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28 February, 2010

The race card is upsetting the scales of justice in Britain

Positive discrimination is saddling Britain with woefully bad lawyers, particularly prosecutors

Last week a report commissioned by the government concluded that a “lack of diversity” among judges was limiting judicial perspectives and was affecting the experience of people who used the courts. The report came up with more than 50 recommendations on how to tackle the problem, including schemes in which judges would encourage students from ethnic-minority backgrounds to pursue judicial careers.

The legal world should think very carefully about this. It is right that the judiciary should reflect the society it serves, of course, but positive discrimination and politically correct initiatives are already, to my mind, having a detrimental effect on the law. Any more could be disastrous.

I was called to the bar in 2006 and, as a British woman of Indian descent, I can hardly be accused of racism. So I perhaps feel freer to speak than some of my colleagues. But what we all see is the same thing: the race card being played in recruitment to legal firms and to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS).

The frustration and resentment this generates is aired in private. In the pubs near chambers you often hear tales of friends finding themselves up against lawyers who can barely speak English and are unable to grasp complex points of law. A judge told me that he and his colleagues were scared to criticise for fear of being told “you have commented on my sub-standard English because I’m not English”. So the issue is boxed away in a corner and it is a shame because the whole system is suffering.

The new report has the laudable aim of changing the make-up of the judiciary. But wouldn’t it be more sensible to let it happen organically, over time, rather than try to shoehorn in people who might not be suitable?

It is not so much at the bar but at the CPS, though, where there is a real problem. The bar is at least independent but the CPS is much more directly connected with the government and has to be seen to be a fair employer. Some of the CPS propaganda material is hilarious. It has gone so overboard in an attempt to be fair that you have to search hard to try to spot the white person in its illustrations. In London, at least, the organisation seems to be stuffed with people from ethnic minorities.

It is worrying when you ring someone up about a case, often a serious one, and you have trouble understanding what they are saying. Or you get skeleton arguments or documents drafted that simply make no sense and are written in pidgin English. In a system responsible for the administration of justice that is alarming ... and when it comes to analysing law and statute, well, you wonder how that can possibly be being done properly.

In a drugs case I was defending last year I lodged a complaint of abuse of process and the skeleton argument presented in response was laughable. It was really quite shocking but nobody commented on it. We all knew, but it just seemed to be accepted.

One of the problems is that CPS lawyers, who appear as higher court advocates, get appointed to cases beyond their capability. At the bar we have a grading system for prosecution. You apply and are graded 1-4, with grades allocated according to experience and grade 4s taking the most serious cases.

The CPS has no such system. CPS lawyers are allotted more serious cases according to time spent in various departments. CPS advocates cover early case hearings where the management of the case is decided. These hearings often result in the case being turned over to the independent bar. But this frequently happens at the last minute, so the barrister who takes it on is left to prosecute underprepared and therefore prosecutions suffer.

I was defending an extremely serious robbery case last year and the prosecution advocate was clearly less senior than I was and didn’t know how to deal with complicated pieces of law, but he was an in-house advocate so had been able to have “first dibs” on the brief rather than it going out to the independent bar. He obviously didn’t have the experience to deal with the case. His presentation was absolutely appalling and that wasn’t so unusual: you see people failing to grasp basic principles and you see their clients suffering and you wonder how on earth they made it to where they are.

This is racism in reverse: and the biggest irony is that the people who suffer from racism now — middle-class white men — are ticked off or called racist if they complain. Sometimes I even have to ask myself, am I racist? But I’m not, I’m really not. Although I do worry that people will think I have got where I am without quite deserving to — so the culture of “diversity” damages people who have worked hard as well as those who have lost out.

SOURCE



Leftist love of regulations never stops in Britain

Now the Government wants competence tests before you can be a dog owner

Every dog owner will have to take a costly ‘competence test’ to prove they can handle their pets, under new Government proposals designed to curb dangerous dogs. Owners of all breeds would also have to buy third-party insurance in case their pet attacked someone, and pay for the insertion of a microchip in their animal recording their name and address.

The proposals are among a range of measures to overhaul dog laws in England and Wales being considered by senior Ministers, who are expected to announce a public consultation within weeks. But critics said responsible dog owners would be penalised by yet more red tape and higher bills – one expert estimated the extra costs at £60 or more – while irresponsible owners of dangerous dogs would just ignore the measures. They added that genuine dog lovers could end up paying for efforts to control a small number of ‘devil dogs’ that terrorised socially deprived areas.

The RSPCA said last night it would welcome a review of legislation which has failed to curb the numbers of dangerous dogs that can attack, and sometimes kill, children and adults. But a spokesman for the charity added: ‘We would not support anything that would hit sensible owners while failing to police those who are a danger.’

A government source said the proposals, contained in a confidential document headed Consultation On Dangerous Dogs, have been drawn up by the Department for Environment, Farming and Rural Affairs (Defra). They follow mounting public concern about the spate of serious injuries and deaths inflicted by dogs. Police figures show an increase in the number of ‘status’ dogs used to intimidate or threaten others. According to the last available figures, there were 703 convictions for dangerously out of control dogs in 2007 – up from 547 in 2004.

Under the proposals, would-be owners would have to show they had a basic understanding of their dogs before being allowed to keep one. The document says: ‘There have been suggestions for a competency test for all or some dog owners, akin to the driving theory test.’

But the document admits the cost of setting up such a scheme to cover Britain’s six million dog owners ‘is likely to be prohibitive’, and would have to be met by either charging for the test or by imposing a dog licence fee. Moreover, the officials concede that there were disagreements over what would constitute competence in looking after and controlling a dog.

Third-party insurance would be less contentious, as owners of certain breeds of dogs are already required to take out such cover. It is also included in the pet insurance taken out by owners to cover unforeseen vets’ bills and it can be bought for a little as £5, though it will be more expensive for larger and more powerful breeds. In addition, many owners have had microchips implanted in the necks of their dogs – a process that costs about £30.

Other proposals due to be floated by the Government include giving the police and local authorities the power to impose Asbos on the owners of unruly dogs, and extending the law to cover attacks everywhere. At the moment, dogs which attack people on private property where they are allowed to be are exempt from the law, despite the complaints from injured postmen. There are also plans to boost the enforcement powers of police, the courts and local authorities.

As part of the proposed overhaul, all dog laws, including the Dangerous Dog Act 1991, often cited as an example of poorly drawn-up ‘knee jerk’ legislation, could be incorporated into a single law.

An RSPCA spokesman said: ‘We welcome a review but the problem is that while responsible owners will abide by the rules, inevitably you are going to get a fraternity that does not. There are always people who will buy a dog from their mate in a pub and won’t tell the authorities. ‘So the danger is that sensible owners will be out of pocket while irresponsible dog owners will ignore any new rules unless the policing of them is rigorous.’ He said, for example, that while the RSPCA encouraged the use of microchips, the system relied on owners keeping the information up to date. ‘It is no good finding an aggressive dog roaming the streets, perhaps having attacked someone, and going to the address on the microchip to find that the owner hasn’t lived there for years,’ he said.

The Kennel Club said that it was in favour of measures to promote responsible dog ownership, but that the competence tests sounded impractical. A spokesman for Defra said: ‘We do not comment on leaked documents.’

SOURCE



The British government claims to be concerned about the high rate of teenage pregnancies

But they are a major cause of it

Sex education has failed. So the Establishment decrees that we must have more of it, and in fact that there shall be no escape from it.

What I don’t grasp is why the people of this country put up with so many separate insults to their intelligence in any given week. And why this particular blatantly obvious sequence comes round year by year and nobody even laughs, let alone draws the correct conclusion.

Despite the casual massacre of unborn babies in the abortion mills, and the free handouts of morning-after pills (originally developed for pedigree dogs which had been consorting improperly with mongrels), and the ready issue of condoms to anyone who asks, and the prescription of contraceptive devices to young girls behind the backs of their parents by smiling advice workers, and the invasion of school classrooms by supposedly educational smut, the Teenage Pregnancy Strategy has failed, is failing and will continue to fail.

In the week that figures clearly showed that the Government’s supposed target for cutting teen pregnancy by half is never going to be reached, compulsory smut education – a key part of this ‘strategy’ – was forced on all English schools by law for the first time. There will be no opt-outs. The new liberal gospel of ‘do what thou wilt – but wear a condom while thou doest it’ will be taught by order of the State.

Some years ago, I wrote a short history of sex education in this country. I didn’t then know about its first invention, during the Hungarian Soviet revolution of 1919, when Education Commissar George Lukacs ordered teachers to instruct children about sex in a deliberate effort to debauch Christian morality.

But what I found was this. That the people who want it are always militant Leftists who loathe conventional family life; that the pretext for it has always been the same – a supposed effort to reduce teen pregnancy and sexual disease; and that it has always been followed by the exact opposite.

It was introduced into schools against much parental resistance during the early Fifties. And, yes, the more of it there was, the more under-age and extramarital sex there seemed to be.

By 1963, in Norwich, parents were told that their young were to be instructed in sexual matters because the illegitimacy rate in that fine city had reached an alarming 7.7 per cent (compared with a national rate of 5.9 per cent). The national rate is now 46 per cent and climbing, so that was obviously a success, wasn’t it? Well, yes it was, because the people who force these peculiar classes on our young are lying about their aims. You can see why.

Most of us, in any other circumstance, would be highly suspicious of adults who wanted to talk about sex to other people’s children. But by this sleight of hand – that they are somehow being protected from disease and unwanted pregnancy – we are tricked into permitting it.

And our civilised society goes swirling down the plughole of moral chaos.

SOURCE



British photography phobia again

Father stopped from taking picture of his son, 4, on children's train ride 'in case he was a paedophile'. But publicity brings the usual backdown

A father was stopped from taking a photo of his son on a children's train ride after an over-zealous security guard accused him of being a paedophile. Kevin Geraghty-Shewan, 48, was approached by the guard after he took the picture of his four-year-old son Ben on the toy engine outside a shop. He was then threatened with arrest after refusing to hand his mobile phone containing the picture after a row with a policeman.

Mr Geraghty-Shewan said: 'Ben saw a children's ride which had a train on it and wanted to have a go because he's obsessed with trains.' Moments later, he was apprehended by the security guard. The father-of-one, who was in the North East visiting family, said: 'He said "you can't take pictures in here". I asked why and he told me it was because for all he knew I could be a paedophile. 'I told him Ben Was my son. But he said I couldn't prove it. 'I couldn't believe it. I walked away and then I thought about making a complaint.'

A few minutes later a police officer arrived at the Bridges Shopping Centre in Sunderland and threatened to delete the photograph. 'They said I matched the description of a man who had been taking pictures,' Mr Geraghty-Shewan said. 'They took my details and said they had the right to remove the picture from my phone. 'I got annoyed and things got heated, then he threatened me with arrest for breach of the peace.

'Ben thought I was in trouble because he had sat on the ride and we didn't put the money in.'

Mr Geraghty-Shewan was so annoyed by the incident he posted a picture of the security guard on his blog.

A spokesman for the Bridges Shopping Centre said: 'We take the safety at all our shopping centres very seriously. 'We do ask our security guards across the estate to be diligent in implementing our security measures, which includes monitoring photography in our centres. 'Unfortunately on this occasion what should have been a simple polite conversation led to a misunderstanding and we apologise for any offence caused. 'It is always our aim to implement our security procedures with the minimum of fuss and disruption to our shoppers.'

A spokesman for Northumbria Police said: 'We received reports of a disagreement over a photo taken on the premises of a shopping centre. No offence took place.'

SOURCE



More deception about immigration from the British Left

The carefully worded letters all send the same sympathetic messages to local 'white families' about the difficulties caused by the record rise in immigration. Soothing words of comfort are combined with powerful pledges of action to ease the pressure on jobs, school places and council housing. 'There is a great deal of worry about the pressure on schools, doctors' surgeries and housing allocations,' reads one of them. 'I want you to help me keep the pressure up on the Government in relation to reforming and updating our immigration and citizenship rules and laws.'

Stirring stuff indeed. So which party do you think is promising to fight the Government on these policy failings? The Conservatives? UKIP, perhaps? No, with astonishing hypocrisy, these pledges come from the Labour Party itself. For the authors are senior Labour MPs who fear losing their seats as a result of the political fall-out from the mass immigration policy that they gladly helped to implement.

Dozens of these letters from sitting Labour MPs have been passed to the Daily Mail - and the authors all have one thing in common. They are fighting for their political lives because of the threat posed by the odious, far-Right British National Party. They include Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary and key ally of Gordon Brown, and Margaret Hodge, the Culture Minister who is fighting a seat in the East End of London.

Some of the leaflets sent out to constituents include dubious immigration questionnaires and promises that local people will be put first in the jobs queue.

Labour's hypocrisy has come to light only days after the scale of Labour's deliberate plan to create a multicultural Britain through mass immigration was revealed. A draft Cabinet Office report, uncovered by a Freedom of Information request, showed how, in 2000, Labour ministers deliberately plotted to open the floodgates to new migrants to achieve the party's 'social objectives'. Traditionally, new immigrants vote for Left-wing parties. The document also revealed how those who dared to question this policy would be branded 'racists'.

Today, however, on the cusp of a General Election, many Labour MPs have realised that their secret plan has backfired spectacularly. As a result of mass immigration, many of their core white working-class voters complain that they feel like second-class citizens in their own communities, and believe that immigrants are given unfair precedence for jobs and public services. As a result, Labour MPs in marginal seats or with a BNP threat are desperately scrambling to play the race card in a shameless attempt to be seen as acting tough on immigration after all.

One of the MPs at the heart of the new get-tough policy on immigration in constituency backyards is Mr Balls, who is the Prime Minister's closest political friend. Mr Balls has been at the centre of Cabinet decision-making over the past decade and will have been only too well aware of Labour's encouragement of a multicultural Britain. Mr Balls, a front-runner to succeed Mr Brown as Labour leader, has held two public meetings and produced direct mail and questionnaires on the immigration issue in his newly-created Morley and Outwood constituency. Significantly, the Schools Secretary's Yorkshire constituency is a fertile breeding ground for the BNP, which already has one BNP councillor and hundreds of members registered locally.

In his recent constituency newsletter, Mr Balls wrote: 'I want to have a conversation with you about immigration. What we really need is proper discussion about the difficulties and benefits that immigration can bring to our country.' He admitted that there were 'concerns about jobs in our area', and asked: 'Do you support updating our immigration laws so that: migrants who want to settle here must speak English? A probationary period should be passed before they are able to claim state benefits?'

It is a similar story in Barking - the East London constituency where BNP leader Nick Griffin is fighting the Culture Minister Margaret Hodge. With one of the highest rates of immigration in Britain, Barking has seen a massive social upheaval as a result of Labour's policy, with many local families struggling to come to terms with the sheer number of new arrivals from abroad. Yet in a two-page letter to constituents, Mrs Hodge paints herself as being tough on immigration, saying that it can be 'very unsettling' for 'predominantly white' and 'traditional East End families'. She adds: 'I respect your concerns about the pace of change. It is wrong for others to dismiss these out of hand and rest assured that you do have my support on this.'

Earlier this month, Mrs Hodge even suggested that migrants should be forced to 'earn' the right to benefits and council housing over several years. She warned that British values of tolerance were under threat because of an increasing sense of 'unfairness' over immigration. Yet at no time has she accepted responsibility for her part in creating these problems, through her own Government's bitterly controversial 'social objectives'. Only now that her seat is under threat has she seen fit to speak out.

In Wakefield, West Yorkshire, the Government whip Mary Creagh has produced similar leaflets and surveys on immigration. 'One issue comes up time and time again,' she writes, 'immigration, and in particular its impact on local communities and the Wakefield job market.' It is a desperate response to the fact that the BNP captured 13 per cent of the vote in her area at the European elections - and may build on that support at the General Election. In an echo of Mr Brown's doomed slogan 'British jobs for British workers', Ms Creagh asks her constituents whether: 'Jobs should be advertised first to people in Wakefield before being opened up to overseas workers' - a statement that would almost certainly fall foul of race relations legislation.

Such concerns have also preoccupied Gisela Stuart, the former junior health minister, who is defending a wafer-thin majority in Birmingham Edgbaston. She carried out a recent survey which invited responses to the proposition: 'Migrants should have to pay into a fund to support communities experiencing significant change as a result of immigration.'

Or how about Tom Watson, the West Bromwich East MP and another close ally of the Prime Minister, who has also been busy posing as being tough on immigration? (Nick Griffin and other leading BNP figures took part in a St George's Day parade through West Bromwich which was attended by 20,000 people). In a recent direct mail and survey about immigration, Watson declared: 'Most people told me that they were concerned about the level of immigration. More surveys were returned than on any other subject I have asked you about in the past. 'There is a great deal of worry about the pressure on schools, doctors' surgeries and housing allocations. Also unsurprisingly, a lot of people also mentioned the issue of protecting local jobs. I want you to help me keep the pressure up on the Government in relation to reforming and updating our immigration and citizenship rules and laws.'

In Burton, Labour MP Ruth Smeeth has gone even further, actively campaigning to portray the Tories as the party that is soft on immigration. Defending a majority of just 1,421 - smaller than the number of BNP votes in her constituency at the 2005 election - Ms Smeeth has highlighted how London's Conservative Mayor Boris Johnson is 'campaigning for an amnesty for illegal immigrants'.

Such breathtaking hypocrisy from the party that has presided over the biggest influx of immigrants in British history has shocked even seasoned immigration campaigners. Sir Andrew Green, chairman of MigrationWatch UK, says: 'It would seem that some Labour MPs are singing to an entirely different hymn sheet from the rest of the Government. 'We have been pressing the Government on these issues for years. It appears to be only the onset of a General Election that has caused some of them to respond - even if it is in a surreptitious manner.'

Shown the evidence of Labour's new electioneering tactic, Lord Carlile, QC, the Government's independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, accused the MPs involved of willfully stirring up resentment and prejudice against immigrants. He says: 'I don't think that any candidate should demean him or herself by grovelling on the ground occupied by Nick Griffin and the BNP. 'We need a sensible debate, and a true analysis of the effect of immigration issues on the economy, benefits and the work place. But pandering to and encouraging prejudice is a very bad idea.'

Lord Ouseley, the former chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, is similarly appalled by these 11th-hour demands for action from vulnerable MPs. 'Where have they been for the past ten years while this is going on? It is only because it has become such a high-profile issue and they fear they are losing support that they are now raising it. No wonder people are so cynical. 'They were too busy at Westminster to worry about the threat from the BNP. Yet their constituents have been worried about this issue for years. They are trying to shut the door now that the horse has well and truly bolted. 'The voters these MPs are trying to reach out to will not fall for this. They feel alienated because they have seen a government that is more interested in wealth and celebrity and has allowed the financial sector to bring the whole edifice crashing down.'

One thing is certain: however offensive, it seems that Mr Balls and his fellow vulnerable MPs will stop at nothing to cling on to their jobs and perks.

SOURCE



New High School qualification introduced by the British Labour party REALLY dumbs education down

Teenagers taking Labour’s new diplomas will learn “far less” about key subjects than A-level students, a Government advisor has warned. Sir Mike Tomlinson, former head of Ofsted, said the Government’s new qualifications in academic subjects would lack some of the “knowledge, content, concept and understanding” offered in other courses – damaging pupils’ chances of getting into university.

The comments are the latest in a series of attacks on diplomas which ministers claim could eventually replace GCSEs and A-levels altogether. The qualifications – for 14 to 19-year-olds – combine classroom study and work-based training. They are currently offered in 10 practical subjects such as media, construction and IT, with plans for seven more in coming years. This includes three in the traditional academic areas of science, languages and humanities.

Sir Mike suggested courses would have no more teaching time than A-levels, despite being far more complicated to run. “My worry is that the result of that may well be that we have far less knowledge, content, concept and understanding in what we do than is currently in A-level, which I think would greatly worry higher education,” he said.

Sir Mike was the author of a 2004 report on the qualifications system, which led to the development of diplomas. Labour has said diplomas could eventually become the “qualification of choice”, replacing existing courses altogether.

But in an interview with the Times Educational Supplement, Sir Mike said: “I think there is a huge commitment to the A-level and until such a time as an alternative is shown to be better than the A-level, people will want to stick with what they know.”

A spokesman for the Department for Children, Schools and Families said: "The Diploma is a very new qualification that is still developing. Those that have been introduced are increasingly popular. We shouldn’t jump to conclusions about those that haven’t even started yet.” He added: "Diplomas are delivering the mix of theoretical and practical skills that employers and universities value and for this reason they could indeed become the qualification of choice for young people."

SOURCE



Cancel indexed phone books such as Yellow Pages to tackle climate change -- say British councils

Households are being asked to opt out of receiving their annual phone book to stop thousands of tonnes of paper being dumped in landfill every year. Unwanted phone books left on doorsteps or dumped in the bin cost councils more than £7 million every year to clear up. The Local Government Association (LGA) said the money could be used on more important services and have launched a campaign asking households to cancel the service.

Environmental campaigners welcomed the move and said it was just the start to the gradual phasing out of phone books as more and more people use the internet to find out about local services. However charities feared that households without good internet connection or the elderly may be unable to contact vital services without access to the phone book.

Every year 25 million households in Britain are sent up to three phone books from Yellow Pages, Thompson and BT. Gary Porter, Chairman of the LGA Environment Board, said most are dumped in the bin without even being opened and urged households to cancel the directories by phone or email.

"Council taxpayers’ money could be spent on better things than picking up phone books, many of which are never even used. Cutting down on the number of pointless phone directories could save millions and allow councils to spend more on vital services like care for the elderly," he said.

But Hannah Bellamy of Global Action Plan said most people are too "lethargic" to cancel the phone book. Instead she said there should be a well-publicised campaign asking people to "opt in" so only people who request the phone book receive a copy. "We should go further," she said. "The phone book is not necessary. It is a waste in terms of energy, oil and other resources."

The Say No to Phone books campaign, backed by 192.com and the Global Action Plan, is lobbying Government to introduce a centralised opt-in system. An independent survey commissioned by the campaign found that 70 per cent of people would back the phasing out of free phone books in favour of an opt in.

But Michelle Mitchell, the Director of Age Concern and Help the Aged Charity Director, feared the end of free phone books would isolate the elderly. "While many services are shifting online, provision must always be made for people who do not have access to the internet," he said.

Trevor Fenwick, chairman of the Data Publishers Association, said the production of directories like BT and Yellowpages is not only a multi-million pound advertising industry in itself but boosts local business who are unable to publicised their services any other way. "The business to consumer directory sector contributes well over £1 billion to local economies, and therefore local business rates, playing a vital economic and social role in linking businesses with their market," he said. "Millions of people in the UK use our paper directories on a regular basis, and it is simply not the case that consumers who search for businesses online will have no further use of a printed directory."

