be to ethnic minority groups. We call them chavs, or - in Scotland - neds, and we award TV comedy such as Little Britain that eviscerates them. We simultaneously neglect and romanticise them. But this is not new.
For the old white men of Bradford, with no jobs, no money, no future, disempowered in bleak surroundings, the parallels with the political landscape of the 1980s were obvious. In the ultimate act of discrimination to the working class, Britain's engine room was shut down. Steel, coal, textiles, shipbuilding, carmaking and almost every part of the heavy manufacturing sector disappeared; lives and jobs and communities folded. It happened in Ayrshire, Fife, Wales, the Midlands, Newcastle, Yorkshire, Lanarkshire.
And here's news for the BBC: there are sad, emasculated, iron-faced older men, just like those from Wibsey, sitting in rundown bars in every former industrial area in Britain, bemoaning that they're not selling enough beer, that Labour has deserted them, just like every other tosser, and no one wants to come to their karaoke nights any more....
I suspect the answer to the kind of divisions we face lies in lack of recognition. Immigrants have not denied the white working class jobs and houses - the ones they got were the ones the whites didn't want - but what they have denied them is political love and attention. The old working class, you might say, is simply fed up with being ignored.
Source
Controversial blog is axed
Britain:
It seems to have been a great blog but they have done a very thorough job of taking it down. There is nothing in the Google cache and the Wayback Machine has nothing either. There are a few excerpts here and here and here and here. If anybody can find more of it, let me know and I will see about getting it posted somewhere. Below are some pretty good bits:
In case not everyone gets British slang, "poncy" translates as "pretentious"
I thought only ICE was this crazy
Three illegal immigrants have been arrested after they were caught trying to get OUT of Britain
The Afghan men had sneaked into the back of a Polish lorry leaving Dover for France. They were discovered when it braked suddenly, causing its load of timber to fall and pin one of them down. The driver went to investigate after hearing noises from the back of his truck. The other two men, who were also injured, were seen trying to run away.
Sir Andrew Green, chairman of the pressure group MigrationWatch, said yesterday: "It seems crazy to stop illegal immigrants leaving the country of their own free will. "We would like to see an amnesty of departure so any illegal immigrant could leave, providing they were not wanted by police, as soon as they wish." Sir Andrew added: "We do not need them here and we certainly do not need to pay for their removal."
Charlie Elphicke, 36, the Tories' prospective parliamentary candidate for Dover, said: "The Home Office is a complete shambles. Why are we stopping them from leaving? "If they want to go, let them go. Why are we spending valuable resources in this way? "We should be making sure our borders are secure against people who are trying to enter our country illegally and helping those who are here illegally to leave. "It is ludicrous to prevent those wanting to leave to do so. The immigration system in this country is truly mad....
A Home Office spokesman said: "The men were taken to a holding room to be processed. "If they are failed asylum seekers we will be able to find their immigration background and there is a possibility of removal from the country. "Our border controls are very strong but this is not a case of the controls not working as the men were going in the other direction, out of the country."
More here. See here for the equivalent ICE [U.S. Immigration] insanity.
The King of 'Climate Porn'
A new book by the UK government's former chief scientific adviser sheds yet more heat than light on the global warming debate - despite its promises of balance
In The Hot Topic, Sir David King and Gabrielle Walker promise to `unpick the entire essential story of global warming - what we humans have done, how we have done it, how we will need to prepare for the changes we can't stop and how we can prevent the even worse effects that will otherwise follow'. Determined to avoid both `pessimism' and `denial', they vow to pick their way through `the blizzard of information and misinformation about global warming, explaining each point in the most straightforward way possible'.
That would indeed be a great book to write; and given the authors' credentials, a truly comprehensive discussion of `how to tackle global warming and still keep the lights on' would be well worth a read. Unfortunately, The Hot Topic adds about as much cool science and clarity to the global warming debate as the celebrity chef wars add to our understanding of nutrition.
The authors of The Hot Topic assure us that we can trust them, that despite their `considerable experience in the worlds of media and politics' they `have no personal axes to grind'. Sir David King is the UK government's former chief scientific adviser, and Gabrielle Walker is a freelance writer and broadcaster and former climate change editor at the prestigious science journal Nature. They have wielded significant influence over the global warming debate to date: the book begins by reminding us that it was King who caused a furore in 2004 by describing climate change as `the most severe problem we are facing today, more serious even than the threat of terrorism', and, by implication, who began the process of placing climate stage centre stage on the political map.
Indeed, in December 2007, in his last interview in post as the chief scientific adviser, King told The Times (London) that raising government consciousness of climate change was his key legacy. He recalls how Ian Coon, a director of British Petroleum, `made a speech in which he said that before Al Gore was Dave King' and points out how he was sticking his neck out on the issue `certainly before Gore started making those speeches'. It is nice to know that King has no axe to grind against his rival eco-worriers, who have heaped his book with praise: among them Al Gore (An Inconvenient Truth), Tim Flannery (The Weather Makers) and James Lovelock (Gaia and The Revenge of Gaia).
King and Walker try to stand out from the crowd of global warming consciousness-raisers by claiming that their book will not only challenge climate change `deniers' (whom they dismiss as either having a `vested interest in ignoring the scientific arguments' or `they are fools'), but challenge the doom-mongers on the green side, who `see disaster around every corner and indulge in gory scenarios that have been labelled "climate porn"'. In January 2008, King told the Guardian that he now thinks that some parts of the green movement are in danger of going too far, and that `the risk is that people feel the problem is being so overstated that it simply can't be true'.
For those of us who have long argued the need for a more sober, rational debate about global warming, a bit of climate-porn busting from somebody with the status of Sir David King would be very welcome - if rather disconcerting, given the chief scientific adviser's own history on this matter. King's attempt to place himself in the territory of opposing both denial and alarmism, and to claim the mantle of a neutral reporter of what `the science' says, seems somewhat ironic given his past willingness to make bold statements about climate change in the name of awareness-raising. In 2004 - having established that global warming is a bigger threat than terrorism - King also told the Independent on Sunday that Antarctica is likely to be the world's only habitable continent by the end of this century if global warming remains unchecked. Strangely, this is not a claim that features in his newly balanced book.
In the same month, following a screening of the Hollywood blockbuster The Day After Tomorrow - a preposterous fantasy in which the ice caps melt, causing a shutdown of the Gulf Stream followed by all manner of disasters leading to a new Ice Age - King admitted to the BBC that `the film brings events together into a highly unlikely or even impossible scenario'. But, he added: `[W]hat's good is that while my colleagues and I have just spent half an hour presenting you with the scientific understanding of climate change, the movie gets the basic message across in a few sentences of dialogue. It's a beautiful piece of script-writing.'
King expressed his `hope' that US audiences would see the film, as `it's very important that we all take cognisance of what science is saying, and that includes American politicians'. The fact that no real science would ever `say' the scenario etched out in The Day After Tomorrow is presumably beside the point.
But anyway, given that the world now has watched the movie and we are all very well aware of global warming, is the `awareness-raising' King of old prepared to discuss the issue in more sober and balanced terms? Hardly. As soon as you go beyond the jacket of The Hot Topic, King and Walker seem less interested in promoting understanding and reasoned debate than in foisting a one-sided account of climate science, coupled with narrow and constraining policy prescriptions, on to their readers. It's a beautiful piece of script-writing, but does nothing to tackle the misleading alarmism over global warming. Indeed, as Mike Hulme, founding director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change at the University of East Anglia, pointed out in his review of The Hot Topic for the UK Independent, the authors are happy to indulge in some additional climate porn of their own:
`[T]he 15 pages of chapter 5, "Wild Cards", offer enough material to keep even the most optimistic of us lying awake at night. In 4,500 words we have 37 separate depictions of climatic fear, one for every 120 words. We have climate change that is "frightening" six times and "alarming" twice, four "disaster scenarios", four "tipping points", three "collapses", two "abrupt dramas", not to mention the "bleak outlooks", the "catastrophe" and the three "grave dangers to our civilisation".'
It is striking the number of times King and Walker lapse from sober science into the trite language of therapeutic policymaking, instructing us that it is time to `kick' our `carbon habit'.
However, what is probably most irritating about The Hot Topic is the way in which one particular response to global warming is promoted as the only sensible response - do everything possible to restrict climate change to no more than two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels - without providing any sense of the substantial controversy that surrounds such a target.
The argument posed by King and Walker runs like this: `All the evidence suggests that the world will experience significant and potentially highly dangerous changes in climate over the next few decades no matter what we do now. All things being equal, to keep the "danger" as low as possible we would pick the lowest possible rise, in other words set a temperature limit of two degrees Celsius. (In addition to the 1.4 degrees Celsius that's already inevitable, that would allow us just 0.6 degrees Celsius of leeway in which to kick our carbon habit.)' [Emphasis in the original.]
Having made the case for setting this temperature limit, Walker and King hit us with `the really bad news': that in fact `it's now almost certainly impossible to restrict warming to two degrees Celsius'. `If', they tell us, `we had started two decades ago we would have had a good chance. But in the present climate, that target looks increasingly out of range'. The problem, according to their account, is that carbon dioxide concentrations are already too high to provide a realistic chance of restricting warming to their desired level. Compared to a pre-industrial concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of around 280ppm (parts per million), they state that today's atmosphere is currently around 430ppmCO2eq (meaning CO2 equivalent concentration when additional greenhouse gases such as methane and nitrous oxide are also taken into account), and argue that with rapid emissions controls 450ppmCO2eq is the lowest we could hope to achieve. How this will translate into temperature increases depends on how sensitive the climate system is to changes in CO2 and other greenhouse gases.
According to Walker and King, the likeliest average global temperature value to be associated with 450ppm is 2.5 degrees Celsius - if we're lucky and the sensitivity turns out to be low `we might stay below that', but if we're unlucky `we could find ourselves heading for a highly dangerous 3.5 degrees Celsius'.
Having befuddled the reader with statistics, Walker and King reassure us that this is not a counsel of despair but rather a call for prompt action. The `good news' is that `we do still have a chance of keeping greenhouse gases to that 450ppm limit' but `we have to act fast'. They are not kidding! `Fast' means that global greenhouse emissions will need to `peak within 15 years, and by 2050 they will have to have fallen to half their current levels'. They accept that this `sounds like a lot to ask, especially when you consider that much of this change will have to come from developing countries that are currently much more focused on improving the wretched lives of their citizens'. Yes, it does sound like a lot to ask.
Set against this hopelessly unrealistic target, and the further impoverishment of the developing world that would be required even to attempt to reach it, the `good news' bit - that `many of the technologies that we will need to curb greenhouse gases are already available or in the pipeline' - does not seem particularly reassuring.
All this might be less objectionable if the book's stated aim were not to pick through `the blizzard of information and misinformation about global warming, explaining each point in the most straightforward way possible'. For there is nothing `straightforward' about a target of two degrees Celsius; and while the EU has also adopted this target, it is a controversial one that could very well be based on some `misinformation'. For example, the economist Professor Richard Tol, highly regarded and widely cited in the climate change literature, has critiqued a two degrees Celsius target as being `supported by rather thin arguments, based on inadequate methods, sloppy reasoning, and selective citation from a very narrow set of studies'. In an examination of the literature supporting a two degrees Celsius target, he points out a number of problems with many studies, such as the lack of attention paid to mitigation costs and, most importantly, the failure to take account of the scope for adaptation especially with regard to risks such as malaria and water shortage.
Tol points out that `a number of "cost-benefit analyses" of greenhouse gas emission abatement have been published' and that the `technically sound amongst these studies (for example, Nordhaus, 1991; Peck and Teisberg, 1992; Maddison, 1995; Manne et al., 1995; Tol, 1997) argue that it is not in our collective best interest to stabilise concentrations - unless there happens to a cheap, large-scale, carbon-free energy source - let alone at the levels needed to meet the 2oC target.' Tol concludes, therefore, that even though the `growth of greenhouse emissions has to be slowed if not reversed', that `deep cuts in emissions will only be achieved if alternative energy technologies become available at reasonable prices'.
Tol is not an insignificant figure in the climate change debate, and nor are the other authors he cites, but nowhere do Walker and King deem it necessary to explain or discuss in any detail alternative positions to their own. Meanwhile Bjorn Lomborg, who has achieved widespread coverage for his argument that adaptation to the effects of climate change is generally a more sensible response to global warming, especially given the far greater opportunities that will inevitably become available to future generations to reduce carbon dioxide emissions more cheaply, doesn't even merit a mention in The Hot Topic - let alone any engagement with or rebuttal of his ideas.
For Walker and King to disagree with these perspectives is one thing, but to essentially ignore them is quite another. While they do devote five-and-a-half pages to the work and criticism of the economist Nicholas Stern and a superficial discussion of debates about whether `to pay now or pay later', they conclude that `there's little need to worry about how much climate change might cost us in the future, when its effects are already being felt today'. But weighing up the potential impacts of climate change against the scope for human adaptation and the costs of emissions reduction in the future is central to any reasoned response to climate change as opposed to chastising humanity for having an impact on the planet.
Ultimately Walker and King appear to regard their trump card as the threat of the Greenland Ice Sheet melting, which they state is expected to begin when temperatures increase to around 2.7oC. Though they accept this process would likely take many centuries, they point out that sea levels would eventually rise by seven metres - which is undoubtedly a significant amount. But is this argument the show-stopper they seem to regard it to be, necessitating expensive and drastic action to reduce carbon emissions now? Again, the authors seem to be shy of providing a full and accessible account of the current substantial gaps in our knowledge of climate change processes.
Take, for example, the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which reports the contribution of Greenland ice sheet melting to sea level rise between 1993 and 2003 to be 0.21 (+/- 0.07) millimetres per year and an Antarctic ice sheet contribution of 0.21 (+/- 0.35)mm - in other words, for Antarctica they don't currently know whether it is adding or subtracting to sea level rise. Projecting forward to 2100, the IPCC estimates a sea level rise by the end of the century of between 0.18 and 0.59 metres excluding future rapid dynamical changes in ice flow (see below) but including `a contribution due to increased ice flow from Greenland and Antarctica at the rates observed for 1993 to 2003'.
None of this provides a basis for alarm, as Walker and King are well aware. However, they point out that `the vulnerability of Greenland depends on aspects of its internal dynamics that are as yet uncertain' - namely whether rapid dynamical changes are likely to occur or not - and that `if these mechanisms cause Greenland to melt more quickly than we expect, sea level could rise by a matter of meters over the next century, which would cause grave danger for our civilisation'. This, they state, `is one of the most convincing reasons we have for the urgent need to curb climate change'.
What Walker and King do not draw their readers' attention to is the fact that the IPCC has excluded such factors from their projections `because a basis in published literature is lacking'. They state, with regard to the possibility of greater contributions to sea level rise from the Greenland or Antarctic ice sheets: `Larger values cannot be excluded, but understanding of these effects is too limited to assess their likelihood or provide a best estimate or an upper bound for sea level rise.'
It would appear then, that a key plank of Walker and King's argument for their stringent emissions targets are processes so poorly understood that even the IPCC, whose projections involve large degrees of uncertainty more generally, was unwilling to include them in its future projections. Surely, a balanced account would explain this fact to the reader? Indeed, the more general difficulties and limitations of modelling climate change are not something that Walker and King enlighten their readers on much either.
So how, after all this, can the diligent reader hope to achieve a more balanced understanding of the global warming debate? Many books may pretend to give the whole story, but no single book can do it. For an antidote to the climate porn popularised by King, Gore and others, you could read Bjorn Lomborg's Cool It! (previously reviewed in the spiked review of books here), or turn to Aynsley J Kellow's recently-published Science and Public Policy: The Virtuous Corruption of Virtual Environmental Science.
Kellow's key argument is that corruption in the name of a noble cause is facilitated by the virtual nature of much environmental science, which relies on mathematical and large-scale computer models. Using the two key examples of biodiversity and global warming, Kellow argues that environmental science is often not conducted with the same kinds of safeguards as surround other scientific research, such as medical research for example. His final chapter, which deals with science and its social and political context, looks at past examples of politicised science, notably Lysenkoism in Stalinist Russia, and the influence of ecological thought on the Nazis.
Kellow's key argument is that it is the indeterminacy of the science that permits political frames to become more prominent. This seems rather a forgiving way of looking at the problem we are witnessing with the climate change debate, where science is routinely misrepresented to suit instrumental ends. Nonetheless, in a debate where far too many questions are asked and alternative explanations given, those who hold the process up to scrutiny are far worthier of a close read than those who spend several hundred pages telling us what, in their view, `the science' tells us to do.
Source
There is an appalling story here about how the British authorities have barred a conservative Israeli from visiting Britain -- while at the same time allowing into Britain a well-known Muslim preacher of hate and Jihad.
Amazing! British bureaucrats fall on their swords: "Most of the officials at the Financial Services Authority (FSA) who were directly responsible for the flawed supervision of Northern Rock have quit, The Times has learnt. Of the seven FSA supervisors working closely on the bank before its implosion last August, five have left, the FSA has admitted, responding to a Freedom of Information Act request from this newspaper. The FSA, the body responsible for ensuring that UK banks have strong-enough balance sheets and sufficient liquidity, has come under fire for failing to spot the fatal flaw in Northern Rock's business model. The FSA is expected to admit to shortcomings in its supervision of the Rock in a report this month. Hector Sants, the chief executive, has already admitted to MPs that the FSA's performance was unacceptable and that there were failings. Northern Rock's extreme dependence on the wholesale money markets, rather than on depositors, for its funding proved a catastrophic weakness when the credit crunch hit last summer, leading to the first run on a British bank for more than a century."
Wibsey Working Men's Club in Bradford was the focus of the opening film in the BBC's new season of programmes about white working-class Britain. Pinch yourself, and the documentary could have been mistaken for a Play for Today from the late 1970s or the 1980s - one of those searing dramas, beautifully made, about being poor and left behind.
Time and tide have bypassed Wibsey, and with it the members of the club, all of them tough northerners who in their prime were the engine room of Britain. Their way of life is endangered. The heavy industry that gave them status has gone; their sons did not choose to join them in the club; and their city, one of Happy Eid and unhappy ethnic tension, is now an alien place to them.
The men, most of them unemployed or retired, held futile committee meetings to discuss their financial crisis, and faced the fact there was little that could be done to keep the club open. Not enough people came any more. It was as simple as that. "We're oop shit creek," muttered one. And it struck me, as they sat in the gloom, rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic, that one of the ironies of Britain today is that if these white working-class men were an ethnic minority group - Asian elders, say, or Polish unmarried mothers - their club could have applied to Bradford council for a support grant and had ethnic minorities co-ordinators swarming around them immediately.
If we provide Muslim women-only swimming clubs, Asian football groups, or Ukrainian festivals, then surely we could also spare some local authority cash for a group of relics from our industrial past. Living history, isn't it? Social cohesion. Shoulders of giants, and all that. Give them a grant at once. It's only fair. Now the whole point of this poignant film, of course, was precisely that: to suggest unfairness. Remember the title of the BBC theme: White. To make it apparent that in the rush to multiculturalism, someone forgot to remember that white working-class males are disenfranchised and discriminated against too.
Thus the BBC season, which continues this week, makes a brave leap. It theorises that immigration is to blame for the plight of the working class; for its sense of alienation within its own heritage. Multiculturalism, that state-sponsored form of ethnic diversity, has created dangerous inequalities and segregation.
But is it true? I wonder. Much as I find the BBC's theme fascinating, I think perhaps it is chasing the wrong hare. Many things have made life difficult for the working classes, but most of them relate to global economics, snobbery and the death of heavy industry, rather than to skin colour. That is not to say that we do not discriminate. Of course we do. We are ruder, in public, to the white working class than we would dare be to ethnic minority groups. We call them chavs, or - in Scotland - neds, and we award TV comedy such as Little Britain that eviscerates them. We simultaneously neglect and romanticise them. But this is not new.
For the old white men of Bradford, with no jobs, no money, no future, disempowered in bleak surroundings, the parallels with the political landscape of the 1980s were obvious. In the ultimate act of discrimination to the working class, Britain's engine room was shut down. Steel, coal, textiles, shipbuilding, carmaking and almost every part of the heavy manufacturing sector disappeared; lives and jobs and communities folded. It happened in Ayrshire, Fife, Wales, the Midlands, Newcastle, Yorkshire, Lanarkshire.
And here's news for the BBC: there are sad, emasculated, iron-faced older men, just like those from Wibsey, sitting in rundown bars in every former industrial area in Britain, bemoaning that they're not selling enough beer, that Labour has deserted them, just like every other tosser, and no one wants to come to their karaoke nights any more....
I suspect the answer to the kind of divisions we face lies in lack of recognition. Immigrants have not denied the white working class jobs and houses - the ones they got were the ones the whites didn't want - but what they have denied them is political love and attention. The old working class, you might say, is simply fed up with being ignored.
Source
Controversial blog is axed
Britain:
"A civil servant who wrote an anonymous blog about the inner workings of government has taken down the site after it attracted widespread publicity. The blog, Civil Serf, which was mentioned in newspapers and used by Tory politicians to criticise the Government, made frequent references to welfare policy and to Peter Hain, the former Work and Pensions Secretary. The Department of Work and Pensions declined to confirm whether the blogger had been identified. Her profile states that she is a 33-year-old fast-stream civil servant.
Source
It seems to have been a great blog but they have done a very thorough job of taking it down. There is nothing in the Google cache and the Wayback Machine has nothing either. There are a few excerpts here and here and here and here. If anybody can find more of it, let me know and I will see about getting it posted somewhere. Below are some pretty good bits:
"- [Former minister] Peter Hain 'can't answer a question without looking confused (if you asked him for his name he'd have to really think about it)'
- 'Ministers only take decisions at the weekend [probably because they have their spouse and/or political adviser do it for them]'
- 'The civil service loves bright young graduates with poncy backgrounds and floppy, golden hair'
In case not everyone gets British slang, "poncy" translates as "pretentious"
I thought only ICE was this crazy
Three illegal immigrants have been arrested after they were caught trying to get OUT of Britain
The Afghan men had sneaked into the back of a Polish lorry leaving Dover for France. They were discovered when it braked suddenly, causing its load of timber to fall and pin one of them down. The driver went to investigate after hearing noises from the back of his truck. The other two men, who were also injured, were seen trying to run away.
Sir Andrew Green, chairman of the pressure group MigrationWatch, said yesterday: "It seems crazy to stop illegal immigrants leaving the country of their own free will. "We would like to see an amnesty of departure so any illegal immigrant could leave, providing they were not wanted by police, as soon as they wish." Sir Andrew added: "We do not need them here and we certainly do not need to pay for their removal."
Charlie Elphicke, 36, the Tories' prospective parliamentary candidate for Dover, said: "The Home Office is a complete shambles. Why are we stopping them from leaving? "If they want to go, let them go. Why are we spending valuable resources in this way? "We should be making sure our borders are secure against people who are trying to enter our country illegally and helping those who are here illegally to leave. "It is ludicrous to prevent those wanting to leave to do so. The immigration system in this country is truly mad....
A Home Office spokesman said: "The men were taken to a holding room to be processed. "If they are failed asylum seekers we will be able to find their immigration background and there is a possibility of removal from the country. "Our border controls are very strong but this is not a case of the controls not working as the men were going in the other direction, out of the country."
More here. See here for the equivalent ICE [U.S. Immigration] insanity.
The King of 'Climate Porn'
A new book by the UK government's former chief scientific adviser sheds yet more heat than light on the global warming debate - despite its promises of balance
In The Hot Topic, Sir David King and Gabrielle Walker promise to `unpick the entire essential story of global warming - what we humans have done, how we have done it, how we will need to prepare for the changes we can't stop and how we can prevent the even worse effects that will otherwise follow'. Determined to avoid both `pessimism' and `denial', they vow to pick their way through `the blizzard of information and misinformation about global warming, explaining each point in the most straightforward way possible'.
That would indeed be a great book to write; and given the authors' credentials, a truly comprehensive discussion of `how to tackle global warming and still keep the lights on' would be well worth a read. Unfortunately, The Hot Topic adds about as much cool science and clarity to the global warming debate as the celebrity chef wars add to our understanding of nutrition.
The authors of The Hot Topic assure us that we can trust them, that despite their `considerable experience in the worlds of media and politics' they `have no personal axes to grind'. Sir David King is the UK government's former chief scientific adviser, and Gabrielle Walker is a freelance writer and broadcaster and former climate change editor at the prestigious science journal Nature. They have wielded significant influence over the global warming debate to date: the book begins by reminding us that it was King who caused a furore in 2004 by describing climate change as `the most severe problem we are facing today, more serious even than the threat of terrorism', and, by implication, who began the process of placing climate stage centre stage on the political map.
Indeed, in December 2007, in his last interview in post as the chief scientific adviser, King told The Times (London) that raising government consciousness of climate change was his key legacy. He recalls how Ian Coon, a director of British Petroleum, `made a speech in which he said that before Al Gore was Dave King' and points out how he was sticking his neck out on the issue `certainly before Gore started making those speeches'. It is nice to know that King has no axe to grind against his rival eco-worriers, who have heaped his book with praise: among them Al Gore (An Inconvenient Truth), Tim Flannery (The Weather Makers) and James Lovelock (Gaia and The Revenge of Gaia).
King and Walker try to stand out from the crowd of global warming consciousness-raisers by claiming that their book will not only challenge climate change `deniers' (whom they dismiss as either having a `vested interest in ignoring the scientific arguments' or `they are fools'), but challenge the doom-mongers on the green side, who `see disaster around every corner and indulge in gory scenarios that have been labelled "climate porn"'. In January 2008, King told the Guardian that he now thinks that some parts of the green movement are in danger of going too far, and that `the risk is that people feel the problem is being so overstated that it simply can't be true'.
For those of us who have long argued the need for a more sober, rational debate about global warming, a bit of climate-porn busting from somebody with the status of Sir David King would be very welcome - if rather disconcerting, given the chief scientific adviser's own history on this matter. King's attempt to place himself in the territory of opposing both denial and alarmism, and to claim the mantle of a neutral reporter of what `the science' says, seems somewhat ironic given his past willingness to make bold statements about climate change in the name of awareness-raising. In 2004 - having established that global warming is a bigger threat than terrorism - King also told the Independent on Sunday that Antarctica is likely to be the world's only habitable continent by the end of this century if global warming remains unchecked. Strangely, this is not a claim that features in his newly balanced book.
In the same month, following a screening of the Hollywood blockbuster The Day After Tomorrow - a preposterous fantasy in which the ice caps melt, causing a shutdown of the Gulf Stream followed by all manner of disasters leading to a new Ice Age - King admitted to the BBC that `the film brings events together into a highly unlikely or even impossible scenario'. But, he added: `[W]hat's good is that while my colleagues and I have just spent half an hour presenting you with the scientific understanding of climate change, the movie gets the basic message across in a few sentences of dialogue. It's a beautiful piece of script-writing.'