SOURCE





27 February, 2010

Another crass failure by British social workers

They attack harmless middle class families and leave children of feral families to die. Contrast the story below with the one immediately following it. Once again we see that Leftism is motivated by a desire to tear down the successful rather than any desire to help the poor. Only hate can explain their priorities

A seven-year-old girl was starved to death by her mother despite a plentiful supply of food in the home and visits from social workers in the weeks before she died. Khyra Ishaq was denied meals and was hidden away in a squalid room at the top of an otherwise clean and tidy house by her mother and stepfather, who operated a draconian punishment regime. Her agonising death occurred despite four visits to the family home by five different officials charged with taking care of vulnerable children in Birmingham, including social workers, police and local authority home-schooling officials.

Last night a High Court judge condemned social workers involved in the case, saying that Khyra would be alive if they had done their job properly. The judge’s comments came after Angela Gordon, Khyra’s mother, was cleared of murder after prosecutors at Birmingham Crown Court accepted her plea of manslaughter on grounds of diminished responsibility. She also admitted five counts of child cruelty against the other children in her care. Her partner, Junaid Abuhamza, a schizophrenic, had a manslaughter plea accepted earlier in the trial after a report on his mental health. The pair will be sentenced next Friday.

Children’s services at Birmingham City Council were last year described as “unfit for purpose” after it emerged that 16 children known to social workers, including Khyra, had died of abuse or neglect in five years. The department mounted a vigorous defence of its role in the child’s death, saying that it lacked sufficient powers to intervene, especially once Khyra was removed from school to be “home-educated”. But the statement from a High Court judge who presided over related care proceedings last year cast doubt on the department’s version of events.

Mrs Justice King said that “in all probability” Khyra would be alive today if there had been “an adequate initial assessment and proper adherence by the educational welfare services to its guidance”. She said: “It is beyond belief that, in 2008, in a bustling, energetic and modern city like Birmingham, a child of 7 was withdrawn from school and thereafter kept in squalid conditions for a period of five months before finally dying of starvation.”

No one from the department has lost their job or been disciplined over these failings.

Yesterday’s verdicts brought to an end a harrowing trial in which jurors heard that the severely emaciated girl resembled a famine victim at the time of her death in Handsworth, Birmingham, in May 2008. The case reduced hardened police officers to tears during the investigation. Khyra was beaten and locked in a garden shed if she broke house rules. Five other children in the house were also starved, and two of them were close to death when Khyra succumbed to an infection and died. Jurors were shown pictures of the well-stocked kitchen and a fridge full of milk, fruit juice and other groceries.

Gordon withdrew Khyra from school in December 2007, five months before she died, saying that she was being bullied and would be taught at home. She then barred visiting social workers and even the police from entering her house, though they were allowed to see some of the children, including Khyra, on the doorstep. They concluded that the children were not in any danger, and closed the case.

Home education officers who visited judged that the home was suitable for home education after seeing a room laid out like a classroom. Their judgment turned out to be seriously flawed.

Given the record of children’s services, Khalid Mahmood, MP for Birmingham Perry Barr, said that it was time for an independent inquiry into the failing department. He has written to Ed Balls, the Education Secretary, urging him to initiate one. Mr Balls called Khyra’s death “preventable” but said that he would await the findings of the serious case review to see whether further action was needed, although he criticised the professionals involved.

“There are clearly serious questions to be answered about what local services and professionals were doing in the months before this tragedy took place. As the trial has shown, it is now clear that concerns about these children were not acted upon effectively, and it is right that a serious case review has been carried out,” Mr Balls said.

Yesterday both the local authority and the local independent children’s safeguarding board blamed in part the current liberal regime around home education for “hampering” child protection work. Although 20,000 home-educated children are known to local authorities, the true number could be as high as 80,000. Under current law no one is responsible for monitoring home education or has powers to see children who have been taken out of school. The Government is currently passing a law to establish a new and tougher system.

SOURCE



British women fleeing to Spain to stop their babies being taken from them by rogue social workers

A pregnant British woman has fled to Spain with her parents to prevent her unborn baby being taken into care by social services, despite an offer by the child’s grandparents to foster her. Megan Coote, 21, is one of two British women who have escaped to Spain after threats by Suffolk social services to remove their babies. The infants were born last week two days apart and are now neighbours.

Their cases reflect what John Hemming, a Lib Dem MP and chairman of Justice for Families, believes is a growing phenomenon. “It is clear that nothing is being done to sort the family courts out and so more people are thinking of simply emigrating,” he said.

The second British woman, Carissa Smith, 32, arrived in Spain over Christmas with her husband, Jim, £300, three cats and their baby on the way. Mr Smith reckons he has spoken to dozens of couples who have made a similar decision. “There’s so many people who want to go back but are frightened,” he said. “It is a horrible way to live. Nobody wants to leave their country, family and friends, but you have to.” Their name has been changed for legal reasons.

The birth of the Smiths’ son brings back painful memories of the daughter they no longer see. Carissa had a psychologist’s diagnosis of factitious illness, which used to be known as Münchausen’s syndrome by proxy, in 2008. The same psychologist later changed the diagnosis to narcissistic personality disorder, but their daughter was already in care. Although experts said there was no immediate risk to the child, social services said she could face emotional abuse in future. When Carissa became pregnant again, the Smiths decided to move abroad.

Tim Yeo, the couple’s MP, suggested in Parliament that Suffolk social workers acted in the Smith case in a manner “sometimes tantamount to child kidnapping”. That the Coote family fled the same authority “rather bears out the theory I had that the department intervenes not with the aim of helping couples become good parents but of separating vulnerable couples from their baby”, Mr Yeo told The Times.

In the case of Ms Coote, who has mild learning difficulties, her parents offered to foster their grandchild. When she became pregnant, her midwife went to social services with concerns about her emotional maturity. A psychological assessment suggested that she would not be capable of looking after the baby. Her parents disagreed, but volunteered as guardians. The baby was due but social services told them that the process would take 12 weeks and could not promise that the baby would not be put forward for adoption beforehand.

When Jim Smith learnt that the Cootes were moving away, he rang to offer them space in his new house.

Suffolk social services would not comment on individual cases. However, Simon White, director of Children and Young People’s Services, said: “Children’s services work hard to support parents and families so that children can remain in their own families. No decisions can be made before assessments which determine whether the child in question can be adequately cared for by the natural parents or within the extended family.”

Some warn that children who have been noted by social services as at risk may face further dangers abroad. Barbara Hopkin, of the Association of Lawyers for Children, was involved in a case in which a mother fled to Spain, fearing that her unborn child would be removed. The baby died, smothered when her drunken boyfriend rolled on it. “Other countries are much less interventionist and our system is generally much better,” Ms Hopkin said.

But Mr Yeo believed that more support for families at home was necessary. “It’s a tragedy that loving couples should have to flee Britain to feel safe to bring up their own baby. It’s a terrible situation for any family and rather a serious indictment of the way the system of support is operating.”

The Cootes feel that they have been let down by social services. “I employ people. I pay my taxes. I abide by the law,” Mr Coote said. “I didn’t think that my country was going to kick me in the teeth.” He is now battling to find a way to reunite his family in the United Kingdom where he still runs a business and his son is in school.

For the Smiths, Spain is home. But their plan to celebrate their baby’s return from hospital yesterday was marred by a visit from Spanish authorities. They had been alerted by Suffolk social services. “They are being really nice but we’ve got a weekend of worry ahead,” said Mr Smith.

SOURCE



The threat to banish school skirts is just one part of an insane and authoritarian attempt to remake Britain into some far-Leftist fantasyland

Back in the Eighties, a string of Labour-run town halls were notorious for their extremism, mismanagement and financial extravagance. Justly known as the 'Loony Left,' these authorities were epitomised by Ken Livingstone's spendthrift and dogmatic regime at the Greater London Council. Their excesses were supposed to have ended with the rise of New Labour.

But, as Gerry Adams once famously said of the IRA, the ideological extremists 'never went away'. They merely transferred their activities from the urban municipalities to the heart of government. Thanks to the 13 years of Labour rule, lunatic Leftism now has more influence than ever. Its politically correct zealotry flourishes throughout the public sector and the quangos. Its fixations with race and gender are written into law. Its obsession with social engineering is transforming the fabric of Britain, destroying traditional, unifying bonds such as family life and nationhood.

The fanaticism of the Left was recently exposed in guidance issued by the Equality and Human Rights Commission for public bodies on how to treat transgender people, including transvestites and those undergoing a change of sex. In one startling passage in this 68-page document, the Commission warned it may be illegal for any school to require girls to wear skirts as part of their uniform, since this could discriminate against transsexual pupils.

Such an edict would be laughable were it not so indicative of the disturbing mindset of the equality bureaucrats who wield such control over our lives. The threat to take legal action against schools because some uniforms can be deemed 'gender specific' is beyond satire. The number of transsexual adults in Britain is tiny, perhaps as few as 5,000, yet the Commission wants all public services to be altered for the sake of this minuscule group. Furthermore, it is absurd to start putting these highly emotive, questionable labels on young people before they have barely passed puberty.

Such action highlights three of the most dangerous traits of the Left-wing doctrinaires. One is their remorseless focus on categorising individuals by race, gender, sexual orientation or class - and then placing them within hierarchies of victimhood according to the perceived disadvantage they have suffered. Another is the sexualisation of children, in which the innocence of youth is destroyed by the aggressive promotion of the so-called 'sexual rights' agenda. The third is the eagerness to obliterate all traditional morality by presenting support for normal, married family life as outmoded and discriminatory.

While warning that requiring girls to wear skirts is 'potentially unlawful', the Equality Commission document highlights, as an example of 'good practice', the real-life case of 'a young transperson born female attending a mixed-sex primary school'. On the advice of a 'gender identity clinic' in London and the local 'lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender youth service', the school transformed its procedures to accommodate this one young child who had been 'identified as transgender' by a psychologist. The changes including a 'gender neutral uniform' - whatever that might be - and 'a new system of lining up for class by mixed-sex group labelled using basic shapes (such as Triangles, Circles and Rectangles) rather than by gender.'

Teachers were also encouraged to use the changes as a way of 'exploring gender stereotypes'. Most parents would prefer that primary schools just teach their pupils to read and write properly rather than embarking on journeys of sexual exploration.

The Equality Commission guidance is riddled with this kind of bizarre nonsense. Public facilities are urged to install unisex toilets which are 'more welcoming' for transgender people.

Following the example of New Forest District Council in Hampshire, leisure centres are encouraged to hold sessions where transgender people have 'sole use of the swimming pool, gym, sauna and badminton courts for an evening'. Prisons are warned against stopping hormone therapy for transgender convicts. When speaking to transgender people, public officials are instructed 'to use the pronoun that is consistent with the person's appearance and gender expression. For example, if the person wears a dress and uses the name Susan, feminine pronouns are appropriate'. Public bodies are further urged to 'designate a trans-equality and human rights champion among its staff' and to provide all staff 'with training on trans-equality'.

As always, the fashionable obsession with ethnicity appears. 'Young black trans men might face different issues and have very different needs compared with older white trans women,' reads one extract. There is also a deluge of ultra-feminist drivel. 'Gender identity is subjective,' proclaims the document, contradicting almost a million years of biology.

How outrageous that we have to pay for this through our taxes. No one voted for this radical agenda or for the bureaucrats pushing through the change. In its ruthless campaign to impose the creed of the hard Left on Britain, the Equality and Human Rights Commission, headed by Labour schmoozer Trevor Phillips, swallows £70million a year and employs 525 staff.

The quango was established in 2006 through a merger of three previous bodies: the Commission for Racial Equality, the Equal Opportunities Commission and the Disability Rights Commission. As usual in the elitist public sector culture, where much of taxpayers' money is treated with contempt, the annual expenditure of the Equality and Human Rights Commission is almost 50 per cent higher than the total budget of all three predecessor bodies combined.

Reflecting the Commission's climate of self-indulgence, salaries have risen by 25 per cent over the past two years - this at a time of deepening recession across the country. No fewer than 28 of the employees earn more than £50,000-a-year and three receive over £100,000.

Profligacy is endemic. The Commission squanders £ 5.5million a year on public relations and, in its first three years, spent more than £3.5million on consultants, despite a large complement of its own pen-pushers.

Ken Livingstone's GLC was infamous for the way it doled out grants to certain politically favoured groups, and the EHRC is exactly the same. The sums doled out to recent recipients from its £10million Strategic Funding Programme are eye-watering. The Derbyshire Friend Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Special Support and Advocacy Services organisation was awarded £393,000. The Lesbian And Gay Foundation was awarded £264,000. Women In Prison was given a grant of £280,300. Ethnic Alcohol Counselling in Hounslow received £120,000.

Travellers' groups have also done well - £114,000 has gone to the Cardiff Gypsy and Traveller Project; £150,000 to the Leeds Gypsy and Traveller Exchange; and £40,000 to the Friends, Families and Travellers in West Sussex to give them 'the confidence to participate actively in the life of the community'.

One of the largest recent grants was the £258,300 dished out to a body called The British Institute of Human Rights, which is headed by barrister Katie Ghose, who used to work for the Labour MP Greville Janner. In her eagerness for judicial activism in support of a radical agenda, Ms Ghose is all too typical of metropolitan elite that loathes traditional Britain. A trustee of the gay pressure group Stonewall, she has also been a leading figure in the outfit called Bail for Immigration Detainees, which campaigns against the detention of asylum seekers and migrants.

As usual with the politically correct brigade, Ghose's definition of human rights does not encompass the rights of taxpayers. In August 2007 she wrote an incredibly patronising article in the Guardian about the decision, on human rights grounds, not to deport from Britain Learco Chindamo, the killer of the headmaster Philip Lawrence. Ghose dismissed the public outcry over the decision as nothing more than 'hysteria' and then, turning to Lawrence's widow Frances, who had expressed her outrage, wrote: 'A more fitting legacy to her husband would be to engender a real understanding of what human rights are about.'

Interestingly, Ghose was employed as a member of the Government's task force which advised on the creation of the Equality and Human Rights Commission - the very Commission that turned out to be so generous towards her own organisation.

The Commission enjoys not just lavish funding, but also tremendous powers under a raft of legislation such as the 2000 Race Relations Amendment Act, which gives all public bodies a statutory duty to promote racial equality. The role of the EHRC will be even more influential when Harriet Harman's Equality Bill becomes law. The EHRC is the chosen instrument for implementing this change, as its commissars will be able to go into any workplace and carry out equality inspections and gender audits. 'We will adopt a targeted approach to private sector organisations,' warns the Commission.

There are two particularly odious aspects to the Equality Bill. One is the introduction, for the first time in British law, of positive discrimination, whereby employers in recruitment will be required to favour ethnic minorities and women, making a nonsense of the very term equality. Second, no business will be allowed to bid for the supply of goods and services in the public sector unless it has demonstrated its commitment to multi-cultural diversity. Given that the state sector's market is estimated to be worth more than £175billion, this rule again gives enormous power to the bureaucrats of the Commission who will check for compliance.

The overtly Left-wing nature of the Commission is reflected in its membership. Almost all the 15 Commissioners are from the politically correct nexus of public bureaucracy, trade unionism and progressive politics. Indeed, more than half are active members of the Labour party. One especially notable Commissioner is Kay Carberry, who has been intimately involved with the Labour movement for over 20 years as a key trade unionist, particularly with the TUC. She is also close to Peter Mandelson, who is godfather to her son. There is one Liberal Democrat on the Commission - but not a single Conservative.

Apart from the naked political bias, what is sickening about the Commission is that it hectors the rest of society while performing so dismally itself. Again, like the erstwhile GLC, the EHRC has become a byword for waste and incompetence. In July 2009, the independent watchdog the National Audit Office severely censured the organisation for wasting almost £1million, when it re-employed seven managers who had received generous early retirement packages from the now defunct Commission for Racial Equality. The seven were given pay-offs worth £629,300 in 2007 and then were taken back days later as consultants on fees totalling £323,700, an arrangement that the Audit Office said was 'novel and contentious', failed 'to follow proper processes' and 'did not represent value for money'.

A scathing report from independent consultants DeLoitte, who had been appointed to examine the disastrous chaos at the EHRC, agreed. In language that was deliberately toned down, the report found that the board 'does not operate against clear, consistently understood rules and a common purpose'. DeLoitte further condemned the bias of the Commission. 'There is currently a lack of representation from the private sector and a need for representation from a broader political spectrum.'

But despite all the turmoil, Trevor Phillips remains in post. With the backing of new legislation, his quango will soon be more powerful than ever, the leading apparatchik of Harriet Harman's sinister new social order. Schools who have the audacity to make their pupils wear skirts should be very afraid indeed.

SOURCE



British Immigration boss admits his children have suffered because of migration

The immigration minister has admitted that his own children have 'suffered' because of the number of foreigners who have flooded into Britain. In an extraordinary declaration, gaffe-prone Phil Woolas accepted the influx of migrants under Labour has taken a toll on local communities and services. Confronted by an unemployed man on a BBC2 Newsnight special, he said: 'We recognise that. My own family... children have suffered from that.'

Mr Woolas, who has two sons, has a house in Chiswick, south west London, and Oldham, Lancashire, which is his constituency. It was not clear whether the minister was talking about class sizes or the pressure placed by migrants on school places or some other issue.

Shadow home secretary Chris Grayling said: 'The biggest impact from immigration in recent years has been on public services. 'It seems extraordinary to have the immigration minister now admitting that - and from his own experience - but yet still defending the policy that caused the problems in the first place.'

It is the latest in a string of blunders for Mr Woolas. He was condemned as 'deeply insensitive' last December after claiming immigration officials were 'putting their lives on the line' for their country. He said UK Border Agency staff were 'very brave' as he defended bonus payouts of more than £10,000 each for 29 senior officials.

Just a month earlier, he was attacked for saying British troops were in Afghanistan partly to help control the number of immigrants heading to Britain - on the day five UK soldiers were killed there by a rogue policeman.

In May, he was humiliated when he was ambushed by Joanna Lumley over the plight of the Gurkhas. In hilarious scenes, the actress sought him out in Westminster and frogmarched him to a live press conference for a very public dressing down.

His bizarre declaration came as new official figures revealed the number of foreigners given UK passports has soared. A total of 203,865 people were handed British citizenship in 2009 - an increase of 58 per cent on the previous year. Tens of thousands more immigrants were also given the right to settle in the UK, with the total up 30 per cent to more than 190,000.

Quarterly immigration figures, published by the Office for National Statistics, also showed a 30 per cent increase in student visa numbers last year compared to 2008. In the final three months of 2009, 61,715 student visas were issued - an astonishing rise of 92 per cent on the same period in 2008. The figures prompted questions over the effectiveness of the new points-based system for student visas.

Separate figures showed applications by asylum seekers arriving in the UK had dropped off, 30 per cent down on the previous year at 4,765.

Whitehall documents revealed this week confirm Labour encouraged mass immigration despite voters being against it. The Government said the public stance was down to 'racism' and ministers were told to try to alter the population's attitude. The approach was unveiled after a document from 2000 prepared by the Cabinet Office and Home Office was finally disclosed in full under freedom of information rules. It showed that ministers were advised that only the ill-educated and those who had never met a migrant were opposed to immigration.

They were also told that large-scale immigration would bring increases in crime, but they concealed these concerns from the public. Sections of the paper, which underpinned Labour policies that admitted between two and three million immigrants to Britain in less than a decade, have already been made public. These have showed that Labour aimed to use immigration not only for economic reasons but also to change the social make-up of the country.

SOURCE



Two British passports a minute are given to foreigners as 1.5m issued since Labour party elected

Passports were given to foreigners at the rate of two a minute last year. Officials approved a record 203,865 citizenship applications, 58 per cent more than in 2008. Another 190,000 immigrants were given the right to settle in the UK in 2009 – a rise of 30 per cent on the year before. Home Office figures show that 1.5million foreigners have become UK citizens since Labour came to power. In 1997, just 37,010 were granted the status.

Officials claim the massive rises during the past year may have been caused by migrants rushing to beat the supposedly tougher system of earned citizenship due to start next year. From then, obtaining a passport will usually take between six and eight years from a migrant’s arrival in the UK – rather than the current five. The figures also reflect the huge influx into Britain in the early part of the last decade. These arrivals are now reaching the stage where they can apply for passports.

Damian Green, Tory immigration spokesman, said: ‘It is now clear that immigration has been running out of control throughout the lifetime of this Government.’

A raft of statistics released yesterday showed that huge numbers of students continue to pour into the UK – despite concerns about bogus colleges and visas. In the final three months of 2009, 61,715 student visas were issued – an astonishing rise of 92 per cent on the same period in 2008.

The figures revealed a shift in the source of the arrivals. The number of Poles registering to work fell by a quarter at the end of last year, but arrivals from Latvia and Lithuania more than doubled. Overall, newcomers from the eight former Soviet countries which joined the EU in 2004 have halved since 2007.

The Institute of Public Policy Research think-tank said the figures showed the number of immigrants was falling as was the number of UK nationals emigrating. In the year to June 2009, 146,000 British nationals emigrated and 87,000 came back to the UK. This meant that net emigration was 59,000, down from 89,000 in the year to June 2008 – and a peak of well over 100,000 in 2004. In the same time period, net immigration by non-British nationals was 206,000, down from 257,000 in the year to June 2008. The weak pound has made it harder to afford to move abroad and, for most, made it more costly to stay there.

MPs Frank Field and Nicholas Soames, who chair the cross-party Balanced Migration Group, said: ‘The Government’s points-based system has had little effect, despite their repeated claims to the contrary. ‘Employment-related visas fell by only 20,000 last year, despite the recession. ‘There was also a modest fall in arrivals from Eastern Europe, as we have long predicted. 'But the reality is that, based on these figures, we are still firmly on course for a population of 70million in 20 years or so.’

Immigration Minister Phil Woolas said: ‘I welcome those who want to become British citizens – the increase in number of grants is as a result of UK Border Agency working through applications quicker. ‘We are clear that being British is a privilege, not a right, and that British citizenship should be earned. 'People who wish to settle permanently in the UK must earn that right by working hard, obeying the law and speaking English.’

SOURCE



British Communist newspaper publishes skeptical letter about global warming!

From inveterate Scottish letter-writer Neil Craig of Glasgow. Glasgow probably has Britain's greatest concentration of Communists so Neil's address may well have helped -- JR

Paul Levy (M Star February 18) is erecting a straw man argument when he denounces Jean Johnson (M Star February 17) for claiming "a systematic attempt on the part of the climatic research unit to manipulate" in her response to Michael Meacher's playing down of the collapse of the catastrophic warming evidence.

She did not say that the disappearance of data from Chinese sites and the Climate Research Unit's reliance on measurements which have been urbanised or moved or both was deliberate manipulation.

She merely said that it had happened - though untrusting folk like myself may find it improbable that all the errors uncovered here and elsewhere should accidentally be angled towards scaring us.

The urban heat island effect is well proven and indeed it is obvious that cities, using electricity, cars, fire etc will give off more heat than countryside.

With the very rapid industrialisation of China it is equally obvious that this is an even greater effect there. Those claiming to see catastrophic CO2-caused warming by using uncorrected or not fully corrected measurements from urban areas are clearly doing very bad science, if it can be called science at all.

Unfortunately time after time in figures from country after country this is what we see being done. When Stephen McIntyre found a programming error of this sort in the US figures, he proved that the actual warmest year in the non-urban US was 1933, not 1998.

The alarmists explained that catastrophic warming was still proven by 1998 being the warmest year outside US boundaries, but there must be doubt about that. If so not only do we not have any catastrophic warming but we have had cooling, not only over the last decade but since 1933.

Never mind. I am sure there will be another eco-catastrophe story along shortly.

SOURCE (See the original for links)



British private schools condemn 'social engineering'

Labour’s mission to “socially engineer” university admissions is built on flawed evidence, according to independent school leaders. Ministers are using unreliable research in an attempt to “blackmail” institutions into taking a larger number of pupils from the state sector, it was claimed.

Andrew Grant, chairman of the Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference, which represents 250 top private schools, insisted most “independent-minded” academics and admissions tutors were resisting Government pressure by continuing to prioritise the brightest pupils irrespective of background. But, writing in The Daily Telegraph today, he warned that their ability to select could come under threat.

His comments came as another top head – Richard Cairns, from fee-paying Brighton College – called for all university applications to be “anonymised” to avoid any prejudice during the admissions process.

Vice-chancellors are already warning of a squeeze on university places this year following a record rise in applications. Despite the rush, Prof Steve Smith, the head of Universities UK, which represents vice-chancellors, said this month that institutions should still be allowed to make lower grade offers to pupils from poor-performing schools as part of the drive to “widen participation” to university. He quoted research from the Government’s Higher Education Funding Council that suggested students from state schools were more likely to get good degrees when compared with independent school peers on a like-for-like basis.

But Mr Grant said the evidence was “wholly unreliable” because it failed to take account of the fact that privately-educated pupils often took tougher courses. According to national figures, they are far more likely to study subjects such as the sciences and languages at university. Teenagers from the independent sector also take up more places at elite institutions such as Oxford and Cambridge.

The comments came as another headmaster said higher education applications should no longer feature the names of pupils’ schools to end the row over admissions and place all candidates on an equal footing. In a speech to the Army and Navy Club in London, Mr Cairns said: “No bright sixth-former - from a private school or a comprehensive school - should feel that there is some hidden prejudice against them. “In consequence, all applications to university should be anonymous. After all, when they sit their own finals exams their papers are sat anonymously. So it should be at the point of application.

“That way, universities cannot be accused of discrimination, sixth-formers will be certain that they will be judged on their own particular merits and, if state schools continue to be under-represented in our leading universities, ministers will have to face up to the fact that it is their fault - and act to address it.”

He said parents who paid for private education – often “going without new cars and holidays” in the process – increasingly feared their children would miss out on university. “So far, such fears are utterly unfounded,” he said. “Brighton College has 60 former pupils at Oxford or Cambridge, four years ago there were only 25. Nevertheless, the fears persist and that increases uncertainty in all quarters.”

SOURCE



Meteorological organizations promise to do better next time

World weather agencies agreed this week to enhance data-gathering significantly and allow independent scrutiny of raw figures used in assessing climate change amid charges by critics that global warming scientific data were skewed.

The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) made the concession after an outcry over e-mails revealing that researchers in Britain had suppressed certain data to bolster claims of global warming. Critics also said some of the manipulated data were included in a 2007 U.N. report on the subject.

Britain's Met Office formally submitted a proposal that scientists around the world undertake the "grand challenge" of measuring land surface temperatures as often as several times a day, and it was approved in principle by about 150 officials at a WMO meeting in Antalya, Turkey.

"This effort will ensure that the datasets are completely robust and that all methods are transparent," the Met Office said, though it added that "any such analysis does not undermine the existing independent datasets that all reflect a warming trend."

It also said that current measurements were "fundamentally ill-conditioned to answer 21st-century questions, such as how extremes are changing, and therefore what adaptation and mitigation decisions should be taken."

Last fall, it was revealed that thousands of e-mail messages discussing the destruction and hiding of data that did not support global warming claims had been obtained through hacking of a server used by the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in Britain. The controversy was dubbed "climategate."

The WMO move is the latest in the growing debate over climate change. Global warming theorists insist that man-made activities have the potential to produce devastating consequences, while skeptics say temperature increases are less alarming and not human-induced.

Scientists and other climate specialists said the WMO has wanted to enhance data collection for years, but it took a persistent campaign by opponents of the global warming science to take the issue more seriously.

"It's interesting how they are couching it and linking it to the skeptics' community," said Sarah Ladislaw, senior fellow in the energy and national security program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "There has been a big push in recent years to improve data collection to make sure we understand things better."

Melanie Fitzpatrick, a member of the Union of Concerned Scientists, said the new measures will require additional funds, although the cost will depend on whether data will be gathered from existing temperature sensors or whether new installations are needed.

More HERE



"Damp rag" incorrect??

One of Britain's most outspoken conservative politicians criticized:

"Nigel Farage compounded a vitriolic attack on the EU’s new President yesterday by refusing a request by a “sweet and rather pretty” Belgian MEP that he apologise for his criticism of her country and its most senior statesman.

The former leader of the UK Independence Party came under widespread criticism for calling Herman Van Rompuy a “damp rag” and dismissing the EU President’s native Belgium as a non-country in a tirade in the European Parliament.

He has been summoned to see the European Parliament President, Jerzy Buzek, about his outburst on Tuesday and is reportedly considering wearing shorts and a schoolboy cap as if for a dressing-down from the headmaster. Asked whether he was trying to get himself banned, Mr Farage told The Times: “You make your own mind up, mate.”

The BBC was drawn into the row after it played the clip of Mr Farage’s attack repeatedly and was accused of using it to drum up viewing figures for Question Time, on which the UKIP MEP was due to appear last night.

Mr Van Rompuy said that he would not respond to the attack but the Belgian press was outraged and the Prime Minister, Yves Leterme, wrote a letter of complaint to Mr Buzek. Like others of Mr Farage’s proudest moments, it was placed on YouTube and has become an internet hit.

Véronique De Keyser, a Belgian Socialist MEP, demanded a formal apology for Mr Farage’s claim that Belgium was a non-country. Mr Farage said: “She is very sweet and rather pretty but I cannot apologise for the fact that Belgium is a completely artificial construction and a mistake.”

Source

My favourite speech by Mr. Farage is here (Video).

The French-speaking and Dutch-speaking halves of Belgium are governed almost independently -- which is what Farage was referring to.



Turnaround at British car company -- under Indian ownership: "After years in the red, Jaguar Land Rover has achieved a $60 million profit for the final quarter of 2009. The company, now Britain’s largest car industry employer, said that its return to the black had come amid a recovering market in luxury cars, backed by its own well-received new models. An amalgam of two of Britain’s most famous motoring marques, the company, which employs a staff of 14,500, was bought by India’s Tata Motors from Ford, of America, for $2.3 billion in the summer of 2008. Tata said that volumes in the last three months of 2009 had increased by 28 per cent compared with the period between July and September, big rises being recorded in North America, Europe and China. Land Rover was up 34 per cent after positive customer reaction to new vehicles, while the XF helped Jaguar to rise by 11.5 per cent. Despite latest sales data that shows Land Rover’s global sales more than tripled in January from the same month last year to 13,295 and that Jaguar sales more than doubled to 2,974 over the same period, there is more cost-cutting to come."





26 February, 2010

U.K. Immigration Data Fuel Fire

New figures show mixed results in the U.K. government's efforts to tighten entry requirements for foreign workers and students, as immigration heats up as an election issue here. The 2009 statistics show fewer foreign workers are coming to the U.K., though the number of student visas issued to non-Europeans continues to rise.

The country has seen a dramatic increase in immigrants since the late 1990s, primarily Eastern Europeans and other foreigners seeking employment during the boom times. As jobs became scarce during the recession and U.K. citizens became increasingly uneasy about losing opportunities to foreigners, pressure has grown on the government to limit immigration.

Meanwhile, there has been pressure to tighten scrutiny of student visas, in part due to numerous incidents involving terrorism suspects who entered the country with student paperwork.

In response, the government two years ago began introducing new visa rules for non-European workers and students. Immigration specialists say the new rules—which include stiffer financial and qualification requirements—are making it tougher for some people to come to the U.K., or stay. In 2009, the number of visas issued to non-European workers and their families declined 21% from a year earlier, to 93,690, according to the Office of National Statistics. Most Europeans are free to seek work in the U.K. without a visa. Meanwhile, the number of student visas issued to non-Europeans increased 31% to 273,610. The U.K. issued two million visas in 2009, including family members and visitors, up 2% from a year earlier.

Polls show many voters want to see fewer immigrants.

Immigration Minister Phil Woolas said the decline in work visas "is a result" of the new visa system, rather than the economic downturn. The government hails the new system as the most significant changes to the U.K.'s immigration rules since World War II. The change, they say, protects British workers by allowing flexibility to prioritize entry for migrants for jobs that are difficult to fill.

However, some say the economic downturn is having a bigger impact than new policies, and point to the large increase in people leaving the country while arrivals have remained relatively steady.

The opposition Conservative Party argues that the government has lost control of the borders, putting pressure on jobs and public services. It pledges to cap the number of work visas issued, if it is voted into power in the spring election.

The net number of migrants coming into the U.K. has increased significantly to more than 200,000 in some years, up from fewer than 50,000 in 1997 when the current Labour government came into power, according to the Office for National Statistics. That equates to more than two million immigrants—a significant portion due to the inflow following the 2004 enlargement of the European Union to include countries such as Poland.

SOURCE



Offensive legal niceties in Britain

Relatives of 7/7 victims offended by ‘apparent bombers’ remark

Relatives of some of the 52 victims of the July 7 London bombings protested in the High Court about a reference to their killers as the “apparent bombers”. One father addressed the court after Hugo Keith, QC, counsel to the 7/7 inquest, made his remark when referring to the four men who detonated suicide bombs on three Tube trains and a bus in July 2005.

“For more than 4½ years, the whole world has known that four sick and evil men killed 52 lovely, innocent people,” said Ernest Adams, 72, whose son James, 32, died in the explosion beneath King’s Cross.

Addressing a pre-inquest hearing, Mr Adams told the Coroner, Lady Justice Hallett: “Your inquest is not going to be about 52 apparent deaths, it will be about 52 real deaths caused by four real bombers. I find it very upsetting and insulting to use the word ‘apparent’.”

Other families echoed his concern and Mr Keith apologised for upsetting the families. The coroner added that her team would try to come up with another phrase that would not cause distress.

SOURCE



Climate crooks to investigate themselves

Whom do they think that will impress?

The two most influential advisory bodies on climate change are planning independent reviews of their research in an attempt to regain public trust after revelations about errors and the suppression of data. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is to appoint an independent team to examine its procedures after admitting having made errors that exaggerated the severity of the impact of global warming.

The Met Office, which supplies the global temperature trends used by the IPCC, has proposed that an international group of scientists re-examine 160 years of temperature data. The Met Office proposal is a tacit admission that its previous reports on such trends have been marred by their reliance on analysis by the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit. Two separate inquiries are being held into allegations that the unit tried to hide raw data from critics and exaggerated the extent of global warming.

In a document entitled Proposal for a New International Analysis of Land Surface Air Temperature Data, the Met Office says: “We feel it is timely to propose an international effort to re-analyse surface temperature data in collaboration with the World Meteorological Organisation.”

The new analysis would test the conclusion reached by the IPCC that “warming of the climate system is unequivocal”. The IPCC’s most glaring error was a claim that all Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035. Most glaciologists believe it would take another 300 years for the glaciers to melt at the present rate.

The allegations about climate scientists are believed to have contributed to a sharp rise in public scepticism about climate change. This month an opinion poll found that the proportion of the population that believes climate change is an established fact and largely man-made has fallen from 41 per cent in November to 26 per cent.

The Met Office paper emphasises that the assessment would be independent and based on data freely available to the public. It says: “The proposed activity would provide a set of independent assessments of surface temperature produced by independent groups using independent methods.”

The Met Office privately proposed the reassessment last December, soon after more than a thousand leaked e-mails raised doubts about the integrity of some scientists at the Climatic Research Unit. The Times revealed on December 5 that the Department of Energy and Climate Change had stopped the Met Office announcing the reassessment because it feared that it would be seized upon as an admission of weakness on the eve of the Copenhagen climate summit.

The reassessment will look at the data in much greater detail than previous attempts and provide more information about which regions are suffering extreme heat waves and the greatest average changes in climate. The Met Office said that this would allow international funding to be directed to where it was most needed.

Data from 3,000 weather stations around the world has already been published on the Met Office website and it hopes that data from the remaining 2,500 will be available later this year. The paper states that the reassessment is intended chiefly to “ensure that the datasets are completely robust and that all methods are transparent”. The Met Office says that it does not expect “any substantial changes in the resulting global and continental-scale multidecadal trends”. It said that the reassessment would take up to three years. It hopes the findings will be ready for the IPCC’s next report, to be published in 2013 and 2014.

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Specialist British nurses ‘ too stretched to care for all who need it’

Nurses who provide specialist services for the long-term sick are overstretched and unable to deliver care to all who need it, health unions and charities say today. The Royal College of Nursing (RCN) and other bodies said that the NHS could save millions of pounds by investing in nurses to support people with conditions such as Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis and epilepsy. But despite recent pledges by the Government to provide cancer patients with dedicated care, other specialist posts were vulnerable to cuts as the health service faces several years of financial restrain, the RCN said.

The union surveyed almost 300 specialist nurses working in 60 NHS organisations and charities and found that only 36 per cent believed that all those patients who needed specialist nursing received it. Of the 49 per cent who identified problems accessing specialist care, 69 per cent said it was because specialist nurse services were oversubscribed and could not take on new patients. More than a third said that they had seen cuts in services over the past 12 months, while 57 per cent are concerned that jobs will be threatened in the near future.

Specialist nurses work in areas including cancer care, diabetes and asthma, helping to keep people out of hospital by offering advice on medication and day-to-day living. The RCN estimates that £56 million a year could be saved on care for people with Parkinson’s through greater use of specialist nurses. A further £180 million could be saved by treating multiple sclerosis at home rather than in hospital, while £84 million could be shaved off the community health budgets if specialist nurses, rather than GPs, supported people with epilepsy.

Dr Peter Carter, general secretary of the RCN, told The Times that despite pledges from ministers to help to support more people in their homes and prevent unnecessary hospital visits, nursing posts were vulnerable when local health managers sought to cut costs. “Nurses realise that whoever wins the next election will be looking to make savings and to deliver more for less. The pressure on services with the economic downturn is going to go on for several years and things are likely to get worse before they get better,” he said. “Anecdotally, at the moment there is talk of local managers ‘reviewing skill mix’, which is just a euphemism for cutting staff.”

When the NHS was last in deficit in 2006, up to 23,000 nursing posts were lost, frozen or downgraded, in many cases depriving patients of specialist advice and care, Dr Carter said. “While the temptation may be to cut or downgrade specialist nursing roles, this would be a false economy which would only add to the growing cost of treating long-term conditions,” he added. About 17 million people in Britain are living with a chronic condition.

The RCN is calling for specialist posts to be supported by guaranteed funding, underwritten by the NHS, to ensure that short term cutbacks do not jeopardise posts in the long-term. Charities supporting the RCN’s policy recommendations include the Parkinson’s Disease Society, Macmillan Cancer Support, the Terrence Higgins Trust and the MS Society.

Norman Lamb, the Liberal Democrats’ health spokesman, commented yesterday: “Cuts are already taking place in marked contrast to the Prime Minister’s commitment for cancer patients to get personal support at home from specialist nurses. “Instead of chasing headlines, the Government needs to show how it intends to improve care.”

Meg Macarthur, senior policy officer at Breakthrough Breast Cancer, another of the charities supporting the call, said: “The threat to breast care and other specialist nurses is potentially devastating to patients. “We know that these nurses play a significant role in their care and recovery, offering an invaluable service throughout their treatment journey.”

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British Conservatives would scrap new legal burden for homeschoolers

The Tories would scrap a new duty that requires parents who educate their children at home to be registered with councils. Michael Gove, the Shadow Schools Secretary, said that he would block plans which “stigmatise” home educators. Under the Children, Schools and Families Bill, which has almost finished going through Parliament, local authorities will setup databases of home-educating families and visit them to ensure that standards are met.

It came after a report into home education by Graham Badman, a former headteacher and director of children’s services, published last summer, who said that there was a need for greater regulation. England has one of the most liberal approaches to home schooling in the Western world and it is not known exactly how many children are taught at home, nor whether they are reaching an acceptable standard of education.

In a debate yesterday on the timesonline blog, Schoolgate, one parent said: “Home educators have no faith in government after being treated so badly by Labour. How can that be rectified?”

Mr Gove said that he thought parents who educated their children at home did a wonderful job. He said: “Government should support them and we won’t allow the current Government’s plans to stigmatise home educators to get through.” Mr Gove promised that clauses of the Bill relating to home education would never become law if the Tories won power in the general election.

A report into home education last year revealed a lack of regulation. It said: “It is a cause of concern that, although approximately 20,000 home-educated children are known to local authorities, estimates vary as to the real number which could be in excess of 80,000.” Mr Badman, its author, added: “I am not persuaded that under the current regulatory regime, that there is a correct balance between the rights of the parents and the rights of the child — either to an appropriate education or to be safe from harm.”

The review found evidence of a small number of extreme cases, where home-educated children had suffered harm because concerns were not picked up. Its recommendations, which were accepted in full by the Government, included parents having to submit statements of what they intend to teach over the coming year. It also said that local authority officials should have the right of access to parents’ homes, after two weeks’ notice, to check the child is making progress.

A spokeswoman for the Action for Home Education group said: “For years home educators have tolerated unfair treatment by local authorities whose understanding of home-based education is, with few exceptions, minimal or non-existent. We are tired of being subjected to unreasonable suspicion and unfair scrutiny when we are doing the very best for our children. “We believe there are moves afoot by government to restrict traditional freedoms to educate children outside the school system and we are determined to do our utmost to prevent this.”

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25 February, 2010

Negligent British bureaucrats arrested for once: Amazing

The sky must be falling

Three Fire Service bosses were arrested yesterday in connection with a warehouse blaze that killed four firefighters. The fire at a vegetable packing plant in Warwickshire caused one of the biggest losses of life in the history of the Fire Service. Ian Reid, 44, Darren Yates-Badley, 24, Ashley Stephens, 20, and John Averis, 27, died tackling the blaze at Atherstone on Stour in 2007.

While police refused to reveal the ranks of the three men being questioned in custody, it is understood that they are managers who played a commanding and organisational role in tackling the fire. A 43-year-old man from Nuneaton, a 49-year-old man from Leamington and a 48-year-old man from Warwick attended Warwickshire police station yesterday morning. They were questioned on suspicion of gross negligence, manslaughter and offences under the Health and Safety at Work Act.

The fire, caused by a suspected arson attack and described as “the worst night for the Fire Service in decades”, started on November 2 at the warehouse near Stratford-upon-Avon. Sixteen fire engines and eighty firefighters tackled the blaze which lasted more than five hours, with flames spiralling hundreds of feet into the air. Mr Stephens, Mr Averis, and Mr Yates-Badley were reported missing and found dead in the smouldering remains of the building after an extensive search. Mr Reid died in hospital after the plant’s roof collapsed while he was inside. It was the biggest loss of life for the service since seven were killed in a fire in Glasgow in 1972.

Last May four Poles, who had worked at the warehouse, were arrested and questioned by Warwickshire Police in connection with the tragedy.

Earlier the Fire Brigades Union (FBU) had revealed that detectives were planning to arrest three managers who were involved in the incident command process. Matt Wrack, the FBU general secretary, said at the time: “We are concerned at the move to arrest these individuals at this stage when all other key players have not even been interviewed. “Evidence from our own investigation suggests there may be systemic failings.”

The incident has been the subject of a joint investigation by the police and the Health and Safety Executive. A Warwickshire Police official said: “A 43-year-old man from Nuneaton, a 49-year-old from Leamington Spa and a 48-year-old man from the Warwick area presented themselves at a Warwickshire police station, where they will be questioned on suspicion of gross negligence, manslaughter and offences under the Heath and Safety at Work Act.”

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British government's Stafford Hospital caused ‘unimaginable suffering’

And the bureaucrats responsible skate, with full pockets and no move for them to face any charges. See here

Patients were routinely neglected or left “sobbing and humiliated” by staff at an NHS trust where at least 400 deaths have been linked to appalling care. An independent inquiry found that managers at Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust stopped providing safe care because they were preoccupied with government targets and cutting costs. The inquiry report, published yesterday by Robert Francis, QC, included proposals for tough new regulations that could lead to managers at failing NHS trusts being struck off.

Staff shortages at Stafford Hospital meant that patients went unwashed for weeks, were left without food or drink and were even unable to get to the lavatory. Some lay in soiled sheets that relatives had to take home to wash, others developed infections or had falls, occasionally fatal. Many staff did their best but the attitude of some nurses “left a lot to be desired”.

The report, which follows reviews by the Care Quality Commission and the Department of Health, said that “unimaginable” suffering had been caused. Regulators said last year that between 400 and 1,200 more patients than expected may have died at the hospital from 2005 to 2008.

Andy Burnham, the Health Secretary, said there could be “no excuses” for the failures and added that the board that presided over the scandal had been replaced. An undisclosed number of doctors and at least one nurse are being investigated by the General Medical Council and Nursing and Midwifery Council.

Mr Burnham said it was a “longstanding anomaly” that the NHS did not have a robust way of regulating managers or banning them from working, as it does with doctors or nurses. “We must end the situation where a senior NHS manager who has failed in one job can simply move to another elsewhere,” he added. “This is not acceptable to the public and not conducive to promoting accountability and high professional standards.” A system of professional accreditation for senior managers would be considered and the Mid Staffordshire trust might lose its foundation status.

Some NHS chief executives have received six-figure redundancy packages or moved to other trusts despite poor performance. Martin Yeates, the former chief executive at Mid Staffordshire, received pay rises that took his annual salary to £180,000, while standards at the trust deteriorated. The Liberal Democrats claimed that he had also received a payoff of more than £400,000 after stepping down last March, though Mr Burnham said he had received “no more than his contractual entitlement”.

The Care Quality Commission, the NHS regulator, said that the trust under its new management was now “safe to provide services”. But it still had concerns about staffing, patient welfare, the availability and suitability of equipment at the trust, and how it monitored and dealt with complaints. The inquiry made 18 recommendations for the trust and the wider health service, which the Government accepted in full. They include a new review of how regulators and regional health authorities monitor NHS hospitals and a report on “early-warning systems” to identify failing trusts.

But the families of those who died or suffered poor care branded the inquiry a “whitewash” and repeated calls for a full public investigation. The Conservatives accused ministers of trying to blame managers rather than taking responsibility for problems with national targets. Julie Bailey, who founded the victims’ campaign group Cure the NHS after her mother died at Stafford Hospital, said that the handling of the scandal was disgraceful and unacceptable. “It is time that the public were told the truth about the very large number of excess deaths in NHS care and the very large number of avoidable but deadly errors that occur every day.”