King expressed his `hope' that US audiences would see the film, as `it's very important that we all take cognisance of what science is saying, and that includes American politicians'. The fact that no real science would ever `say' the scenario etched out in The Day After Tomorrow is presumably beside the point.
But anyway, given that the world now has watched the movie and we are all very well aware of global warming, is the `awareness-raising' King of old prepared to discuss the issue in more sober and balanced terms? Hardly. As soon as you go beyond the jacket of The Hot Topic, King and Walker seem less interested in promoting understanding and reasoned debate than in foisting a one-sided account of climate science, coupled with narrow and constraining policy prescriptions, on to their readers. It's a beautiful piece of script-writing, but does nothing to tackle the misleading alarmism over global warming. Indeed, as Mike Hulme, founding director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change at the University of East Anglia, pointed out in his review of The Hot Topic for the UK Independent, the authors are happy to indulge in some additional climate porn of their own:
`[T]he 15 pages of chapter 5, "Wild Cards", offer enough material to keep even the most optimistic of us lying awake at night. In 4,500 words we have 37 separate depictions of climatic fear, one for every 120 words. We have climate change that is "frightening" six times and "alarming" twice, four "disaster scenarios", four "tipping points", three "collapses", two "abrupt dramas", not to mention the "bleak outlooks", the "catastrophe" and the three "grave dangers to our civilisation".'
It is striking the number of times King and Walker lapse from sober science into the trite language of therapeutic policymaking, instructing us that it is time to `kick' our `carbon habit'.
However, what is probably most irritating about The Hot Topic is the way in which one particular response to global warming is promoted as the only sensible response - do everything possible to restrict climate change to no more than two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels - without providing any sense of the substantial controversy that surrounds such a target.
The argument posed by King and Walker runs like this: `All the evidence suggests that the world will experience significant and potentially highly dangerous changes in climate over the next few decades no matter what we do now. All things being equal, to keep the "danger" as low as possible we would pick the lowest possible rise, in other words set a temperature limit of two degrees Celsius. (In addition to the 1.4 degrees Celsius that's already inevitable, that would allow us just 0.6 degrees Celsius of leeway in which to kick our carbon habit.)' [Emphasis in the original.]
Having made the case for setting this temperature limit, Walker and King hit us with `the really bad news': that in fact `it's now almost certainly impossible to restrict warming to two degrees Celsius'. `If', they tell us, `we had started two decades ago we would have had a good chance. But in the present climate, that target looks increasingly out of range'. The problem, according to their account, is that carbon dioxide concentrations are already too high to provide a realistic chance of restricting warming to their desired level. Compared to a pre-industrial concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of around 280ppm (parts per million), they state that today's atmosphere is currently around 430ppmCO2eq (meaning CO2 equivalent concentration when additional greenhouse gases such as methane and nitrous oxide are also taken into account), and argue that with rapid emissions controls 450ppmCO2eq is the lowest we could hope to achieve. How this will translate into temperature increases depends on how sensitive the climate system is to changes in CO2 and other greenhouse gases.
According to Walker and King, the likeliest average global temperature value to be associated with 450ppm is 2.5 degrees Celsius - if we're lucky and the sensitivity turns out to be low `we might stay below that', but if we're unlucky `we could find ourselves heading for a highly dangerous 3.5 degrees Celsius'.
Having befuddled the reader with statistics, Walker and King reassure us that this is not a counsel of despair but rather a call for prompt action. The `good news' is that `we do still have a chance of keeping greenhouse gases to that 450ppm limit' but `we have to act fast'. They are not kidding! `Fast' means that global greenhouse emissions will need to `peak within 15 years, and by 2050 they will have to have fallen to half their current levels'. They accept that this `sounds like a lot to ask, especially when you consider that much of this change will have to come from developing countries that are currently much more focused on improving the wretched lives of their citizens'. Yes, it does sound like a lot to ask.
Set against this hopelessly unrealistic target, and the further impoverishment of the developing world that would be required even to attempt to reach it, the `good news' bit - that `many of the technologies that we will need to curb greenhouse gases are already available or in the pipeline' - does not seem particularly reassuring.
All this might be less objectionable if the book's stated aim were not to pick through `the blizzard of information and misinformation about global warming, explaining each point in the most straightforward way possible'. For there is nothing `straightforward' about a target of two degrees Celsius; and while the EU has also adopted this target, it is a controversial one that could very well be based on some `misinformation'. For example, the economist Professor Richard Tol, highly regarded and widely cited in the climate change literature, has critiqued a two degrees Celsius target as being `supported by rather thin arguments, based on inadequate methods, sloppy reasoning, and selective citation from a very narrow set of studies'. In an examination of the literature supporting a two degrees Celsius target, he points out a number of problems with many studies, such as the lack of attention paid to mitigation costs and, most importantly, the failure to take account of the scope for adaptation especially with regard to risks such as malaria and water shortage.
Tol points out that `a number of "cost-benefit analyses" of greenhouse gas emission abatement have been published' and that the `technically sound amongst these studies (for example, Nordhaus, 1991; Peck and Teisberg, 1992; Maddison, 1995; Manne et al., 1995; Tol, 1997) argue that it is not in our collective best interest to stabilise concentrations - unless there happens to a cheap, large-scale, carbon-free energy source - let alone at the levels needed to meet the 2oC target.' Tol concludes, therefore, that even though the `growth of greenhouse emissions has to be slowed if not reversed', that `deep cuts in emissions will only be achieved if alternative energy technologies become available at reasonable prices'.
Tol is not an insignificant figure in the climate change debate, and nor are the other authors he cites, but nowhere do Walker and King deem it necessary to explain or discuss in any detail alternative positions to their own. Meanwhile Bjorn Lomborg, who has achieved widespread coverage for his argument that adaptation to the effects of climate change is generally a more sensible response to global warming, especially given the far greater opportunities that will inevitably become available to future generations to reduce carbon dioxide emissions more cheaply, doesn't even merit a mention in The Hot Topic - let alone any engagement with or rebuttal of his ideas.
For Walker and King to disagree with these perspectives is one thing, but to essentially ignore them is quite another. While they do devote five-and-a-half pages to the work and criticism of the economist Nicholas Stern and a superficial discussion of debates about whether `to pay now or pay later', they conclude that `there's little need to worry about how much climate change might cost us in the future, when its effects are already being felt today'. But weighing up the potential impacts of climate change against the scope for human adaptation and the costs of emissions reduction in the future is central to any reasoned response to climate change as opposed to chastising humanity for having an impact on the planet.
Ultimately Walker and King appear to regard their trump card as the threat of the Greenland Ice Sheet melting, which they state is expected to begin when temperatures increase to around 2.7oC. Though they accept this process would likely take many centuries, they point out that sea levels would eventually rise by seven metres - which is undoubtedly a significant amount. But is this argument the show-stopper they seem to regard it to be, necessitating expensive and drastic action to reduce carbon emissions now? Again, the authors seem to be shy of providing a full and accessible account of the current substantial gaps in our knowledge of climate change processes.
Take, for example, the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which reports the contribution of Greenland ice sheet melting to sea level rise between 1993 and 2003 to be 0.21 (+/- 0.07) millimetres per year and an Antarctic ice sheet contribution of 0.21 (+/- 0.35)mm - in other words, for Antarctica they don't currently know whether it is adding or subtracting to sea level rise. Projecting forward to 2100, the IPCC estimates a sea level rise by the end of the century of between 0.18 and 0.59 metres excluding future rapid dynamical changes in ice flow (see below) but including `a contribution due to increased ice flow from Greenland and Antarctica at the rates observed for 1993 to 2003'.
None of this provides a basis for alarm, as Walker and King are well aware. However, they point out that `the vulnerability of Greenland depends on aspects of its internal dynamics that are as yet uncertain' - namely whether rapid dynamical changes are likely to occur or not - and that `if these mechanisms cause Greenland to melt more quickly than we expect, sea level could rise by a matter of meters over the next century, which would cause grave danger for our civilisation'. This, they state, `is one of the most convincing reasons we have for the urgent need to curb climate change'.
What Walker and King do not draw their readers' attention to is the fact that the IPCC has excluded such factors from their projections `because a basis in published literature is lacking'. They state, with regard to the possibility of greater contributions to sea level rise from the Greenland or Antarctic ice sheets: `Larger values cannot be excluded, but understanding of these effects is too limited to assess their likelihood or provide a best estimate or an upper bound for sea level rise.'
It would appear then, that a key plank of Walker and King's argument for their stringent emissions targets are processes so poorly understood that even the IPCC, whose projections involve large degrees of uncertainty more generally, was unwilling to include them in its future projections. Surely, a balanced account would explain this fact to the reader? Indeed, the more general difficulties and limitations of modelling climate change are not something that Walker and King enlighten their readers on much either.
So how, after all this, can the diligent reader hope to achieve a more balanced understanding of the global warming debate? Many books may pretend to give the whole story, but no single book can do it. For an antidote to the climate porn popularised by King, Gore and others, you could read Bjorn Lomborg's Cool It! (previously reviewed in the spiked review of books here), or turn to Aynsley J Kellow's recently-published Science and Public Policy: The Virtuous Corruption of Virtual Environmental Science.
Kellow's key argument is that corruption in the name of a noble cause is facilitated by the virtual nature of much environmental science, which relies on mathematical and large-scale computer models. Using the two key examples of biodiversity and global warming, Kellow argues that environmental science is often not conducted with the same kinds of safeguards as surround other scientific research, such as medical research for example. His final chapter, which deals with science and its social and political context, looks at past examples of politicised science, notably Lysenkoism in Stalinist Russia, and the influence of ecological thought on the Nazis.
Kellow's key argument is that it is the indeterminacy of the science that permits political frames to become more prominent. This seems rather a forgiving way of looking at the problem we are witnessing with the climate change debate, where science is routinely misrepresented to suit instrumental ends. Nonetheless, in a debate where far too many questions are asked and alternative explanations given, those who hold the process up to scrutiny are far worthier of a close read than those who spend several hundred pages telling us what, in their view, `the science' tells us to do.
Source
There is an appalling story here about how the British authorities have barred a conservative Israeli from visiting Britain -- while at the same time allowing into Britain a well-known Muslim preacher of hate and Jihad.
Amazing! British bureaucrats fall on their swords: "Most of the officials at the Financial Services Authority (FSA) who were directly responsible for the flawed supervision of Northern Rock have quit, The Times has learnt. Of the seven FSA supervisors working closely on the bank before its implosion last August, five have left, the FSA has admitted, responding to a Freedom of Information Act request from this newspaper. The FSA, the body responsible for ensuring that UK banks have strong-enough balance sheets and sufficient liquidity, has come under fire for failing to spot the fatal flaw in Northern Rock's business model. The FSA is expected to admit to shortcomings in its supervision of the Rock in a report this month. Hector Sants, the chief executive, has already admitted to MPs that the FSA's performance was unacceptable and that there were failings. Northern Rock's extreme dependence on the wholesale money markets, rather than on depositors, for its funding proved a catastrophic weakness when the credit crunch hit last summer, leading to the first run on a British bank for more than a century."
Monday, March 10, 2008
The nasty history of supermarket-bashing
Nobody would label today's critics of big chainstores as `Nazis'. Yet their arguments bear a striking resemblance to those of the Third Reich. Comment from Britain:
Nothing better symbolises the strange, topsy-turvy state of politics in the twenty-first century than the ongoing hostile campaign against supermarkets and those of us who shop in them.
In recent years in Britain, the big four supermarkets, in particular Tesco, have been condemned for producing `clone towns', reducing consumer choice, selling unethical goods and strangling competition for smaller traders. Amongst some middle-class commentators, and increasingly amongst the political elite, too, supermarkets have come to symbolise everything that is heinous and disgusting about modern-day life. Supported by very sympathetic and powerful media outlets, including the London Evening Standard, the Guardian and Channel 4, the supermarket-bashers may soon win the backing of officialdom in their effort to hold back supermarkets and limit the benefits they bring to millions of people.
The UK Competition Commission has put forward recommendations to discourage supermarket chains from developing local monopolies and forcing smaller stores out of business. An ombudsman will oversee and regulate the relationship between Tesco, Sainsbury's, Asda and Morrisons and their suppliers. It is not just the shareholders and top managers of the supermarket giants who should be worried: these latest interventions could have negative ramifications for millions of shoppers, too. The Commission's ombudsman is expected to have the power to fine companies for introducing sharp price cuts, or for charging new products for shelf-space and `pay-to-stay' fees. Large retailers who do not meet competition standards could have their planning applications refused (1).
The regulatory measures are justified as an attempt to stimulate more competition in areas where particular chains have been dominant. The Competition Commission wants to protect local shops and allow them to exercise greater retail muscle. The problem, however, is that since independent retailers do not have an extensive division of labour, and are weak in their ability to produce economies of scale, the costs of their shelf-stacked commodities will often be higher than in supermarkets. If local shops are guaranteed a monopoly in residential areas, it will mean that a family's grocery bill will increase - potentially by a lot.
In short, it seems that the Competition Commission wants to beef up the profit margins of small traders by driving down the living standards of ordinary consumers. Today's champions of small trade, such as Andrew Simms of the new economics foundation and author of Tescopoly, will no doubt argue that such tough measures are necessary to promote `community cohesion' and protect `the local environment' from rampaging supermarkets - yet whatever garbled language they use to cheer the Competition Commission's restrictions on Tesco and the rest, there is no avoiding the reality that everyday consumers will be forced to pay more so that local retailers can prosper (2).
The mass of consumers has been put in this position before. Many of the Competition Commission's recommendations on supermarkets bear a striking resemblance to those established in Nazi Germany during the 1930s. Of course, shouting `fascists' is a shrill, cheap shot in contemporary debate, designed falsely to discredit political opponents as being beyond the pale. Comparing people to 'the Nar-zis' is also fraught with ahistorical inaccuracies: it is a lazy device in cowardly contemporary debate. Nobody would seriously suggest that today's critics of supermarkets are anywhere near to being Nazis. And yet. there is a peculiar paradox that while Nazi Germany is held up as a symbol of evil today, many of the core ideas and beliefs associated with Nazism, such as the mystical worship of nature and hostility towards Enlightenment modernity, are increasingly commonplace amongst today's radical middle classes. And nowhere is that clearer than in their hang-ups about supermarkets.
The historian and authority on the Third Reich, Professor Richard J Evans, traces the initial electoral base of Hitler's Nazi Party in the Mittelstand - the `people who were neither bourgeois nor proletarian' but who `should have a recognised place in society'. As Evans explains: `Located between the two great antagonistic classes into which society had become divided, they represented people who stood on their own two feet, independent, hard-working, the healthy core of the German people. It was to people like these - small shopkeepers, skilled artisans running their own workshops, self-sufficient peasant farmers - that the Nazis had initially directed their appeal.' (3)
As the Nazi Party attracted considerable numbers of the Mittelstand to its programme, physical attacks, boycotts and discrimination against department and chain stores started to increase. Such street-level chainstore-bashing initiatives `were quickly backed by a Law for the Protection of Individual Trade passed on 12 May 1933', writes Evans. In a similar way to the current recommendations put forward by the Competition Commission, in Nazi Germany `chain stores were forbidden to expand or open new branches'. Towards the end of 1933, the Nazi Party introduced further moves along the lines currently outlined by the Competition Commission: `Department and chain stores were prohibited from offering a discount of more than three per cent on prices, a measure also extended to consumer co-operatives.' (4)
As the representatives of the embittered middle classes, the Mittelstand, the Nazis initially made sure that both big business and working-class interests were subordinated in order to boost the living standards and prestige of the small shopkeeper and artisan. Of course, Britain in 2008 is clearly not in the grip of a deep economic and social crisis in the way that German society was in the 1920s and 1930s. And no doubt there are small traders in Britain today who have lost out to the growth of supermarkets, though the evidence indicates that the retail market is big enough to accommodate both large and small retailers. Yet German officialdom's attack on supermarkets in the 1930s looks eerily like British officialdom's attack, backed by our own Mittelstand, in 2008.
What seems to aggravate middle-class commentators and campaigners most of all is that supermarkets put so many goods within the price range of millions of people, the mass of the population. For them, it seems an outrage that even `the lowest of the low', the poorest of families, can enjoy roast chicken for a mere 2 pounds or buy a pair of jeans for o3, not to mention the fact that even those on low disposable incomes can afford a flight to Prague these days courtesy of numerous no-frills airlines. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Eton-educated cook and organic farmer-cum-campaigner, alongside numerous broadsheet columnists, argues that the supermarket's cutting of prices `undermines the true value' and `meaning' of commodities (5). In truth, it seems that cheaply available goods undermine these campaigners' own sense of moral worth and social status.
Looked at in this way, it seems that attacking supermarkets represents the cutting edge of the middle classes' familiar aspiration to have a `recognisable place in society', away from hoi polloi and their mass-produced tastes. At the same time, hostility towards new housing developments, lionising nature over modernity - and organic over industrialised farming, animals over human wellbeing - are other mechanisms which middle-class radicals affect to appear more benign and, in Fearnley-Whittingstall's words, more `caring' - especially against the sensibilities of `vulgar modernists'. It is not Nazi-mongering to point out that such ideas were once the solid bedrock upon which the Third Reich was founded, which won admiration from middle-class sections of society both within and without Germany; that is simply the reality (6).
Many aspects of German Nazism can be seen as a form of `peasant ideology'. The `Blood and Soil' ideas of Walter Darr,, for instance, which were hugely influential on Nazi thinking, considered humans to be best suited to a simple existence living close to the land, and argued that urbanisation and industrialisation were so decadent and corrupt that `stultifying cities' would weaken a nations' `racial stock'. Darr,'s ideas also influenced the Nazis' belief in the virtues of Kultur, which embodied the folk traditions and craft skills `over the essentially empty products of Western civilisation' (7). Does this sound familiar? Is it really so very different from the complaints of countless commentators today, about mass-produced commodities, the destruction of nature by greedy mankind, and the emptiness of Western civilisation?
The `peasant ideology' also fuelled the idea of Lebensraum -- a space in which the German people could assume their proper, peasant existence. Such a rural idyll for the Germans could only be achieved, of course, by a drastic and forced reduction in the level of Europe's population. Today, too, whether it is the Optimum Population Trust (supported by Jonathon Porritt) or mainstream environmentalists who call for social policies that encourage less breeding, especially in Africa, there is a consensus that there are `too many people' in the world and that a massive reduction in human numbers, preferably through family-planning but possibly through a natural disaster, should be welcomed (8). Of course, none of these population campaigners is calling for a genocide; but they do passionately believe that the Earth is overcrowded.
The social forces driving the re-emergence of these destructive ideas are very different from those that existed in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s. Disenchantment with modernity and modern life has been an undercurrent in Western societies for 30 or 40 years now. Yet never have such ideas seem so accepted, so mainstream, and so consequential. Where middle-class supporters of small trade and organic farming once had to fight hard for a hearing, trying to make themselves heard over the clash of the `great antagonistic' classes, today the middle classes' strange ideas often seem to be the only ideas in town. Why?
The collapse of a century-old fight between the capitalist and working classes by the early 1990s pushed self-appointed middle-class radicals into the centre stage. So much so that their preoccupations and petty prejudices have steadily evolved into something approaching a `New Establishment', as Tory journalist and historian Max Hastings describes his chosen employers, the Guardian (9). It seems the middle classes have at last `found their place' in modern society, and they don't like what they see all around them.
Their old concerns - that the working masses are getting ideas above their station, that modernity is awful - are expressed in slightly different ways today. In the past, that fear and loathing of mass society was expressed against trade union militancy and working-class political organisations. In the 1970s, for instance, even though opinion-makers were not directly affected by union strikes at car manufacturing plants, for them it was still outrageous that `mere' car workers would not accept their place and get on with being exploited. The fact that the working classes could throw their weight around and put the political class under pressure angered them even more. Who did those oiks think they were?
The days of mass industrial unrest are long gone, of course, but that same exasperated question still haunts some commentators when they examine the modern world. Indeed, the development of a truly globalised mass economy has angered many because it has helped reduce commodity prices and raised ordinary people's living standards in the process. Such an historically unprecedented situation means that many working people enjoy the `good life' in ways that was once only available to the elites and the middle classes.
As a consequence, the old demarcations of social status and privilege are not as rigidly set in stone as they once were. That is why some middle-class radicals are determined to establish new demarcations to separate themselves from the mass of people. Hectoring on lifestyle choices, consumer habits and tastes is an artificial way of visibly underscoring class differences in society. In their screeching rejection of supermarkets and cheap flights abroad, and their lionising of rural idylls, many commentators are creating a new dividing line between the haves and have-nots - that is, those who have taste, and those who do not have taste.
The modernity-bashing radicals are not simply cranks on the fringes of society; they are increasingly respected and listened to by powerful decision-makers across the board. Not only have their nasty-minded complaints about housing prevented us from buying decent homes - now their anti-supermarket campaigns means we will soon be paying more for less groceries, too. Most of us can see that this is plain wrong. But for the opponents of supermarkets, undoubtedly this is the Reich way forward.
Source
Something else that the excellent article above could have mentioned is that item 16 of the (February 25th., 1920) 25 point plan of the National Socialist German Workers Party (written by the leader of that party, Adolf Hitler) also demanded the abolition of big stores and their replacement by small businesses. Just the usual Leftist hatred of success in others, of course
'No' to a Referendum
The British Parliament's vote last night not to stage a national referendum on the EU's new Lisbon Treaty might not, on its own, cost Gordon Brown the premiership whenever he finally faces the voters. But it will be added to the growing pile of evidence that he is more cautious and calculating a leader than many Britons would care to have in Number 10.
The crux of the parliamentary debate was whether the Lisbon Treaty, which Mr. Brown's Labour government supports, is tantamount to the failed EU constitution. The Prime Minister argues that it isn't and that he therefore isn't honor-bound to hold a popular vote, as Britain's three major political parties all pledged in 2005. Yet the reading of many -- including other European heads of government -- is that Lisbon is essentially the same as the constitution that died in the ballot boxes of France and Holland nearly three years ago.
Britain's referendum advocates had also focused on how the treaty will affect London's voting weight in Brussels and its national sovereignty -- vital topics, but ones that allowed Mr. Brown to give the debate a technical tint. It allowed him to argue that "opt-outs" from certain treaty provisions, such as on law enforcement, sufficiently guarded U.K. sovereignty. Most legal scholars couldn't say for sure.
In yesterday's debate, Conservative leader David Cameron fingered the thread that ties this issue to others that have plagued Mr. Brown since he succeeded Tony Blair in June. "We have the courage of our convictions and are sticking to that promise," Mr. Cameron told Mr. Brown in the Commons. "You have lost your courage."
That's easy for him to say, knowing he won't have to face other EU leaders at next week's summit. And to be fair, Paris and The Hague have also been unwilling to let their voters consider the new treaty after they voted down the constitution. But the Tory boss is right. What's really damning is that Mr. Brown seems to be afraid to take his case to the people.
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Series of blunders turned the plastic bag into global villain
Scientists and environmentalists have attacked a global campaign to ban plastic bags which they say is based on flawed science and exaggerated claims. The widely stated accusation that the bags kill 100,000 animals and a million seabirds every year are false, experts have told The Times. They pose only a minimal threat to most marine species, including seals, whales, dolphins and seabirds.
Gordon Brown announced last month that he would force supermarkets to charge for the bags, saying that they were "one of the most visible symbols of environmental waste". Retailers and some pressure groups, including the Campaign to Protect Rural England, threw their support behind him.
But scientists, politicians and marine experts attacked the Government for joining a "bandwagon" based on poor science. Lord Taverne, the chairman of Sense about Science, said: "The Government is irresponsible to jump on a bandwagon that has no base in scientific evidence. This is one of many examples where you get bad science leading to bad decisions which are counter-productive. Attacking plastic bags makes people feel good but it doesn't achieve anything."
Campaigners say that plastic bags pollute coastlines and waterways, killing or injuring birds and livestock on land and, in the oceans, destroying vast numbers of seabirds, seals, turtles and whales. However, The Times has established that there is no scientific evidence to show that the bags pose any direct threat to marine mammals. They "don't figure" in the majority of cases where animals die from marine debris, said David Laist, the author of a seminal 1997 study on the subject. Most deaths were caused when creatures became caught up in waste produce. "Plastic bags don't figure in entanglement," he said. "The main culprits are fishing gear, ropes, lines and strapping bands. Most mammals are too big to get caught up in a plastic bag."
He added: "The impact of bags on whales, dolphins, porpoises and seals ranges from nil for most species to very minor for perhaps a few species.For birds, plastic bags are not a problem either."
The central claim of campaigners is that the bags kill more than 100,000 marine mammals and one million seabirds every year. However, this figure is based on a misinterpretation of a 1987 Canadian study in Newfoundland, which found that, between 1981 and 1984, more than 100,000 marine mammals, including birds, were killed by discarded nets. The Canadian study did not mention plastic bags.
Fifteen years later in 2002, when the Australian Government commissioned a report into the effects of plastic bags, its authors misquoted the Newfoundland study, mistakenly attributing the deaths to "plastic bags". The figure was latched on to by conservationists as proof that the bags were killers. For four years the "typo" remained uncorrected. It was only in 2006 that the authors altered the report, replacing "plastic bags" with "plastic debris". But they admitted: "The actual numbers of animals killed annually by plastic bag litter is nearly impossible to determine." In a postscript to the correction they admitted that the original Canadian study had referred to fishing tackle, not plastic debris, as the threat to the marine environment. Regardless, the erroneous claim has become the keystone of a widening campaign to demonise plastic bags.
David Santillo, a marine biologist at Greenpeace, told The Times that bad science was undermining the Government's case for banning the bags. "It's very unlikely that many animals are killed by plastic bags," he said. "The evidence shows just the opposite. We are not going to solve the problem of waste by focusing on plastic bags. "It doesn't do the Government's case any favours if you've got statements being made that aren't supported by the scientific literature that's out there. With larger mammals it's fishing gear that's the big problem. On a global basis plastic bags aren't an issue. It would be great if statements like these weren't made."
Geoffrey Cox, a Tory member of the Commons Environment Select Committee, said: "I don't like plastic bags and I certainly support restricting their use, but plainly it's extremely important that before we take any steps we should rely on accurate information. It is bizarre that any campaign should be endorsed on the basis of a mistranslation. Gordon Brown should get his facts right."
A 1968 study of albatross carcasses found that 90 per cent contained some form of plastic but only two birds had ingested part of a plastic bag.
Professor Geoff Boxshall, a marine biologist at the Natural History Museum, said: "I've never seen a bird killed by a plastic bag. Other forms of plastic in the ocean are much more damaging. Only a very small proportion is caused by bags." Plastic particles known as nurdles, dumped in the sea by industrial companies, form a much greater threat as they can be easily consumed by birds and animals.
Many British groups are now questioning whether a ban on bags would cost consumers more than the environmental benefits. Charlie Mayfield, chairman of retailer John Lewis, said that tackling packaging waste and reducing carbon emissions were far more important goals. "We don't see reducing the use of plastic bags as our biggest priority," he said. "Of all the waste that goes to landfill, 20 per cent is household waste and 0.3 per cent is plastic bags." John Lewis added that a scheme in Ireland had reduced plastic bag usage, but sales of bin liners had increased 400 per cent.