The NHS Confederation, which represents health trusts, said: “The responsibility for the way this hospital was run rests with its board, management and staff but, as the report says, the framework of targets, regulatory systems and policy priorities it worked within are also very important.”

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British professor who claimed that degrees were dumbed down wins his case

But it's a long hard road for those who defend academic standards in modern-day Britain

An academic who took a stand against “dumbing down” the quality of university degrees won a long-running legal battle yesterday when the Court of Appeal accepted that he was forced out of his job. Professor Paul Buckland will be entitled to compensation from Bournemouth University after a previous ruling against him by the Employment Appeal Tribunal was overturned.

He resigned from the university’s chair of environmental archaeology in a dispute over marking after he failed 18 out of 60 second-year undergraduates who took examinations in 2006. When 16 of the students retook the paper, Professor Buckland failed all but two of them. He thought that “many of the papers were of poor quality”, the Court of Appeal heard. A second marker endorsed his scores, as did the university’s board of examiners, although it took note of the high failure rate and the need to address its causes.

But his department then had the exam papers marked for a third time and the marks were increased by up to six percentage points, moving several students from a “clear fail” to a “potential pass” depending on other results, the court heard.

Professor Buckland, who lives in Sheffield, took exception to the papers being marked for a third time, claiming that it was done “by somebody who did not have the relevant expert knowledge”. He accused Bournemouth University of cheapening degrees and making “a complete mockery of the examination process”. He claimed that the move was “part of a much larger process of dumbing down” and amounted to “an unequivocal affront to his integrity”.

The university held an internal inquiry that found in Professor Buckland’s favour. It said that he should have been consulted on the decision to mark the exam papers for a third time. But he remained unhappy and resigned in February 2007. He took the university to an employment tribunal, which decided in August 2008 that there had been a “fundamental breach of the implied term of trust and confidence” in his employment contract and that he had been constructively dismissed.

The decision was overruled in March last year by the Employment Appeal Tribunal but the Court of Appeal rejected that judgment yesterday and restored the original ruling.

Lord Justice Sedley said that the university could not defend the way it had undermined Professor Buckland’s status and it was the “inexorable outcome” that he had been constructively dismissed. Lord Justice Jacob said that it “ought to be entirely at the wronged party’s choice” whether to accept a repudiatory breach of contract and resign, or carry on in the job. If the university does not settle with him, Professor Buckland’s case will go to an employment tribunal for the level of compensation to be assessed.

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Belief in climate change dives in Britain

PUBLIC conviction in Britain about the threat of climate change has plummeted after months of questions over the science and growing disillusionment with government action, a leading poll has found. Reports yesterday said the proportion of adults who believed climate change was "definitely" a reality dropped by 13 per cent over the past year, from 44 per cent to 31 per cent, in the latest survey by Ipsos Mori.

Overall, about nine out of 10 people questioned still appeared to accept some degree of global warming, The Guardian reported. But the steep drop in those without doubts raised fears that it would be harder to persuade the public to support actions to curb the problem, particularly higher prices for energy and other goods, the paper said.

The true level of doubt was probably underestimated because the poll questioned only 16 to 64-year-olds, it said. People over 65 were more likely to be sceptical, the researchers said. Another finding by the poll that hinted at a growing lack of public confidence was a significant drop in those who said climate change was caused by human activities, the report said. One year ago, this number was one in three, but this year just one in five people believed global warming to be man-made, pollster Edward Langley told the paper.

"It's going to be a hard sell to make people make changes to their behaviours unless there's something else in it for them -- (such as) energy efficiency measures saving money on fuel bills," he said. "It's a hard sell to tell people not to fly off for weekends away if you're not wholly convinced by the links. Even people who are (convinced) still do it."

John Sauven, executive director of Greenpeace, told the paper that fluctuations in public opinion had prompted environment groups to rethink their approach to campaigning -- which had often focused on threats of climate disaster and making people feel guilty for their part in it. "All of us have (talked about these changes)," Mr Sauven said. "A lot of headlines have been grossly distorted, but that doesn't get away from the fact it's quite a complex issue, so we have got to talk about what is engaging and positive in terms of the response (that) can have many benefits to our society, for example energy security."

The shift in public opinion with respect to climate change comes after hackers leaked thousands of emails from a top British research facility showing that some of the world's most influential climatologists had been trying to disguise flaws in their work, blocking scrutiny and plotting together to enforce what amounted to a party line on climate change.

The poll comes after the UN's advisory group, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, was embarrassed by the revelation some alarming predictions about climate change contained in an influential report that it released in 2007 had little or no scientific basis. But The Guardian said evidence that these events were behind the increased public uncertainty in Britain was mixed.

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24 February, 2010

At last we know the truth: The Labour party despises anyone who loves Britain, its values and its history

Of all the issues of concern to the public, immigration is possibly the most explosive - and the one about which the most lies are continuing to be told. During the period that Labour has been in office, mass immigration has simply changed the face of Britain. The total number of immigrants since 1997 is pushing three million.

Ministers claim that immigration policy has been driven principally to help the economy. They have always denied that they actually set out deliberately to change the ethnic composition of the country. Well, now we know for a certainty that this is not true. The Government embarked on a policy of mass immigration to change Britain into a multicultural society - and they kept this momentous aim secret from the people whose votes they sought. Worse still, they did this knowing that it ran directly counter to the wishes of those voters, whose concerns about immigration they dismissed as racist; and they further concealed official warnings that large-scale immigration would bring about significant increases in crime.

The truth about this scandal was first blurted out last October by Andrew Neather, a former Labour Party speechwriter. He wrote that until the new points-based system limiting foreign workers was introduced in 2008 - in response to increasing public uproar - government policy for the previous eight years had been aimed at promoting mass immigration. The 'driving political purpose' of this policy, wrote Neather, was 'to make the UK truly multicultural' - and one subsidiary motivation was 'to rub the Right's nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date'.

Ministers, however, went to great lengths to keep their real intentions secret from the public - with, said Neather, a ' paranoia' that these would reach the media - since they knew their core white working-class voters would react very badly. Accordingly, a report about immigration by a government advisory unit, which formed the core of a landmark speech in 2000 announcing the loosening of border controls, went through several drafts before it was finally published - and the Government's true intentions about changing Britain into a multicultural society were removed from the final version.

After revealing all this, Neather subsequently tried to backtrack, saying that his views had been twisted out of all recognition by the media. They hadn't been. Nevertheless, Jack Straw, who was Home Secretary at the time the immigration policy was changed, said he had read press reports of Neather's remarks with incredulity since they were 'the reverse of the truth'.

Now we know, however, that they were indeed the truth. We know this only because details of the advisory unit's report which were excised from the final published version - just as Neather said - have been emerging into the public domain through Freedom of Information requests. The pressure group MigrationWatch obtained an early draft which revealed that the Government's intention was to encourage mass immigration for 'social objectives' - in other words, to produce a more ethnically diverse society - but that on no fewer than six occasions this phrase was excised from the final version, published some three months later.

Now we further discover, from what was removed from seemingly another early draft, that the aim was not just to implement this policy of mass immigration without the knowledge or consent of the British people. It was done in the full knowledge that the people actually wanted immigration reduced. And we also discover that those who expressed such concerns were dismissed with utter contempt as racists - and it was further suggested that ministers should manipulate public opinion in an attempt to change people's attitudes.

Well, they have certainly tried to do that by hanging the disgusting label of 'racism' round the neck of anyone who dares voice such concerns. Thus the eminent and decent Labour MP Frank Field found himself smeared as a racist for daring to suggest that the rate of immigration should be reduced. What bullying arrogance. The real prejudice is surely to believe that opposition to mass migration can never be based on any reasonable objection.

The implications of this covert policy are quite staggering. Ministers deliberately set out to change the cultural and ethnic identity of this country in secret. They did this mainly because they hated what Britain was, a largely homogeneous society rooted in 1,000 years of history. They therefore set out to replace it by a totally new kind of multicultural society - and one in which the vast majority of newcomers could be expected to vote Labour.

They set out to destroy the right of the British people to live in a society defined by a common history, religion, law, language and traditions. They set out to destroy for ever what it means to be culturally British and to put another 'multicultural' identity in its place. And they then had the gall to declare that to have love for or pride in that authentic British identity, and to want to protect and uphold it, was racist.

So the very deepest feelings of people for their country were damned as bigotry, for which crime they were to have their noses rubbed in mass immigration until they changed their attitudes.

What an appalling abuse of power. Yet even now they are denying that this is what they did. Yesterday, the Immigration Minister Phil Woolas blustered that the advisory unit report had not been accepted by ministers at the time. But the fact is that mass immigration actually happened. The only thing ministers hadn't accepted was that the truth about their intentions should be revealed to the public.

Surreally, Mr Woolas further claims that the Government has brought immigration down. But the reductions he is talking about have taken place on the separate issue of asylum. The impact of the Government's new points scheme upon the record rate of immigration growth has been negligible.

The truth is that these early drafts of the advisory unit's report have blown open one of the greatest political scandals of the Labour years. At no stage did Labour's election manifestos make any reference to a policy of mass immigration nor the party's aim of creating a multicultural society. What we have been subjected to is a deliberate deception of the voters and a gross abuse of democracy.

There could scarcely be a more profound abuse of the democratic process than to set out to destroy a nation's demographic and cultural identity through a conscious deception of the people of that nation. It is an act of collective national treachery.

Now we face imminently another General Election. And now we know that in their hearts, Labour politicians hold the great mass of the public, many of them their own voters, in total contempt as racist bigots - all for wanting to live in a country whose identity they share.

There could hardly be a more worthy issue for the Conservative Party to leap upon. Yet their response is muted through their own visceral terror of appearing racist. The resulting despair over the refusal of the mainstream parties to address this issue threatens to drive many into the arms of the truly racist British National Party. If that happens, the fault will lie not just with Labour's ideological malice and mendacity, but with the spinelessness of an entire political class.

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Why can't Britain follow Israel’s lead?

EXCUSE me for not sending flowers to the funeral of the terrorist the Israelis bumped off in Dubai. Unlike the bleeding hearts in the liberal media I’m not shedding any tears. As military chief of terrorist group Hamas, Mahmoud al Mabhouh had the blood of many Israeli soldiers and civilians on his hands. He was in charge of smuggling rockets and grenades into the Gaza Strip so his murderous gangs could lob them into Israel. He could hardly complain when a hit squad from Mossad, the Israeli security service, brought his life to a swift end. To say he had it coming is an understatement.

So why such a fuss about his execution? Why has the Foreign office twisted the arm of the Israeli ambassador? And possibly the most crucial question of all: whose side are we on, the terrorists or those with the courage to stand up to them? The Israelis don’t mess about, they don’t sit back and take it. You kill one of them and they will kill you. And afterwards they won’t explain, they won’t apologise, they won’t even deny it.

WORLD opinion means nothing – what ever London, Washington or Damascus may say the Israelis are convinced that they are right. An eye for an eye is the most basic concept of natural justice, dating back 4,000 years to Babylonian times and is promoted three times in the old Testament. Even in the New Testament Jesus says: Those who take up the sword shall die by the sword.

Did Mahmoud al-Mabhouh reflect on that as he checked in to room 230 at his posh hotel in Dubai? He was the man behind the kidnapping and killing of two Israel soldiers 21 years ago; he had been smuggling arms into the Gaza Strip; he was believed to be in Dubai to buy more weapons from an Iranian dealer. If Mossad agents came to call they were hardly there to inquire after his health.

Unlike Britain, Israel doesn’t tolerate an enemy within. It doesn’t give those who hate them free housing and welfare handouts. It doesn’t let the right of free speech enable them to preach murder on its streets.

Retribution is a vital part of Israel’s psyche. After the Second World War the Israelis spent half a century tracking down evil Nazis. When Israeli athletes were murdered at the 1972 olympics their Palestinian killers were hunted around the world and eliminated: one by a bomb in his bed, another by a booby-trapped phone.

Who can forget the electrifying raid on Entebbe in 1976 when Israeli special forces stormed a hijacked airliner, killed the terrorists and freed all but three of the hostages? It was a salutary lesson to the world.

You’d think that Britain of all countries would understand the need to pull no punches with those who have sworn to be your enemies. That’s what the SAS did in Northern Ireland for more than 30 years, taking out IRA members before they could perpetrate further outrages. It is what our special forces did in Iraq and are doubtless doing in Afghanistan.

It is what the SAS should be doing today in Somalia, where British yacht couple Paul and Rachel Chandler are being held by pirates. Can you imagine the Israelis allowing two of their people to suffer so long in some fly-blown African hellhole?

Israel has no reason to be ashamed of its actions. As Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman points out: “our security activity is conducted according to the very clear, very cautious and responsible rules of the game.” rule No 1 of course in any security activity is kill or be killed.

Where Britain has a right to be upset, however, is the way the Israelis have carried out ID theft on the passports of six of our citizens. It’s not the first time they’ve done it and last time they promised they wouldn’t do it again.

One Foreign office source says Britain could cut ties with Mossad if the Israelis have been “found to be acting against British interests”. You might think executing the would terrorist might be precisely in our interests but the career diplomats take a loftier view.

Gordon Brown says Israel has questions to answer about nicking our passports but the implication is that Britain wouldn’t be in the least bit put out if the Israeli hit squad had used fake documents from Libya, Japan, Peru – in fact anywhere other than Britain. BROWN even has the cheek to spout that “a British passport is an important part of being British”. This from a Prime Minister whose policy was to welcome millions of immigrants so he could socially engineer the country to be less British and more likely to vote Labour.

We should take no lessons either from the BBC, which for too long refused to call Hamas suicide bombers “terrorists” and hid behind weasel words like “radicals” and “militants”. Its anti-Israel bias is clear today when BBC News pontificates that Israel “may have scored a costly own goal” by using British identities for what it calls “nefarious activities”.

Make no mistake, I think a British passport is the most valuable document in the world and I don’t like it being used to gain illegal entry to another country. But my top priority will always be security and the world is undoubtedly more secure now Hamas has lost another murderer from its ranks.

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Whatever it may claim, Britain's Leftist Government thinks critics of immigration are racists

The plot thickens around “Neathergate” (as no one is calling it yet). As the Telegraph reports:

Opponents of immigration could be racist, warned advisers a decade ago

People opposed to immigration in to Britain could be influenced by racism, a previously unseen Government paper signalled.

The draft paper, drawn up for the Home Office, said “anti-immigrant sentiment is closely correlated with racism” but the message was removed when the document was finally published, fuelling suggestions it was considered too sensitive a point to make. It was contained in an early version of an analysis of the impact of immigration on the UK first written in 2000 and published the following year.

Labour has now claimed the “it’s not racist to talk about immigration” line as its own, in true Stalinist fashion, despite being the ones to throw that slur at anyone who ever dissented over these past dozen years. But what especially interests me is this:

The latest draft to be unearthed said: “Recent research shows that anti-immigrant sentiment is closely correlated with racism rather than economic motives.

“Education and people’s personal exposure to migrants make them less likely to be anti-migrant.

“The most negative attitudes are found among those who have relatively little direct contact with migrants, but see them as a threat.”

It said it was “correct that public opinion favours relatively restrictive policies on immigration” and advised ministers to adopt a “clear strategy for public opinion and public debate” to change views – but they were removed from the published version.

Of course anti-immigration sentiment may be motivated by racism – it certainly is in some cases – just as anti-bankers’ bonuses sentiment may be motivated by envy, or anti-socialist sentiment by greed. But to suggest that any of these arguments are therefore invalid because some of their supporters are secretly motivated by dark motives is a logical fallacy.

So is the belief that hostility to immigration is correlated to a lack of education. Poor people may be more hostile to immigration, because they bear all its costs, but even then they’re often not: the white working class are more likely to intermarry than any other group in Britain, apart from African-Caribbeans. Likewise, anti-social or violent individuals may show more hostility and aggression towards members of other groups – but they also show more violence towards members of their own group as well. This does not mean there is any corrollation between anti-social, violent behaviour and hostility to diversity, or that diversity makes people less anti-social.

People’s exposure to migrants may make them less hostile to migrants where friendships are formed, but otherwise the increasing diversity of an area will, in fact, make more people more hostile and distrusting to all their neighbours. Sometimes what the political class call “racism” is racism; sometimes it’s just a recognition that large-scale immigration can unsettle an area, what Robert Putnam found about the downside of diversity:

Across local areas in the United States, Australia, Sweden, Canada and Britain, greater ethnic diversity is associated with lower social trust and, at least in some cases, lower investment in public goods… immigration and ethnic diversity challenge social solidarity and inhibit social capital… People living in ethnically diverse settings appear to ‘hunker down’ – that is, to pull in like a turtle.

Diversity has diverse consequences, and many people had social as well as economic reasons for opposing it. But the Government’s “clear strategy for public opinion and public debate” to counter this feeling was to shout “racism” at anyone who objected, even when opinion polls showed black and Asian Britons hostile to high levels of immigration.

But Whitehall officials were obviously too unsure of their own arguments to stand up this allegation of racism in public. Instead, the final document published in 2001 had all Labour’s hidden “social” motives taken out, and merely argued for the economic, rather than social, benefits of mass immigration.

But, as the House of Lords found in its 2007/2008 report, those economic benefits are virtually non-existent.

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Breast cancer victims face NHS ageism, campaigners claim

Age discrimination is rife in the care of breast cancer patients, campaigners claimed yesterday. Older women with the disease are up to 40 times less likely to be given surgery on the NHS than younger patients, research shows. They are also less likely to be diagnosed or receive standard treatments such as chemotherapy and radiotherapy.

The findings on surgery applies to women over the age of 80. When they do get surgery, it is 'significantly' less likely to be breast-conserving, with more women losing their entire breast during the operation. In addition, those over 70 are not routinely invited to breast screening, which can lead to an earlier diagnosis.

Daphne Cook was diagnosed with breast cancer aged 74, but her consultant said she did not need radiotherapy as being older might make it difficult for her to get to the hospital. Mrs Cook, now 87, a grandmother of seven and great-grandmother of six, eventually got the treatment after her daughter, a health worker, questioned the decision. 'I didn't understand the importance of radiotherapy treatment and I certainly wouldn't have pushed for it,' Mrs Cook said. She has since enjoyed more than ten years of good health.

Jeremy Hughes, chief executive of Breakthrough Breast Cancer, which carried out the research, said: 'Ten years ago women like Daphne were not being given a full range of treatment options and our research has found this is still the case today, despite many advances in breast cancer treatment. 'With nearly 12,000 women dying of breast cancer each year it is scandalous that all women are not receiving equal access to the treatments they need.'

The charity is calling for the Government to implement laws against ageism in the Health Service. Last year a survey of doctors caring for older patients found that almost half believed the NHS is 'institutionally ageist'.

The risk of breast cancer increases with age and a third of cases occur in women aged 70 and over. Nearly 46,000 were diagnosed with breast cancer last year, and experts predict this will rise to 57,000 a year by 2024 - an increase of 20 per cent.

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In British education, the high fly, the rest sink. And no one acts

Selection by ability, normal in most countries, has become selection by cash. This is insular, hypocritical and damaging

On the conduct of wars the political parties can disagree, on the economy they can pretend to, but on a key subject for Britain’s future — selection in education — a conspiracy of silence reigns, which as the election approaches will become deafening.

For 13 years new Labour, to this day an almost religiously anti-selection party, has presided over the downgrading of the educational expectations of the lowest in society, the flourishing of the highest, and the extinction of competition between the two. Hence, in large part, the startling retreat of meritocracy in Britain compared with other countries: an LSE report in 2005 showed that in the past 30 years we had gone into reverse, mostly for educational reasons.

It is not about money. Under the hardline, anti-selection Ed Balls the greater the expenditure on education the wider the great divide between state and private. Labour remains neurotic about social class, and sure enough the most recent examination figures are a caricature of their class connotations: independent schools — 7 per cent of total pupils — scored 11,500 straight As against a piddling 9,725 sixth formers in comprehensives.

What will happen when the first starred As are published later this year? I think we know who will get the lion’s share. The result will no doubt be even more anguished contortions in university admission procedures, to avoid the embarrassment of too many starred pupils getting the best university places. Only in Britain ...

The situation would be less appalling if Labour’s defunct ideology were under challenge, but the Conservatives go along with it, and the Lib-Dems you can once again forget. The question the Tories never answer is how the independent schools they largely patronise can be selective in every sense — academically, financially, socially — while the party leadership abhors selection for people who do not have the cash?

Who would have thought that Conservatives would frown on those upstart grammar schools — a personal bugbear of Cameron it seems — as “entrenching advantage,” in the ill-chosen words of David Willetts. From a party with no criticism to make of parents who send their children to private schools (and nor should it), that is a phrase to be rolled around the tongue.

Meanwhile, all parties collude in masking the true position on university admissions, which is worse than people think. In Oxbridge they think something over 40 per cent are from the 7 per cent of private schools — shocking enough. But if you include selective grammars (in well-to-do areas, by and large) alongside selective independents, the 2008 figure is 63 per cent selective. The underperformance of the comprehensives, some 90 per cent of the system, in Oxbridge as elsewhere is tragic.

In Britain any debate on selection is cut off at the knees before it starts: “11 plus,” “a return to old-style grammars” and “writing off as failures” is all you need to say. No serious person proposes any of this. Sir Eric Anderson, former Provost of Eton and mentor to Blair and Cameron, says that the debate should not be about the 11-plus and whether or not to select, but how to do it. It could be later than 11, it does not have to be in separate schools, though that should be an option, since national standardisation introduces rigor mortis into the system.

The British non-debate on selection is insular, ignorant, class ridden, neurotic and to the nth degree hypocritical, especially in the upper reaches. The Sutton Trust’s report on selection in other parts of the world, due at the end of the year, will help. It exists in various forms pretty much everywhere. There are sophisticated systems in France and Germany, where it takes place at 14, and those who don’t make the Gymnasium (grammar schools) may have to content themselves with being doctors or well-paid engineers.

The Indians and the Chinese especially have no qualms about selecting the best suited to particular lines of study. In India vocational emphasis begins at 14, in China higher technical schools start at 15. With the talents of hundreds of millions to draw on, in time these countries will outclass us in field after field. We must hope that ambitious immigrants will increasingly challenge their host country’s indolent and evasive assumptions about how, without effort or distinction, or being drawn into the invidious position of accepting that one person can be more capable in some ways than another, somehow the Brits will always come out on top.

Though perhaps the British case is hopeless? It may be that ingrained cultural factors are at work, a perverse social consciousness that leads the British to think it normal that the upper reaches of society should be schooled according to one theory of education, with remarkable success it seems, while the non-affluent majority should be content to follow a manifestly inferior system. Where else in the developed world are two methods of examination developing, pretty much without comment, one largely the preserve of monnied folk — the International Baccalaureate — and a less demanding one for the rest?