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`Sexed-up' numbers should not always be accepted as science
By Mike Hulme (Mike Hulme is a professor in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia)
In the recent flurry of moves to ban plastic bags a frequently cited statistic is that more than 100,000 marine mammals and sea turtles die each year from entanglement in, or ingestion of, plastic bags. The original scientific study upon which this estimate relied actually attributed these deaths to fishing tackle in the oceans, not plastic bags. Yet the terms "100,000 marine deaths" and "plastic bags" now circulate happily through our public discourse, solidified as established fact.
But when is a fact a fact? Can facts change over time? And does it matter if they do? Science is instinctively referred to as the source and authenticator of facts such as the one cited above, and rightly so. Yet as this example shows, we need to be very careful about the veracity of the numbers we latch on to, and about what they signify. What may start out as a credible, yet qualified and provisional, scientific estimate may end up, either through distortion or mere negligence, enduring as an urban myth, apocryphal numbers - the modern equivalent of folklore.
My own area of climate change offers plenty of such examples. In December 2005 a study in the journal Nature offered the observation that the circulation in the North Atlantic Ocean, which sustains the Gulf Stream, had weakened by up to 30 per cent over the previous few decades. This figure and its juxtapositioning alongside the melodrama of films such as The Day after Tomorrow were amplified through the cooperation of scientists and media to result in headlines such as "Alarm over dramatic weakening of Gulf Stream" ( The Guardian, Dec 1, 2005). The urban myth that emerged from this episode was that we were closer to a mini Ice Age in the UK than had previously been thought. Eighteen months later, however, and unremarked by the media, two studies in equally reputable journals pointed out that such a trend was within the range of natural variability and may signify nothing at all.
A second example concerns the claim that, "by the end of this century, climate change will have killed around 182 million people in sub-Saharan Africa" (Christian Aid, May 2006). This number - 180 million African dead - has become one of the most widely cited numbers in the litany of doom that accompanies talk of climate change. In this case, however, the number 180 million was sexed-up science. Christian Aid took the worst-case climate scenario, the highest population scenario and the scenario with the least public health intervention and conjured the number into being. And here it has stayed, a number detached from its receding scientific origins in which assumptions were overlain on scenarios that captured uncertainties.
Whether through being lost in translation, through the premature citing of provisional science or through the purposeful sexing-up of deeply uncertain numbers, the facts of science are not always to be taken at face value.
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Replacing the Fatropolis with Fit Towns
New `healthy towns' that encourage people to walk more, eat the right kind of food and stay forever fit take repression to a new level. Comment from Britain
`Salt `could fuel childhood obesity"' whispered one headline this week; `World is in obesity crisis' roared another. It seems barely a day passes without some report or policy announcement reminding us that the deep-fried fruits of modernity are dragging us to our gluttonous, sedentry doom. Change your ways, they exhort. However, if recent plans to redesign our towns as `fit towns' are anything to go by, instruction and guilt-tripping are giving way to something far more repressive.
The possibility of replanning and redesigning our towns in order to encourage healthy lifestyles was originally raised last November by UK health secretary, Alan Johnson. Citing `international evidence and research' that shows we `need a large-scale approach across the whole community to help tackle obesity' he suggested proposed eco-towns should also be made `healthy towns. through their layout, facilities and construction'. He concluded that our `built environment [must] do more to help people make physical activity a normal part of everyday life' (1).
In Boston last Sunday, the conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science saw a similarly depressing nod to lifestyle management. Professor Philip James of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and, more importantly, chairman of the Brave-New-World-sounding International Obesity Taskforce, declared: `The environment in which we live is the overwhelming factor amplifying the obesity epidemic'. He continued, arguing that it was na‹ve to place `the onus on individuals making "healthier choices" while the environment in which we live is the overwhelming factor amplifying the epidemic' (2). Rena Wing of Brown University echoed the pessimistic view of individuals' capacity to make what the holier-than-thou alliance of policy makers and experts deem the right choices: `We live in an obesogenic environment that relies heavily on fast food, automobiles and remote controls - all of which can be labelled as "toxic" to maintaining a healthy weight.' (3)
The overarching aim of remaking our fatropolises as fit-towns is all too clear: as we can't be trusted to make the correct decisions, we, the public, shall be forcibly diverted from the dual-carriage way of temptation on to the fully pedestrianised area of righteousness.
Admittedly, some of the measures suggested seem innocuous enough. Stairwells, for instance, should be made to look less like badly lit fire escapes and made a bit more glamorous, spiral perhaps. And parks should be better maintained, with better lighting. Other proposals, however, are all too restrictive. For instance, some of the proposed towns should give priority to pedestrians and cyclists over the car, perhaps providing office premises with bike-only parking. And the bane of the obesity warrior's crusade, the fast food outlet, must never be erected near parks or schools. (4)
Of course there is nothing especially novel about urban planning, nor its political underpinnings. Take Baron Haussmann's reconstruction of Paris between 1852 and 1870. With memories of the revolutionary commune of 1848 still fresh, Haussmann, under Napoleon III's instructions, demolished vast swathes of the city and built long, sweeping boulevards in their place. In doing so he both inhibited the erection of barricades and made it easy for the army to gain access. In other words the attempt to maintain social order was embodied in Parisians' lived environment.
Indeed, on a more general scale, our environment has long reflected the ruling needs of the moment. Richard Sennet in his 1997 book, The Fall of Public Man, saw in the bustling thoroughfares and concourses of the modern city the predominance of the private individual of bourgeois myth. Public space was made a mere function of private motion, of getting from a to b as quickly as possible. Strolling, meandering, and leisurely interacting with our fellows were incompatible with the manic industriousness demanded of the bourgeois individual.
Accepting that urban planning - the regulation of public space - or indeed, its absence, has always provided a mirror of society, then what does the notion of the fit town reflect? Whilst it is not concerned, as Napoleon III was, with the threat posed by social disorder, it is still dealing with a threat. This time however, the threat is not embodied in, say, the communards - it is not external at all. It is, rather, internal to each and every one of us. Fit towns combat our tendency to consume and to seek convenience - we are our own worst enemies. While fast food, remote controls or electric tooth brushes save labour, they're killing us.
Fit towns embody more than the war on obesity. They wage war on our consuming passions per se, be it a desire to light-up, to booze, or to go large on a Big Mac and fries. Above all they fight our tendency to err.
To borrow, then, from the increasingly martial lexicon of government policy, fit towns are located on the frontier of the war on error. The result, from the jarring positivity of phrases like the International Obesity Taskforce, or, indeed, the `fit town' itself is an environment every bit as deeply repressive as that evoked in their different ways by George Orwell or Aldous Huxley.
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Heart disease: we need medicine not moralism
Fear of rising heart deaths is unfounded. And if we're serious about lowering the death rate even further, we need better treatment not lifestyle lectures
This week, a number of news headlines have highlighted the deadly threat of heart disease in Britain: `Bank crises "increase rate of heart attacks"`, warned the UK Guardian on Tuesday. The day before, The Times (London) cautioned that `Young adults' inactivity puts them at risk of heart attack'.
The Guardian report is based on research from the University of Cambridge. Data from the World Bank and World Health Organisation over a 40-year period was analysed at Cambridge, where the researchers concluded that between 1,280 and 5,130 Brits `could die from heart attacks if there was a widespread repeat of the Northern Rock banking crisis' (1). Lead researcher David Stuckler said: `To put this effect in perspective, this is more than 10 times the number of British troops who have died in Iraq.' The researchers found that `cardiac deaths surge briefly and regularly every time there is a systemic bank failure' and it is the elderly that are at greatest risk.
But those of us aged 35 to 54 had better not be too complacent, we're told, because our lives may be cut short by our `live-now' lifestyles. Simon Capewell, professor of clinical epidemiology at the University of Liverpool, said: `The flattening trends in mortality rates among young adults suggest that the cardiovascular disease epidemic is not being controlled.' He warned: `The party is over and complacency runs a high risk.'
Having recently lost both my mother and my uncle to heart disease, I am not about to advocate complacency. It is estimated that in the European Union, cardiovascular disease kills over two million people every year. Still, a little perspective would not go amiss. The fact is that despite the impression given by various newspaper headlines, heart disease is not on the rise. Instead, the concern voiced by some experts, and blown out of all proportion by others, is that the dramatic decrease in deaths from heart disease over the last few decades has started to flatten out.
In my view, the experts should be concerned. They should be continually trying to reduce deaths from heart disease. Clearly, a hell of lot more can be done to improve medical intervention: my mother died from a massive heart attack several months after being put on a waiting list for heart surgery. If she had been given the treatment she needed earlier she may still have been alive today. If the medical establishment could spend a little more time putting its own house in order and a little less time lecturing us about our `live-now' lifestyles, we may all be better off.
The warning that up to 5,000 people could lose their lives if we faced a massive banking crisis may be shocking. But these figures were arrived at using not-entirely-reliable computer models comparing associations between banking crises and cardiovascular disease deaths. Also, when we consider the Cambridge study's figures alongside the fact that there were 68,230 fewer deaths from heart disease in 2000 than there were in 1981 in England and Wales, the potential effect of a financial crisis no longer seems so shocking.
There was a 62 per cent reduction in deaths from heart disease among men and a 45 per cent reduction among women over two decades from 1981. Various factors have contributed to this dramatic decrease. A large-scale study in 2004 by Capewell indicates that 58 per cent of this decrease is due to a reduction in certain risk factors, such as smoking, and 42 per cent is due to the availability of more advanced medical and surgical treatments - although this study, too, was the product of a computer model (2). Today's heart scare is the result of scaremongers twisting what is actually a good news story: the dramatic decline in deaths from heart disease over the past 20 years. That this decline seems to be levelling off should be investigated, of course, but it should also be seen in the context of an overall successful war against death from heart disease.
We all know smoking is bad for us and don't need to be lectured any more about that. The effect of obesity and diet on our health and our hearts is much more uncertain and, to the extent that there is a problem, there is as yet no simple solution like there is with smoking - we can't exactly quit food. So, rather than telling us how to live, physicians should now concentrate on reducing mortality rates further by improving the availability and efficacy of medical intervention.
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Nobody would label today's critics of big chainstores as `Nazis'. Yet their arguments bear a striking resemblance to those of the Third Reich. Comment from Britain:
Nothing better symbolises the strange, topsy-turvy state of politics in the twenty-first century than the ongoing hostile campaign against supermarkets and those of us who shop in them.
In recent years in Britain, the big four supermarkets, in particular Tesco, have been condemned for producing `clone towns', reducing consumer choice, selling unethical goods and strangling competition for smaller traders. Amongst some middle-class commentators, and increasingly amongst the political elite, too, supermarkets have come to symbolise everything that is heinous and disgusting about modern-day life. Supported by very sympathetic and powerful media outlets, including the London Evening Standard, the Guardian and Channel 4, the supermarket-bashers may soon win the backing of officialdom in their effort to hold back supermarkets and limit the benefits they bring to millions of people.
The UK Competition Commission has put forward recommendations to discourage supermarket chains from developing local monopolies and forcing smaller stores out of business. An ombudsman will oversee and regulate the relationship between Tesco, Sainsbury's, Asda and Morrisons and their suppliers. It is not just the shareholders and top managers of the supermarket giants who should be worried: these latest interventions could have negative ramifications for millions of shoppers, too. The Commission's ombudsman is expected to have the power to fine companies for introducing sharp price cuts, or for charging new products for shelf-space and `pay-to-stay' fees. Large retailers who do not meet competition standards could have their planning applications refused (1).
The regulatory measures are justified as an attempt to stimulate more competition in areas where particular chains have been dominant. The Competition Commission wants to protect local shops and allow them to exercise greater retail muscle. The problem, however, is that since independent retailers do not have an extensive division of labour, and are weak in their ability to produce economies of scale, the costs of their shelf-stacked commodities will often be higher than in supermarkets. If local shops are guaranteed a monopoly in residential areas, it will mean that a family's grocery bill will increase - potentially by a lot.
In short, it seems that the Competition Commission wants to beef up the profit margins of small traders by driving down the living standards of ordinary consumers. Today's champions of small trade, such as Andrew Simms of the new economics foundation and author of Tescopoly, will no doubt argue that such tough measures are necessary to promote `community cohesion' and protect `the local environment' from rampaging supermarkets - yet whatever garbled language they use to cheer the Competition Commission's restrictions on Tesco and the rest, there is no avoiding the reality that everyday consumers will be forced to pay more so that local retailers can prosper (2).
The mass of consumers has been put in this position before. Many of the Competition Commission's recommendations on supermarkets bear a striking resemblance to those established in Nazi Germany during the 1930s. Of course, shouting `fascists' is a shrill, cheap shot in contemporary debate, designed falsely to discredit political opponents as being beyond the pale. Comparing people to 'the Nar-zis' is also fraught with ahistorical inaccuracies: it is a lazy device in cowardly contemporary debate. Nobody would seriously suggest that today's critics of supermarkets are anywhere near to being Nazis. And yet. there is a peculiar paradox that while Nazi Germany is held up as a symbol of evil today, many of the core ideas and beliefs associated with Nazism, such as the mystical worship of nature and hostility towards Enlightenment modernity, are increasingly commonplace amongst today's radical middle classes. And nowhere is that clearer than in their hang-ups about supermarkets.
The historian and authority on the Third Reich, Professor Richard J Evans, traces the initial electoral base of Hitler's Nazi Party in the Mittelstand - the `people who were neither bourgeois nor proletarian' but who `should have a recognised place in society'. As Evans explains: `Located between the two great antagonistic classes into which society had become divided, they represented people who stood on their own two feet, independent, hard-working, the healthy core of the German people. It was to people like these - small shopkeepers, skilled artisans running their own workshops, self-sufficient peasant farmers - that the Nazis had initially directed their appeal.' (3)
As the Nazi Party attracted considerable numbers of the Mittelstand to its programme, physical attacks, boycotts and discrimination against department and chain stores started to increase. Such street-level chainstore-bashing initiatives `were quickly backed by a Law for the Protection of Individual Trade passed on 12 May 1933', writes Evans. In a similar way to the current recommendations put forward by the Competition Commission, in Nazi Germany `chain stores were forbidden to expand or open new branches'. Towards the end of 1933, the Nazi Party introduced further moves along the lines currently outlined by the Competition Commission: `Department and chain stores were prohibited from offering a discount of more than three per cent on prices, a measure also extended to consumer co-operatives.' (4)
As the representatives of the embittered middle classes, the Mittelstand, the Nazis initially made sure that both big business and working-class interests were subordinated in order to boost the living standards and prestige of the small shopkeeper and artisan. Of course, Britain in 2008 is clearly not in the grip of a deep economic and social crisis in the way that German society was in the 1920s and 1930s. And no doubt there are small traders in Britain today who have lost out to the growth of supermarkets, though the evidence indicates that the retail market is big enough to accommodate both large and small retailers. Yet German officialdom's attack on supermarkets in the 1930s looks eerily like British officialdom's attack, backed by our own Mittelstand, in 2008.
What seems to aggravate middle-class commentators and campaigners most of all is that supermarkets put so many goods within the price range of millions of people, the mass of the population. For them, it seems an outrage that even `the lowest of the low', the poorest of families, can enjoy roast chicken for a mere 2 pounds or buy a pair of jeans for o3, not to mention the fact that even those on low disposable incomes can afford a flight to Prague these days courtesy of numerous no-frills airlines. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Eton-educated cook and organic farmer-cum-campaigner, alongside numerous broadsheet columnists, argues that the supermarket's cutting of prices `undermines the true value' and `meaning' of commodities (5). In truth, it seems that cheaply available goods undermine these campaigners' own sense of moral worth and social status.
Looked at in this way, it seems that attacking supermarkets represents the cutting edge of the middle classes' familiar aspiration to have a `recognisable place in society', away from hoi polloi and their mass-produced tastes. At the same time, hostility towards new housing developments, lionising nature over modernity - and organic over industrialised farming, animals over human wellbeing - are other mechanisms which middle-class radicals affect to appear more benign and, in Fearnley-Whittingstall's words, more `caring' - especially against the sensibilities of `vulgar modernists'. It is not Nazi-mongering to point out that such ideas were once the solid bedrock upon which the Third Reich was founded, which won admiration from middle-class sections of society both within and without Germany; that is simply the reality (6).
Many aspects of German Nazism can be seen as a form of `peasant ideology'. The `Blood and Soil' ideas of Walter Darr,, for instance, which were hugely influential on Nazi thinking, considered humans to be best suited to a simple existence living close to the land, and argued that urbanisation and industrialisation were so decadent and corrupt that `stultifying cities' would weaken a nations' `racial stock'. Darr,'s ideas also influenced the Nazis' belief in the virtues of Kultur, which embodied the folk traditions and craft skills `over the essentially empty products of Western civilisation' (7). Does this sound familiar? Is it really so very different from the complaints of countless commentators today, about mass-produced commodities, the destruction of nature by greedy mankind, and the emptiness of Western civilisation?
The `peasant ideology' also fuelled the idea of Lebensraum -- a space in which the German people could assume their proper, peasant existence. Such a rural idyll for the Germans could only be achieved, of course, by a drastic and forced reduction in the level of Europe's population. Today, too, whether it is the Optimum Population Trust (supported by Jonathon Porritt) or mainstream environmentalists who call for social policies that encourage less breeding, especially in Africa, there is a consensus that there are `too many people' in the world and that a massive reduction in human numbers, preferably through family-planning but possibly through a natural disaster, should be welcomed (8). Of course, none of these population campaigners is calling for a genocide; but they do passionately believe that the Earth is overcrowded.
The social forces driving the re-emergence of these destructive ideas are very different from those that existed in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s. Disenchantment with modernity and modern life has been an undercurrent in Western societies for 30 or 40 years now. Yet never have such ideas seem so accepted, so mainstream, and so consequential. Where middle-class supporters of small trade and organic farming once had to fight hard for a hearing, trying to make themselves heard over the clash of the `great antagonistic' classes, today the middle classes' strange ideas often seem to be the only ideas in town. Why?
The collapse of a century-old fight between the capitalist and working classes by the early 1990s pushed self-appointed middle-class radicals into the centre stage. So much so that their preoccupations and petty prejudices have steadily evolved into something approaching a `New Establishment', as Tory journalist and historian Max Hastings describes his chosen employers, the Guardian (9). It seems the middle classes have at last `found their place' in modern society, and they don't like what they see all around them.
Their old concerns - that the working masses are getting ideas above their station, that modernity is awful - are expressed in slightly different ways today. In the past, that fear and loathing of mass society was expressed against trade union militancy and working-class political organisations. In the 1970s, for instance, even though opinion-makers were not directly affected by union strikes at car manufacturing plants, for them it was still outrageous that `mere' car workers would not accept their place and get on with being exploited. The fact that the working classes could throw their weight around and put the political class under pressure angered them even more. Who did those oiks think they were?
The days of mass industrial unrest are long gone, of course, but that same exasperated question still haunts some commentators when they examine the modern world. Indeed, the development of a truly globalised mass economy has angered many because it has helped reduce commodity prices and raised ordinary people's living standards in the process. Such an historically unprecedented situation means that many working people enjoy the `good life' in ways that was once only available to the elites and the middle classes.
As a consequence, the old demarcations of social status and privilege are not as rigidly set in stone as they once were. That is why some middle-class radicals are determined to establish new demarcations to separate themselves from the mass of people. Hectoring on lifestyle choices, consumer habits and tastes is an artificial way of visibly underscoring class differences in society. In their screeching rejection of supermarkets and cheap flights abroad, and their lionising of rural idylls, many commentators are creating a new dividing line between the haves and have-nots - that is, those who have taste, and those who do not have taste.
The modernity-bashing radicals are not simply cranks on the fringes of society; they are increasingly respected and listened to by powerful decision-makers across the board. Not only have their nasty-minded complaints about housing prevented us from buying decent homes - now their anti-supermarket campaigns means we will soon be paying more for less groceries, too. Most of us can see that this is plain wrong. But for the opponents of supermarkets, undoubtedly this is the Reich way forward.
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Something else that the excellent article above could have mentioned is that item 16 of the (February 25th., 1920) 25 point plan of the National Socialist German Workers Party (written by the leader of that party, Adolf Hitler) also demanded the abolition of big stores and their replacement by small businesses. Just the usual Leftist hatred of success in others, of course
'No' to a Referendum
The British Parliament's vote last night not to stage a national referendum on the EU's new Lisbon Treaty might not, on its own, cost Gordon Brown the premiership whenever he finally faces the voters. But it will be added to the growing pile of evidence that he is more cautious and calculating a leader than many Britons would care to have in Number 10.
The crux of the parliamentary debate was whether the Lisbon Treaty, which Mr. Brown's Labour government supports, is tantamount to the failed EU constitution. The Prime Minister argues that it isn't and that he therefore isn't honor-bound to hold a popular vote, as Britain's three major political parties all pledged in 2005. Yet the reading of many -- including other European heads of government -- is that Lisbon is essentially the same as the constitution that died in the ballot boxes of France and Holland nearly three years ago.
Britain's referendum advocates had also focused on how the treaty will affect London's voting weight in Brussels and its national sovereignty -- vital topics, but ones that allowed Mr. Brown to give the debate a technical tint. It allowed him to argue that "opt-outs" from certain treaty provisions, such as on law enforcement, sufficiently guarded U.K. sovereignty. Most legal scholars couldn't say for sure.
In yesterday's debate, Conservative leader David Cameron fingered the thread that ties this issue to others that have plagued Mr. Brown since he succeeded Tony Blair in June. "We have the courage of our convictions and are sticking to that promise," Mr. Cameron told Mr. Brown in the Commons. "You have lost your courage."
That's easy for him to say, knowing he won't have to face other EU leaders at next week's summit. And to be fair, Paris and The Hague have also been unwilling to let their voters consider the new treaty after they voted down the constitution. But the Tory boss is right. What's really damning is that Mr. Brown seems to be afraid to take his case to the people.
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Series of blunders turned the plastic bag into global villain
Scientists and environmentalists have attacked a global campaign to ban plastic bags which they say is based on flawed science and exaggerated claims. The widely stated accusation that the bags kill 100,000 animals and a million seabirds every year are false, experts have told The Times. They pose only a minimal threat to most marine species, including seals, whales, dolphins and seabirds.
Gordon Brown announced last month that he would force supermarkets to charge for the bags, saying that they were "one of the most visible symbols of environmental waste". Retailers and some pressure groups, including the Campaign to Protect Rural England, threw their support behind him.
But scientists, politicians and marine experts attacked the Government for joining a "bandwagon" based on poor science. Lord Taverne, the chairman of Sense about Science, said: "The Government is irresponsible to jump on a bandwagon that has no base in scientific evidence. This is one of many examples where you get bad science leading to bad decisions which are counter-productive. Attacking plastic bags makes people feel good but it doesn't achieve anything."
Campaigners say that plastic bags pollute coastlines and waterways, killing or injuring birds and livestock on land and, in the oceans, destroying vast numbers of seabirds, seals, turtles and whales. However, The Times has established that there is no scientific evidence to show that the bags pose any direct threat to marine mammals. They "don't figure" in the majority of cases where animals die from marine debris, said David Laist, the author of a seminal 1997 study on the subject. Most deaths were caused when creatures became caught up in waste produce. "Plastic bags don't figure in entanglement," he said. "The main culprits are fishing gear, ropes, lines and strapping bands. Most mammals are too big to get caught up in a plastic bag."
He added: "The impact of bags on whales, dolphins, porpoises and seals ranges from nil for most species to very minor for perhaps a few species.For birds, plastic bags are not a problem either."
The central claim of campaigners is that the bags kill more than 100,000 marine mammals and one million seabirds every year. However, this figure is based on a misinterpretation of a 1987 Canadian study in Newfoundland, which found that, between 1981 and 1984, more than 100,000 marine mammals, including birds, were killed by discarded nets. The Canadian study did not mention plastic bags.
Fifteen years later in 2002, when the Australian Government commissioned a report into the effects of plastic bags, its authors misquoted the Newfoundland study, mistakenly attributing the deaths to "plastic bags". The figure was latched on to by conservationists as proof that the bags were killers. For four years the "typo" remained uncorrected. It was only in 2006 that the authors altered the report, replacing "plastic bags" with "plastic debris". But they admitted: "The actual numbers of animals killed annually by plastic bag litter is nearly impossible to determine." In a postscript to the correction they admitted that the original Canadian study had referred to fishing tackle, not plastic debris, as the threat to the marine environment. Regardless, the erroneous claim has become the keystone of a widening campaign to demonise plastic bags.
David Santillo, a marine biologist at Greenpeace, told The Times that bad science was undermining the Government's case for banning the bags. "It's very unlikely that many animals are killed by plastic bags," he said. "The evidence shows just the opposite. We are not going to solve the problem of waste by focusing on plastic bags. "It doesn't do the Government's case any favours if you've got statements being made that aren't supported by the scientific literature that's out there. With larger mammals it's fishing gear that's the big problem. On a global basis plastic bags aren't an issue. It would be great if statements like these weren't made."
Geoffrey Cox, a Tory member of the Commons Environment Select Committee, said: "I don't like plastic bags and I certainly support restricting their use, but plainly it's extremely important that before we take any steps we should rely on accurate information. It is bizarre that any campaign should be endorsed on the basis of a mistranslation. Gordon Brown should get his facts right."
A 1968 study of albatross carcasses found that 90 per cent contained some form of plastic but only two birds had ingested part of a plastic bag.
Professor Geoff Boxshall, a marine biologist at the Natural History Museum, said: "I've never seen a bird killed by a plastic bag. Other forms of plastic in the ocean are much more damaging. Only a very small proportion is caused by bags." Plastic particles known as nurdles, dumped in the sea by industrial companies, form a much greater threat as they can be easily consumed by birds and animals.
Many British groups are now questioning whether a ban on bags would cost consumers more than the environmental benefits. Charlie Mayfield, chairman of retailer John Lewis, said that tackling packaging waste and reducing carbon emissions were far more important goals. "We don't see reducing the use of plastic bags as our biggest priority," he said. "Of all the waste that goes to landfill, 20 per cent is household waste and 0.3 per cent is plastic bags." John Lewis added that a scheme in Ireland had reduced plastic bag usage, but sales of bin liners had increased 400 per cent.
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`Sexed-up' numbers should not always be accepted as science
By Mike Hulme (Mike Hulme is a professor in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia)
In the recent flurry of moves to ban plastic bags a frequently cited statistic is that more than 100,000 marine mammals and sea turtles die each year from entanglement in, or ingestion of, plastic bags. The original scientific study upon which this estimate relied actually attributed these deaths to fishing tackle in the oceans, not plastic bags. Yet the terms "100,000 marine deaths" and "plastic bags" now circulate happily through our public discourse, solidified as established fact.
But when is a fact a fact? Can facts change over time? And does it matter if they do? Science is instinctively referred to as the source and authenticator of facts such as the one cited above, and rightly so. Yet as this example shows, we need to be very careful about the veracity of the numbers we latch on to, and about what they signify. What may start out as a credible, yet qualified and provisional, scientific estimate may end up, either through distortion or mere negligence, enduring as an urban myth, apocryphal numbers - the modern equivalent of folklore.
My own area of climate change offers plenty of such examples. In December 2005 a study in the journal Nature offered the observation that the circulation in the North Atlantic Ocean, which sustains the Gulf Stream, had weakened by up to 30 per cent over the previous few decades. This figure and its juxtapositioning alongside the melodrama of films such as The Day after Tomorrow were amplified through the cooperation of scientists and media to result in headlines such as "Alarm over dramatic weakening of Gulf Stream" ( The Guardian, Dec 1, 2005). The urban myth that emerged from this episode was that we were closer to a mini Ice Age in the UK than had previously been thought. Eighteen months later, however, and unremarked by the media, two studies in equally reputable journals pointed out that such a trend was within the range of natural variability and may signify nothing at all.
A second example concerns the claim that, "by the end of this century, climate change will have killed around 182 million people in sub-Saharan Africa" (Christian Aid, May 2006). This number - 180 million African dead - has become one of the most widely cited numbers in the litany of doom that accompanies talk of climate change. In this case, however, the number 180 million was sexed-up science. Christian Aid took the worst-case climate scenario, the highest population scenario and the scenario with the least public health intervention and conjured the number into being. And here it has stayed, a number detached from its receding scientific origins in which assumptions were overlain on scenarios that captured uncertainties.
Whether through being lost in translation, through the premature citing of provisional science or through the purposeful sexing-up of deeply uncertain numbers, the facts of science are not always to be taken at face value.
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Replacing the Fatropolis with Fit Towns
New `healthy towns' that encourage people to walk more, eat the right kind of food and stay forever fit take repression to a new level. Comment from Britain
`Salt `could fuel childhood obesity"' whispered one headline this week; `World is in obesity crisis' roared another. It seems barely a day passes without some report or policy announcement reminding us that the deep-fried fruits of modernity are dragging us to our gluttonous, sedentry doom. Change your ways, they exhort. However, if recent plans to redesign our towns as `fit towns' are anything to go by, instruction and guilt-tripping are giving way to something far more repressive.
The possibility of replanning and redesigning our towns in order to encourage healthy lifestyles was originally raised last November by UK health secretary, Alan Johnson. Citing `international evidence and research' that shows we `need a large-scale approach across the whole community to help tackle obesity' he suggested proposed eco-towns should also be made `healthy towns. through their layout, facilities and construction'. He concluded that our `built environment [must] do more to help people make physical activity a normal part of everyday life' (1).
In Boston last Sunday, the conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science saw a similarly depressing nod to lifestyle management. Professor Philip James of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and, more importantly, chairman of the Brave-New-World-sounding International Obesity Taskforce, declared: `The environment in which we live is the overwhelming factor amplifying the obesity epidemic'. He continued, arguing that it was na‹ve to place `the onus on individuals making "healthier choices" while the environment in which we live is the overwhelming factor amplifying the epidemic' (2). Rena Wing of Brown University echoed the pessimistic view of individuals' capacity to make what the holier-than-thou alliance of policy makers and experts deem the right choices: `We live in an obesogenic environment that relies heavily on fast food, automobiles and remote controls - all of which can be labelled as "toxic" to maintaining a healthy weight.' (3)
The overarching aim of remaking our fatropolises as fit-towns is all too clear: as we can't be trusted to make the correct decisions, we, the public, shall be forcibly diverted from the dual-carriage way of temptation on to the fully pedestrianised area of righteousness.
Admittedly, some of the measures suggested seem innocuous enough. Stairwells, for instance, should be made to look less like badly lit fire escapes and made a bit more glamorous, spiral perhaps. And parks should be better maintained, with better lighting. Other proposals, however, are all too restrictive. For instance, some of the proposed towns should give priority to pedestrians and cyclists over the car, perhaps providing office premises with bike-only parking. And the bane of the obesity warrior's crusade, the fast food outlet, must never be erected near parks or schools. (4)
Of course there is nothing especially novel about urban planning, nor its political underpinnings. Take Baron Haussmann's reconstruction of Paris between 1852 and 1870. With memories of the revolutionary commune of 1848 still fresh, Haussmann, under Napoleon III's instructions, demolished vast swathes of the city and built long, sweeping boulevards in their place. In doing so he both inhibited the erection of barricades and made it easy for the army to gain access. In other words the attempt to maintain social order was embodied in Parisians' lived environment.
Indeed, on a more general scale, our environment has long reflected the ruling needs of the moment. Richard Sennet in his 1997 book, The Fall of Public Man, saw in the bustling thoroughfares and concourses of the modern city the predominance of the private individual of bourgeois myth. Public space was made a mere function of private motion, of getting from a to b as quickly as possible. Strolling, meandering, and leisurely interacting with our fellows were incompatible with the manic industriousness demanded of the bourgeois individual.
Accepting that urban planning - the regulation of public space - or indeed, its absence, has always provided a mirror of society, then what does the notion of the fit town reflect? Whilst it is not concerned, as Napoleon III was, with the threat posed by social disorder, it is still dealing with a threat. This time however, the threat is not embodied in, say, the communards - it is not external at all. It is, rather, internal to each and every one of us. Fit towns combat our tendency to consume and to seek convenience - we are our own worst enemies. While fast food, remote controls or electric tooth brushes save labour, they're killing us.
Fit towns embody more than the war on obesity. They wage war on our consuming passions per se, be it a desire to light-up, to booze, or to go large on a Big Mac and fries. Above all they fight our tendency to err.
To borrow, then, from the increasingly martial lexicon of government policy, fit towns are located on the frontier of the war on error. The result, from the jarring positivity of phrases like the International Obesity Taskforce, or, indeed, the `fit town' itself is an environment every bit as deeply repressive as that evoked in their different ways by George Orwell or Aldous Huxley.
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Heart disease: we need medicine not moralism
Fear of rising heart deaths is unfounded. And if we're serious about lowering the death rate even further, we need better treatment not lifestyle lectures
This week, a number of news headlines have highlighted the deadly threat of heart disease in Britain: `Bank crises "increase rate of heart attacks"`, warned the UK Guardian on Tuesday. The day before, The Times (London) cautioned that `Young adults' inactivity puts them at risk of heart attack'.
The Guardian report is based on research from the University of Cambridge. Data from the World Bank and World Health Organisation over a 40-year period was analysed at Cambridge, where the researchers concluded that between 1,280 and 5,130 Brits `could die from heart attacks if there was a widespread repeat of the Northern Rock banking crisis' (1). Lead researcher David Stuckler said: `To put this effect in perspective, this is more than 10 times the number of British troops who have died in Iraq.' The researchers found that `cardiac deaths surge briefly and regularly every time there is a systemic bank failure' and it is the elderly that are at greatest risk.
But those of us aged 35 to 54 had better not be too complacent, we're told, because our lives may be cut short by our `live-now' lifestyles. Simon Capewell, professor of clinical epidemiology at the University of Liverpool, said: `The flattening trends in mortality rates among young adults suggest that the cardiovascular disease epidemic is not being controlled.' He warned: `The party is over and complacency runs a high risk.'
Having recently lost both my mother and my uncle to heart disease, I am not about to advocate complacency. It is estimated that in the European Union, cardiovascular disease kills over two million people every year. Still, a little perspective would not go amiss. The fact is that despite the impression given by various newspaper headlines, heart disease is not on the rise. Instead, the concern voiced by some experts, and blown out of all proportion by others, is that the dramatic decrease in deaths from heart disease over the last few decades has started to flatten out.
In my view, the experts should be concerned. They should be continually trying to reduce deaths from heart disease. Clearly, a hell of lot more can be done to improve medical intervention: my mother died from a massive heart attack several months after being put on a waiting list for heart surgery. If she had been given the treatment she needed earlier she may still have been alive today. If the medical establishment could spend a little more time putting its own house in order and a little less time lecturing us about our `live-now' lifestyles, we may all be better off.
The warning that up to 5,000 people could lose their lives if we faced a massive banking crisis may be shocking. But these figures were arrived at using not-entirely-reliable computer models comparing associations between banking crises and cardiovascular disease deaths. Also, when we consider the Cambridge study's figures alongside the fact that there were 68,230 fewer deaths from heart disease in 2000 than there were in 1981 in England and Wales, the potential effect of a financial crisis no longer seems so shocking.
There was a 62 per cent reduction in deaths from heart disease among men and a 45 per cent reduction among women over two decades from 1981. Various factors have contributed to this dramatic decrease. A large-scale study in 2004 by Capewell indicates that 58 per cent of this decrease is due to a reduction in certain risk factors, such as smoking, and 42 per cent is due to the availability of more advanced medical and surgical treatments - although this study, too, was the product of a computer model (2). Today's heart scare is the result of scaremongers twisting what is actually a good news story: the dramatic decline in deaths from heart disease over the past 20 years. That this decline seems to be levelling off should be investigated, of course, but it should also be seen in the context of an overall successful war against death from heart disease.
We all know smoking is bad for us and don't need to be lectured any more about that. The effect of obesity and diet on our health and our hearts is much more uncertain and, to the extent that there is a problem, there is as yet no simple solution like there is with smoking - we can't exactly quit food. So, rather than telling us how to live, physicians should now concentrate on reducing mortality rates further by improving the availability and efficacy of medical intervention.
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Sunday, March 09, 2008
Personal responsibility takes another dive in Britain
Lampposts on East London's Brick Lane have today been wrapped up in padding to protect Britain's clumsy texters. The renowned capital curry haunt has been highlighted as the most dangerous place for mobile phone users to be texting with Londoners frequently picking up injuries ranging from bruises to fractured bones.
Whether it be the perils of walking into a lamppost while not keeping your eyes on the road or careering into a bin after a couple of drinks at a local drinking establishment, the street apparently poses many menaces to dozy phone users. And in order to stem the flow of ailments anything potentially harmful is being wrapped in cotton wool, or at least brightly coloured padding. Brick Lane has now become the first 'Safe Text' street in the UK, with rugby post-like cushioning put around the 10 of the road's higher-than-average number of lampposts.
If the trial proves a success then other capital danger-zones, including Charing Cross Road, Old Bond Street, Oxford Street and Church Street, Stoke Newington, will also be set for some extra padding.
According to a survey of 1055 Britons by text information service 118118, which is overseeing the pilot scheme alongside public space charity Living Streets, one in ten Britons has injured themselves while walking and texting in the last 12 months. Nearly half (44%) of those asked said they would be happy to see protective pads put on lampposts, and one in four Britons (27%) would support a 'Mobile Motorway' - a coloured line on the road to keep texters out of trouble.
Fending off suggestions that the scheme was moving Britain further towards becoming a 'nanny state', Alex Wood, a spokesman for 118118, said it was backed up by the accident figures. "Ultimately you're never going to stop people from walking and texting so this is about pedestrian protection," he said. "We've had one case of a fractured cheekbone when someone went straight into a lamppost and another of a fractured knee."
Polls will be conducted on Brick Lane to gauge the response of locals and a nationwide rollout is likely - with streets in Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool and Manchester earmarked for protection - if the scheme is well received. "We're updating Britain's streets to take into account a modern way of life - perhaps it's time for a change," Mr Wood added.
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The above is probably just an advertising stunt but who knows in today's Britain?
Will the British ID card be Britain's biggest bureaucratic bungle yet?
Comment by Ian Angell, Professor of Information Systems at the London School of Economics
The ID card project is still on track - more or less. Jacqui Smith is just the latest in a long line of Home Office ministers to sell us the benefits of ID cards, while casually informing us of the latest rise in costs or slippage in its implementation schedule. Ms Smith is also yet another Home Secretary who subscribes to the "pixie dust" school of technology: computation is a magic substance to be sprinkled over problems, that, hey presto, then vanish. Little wonder that Britain has an appalling record in government IT projects.
The ID project is one of the biggest computer systems envisaged - far more complex than the failing NHS system. And it's another disaster waiting to happen. Still the politicians naively claim there will be no problems: it will be totally secure because of biometrics. Apparently iris scans, fingerprints, face-recognition software will all work perfectly, be amazingly cheap to implement - and all foolproof. It must be true, as they've been told this by those selling the technology. Baroness Anelay of St Johns, with a group of parliamentarians, was once given a demonstration of a facial recognition system. It failed; indeed the system subsequently crashed, twice. The reason? The baroness was told her face was "too bland".
The only property that all systems have in common is that they fail. And the bigger the system - 60 million entries on a compulsory ID card database - the greater the opportunity of failure. Systems are much like any life form: they degrade over time, they entropy. In the case of databases, the pick up errors and then build data error upon error. The DVLA in Swansea in 2006, for instance, admitted that a third of entries contained at least one error, and that the proportion was getting worse.
We've all had encounters with computer systems that get it wrong. Barclays once refused one of my transactions because they said I was accessing an account owned by a teenage girl named Ian Angell, who lived at my address and was a professor at LSE. I still had to take a morning off work to explain that a 14-year-old couldn't own an account that, according to their own records, had been open for 35 years.
And however scrupulous the managers might be, errors leak and take on a life of their own. They are sampled by other databases, known as "farming": errors, even when corrected in the original database, live on elsewhere.
But the ID project will be different, we are told. According to the rhetoric, an ID card, one central point of reference, will be so much more efficient and beneficial than you having to prove your identity daily, by producing driving licences, gas bills and so on. Its proponents fail to see that if any of these documents is erroneous, then we don't use the one with, say, a mistake in the address to prove our identity. With the ID card, we won't have the choice. Even if the card is not compulsory, all financial systems will converge on it, and anyone without a card faces great cost and inconvenience. Just like Oyster cards on the London Underground, you're not forced, but it's so much more expensive and tiresome without one.
However, the ID card itself isn't the real problem: it's the ID register. There, each entry will eventually take on a legal status. In time, all other proofs of identity will refer back to the one entry. If the register is wrong - and remember fallible human hands will at some stage have to handle your personal information - then all other databases will be wrong too. Given the propensity of officialdom to trust the details on their computer screen, rather than the person in front of them, you will have to conform to your entry in the register - or become a non-person.
In effect, your identity won't reside in the living flesh and blood of you, but in the database. You will be separated from your identity; you will no longer own it. All your property and money will de facto belong to the database entry. You only have access to your property with the permission of the database. Paradoxically, you only agreed to register to protect yourself from "identity theft", and instead you find yourself victim of the ultimate identity theft - the total loss of control over your identity.
Errors won't just happen by accident. It's possible to imagine that workers on the ID database will be corrupted, threatened or blackmailed into creating perfectly legal ID cards for international terrorists and criminals. Then the ID card, far from eliminating problems, will be a one-stop shop for identity fraud; foreign terrorists, illegal immigrants will be waved past all immigration checks.
At a recent Ditchley Park conference on combating organised crime, a persistent warning from the law enforcement authorities was that criminal gangs had placed "sleepers" in financial sector companies, and they were just waiting for the one big hit. The perpetrators of 80 per cent of all computer security lapses are not hackers, but employees. Cryptographic systems don't help if the criminal has been given the keys to the kingdom. Why should the ID centre be immune, especially when there will be nearly 300 government departments logging in. Furthermore, the register will be the No 1 target for every hacker on the planet: the Olympic Games of hacking.
So why is the Goverment so keen to force ID cards on us? Is it because ministers are control freaks who, having read 1984, only saw it as a wishlist. John Lennon may have been right: "Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we're being run by maniacs." More likely, ministers have been dazzled by the myth of the perfectibility of computers.
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Dead rat OK in British hospital
A PATIENT was told there was no reason why he couldn't have surgery in a British hospital, despite the smell caused by a dead rodent trapped in the building's ceiling. Andrew Cowper was due to have an operation at the Queen Elizabeth II Hospital in Hertfordshire when staff "were made aware of a dead rodent in the single storey unit's roof space", the hospital said.
The hospital said its experts concluded that the dead animal was outside the operating theatre and posed no risk. But "despite being told that the trust's infection control experts had stated that Mr Cowper was not being exposed to an infection risk, he decided not to proceed with the operation," it said.
Mr Cowper, 19, told the Sun newspaper he had waited 11 months for the operation, and the doctor told him he could go ahead despite the stench. "He said the smell didn't represent a health risk, but I was appalled," Mr Cowper said. "I asked him: 'If you were me, would you have the operation?' He looked at me and said 'no', so I decided there and then I wasn't going to go ahead."
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Young dentists desert the NHS
The boom in teeth-whitening and capping has led to a further drain on young dentists who appear to be switching from the NHS to highly lucrative private cosmetic treatment. Gordon Brown is among those who are said to have their smiles improved by professional teeth-whitening but the growth in the business could be exacerbating the lack of availability of NHS dentists. Figures produced from the NHS Information Centre showed that dentists under 35 years old in 2000-01 earned 65 per cent of their income from the NHS but, by 2005-6, that had nearly halved to 36 per cent.
That compares to dentists in the older age groups who have seen a much smaller change. Dentists aged 55 and older received 58 per cent of their income from the NHS in 2000-1 but by 2005-6 the share from the NHS had declined to 47 per cent. A note of caution was added by the dental profession who said the study was a small sample, but it reinforces fears that a new contract for dentists has failed to reverse the exodus of dentists from NHS care.
Ann Keen, the Health minister responsible for dentistry, will be questioned this morning about the figures at a hearing of the Commons select committee on health, which is carrying out an investigation into the shortage of NHS dentists.
Dr Howard Stoate, a GP and the Labour chairman of the all-party Commons primary care committee, said: "If it is true [that] a large number are switching to private care, it would be worrying. The primary care trusts take the view that there are enough dentists coming forward because it does seem that they are able to offer a dental service that does seem to be better than before."
Young dentists who are benefiting from the trend to more cosmetic treatment include Ben Atkins, 32, who has built up his own nine-dentist Rocky Lane Dental Practice. The practice earns 80 per cent of its income from NHS patients but Mr Atkins says "patients are exercising more and more choice". He said patients were prepared to pay for the extra services and time they can get through private consultations which meant they were opting out of the NHS. "Lots of people want cosmetic dentistry and that is their right," he said. "Many patients will say they do not want the silver fillings and are prepared to pay for white fillings."
But Mr Atkins denied younger dentists are wilfully turning their backs on the NHS. He believes younger dentists still want to do NHS work, but are often faced by a lack of opportunities.
Government figures last month showed that more than 500,000 fewer patients were seen in the past two years, compared to the 24 months prior to the introduction of a new contract in 2006. The new statistics were published as evidence emerged that complaints about NHS dental treatment are on the rise. A survey of primary care trusts for the Patients Association found widespread problems following the introduction of a new dental contract in 2006.
It sent questionnaires to the chairmen and dental commissioners of 150 PCTs in England, and 112 replied. The report - The New Dental Contract: Full of Holes and Causing Pain? - found problems with funding, prevention work and patient experiences. It said: "PCTs complain there is a widespread lack of funds for orthodontics and other specialist treatments and cite this funding gap as the reason for not implementing best practice. There is increasing concern for the preventive role of dentistry in detection of oral health disease."
The report found that complaints had risen, with more than half of PCTs admitting an increase in the number of complaints. Of these, 60 per cent were about charges, 37.6 per cent about access and 28.2 per cent directly about orthodontics.
Peter Ward, chief executive of the BDA, said: "The new dental contract limits the amount of NHS dentistry that primary care trusts can commission. The result is that some dentists who want to provide NHS care are unable to do so and that millions of people who wish to access NHS care cannot."
GPs are also expected today to reluctantly support changes to their new contract which will pay their practices an extra 1.5 per cent for longer opening hours at night and at weekends. The results of the ballot will be announced by the BMA, which last week said it was backing this option. One Labour MP said GPs were choosing "the least worst option".
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British government refusal to recognize the grim and dangerous state of many State schools
Caring parents have good reason to avoid certain schools. In their brainless way the British government think they can fix it all by allocating school places randomly (by a lottery)!
What is this middle-class panic over school lotteries really about? Does it stem from fear about long-off GCSE results, expecting a place at the league table equivalent of Chelsea but ending up with Crewe? Or is it something more primal and tribal, something never explicitly acknowledged for all its un-PC implications of snobbery and racism: anxiety that our children will not be educated among People Like Us?
It is an impulse that, when given a religious expression, garners unquestioning support from the State. Of course Catholic parents should be allowed to raise children among fellow reciters of the rosary or Muslim parents to choose Islamic faith schools where their properly shrouded girls can be educated free from uppity secular ways.
Yet what if your beliefs are not religious, but amorphous (if heartfelt), encompassing any or all of the following: piano lessons, harvest festivals, emotional continence, the power of books, a bristling at Margaret Hodge for attacking the Proms (though you'd rather put pins in your eyes than go yourself), a repulsion at slutty kiddy clobber, a bossy sense of responsibility for public spaces, an absolute belief in education ... How hard it is to express what being middle-class means, yet how obvious when you see it.
The reason such folk move to the country or suddenly fill church pews or buy houses around a chosen school like wagons encircling to keep out Injuns is not to perpetuate their own privilege per se, but to ensure their type of children constitute a majority and thus their own values remain uppermost. In London, when a state primary school is signalled by the bush telegraph as "up and coming" it may mean the new head is magnificent but more likely it means that Parents Like Us have established base camp. There will be a few other mums with Orla Kiely bags to talk to in the playground. Little Josh is guaranteed playdates with an Oliver and a Fred. And so a tipping point occurs, as aspirational parents rush into Foxtons waving catchment area maps.
In my experience of an inner London primary school, there can be deep respect and goodwill between different ethnic groups and social classes. We smile hellos, chat at the school fair, gladly exchange favours. But deeper interracial or cross-class friendships are rare. Children have a hardwired instinct to seek out those like themselves, a suspicion or at least unease with difference. Yet understanding that disparate folks can coexist is a vital lesson; and children educated wholly in the white prep-school bubble - and with a vile, largely unchallenged tendency to mock poorer kids as "chavs" - are, for all their nice manners and grade 8 piano, in this sense less equipped for adult life.
But the question the lottery idea throws up is: do middle-class parents hog the best schools or are schools best because middle-class parents hog them? The Government assumes the former and demands that the most coveted places are more evenly divvied up. Yet it also counts on lesser schools being improved because middle-class parents are randomly forced on to their rolls. At primary level this task is not so irksome: parents are perpetually in the playground, can agitate for improvement, raise cash for nicer loos, nag a head to raise her game. (Although they also demand teachers give their precious ones a disproportionate amount of energy.) But above all their children helpfully skew a class's number of keen, manageable pupils.
But at secondary level, who feels equal to improving a failing local school? So big and daunting and scary. The odds so stacked, the culture so alien. At one open evening the head boasted how new CCTV cameras had made his school less prone to intrusion by gangs and emphasised that pupils were only permitted one piercing and no tattoos. A bubble of warm feelings about the fab new science block and improving results abruptly popped. Was this induction day at a borstal? You could sense other hopeful, socially minded but aspirational parents scrub it from their list.
Yet it is often said that bright kids with supportive parents thrive anywhere. Don't worry, we're told, they'll be fine. Indeed, professors of education from three British universities, studying 124 middle-class families from London and two other cities with kids at average and below-average comprehensives discovered they mostly achieved brilliant results, a clutch of places at top universities. Teachers leapt to help them to fulfil potential, even devising special courses so they could stay on.
But, blimey, the investment of parental time and energy required. Many were already activists politically committed to state education, more than half became governors, all monitored their children's progress hawkishly. And ironically, although enrolled in melting-pot schools so they would be better socially integrated, these middle-class students clustered together in the top sets, making few friends with poorer peers.
So is that "fine"? Is it OK for your son or daughter, in practice, to have only a tiny pool of potential pals? Maybe they'll get lucky with classmates or stick to their best mate from primary. Blessed with social dexterity they might develop that unteachable, priceless life-skill of getting on with anyone. But what if they are eccentric, bookish, off-the-wall? Will a few years of mockery and bullying knock off their corners, put a little grit in the old oyster? Or will it break their spirits? Fine if they are the kind of easygoing yet focused child who can zone out anti-learning static. But what if they are budding alpha males, magnetised towards the bad boys?
Frankly they all have less cause for sympathy than clever, potentially high-achieving working-class children who lack financial resources and parents confident and wily enough to work the system. A friend of mine, a Jewish grammar school boy from Leeds, is writing a book about social mobility. Where today, he asks, are the stories of local boy/girl made good, the inspiring heroes of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Room at the Top, A Taste of Honey, who burst through the limits of their backgrounds? Now all we have is Shameless, rap videos and other nihilistic, ghetto wallowings.
But if the Government believes middle-class parents are useful agents of change, they should address their fears and stop treating them like the enemy. In Brighton, the rush of the disaffected into the private sector is a catastrophe for state schools. And, at root, it has surprisingly little to do with education.
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Aspirin could help to reduce risk of breast cancer by 20%
But aspirin routinely causes stomach bleeding! Surely we can't have that? Ban aspirin!
Drugs such as aspirin may help to reduce the risk of breast cancer by about 20 per cent, according to a review of past studies. Experts analysed 21 studies involving more than 37,000 women and found an overall decreased risk for those taking non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs). They could also play a role in treating women who have breast cancer.
The researchers said that more studies were needed on the ideal type of drug, dose and duration, and that they had not considered the side-effects. High doses can increase the risk of heart attacks and other health problems. The researchers concluded: "There may be a role for NSAIDs in combination with endocrine therapies as either an adjuvant or palliative treatment for women with established breast cancer."
Ian Fentiman, Professor of Oncology at Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust, carried out the study, published in the International Journal of Clinical Practice.
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Lampposts on East London's Brick Lane have today been wrapped up in padding to protect Britain's clumsy texters. The renowned capital curry haunt has been highlighted as the most dangerous place for mobile phone users to be texting with Londoners frequently picking up injuries ranging from bruises to fractured bones.
Whether it be the perils of walking into a lamppost while not keeping your eyes on the road or careering into a bin after a couple of drinks at a local drinking establishment, the street apparently poses many menaces to dozy phone users. And in order to stem the flow of ailments anything potentially harmful is being wrapped in cotton wool, or at least brightly coloured padding. Brick Lane has now become the first 'Safe Text' street in the UK, with rugby post-like cushioning put around the 10 of the road's higher-than-average number of lampposts.
If the trial proves a success then other capital danger-zones, including Charing Cross Road, Old Bond Street, Oxford Street and Church Street, Stoke Newington, will also be set for some extra padding.
According to a survey of 1055 Britons by text information service 118118, which is overseeing the pilot scheme alongside public space charity Living Streets, one in ten Britons has injured themselves while walking and texting in the last 12 months. Nearly half (44%) of those asked said they would be happy to see protective pads put on lampposts, and one in four Britons (27%) would support a 'Mobile Motorway' - a coloured line on the road to keep texters out of trouble.