Proof that the egalitarian experiment has run its course is mounting, but no one seems ready to contemplate alternative systems. Rather than face up to fundamentals, gimcrack ideas are imported from countries with a population smaller than London. Meanwhile, all our party leaders and most leading political figures were selectively or independently educated. Not their choice, of course, but it seems to have served them well, and I don’t see many of them sending their own children to the new, non-selective local city academy.

The culture of anti-intellectualism fostered by an egalitarian system means that it is no longer possible to discuss anything much without recourse to celebrity. The clinching argument in favour of a system that gives the non-advantaged a chance against the rest must, therefore, be that an increasing number of our pop stars, comedians, actors and sportsmen and women are privately (ie, selectively) educated.

Britain’s got talent, the TV programme tells us, and I suspect it has, but we won’t go far while selection can only operate on TV shows.

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23 February, 2010

Sick Britain again

Sex attacker freed from jail to kill mother as his human rights deemed 'more important than safety of others'

A woman was murdered by a violent sex attacker who had been released from prison just nine months earlier, an inquest heard today. Anthony Rice was on licence at the Elderfield probation hostel in Winchester, Hampshire, when he killed Naomi Bryant after they met in the city, the inquest was told. A report by the chief inspector of probation released in 2006 said probation and other officials were sidetracked by considering Rice's human rights above their duty to the public.

The hearing into the death of multiple sclerosis sufferer and mother-of-one Ms Bryant, 40, takes place almost five years after she was strangled and stabbed to death in her home by Anthony Rice. Central Hampshire Coroner Grahame Short told the jury that the cause of Ms Bryant's death had been murder but the inquest, which is expected to last up to three weeks, would look into the issues surrounding the killing.

He explained that the hearing at Winchester Crown Court would take evidence from police, probation and prison service representatives looking at Rice's release from prison and management in the community. He said: 'We will be looking at what the various authorities did or did not do to protect the public and in particular Naomi Bryant.' He added: 'This inquest is not straightforward but it is emotive. Naomi Bryant left a daughter aged 14 without a mother and her own mother lost a child. 'They will have been devastated by her death and you will feel great sympathy for them. 'You may feel revulsion at some of the evidence, you will hear evidence of a violent and sexual nature, however your duty is to find the facts and reach a conclusion.'

The inquest was told that a post mortem examination showed that Ms Bryant had been stabbed 15 times to the chest and once to the neck and had been strangled with a ligature. The cause of death was given as pressure to the neck and multiple stab wounds.

A critical report by chief inspector of probation Andrew Bridges released in 2006 found that there were 'substantial deficiencies' in supervision by probation and other officials in Hampshire. He concluded that officials were sidetracked by considering Rice's human rights above their duty to the public. Two parole requests were refused before he was released in November 2004, having served nearly 16 years. The Parole Board concluded he presented only a 'minimal risk'. The report said the 2001 decision by the board to move him to an open prison created a 'momentum towards release'.

When the decision to free him was made the board 'gave insufficient weight to the underlying nature of his risk of harm to others'. Rice was then put under the supervision of the Multi Agency Public Protection Arrangements, designed to manage violent offenders in England and Wales.

Detective Inspector David Crouch, of Hampshire Police's major crime department, told the hearing that Ms Bryant suffered from multiple sclerosis and was also an alcoholic who was well known in Winchester. He said: 'She had been a regular drinker for most of her adult life, she was what is commonly known as an alcoholic. 'She had a distinctive style of dress, a local character, and a very nice lady by all accounts.'

He described how Ms Bryant met Rice in a pub on August 13, 2005, a few days before he killed her. They met again in passing on August 17 when Ms Bryant called her daughter on Rice's mobile phone to tell her that she was going out drinking, Mr Crouch said. He added that at 7pm that evening Ms Bryant and Rice were seen walking together towards her home, where her body was found the next morning by her ex-partner and her daughter.

He said that when police arrived, they found 'a lot of blood' between the bedroom and bathroom. He added that Ms Bryant's body was found hidden under a mattress between two sections of the bed which had been pulled apart. She had been stabbed with a knife taken from the kitchen of the house. The force of the blows had caused the tip of the knife to break off, the inquest heard.

He said that Rice was arrested the following day in London where he had bought a ticket to return to Scotland, where he had grown up. Mr Crouch said that Rice confessed during police interview to the killing and told officers that there had not been a sexual motive to the crime. Rice told police that he decided he was going to kill her simply because he had a 'deep set anger inside him', the inquest heard. He also said in interview that if it had not been Ms Bryant he would have killed someone else and he had chosen her because she was 'vulnerable' and an 'easy target'. The hearing was told that Rice had said that he knew that he would be caught and go back to prison, but said that he did not care.

Mr Crouch told the inquest that Rice also confessed to attacking a woman with a brick in Southampton in April 2005. He said that Rice had told police that he had gone to visit a prostitute but had become angry when she had 'ripped him off'. Rice said that he had vented his anger by hitting the woman with a brick as she walked to work and also attacked another prostitute and a vagrant. Rice was given a life sentence at Winchester Crown Court for the murder of Ms Bryant, in October 2005, with a minimum term of 25 years imposed.

The inquest was told that Rice had 22 previous convictions prior to the murder dating back to 1972 when he was aged 15. The first offences were six charges of indecent assault and were dealt with at a Dundee youth court and involved him slapping the faces of passers by and indecently assaulting some of them. In 1989 Rice was convicted of attempted rape. Mr Crouch said that as part of his conditions for release from prison, Rice was given a residential place at the Elderfield hostel where he was subject to a curfew.

He said that Rice was allowed to leave the hostel during the day and he worked at a launderette for a period and was also trying to get on to a computer training course.

SOURCE



Crazy NHS tells old lady to go to one hospital to treat her left eye and to another hospital to treat her right eye -- even though both eyes had the same problem!

No doubt that made sense to some bureaucrat

A 79-year-old grandmother revealed today how she was told she must receive sight-saving treatment for her eyes at two hospitals that are 30 miles apart. Pensioner Mavis Eldridge must travel to another city to treat Acute Macular Degeneration (AMD) in her left eye, even though her local hospital is already treating her right one.

She was given the sight-saving wonderdrug Lucentis in her right eye at University Hospital in Coventry, where she is still being treated for the disease. But she was told doctors were too busy to treat her after she developed the same condition in her left eye, even though the injection only takes a few seconds. Mavis, from Coventry, said: 'It is well known if you get macular disease in one eye you very often get it in the other too. So why can't they treat both?'

Mavis still has monthly scans at University Hospital but the disease, caused by bleeding at the back of the eye, is rapidly ruining the sight in her left eye too. Mavis has been told to make her own way to Selly Oak Hospital in Birmingham despite her sight-loss meaning she cannot drive. Mavis's daughter Maggie Richards drove 85 miles from Marlow, Bucks, to take her mother for her first appointment at Selly Oak on Saturday. She said: 'It seems bizarre that the clinic in Coventry can monitor and scan her left eye but not actually treat it.'

It is not the first time Mavis has hit problems getting her AMD treated. Last year, she had to pay more than £600 for a private course of the high-risk drug Avastin to stop her going blind in her right eye. The NHS had waited so long to treat her deteriorating sight that she no longer qualified for free care. Luckily the drug worked and her sight recovered enough for her to be eligible for further NHS treatment.

The Macular Disease Society said it had never heard of another patient having to be treated at separate hospitals for each eye. Chief executive Helen Jackman said the treatment Lucentis was approved by the NHS in August 2008 and the hospital and primary care trust should have had time to develop their services by now. She said: 'We understand that it is difficult for hospitals in some areas. But it is also very difficult for Mrs Eldridge and we urge the trusts to try to find a more acceptable or imaginative solution that takes into account individual needs.'

Richard Kennedy, medical director at University Hospital, said Mavis was offered the alternative choice of being treated at Selly Oak Hospital to ensure she could get NHS care as soon as possible. He said the decision was made in the patient's best interests because it was vital to treat AMD quickly. Mr Kennedy said there was huge demand for Lucentis as a new drug which was putting hospitals under great pressure.

SOURCE



Climate: The week that was

Perhaps the major environmental news of the week was a friendly interview of Phil Jones, the former head of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU), by BBC’s Roger Harabin. After the interview, a question and answer statement, with some corrections, was released by BBC.

In the interview Jones stated that although there has been a modest warming trend since 1995, it is not statistically significant. Further, there is no statistically significant difference among the four warming trends of 1860-1880, 1910-40, 1975-1995, and 1975-2009. Thus, one can not use the global surface temperature record to statistically establish that the recent warming was different from past warming periods. Many “skeptics” have been vindicated – the global surface temperature datasets do not establish a statistically defensible link between carbon dioxide emissions and the recent warming.

Jones claims the agreement between the CRU and the NASA GISS, and NOAA datasets indicates nothing is wrong. However all three may be wrong. Reports by D’Aleo, Watts, the Russian Institute of Economic Analysis, etc. strongly suggest that the three global surface temperature datasets have been heavily compromised in recent years and likely contain strong warming biases.

These revelations contradict the findings of the IPCC and US EPA in its Endangerment Finding. Since, IPCC and EPA failed to offer strong physical evidence that the recent warming was caused by carbon dioxide emissions, their claims that CO2 was the cause are not scientifically defensible by statistics or physical science.

On New Year’s Eve, after years of requests under the Freedom of Information Act, NASA GISS released emails and data related to its reports on global surface temperatures. The NASA GISS dataset depends, in part, on NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center dataset but is calculated differently. It will take diligent work to understand the full impact of what is being revealed. But the January reports by D’Aleo, et al. on the disappearance of 565 of 600 Canadian weather stations from NASA and NOAA datasets are indications of what may come.

As a whole, the US media has been dismissive of the importance of Climategate and subsequent revelations. The non-scientific claims of the IPCC are considered by many commentators as insignificant. A reading of Chapter 9, “Transforming the Energy Sector and Addressing Climate Change,” in the recently released Economic Report of the President illustrates the significance of the scientifically unsupported claims by IPCC.

The chapter begins by citing claims that CO2 emissions will likely cause large temperature increases – all from IPCC models that have never been validated thus have no predictive power. It continues with claims of “increased mortality rates, reduced agricultural yields in many parts of the world, and rising sea levels that could inundate low-lying coastal areas.”

“The planet has not experienced such a rapid warming on a global scale in many thousands of years, and never as a result of emissions from human activity.”

Elsewhere the President’s report cites EPA’s Endangerment Finding, calculates massive increases in property damage from increased severity of storms, justifies cap-and-trade, and promotes spending $60 Billion in cash and $30 Billion in tax credits for alternative energy. Of course tax credits benefit only those with high tax liabilities (high incomes).

The claims of increased mortality rates and reduced agriculture yields (found in IPCC reports) are directly contradicted by late 20th Century history, the period claimed to be one of unprecedented warming. During this time mortality rates generally went down, human longevity up, and agricultural yields increased dramatically. Ironically, after declaring agricultural yields will decline the President’s report embraced an increase in mandatory bio-fuel use in gasoline from 9 billion gallons in 2008 to 36 billion gallons by 2022. It does not calculate the farm acreage required for this effort.

The claimed massive increases in property damage are, no doubt, based on IPCC’s claim in which the actual study found no statistically significant link between warming and catastrophic property damage. Sea levels have increased about 400 feet in the last 18,000 years or about 27 inches per century. The report cites a 7 inch rise since 1900 as if it is alarming. The statement that the “planet has not experienced such a rapid warming” has no merit.

Perhaps most journalists consider spending $90 Billion on various schemes to “fight climate change” insignificant. But one would hope for better scientific justification.

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The Great Asbestos Hysteria: The BBC, profiteering firms and politicians have exaggerated the dangers

Yesterday saw the launch of yet another scare campaign. As so often before championed by the BBC, it warned us again of the deadly dangers posed by asbestos - this time in Britain's schools.

In the past 30 years, it was claimed on Radio 4's Today programme, 178 teachers have died of asbestos-related diseases - and their numbers are rising all the time. Indeed, according to a new study backed by the teaching unions and cited by the Today programme report, three-quarters of our schools contain asbestos - and almost none of it is being properly 'managed' as the law dictates.

It sounds horrific, as though hundreds of thousands of children and their teachers are being daily put at risk by exposure to a substance as deadly as anthrax. Yet the truth is that this is just the latest in a series of attempts to whip up mass hysteria over the dangers of asbestos in schools, which are, in reality, all but non-existent.

No one would deny that asbestos, which has been used as a heat retardant and binding agent for centuries, can cause serious health problems. The fibres of some types of asbestos have been linked to various forms of cancer. But too often the scare stories are based on fiction, not fact.

A few years ago, for example, much publicity was given to a similar bid to alarm Britain's parents. This one centred on a claim by a Michael Lees, whose teacher wife had supposedly died of an asbestos-related cancer, mesothelioma. It claimed that 'death-trap classrooms' were 'riddled with asbestos' and had claimed the lives of no fewer than 147 teachers between 1991 and 2000.

When Mr Lees's claim was investigated by the Health and Safety Executive - the Government agency responsible for enforcing asbestos regulation - however, it found his belief that 'the number of deaths of primary school teachers from mesothelioma was disproportionately high' was 'not borne out by the facts'. The death rate among female teachers, it turned out, was no higher than for the rest of the female working population - and was anyway extremely low.

It is true that most older school buildings contain asbestos products of one kind or another, such as asbestos cement roof slates or ceiling tiles. But almost all of these products contain relatively harmless white asbestos, encapsulated in cement or other materials, from which it is virtually impossible to extract even a single dangerous fibre. The dangers from such products are so vanishingly small - as many scientific studies have shown - that, in the cautious words of a report by the HSE itself, they are 'insignificant'. The risks of their causing lung cancer are 'arguably zero'.

This is why the HSE correctly advises school authorities to leave asbestos products in place and intact wherever they are serving a useful purpose - such as minimising the risk of fire or providing effective roofing.

So why these repeated attempts to whip up people's fears over what all the evidence reveals to be a non- existent problem? Part of the problem is that there is money to be made from fuelling asbestos hysteria. First, licensed asbestos removal contractors can all too often charge exorbitant sums for handling and disposing of this 'deadly' material. Second, a new breed of law firm, which specialises in compensation claims and takes a healthy cut from any successful cases, is keen to tout for custom. They will even pay commissions to trade unions, such as those representing teachers, for any potential 'clients' passed on to them.

And both benefit from a general ignorance of what asbestos really is. The word 'asbestos' is, in fact, a non- scientific term used to cover two very different substances. It is now more than 50 years since the iron silicate minerals known as 'blue' and 'brown' asbestos were discovered to be highly dangerous, killing tens of thousands of people in very unpleasant ways. Their use amounted to one of the nastier public health disasters of the 20th century and was a terrible tragedy for all those who suffered. On the back of this, compensation claims - particularly in America - amounted to many billions of dollars.

But the devil got into the story when this justified concern was then used, by sleight of hand, to demonise a quite different mineral: 'white' asbestos, which is used to make more than 90 per cent of all the asbestos products in the world. For ' white' asbestos, as even the HSE has acknowledged, is 500 times less dangerous than the 'blue' form, because its soft magnesium silicate fibres rapidly dissolve in the human lung. And when it is encapsulated in cement, as it most often is, it is virtually impossible for those fibres to escape and be breathed into the lungs at all.

Shamefully, however, our gullible lawmakers have allowed themselves to be talked into confusing the genuinely dangerous forms of asbestos with those that pose no risk - simply because they share the same general name. And this has paved the way for these two commercial rackets.

The new army of specialist asbestos removal contractors, the only professionals now allowed to handle asbestos, certainly have a vested interest in exaggerating the dangers of products which are, in effect, harmless. As does the ' compensation' industry, which makes a fortune from claims.

No one could be more deserving of sympathy than the genuine-victims of asbestos-related diseases, the vast majority of whom were dockyard workers, electricians and plumbers, exposed to the dangerous forms of asbestos in the years before those risks were properly recognised. But this genuine concern has now been used to whip up unjustified alarm over products which are safe, leaving us to face yet another of those damaging and unnecessary 'scares' of which our society has seen too many in recent years.

And make no mistake: it is costing us a fortune. Indeed, many people are so confused that they can be fooled into imagining that a harmless asbestos roof might somehow pose a lethal danger - and duped into paying through the nose to have it replaced.

Even the once sensible HSE has been drawn into supporting the scare machine, so that it was recently forced by the Advertising Standards Authority to withdraw a series of commercials claiming that mesothelioma is now killing 4,500 people a year. When John Bridle, the whistleblower who brought this successful complaint against the HSE for ludicrously exaggerating its figures, he did so simply by producing the evidence of the HSE's own published statistics, which showed the figure was closer to 2,000 at the very worst.

The contractors, lawyers and the BBC might want to scaremonger with this latest attempt to frighten us into imagining our children are dying from exposure to the roof on a school classroom - but it's time the truth came out. Or we're going to unnecessarily scare an awful lot of people and be left picking up a very large bill.

Source



SOME IVF children have higher risk of infertility, obesity and diabetes

"In terms of absolute numbers this is not very important". It does seem clear, however, that the more risky ICSI procedure is overused

Britain faces an infertility timebomb because a generation of IVF babies may have inherited their parents' inability to conceive, a leading doctor has warned. More than 260,000 children born from IVF treatment in the UK are at greater risk of health problems than naturally conceived youngsters, a conference heard yesterday. And as the generation of IVF children reaches adulthood, many will discover they too are unable to have babies naturally.

IVF pioneer Dr Andre van Steirteghem also accused clinics of putting patients at unnecessary risk by 'overusing' a technique he invented for male infertility more than two decades ago. 'There are genetic causes of infertility that you can pass on,' said Dr Van Steirteghem. 'It means that the next generation may be infertile as well and this is something all clinics should mention to the patients - that if there is a genetic origin that this genetic origin of infertility may be transmitted to the next generation.'

IVF - or in vitro fertilisation - is one of the fastest and most profitable branches of medicine. Last year, the £500million fertility industry used it to produce more than 13,000 babies. Fertility treatment is so common that one child in every primary school year group is thought to have been conceived in a fertility clinic.

But the growth of IVF may have come at a cost to a small, but significant, minority of children. Studies have shown that test-tube babies are slightly more likely to suffer from birth defects. Because so many are twins and triplets, they are also at greater risk of low birth weight, obesity, diabetes and high blood pressure later in life. Doctors fear many IVF babies will also inherit the genetic mutations that caused their mother or father's infertility.

Dr Van Steirteghem, of the Brussels Free University Centre for Reproductive Medicine, said most parents accepted the risk that their children could have fertility problems - and that future doctors would be able to treat them. 'Overall these children do well,' he told the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference in San Diego. 'Are there any negative things? Yes. There are a few more problems with these children. In terms of absolute numbers this is not very important.

'If you talk about malformation rate this will go from a background of 3.5 per cent of all births after spontaneous conception to about 4 per cent to 5 per cent and there may be some other problems as well. We have to follow up these children to see what will happen later on. It's important to know.'

The risks of birth defects are higher for babies born using ICSI - or intra-cytoplasmic sperm injection - a treatment for infertile men in which an individual sperm is selected and injected directly into an egg. In Britain, it is used in around 43 per cent of fertility treatment cycles, while the rate in some private clinics is 77 per cent. Dr Van Steirteghem, who invented ICSI in the 1980s, called for clinics to cut down on its use. Some studies have shown it leads to slightly lower pregnancy rates, while it costs twice as much as standard IVF.

There are also concerns ICSI uses sperm that would normally be too unfit to fertilise an egg, increasing the risks of genetic defects in the child. 'When you have a method like conventional IVF which is certainly less invasive than ICSI and that can help couples with female factory infertility where the sperm count is normal, I don't see any reason why ICSI should be used,' he said.

The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority recommends that ICSI should be used only when there are problems with a man's sperm or when past attempts at IVF have failed.

The doctor's comments came as Dr Carmen Sapienza of Temple University Medical School in Philadelphia showed that dozens of genes involved in growth, metabolism and obesity behaved differently in IVF babies. But he stressed the risks of birth defects was small and that 90 per cent of children in the IVF group were within the normal range of activity of genes. 'If you look at kids born through assisted reproduction, by and large they are just fine,' he said.

Doctors are unsure whether the fertility treatment is to blame for the increase in health problems - or whether they are inherited problems from an infertile parent.

A spokesman for the HFEA said it was important that long term research was carried out into all forms of assisted reproduction so clinicians and patients had the best information available when making decisions about treatment.

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22 February, 2010

Innocent Brits could have lives wrecked by Big Brother vetting "checks"

It's reminiscent of the "trials by accusation" that prevailed in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia: No checking for truth so very open to abuse by nasty people. It's a totally non-judicial system that can nonetheless hand out very damaging punishments. British justice is obviously long dead

Innocent teachers and nurses could be banned from working with children because of their attitudes or lifestyles. Workers judged to be lonely and to have a chaotic home life could be barred from working with vulnerable people, even though there is no evidence that they pose a risk, according to guidelines from the Government's new vetting agency. Decisions about staff will be taken by officials who have never met them, based on details passed on by their employers.

Experts claimed that the "Big Brother" approach meant innocent people could have their careers wrecked on the basis of cruel rumours or ill-informed moral judgements.

The row is the latest controversy to hit the Independent Safeguarding Authority (ISA), which was set up to vet millions of people working with vulnerable people. The Government announced a watering down of the scheme in December in the wake of a public outcry over plans to force adults who give other children lifts to clubs and sports events to undergo criminal records checks and register with the ISA.

Since October, employers have been under a legal duty to refer staff to ISA for assessment if children or vulnerable adults who they work with are considered to have been harmed or put in danger. Controversially, managers have also been told to pass on names of staff they have prevented from working with vulnerable people for fear they could "pose a future risk" - even though no incident has occurred.

Guidance seen by The Sunday Telegraph, which has been given to more than 100 case workers at the ISA reveals that those referred could be permanently blocked from work if aspects of their home life or attitudes are judged to be unsatisfactory. It says case workers should be "minded to bar" cases referred to them if they feel "definite concerns" about at least two aspects of their life, which are specified in the document. It means, for example, that if a teaching assistant was believed to be "unable to sustain emotionally intimate relationships" and also had a "chaotic, unstable lifestyle" they could be barred from ever working with children. If a nurse was judged to suffer from "severe emotional loneliness" and believed to have "poor coping skills" their career could also be ended.

ISA's case workers, who have no minimum qualification or experience, make their decision about whether someone should be barred from working with children or vulnerable adults without ever seeing the person. They are expected to establish the person's relationship history and emotional state based on the file passed on by their employer.

Psychologists, professional regulators and health and teaching unions last night expressed horror over the guidance. Harry Cayton, chief executive of the Council for Healthcare Regulatory Excellence, which oversees Britain's nine health regulators, said: "My concern is that judgements are being made not on the basis of facts but on opinion and third party perceptions."

Dr Mike Berry, a leading forensic psychologist, described the system as "incredibly dangerous" and open to error. The expert in criminal profiling said: "These tests are so subjective; plenty of people are lonely, while others have what some might call a chaotic lifestyle. It depends who is judging." Dr Berry, a senior lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University added: "This tool is based on a stereotype of paedophilia, based on social inadequacy, but there are plenty of people who are quite self-contained, a bit of a computer nerd, and perhaps a bit isolated who present no danger to society. Meanwhile Rose West would pass this test with flying colours."

He said the dangers in the scheme were compounded by the fact case workers had no direct contact with the person they assessed. "I think it is a major problem that the person making this decision is so distant from the case, and to the consequences of what they are doing. "They are essentially sitting in a call centre, following an automated system, and dependent on information from third parties. That in itself is very worrying," said Dr Berry.

Chris Grayling, the shadow home secretary, said: "This Government is creating a society where everyone is treated as guilty unless they are proved to be innocent. "These changes contravene any principles of natural justice and will destroy the lives of decent innocent people. Gordon Brown is creating Government by "thought police"."

Gail Adams, head of nursing at Unison, said: "We are concerned that it is a paper process, that it is subjective. "Of course we want to protect children and vulnerable adults, but you have got to get the balance right. This is more like Big Brother." Amanda Brown from the National Union of Teachers said the union was "extremely worried" about the operation of the system.

Adrian McAllister chief executive of ISA said no one would be barred purely on the basis of their lifestyle or attitude, given that all referrals had to identify either harm done, or a "future risk of harm". He said: "One of the understandable concerns we have heard from people is that they could be barred for private interests like pornography, or liking a drink. That isn't the case. "We only look at these risk factors if relevant conduct [actual harm] or a risk of harm has been identified."

Mr McAllister said he expected the "vast majority" of its cases to involve incidents where actual risk or harm has occurred, based on evidence such as a police caution, "rather than cases based on a feeling or suspicion". The organisation was unable to explain the reasoning behind its instruction to staff that definite concerns in two areas should be sufficient to be "minded to bar" staff. It would only say that the protocol follows advice from a forensic psychologist.

SOURCE



The Avandia beatup

I would normally cover this attack on a British company on my FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC blog but as it seems to be part of a political war against the drug companies designed to shore up support for Obamacare, I am covering it here. It is a huge crock, as I will point out at the foot of the article below. Politicians faulting the super-cautious FDA on drug safety really is a laugh

A Senate report that revives concerns about a GlaxoSmithKline PLC diabetes drug's link to heart attacks is putting pressure on the Food and Drug Administration to make changes to its drug-safety program. People familiar with the situation say agency leaders held calls over the weekend to discuss how to address complaints from Sens. Max Baucus (D., Mont.) and Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa), who released a new report Saturday on the Glaxo drug, called Avandia.

The FDA is trying to assemble a timeline of what the FDA knew of risks associated with Avandia, these people say, and plans to call a meeting of an outside advisory committee in the next few months to look at recent information on the drug, which Glaxo reported as having global sales of £771 million ($1.2 billion) in 2009.

According to a two-year investigation by the Senate Finance Committee, Glaxo knew about data linking Avandia to elevated risk of cardiovascular events for several years, but played down the information and tried to suppress doctors who raised concerns. Starting in 1999, Glaxo executives complained to superiors about researchers who questioned Avandia's safety, the report says.

Glaxo rejected those conclusions. It said in a statement that the increased risk of heart attacks hasn't been proven and noted that the FDA "has ruled that Avandia remain available." The company says it never tried to suppress doctors' views but sought to correct what it considered misinformation.

Internal FDA reviews included in the Senate report show that in 2008, longtime FDA scientists David Graham and Kate Gelperin urged the FDA to get Avandia off the market. They analyzed data on side effects in dozens of Avandia studies, but their recommendations were rejected by FDA chiefs. The senators want to know why.

Avandia is still on the market, but it has a strong warning label about cardiac risks. Its sales dropped after a widely publicized study in May 2007 by the Cleveland Clinic's Steven Nissen that linked Avandia to a 43% greater risk for heart attack.

More HERE

Below is a meta-analysis of the data upon which the FDA based its decision. The meta-analysis appeared in the prestigious "Journal of the American Medical Association"

Long-term Risk of Cardiovascular Events With Rosiglitazone: A Meta-analysis

By Sonal Singh et al.

Context: Recent reports of serious adverse events with rosiglitazone use have raised questions about whether the evidence of harm justifies its use for treatment of type 2 diabetes.

Objective: To systematically review the long-term cardiovascular risks of rosiglitazone, including myocardial infarction, heart failure, and cardiovascular mortality.

Data Sources: We searched MEDLINE, the GlaxoSmithKline clinical trials register, the US Food and Drug Administration Web site, and product information sheets for randomized controlled trials, systematic reviews, and meta-analyses published in English through May 2007.

Study Selection: Studies were selected for inclusion if they were randomized controlled trials of rosiglitazone for prevention or treatment of type 2 diabetes, had at least 12 months of follow-up, and monitored cardiovascular adverse events and provided numerical data on all adverse events. Four studies were included after detailed screening of 140 trials for cardiovascular events.

Data Extraction: Relative risks (RRs) of myocardial infarction, heart failure, and cardiovascular mortality were estimated using a fixed-effects meta-analysis of 4 randomized controlled trials (n = 14 291, including 6421 receiving rosiglitazone and 7870 receiving control therapy, with a duration of follow-up of 1-4 years).

Results: Rosiglitazone significantly increased the risk of myocardial infarction (n = 94/6421 vs 83/7870; RR, 1.42; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.06-1.91; P = .02) and heart failure (n = 102/6421 vs 62/7870; RR, 2.09; 95% CI, 1.52-2.88; P < .001) without a significant increase in risk of cardiovascular mortality (n = 59/6421 vs 72/7870; RR, 0.90; 95% CI, 0.63-1.26; P = .53). There was no evidence of substantial heterogeneity among the trials for these end points (I2 = 0% for myocardial infarction, 18% for heart failure, and 0% for cardiovascular mortality).

Conclusion: Among patients with impaired glucose tolerance or type 2 diabetes, rosiglitazone use for at least 12 months is associated with a significantly increased risk of myocardial infarction and heart failure, without a significantly increased risk of cardiovascular mortality.

JAMA Vol. 298 No. 10, 1189-1195, September 12, 2007

In other words, a survey of the strongest data available showed that taking Avandia increased your risk of having a heart attack from 1.05% to 1.46%, an increase in risk of less than one half of one percent -- which is vanishingly trivial compared to the risks we take in most things we do. Given the large sample size, however, the result is statistically significant, if not significant in any other sense. If we were to reject such small risks as that we would have NO drugs on the market because all drugs have some adverse side-effects.

But here's the real kicker. Read the last clause in the abstract above. What it means in plain English is this: Although Avandia takers had a minutely greater risk of having heart attacks, the "extra" heart attacks DID NOT KILL THEM. Avandia takers were no more likely to die from a heart attack than anybody else! And THAT is the drug that is so evil that the Senate Democrats are making a huge fuss about it! It's just the usual search for evil in the world about them that IS Leftism.

Update

Grassley is a Republican but he was an easy target to get sucked into this affair as he has in the past made something of a career of exposing researchers who had failed to declare payments received from drug companies. His interest is clearly in the possibility of corruption rather than in the science.



British Schools should not force girls to wear skirts - it discriminates against transsexuals, warns watchdog

How come that the rights of transsexuals trump the rights of everybody else?

Schools which force girls to wear skirts may be breaking the law - because the policy apparently discriminates against transsexuals. Official guidance from the Equality and Human Rights Commission says the dress code may breach the rights of girls who feel compelled to live as boys.

In a 68-page report on the human rights of transsexuals, the watchdog says that 'requiring pupils to wear gender-specific clothes is potentially unlawful'. It says that research conducted for its report found that 'pupils born female with gender dysphoria experienced great discomfort being forced to wear stereotypical girls’ clothes — for example a skirt'.

Many schools across the country insist on girls wearing skirts as part of a strict uniform code which they believe maintains good levels of discipline among their pupils. And although the Commission has threatened to use 'costly legal action' on schools who fail to comply, many are expected to maintain their rule on skirt wearing.

Elspeth Insch, head teacher of King Edward VI Handsworth school in Birmingham, said: 'The message is: not in my school. We’re sticking with our skirts.'

The guidance has been produced ahead of the Government’s Equality Bill which is likely to come into force this autumn. The bill, masterminded by Harriet Harman, the Labour deputy leader, makes it a legal requirement for public authorities, including schools, to consider the impact on minority groups of all their policies — including how school uniforms might affect transsexual people. They must do all they can to ensure transsexual children do not suffer discrimination, or face potential legal sanctions.

The bill extends new rights to people who believe they were born into the wrong gender. They gain this protection 'regardless of whether or not they intend to undergo, are undergoing or have undergone gender reassignment'. Previously transsexuals had to be under medical supervision or to had to have had a sex change to be covered by discrimination rules. There are an estimated 5,000 adult transsexuals in Britain.

The Commission's official guidance, entitled Provision of Goods, Facilities and Services to Trans People — Guidance for Public Authorities in Meeting your Equality Duties and Human Rights Obligations, says schools have a duty to be 'proactive' in ensuring transsexual students are not discriminated against.

It also cites existing human rights and sex discrimination laws. The guidelines state: 'Uniform is a key issue for young trans people at schools. Many schools have strict uniform codes where boys and girls are required to wear particular clothes, for example, girls cannot wear trousers.'

A spokesman from the Commission said: 'This is all about giving schools information which will help them interpret the law. 'It’s about schools taking a bit of time to consider their policies, how flexible they are in accommodating pupils with different needs, and what they might need to do to both help pupils get the most out of school and potentially avoid situations which might culminate in difficult and costly legal action.'

Girls wearing skirts to school became a thorny problem for St Albans Catholic High School two weeks ago. The catholic school, in Ipswich, Suffolk, banned female pupils from wearing skirts because students were failing to wear them in an 'appropriate manner'. It will force girls to wear trousers from September following concerns that some skirts were being worn too high.

Despite protests from students, the school, which has about 1,000 mixed students aged between 11 and 18, claims its policy has won support by parents and the wider school community.

SOURCE



Hope for children with peanut allergy as desensitization treatment is tested

Systematic desensitization is an old idea. The disgrace is that it has not been applied sooner

More than 100 British children with severe peanut allergies are to be treated with an experimental desensitising therapy that has had promising early results. The study, in which children are given small daily doses of peanut flour to build tolerance to the potentially deadly allergen, is to begin next month at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge after scientists were awarded a £1 million grant by the National Institute for Health Research.

It follows successful preliminary research, published a year ago, in which 21 of 23 children treated for peanut allergy showed substantial improvements over six months. By the end of their therapy the children could eat up to 12 nuts a day. “The families involved say that it’s changed their lives,” Andrew Clark, a consultant in paediatric allergy who leads the project, told the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference in San Diego.

“Before they were checking every food label every time they ate food. They would worry it would cause a reaction or even kill them, but now they can go out and eat curries and Chinese food. “They can eat everyday snacks and treats. For their birthday they can have chocolate cake and chocolates without any fear of reactions. So that's our real motiviation — to try to develop that as a clinical treatment that we could spread to the rest of the country.”

Peanut allergy affects an estimated 2 per cent of British children and is becoming more common. Effects range from mild itching and rashes to breathing difficulties and the severe reaction anaphylaxis.

The experimental treatment involves adding small amounts of peanut flour to yoghurt, but starting with a dose of just 5 milligrams. Over six months it is increased to 800mg a week – the equivalent of five peanuts, or 160 times the dose the children can initially tolerate. “This is going to be the largest trial of its kind in the world and it should give us a definitive idea of whether it works and whether it’s safe,” Dr Clark said. He emphasised that parents should not try the treatment without medical supervision.

“I think in two or three years time we will be in a position where we have a treatment that works but we are still working on a long-term cure. “It’s likely to be a treatment that lasts at last two or three years, and we hope that once that's over we can withdraw the treatment and maintain long-term tolerance, but we need a long-term study to find out.”

SOURCE





21 February, 2010

British social workers only care about hurting ordinary people. They don't care about real child abuse

It's the Marxist inversion of values: The bourgeoisie are the problem, not the underclass. Contrast the story below with the specious reasons given by social workers for removal of a child that headed up yesterday's posts on this blog. A child that is at no demonstrable risk is removed but a child in dire peril is left where it is. The social class background makes the difference. Believe me now about the Marxist values taught in social work schools?

Haringey Council allowed a second "Baby Peter" case to occur more than a year after the first, then "buried" it, it can be revealed. A second young boy, only a few months older than the murdered Baby Peter Connolly, suffered serious injuries while supposedly under the protection of Haringey social services in mid-August 2008. His mother was subsequently arrested for assault.

Although the boy - known as "Child Y" - survived, he spent weeks in hospital. Despite promises of improvements after Baby Peter's 2007 death, a serious case review into Child Y found many of the same failings that allowed Peter to be killed. The damning review, by social work consultant Sally Trench, has been quietly published on an obscure website without any form of public announcement. It was accessed by The Sunday Telegraph after a tip-off from a senior source involved in child protection in Haringey.

The review catalogued dozens of contacts Child Y had with official agencies before his injury. It said it was "perplexing" that "practitioners, managers and professional networks apparently make the same mistakes over and over again". It added: "This serious case review has several key issues in common with those of recent Haringey serious case reviews."

After Baby Peter's mother and her boyfriend were convicted of causing his death, in November 2008, Haringey's then director of social services, Sharon Shoesmith, was dismissed. She is currently fighting a High Court action for unfair dismissal, claiming her sacking was unjustified, but the further evidence of her department's failings is unlikely to help her case.

Child Y was born in March 2006 to Ms Y, who was only 15 years old at the time, and an 18-year-old father, Mr T, described as a "serious and prolific offender" who had already served three custodial sentences for violent crimes while still a minor. Ms Y had accompanied Mr T on some of his crimes and had received three criminal supervision orders, the first when she was 13. Haringey considered the case, but decided to allow the couple to keep the baby.

In the months after Child Y's birth, the review says, Mr T "severely attacked" Ms Y on at least five occasions. As with Baby Peter, the police, GPs and probation service were closely involved with the family but Haringey had by this stage stopped contact and "Y was not seen by a social worker or health visitor for many months."

After Mr T attempted to rape Ms Y in the presence of the child, leading to further police intervention, Haringey finally drew up a child protection plan, but the review says that, as with Baby Peter, "several parts of the plan were not implemented and in fact the details of who was looking after [Child Y] were often unclear."

In August 2008, when Child Y was just over two years old, Ms Y was arrested after bringing him in to North Middlesex Hospital with a badly fractured thigh. Doctors found that the boy's injuries were "not consistent" with the explanation given by Ms Y, that he had fallen while jumping on a bed, and were "likely to be a non-accidental injury". After he was released from hospital, several weeks later, Child Y was taken into care. It is not clear whether his mother has yet been charged or tried for causing the injury amid doubts about the strength of the medical evidence.

The review said that until the injury, Haringey social services took the "mistaken view" that the risk to the child was "low level". In fact, it said, the risk was "significant" and "considerable" and this should have been obvious to the council. It also said that information about the family was not properly shared between agencies such as GPs, social services and police, a key failing also identified in the Baby Peter case. "Agencies generally worked in 'silos', making it difficult to achieve a full picture of the risks," the review said.

The review said Haringey social services' response to Y's birth was "insufficient" and its assessment of the danger of keeping him with his parents was "inadequate" and "tended to underplay areas of risk". The social workers handling the case changed frequently, it says, and there was inadequate supervision, in a further echo of the Baby Peter case.

Baby Peter was found dead on 3 August 2007 at the age of 17 months. A post-mortem found that he had eight broken ribs, lacerations and bruising. It later emerged that he had had at least 60 contacts with official agencies. The serious case review into his death identified a series of failings and the council promised improvements. However, the Child Y case suggests that even a year after the Baby Peter tragedy the improvements had not been delivered.

The review into the Y case did not even begin for several months after Y's injury and did not conclude until autumn 2009. Some time between then and last week it was placed on the publications page of the Haringey Local Children Safeguarding Board website, but the case has received no publicity until now.

Lynne Featherstone, the Lib Dem MP for Hornsey and Wood Green, said: "I have never heard of this case until you told me about it. "It is really shocking that something that bears all the hallmarks of what happened in Baby P can go wrong again in Haringey. "Haringey, of all boroughs, needs to be upfront about these problems. The whole problem with Haringey is its tendency to close ranks and bury embarrassing information. "Every time they promise things have changed and they haven't changed. If this happened in 2008, it's a disgrace that it's only come to light now."

Cllr Lorna Reith, cabinet member for children and young people, said: "We have accepted all the recommendations of the review and are addressing the issues identified by the local children's safeguarding board. "These improvements form part of our wider programme of work that is well under way to bring the standards of our children's service up to the level of the best, to ensure families and children in Haringey get the support they need."

SOURCE



The hypocritical British Leftist elite

Conservatives don't believe in equality but Leftists claim to

Class is an illness from which this country seems unable to recover. No sooner had new Labour soothed us into feeling better, murmuring that we were all middle class now, than old Labour spread the old infection of class resentment: listen to Gordon Brown’s jibes about the playing fields of Eton and his threats of class-war electioneering. And just as David Cameron tries to persuade us that we are all in this together, an old Tory nincompoop reminds us that we aren’t. We are still in two different compartments.

Sir Nicholas Winterton, the Conservative MP, made an astonishing protest against proposals that MPs should no longer travel first class on trains. His explanations were beyond parody: he said he felt it was quite wrong for MPs to have to travel with the rest of us as it would make it impossible for him to work, and it would put chaps such as him “below” local councillors and local government officials and even, for heaven’s sake, below army majors.

Besides, the rest of us in standard class are “a totally different type of people”. That at least is a relief to my feelings — I wouldn’t want to be at all like Winterton — but his explanations could not fail to irritate. “I didn’t say they weren’t as good, but they are in a different walk of life. They are doing different things. Very often they are there with children.” ...

However, although it took a silly, superannuated Conservative to remind us of all this, what is truly despicable is that Labour is no better. Since 1997 new Labour ducks have taken easily to the waters of state-subsidised privilege, as of right; they are just as keen on paddling round designer duck houses and rabble-excluding moats as any Tory booby. “The many, not the few” — that’s what they claim to stand for.

In fact they’re quite content to let the many do the standing while they themselves sit without a hint of self-reproach in the quiet comfort of first class, both literally and metaphorically. They are not even embarrassed by the phrase.

We have a government — and, more widely than that, a centre-left establishment in the public services — that gives every impression of being obsessed with inequality. We are lectured constantly by new Labour about the evils of social exclusion, the lasting damage done by real inequality, the social malaise that follows social injustice, and the central importance of imposing equality by law — complete with an ambitious Equality Bill. The Conservatives do not disassociate themselves from this rhetoric — quite the reverse.

Yet, over 13 years in office, this same political class has left in place, on the country’s state-subsidised, public-service trains, the astonishing notion of first class — a notion that is an offence against the idea of equality. And (with some honourable exceptions) it is happy to travel first class at the expense of the low-paid and the poor.

Admittedly, there are some people who do need special treatment, for reasons of security or perhaps of sanity — pop stars, the Queen, a few secret agents and the prime minister. Then there are those who just want special treatment and can pay for it out of their own money. But if there is little or no need for special treatment, and if — as with train tickets — the cost-benefit ratio is daft, then there can be no possible reason the taxpayers should bear the expense of it. Equality is, or ought to be, good enough for most people.

I never travel first class (apart from buying an occasional £5 weekend upgrade in the past). But I have often walked through first-class compartments on my way to steerage, wondering what sort of people could afford to sit in them, and I can confirm Winterton’s point that they are stuffed full of public servants who are not paying for their own seats. Local authority workers, BBC apparatchiks, politicians, civil servants and armies of quangocrats are there, squandering vast sums on the tiny advantages that a first-class seat has over a standard quiet seat.

What is so remarkable is the unthinking sense of entitlement. You might have expected it from some of the worst grandees of the past but not, surely, from present-day public servants. Altogether, this is an odd way to carry on for those whose working lives are spent in the aggressive pursuit of equality in every form — through statutory equality agendas, new equality legislation and the mind-numbing equality rhetoric adopted so aggressively by all political parties. First-class rail tickets for dedicated egalitarians are a comic example of cognitive dissonance.

What’s really going on, I think, is that the nature of class war has changed. The old virus has mutated. The old social and political divisions have given way to two new classes — rather as on the trains. Those in economy are most of us, paying for the comforts of those in first class. And those in first class are the new political class — all those who owe their advancement and their security and their pensions and their privileges not to their backgrounds or their talents, or even necessarily their political parties, but to the state and our taxes.

Member of the first class are various, from the Tony Blairs to the Wintertons, but whatever they say about equality, they are in fact united in defence of their right to their privileges and to having their own undemocratic way.

And in his strange cry of complaint Winterton was speaking not just for the old order, but also for the new first class. It is this class that is the new cross-party adversary of the good society, but, just like the old class virus, it will be hard to fight.

SOURCE



Whistleblower being 'hounded out' of evil British public hospital

The senior consultant who warned of "serious failings" at the Great Ormond Street Hospital clinic which sent Baby P home to die is being "hounded out," according to her husband. David Holt said his wife, Kim, a consultant of 25 years' standing, was "in shock" after the world-famous hospital advertised her job recently without even telling her. "She couldn't believe it," he said. "She was speechless. This kind of behaviour completely blows out of the water any belief in the hospital's good faith, or their ability to change the oppressive culture Kim has experienced."

The move is the latest in a string of cases where the NHS's promises to protect whistle-blowers have proved false.

The inquiry into the Stafford hospital scandal has heard how medical staff who tried to warn of fatal failings at the trust were threatened into silence by NHS managers.

This month, a London consultant, Ramon Niekrash, won an employment tribunal case against Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Woolwich, after he was victimised for raising concerns about cost-cutting.

Dr Holt's MP, Lynne Featherstone, has said that colleagues who supported Dr Holt are being "bullied" and "pressured" by the hospital into retracting their statements. However, further staff have come forward to speak of serious problems at Great Ormond Street.

In December, Great Ormond Street promised to reach a "swift and amicable solution" with Dr Holt after a damning NHS London report largely vindicated her criticisms of the child abuse clinic in Haringey, for which Great Ormond Street provided the doctors. Dr Holt has spent the last three years on "special leave" since warning – more than a year before Baby P came to the clinic – that she and other doctors there were dangerously overworked and a child would die unless action was taken.

Tomorrow Dr Sabah al-Zayyat, the temporary locum who replaced Dr Holt after she was forced out of the clinic, goes before the General Medical Council, accused of missing serious injuries to Baby Peter two days before he died.

Great Ormond Street promised to implement the recommendations of the NHS London report, one of which was that Dr Holt had done nothing wrong and should be reinstated. However, more than two months after its publication, said her husband, there has been no movement. "Saying that nothing has happened is almost too positive," said Mr Holt. "What has happened is that they are pushing forward with their plan to drive Kim out of the service."