Fending off suggestions that the scheme was moving Britain further towards becoming a 'nanny state', Alex Wood, a spokesman for 118118, said it was backed up by the accident figures. "Ultimately you're never going to stop people from walking and texting so this is about pedestrian protection," he said. "We've had one case of a fractured cheekbone when someone went straight into a lamppost and another of a fractured knee."
Polls will be conducted on Brick Lane to gauge the response of locals and a nationwide rollout is likely - with streets in Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool and Manchester earmarked for protection - if the scheme is well received. "We're updating Britain's streets to take into account a modern way of life - perhaps it's time for a change," Mr Wood added.
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The above is probably just an advertising stunt but who knows in today's Britain?
Will the British ID card be Britain's biggest bureaucratic bungle yet?
Comment by Ian Angell, Professor of Information Systems at the London School of Economics
The ID card project is still on track - more or less. Jacqui Smith is just the latest in a long line of Home Office ministers to sell us the benefits of ID cards, while casually informing us of the latest rise in costs or slippage in its implementation schedule. Ms Smith is also yet another Home Secretary who subscribes to the "pixie dust" school of technology: computation is a magic substance to be sprinkled over problems, that, hey presto, then vanish. Little wonder that Britain has an appalling record in government IT projects.
The ID project is one of the biggest computer systems envisaged - far more complex than the failing NHS system. And it's another disaster waiting to happen. Still the politicians naively claim there will be no problems: it will be totally secure because of biometrics. Apparently iris scans, fingerprints, face-recognition software will all work perfectly, be amazingly cheap to implement - and all foolproof. It must be true, as they've been told this by those selling the technology. Baroness Anelay of St Johns, with a group of parliamentarians, was once given a demonstration of a facial recognition system. It failed; indeed the system subsequently crashed, twice. The reason? The baroness was told her face was "too bland".
The only property that all systems have in common is that they fail. And the bigger the system - 60 million entries on a compulsory ID card database - the greater the opportunity of failure. Systems are much like any life form: they degrade over time, they entropy. In the case of databases, the pick up errors and then build data error upon error. The DVLA in Swansea in 2006, for instance, admitted that a third of entries contained at least one error, and that the proportion was getting worse.
We've all had encounters with computer systems that get it wrong. Barclays once refused one of my transactions because they said I was accessing an account owned by a teenage girl named Ian Angell, who lived at my address and was a professor at LSE. I still had to take a morning off work to explain that a 14-year-old couldn't own an account that, according to their own records, had been open for 35 years.
And however scrupulous the managers might be, errors leak and take on a life of their own. They are sampled by other databases, known as "farming": errors, even when corrected in the original database, live on elsewhere.
But the ID project will be different, we are told. According to the rhetoric, an ID card, one central point of reference, will be so much more efficient and beneficial than you having to prove your identity daily, by producing driving licences, gas bills and so on. Its proponents fail to see that if any of these documents is erroneous, then we don't use the one with, say, a mistake in the address to prove our identity. With the ID card, we won't have the choice. Even if the card is not compulsory, all financial systems will converge on it, and anyone without a card faces great cost and inconvenience. Just like Oyster cards on the London Underground, you're not forced, but it's so much more expensive and tiresome without one.
However, the ID card itself isn't the real problem: it's the ID register. There, each entry will eventually take on a legal status. In time, all other proofs of identity will refer back to the one entry. If the register is wrong - and remember fallible human hands will at some stage have to handle your personal information - then all other databases will be wrong too. Given the propensity of officialdom to trust the details on their computer screen, rather than the person in front of them, you will have to conform to your entry in the register - or become a non-person.
In effect, your identity won't reside in the living flesh and blood of you, but in the database. You will be separated from your identity; you will no longer own it. All your property and money will de facto belong to the database entry. You only have access to your property with the permission of the database. Paradoxically, you only agreed to register to protect yourself from "identity theft", and instead you find yourself victim of the ultimate identity theft - the total loss of control over your identity.
Errors won't just happen by accident. It's possible to imagine that workers on the ID database will be corrupted, threatened or blackmailed into creating perfectly legal ID cards for international terrorists and criminals. Then the ID card, far from eliminating problems, will be a one-stop shop for identity fraud; foreign terrorists, illegal immigrants will be waved past all immigration checks.
At a recent Ditchley Park conference on combating organised crime, a persistent warning from the law enforcement authorities was that criminal gangs had placed "sleepers" in financial sector companies, and they were just waiting for the one big hit. The perpetrators of 80 per cent of all computer security lapses are not hackers, but employees. Cryptographic systems don't help if the criminal has been given the keys to the kingdom. Why should the ID centre be immune, especially when there will be nearly 300 government departments logging in. Furthermore, the register will be the No 1 target for every hacker on the planet: the Olympic Games of hacking.
So why is the Goverment so keen to force ID cards on us? Is it because ministers are control freaks who, having read 1984, only saw it as a wishlist. John Lennon may have been right: "Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we're being run by maniacs." More likely, ministers have been dazzled by the myth of the perfectibility of computers.
Source
Dead rat OK in British hospital
A PATIENT was told there was no reason why he couldn't have surgery in a British hospital, despite the smell caused by a dead rodent trapped in the building's ceiling. Andrew Cowper was due to have an operation at the Queen Elizabeth II Hospital in Hertfordshire when staff "were made aware of a dead rodent in the single storey unit's roof space", the hospital said.
The hospital said its experts concluded that the dead animal was outside the operating theatre and posed no risk. But "despite being told that the trust's infection control experts had stated that Mr Cowper was not being exposed to an infection risk, he decided not to proceed with the operation," it said.
Mr Cowper, 19, told the Sun newspaper he had waited 11 months for the operation, and the doctor told him he could go ahead despite the stench. "He said the smell didn't represent a health risk, but I was appalled," Mr Cowper said. "I asked him: 'If you were me, would you have the operation?' He looked at me and said 'no', so I decided there and then I wasn't going to go ahead."
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Young dentists desert the NHS
The boom in teeth-whitening and capping has led to a further drain on young dentists who appear to be switching from the NHS to highly lucrative private cosmetic treatment. Gordon Brown is among those who are said to have their smiles improved by professional teeth-whitening but the growth in the business could be exacerbating the lack of availability of NHS dentists. Figures produced from the NHS Information Centre showed that dentists under 35 years old in 2000-01 earned 65 per cent of their income from the NHS but, by 2005-6, that had nearly halved to 36 per cent.
That compares to dentists in the older age groups who have seen a much smaller change. Dentists aged 55 and older received 58 per cent of their income from the NHS in 2000-1 but by 2005-6 the share from the NHS had declined to 47 per cent. A note of caution was added by the dental profession who said the study was a small sample, but it reinforces fears that a new contract for dentists has failed to reverse the exodus of dentists from NHS care.
Ann Keen, the Health minister responsible for dentistry, will be questioned this morning about the figures at a hearing of the Commons select committee on health, which is carrying out an investigation into the shortage of NHS dentists.
Dr Howard Stoate, a GP and the Labour chairman of the all-party Commons primary care committee, said: "If it is true [that] a large number are switching to private care, it would be worrying. The primary care trusts take the view that there are enough dentists coming forward because it does seem that they are able to offer a dental service that does seem to be better than before."
Young dentists who are benefiting from the trend to more cosmetic treatment include Ben Atkins, 32, who has built up his own nine-dentist Rocky Lane Dental Practice. The practice earns 80 per cent of its income from NHS patients but Mr Atkins says "patients are exercising more and more choice". He said patients were prepared to pay for the extra services and time they can get through private consultations which meant they were opting out of the NHS. "Lots of people want cosmetic dentistry and that is their right," he said. "Many patients will say they do not want the silver fillings and are prepared to pay for white fillings."
But Mr Atkins denied younger dentists are wilfully turning their backs on the NHS. He believes younger dentists still want to do NHS work, but are often faced by a lack of opportunities.
Government figures last month showed that more than 500,000 fewer patients were seen in the past two years, compared to the 24 months prior to the introduction of a new contract in 2006. The new statistics were published as evidence emerged that complaints about NHS dental treatment are on the rise. A survey of primary care trusts for the Patients Association found widespread problems following the introduction of a new dental contract in 2006.
It sent questionnaires to the chairmen and dental commissioners of 150 PCTs in England, and 112 replied. The report - The New Dental Contract: Full of Holes and Causing Pain? - found problems with funding, prevention work and patient experiences. It said: "PCTs complain there is a widespread lack of funds for orthodontics and other specialist treatments and cite this funding gap as the reason for not implementing best practice. There is increasing concern for the preventive role of dentistry in detection of oral health disease."
The report found that complaints had risen, with more than half of PCTs admitting an increase in the number of complaints. Of these, 60 per cent were about charges, 37.6 per cent about access and 28.2 per cent directly about orthodontics.
Peter Ward, chief executive of the BDA, said: "The new dental contract limits the amount of NHS dentistry that primary care trusts can commission. The result is that some dentists who want to provide NHS care are unable to do so and that millions of people who wish to access NHS care cannot."
GPs are also expected today to reluctantly support changes to their new contract which will pay their practices an extra 1.5 per cent for longer opening hours at night and at weekends. The results of the ballot will be announced by the BMA, which last week said it was backing this option. One Labour MP said GPs were choosing "the least worst option".
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British government refusal to recognize the grim and dangerous state of many State schools
Caring parents have good reason to avoid certain schools. In their brainless way the British government think they can fix it all by allocating school places randomly (by a lottery)!
What is this middle-class panic over school lotteries really about? Does it stem from fear about long-off GCSE results, expecting a place at the league table equivalent of Chelsea but ending up with Crewe? Or is it something more primal and tribal, something never explicitly acknowledged for all its un-PC implications of snobbery and racism: anxiety that our children will not be educated among People Like Us?
It is an impulse that, when given a religious expression, garners unquestioning support from the State. Of course Catholic parents should be allowed to raise children among fellow reciters of the rosary or Muslim parents to choose Islamic faith schools where their properly shrouded girls can be educated free from uppity secular ways.
Yet what if your beliefs are not religious, but amorphous (if heartfelt), encompassing any or all of the following: piano lessons, harvest festivals, emotional continence, the power of books, a bristling at Margaret Hodge for attacking the Proms (though you'd rather put pins in your eyes than go yourself), a repulsion at slutty kiddy clobber, a bossy sense of responsibility for public spaces, an absolute belief in education ... How hard it is to express what being middle-class means, yet how obvious when you see it.
The reason such folk move to the country or suddenly fill church pews or buy houses around a chosen school like wagons encircling to keep out Injuns is not to perpetuate their own privilege per se, but to ensure their type of children constitute a majority and thus their own values remain uppermost. In London, when a state primary school is signalled by the bush telegraph as "up and coming" it may mean the new head is magnificent but more likely it means that Parents Like Us have established base camp. There will be a few other mums with Orla Kiely bags to talk to in the playground. Little Josh is guaranteed playdates with an Oliver and a Fred. And so a tipping point occurs, as aspirational parents rush into Foxtons waving catchment area maps.
In my experience of an inner London primary school, there can be deep respect and goodwill between different ethnic groups and social classes. We smile hellos, chat at the school fair, gladly exchange favours. But deeper interracial or cross-class friendships are rare. Children have a hardwired instinct to seek out those like themselves, a suspicion or at least unease with difference. Yet understanding that disparate folks can coexist is a vital lesson; and children educated wholly in the white prep-school bubble - and with a vile, largely unchallenged tendency to mock poorer kids as "chavs" - are, for all their nice manners and grade 8 piano, in this sense less equipped for adult life.
But the question the lottery idea throws up is: do middle-class parents hog the best schools or are schools best because middle-class parents hog them? The Government assumes the former and demands that the most coveted places are more evenly divvied up. Yet it also counts on lesser schools being improved because middle-class parents are randomly forced on to their rolls. At primary level this task is not so irksome: parents are perpetually in the playground, can agitate for improvement, raise cash for nicer loos, nag a head to raise her game. (Although they also demand teachers give their precious ones a disproportionate amount of energy.) But above all their children helpfully skew a class's number of keen, manageable pupils.
But at secondary level, who feels equal to improving a failing local school? So big and daunting and scary. The odds so stacked, the culture so alien. At one open evening the head boasted how new CCTV cameras had made his school less prone to intrusion by gangs and emphasised that pupils were only permitted one piercing and no tattoos. A bubble of warm feelings about the fab new science block and improving results abruptly popped. Was this induction day at a borstal? You could sense other hopeful, socially minded but aspirational parents scrub it from their list.
Yet it is often said that bright kids with supportive parents thrive anywhere. Don't worry, we're told, they'll be fine. Indeed, professors of education from three British universities, studying 124 middle-class families from London and two other cities with kids at average and below-average comprehensives discovered they mostly achieved brilliant results, a clutch of places at top universities. Teachers leapt to help them to fulfil potential, even devising special courses so they could stay on.
But, blimey, the investment of parental time and energy required. Many were already activists politically committed to state education, more than half became governors, all monitored their children's progress hawkishly. And ironically, although enrolled in melting-pot schools so they would be better socially integrated, these middle-class students clustered together in the top sets, making few friends with poorer peers.
So is that "fine"? Is it OK for your son or daughter, in practice, to have only a tiny pool of potential pals? Maybe they'll get lucky with classmates or stick to their best mate from primary. Blessed with social dexterity they might develop that unteachable, priceless life-skill of getting on with anyone. But what if they are eccentric, bookish, off-the-wall? Will a few years of mockery and bullying knock off their corners, put a little grit in the old oyster? Or will it break their spirits? Fine if they are the kind of easygoing yet focused child who can zone out anti-learning static. But what if they are budding alpha males, magnetised towards the bad boys?
Frankly they all have less cause for sympathy than clever, potentially high-achieving working-class children who lack financial resources and parents confident and wily enough to work the system. A friend of mine, a Jewish grammar school boy from Leeds, is writing a book about social mobility. Where today, he asks, are the stories of local boy/girl made good, the inspiring heroes of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Room at the Top, A Taste of Honey, who burst through the limits of their backgrounds? Now all we have is Shameless, rap videos and other nihilistic, ghetto wallowings.
But if the Government believes middle-class parents are useful agents of change, they should address their fears and stop treating them like the enemy. In Brighton, the rush of the disaffected into the private sector is a catastrophe for state schools. And, at root, it has surprisingly little to do with education.
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Aspirin could help to reduce risk of breast cancer by 20%
But aspirin routinely causes stomach bleeding! Surely we can't have that? Ban aspirin!
Drugs such as aspirin may help to reduce the risk of breast cancer by about 20 per cent, according to a review of past studies. Experts analysed 21 studies involving more than 37,000 women and found an overall decreased risk for those taking non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs). They could also play a role in treating women who have breast cancer.
The researchers said that more studies were needed on the ideal type of drug, dose and duration, and that they had not considered the side-effects. High doses can increase the risk of heart attacks and other health problems. The researchers concluded: "There may be a role for NSAIDs in combination with endocrine therapies as either an adjuvant or palliative treatment for women with established breast cancer."
Ian Fentiman, Professor of Oncology at Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust, carried out the study, published in the International Journal of Clinical Practice.
Source
Saturday, March 08, 2008
Nurse left to go blind by NHS
Don't you love government health insurance?
A retired nurse who worked for the NHS for decades has been denied treatment which could save her sight. Cora Slade was told the NHS would not fund the injections she needed for her condition, even though it might leave her blind within two years. The 74-year-old, who retired in 1997, 'did not meet the criteria' for the treatment, which was available to patients in other parts of the country. She said: 'They have turned their back on me.'
Mrs Slade, who cares for sick husband Don, was diagnosed with wet age-related macular degeneration in her left eye in May. She has the dry variety in the other. She spent 2,400 pounds on injections of Lucentis after being told she did not qualify for NHS treatment. The mother-of-three, from Sidmouth, Devon, said: 'They were savings for old age so we wouldn't be a burden on the state. 'If I go blind in both eyes, they will have to pay to look after my husband.'
Devon Primary Care Trust insisted its funding guidelines were generous. Board member Dr Nick D'Arcy said: 'We do all we can to ensure applications for funding are dealt with fairly, on clinical grounds.'
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British culture boss criticised for anti-patriotic attack
The culture minister, Margaret Hodge, is facing a chorus of criticism from across the political spectrum after attacking the Proms for not being multicultural enough. The minister said the annual series of concerts at the Royal Albert Hall failed to attract a diverse audience and unite different sections of society
Many view the flag waving and patriotism of the Last Night of the Proms as one of the greatest expressions of Britishness and a high point of the cultural calendar. But the minister suggested that it failed to attract all those living in multicultural Britain.
Downing Street was forced into an immediate U-turn and denied that the Government, or Mrs Hodge, had attacked the Proms. Gordon Brown's spokesman praised the concerts as a "wonderful, democratic and quintessentially British institution". He said: "The Prime Minister's position on this is quite clear - he thinks the Proms are a good institution." Privately, Mr Brown, who has championed the values of Britain, was said to be angry that Mrs Hodge's remarks had not been cleared with Downing Street.
David Cameron, the Tory leader, said: "Margaret Hodge is wrong. We need more things where people celebrate Britishness and people think the Union Jack is a great symbol of togetherness. It is a classic example of a Labour politician not getting the sort of things people like to celebrate - culture and identity and a great British institution." Jeremy Hunt, the shadow culture secretary, said: "There is probably no better example in the world of a series of concerts that attracts a huge audience to often quite challenging classical music."
Mrs Hodge's comments came in a speech to the Institute of Public Policy Research think tank. She praised "icons of a common culture" including Coronation Street and the Angel of the North and said culture could enhance a sense of "shared identity", but she singled out the Proms for not doing that. She said: "The audiences for many of our greatest cultural events - I'm thinking in particular of the Proms - is still a long way from demonstrating that people from different backgrounds feel at ease in being part of this. "I know this is not about making every audience completely representative, but if we claim great things for our sectors in terms of their power to bring people together, then we have a right to expect they will do that wherever they can."
A BBC spokesman defended the Proms saying: "We are proud that the BBC Proms is world-renowned for the way it combines excellence in classical music with an ongoing commitment to bringing it to the widest possible audience. "Indeed, this has recently been recognised by three nominations for audience development in the Royal Philharmonic Society Awards."
The Proms were founded in 1895 to give everyone the chance to hear live classical music with low ticket prices. It is the biggest classical musical festival in the world with more than 70 concerts in the Royal Albert Hall over eight weeks in the summer. It climaxes with the Last Night which features patriotic pieces including Land Of Hope And Glory, Rule Britannia and the national anthem.
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The enemy within
Post below lifted from Prof. Brignell. See the original for links
When your bending author was an industrial apprentice half a century ago there was an undeclared war going on. It was being conducted by communists and their target was the British economy. They had infiltrated the main trades unions and had effective control over vital swathes of industry. If you worked in a section of the factory where there was a communist shop steward you could feel the constant apprehension. The workers put on a face of treating it all as a joke, but they betrayed themselves in unguarded moments. It was a stressful situation for a teenager to be in and the stuff of subsequent nightmares. The activity was little short of persistent industrial sabotage. Then and since, people have derided the very idea that this happened. Revelatory accounts such as the dramatic film, The Angry Silence, with Alfred Burke as the sinister agent provocateur, or the more comic yet cogent treatment in I'm all right Jack are routinely dismissed as wild exaggerations, but they were not.
Now a similar war is going on, but most of the participants and some of the methods are different. The colour has changed, but the objective is the same, as are some of the people (Danny the Red is now Danny the Green). The way to bring down a modern state is to cut off its access to energy, and that is the objective of the new war. The infiltration goes on, but it is more ambitious and more successful, the target now being the leading components of the scientific, media and political establishment.
There is no more blatant example than that unspeakable travesty of a journalist Johann Hari. The lefty-greeny faction likes to throw around words like fascism, but this man is a genuine fascist. He is a demonstrable liar who wishes to cast aside democracy and install authoritarian government. There has been yet another example of his ruthless mendacity in his attack on Spiked. Without any evidence he trots out the old canard of an ad hominem assault of his targets being funded by Big Oil. How even The Independent, which has so egregiously betrayed the hopes that were raised by its foundation, can tolerate the fellow is a mystery.
Today's most extreme prophet of doom
Throughout history, prophets of doom have always got a hearing -- and humanity has not changed
In 1965 executives at Shell wanted to know what the world would look like in the year 2000. They consulted a range of experts, who speculated about fusion-powered hovercrafts and "all sorts of fanciful technological stuff". When the oil company asked the scientist James Lovelock, he predicted that the main problem in 2000 would be the environment. "It will be worsening then to such an extent that it will seriously affect their business," he said. "And of course," Lovelock says, with a smile 43 years later, "that's almost exactly what's happened."
Lovelock has been dispensing predictions from his one-man laboratory in an old mill in Cornwall since the mid-1960s, the consistent accuracy of which have earned him a reputation as one of Britain's most respected - if maverick - independent scientists. Working alone since the age of 40, he invented a device that detected CFCs, which helped detect the growing hole in the ozone layer, and introduced the Gaia hypothesis, a revolutionary theory that the Earth is a self-regulating super-organism. Initially ridiculed by many scientists as new age nonsense, today that theory forms the basis of almost all climate science.
For decades, his advocacy of nuclear power appalled fellow environmentalists - but recently increasing numbers of them have come around to his way of thinking. His latest book, The Revenge of Gaia, predicts that by 2020 extreme weather will be the norm, causing global devastation; that by 2040 much of Europe will be Saharan; and parts of London will be underwater. The most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report deploys less dramatic language - but its calculations aren't a million miles away from his.
As with most people, my panic about climate change is equalled only by my confusion over what I ought to do about it. A meeting with Lovelock therefore feels a little like an audience with a prophet. Buried down a winding track through wild woodland, in an office full of books and papers and contraptions involving dials and wires, the 88-year-old presents his thoughts with a quiet, unshakable conviction that can be unnerving. More alarming even than his apocalyptic climate predictions is his utter certainty that almost everything we're trying to do about it is wrong.
On the day we meet, the Daily Mail has launched a campaign to rid Britain of plastic shopping bags. The initiative sits comfortably within the current canon of eco ideas, next to ethical consumption, carbon offsetting, recycling and so on - all of which are premised on the calculation that individual lifestyle adjustments can still save the planet. This is, Lovelock says, a deluded fantasy. Most of the things we have been told to do might make us feel better, but they won't make any difference. Global warming has passed the tipping point, and catastrophe is unstoppable.
"It's just too late for it," he says. "Perhaps if we'd gone along routes like that in 1967, it might have helped. But we don't have time. All these standard green things, like sustainable development, I think these are just words that mean nothing. I get an awful lot of people coming to me saying you can't say that, because it gives us nothing to do. I say on the contrary, it gives us an immense amount to do. Just not the kinds of things you want to do." He dismisses eco ideas briskly, one by one. "Carbon offsetting? I wouldn't dream of it. It's just a joke. To pay money to plant trees, to think you're offsetting the carbon? You're probably making matters worse. You're far better off giving to the charity Cool Earth, which gives the money to the native peoples to not take down their forests."
Do he and his wife try to limit the number of flights they take? "No we don't. Because we can't." And recycling, he adds, is "almost certainly a waste of time and energy", while having a "green lifestyle" amounts to little more than "ostentatious grand gestures". He distrusts the notion of ethical consumption. "Because always, in the end, it turns out to be a scam ... or if it wasn't one in the beginning, it becomes one."
Somewhat unexpectedly, Lovelock concedes that the Mail's plastic bag campaign seems, "on the face of it, a good thing". But it transpires that this is largely a tactical response; he regards it as merely more rearrangement of Titanic deckchairs, "but I've learnt there's no point in causing a quarrel over everything". He saves his thunder for what he considers the emptiest false promise of all - renewable energy. "You're never going to get enough energy from wind to run a society such as ours," he says. "Windmills! Oh no. No way of doing it. You can cover the whole country with the blasted things, millions of them. Waste of time."
This is all delivered with an air of benign wonder at the intractable stupidity of people. "I see it with everybody. People just want to go on doing what they're doing. They want business as usual. They say, 'Oh yes, there's going to be a problem up ahead,' but they don't want to change anything."
Lovelock believes global warming is now irreversible, and that nothing can prevent large parts of the planet becoming too hot to inhabit, or sinking underwater, resulting in mass migration, famine and epidemics. Britain is going to become a lifeboat for refugees from mainland Europe, so instead of wasting our time on wind turbines we need to start planning how to survive. To Lovelock, the logic is clear. The sustainability brigade are insane to think we can save ourselves by going back to nature; our only chance of survival will come not from less technology, but more.
Nuclear power, he argues, can solve our energy problem - the bigger challenge will be food. "Maybe they'll synthesise food. I don't know. Synthesising food is not some mad visionary idea; you can buy it in Tesco's, in the form of Quorn. It's not that good, but people buy it. You can live on it." But he fears we won't invent the necessary technologies in time, and expects "about 80%" of the world's population to be wiped out by 2100. Prophets have been foretelling Armageddon since time began, he says. "But this is the real thing."
Faced with two versions of the future - Kyoto's preventative action and Lovelock's apocalypse - who are we to believe? Some critics have suggested Lovelock's readiness to concede the fight against climate change owes more to old age than science: "People who say that about me haven't reached my age," he says laughing.
But when I ask if he attributes the conflicting predictions to differences in scientific understanding or personality, he says: "Personality." There's more than a hint of the controversialist in his work, and it seems an unlikely coincidence that Lovelock became convinced of the irreversibility of climate change in 2004, at the very point when the international consensus was coming round to the need for urgent action. Aren't his theories at least partly driven by a fondness for heresy? "Not a bit! Not a bit! All I want is a quiet life! But I can't help noticing when things happen, when you go out and find something. People don't like it because it upsets their ideas."
But the suspicion seems confirmed when I ask if he's found it rewarding to see many of his climate change warnings endorsed by the IPCC. "Oh no! In fact, I'm writing another book now, I'm about a third of the way into it, to try and take the next steps ahead."
Interviewers often remark upon the discrepancy between Lovelock's predictions of doom, and his good humour. "Well I'm cheerful!" he says, smiling. "I'm an optimist. It's going to happen." Humanity is in a period exactly like 1938-9, he explains, when "we all knew something terrible was going to happen, but didn't know what to do about it". But once the second world war was under way, "everyone got excited, they loved the things they could do, it was one long holiday ... so when I think of the impending crisis now, I think in those terms. A sense of purpose - that's what people want."
At moments I wonder about Lovelock's credentials as a prophet. Sometimes he seems less clear-eyed with scientific vision than disposed to see the version of the future his prejudices are looking for. A socialist as a young man, he now favours market forces, and it's not clear whether his politics are the child or the father of his science. His hostility to renewable energy, for example, gets expressed in strikingly Eurosceptic terms of irritation with subsidies and bureaucrats. But then, when he talks about the Earth - or Gaia - it is in the purest scientific terms all.