Dr Holt herself – who first raised her concerns in The Sunday Telegraph – has been warned by the BMA not to speak to the media again for fear that the hospital will use it as a pretext to sack her. But her husband said she had been asked to sign an agreement that was tantamount to a "death warrant." "They called it an independent mediation agreement, but it looked more like an exit agreement," he said. "Kim would have to agree to be bound by it, and the hospital was given the final say over her fate. There is no case for mediation, even if it was genuinely independent, because NHS London has already said Kim should return to her job. This is just another way of disposing of her."

Shortly after the mediation agreement was proposed, Dr Holt opened the British Medical Journal to find that the job she was supposed to return to was being advertised. "That was the most blatant example of the way Great Ormond Street act," said Mr Holt. "They clearly believe they are completely impregnable and beyond the law and they intend to carry on exactly as they always have done."

Mr Holt said that his wife had received "overwhelming support" from fellow staff at the hospital since her Sunday Telegraph interview. "She was approached by a number of other senior individuals in the Trust who feel the same way she does, particularly about the way in which Great Ormond Street is being managed and the oppressive culture there," he said. "Maybe Kim is being treated in the way she is because the management are desperately trying to deter others from going public."

Mr Holt, who is director of finance at the FTSE 100 property giant Land Securities, said: "I have been in the business world for 25 years and I have never seen anything like this. "In most blue-chip organisations people are allowed to express a view without being quashed or targeted."

Mr Holt appealed to potential staff to avoid Great Ormond Street. "Don't believe the hype," he said. "Don't work there. There are clearly major problems at this hospital and my concern is that by ignoring them, they could bring down a great national institution."

A Great Ormond Street spokesman said: "We are committed to resolving the matter with our employee but regard it as a private matter."

SOURCE



Quack medicines being funded on the NHS

While real medicines are often denied to patients

Homoeopathic medicines should not be allowed to make claims they cannot justify and should not be paid for by the taxpayer, MPs will recommend. A report from the Commons science and technology committee is expected to criticise the use of NHS resources to fund the remedies based on the current evidence for them. The committee will also argue that medicines should not be allowed to use phrases like "used to treat" in their marketing, as consumers might think there is clinical evidence that they work.

Latest figures show 54,000 patients are treated each year at four NHS homoeopathic hospitals in London, Glasgow, Bristol and Liverpool, at a cost of £4 million. A fifth hospital in Tunbridge Wells in Kent was forced to close last year when local NHS funders stopped paying for treatments.

Homoeopathy is based on a theory that substances which cause symptoms in a healthy person can, when vastly diluted, cure the same problems in a sick person. Proponents say the resulting "remedy" retains a "memory" of the original ingredient – a concept dismissed by scientists.

During the committee's inquiry, the British Medical Association said the use of homoeopathic medicine could not be justified on the current evidence. The Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain said there was no possible reason why such treatments, marketed by an industry worth £40 million in this country, could be effective scientifically.

Advocates of homoeopathy say even if the effect of the remedies is to work as a placebo, they are chosen by thousands of people, and do not carry the risks and side effects of many mainstream medicines.

Prince Charles, one of the best known proponents of the concept, which originated in Germany 200 years ago, founded the charity The Prince's Foundation for Integrated Health, which promotes the use of alternative medicines. Dr Michael Dixon, the charity's medical director, urged the Government not to restrict the use of homoeopathy, which he said would mean "abandoning patients". "For all those people with long term conditions for whom there is no evidence-based medicine, it doesn't matter how it works, what matters is whether it helps them get better," he said. A survey carried out at England's NHS homoeopathic hospitals found 70 per cent of [self-selected] patients said they felt some improvement after undergoing treatment.

David Colquhoun, professor of pharmacology at University College London, said: "It really is very simple, there is nothing in the pills. The danger is that people get diverted from the actual medicine which could cure them."

Last year an Australian homoeopath and his wife were found guilty of the manslaughter of their baby daughter because they did not seek conventional medical treatment for the nine-month-old, who died of septicaemia.

Cristal Sumner, chief executive of the British Homeopathic Association, said: "We feel the [select committee] inquiry was too narrow in its remit, there is plenty of evidence to support homoeopathy, with 100 randomised controlled trials, and many more on outcome measures, which reflect how patients say they feel."

SOURCE



Basic sums baffle British grade-school teachers

Primary school teachers have such a poor grasp of basic maths that they struggle to solve sums that 11 year olds should be able to answer

A test of simple maths skills taken by teachers from schools across the country has revealed a "shocking" lack of mental arithmetic ability and basic maths knowledge. Only four out of 10 teachers could work out that 2.1 per cent of 400 is 8.4. Only a third knew that 1.4 divided by 0.1 is 14, and less than 50 per cent could work out that a half divided by a quarter is 2.

The results from 155 teachers in 18 schools, revealed in Channel 4's Dispatches programme, add to growing concerns about numeracy standards and teaching in England. Almost a quarter of children are leaving primary school with a poor grasp of maths, even though spending on the subject is about £2.5 billion a year. Around 135,000 pupils start secondary school unable to cope with their courses.

Richard Dunne, a maths education specialist who set the test, said a generation of teachers did not fully understand the subject. Alison Wolf, professor of public sector management at King's College, London, said: "I am actually horrified by the statistics. "I really think that our obsession with generic teaching skills has crowded out time in which we could be making sure that people actually have the basic content and knowledge of content that they need. "It doesn't mean that anybody who can do maths can teach maths, that is obviously not true - but I don't think you can teach maths if you can't do it."

The findings will fuel a political row over the qualifications needed to become a teacher. At present, the minimum maths requirement to train as a primary teacher is a grade C at GCSE. Many teachers will not have studied the subject beyond that. The Tories plan to raise the grade to B.

The material covered in the Dispatches test is contained in the primary national curriculum, yet the programme found that only 54 per cent of teachers could work out the correct value of 1.12 x 2.2 (2.464), even when told that 112 x 22 = 2,464.

Mr Dunne said: "What we have are tests from 155 teachers which illustrate that probably more than half of them know so little maths that they cannot be conveying mathematics to their children in the classroom."

Failings in maths teaching will also be identified this week by a leading academic in a Royal Institution lecture. Jo Boaler, professor of education at Sussex University, will say the children are being introduced to abstract concepts before they are ready, at age four and five. She attributes Britain's lack of international standing in maths education, in part, to the attempt to teach 'too much, too soon'. "We need to give primary teachers a few concepts so that four-, five- and six-year-olds are given a good base in understanding numbers, shapes, counting and sums," she said. "Instead they are given a massive list of methods. In most EU countries, there is no formal learning of methods until children are age seven. "When children in the UK find they don't understand, they are put in to lower sets and basically told 'You can't do maths.'

"In countries like Japan, China and Finland, which top the international league tables for maths, they believe all children should be able to do maths and are horrified by what we do here."

Fears were also raised last week that pupils at secondary school were not being prepared to study maths at higher levels because the GCSE was too easy. The Children, Schools and Families Select Committee heard that maths papers were being 'dumbed down' and modular courses, which are now the norm, were making the situation worse. Margaret Brown, a professor of maths education at King's College, London, told MPs: "There is competition between exam boards to make exams ever simpler. "More modular exams, which can be taken again and again create a fail-safe and that is a problem."

A National Audit Office report, published in 2008, criticised weaknesses in teachers' knowledge of maths and backed calls for a big increase in the number of specialist primary maths teachers. [Why would anyone good at maths want to be a British primary school teacher? Perhaps Britain is aiming to import teachers from Mars]

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British Council gets in on the climate act

Why is the British Council spending taxpayers' money on the recruiting of 100,000 "international climate champions"?

Last December, our television screens were filled with scenes of young demonstrators from all over the world parading through the streets of Copenhagen to call for action to halt global warming. Few people will have been aware, though, that they were being funded with the aid of millions of pounds from British taxpayers. What makes this even more curious is that the money was provided by a body set up to promote British culture internationally.

Last Sunday, when I reported on some of the ways in which an array of British ministries have poured hundreds of millions of pounds into projects related to climate change, I overlooked one branch of government which has been as active in the cause of saving the planet as any – the British Council, created more than 70 years ago to stage lectures on Shakespeare and Jane Austen, and to spread the use of the English language.

In recent years, however, on the initiative of Lord Kinnock when he was its chairman, the British Council has been hijacked to promote the need for action on climate change. In answer to a Freedom of Information request, we can now see some of the curious ways in which the British Council has been spending our money.

More than £3.5 million has gone on recruiting a worldwide network of young "climate activists" in over 70 countries to engage in climate change propaganda – what Marxists used to call agitprop – and to pressure their politicians to join the worldwide struggle. Under a programme called Challenge Europe, £1.1 million has been paid out to fund young "climate advocates" in 17 countries across Europe, including Britain itself. But £2.5 million has been spent on a more ambitious project to recruit a global network of 100,000 activists in 60 countries across the world, led by 1,300 young "International Climate Champions", to participate in "international peer networks, both in person and online, to share ideas, projects and experiences".

Of this sum, £303,093.24 went to China; £71,262.91 to Brazil; £53,006.25 to Japan; £70,132.88 to India (including £11,000 to Dr Pachauri's Teri institute); £77,507.89 to oil-rich Qatar; and £50,000 to the US. There was £120,000 for a dozen different countries in Africa, including £14,000 to fund climate champions in starving Zimbabwe.

All this, it is comforting to know, is being led by the climate-change activist Dr David Viner, formerly employed by East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (the focus of the "Climategate" emails scandal), who is most famous for the prediction he made in 2001, that within a few years winter snow would become "a very rare and exciting event". No doubt the climate champions we are funding in the eastern US will have been grateful for our support last week as they tried to explain the several feet of snow across the region which broke records established in the 1880s. What it all has to do with Macbeth or Pride and Prejudice is something of a mystery.

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20 February, 2010

Social worker evil never stops in Britain

They are taught hate as part of the Marxist indoctrination they get in social work school

This is the baby whose birth has brought both joy and heartbreak to his parents. Happiness at their son's arrival in the world is tinged with sadness that he has a sister he may never see. The couple - who for legal reasons can be referred to only as Carissa and Jim, which are not their real names - fled to Spain just before Christmas to prevent their unborn child being seized by social workers.

Their daughter, who is now 18 months old, was removed from their care at 11 weeks and put up for adoption because they were declared unfit parents. Their case has been taken up by Conservative MP Tim Yeo, who said there was no justification for the intervention and accused Suffolk Social Services of being 'child kidnappers'.

Carissa, 32, gave birth to her 6lb 1oz son by caesarean section at Torrevieja Hospital on the Costa Blanca on Wednesday evening. He is being treated in an incubator for a minor breathing problem. Fighting back tears as she spoke exclusively to the Daily Mail yesterday, she said: 'I am so very happy because of my beautiful new son. He is wonderful and means the world to us. 'But at the same time I am sad because his older sister should be here with us. It terrifies me to think they might never meet.'

Her husband, a 41-year-old lorry driver, added: 'We are still fighting tooth and nail to get our daughter back and complete our family. We are very happy to be here in Spain, where it seems social services want to help us, rather than split us up.'

Mr Yeo used parliamentary privilege in November to accuse Suffolk County Council of 'actively seeking opportunities to remove babies from their mothers'. He described how social workers began monitoring Carissa and Jim after the birth of their daughter, referred to as Poppy, in August 2008. They waited until Jim was out at work one day 11 weeks later to swoop on the couple's home with police and 'snatch the baby from the arms of her mother'. In the ensuing legal battle, the council repeatedly changed its grounds for intervening, alternating between blaming one parent and then the other. Carissa was accused of having factitious disorder - a condition in which sufferers feign illness or exaggerate symptoms. She was also alleged to have claimed her son suffered from various illnesses. She denied both claims. Jim was assessed by a doctor to be a 'pathological liar', but later a consultant clinical psychologist 'would not endorse the expression'.

Mr Yeo added: 'The final, favoured rationale given by social services for Poppy's adoption order was based on nothing more than the possibility of future emotional abuse.'

He later told the Mail Carissa originally came to the attention of social workers after her former husband successfully fought for custody of a son they had together. The boy, he said, was taken away after her ex-husband's girlfriend, who works for Essex Social Services, contacted a friend in Suffolk Social Services and raised 'spurious' concerns about her parenting skills.

Describing the move to Spain, Carissa said: 'It was a very tough decision, leaving our friends and family-behind, but it was the only way we could be sure we could raise our son. 'We were crying tears of happiness and sadness at the same time as we passed through the Channel Tunnel. Christmas in Spain without our daughter was heartbreaking.'

The couple have had no contact with their daughter, who is with adoptive parents, for 15 weeks. They hope to take their case to the European Court of Human Rights to get her back but unless it can act within the next few months the adoption will be finalised. Jim said: 'We're never going back to the UK. All we want is to be able to raise our family. We are not bad parents, we love our children.'

Mr Yeo last night said the council had a group of 'excessively zealous professionals who have an agenda to separate very young children from their natural parents'. Suffolk County Council said it was 'not appropriate' to discuss individual cases with anyone other than those directly involved.

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Britain's "human rights" shambles

Human rights litigation is on the rise and predicted to rise further — just in time for the election and the battleground that is expected over the Human Rights Act. New figures show that cases making use of the Act have gone up for the first time in seven years. The dramatic 34 per cent increase comes within days of comments by Jonathan Evans, the head of M15, hinting that the courts are being used as propaganda to undermine the fight on terrorism.

Stephen Grosz, the head of public law and human rights at Bindman & Partners, said: “The Home Office continues to be the biggest repeat defendant in the field when it comes to human rights cases. “There is a significant rise in cases dealing with immigration, asylum and deportation issues — and terorrism-related cases, in particular those dealing with control orders, played a significant part.” The rise in such cases was an inevitable result of efforts by the Government to deal with potential terrorist threats, he added. “Tackling these threats to UK nationals remains at the top of the Government’s agenda. Next year will probably see further human rights challenges to control orders, which allow drastic restrictions on freedom of movement and privacy.”

Another reason was that human rights law continued to develop as an area of jurisdiction, Mr Grosz added. “Measures against terrorists in a democratic society have to be tempered by respect for human rights. Otherwise, what are we protecting?”

The survey by Sweet & Maxwell, the legal publishers, finds that in the 12 months to October 2009 there were 51 cases, or 15 per cent, that involved those issues — an increase of more than a third on the 38 reported the year before.

The survey also finds a rise of 90 per cent in disputes with government agencies brought by businesses, corporations or firms making use of the Human Rights Act. The increase in business disputes almost doubled from 10 to 19. Typical of cases brought was that in 2009 against the Treasury, in which it was argued that nationalisation of Northern Rock had deprived shareholders of their property, in breach of the Human Rights Act.

Last week, after a Court of Appeal ruling that the Foreign Secretary had to disclose material showing what it knew of the torture of a Guantánamo Bay detainee, Mr Evans said that accusations that MI5 colluded in torture would be used by the country’s enemies as “propaganda to undermine our will and ability to confront them”. Whitehall sources are also suggesting that the work of the security agencies is being undermined through actions being brought against them in the courts.

The comments came after it emerged that Lord Neuberger of Abbotsbury, the country’s second most senior judge, had accused MI5 of a “culture of suppression” and of misleading Parliament, Mr Evans said that was “the precise opposite of the truth”.

Shami Chakrabarti, the director of Liberty, said: “We need an inquiry so that we can separate fact from conspiracy theories. The idea that human rights judges and lawyers are part of a campaign to destabalise the intelligence agencies is ridiculous.” Human rights cases would continue to be brought, she added, because “in this country we respect the rule of law and there has to be legal scrutiny and accountability in a court of law”. But she added: “It should be remembered that claims made are not the same as claims succeeding.”

The survey comes as both main political parties are vying over what to do about the Human Rights Act. The Conservatives say that they want to scrap the Act as presently constituted and redefine it to enshrine common law principles such as the right to trial by jury. The Government, meanwhile, is discussing extending the Act to include other rights such as healthcare.

Alex Deane, the director of Big Brother Watch, said: “Human rights are vital, but the Human Rights Act is often used to achieve frivolous and greedy ends, for purposes nothing to do with proper human rights. “The abuse of the Act is a tragedy that undermines the whole idea of human rights in the eyes of the public.”

This is the perception that politicians are seeking to grapple with. As Vernon Bogdanor says in The Times Law pages today, many people feel that the Act has been hi-jacked and is a “villain’s charter”.

But as the survey shows, businesses are now using the Act as much as are prisoners. The conundrum for politicians is how to re-cast — or re-sell — the Human Rights Act, without taking away rights that are now well established, or, as Professor Bogdanor says, promoting a British Bill of Rights that alienates some parts of the United Kingdom.

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The sorry saga of the NHS and my year undercover in hospitals

By Harriet Sergeant

Sometimes, it's the little things that offer the greatest insights. I was standing in a store cupboard with two outraged nurses. It was dark and stuffy, but the nurses had insisted I inspect the soap. It looked normal enough to me, but that was the problem. 'It's a family sized bar,' said one nurse. 'But we are not dealing with families, we are dealing with individual patients who need a fresh bar every time, so we are throwing away a large bar of soap after every bed bath. It's an appalling waste.'

The answer seemed simple, I said: smaller bars of soap. The nurses shook their heads. 'The NHS dictates who we can buy from,' said the nurse. 'And while the chosen supplier makes so much profit from the large bars, well, they're not going to change, are they?' The two nurses were so upset that they spent their lunchtime - and their own money - buying small bars of soap for their patients.

Those nurses know the NHS spending party is over and that something has to be done about the way we finance our healthcare. Spending has doubled from £51billion in 1999 to £101billion today. Chief executive David Nicholson has said that the NHS must look to save £20billion by 2014.

But how on earth will it cope with the exploding number of elderly patients and the costly new procedures and treatments coming on to the market? The answer, says the health think tank the King's Fund, is to increase productivity in the NHS. But over the past decade, it fell by almost 4 per cent. (Over the same time, it rose by almost 23 per cent in the private sector). So how to push up productivity and get value for the taxpayer?

A possible solution came this week from the Hinchingbrooke Hospital in Cambridgeshire. The hospital has debts of £40million. So from next year it will be run not by the NHS, but by one of five private sector organisations. This is the closest the NHS has come to the privatisation of a leading hospital. It is a radical departure 'born of necessity,' says Stephen Dunn, director of strategy for the East of England Health Authority. 'We need the best provider and this is the only way forward.' Only a private company, he says, will get 'real innovation and efficiency' into the process.

It's a bold and controversial step - but I believe he is right. After a year visiting behind the scenes at hospitals, I have seen at first hand how the biggest problem confronting the NHS is its monolithic bureaucracy. It is not for lack of ideas that our health service has been allowed to stagnate. During my research, I came across plenty of staff - porters, junior doctors, nurses and matrons - with exciting plans for more efficiency and better patient care. (It was surprising how often the two went together). But no one is listening to them.

Instead, initiatives cascade down from the Department of Health (DoH). And there lies the greatest problem in reforming the finances of the NHS.

I had not realised how costly the actual structure of the NHS is until I sat in on a hospital board meeting. Making sure the hospital complied with the latest government initiatives dominated the agenda. We didn't discuss patients, improving care, saving money or any issue relating to the hospital. The focus was on the bureaucratic process. The initiatives did not come cheap. The board has to prove to the DoH it is complying.

So, for nearly every new initiative, the hospital appoints a manager, often on £50,000 to £80,000 a year - not to mention a secretary - to collect the all-important data that must then be submitted to the Department of Health. The hospital is not given any additional money for this. It has to find the funds out of its annual budget, often at the expense of front-line services. Worse, the DoH is not required to calculate the likely cost of any initiative before it is implemented - a situation described as 'astonishing' by the chairman of the Public Administration Select Committee.

The effect of this is clear. One consultant calculated the proportion of managers, administrators and support staff to nurses in the NHS is 41/2 times greater than in private hospitals, which are not subject to the government initiatives.

In the year I spent visiting hospitals, I met only one person who was doing what a good manager in the NHS should be doing - questioning activity and redesigning processes to get the best care and the most efficient use of taxpayers' money. Even finance directors didn't see that as their role. I asked one what he was doing to save money and increase efficiency. He looked at me as if I were mad. He had no time for that. His time was spent reacting to the 'hell of a lot of indicators' pouring out of Whitehall. He told me he was working out the implications 'of a whole new agenda about the way funds flow around the system'. This meant he had little time to look at the finances of his own hospital, let alone work out how to save money.

In fact, what went on in his own hospital was a bit of a mystery to him. He admitted this meant he spent most of his time fire-fighting - rushing from one crisis to another. He was ten minutes late for our interview because his budget deficit had shot up that month. Was it a one-off or a trend? He had no idea. 'The financial position in this hospital is so unstable that if you don't keep an eye on it, it turns around and bites you,' he said.

All this stopped him from doing what he wanted to do and what his hospital and patients needed. As he said: 'At this stage in my career, I should be spending time thinking up intellectual and creative solutions.' Indeed, he should - and his pay should reflect this. But that is not what is happening. Almost all of the 1.6 million NHS staff have their pay increased automatically every year, at a cost of £420million. Pay is not linked to performance, as it is in the private sector, let alone to creative ideas.

The way that our hospitals are funded is surely another bar to finding savings and increasing productivity. I spoke to one non-executive director who has a career in trouble-shooting ailing companies and who was astounded by the attitude of his local hospital. With only a cursory look at the books, he announced he could save £200,000 just by good accounting. The response he got? 'It was as if I was speaking Ancient Greek.' His ideas were dismissed as not applicable in a service funded by the Government.

Worse, the hospital's chief executive feared that an investigation might expose failings and leave him vulnerable to political interference. 'They put up a facade composed of ignorance and fear,' said the non-executive director. Nonetheless, he had a go at the equipment budget, which was 21/2 times over budget in the last financial year. He started from the basics, costing everything from the bottom up. He was startled to discover that this had never been done before. Cascades of money from the top had left managers indifferent to the basic routine of accounting.

Did the trust know what it owned? Was there an inventory? It appeared not. So no one knew how much equipment had simply disappeared. His wife had been given a crutch when she broke her foot. Months later, she is fully recovered, but the crutch is still lying about at home unclaimed and presumably forgotten by the authorities. The taxpayer, of course, has to pay for its replacement.

This financial vagueness was in every area he examined. For example, there was no system or control on what vehicles the trust owned or what they spent on transport. The local energy company had done a free audit of the hospital's heating system and reported that £32,000 a year could be saved by adjusting the boiler controls. But nothing had happened. Instead, managers were spending a fortune attending conferences to learn about the implications of the latest government initiative.

The non-executive director pointed out that, with travelling and a night away, this cost the trust £1,000 a head. 'The chairman and chief executive went to Harrogate last month and that alone cost £4,000,' he said.

The non-executive suggested they save money by not attending any conferences for a year. The amount of money this would save could not be calculated because no one had any idea how much they trust had spent on previous conferences. 'The NHS does not need vast injections of money. It just needs someone on the inside to say how we can save money,' he said.