"There have been seven disasters since humans came on the earth, very similar to the one that's just about to happen. I think these events keep separating the wheat from the chaff. And eventually we'll have a human on the planet that really does understand it and can live with it properly. That's the source of my optimism." What would Lovelock do now, I ask, if he were me? He smiles and says: "Enjoy life while you can. Because if you're lucky it's going to be 20 years before it hits the fan."
Source
New 'thin pill' could replace surgery
A new generation of diet pills that could achieve the same dramatic weight loss as surgery could be available within a decade. A team at University College London is working towards developing a weight loss pill that makes people feel they are full after eating a small amount of food. The stomach has to expand to digest food, the basic process by which the body harvests calories from meals, but scientists have found a way of stopping this from happening.
The pill could offer an alternative to stomach stapling - gastroplasty - in which a band or surgery is used to reduce the size of the stomach. This can result in weight loss of up to 7st in a year. However, surgery can be risky with one in every 100 patients dying within 12 months. The potential new drug is described in the Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics by Dr Brian King and Dr Andrea Townsend-Nicholson. "It is chemical gastric banding," said Dr Townsend-Nicholson, adding that the pill could be available for use within five to 10 years.
The team found two proteins - P2Y1 and P2Y11 - which are receptors that pick up signals from nerves to control the size of the gut. These were identified in the guinea pig, but are also present in humans. Dr King said: "This would be a brand new approach to weight control." Dr Brian King says: "The mechanisms we have identified are important to the normal workings of the stomach - a hollow organ which actively relaxes to help accommodate the size of your meal.
The human stomach has a 'resting' internal volume of 75 millilitres (one tenth of a pint) but, by relaxing its muscular wall, can expand to an internal volume of two litres (3.5 pints) or more - a 25-fold increase in the volume it can accept. "This expansion is controlled by nerves inside the stomach wall and these release molecules that stimulate the P2Y1 and P2Y11 receptor proteins embedded in muscle cells in the gut wall. The mechanism of this slow relaxation of the stomach might represent a future drug target in the fight to control weight gain and reverse obesity. "We are looking to identify drugs that would block the P2Y11 receptor and, therefore, prevent slow relaxation of the stomach. As a result of blocking the P2Y11-based mechanism, meal size would be smaller, offering the person a better chance of regulating their food intake.
"This would be a brand new approach to weight control. At present, the most successful way to help obese patients lose weight is gastric banding or stomach stapling, both of which reduce the maximum volume of the stomach. "But these are also tricky surgical procedures, not without attendant risks. A pill that could replace this surgery, yet have the same effect, might be a useful alternative."
If the gastric bypass is anything to go by, there may be side effects. In the wake of stomach stapling, high fibre foods and foods with a more dense, natural consistency can become very difficult to eat relative to highly refined foods. There can be vomiting and severe discomfort if food is not properly chewed or if food is eaten too quickly. However, the UCL team believes that any possible side effects of chemical gastric banding are likely to outweigh the adverse health consequences of obesity.
Figures released in January showed that more than one million prescriptions for obesity drugs are now given to patients by GPs.
Source
Yet another black psychopath in "multicultural" Britan: "A gym instructor scuffled violently with court guards yesterday as he was found guilty of bludgeoning to death a student who performed on the junior version of Stars in Their Eyes, her mother and younger brother. Pierre Williams, 33, used a steelheaded hammer to kill his former lover, Beverley Samuels, a 36-year-old nurse, her daughter, Kesha Wizzart, 18, and son, Fred, 13. Three security guards rushed to restrain Williams, who was bundled down to the cells at Manchester Crown Court after the verdict, loudly proclaiming his innocence. He was banned from the dock by the judge, when he sentenced him later to at least 38 years in prison. Mr Justice Pitchford concluded that only Williams, who had a history of sexual violence towards women, could know what terror and pain he had inflicted upon his victims before they died".
Don't you love government health insurance?
A retired nurse who worked for the NHS for decades has been denied treatment which could save her sight. Cora Slade was told the NHS would not fund the injections she needed for her condition, even though it might leave her blind within two years. The 74-year-old, who retired in 1997, 'did not meet the criteria' for the treatment, which was available to patients in other parts of the country. She said: 'They have turned their back on me.'
Mrs Slade, who cares for sick husband Don, was diagnosed with wet age-related macular degeneration in her left eye in May. She has the dry variety in the other. She spent 2,400 pounds on injections of Lucentis after being told she did not qualify for NHS treatment. The mother-of-three, from Sidmouth, Devon, said: 'They were savings for old age so we wouldn't be a burden on the state. 'If I go blind in both eyes, they will have to pay to look after my husband.'
Devon Primary Care Trust insisted its funding guidelines were generous. Board member Dr Nick D'Arcy said: 'We do all we can to ensure applications for funding are dealt with fairly, on clinical grounds.'
Source
British culture boss criticised for anti-patriotic attack
The culture minister, Margaret Hodge, is facing a chorus of criticism from across the political spectrum after attacking the Proms for not being multicultural enough. The minister said the annual series of concerts at the Royal Albert Hall failed to attract a diverse audience and unite different sections of society
Many view the flag waving and patriotism of the Last Night of the Proms as one of the greatest expressions of Britishness and a high point of the cultural calendar. But the minister suggested that it failed to attract all those living in multicultural Britain.
Downing Street was forced into an immediate U-turn and denied that the Government, or Mrs Hodge, had attacked the Proms. Gordon Brown's spokesman praised the concerts as a "wonderful, democratic and quintessentially British institution". He said: "The Prime Minister's position on this is quite clear - he thinks the Proms are a good institution." Privately, Mr Brown, who has championed the values of Britain, was said to be angry that Mrs Hodge's remarks had not been cleared with Downing Street.
David Cameron, the Tory leader, said: "Margaret Hodge is wrong. We need more things where people celebrate Britishness and people think the Union Jack is a great symbol of togetherness. It is a classic example of a Labour politician not getting the sort of things people like to celebrate - culture and identity and a great British institution." Jeremy Hunt, the shadow culture secretary, said: "There is probably no better example in the world of a series of concerts that attracts a huge audience to often quite challenging classical music."
Mrs Hodge's comments came in a speech to the Institute of Public Policy Research think tank. She praised "icons of a common culture" including Coronation Street and the Angel of the North and said culture could enhance a sense of "shared identity", but she singled out the Proms for not doing that. She said: "The audiences for many of our greatest cultural events - I'm thinking in particular of the Proms - is still a long way from demonstrating that people from different backgrounds feel at ease in being part of this. "I know this is not about making every audience completely representative, but if we claim great things for our sectors in terms of their power to bring people together, then we have a right to expect they will do that wherever they can."
A BBC spokesman defended the Proms saying: "We are proud that the BBC Proms is world-renowned for the way it combines excellence in classical music with an ongoing commitment to bringing it to the widest possible audience. "Indeed, this has recently been recognised by three nominations for audience development in the Royal Philharmonic Society Awards."
The Proms were founded in 1895 to give everyone the chance to hear live classical music with low ticket prices. It is the biggest classical musical festival in the world with more than 70 concerts in the Royal Albert Hall over eight weeks in the summer. It climaxes with the Last Night which features patriotic pieces including Land Of Hope And Glory, Rule Britannia and the national anthem.
Source
The enemy within
Post below lifted from Prof. Brignell. See the original for links
When your bending author was an industrial apprentice half a century ago there was an undeclared war going on. It was being conducted by communists and their target was the British economy. They had infiltrated the main trades unions and had effective control over vital swathes of industry. If you worked in a section of the factory where there was a communist shop steward you could feel the constant apprehension. The workers put on a face of treating it all as a joke, but they betrayed themselves in unguarded moments. It was a stressful situation for a teenager to be in and the stuff of subsequent nightmares. The activity was little short of persistent industrial sabotage. Then and since, people have derided the very idea that this happened. Revelatory accounts such as the dramatic film, The Angry Silence, with Alfred Burke as the sinister agent provocateur, or the more comic yet cogent treatment in I'm all right Jack are routinely dismissed as wild exaggerations, but they were not.
Now a similar war is going on, but most of the participants and some of the methods are different. The colour has changed, but the objective is the same, as are some of the people (Danny the Red is now Danny the Green). The way to bring down a modern state is to cut off its access to energy, and that is the objective of the new war. The infiltration goes on, but it is more ambitious and more successful, the target now being the leading components of the scientific, media and political establishment.
There is no more blatant example than that unspeakable travesty of a journalist Johann Hari. The lefty-greeny faction likes to throw around words like fascism, but this man is a genuine fascist. He is a demonstrable liar who wishes to cast aside democracy and install authoritarian government. There has been yet another example of his ruthless mendacity in his attack on Spiked. Without any evidence he trots out the old canard of an ad hominem assault of his targets being funded by Big Oil. How even The Independent, which has so egregiously betrayed the hopes that were raised by its foundation, can tolerate the fellow is a mystery.
Today's most extreme prophet of doom
Throughout history, prophets of doom have always got a hearing -- and humanity has not changed
In 1965 executives at Shell wanted to know what the world would look like in the year 2000. They consulted a range of experts, who speculated about fusion-powered hovercrafts and "all sorts of fanciful technological stuff". When the oil company asked the scientist James Lovelock, he predicted that the main problem in 2000 would be the environment. "It will be worsening then to such an extent that it will seriously affect their business," he said. "And of course," Lovelock says, with a smile 43 years later, "that's almost exactly what's happened."
Lovelock has been dispensing predictions from his one-man laboratory in an old mill in Cornwall since the mid-1960s, the consistent accuracy of which have earned him a reputation as one of Britain's most respected - if maverick - independent scientists. Working alone since the age of 40, he invented a device that detected CFCs, which helped detect the growing hole in the ozone layer, and introduced the Gaia hypothesis, a revolutionary theory that the Earth is a self-regulating super-organism. Initially ridiculed by many scientists as new age nonsense, today that theory forms the basis of almost all climate science.
For decades, his advocacy of nuclear power appalled fellow environmentalists - but recently increasing numbers of them have come around to his way of thinking. His latest book, The Revenge of Gaia, predicts that by 2020 extreme weather will be the norm, causing global devastation; that by 2040 much of Europe will be Saharan; and parts of London will be underwater. The most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report deploys less dramatic language - but its calculations aren't a million miles away from his.
As with most people, my panic about climate change is equalled only by my confusion over what I ought to do about it. A meeting with Lovelock therefore feels a little like an audience with a prophet. Buried down a winding track through wild woodland, in an office full of books and papers and contraptions involving dials and wires, the 88-year-old presents his thoughts with a quiet, unshakable conviction that can be unnerving. More alarming even than his apocalyptic climate predictions is his utter certainty that almost everything we're trying to do about it is wrong.
On the day we meet, the Daily Mail has launched a campaign to rid Britain of plastic shopping bags. The initiative sits comfortably within the current canon of eco ideas, next to ethical consumption, carbon offsetting, recycling and so on - all of which are premised on the calculation that individual lifestyle adjustments can still save the planet. This is, Lovelock says, a deluded fantasy. Most of the things we have been told to do might make us feel better, but they won't make any difference. Global warming has passed the tipping point, and catastrophe is unstoppable.
"It's just too late for it," he says. "Perhaps if we'd gone along routes like that in 1967, it might have helped. But we don't have time. All these standard green things, like sustainable development, I think these are just words that mean nothing. I get an awful lot of people coming to me saying you can't say that, because it gives us nothing to do. I say on the contrary, it gives us an immense amount to do. Just not the kinds of things you want to do." He dismisses eco ideas briskly, one by one. "Carbon offsetting? I wouldn't dream of it. It's just a joke. To pay money to plant trees, to think you're offsetting the carbon? You're probably making matters worse. You're far better off giving to the charity Cool Earth, which gives the money to the native peoples to not take down their forests."
Do he and his wife try to limit the number of flights they take? "No we don't. Because we can't." And recycling, he adds, is "almost certainly a waste of time and energy", while having a "green lifestyle" amounts to little more than "ostentatious grand gestures". He distrusts the notion of ethical consumption. "Because always, in the end, it turns out to be a scam ... or if it wasn't one in the beginning, it becomes one."
Somewhat unexpectedly, Lovelock concedes that the Mail's plastic bag campaign seems, "on the face of it, a good thing". But it transpires that this is largely a tactical response; he regards it as merely more rearrangement of Titanic deckchairs, "but I've learnt there's no point in causing a quarrel over everything". He saves his thunder for what he considers the emptiest false promise of all - renewable energy. "You're never going to get enough energy from wind to run a society such as ours," he says. "Windmills! Oh no. No way of doing it. You can cover the whole country with the blasted things, millions of them. Waste of time."
This is all delivered with an air of benign wonder at the intractable stupidity of people. "I see it with everybody. People just want to go on doing what they're doing. They want business as usual. They say, 'Oh yes, there's going to be a problem up ahead,' but they don't want to change anything."
Lovelock believes global warming is now irreversible, and that nothing can prevent large parts of the planet becoming too hot to inhabit, or sinking underwater, resulting in mass migration, famine and epidemics. Britain is going to become a lifeboat for refugees from mainland Europe, so instead of wasting our time on wind turbines we need to start planning how to survive. To Lovelock, the logic is clear. The sustainability brigade are insane to think we can save ourselves by going back to nature; our only chance of survival will come not from less technology, but more.
Nuclear power, he argues, can solve our energy problem - the bigger challenge will be food. "Maybe they'll synthesise food. I don't know. Synthesising food is not some mad visionary idea; you can buy it in Tesco's, in the form of Quorn. It's not that good, but people buy it. You can live on it." But he fears we won't invent the necessary technologies in time, and expects "about 80%" of the world's population to be wiped out by 2100. Prophets have been foretelling Armageddon since time began, he says. "But this is the real thing."
Faced with two versions of the future - Kyoto's preventative action and Lovelock's apocalypse - who are we to believe? Some critics have suggested Lovelock's readiness to concede the fight against climate change owes more to old age than science: "People who say that about me haven't reached my age," he says laughing.
But when I ask if he attributes the conflicting predictions to differences in scientific understanding or personality, he says: "Personality." There's more than a hint of the controversialist in his work, and it seems an unlikely coincidence that Lovelock became convinced of the irreversibility of climate change in 2004, at the very point when the international consensus was coming round to the need for urgent action. Aren't his theories at least partly driven by a fondness for heresy? "Not a bit! Not a bit! All I want is a quiet life! But I can't help noticing when things happen, when you go out and find something. People don't like it because it upsets their ideas."
But the suspicion seems confirmed when I ask if he's found it rewarding to see many of his climate change warnings endorsed by the IPCC. "Oh no! In fact, I'm writing another book now, I'm about a third of the way into it, to try and take the next steps ahead."
Interviewers often remark upon the discrepancy between Lovelock's predictions of doom, and his good humour. "Well I'm cheerful!" he says, smiling. "I'm an optimist. It's going to happen." Humanity is in a period exactly like 1938-9, he explains, when "we all knew something terrible was going to happen, but didn't know what to do about it". But once the second world war was under way, "everyone got excited, they loved the things they could do, it was one long holiday ... so when I think of the impending crisis now, I think in those terms. A sense of purpose - that's what people want."
At moments I wonder about Lovelock's credentials as a prophet. Sometimes he seems less clear-eyed with scientific vision than disposed to see the version of the future his prejudices are looking for. A socialist as a young man, he now favours market forces, and it's not clear whether his politics are the child or the father of his science. His hostility to renewable energy, for example, gets expressed in strikingly Eurosceptic terms of irritation with subsidies and bureaucrats. But then, when he talks about the Earth - or Gaia - it is in the purest scientific terms all.
"There have been seven disasters since humans came on the earth, very similar to the one that's just about to happen. I think these events keep separating the wheat from the chaff. And eventually we'll have a human on the planet that really does understand it and can live with it properly. That's the source of my optimism." What would Lovelock do now, I ask, if he were me? He smiles and says: "Enjoy life while you can. Because if you're lucky it's going to be 20 years before it hits the fan."
Source
New 'thin pill' could replace surgery
A new generation of diet pills that could achieve the same dramatic weight loss as surgery could be available within a decade. A team at University College London is working towards developing a weight loss pill that makes people feel they are full after eating a small amount of food. The stomach has to expand to digest food, the basic process by which the body harvests calories from meals, but scientists have found a way of stopping this from happening.
The pill could offer an alternative to stomach stapling - gastroplasty - in which a band or surgery is used to reduce the size of the stomach. This can result in weight loss of up to 7st in a year. However, surgery can be risky with one in every 100 patients dying within 12 months. The potential new drug is described in the Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics by Dr Brian King and Dr Andrea Townsend-Nicholson. "It is chemical gastric banding," said Dr Townsend-Nicholson, adding that the pill could be available for use within five to 10 years.
The team found two proteins - P2Y1 and P2Y11 - which are receptors that pick up signals from nerves to control the size of the gut. These were identified in the guinea pig, but are also present in humans. Dr King said: "This would be a brand new approach to weight control." Dr Brian King says: "The mechanisms we have identified are important to the normal workings of the stomach - a hollow organ which actively relaxes to help accommodate the size of your meal.
The human stomach has a 'resting' internal volume of 75 millilitres (one tenth of a pint) but, by relaxing its muscular wall, can expand to an internal volume of two litres (3.5 pints) or more - a 25-fold increase in the volume it can accept. "This expansion is controlled by nerves inside the stomach wall and these release molecules that stimulate the P2Y1 and P2Y11 receptor proteins embedded in muscle cells in the gut wall. The mechanism of this slow relaxation of the stomach might represent a future drug target in the fight to control weight gain and reverse obesity. "We are looking to identify drugs that would block the P2Y11 receptor and, therefore, prevent slow relaxation of the stomach. As a result of blocking the P2Y11-based mechanism, meal size would be smaller, offering the person a better chance of regulating their food intake.
"This would be a brand new approach to weight control. At present, the most successful way to help obese patients lose weight is gastric banding or stomach stapling, both of which reduce the maximum volume of the stomach. "But these are also tricky surgical procedures, not without attendant risks. A pill that could replace this surgery, yet have the same effect, might be a useful alternative."
If the gastric bypass is anything to go by, there may be side effects. In the wake of stomach stapling, high fibre foods and foods with a more dense, natural consistency can become very difficult to eat relative to highly refined foods. There can be vomiting and severe discomfort if food is not properly chewed or if food is eaten too quickly. However, the UCL team believes that any possible side effects of chemical gastric banding are likely to outweigh the adverse health consequences of obesity.
Figures released in January showed that more than one million prescriptions for obesity drugs are now given to patients by GPs.
Source
Yet another black psychopath in "multicultural" Britan: "A gym instructor scuffled violently with court guards yesterday as he was found guilty of bludgeoning to death a student who performed on the junior version of Stars in Their Eyes, her mother and younger brother. Pierre Williams, 33, used a steelheaded hammer to kill his former lover, Beverley Samuels, a 36-year-old nurse, her daughter, Kesha Wizzart, 18, and son, Fred, 13. Three security guards rushed to restrain Williams, who was bundled down to the cells at Manchester Crown Court after the verdict, loudly proclaiming his innocence. He was banned from the dock by the judge, when he sentenced him later to at least 38 years in prison. Mr Justice Pitchford concluded that only Williams, who had a history of sexual violence towards women, could know what terror and pain he had inflicted upon his victims before they died".
Friday, March 07, 2008
School's bizarre ploy to beat internet perverts - masking pupils with Acid House smileys
A primary school has been accused of being alarmist for covering up the faces of pupils on its website - apparently to protect them from paedophiles. Bizarrely, the images have been altered with the type of smiley faces popular during the Acid House dance craze of the 1980s. The decision was taken at Cann Hall Primary School in Clacton, Essex. Headmistress Clare Reece said yesterday: "The public nature of the internet is an issue we feel strongly about. "Not all parents want their children's picture on there. "You can't say what is going to happen with any of those pictures."
She said that the photographs were printed unaltered in the school newsletter which was sent to parents. But on the primary's website, the children's faces are obscured. The school guarantees the content of the site is "child friendly", adding: "In order to protect our children, we have made the decision not to include any photos of our pupils on this website."
Previously, faces were simply blurred, but newer pictures, including action shots of the athletics tournament, use the smiley faces. However, one child in a line-up of medal winners has been singled out - he alone has been given a sad face.
Children's charity NCH yesterday said that schools were right to be cautious about putting children's pictures on the internet if they were vulnerable or in care. However, spokesman Shaun Kelly added: "The images shocked me, actually. What message is it giving? "It looks very, very odd. If you want to obscure children's faces you can obscure them with pixels. "We need to be cautious about taking images of children out of the media."
Frank Furedi, a sociology professor at the University of Kent, said the school was being alarmist. "Every time a school takes silly measures, it says we see the world through the eyes of a paedophile. "They think that any innocent picture of school children will somehow be subverted and manipulated. "These pictures serve a very important purpose of giving children clear images of their experiences, something they can remember later in life. "Depriving ourselves of these experiences is not only irrational but serves no purpose whatsoever."
However, some parents at the school said they supported the decision. One said: "I wouldn't want my child's face on a disgusting site.' But Michaela Day, 35, whose eight-year-old son, Connor, attends the school, said: "If they are covering the children's faces, what is the point of using the photographs? It's a waste of time."
A spokesman for the Department for Children, Schools and Families said that it advises schools to get permission from parents or carers in writing before publishing photographs of pupils on a website or in a prospectus. However, this is not a legal requirement. The school took down the controversial pictures from its website at around 3pm yesterday. A message on the website said: "Our newsletter section is undergoing maintenance. Back soon!"
Source
Socialist Britain: Your government will look after you (NOT)
The shocking truth behind daycare at nurseries and creches: All covered up by deep layers of bullsh*it and pervasive official negligence. So parents are lulled into a very mistaken sense of security
Britain's childcare industry is booming. Every working day, more than a million parents drop off their precious little cargos at childminders and private nurseries. All of them do it firm in the belief that those they trust with their babies are highly-qualified, strictly regulated and genuine, caring people. Terrifyingly, they are wrong. During an eight-month investigation for the BBC1 investigative programme Whistleblower, I uncovered a childcare culture where a new carer's criminal records and references are never checked, yet they will immediately be left alone with young, vulnerable children.
I was initially alerted to the scandal by an inspector for Ofsted (the government agency that regulates childminders and nurseries). She said that, as a parent of two children and having inspected 700 nurseries with her colleagues, she had found only five that she would have let her own children attend. She also said that Ofsted inspection reports - the only safeguards that parents have to go on when choosing a nursery - aren't worth the paper they're printed on. "We are literally skimming the surface," she said. "We are told constantly: "If you don't see a problem, don't look for one. Take a quick look and get out." "The priority for all Ofsted inspectors is to meet their targets. If they don't, they are disciplined. Targets take priority over safeguarding children."
I decided to test these claims by going undercover and getting myself a job in a number of nurseries. I thought I would encounter difficulties since I had no children and, apart from a couple of babysitting stints, no experience of looking after babies and toddlers. Yet I needn't have worried. None of the nurseries with which I got jobs bothered to check my fake CV or fictitious references. Even Ofsted, which at least checked my criminal record, registered me as a childminder despite the premises where I was looking after the children not being at all suitable.
My first job was at the Buttons nursery in Ealing, West London. We'd had a tip-off that its supervision of babies and toddlers was unacceptable. After a cursory interview, I was appointed as a nursery assistant. No one checked my references in the five weeks I was there and even though the law states that everyone working with children has to have their background checked by Home Office agency the Criminal Records Bureau (CRB), the all-clear didn't come back until I had left.
Buttons is based in a rambling, 19th-century detached house and caters to the area's professional middle classes. It was not cheap, charging 1,100 pounds a month for a child who is dropped off at 8am and collected at 6pm. On my first day, I was terrified - partly afraid that my secret filming equipment would be discovered, but mostly because apart from a quick nappychanging lesson with a friend's baby, I had no clue how to look after children. As it turned out, no one noticed my inexperience. At 21, I was one of the oldest nursery assistants. Many were trainees and had no idea what they were supposed to be doing. There was no on-the-job training. Instead, we were thrown in at the deep end. At times I was on my own with as many as 13 children, even though the law says carers waiting for their CRB clearance should always be closely supervised at all times. And they shouldn't be allowed to change nappies and take children to the toilet.
With so many children to look after, I could barely make sure they were safe, let alone care for them individually. Instead, it was just damage limitation - I found myself grabbing broken glass, sticks and sharp objects from children as young as three. One day, builders were brought in to fit guards to the radiators because one little boy - weeks earlier - had badly burnt his hand on one.
The other staff told me that the owner, Satnam Parhar, had blamed the staff for not supervising the burned boy properly and that he was only getting the guards fitted because an Ofsted inspection was due. The builders left their power tools inches away from where the children were playing and no one seemed to notice. I spent that particular session on tenterhooks.
The nursery assistants at Buttons were poorly supervised and very poorly paid. I was on about 100 pounds a week - less than the legal minimum wage. It's hardly surprising, then, that many of the staff were less than high-quality carers. I saw two nursery assistants hauling a boy across the nursery by his arm. Then I heard a child being called a "sh*t-bag" and saw a little girl's head being shoved into a mattress on the floor as she didn't want to go. When I complained to the owner that I had been left on my own with 13 children, he refused to accept what I was saying and called the idea crazy.
When I contacted him later, saying I had been undercover for a TV programme, he issued a statement. "The care and safety of our children is of utmost importance. "New joiners to our staff undertake a full induction programme and there are procedures in place to ensure the safety of children. "We take any allegations or criticism very seriously and will investigate these complaints and take appropriate action."
My next childcare job took me to a nursery with the worst possible history. In April 2006, a ten-month-old girl called Georgia Hollick had choked to death on a slice of apple at the Just Learning nursery in Cambourne, Cambridgeshire. The inquest found that her death was accidental and made no criticism of the nursery. However, a subsequent investigation by Ofsted found that children's health and safety were being compromised at the nursery. Nevertheless, it was allowed to reopen less than a month after her death. One day, I had to stop babies eating - and potentially choking on - small Christmas decorations that a member of staff had placed in the sandpit. It was unbelievable that just 19 months after a baby choked to death at this nursery, such chances were still being taken with child safety.
Within days of the result of my investigation being put to them, Just Learning closed the Cambourne nursery and issued a statement saying: "The company has found that its rigorous policies and procedures have been seriously breached in this case and this was one factor considered when it decided to close this nursery. "The issues at Cambourne are isolated to this one nursery." But this still left the question of why such a failing nursery had previously survived a very critical Ofsted report following the death of a young child in its care.
The BBC has been given an internal Ofsted document that refers to the Tory MP Michael Fallon, who was managing director of Just Learning at the time of Georgia Hollick's death. A passage says: "If we cancel this particular setting [nursery] then there are implications for Michael Fallon as he would be automatically disqualified [from running it]." Mr Fallon has since responded, saying: "This is news for me and a matter for Ofsted. I have had no discussions with Ofsted about the fatal accident at Cambourne. "I resigned as MD immediately afterwards. "I strongly endorse the decision of the Board to close the nursery. The breach of the company's procedures was completely unacceptable."
After these two nurseries, I decided to investigate the self-styled upper end of the child-minding business, where I soon realised that the problems are not confined to our own shores. Mark Warner operates at the top of the holiday market, charging up to 8,000 for two weeks abroad for a family of four. It makes a point of offering "award-winning" childcare. That award-winning care didn't extend to checking my CV, contacting my references, doing a criminal records check or even asking to see some basic ID. Again, I could have been anyone.
I worked at Mark Warner's swanky Hilton resort in Dahab, Egypt, where the luxurious hotel rooms are built to resemble a traditional whitewashed Arab village. Despite being promised two days' training at the interview, I was thrown straight in with a group of toddlers. Once, there were two of us looking after 13 children - when Mark Warner's own regulations state there should be no more than six per adult. When I asked about my training, the manager just said: "You don't get official training as such. It's very relaxed, very laid-back here." This is unlikely to be the approach parents think they are paying for.
Next, I was asked to supervise the children on the beach. Again, no one had checked if I had any swimming or rescue qualifications. Even more worrying, I had to take children out on a boat without enough safety gear for all of them. When I raised the issue with my manager, he told me to go ahead with the boat trip anyway. Also, for such a prestigious company with an upmarket reputation, Mark Warner has a very cavalier attitude to the employment laws of the countries where it operates, and is not controlled by Ofsted. Like many of its staff in Dahab, I was there on a tourist visa. Mark Warner should have paid for work permits but instead had us break Egyptian law on their behalf. We were told we should just lie and say we were there on holiday, but Egypt is not the kind of country-where you want to end up in prison.
Three weeks after I returned from Egypt, the disappearance of Madeleine McCann from a Mark Warner resort in Praia da Luz in Portugal made headlines around the world. No one blamed the company or its staff for the little girl's disappearance, but given the case, I assumed the company would toughen up its vetting of nannies. To test this out, a BBC colleague applied for a Mark Warner childcare job and was sent to an upmarket French ski resort.
Her false CV went unchecked and, months after the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, the company still didn't do a CRB check before she started work. Later, I recounted my experiences to Mark Warner's managing director. He refused to be interviewed but issued a statement that said: "It is company policy that all childcare staff employed by Mark Warner must supply two references and submit a form to check their criminal record. "There were clearly two occasions where we failed to do this. That is completely unacceptable and we apologise. "We have now reviewed and strengthened our procedures."
For the final part of my investigation, I discovered that even an inexperienced 21-year old with no qualifications can also fool Ofsted. I borrowed a large house, made no alterations to accommodate young children - despite the fact that no youngster had lived there for 20 years - and applied for a childminder's licence. I admitted to the Ofsted inspector who visited that I had no fireguard, no first aid kit, no stairgates, no safety glass or socket covers. I didn't even have a table for the children to sit at. The building was completely unsuitable. But I did say I had a wish-list containing all those items and planned to install them. That was enough for the inspector and I got the go-ahead. No one ever came back to check up that I had put them in place.
When contacted, Ofsted said in a statement that it would consider making improvements based on the findings that I had uncovered. But it said: "Ours is the most intensive inspection and monitoring system in Europe. Our inspections of nurseries and childminders are rigorous and the vast majority of our inspectors are highly skilled professionals who do a good job. Ofsted is independent. We report without fear or favour." I don't yet have children but having seen what I've seen, I can't imagine I'll ever risk putting my own into childcare.
Source
Some Experts Doubt Obesity Epidemic
Go on, have another doughnut. According to some experts whose views are public health heresy, the jury is still out on how dangerous it is to be fat. "The obesity epidemic has absolutely been exaggerated," said Dr. Vincent Marks, emeritus professor of clinical biochemistry at the University of Surrey. Marks is among a minority of skeptics who doubt the severity of the obesity problem. They claim that the data about the dangers of obesity are mixed and there is little proof that being fat causes problems including high blood pressure, heart disease and cancer. Such views contradict nearly everything doctors have been saying for years.
Being fat has long been blamed for conditions like diabetes, which can lead to heart, kidney and nerve diseases. There is also increasing evidence that certain cancers may be linked to weight gain. "The evidence linking obesity to diabetes and cardiovascular disease is very strong," said Dr. James Hill, director of the Center for Human Nutrition at the University of Colorado. "Type two diabetes rarely happens in people who aren't obese."
But obesity contrarians say that there's no data proving why being fat - in itself - would be dangerous. "There's no good causal connection," said Eric Oliver, author of Fat Politics and a political science professor at the University of Chicago. Blaming obesity for diabetes and heart attacks, Oliver says, is like blaming lung cancer on bad breath rather than on smoking. Excess weight may actually be a red herring, Oliver says, since other factors like exercise, diet or genetic predispositions towards diseases are harder to measure than weight.
In addition to questioning the dangers of being fat, researchers like Marks also criticize oft-repeated alarmist projections about the rise in obesity - like the British government's warning that nearly half of Britain will be obese by 2050. Those simply aren't based on good evidence, they say. According to national health statistics released last month, from 1993 to 2006, "relatively little change" was noted in weight gain, with men and women gaining an average of about 4 kilograms (9 pounds). In children, no significant gains were recorded.
The main problem, obesity skeptics say, is that too many people are considered fat, with the obese and overweight often lumped together. "Being moderately plump is not a health disadvantage," Marks said. "Some overweight people may not look svelte, but they may be perfectly healthy." As defined by the World Health Organization, anyone with a body mass index above 25 is overweight, and anyone above 30 is obese. Most experts agree the distinctions are imperfect and somewhat arbitrary.
Moreover, Marks and others point to research showing the benefits of a few extra kilos (pounds). In 2005, Katherine Flegal of the United States' Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association, finding that overweight people typically live longer than normal-weight people. More than a dozen other studies have come to the same conclusion.
Outrage ensued. Prominent health experts called the research flawed and worried that people would gleefully supersize their meals. "I think some experts found it disturbing that we actually said that overweight people have a lower death risk," Flegal said. In other research, Flegal and colleagues found there to be almost no link between death rates and weight. "The relationship between weight and disease and survival is very complex and we don't have a good handle on why some of these things are related and others are not," Flegal said. She suggested that being fat may help you survive some conditions, but not others.
Doctors have long struggled to explain the obesity paradox - the mystery that in certain conditions like heart attacks, fat patients often have better odds of surviving than thin people. Some experts hypothesize that fat peoples' hearts already work harder than those of thin people, thus giving them a natural edge when their bodies are stressed. "We don't want people to think it's ok to be heavier," said Hill. "But not everybody who gains weight is going to get heart disease or diabetes," he said.
Some obesity skeptics question the motives of experts who make dire predictions about obesity. With millions of dollars for obesity researchers, an industry of anti-fat drugs, and a boom in the number of doctors offering surgeries like stomach-stapling, the more fat people there are, the more profits there will be in selling them solutions.
Experts on both sides of the obesity debate have often criticized WHO's overweight and obesity measures, saying they are too low. When WHO defined the body mass index scores constituting normal, overweight and obese, they appeared to be the result of an independent expert committee convened by WHO. Yet the 1997 Geneva consultation was held jointly with the International Obesity Task Force, an advocacy group whose self-described mission is "to inform the world about the urgency of the (obesity) problem."
According to the task force's most recent available annual report, more than 70 percent of their funding came from Abbott Laboratories and F. Hoffman La-Roche, companies which make top-selling anti-fat pills. The task force remains one of Europe's most influential obesity advocacy groups and continues to work closely with WHO.
The blurred lines between pharmaceutical money and obesity groups have also caused concern in Britain. In 2006, one of the country's top obesity doctors quit the organization he founded to combat obesity, the National Obesity Forum, complaining that its goals had been skewed by drug money. "There's not a lot of money in trying to debunk obesity, but a huge amount in making sure it stays a big problem," said Patrick Basham, a professor of health care policy at Johns Hopkins University.
Still, while skeptics insist that obesity warnings must be taken with a grain of salt, nearly all agree that while a little bit of extra padding may not be too deadly, too much almost certainly is. "The vast majority of people who get labeled under the obesity epidemic are well under 300 pounds and probably are not facing big health consequences," Oliver said. "It's the morbidly obese people who should be worried."
Source
Average NHS waiting times have RISEN under Labour - despite billions "invested"
Hospital waiting times are longer than under the Conservatives, despite 90billion pounds being ploughed into the health service this year alone. The average wait for treatment in hospital is now 49 days, up from 41 days in 1997, the year Labour took power with a promise to "save the NHS". Ministers say they have delivered on their promise to reduce very long waits. By the end of the year no one should wait more than 18 weeks compared with the 18-month waits which were common under the Tories.
But doctors said patients with serious illnesses were among those still waiting too long, while those with comparatively minor problems were being fast-tracked to meet the Government's 18-week target. Many of the big falls in waiting have been seen in conditions such as cataracts and dermatitis and eczema. Yet the figures, obtained by the BBC from the NHS Information Centre which collates statistics on health and social care, show that for some cancers average waiting has increased slightly.
Jonathan Fielden, chairman of the British Medical Association's consultants' committee, said: "All that has happened is that the Government has put an end to the really long waits and the really short waits. "Doctors have been stopped from using their clinical judgment and pushing people through the system when they need to. "Of course, it is good that the really long waits have gone, but it is wrong to say that all patient care has improved because of shorter waits."
Katherine Murphy, of the Patients' Association, said: "These figures make us really question whether patients are getting a better deal. "What concerns me is that patients with serious conditions may be waiting longer than they used to. That is wrong."
Labour has massively increased NHS funding after Tony Blair pledged to bring health spending up to the European average. The NHS budget this year is 90billion, up from 34billion when Labour came to power in 1997. The Treasury projects the total to rise to 110billion in 2010-11. Some of the extra cash that has been ploughed into the service has gone on employing more doctors and nurses and building new hospitals, all of which should bring waiting times down.
But more than half of the money has gone on hugely increased pay for GPs and hospital consultants, more NHS managers, and higher drugs costs. Little progress on reducing waiting times was made in the first years after Labour took power. Even by 2000, there were still 125,000 people waiting more than nine months. But the extra expenditure has seen long waits almost abolished. Ministers say an unavoidable effect of the push to reduce long waits has been to slightly increase the average wait, but this figure has has been coming down since hitting a high of 52 days in 2004/05.
Health minister Ben Bradshaw said: "Our waiting time targets were specifically designed to eradicate unacceptably long waits. "Under the Tories it was not uncommon to wait 18 months or more for an operation. "Tackling long waits leads to a short-term increase in the average wait as the backlog is cleared." Latest figures show that only 72 per cent of patients are waiting less than the Government target of 18 weeks, and that waiting times are rising in a quarter of trusts.
But Mr Bradshaw says he remains confident the NHS will meet its target. Commenting on the rise in average waiting times, Liberal Democrat health spokesman Norman Lamb said: "These figures massively undermine Labour's claims to have made a substantial difference to NHS waiting times." Andrew Lansley, Tory health spokesman, said: "This shows how the bigger picture gets neglected in order to meet the Government's top-down targets. "In meeting one target, another patient misses out. It is simply unfair."
However John Appleby, of the health think tank the King's Fund, said the Government was right to target long waits. "The whole point of the targets was to change clinical priorities, because doctors seemed content to put up with long waits for their patients - while patients were not content," he said. "Despite what the BMA say, there is no evidence that vital priorities such as urgent cases have been delayed. "One would expect the average wait to go up but it is now on the way down and we can expect that to continue."
• The NHS is heading for a 1.8billion surplus in England, just months after being forced to cut jobs and close wards. Ministers say the size of the surplus is just 2 per cent of turnover and makes good business sense, but patients' groups said it was equivalent to 1p off income tax.
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There's a brilliant British video HERE about Islam. There is still SOME straight talk left in Britain.
British grit still exists: "War hero Captain Bernie Bambury's leg was torn off in an 80mph toboggan crash - and he did not even realise it was missing. Bernie, 32, COMPLETED the famous Cresta Run, then asked: "Is my ankle broken?" He was told: "It's not broken, it's gone." The dashing Army officer survived six months in Iraq unscathed, only to suffer the horrific accident in St Moritz, Switzerland. Swiss microsurgeons sewed the limb back on. But after nine operations they told Bernie it would be two years before he could walk - and he might never regain full mobility. So the tough soldier from the 4th Battalion The Rifles ordered astonished medics: "Cut it off." Yesterday he was fitted with a false leg and hopes to be back leading his men within a year. He told The Sun: "Amputation gave the best prospects for the rest of my life and the swiftest return to duty." Bernie, based at Bulford, Wilts, tackled the fearsome Cresta Run - nearly a mile of solid ice - at an Army tobogganing event in January. His right foot hit a marker post and the leg, severed below the knee, was recovered hundreds of yards up the course after he crossed the finish."
Another black psychopath: "A London fitness instructor has been jailed for life after he went on a first date armed with a carving knife and murdered a businesswoman by stabbing her more than 30 times. Karl Taylor, 27, was told by Old Bailey judge Giles Forrester that he would not be eligible for parole for at least 30 years for Kate Beagley's brutal murder. The 32-year-old, of Walton-on-Thames, was stabbed in the face and neck during her date with Taylor, the court was told. Prosecutors said Taylor, who also worked as a football coach, met his victim in the CC Club at the Trocadero in Piccadilly, central London, on May 20 2007. After dancing they arranged another meeting, with their first date 10 days later in Chiswick, West London. After their first drink, Beagley - described as "well-travelled, with a great sense of adventure" by friends and family - drove Taylor to Richmond Hill where they had another drink. They then walked to a bench overlooking the River Thames, where she was killed. After her father, Alan, had reported her missing, Taylor was traced and interviewed, where he could not offer an explanation for the killing."
A primary school has been accused of being alarmist for covering up the faces of pupils on its website - apparently to protect them from paedophiles. Bizarrely, the images have been altered with the type of smiley faces popular during the Acid House dance craze of the 1980s. The decision was taken at Cann Hall Primary School in Clacton, Essex. Headmistress Clare Reece said yesterday: "The public nature of the internet is an issue we feel strongly about. "Not all parents want their children's picture on there. "You can't say what is going to happen with any of those pictures."
She said that the photographs were printed unaltered in the school newsletter which was sent to parents. But on the primary's website, the children's faces are obscured. The school guarantees the content of the site is "child friendly", adding: "In order to protect our children, we have made the decision not to include any photos of our pupils on this website."
Previously, faces were simply blurred, but newer pictures, including action shots of the athletics tournament, use the smiley faces. However, one child in a line-up of medal winners has been singled out - he alone has been given a sad face.
Children's charity NCH yesterday said that schools were right to be cautious about putting children's pictures on the internet if they were vulnerable or in care. However, spokesman Shaun Kelly added: "The images shocked me, actually. What message is it giving? "It looks very, very odd. If you want to obscure children's faces you can obscure them with pixels. "We need to be cautious about taking images of children out of the media."
Frank Furedi, a sociology professor at the University of Kent, said the school was being alarmist. "Every time a school takes silly measures, it says we see the world through the eyes of a paedophile. "They think that any innocent picture of school children will somehow be subverted and manipulated. "These pictures serve a very important purpose of giving children clear images of their experiences, something they can remember later in life. "Depriving ourselves of these experiences is not only irrational but serves no purpose whatsoever."
However, some parents at the school said they supported the decision. One said: "I wouldn't want my child's face on a disgusting site.' But Michaela Day, 35, whose eight-year-old son, Connor, attends the school, said: "If they are covering the children's faces, what is the point of using the photographs? It's a waste of time."
A spokesman for the Department for Children, Schools and Families said that it advises schools to get permission from parents or carers in writing before publishing photographs of pupils on a website or in a prospectus. However, this is not a legal requirement. The school took down the controversial pictures from its website at around 3pm yesterday. A message on the website said: "Our newsletter section is undergoing maintenance. Back soon!"
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Socialist Britain: Your government will look after you (NOT)
The shocking truth behind daycare at nurseries and creches: All covered up by deep layers of bullsh*it and pervasive official negligence. So parents are lulled into a very mistaken sense of security
Britain's childcare industry is booming. Every working day, more than a million parents drop off their precious little cargos at childminders and private nurseries. All of them do it firm in the belief that those they trust with their babies are highly-qualified, strictly regulated and genuine, caring people. Terrifyingly, they are wrong. During an eight-month investigation for the BBC1 investigative programme Whistleblower, I uncovered a childcare culture where a new carer's criminal records and references are never checked, yet they will immediately be left alone with young, vulnerable children.
I was initially alerted to the scandal by an inspector for Ofsted (the government agency that regulates childminders and nurseries). She said that, as a parent of two children and having inspected 700 nurseries with her colleagues, she had found only five that she would have let her own children attend. She also said that Ofsted inspection reports - the only safeguards that parents have to go on when choosing a nursery - aren't worth the paper they're printed on. "We are literally skimming the surface," she said. "We are told constantly: "If you don't see a problem, don't look for one. Take a quick look and get out." "The priority for all Ofsted inspectors is to meet their targets. If they don't, they are disciplined. Targets take priority over safeguarding children."
I decided to test these claims by going undercover and getting myself a job in a number of nurseries. I thought I would encounter difficulties since I had no children and, apart from a couple of babysitting stints, no experience of looking after babies and toddlers. Yet I needn't have worried. None of the nurseries with which I got jobs bothered to check my fake CV or fictitious references. Even Ofsted, which at least checked my criminal record, registered me as a childminder despite the premises where I was looking after the children not being at all suitable.
My first job was at the Buttons nursery in Ealing, West London. We'd had a tip-off that its supervision of babies and toddlers was unacceptable. After a cursory interview, I was appointed as a nursery assistant. No one checked my references in the five weeks I was there and even though the law states that everyone working with children has to have their background checked by Home Office agency the Criminal Records Bureau (CRB), the all-clear didn't come back until I had left.
Buttons is based in a rambling, 19th-century detached house and caters to the area's professional middle classes. It was not cheap, charging 1,100 pounds a month for a child who is dropped off at 8am and collected at 6pm. On my first day, I was terrified - partly afraid that my secret filming equipment would be discovered, but mostly because apart from a quick nappychanging lesson with a friend's baby, I had no clue how to look after children. As it turned out, no one noticed my inexperience. At 21, I was one of the oldest nursery assistants. Many were trainees and had no idea what they were supposed to be doing. There was no on-the-job training. Instead, we were thrown in at the deep end. At times I was on my own with as many as 13 children, even though the law says carers waiting for their CRB clearance should always be closely supervised at all times. And they shouldn't be allowed to change nappies and take children to the toilet.
With so many children to look after, I could barely make sure they were safe, let alone care for them individually. Instead, it was just damage limitation - I found myself grabbing broken glass, sticks and sharp objects from children as young as three. One day, builders were brought in to fit guards to the radiators because one little boy - weeks earlier - had badly burnt his hand on one.
The other staff told me that the owner, Satnam Parhar, had blamed the staff for not supervising the burned boy properly and that he was only getting the guards fitted because an Ofsted inspection was due. The builders left their power tools inches away from where the children were playing and no one seemed to notice. I spent that particular session on tenterhooks.
The nursery assistants at Buttons were poorly supervised and very poorly paid. I was on about 100 pounds a week - less than the legal minimum wage. It's hardly surprising, then, that many of the staff were less than high-quality carers. I saw two nursery assistants hauling a boy across the nursery by his arm. Then I heard a child being called a "sh*t-bag" and saw a little girl's head being shoved into a mattress on the floor as she didn't want to go. When I complained to the owner that I had been left on my own with 13 children, he refused to accept what I was saying and called the idea crazy.
When I contacted him later, saying I had been undercover for a TV programme, he issued a statement. "The care and safety of our children is of utmost importance. "New joiners to our staff undertake a full induction programme and there are procedures in place to ensure the safety of children. "We take any allegations or criticism very seriously and will investigate these complaints and take appropriate action."
My next childcare job took me to a nursery with the worst possible history. In April 2006, a ten-month-old girl called Georgia Hollick had choked to death on a slice of apple at the Just Learning nursery in Cambourne, Cambridgeshire. The inquest found that her death was accidental and made no criticism of the nursery. However, a subsequent investigation by Ofsted found that children's health and safety were being compromised at the nursery. Nevertheless, it was allowed to reopen less than a month after her death. One day, I had to stop babies eating - and potentially choking on - small Christmas decorations that a member of staff had placed in the sandpit. It was unbelievable that just 19 months after a baby choked to death at this nursery, such chances were still being taken with child safety.
Within days of the result of my investigation being put to them, Just Learning closed the Cambourne nursery and issued a statement saying: "The company has found that its rigorous policies and procedures have been seriously breached in this case and this was one factor considered when it decided to close this nursery. "The issues at Cambourne are isolated to this one nursery." But this still left the question of why such a failing nursery had previously survived a very critical Ofsted report following the death of a young child in its care.
The BBC has been given an internal Ofsted document that refers to the Tory MP Michael Fallon, who was managing director of Just Learning at the time of Georgia Hollick's death. A passage says: "If we cancel this particular setting [nursery] then there are implications for Michael Fallon as he would be automatically disqualified [from running it]." Mr Fallon has since responded, saying: "This is news for me and a matter for Ofsted. I have had no discussions with Ofsted about the fatal accident at Cambourne. "I resigned as MD immediately afterwards. "I strongly endorse the decision of the Board to close the nursery. The breach of the company's procedures was completely unacceptable."
After these two nurseries, I decided to investigate the self-styled upper end of the child-minding business, where I soon realised that the problems are not confined to our own shores. Mark Warner operates at the top of the holiday market, charging up to 8,000 for two weeks abroad for a family of four. It makes a point of offering "award-winning" childcare. That award-winning care didn't extend to checking my CV, contacting my references, doing a criminal records check or even asking to see some basic ID. Again, I could have been anyone.
I worked at Mark Warner's swanky Hilton resort in Dahab, Egypt, where the luxurious hotel rooms are built to resemble a traditional whitewashed Arab village. Despite being promised two days' training at the interview, I was thrown straight in with a group of toddlers. Once, there were two of us looking after 13 children - when Mark Warner's own regulations state there should be no more than six per adult. When I asked about my training, the manager just said: "You don't get official training as such. It's very relaxed, very laid-back here." This is unlikely to be the approach parents think they are paying for.
Next, I was asked to supervise the children on the beach. Again, no one had checked if I had any swimming or rescue qualifications. Even more worrying, I had to take children out on a boat without enough safety gear for all of them. When I raised the issue with my manager, he told me to go ahead with the boat trip anyway. Also, for such a prestigious company with an upmarket reputation, Mark Warner has a very cavalier attitude to the employment laws of the countries where it operates, and is not controlled by Ofsted. Like many of its staff in Dahab, I was there on a tourist visa. Mark Warner should have paid for work permits but instead had us break Egyptian law on their behalf. We were told we should just lie and say we were there on holiday, but Egypt is not the kind of country-where you want to end up in prison.
Three weeks after I returned from Egypt, the disappearance of Madeleine McCann from a Mark Warner resort in Praia da Luz in Portugal made headlines around the world. No one blamed the company or its staff for the little girl's disappearance, but given the case, I assumed the company would toughen up its vetting of nannies. To test this out, a BBC colleague applied for a Mark Warner childcare job and was sent to an upmarket French ski resort.
Her false CV went unchecked and, months after the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, the company still didn't do a CRB check before she started work. Later, I recounted my experiences to Mark Warner's managing director. He refused to be interviewed but issued a statement that said: "It is company policy that all childcare staff employed by Mark Warner must supply two references and submit a form to check their criminal record. "There were clearly two occasions where we failed to do this. That is completely unacceptable and we apologise. "We have now reviewed and strengthened our procedures."
For the final part of my investigation, I discovered that even an inexperienced 21-year old with no qualifications can also fool Ofsted. I borrowed a large house, made no alterations to accommodate young children - despite the fact that no youngster had lived there for 20 years - and applied for a childminder's licence. I admitted to the Ofsted inspector who visited that I had no fireguard, no first aid kit, no stairgates, no safety glass or socket covers. I didn't even have a table for the children to sit at. The building was completely unsuitable. But I did say I had a wish-list containing all those items and planned to install them. That was enough for the inspector and I got the go-ahead. No one ever came back to check up that I had put them in place.
When contacted, Ofsted said in a statement that it would consider making improvements based on the findings that I had uncovered. But it said: "Ours is the most intensive inspection and monitoring system in Europe. Our inspections of nurseries and childminders are rigorous and the vast majority of our inspectors are highly skilled professionals who do a good job. Ofsted is independent. We report without fear or favour." I don't yet have children but having seen what I've seen, I can't imagine I'll ever risk putting my own into childcare.
Source
Some Experts Doubt Obesity Epidemic
Go on, have another doughnut. According to some experts whose views are public health heresy, the jury is still out on how dangerous it is to be fat. "The obesity epidemic has absolutely been exaggerated," said Dr. Vincent Marks, emeritus professor of clinical biochemistry at the University of Surrey. Marks is among a minority of skeptics who doubt the severity of the obesity problem. They claim that the data about the dangers of obesity are mixed and there is little proof that being fat causes problems including high blood pressure, heart disease and cancer. Such views contradict nearly everything doctors have been saying for years.
Being fat has long been blamed for conditions like diabetes, which can lead to heart, kidney and nerve diseases. There is also increasing evidence that certain cancers may be linked to weight gain. "The evidence linking obesity to diabetes and cardiovascular disease is very strong," said Dr. James Hill, director of the Center for Human Nutrition at the University of Colorado. "Type two diabetes rarely happens in people who aren't obese."
But obesity contrarians say that there's no data proving why being fat - in itself - would be dangerous. "There's no good causal connection," said Eric Oliver, author of Fat Politics and a political science professor at the University of Chicago. Blaming obesity for diabetes and heart attacks, Oliver says, is like blaming lung cancer on bad breath rather than on smoking. Excess weight may actually be a red herring, Oliver says, since other factors like exercise, diet or genetic predispositions towards diseases are harder to measure than weight.
In addition to questioning the dangers of being fat, researchers like Marks also criticize oft-repeated alarmist projections about the rise in obesity - like the British government's warning that nearly half of Britain will be obese by 2050. Those simply aren't based on good evidence, they say. According to national health statistics released last month, from 1993 to 2006, "relatively little change" was noted in weight gain, with men and women gaining an average of about 4 kilograms (9 pounds). In children, no significant gains were recorded.
The main problem, obesity skeptics say, is that too many people are considered fat, with the obese and overweight often lumped together. "Being moderately plump is not a health disadvantage," Marks said. "Some overweight people may not look svelte, but they may be perfectly healthy." As defined by the World Health Organization, anyone with a body mass index above 25 is overweight, and anyone above 30 is obese. Most experts agree the distinctions are imperfect and somewhat arbitrary.
Moreover, Marks and others point to research showing the benefits of a few extra kilos (pounds). In 2005, Katherine Flegal of the United States' Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association, finding that overweight people typically live longer than normal-weight people. More than a dozen other studies have come to the same conclusion.
Outrage ensued. Prominent health experts called the research flawed and worried that people would gleefully supersize their meals. "I think some experts found it disturbing that we actually said that overweight people have a lower death risk," Flegal said. In other research, Flegal and colleagues found there to be almost no link between death rates and weight. "The relationship between weight and disease and survival is very complex and we don't have a good handle on why some of these things are related and others are not," Flegal said. She suggested that being fat may help you survive some conditions, but not others.
Doctors have long struggled to explain the obesity paradox - the mystery that in certain conditions like heart attacks, fat patients often have better odds of surviving than thin people. Some experts hypothesize that fat peoples' hearts already work harder than those of thin people, thus giving them a natural edge when their bodies are stressed. "We don't want people to think it's ok to be heavier," said Hill. "But not everybody who gains weight is going to get heart disease or diabetes," he said.
Some obesity skeptics question the motives of experts who make dire predictions about obesity. With millions of dollars for obesity researchers, an industry of anti-fat drugs, and a boom in the number of doctors offering surgeries like stomach-stapling, the more fat people there are, the more profits there will be in selling them solutions.
Experts on both sides of the obesity debate have often criticized WHO's overweight and obesity measures, saying they are too low. When WHO defined the body mass index scores constituting normal, overweight and obese, they appeared to be the result of an independent expert committee convened by WHO. Yet the 1997 Geneva consultation was held jointly with the International Obesity Task Force, an advocacy group whose self-described mission is "to inform the world about the urgency of the (obesity) problem."
According to the task force's most recent available annual report, more than 70 percent of their funding came from Abbott Laboratories and F. Hoffman La-Roche, companies which make top-selling anti-fat pills. The task force remains one of Europe's most influential obesity advocacy groups and continues to work closely with WHO.
The blurred lines between pharmaceutical money and obesity groups have also caused concern in Britain. In 2006, one of the country's top obesity doctors quit the organization he founded to combat obesity, the National Obesity Forum, complaining that its goals had been skewed by drug money. "There's not a lot of money in trying to debunk obesity, but a huge amount in making sure it stays a big problem," said Patrick Basham, a professor of health care policy at Johns Hopkins University.
Still, while skeptics insist that obesity warnings must be taken with a grain of salt, nearly all agree that while a little bit of extra padding may not be too deadly, too much almost certainly is. "The vast majority of people who get labeled under the obesity epidemic are well under 300 pounds and probably are not facing big health consequences," Oliver said. "It's the morbidly obese people who should be worried."
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Average NHS waiting times have RISEN under Labour - despite billions "invested"
Hospital waiting times are longer than under the Conservatives, despite 90billion pounds being ploughed into the health service this year alone. The average wait for treatment in hospital is now 49 days, up from 41 days in 1997, the year Labour took power with a promise to "save the NHS". Ministers say they have delivered on their promise to reduce very long waits. By the end of the year no one should wait more than 18 weeks compared with the 18-month waits which were common under the Tories.
But doctors said patients with serious illnesses were among those still waiting too long, while those with comparatively minor problems were being fast-tracked to meet the Government's 18-week target. Many of the big falls in waiting have been seen in conditions such as cataracts and dermatitis and eczema. Yet the figures, obtained by the BBC from the NHS Information Centre which collates statistics on health and social care, show that for some cancers average waiting has increased slightly.
Jonathan Fielden, chairman of the British Medical Association's consultants' committee, said: "All that has happened is that the Government has put an end to the really long waits and the really short waits. "Doctors have been stopped from using their clinical judgment and pushing people through the system when they need to. "Of course, it is good that the really long waits have gone, but it is wrong to say that all patient care has improved because of shorter waits."
Katherine Murphy, of the Patients' Association, said: "These figures make us really question whether patients are getting a better deal. "What concerns me is that patients with serious conditions may be waiting longer than they used to. That is wrong."
Labour has massively increased NHS funding after Tony Blair pledged to bring health spending up to the European average. The NHS budget this year is 90billion, up from 34billion when Labour came to power in 1997. The Treasury projects the total to rise to 110billion in 2010-11. Some of the extra cash that has been ploughed into the service has gone on employing more doctors and nurses and building new hospitals, all of which should bring waiting times down.
But more than half of the money has gone on hugely increased pay for GPs and hospital consultants, more NHS managers, and higher drugs costs. Little progress on reducing waiting times was made in the first years after Labour took power. Even by 2000, there were still 125,000 people waiting more than nine months. But the extra expenditure has seen long waits almost abolished. Ministers say an unavoidable effect of the push to reduce long waits has been to slightly increase the average wait, but this figure has has been coming down since hitting a high of 52 days in 2004/05.
Health minister Ben Bradshaw said: "Our waiting time targets were specifically designed to eradicate unacceptably long waits. "Under the Tories it was not uncommon to wait 18 months or more for an operation. "Tackling long waits leads to a short-term increase in the average wait as the backlog is cleared." Latest figures show that only 72 per cent of patients are waiting less than the Government target of 18 weeks, and that waiting times are rising in a quarter of trusts.
But Mr Bradshaw says he remains confident the NHS will meet its target. Commenting on the rise in average waiting times, Liberal Democrat health spokesman Norman Lamb said: "These figures massively undermine Labour's claims to have made a substantial difference to NHS waiting times." Andrew Lansley, Tory health spokesman, said: "This shows how the bigger picture gets neglected in order to meet the Government's top-down targets. "In meeting one target, another patient misses out. It is simply unfair."
However John Appleby, of the health think tank the King's Fund, said the Government was right to target long waits. "The whole point of the targets was to change clinical priorities, because doctors seemed content to put up with long waits for their patients - while patients were not content," he said. "Despite what the BMA say, there is no evidence that vital priorities such as urgent cases have been delayed. "One would expect the average wait to go up but it is now on the way down and we can expect that to continue."
• The NHS is heading for a 1.8billion surplus in England, just months after being forced to cut jobs and close wards. Ministers say the size of the surplus is just 2 per cent of turnover and makes good business sense, but patients' groups said it was equivalent to 1p off income tax.
Source
There's a brilliant British video HERE about Islam. There is still SOME straight talk left in Britain.
British grit still exists: "War hero Captain Bernie Bambury's leg was torn off in an 80mph toboggan crash - and he did not even realise it was missing. Bernie, 32, COMPLETED the famous Cresta Run, then asked: "Is my ankle broken?" He was told: "It's not broken, it's gone." The dashing Army officer survived six months in Iraq unscathed, only to suffer the horrific accident in St Moritz, Switzerland. Swiss microsurgeons sewed the limb back on. But after nine operations they told Bernie it would be two years before he could walk - and he might never regain full mobility. So the tough soldier from the 4th Battalion The Rifles ordered astonished medics: "Cut it off." Yesterday he was fitted with a false leg and hopes to be back leading his men within a year. He told The Sun: "Amputation gave the best prospects for the rest of my life and the swiftest return to duty." Bernie, based at Bulford, Wilts, tackled the fearsome Cresta Run - nearly a mile of solid ice - at an Army tobogganing event in January. His right foot hit a marker post and the leg, severed below the knee, was recovered hundreds of yards up the course after he crossed the finish."
Another black psychopath: "A London fitness instructor has been jailed for life after he went on a first date armed with a carving knife and murdered a businesswoman by stabbing her more than 30 times. Karl Taylor, 27, was told by Old Bailey judge Giles Forrester that he would not be eligible for parole for at least 30 years for Kate Beagley's brutal murder. The 32-year-old, of Walton-on-Thames, was stabbed in the face and neck during her date with Taylor, the court was told. Prosecutors said Taylor, who also worked as a football coach, met his victim in the CC Club at the Trocadero in Piccadilly, central London, on May 20 2007. After dancing they arranged another meeting, with their first date 10 days later in Chiswick, West London. After their first drink, Beagley - described as "well-travelled, with a great sense of adventure" by friends and family - drove Taylor to Richmond Hill where they had another drink. They then walked to a bench overlooking the River Thames, where she was killed. After her father, Alan, had reported her missing, Taylor was traced and interviewed, where he could not offer an explanation for the killing."
Thursday, March 06, 2008
British police chief: official figures miss out millions of crimes
Surprise! Surprise! Official British statistics on anything these days are about as trustworthy as Stalin's old production figures
OFFICIAL crime figures are "misleading" and "flawed" because they fail to include as many as six out of 10 crimes, one of Britain's most senior police officers has admitted. Ian Johnston, chairman of the police chiefs' crime committee, says the figures used by ministers and police are misleading because they exclude much violent crime and need to be "bolstered" in order to restore public trust.
He said: "People don't believe what the government and the police tell them about the crime figures. "Some of the figures tell the truth and are pretty accurate. But the British Crime Survey [BCS] is inadequate; it's partially misleading. It doesn't provide the true scale of crime in the UK."
Johnston, who is chief constable of the British Transport Police and chairman of the crime committee of the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo), said the BCS and official crime statistics needed to be overhauled. He said the official figures missed out millions of crimes because of "under reporting". He said the BCS excluded all crimes among those under 16 ? at least 500,000 according to reliable estimates. Many of those offences include muggings, especially involving the theft of iPods and mobile phones. "It doesn't include crimes against people in institutions such as those in university accommodation, old people's homes and hospitals," he said.
Johnston said he had repeatedly raised the problem with ministers and officials, but no action had been taken. He said he agreed with the findings of an independent review in 2006 of crime statistics, which found that 60% of all crime was not reported to the police. According to the most recent crime figures for 2006-7 there were 5.42m crimes reported to police. That would mean a further 8.13m crimes went unreported.
Source
Surprise! Surprise! Official British statistics on anything these days are about as trustworthy as Stalin's old production figures
OFFICIAL crime figures are "misleading" and "flawed" because they fail to include as many as six out of 10 crimes, one of Britain's most senior police officers has admitted. Ian Johnston, chairman of the police chiefs' crime committee, says the figures used by ministers and police are misleading because they exclude much violent crime and need to be "bolstered" in order to restore public trust.
He said: "People don't believe what the government and the police tell them about the crime figures. "Some of the figures tell the truth and are pretty accurate. But the British Crime Survey [BCS] is inadequate; it's partially misleading. It doesn't provide the true scale of crime in the UK."
Johnston, who is chief constable of the British Transport Police and chairman of the crime committee of the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo), said the BCS and official crime statistics needed to be overhauled. He said the official figures missed out millions of crimes because of "under reporting". He said the BCS excluded all crimes among those under 16 ? at least 500,000 according to reliable estimates. Many of those offences include muggings, especially involving the theft of iPods and mobile phones. "It doesn't include crimes against people in institutions such as those in university accommodation, old people's homes and hospitals," he said.
Johnston said he had repeatedly raised the problem with ministers and officials, but no action had been taken. He said he agreed with the findings of an independent review in 2006 of crime statistics, which found that 60% of all crime was not reported to the police. According to the most recent crime figures for 2006-7 there were 5.42m crimes reported to police. That would mean a further 8.13m crimes went unreported.
Source
Wednesday, March 05, 2008
Amazingly erratic NHS financial management
Running the NHS is like steering a supertanker. It responds with majestic inertia to a whirl on the wheel, but before you know where you are, you are ten miles out to sea. Given a simple objective, the service seldom fails. But it can easily overcompensate. Two years ago the order went out to balance the books and save Patricia Hewitt’s job as Health Secretary. The books have been duly balanced, though Ms Hewitt was still cast to the sharks. But, having eliminated the deficits, the NHS is now heading for an embarrassingly large surplus of almost £1.8 billion this financial year.
Under Treasury rules all of this money stays with the NHS. But that is small compensation for the hundreds of patients denied access to modern drugs this year because the NHS said that it couldn’t afford them. It also makes the promise by Andrew Lansley, the Shadow Health Secretary, to spend still more on the NHS look even more ill-timed.
Where will the money be spent? The Department of Health would like us to believe that it will be invested in new and innovative services. (The art of making spending sound virtuous is to call it investment.) In practice, all that will happen is that the NHS will relax its controls. The cost savings were made in 2006-07 by squeezing emergency care, reducing the prices paid to hospitals for such care and cutting staff by 8,500 – the first fall in numbers for ten years. Staff numbers only have to begin creeping up again and the surplus will disappear. Cost-of-living salary increases have also been under tight control, which cannot last for ever.
And the whopping surpluses made by the strategic health authorities have come in part from raiding their training budgets. That is another short-term economy that cannot realistically be extended indefinitely.
So, the impression that the NHS has suddenly become much more efficient is, alas, an illusion. It has jammed on the brakes, squeezed its staff and denied some patients the care they would take for granted in other countries. As a result, it is in surplus. But it won’t last.
Source
Turn your nose up at eco-snobs
What was it, this frisson that passed between the young woman behind the counter at Pret A Manger and me? It wasn't flirtation, exactly. It was more conspiratorial than that. A knowing look. A social judgment shared. As she asked me if I wanted a plastic bag for my two items - a (wild) salmon sandwich and a banana - the man at the head of the queue next to mine was asked the same question by another assistant. He had a sandwich and an apple. The point is, I said no. He said yes. That was when the look was exchanged
That, I am ashamed to admit, was the moment I felt superior, if only by one degree, if only for a second. The man had committed a faux pas. He had transgressed an unwritten ethical code. He had fallen foul of the new morality, which actually, if you think about it, is also the new snobbery. It is apparent everywhere. In a restaurant the other night our companions asked us if we wanted sparkling water or whether we were happy with a jug of tap. The clue to the correct answer was in the word "happy". We went with the tap. It wasn't that we were being cheap - but we probably were being a little smug. My wife and I are paid-up members of the enlightened middle classes, you see. Our consciousnesses have been raised. We are E, the modern equivalent of U.
Just as Nancy Mitford divided society into the upper classes and the aspiring middle classes - that is, into U and Non-U - so society is being divided into the environmentally aware and environmentally unaware, or E and Non-E. It satisfies a need we seem to have to judge one another. The modern equivalent of saying "toilet", "serviette" or "pardon" is leaving your television on stand-by, driving a Chelsea tractor [SUV], arriving at Waitrose [a supermarket that believes in "Corporate Social Responsibility"] without your own heavy-duty carrier bags, popping into Starbucks without your own reusable mug, walking past the shelves selling organic, Fairtrade and free-range, or flying long-haul when you don't really need to (and without offsetting your carbon footprint). I tell you, it's a social minefield out there.
Even going to Glastonbury [A mostly hippy festival which is supposed to be "spiritual"] has become Non-E. I know - that surprises me, too. I thought Glastonbury was the ultimate in environmental chic, a demonstration that you suckle at the teat of Mother Earth, that you are in touch with your inner solstice. But no - for the bien pensants, Glastonbury is ruled out this year. And this comes straight from the top: Thom Yorke, the lead singer of Radiohead. Why? Because it doesn't have "an adequate public transport infrastructure in place". Radiohead, he added in an article in the Sun on Thursday, "are doing everything we can to minimise our impact on the environment".
Hmm. Could this be the moment when the backlash starts? It is, after all, a scientifically verifiable fact there is nothing in this world more annoying than being lectured by a pop star. According to this premise, the blame for the Iraq war rests squarely on the shoulders of Ms Dynamite. Had she not argued in March 2003 the invasion should not be allowed to happen, it wouldn't have happened. Her annoying intervention was, for George W Bush and Tony Blair, the tipping point.
Being harangued by a newspaper comes a close second. The Independent has been banging the environmental drum for a few years now - ever since its editor-in-chief, Simon Kelner, had lunch with Laurie David, Hollywood's richest and most glamorous eco-warrior, the woman who holds "eco-salons" for Leonardo Di Caprio, Cameron Diaz, Angelina Jolie et al. But at least the Independent?'s heart is in the right place.
More disturbing is the come-lately arrival on the eco-worthy scene of the Daily Mail. About five years ago that paper's standard response to an eco story was merciless ridicule. Last week it dedicated its front page to a campaign to stop us using plastic bags. Perhaps its canny editor had tested the air and knew that Sainsbury's and Tesco were about to announce plans to reduce plastic bags by a billion a year anyway. Hmm, again.
Being lectured by a posh person comes third. I wonder how much longer the green revolution took to filter into the mainstream because the Prince of Wales was leading it. Don't get me wrong, I think he is a visionary, a true philosopher prince. But given that the other two leading figures in the green movement, the Eton-educated Jonathon Porritt and the Stowe-educated George Monbiot, are also pretty posh, there may have been some inverted snobbery in the slowness of the eco uptake.
On the other hand, perhaps in some subliminal way this association of greenness with poshness explains the current vogue for going green among the aspiring middle classes. David Cameron (Eton-educated, of course, and for once this seems relevant to the discussion) has been canny in the way he has exploited this fashion.
I hope there isn't a backlash, by the way. I'm all for recycling, sustainability, diversity, lowering carbon emissions and everything. But I do think the eco-awareness game has to be played more subtly than it is being played at the moment. When the BSE scare was at its height, there were those contrarians among us who made a point of ordering rare beef as a gesture of defiance. Others deliberately wore fur when that became the cause celebre.
When councils start preaching at us, that really winds us up. If people were allowed to use recycling bins when they needed to, I reckon they would. But we resent being treated like children and told we can't have collections every week because we don't know what's best for us.
And how galling it must be for my parents' generation to be told not to waste things when they have lived through rationing and know all about the benefits of frugality. If there is one thing the British hate more than having their environment needlessly destroyed, overheated or squandered, it is being preached at by busybodies, puritans and snobs.
The eco-snobs are the worst. It is not enough they get to feel better about themselves for doing the right thing environmentally; they have to make someone else feel worse. Make them feel small, vulgar, immoral. I caught myself doing it in that queue the other day. And shame on me for that.
Source
There is a new lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- on his usual vastly "incorrect" themes of race and IQ.
Running the NHS is like steering a supertanker. It responds with majestic inertia to a whirl on the wheel, but before you know where you are, you are ten miles out to sea. Given a simple objective, the service seldom fails. But it can easily overcompensate. Two years ago the order went out to balance the books and save Patricia Hewitt’s job as Health Secretary. The books have been duly balanced, though Ms Hewitt was still cast to the sharks. But, having eliminated the deficits, the NHS is now heading for an embarrassingly large surplus of almost £1.8 billion this financial year.
Under Treasury rules all of this money stays with the NHS. But that is small compensation for the hundreds of patients denied access to modern drugs this year because the NHS said that it couldn’t afford them. It also makes the promise by Andrew Lansley, the Shadow Health Secretary, to spend still more on the NHS look even more ill-timed.
Where will the money be spent? The Department of Health would like us to believe that it will be invested in new and innovative services. (The art of making spending sound virtuous is to call it investment.) In practice, all that will happen is that the NHS will relax its controls. The cost savings were made in 2006-07 by squeezing emergency care, reducing the prices paid to hospitals for such care and cutting staff by 8,500 – the first fall in numbers for ten years. Staff numbers only have to begin creeping up again and the surplus will disappear. Cost-of-living salary increases have also been under tight control, which cannot last for ever.
And the whopping surpluses made by the strategic health authorities have come in part from raiding their training budgets. That is another short-term economy that cannot realistically be extended indefinitely.
So, the impression that the NHS has suddenly become much more efficient is, alas, an illusion. It has jammed on the brakes, squeezed its staff and denied some patients the care they would take for granted in other countries. As a result, it is in surplus. But it won’t last.
Source
Turn your nose up at eco-snobs
What was it, this frisson that passed between the young woman behind the counter at Pret A Manger and me? It wasn't flirtation, exactly. It was more conspiratorial than that. A knowing look. A social judgment shared. As she asked me if I wanted a plastic bag for my two items - a (wild) salmon sandwich and a banana - the man at the head of the queue next to mine was asked the same question by another assistant. He had a sandwich and an apple. The point is, I said no. He said yes. That was when the look was exchanged
That, I am ashamed to admit, was the moment I felt superior, if only by one degree, if only for a second. The man had committed a faux pas. He had transgressed an unwritten ethical code. He had fallen foul of the new morality, which actually, if you think about it, is also the new snobbery. It is apparent everywhere. In a restaurant the other night our companions asked us if we wanted sparkling water or whether we were happy with a jug of tap. The clue to the correct answer was in the word "happy". We went with the tap. It wasn't that we were being cheap - but we probably were being a little smug. My wife and I are paid-up members of the enlightened middle classes, you see. Our consciousnesses have been raised. We are E, the modern equivalent of U.
Just as Nancy Mitford divided society into the upper classes and the aspiring middle classes - that is, into U and Non-U - so society is being divided into the environmentally aware and environmentally unaware, or E and Non-E. It satisfies a need we seem to have to judge one another. The modern equivalent of saying "toilet", "serviette" or "pardon" is leaving your television on stand-by, driving a Chelsea tractor [SUV], arriving at Waitrose [a supermarket that believes in "Corporate Social Responsibility"] without your own heavy-duty carrier bags, popping into Starbucks without your own reusable mug, walking past the shelves selling organic, Fairtrade and free-range, or flying long-haul when you don't really need to (and without offsetting your carbon footprint). I tell you, it's a social minefield out there.
Even going to Glastonbury [A mostly hippy festival which is supposed to be "spiritual"] has become Non-E. I know - that surprises me, too. I thought Glastonbury was the ultimate in environmental chic, a demonstration that you suckle at the teat of Mother Earth, that you are in touch with your inner solstice. But no - for the bien pensants, Glastonbury is ruled out this year. And this comes straight from the top: Thom Yorke, the lead singer of Radiohead. Why? Because it doesn't have "an adequate public transport infrastructure in place". Radiohead, he added in an article in the Sun on Thursday, "are doing everything we can to minimise our impact on the environment".
Hmm. Could this be the moment when the backlash starts? It is, after all, a scientifically verifiable fact there is nothing in this world more annoying than being lectured by a pop star. According to this premise, the blame for the Iraq war rests squarely on the shoulders of Ms Dynamite. Had she not argued in March 2003 the invasion should not be allowed to happen, it wouldn't have happened. Her annoying intervention was, for George W Bush and Tony Blair, the tipping point.
Being harangued by a newspaper comes a close second. The Independent has been banging the environmental drum for a few years now - ever since its editor-in-chief, Simon Kelner, had lunch with Laurie David, Hollywood's richest and most glamorous eco-warrior, the woman who holds "eco-salons" for Leonardo Di Caprio, Cameron Diaz, Angelina Jolie et al. But at least the Independent?'s heart is in the right place.
More disturbing is the come-lately arrival on the eco-worthy scene of the Daily Mail. About five years ago that paper's standard response to an eco story was merciless ridicule. Last week it dedicated its front page to a campaign to stop us using plastic bags. Perhaps its canny editor had tested the air and knew that Sainsbury's and Tesco were about to announce plans to reduce plastic bags by a billion a year anyway. Hmm, again.
Being lectured by a posh person comes third. I wonder how much longer the green revolution took to filter into the mainstream because the Prince of Wales was leading it. Don't get me wrong, I think he is a visionary, a true philosopher prince. But given that the other two leading figures in the green movement, the Eton-educated Jonathon Porritt and the Stowe-educated George Monbiot, are also pretty posh, there may have been some inverted snobbery in the slowness of the eco uptake.
On the other hand, perhaps in some subliminal way this association of greenness with poshness explains the current vogue for going green among the aspiring middle classes. David Cameron (Eton-educated, of course, and for once this seems relevant to the discussion) has been canny in the way he has exploited this fashion.
I hope there isn't a backlash, by the way. I'm all for recycling, sustainability, diversity, lowering carbon emissions and everything. But I do think the eco-awareness game has to be played more subtly than it is being played at the moment. When the BSE scare was at its height, there were those contrarians among us who made a point of ordering rare beef as a gesture of defiance. Others deliberately wore fur when that became the cause celebre.
When councils start preaching at us, that really winds us up. If people were allowed to use recycling bins when they needed to, I reckon they would. But we resent being treated like children and told we can't have collections every week because we don't know what's best for us.
And how galling it must be for my parents' generation to be told not to waste things when they have lived through rationing and know all about the benefits of frugality. If there is one thing the British hate more than having their environment needlessly destroyed, overheated or squandered, it is being preached at by busybodies, puritans and snobs.
The eco-snobs are the worst. It is not enough they get to feel better about themselves for doing the right thing environmentally; they have to make someone else feel worse. Make them feel small, vulgar, immoral. I caught myself doing it in that queue the other day. And shame on me for that.
Source
There is a new lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- on his usual vastly "incorrect" themes of race and IQ.
Tuesday, March 04, 2008
Murderous dictators: cool, huh?
Why does the Left still worship Fidel Castro and all his appalling fellow communists? Daniel Finkelstein comments below on Harriet Harman -- who is Deputy Leader of Britain's Labour Party, the Leader of the House of Commons and a member of the Cabinet. When recently asked in an interview: "Fidel Castro - authoritarian dictator or hero of the Left?" Harman answered unhesitatingly - "hero of the Left".
I had a strange idea yesterday. I had the idea of inviting Harriet Harman home for dinner. This isn't a thought that occurs to me often, but I suddenly felt it might be fun. I'd invite my Dad too. And then, when we'd given Harriet a nice meal (what do you think she likes to eat?), my father could tell her his story.
He could tell her how the Soviets and the Nazis closed in on his home town of Lvov in September 1939 and how the town council chose the Soviets to surrender to. Then he might tell her how the fathers of his friends were taken to the woods at Katyn and shot by the communists.
He might recount the story of his father's arrest as an antisocial element, of Adolf Finkelstein's repeated interrogations leading to a trial in his absence and a jail sentence of 15 years' hard labour. Then Dad could tell the Deputy Leader of the Labour Party about his own experience as a child, exiled to a remote Siberian village. And how he and his mother and his father never saw their home again. And, when he'd finished, he could let Harriet speak. And she could expl
Why does the Left still worship Fidel Castro and all his appalling fellow communists? Daniel Finkelstein comments below on Harriet Harman -- who is Deputy Leader of Britain's Labour Party, the Leader of the House of Commons and a member of the Cabinet. When recently asked in an interview: "Fidel Castro - authoritarian dictator or hero of the Left?" Harman answered unhesitatingly - "hero of the Left".
I had a strange idea yesterday. I had the idea of inviting Harriet Harman home for dinner. This isn't a thought that occurs to me often, but I suddenly felt it might be fun. I'd invite my Dad too. And then, when we'd given Harriet a nice meal (what do you think she likes to eat?), my father could tell her his story.
He could tell her how the Soviets and the Nazis closed in on his home town of Lvov in September 1939 and how the town council chose the Soviets to surrender to. Then he might tell her how the fathers of his friends were taken to the woods at Katyn and shot by the communists.
He might recount the story of his father's arrest as an antisocial element, of Adolf Finkelstein's repeated interrogations leading to a trial in his absence and a jail sentence of 15 years' hard labour. Then Dad could tell the Deputy Leader of the Labour Party about his own experience as a child, exiled to a remote Siberian village. And how he and his mother and his father never saw their home again. And, when he'd finished, he could let Harriet speak. And she could expl