Yet for all his experience, my source had not grasped the essential feature of NHS accounting. It is not to provide the hospital with the information on how to run itself more efficiently; it is a tool to secure yet more money from central funding. I discovered this while I was shadowing a modern matron. A male nurse in charge of the ward's finances stopped her. He was very upset. Last month, after a lot of juggling, he had managed to reduce spending on agency nurses. It was his best monthly figure ever. So why was he despondent? Surely the least he had got was a pat on the back from the finance department?

On the contrary. They had ticked him off for spending double the amount. I was confused by this. The nurse and the matron looked at me pityingly. In the surreal world of NHS finances, reality had nothing to do with it. What had happened was that the finance department had fiddled the figure to make it look as if he had spent twice the amount - and then had the brass neck to berate the nurse for spending so much. Why had they massaged the figure upwards? Because they wanted to extract more money from the Department of Health. 'They've told me not to do it again,' the nurse said.

The problems with NHS finances are bound up with the problems of the institution itself. It was designed to be state-owned, centrally planned, financed and run. Until we engage with that basic premise, the NHS will continue to be inefficient and expensive. And we'll see more hospitals closed and front-line staff cut.

It is clear to me that we can no longer afford this top-down approach. But where do we go from here? I believe that instead of devising its own solutions to problems, the Government should cease to micro-manage our healthcare. Instead, it should be creating the opportunities for individuals and companies, inside and outside the NHS, to come up with the most efficient and cost-effective solutions, with the Government's role as strictly regulatory.

For a time, it looked as if Labour might be doing just that. They allowed independent providers to compete for business with the NHS and patients could choose where to go for certain treatments, which were still paid for by the Government. This has proved popular and successful. Care UK, which is one of the largest providers of healthcare (and one of the bidders to run Hinchingbrooke Hospital), operates walk-in health centres and GP services, as well as seven hospitals with exceptionally good clinical outcomes and no cases of hospital-acquired MRSA. More than half of its patients come through recommendations from family and friends.

Ali Parsa, the managing director of Circle (another bidder for Hinchingbrooke Hospital), the largest partnership of healthcare professionals in Europe, typifies the new philosophy. He sees the answer to the shortfalls in NHS funding coming from bottom-up innovation rather than top-down edicts. Circle's hospitals and clinics are co-formed and co-run by its clinical staff, who own half the shares. 'We need a system that attracts the best ideas from the greatest number of people,' he said.

Sadly, all this innovation is grinding to a halt under Gordon Brown. Far from giving the public a multiplicity of choice, Andy Burnham, the Secretary of State for Health, recently announced that the NHS should remain our 'preferred provider'. Chillingly, patients will be allowed to go elsewhere only if the under-performance of their local hospital remains 'significant'. So much for Labour putting patient care first.

Paul Corrigan, former special adviser on heath to Tony Blair, has urged NHS trusts to ignore this latest directive. They have a duty to provide the best care and 'this overrides any preference they have for one provider or another'. He said the service 'should not be denied the weapon of competition' to drive up value for money.

That is why what is happening at Hinchingbrooke Hospital is such an exciting departure. Hopefully, the Conservatives are listening. You never know - in the future if you are admitted as an NHS patient, you could even be offered a sensible sized bar of soap.

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Children at top British hospital had to wash in buckets

Sick children at a leading hospital were forced to wash in buckets for almost a month after bosses failed to fix the hot water supply. More than 100 youngsters, some of them seriously ill, were left without hot running water over a period of nearly four weeks. Parents were forced to carry hot water in buckets from a single working tap in a sluice room so their children could wash. Youngsters suffering from brain tumours and cystic fibrosis were among those affected.

Despite complaints from patients and staff, bosses at Kings College Hospital, in South London, failed to fix the broken pump - and left half the children's wards without hot water for weeks.

One mother said she saw infants standing in buckets to be washed while parents carried hot water to patients' bedsides in 'sick bowls'. Gemma Dadgostar, whose 18-month-old son Aiden was being treated for Cystic Fibrosis at the hospital, said she was 'shocked' that the hospital failed to solve the problem. 'I thought it was absolutely outrageous,' Mrs Dadgostar, 29, said. 'Hot water is an absolutely basic necessity. 'Aiden was just recovering from surgery and the last thing he needed was to be bathing in lukewarm water. We had to carry hot water to his bedside in cardboard sick bowls. Other parents were washing their children in buckets. 'It was bizarre to see. In a hospital of that size it's unbelievable that they couldn't sort it out.'

Aiden's grandmother Nadine Helsdown said the scene was 'absolutely disgusting' when she visited the hospital last month. 'Other parents with children on the ward were absolutely scandalised the same as we were,' Mrs Helsdown, 51, said. 'The ward manager was disgusted, all the staff were. 'They asked and asked and tried their best to sort it out, but nothing was done.'

King's College is one of 18 hospitals named in a report by the Department of Health this month, for failing to comply with more than 10 orders to prevent people dying from accidents involving drugs, surgery or equipment.

Katherine Murphy, director of the Patients Association, last night demanded a full inquiry into why the hospital did not act sooner. She said: 'This is absolutely appalling and shows a completely cavalier attitude to patient safety. 'A lack of hot water is a serious problem and I don't accept the hospital did everything they could.' Miss Murphy added: 'Staff and parents were both rightly appalled by this and yet the hospital did nothing. I would like to see a full inquiry into how this situation was allowed to continue for as long as it did.'

A spokesman for the hospital said: 'We experienced intermittent problems with the hot water supply on three paediatric wards during January and February. 'The underlying problem was very difficult to trace, but it has now been identified and rectified. 'We would like to apologise to patients and their families who were affected by the problem.'

Earlier this month the same hospital was accused of turning off a grandmother's life support machine before her sons had a chance to say their last goodbyes to save money. The husband of 58-year-old Lai-Mai Pang-Cheung claims doctors told him the life support machine had to be switched off because of 'tight resources' - even though the couple's two sons were rushing to Britain from Hong Kong to see her.

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Reality dawns in broke Britain

Major power plant suspends plan to replace coal with greener fuel -- because coal is cheaper

Britain’s biggest power station has suspended its plan to replace coal with greener fuel, leaving the Government little chance of meeting its target for renewable energy. Drax, in North Yorkshire, which produces enough electricity for six million homes, is withdrawing a pledge to cut CO2 emissions by 3.5 million tonnes a year, or 17.5 per cent.

The power station, which is the country’s largest single source of CO2, has invested £80 million in a processing unit for wood, straw and other plant-based fuels, known as biomass. The unit is designed to produce more renewable electricity than 600 wind turbines, but will operate at only a fraction of its capacity because Drax says it is cheaper to continue to burn coal.

Drax is also one of dozens of companies delaying investments in new biomass power stations because of uncertainty over the Government’s policy on long-term subsidies. Hundreds of farmers growing biomass crops may now struggle to sell their produce.

Drax’s decision will make it almost impossible for the Government to meet its commitment to increase the proportion of electricity from renewable sources from 5.5 per cent to 30 per cent by 2020. Renewable energy is a key component of Britain’s legally binding targets to cut overall emissions by 34 per cent by 2020 and 80 per cent by 2050. In an interview with The Times, Dorothy Thompson, Drax’s chief executive, blamed the Government for failing to give sufficient subsidy to biomass to make it competitive with coal. Drax has bought two million tonnes of biomass, but Ms Thompson said that it was considering selling it overseas because it no longer made economic sense to burn it in its six boilers.

Ms Thompson said: “We are not confident that the [subsidy] regime for what is one of the cheapest forms of renewable energy will support operating the biomass unit at full load. The UK is missing out massively on the potential for renewable energy from biomass. We want to run in a lowcarbon way but policy is against us.”

She accused the Department of Energy and Climate Change of lacking the skills to develop a successful biomass policy and focusing too heavily on expensive and unreliable wind turbines. “I think they simply have not put enough expertise into biomass. Wind is not a silver bullet; its benefits have been overstated.”

Ms Thompson said that the Government was holding back biomass by offering it only a quarter of the subsidy given to offshore wind farms and capping the amount of crops that can be burnt in coal-fired power stations. She said that it was cheaper for Drax to pay for emissions permits to burn coal, the most polluting fossil fuel, than to switch to biomass. Each megawatt hour of electricity costs Drax £31 to produce from coal and £40 from biomass.

Ms Thompson said that Drax would also be unable to proceed with its £2 billion plan for three new biomass power plants unless the Government offered longer-term support. “We do not believe we can create a credible investment case for our shareholders if there is complete regulatory uncertainty. This is a very serious issue because renewable energy through biomass is a key component for delivering the 2020 target.”

The Renewable Energy Association said that plans for more than 50 biomass projects, totalling £13 billion of investment, had been suspended because of uncertainty over policy. Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, the Energy Minister, said this month that the subsidy regime for biomass needed to be reviewed. Wind farm developers are guaranteed fixed subsidies for 20 years, but biomass investors could have the subsidy cut after four years.

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Britain's bleak winter could be the worst for 81 years

The long, hard winter looks like dragging on into March. And if the bitter winds carry on for the next two weeks, there is a very good chance that this winter will turn out to be the coldest across the UK since 1929.

The National Trust reports that spring flowers have been set back by up to four weeks compared with recent years, although they expect that when some decent warmth arrives it could unleash a huge burst of flowering.

In the latest outbreak of wintry weather, heavy snow swamped much of the South West, Wales, the Midlands and parts of East Anglia, with the threat of ice on those roads not covered with snow. There’s a risk of a similar snowfall returning on Monday, stretching from the M4 corridor across Wales, the Midlands, East Anglia and parts of the North.

These snowfalls have come from a collision of wet, mild, Atlantic air smashing into freezing colder air stuck over northern parts of Britain. This stems from a problem that has plagued much of this winter — the weather patterns have become blocked and sent the jet stream running south.

This wind runs a few miles high and marks the battlefront between Arctic air and tropical air, and usually lies close to the UK during winter, delivering mild but wet weather. This winter, though, bitterly cold air from the Arctic thrust down into Europe and sent the jet stream off-course.

And the same happened in the eastern US, where the bitter cold has produced monster-sized snowfalls that have set new records in many places.

While much of Europe, North America and Asia have shivered, other places have been ridiculously warm. Just like squeezing a balloon, mild air has shifted to other regions such as Vancouver, where the Winter Olympics are in dire trouble with incredibly warm weather, heavy rains and fog.

The blame for this mess is partly thanks to El Niño, the warming of the tropical seas of the Pacific, which causes a huge upheaval in weather patterns across much of the globe.

This current El Niño is fairly powerful, and has swept warm air across Alaska and the West Coast of Canada, which is why Vancouver broke its record for the warmest January. Even the UK has caught the turmoil from El Niño, despite being thousands of miles away. Warm air from El Niño shot up into the stratosphere and shunted a surge of cold air from the Arctic down across the Continent and the UK this month.

Despite the snow and recent rain, this winter could turn out to be one of the driest on record, based on Met Office figures up to February 15. Although snowfalls through January and February were often heavy, they did not amount to much in terms of rainfall. Even showers forecast next week will not substantially change the average rainfall for the whole winter.

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British government lavished £9m on climate change stunts... but public opinion is left cold by global warming 'propaganda'

A disastrous series of failed climate change publicity stunts cost taxpayers £ 9million, it emerged yesterday. The projects paid for by the Government’s Climate Challenge Fund did next to nothing to change public opinion, a Whitehall report found. It said the initiatives were almost entirely preaching to the converted and that trying to drum up interest through sensationalism only put people off.

Schemes included a £40,000 DVD in which schoolchildren explained that in ten years everyone will have to wear sunglasses all the time, because the sun will be shining more.

A tent set up in shopping centres and labelled an ‘experiential climate dome’ was subsidised by Whitehall to the tune of nearly £400,000; a computer game cost £47 every time it was played; and a series of ‘ challenging pub quizzes’ about climate change cost more than £85,000.

Large grants went to councils, schools and youth groups for ‘ attitude modification’ programmes and to assure the public that man-made global warming is an established scientific fact. And £200,000 went to Oxford University to ‘take climate change into the community’.

Details of the projects and the report for Ed Miliband’s Department of Energy and Climate Change – which was never published – were unearthed by the TaxPayers’ Alliance through Freedom of Information requests. Matthew Sinclair, the group’s research director, said: ‘The Government has clearly crossed the line from public information to propaganda on climate change. ‘Many of the Climate Challenge Fund projects are utterly bonkers and misleading, and come with a huge price tag.

‘Despite a fortune having been spent on these projects, the fund has failed even on its own spurious terms. It is infuriating for taxpayers to see their money squandered on attempts to scare and indoctrinate the public.’

The report by consultants Brook Lyndhurst said the projects largely failed to produce any changes in the opinions among their target audiences. It judged that ‘the aggregate picture is one of neutral or very modest positive shifts’. Future programmes should ‘avoid sensationalist or shocking imagery in climate change messages, since respondents are likely to find this off-putting’, it said.

The report added that those attracted to the projects were ‘already interested in climate change’. It suggested that in many cases organisations viewed the funding as ‘a way to secure additional resources’, and said the people running the projects often did not have ‘necessary skills’. The money was paid to public organisations and voluntary groups between 2006 and 2008.

Details emerged after several other high-profile climate change failures in recent months. The Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, which received £16,000 from the Climate Challenge Fund, has come under fire over leaked emails which show scientists attempted to hide data from sceptics.

And the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been found to have made exaggerated and ill-informed claims, for example over the rate at which Himalayan glaciers are melting. Its chief, Rajendra Pachauri, has faced calls to resign.

SOURCE



Rhubarb crumble - the new cancer-busting superfood?

The usual polyphenol nonsense. Speculation based on observations in laboratory glassware, apparently. No double blind trial in humans. Double blind trials can be SO disappointing to deductions based on observations of events in laboratory glassware

Rhubarb crumble can help fight cancer, claim scientists. Researchers have found that the traditional favourite, like many red vegetables, contains cancer killing chemicals. And baking the plant for 20 minutes - like in a crumble or pie - dramatically increases their concentration. Now it is hoped that extracting the substances from the plant could come up with new drug treatments for cancers such as leukaemia.

The findings showed the chemicals, called polyphenols, could kill or prevent the growth of cancer cells and could be used to develop new, less toxic, treatments for the disease. It could even be used in cases where cancers had proved resistant to other treatments.

The study, by Sheffield Hallam University, is the first time the benefits of British garden rhubarb, specifically a variety grown in south Yorkshire, have been studied. Previous research focused on Oriental medicinal rhubarb, which has been recognised for its health benefits and used in traditional Chinese medicine for thousands of years. Academics now hope to discover the best combination of rhubarb's polyphenols and chemotherapy agents needed to kill leukaemia cells.

Dr Nikki Jordan-Mahy, of Sheffield Hallam University's biomedical research centre, said: "Our research has shown that British rhubarb is a potential source of chemicals that may be used to develop new anti-cancerous drugs. "Rhubarb has been shown to have some very interesting polyphenols that have anti-cancerous properties. Eating a nice crumble will be good for you.

"But if we can extract the polyphenols they may be useful in helping to fight cancer along with chemotherapy. "Current treatments are not effective in all cancers and resistance is a common problem as is toxicity. "Cancer affects one in three individuals in the UK so it's very important to discover novel, less toxic, treatments, which can overcome resistance."

The research, jointly carried out by the Scottish Crop Research Institute, is published in the journal Food Chemistry.

SOURCE





19 February, 2010

British poll finds 77% want immigration cut

An increasing number of British people believe ethnic minorities are integrating well within local neighbourhoods even though most still want a sharp reduction in immigration, a government poll on social attitudes has found.

The latest update of the "citizenship survey", which has sought people's views about community cohesion since 2001, showed that 77 per cent of people thought immigration should be cut, with slightly more than half saying it should be reduced "by a lot".

Those figures will be seized on by anti-immigration lobby groups, who argue that the mainstream political parties remain out of step with the electorate over the issue, with many voters saying it is one of their highest priorities.

However, the survey - conducted for the Department of Communities and Local Government - also showed that 84 per cent of people agreed that their local neighbourhood was a place where people from different backgrounds got on well together, up from 80 per cent in 2005.

The far-right British National party has made some electoral inroads in recent years by stoking up fears that "ordinary white people" have become marginalised in the UK. But the survey of 15,000 adults in England and Wales showed that, even among white respondents, 83 per cent of people thought their community was cohesive - up from 81 per cent in the previous year. People living in the most deprived parts of the country were less upbeat, with only 69 per cent believing their community was well integrated.

The 2008-09 survey also showed that negative attitudes towards immigration were not softening. There was a small decrease in the number of people who want to see a big fall in immigration, but the number who want some kind of cut remains stable at more than three-quarters.

Students, better-paid workers and holders of degrees were far more favourable towards immigration than those further down the wage scale and people without qualifications, who often find themselves competing with migrant workers. The issue of immigration is shaping up as a key electoral battleground.

The Labour government argues that its points-based system for non-European Union workers is helping to cut migrant numbers after a period in which it has been accused of operating an "open door" policy.

Alan Johnson, the home secretary, has admitted that the government has been "maladroit" in addressing the concerns of voters over the issue, with Labour particularly worried about losing core support in its traditional industrial heartlands.

The Conservatives have promised a yearly cap on migrants, although it is unclear how much scope they would have to make a reduction, given that they will not be able to stop people coming from the EU.

The survey also raises questions about Tory claims that British society is "broken", with nine out of 10 people saying that they "definitely" or "to some extent" enjoy living in their neighbourhood.

SOURCE



Britain's obscene and insane "obesity" bureaucrats

Mother's fury as nanny state brands her healthy daughter, 5, 'fat and at risk of heart disease'. But the bureaucrats are unrepentant. No recognition that they might have got it wrong



Sports mad, always full of energy and certainly not fat, five-year-old Lucy Davies' parents had no concern about her health. But when she was examined at school as part of a Government initiative to turn the rising tide of obesity, they were shocked to be told that she was 'overweight and unhealthy.' They said Lucy may have an increased risk of heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure and cancer as her body mass index (BMI) was outside recommended guidelines by just one per cent.

Lucy is 3ft 9ins tall and weighs 3st 9lbs - which is itself within the recommended healthy range for a five-year-old child. Her mother, Susan Davies, 38, said she was shocked by the letter she and husband Tony were sent about their daughter's weight. 'I couldn't believe what I was reading,' she said. Lucy is five-years-old and not fat in the slightest. She shouldn't even be thinking about her weight at her age. 'I want her to be running around playing and having fun, not worrying about what she looks like.'

National Child Measurement Programme is being carried out in schools across the UK and results are calculated by taking into account height, weight and age.

Mrs Davies, a mother-of-four from Poole, Dorset, received the letter which said: 'The results suggest your child is overweight.' It added that this can have 'implications on health and wellbeing' and listed a catalogue of serious medical conditions her daughter may later suffer from.

A child's is calculated using the same method as for adults - weight in kilograms divided by height in metres squared. Special BMI figures for children are used to determine whether a child is overweight or obese given their age. In Lucy's case she missed out on being placed in the healthy category by just one percentile point. Confusingly, separate guidelines tell parents what a healthy weight is for their height.

Last night eating disorder experts condemned the letter saying the new initiative needed to show more common sense. A spokeswoman for eating disorder charity BEAT said: 'More common sense needs to be applied in these situations. It is really taking things to extremes. For all the right reasons, they are paying attention to the growing problem of obesity, but some of the messages that are being put out are not necessarily right for young people to be hearing. 'Children at a younger and younger age are becoming aware of their body image and pressures on them to be the ideal image and figure.'

Mrs Davies said her daughter was an active young girl who was clearly not obese. She said: 'Lucy is one of those children who is always on the go - she does ballet, cheerleading and we spend our free time going on family walks and playing outdoors. 'No child of her age should be worried about whether they have a tummy.' She said the letter illustrated how far the 'nanny state' had intruded into the private lives of families.

Mrs Davies, who is married to 41-year-old financial advisor Tony, said: 'What business is it of theirs? They seem to want us all to be round pegs to fit into round holes. 'If it wasn't all so official, and a nurse who knew the children could ring up the parents for a chat, then it might do more good. But this is a horrible scare tactic.'

A spokeswoman for the Bournemouth and Poole Primary Care Trust, which carried out the tests, stressed the results were aimed at parents and results were not given to children directly. Dr Adrian Dawson, director of public health at the trust, said: 'We are concerned about the health of our children. 'If they are overweight this will cause many problems for them as they grow older and we need to tackle this head on. 'Parents are the only people who can effect this change in lifestyle through healthy eating, meal time portion control and daily physical activity. It is right that they are aware of the consequences for their children.'

SOURCE



British Equality laws are no longer a mother’s helper

Orwellian rules prevent employers and workers from asking honest questions. We should tear them up and start again

Harassment and discrimination rules are broad, illogical, ill defined and easily abused. Nowhere is this more true than in the parallel universe where discrimination laws meet pregnancy and motherhood. The law firm Eversheds is the latest company to become tied in knots over this. A leaked e-mail from a senior partner referred to a job candidate: “This lady has recently had a child. Are there any guidelines on how we can ask questions properly designed to identify her commitment, hours she is prepared to do, how she will balance work and a child?” After protests from a colleague, the partner, Stuart Dutson, was investigated, warned about his conduct and sent on a training course.

What was he taught there? That freedom of speech stops at the office security gates? That women, bless ’em, need handling sensitively in case the poor dears blub on to their bumps? That the contract between employer and employee must be based on silence and lies?

Law firms such as Eversheds are useful for testing the hypothesis that working women are oppressed by a patriarchy that sees fecundity as a threat to its success — because the link between hours worked and career advancement is more explicit than almost anywhere else: lawyers are paid by the hour; the firm’s earnings — and the partners’ profits — are directly related to how many hours everyone puts in; performance is assessed on hours worked. In return for living in the office, lawyers are paid extraordinarily well. Typical pay for a partner at a “magic circle” law firm is between £500,000 and £1.5 million a year.

To become a partner, senior associates are expected to put in Stakhanovite working hours — up to 90 a week, one corporate lawyer told me. She said: “You work huge hours for a huge salary, then you have a baby. Your heart tells you to work 9 to 5, but you can’t pocket a big salary on the one hand and expect to work 9 to 5 on the other. It’s not reasonable. So you have to make a decision.” Yet the law pretends there is no tension between heart and wallet.

All new mothers — no matter whether they are careerists or simply working to pay the bills — are obsessed with this decision, the impossible-to-solve equation that tries to balance work, family and money. Life = (work+family)xguilt2. They are trying to solve the equation at a time when their sense of self, painstakingly assembled through the horrors of the teenage years and the glories of young adulthood, is utterly transformed by childbirth.

As Naomi Wolf says in her book Misconceptions, her take on the bewildering maelstrom that follows conception, we “are weakened, as well as strengthened, by childbirth”.

It would be useful to talk to someone about this stuff, about how the new you and the old job can come to an understanding. I know, how about your boss? Only your boss is not allowed to talk to you about it, for fear of being shipped off to some doublethink retraining course, to learn the answers to questions like: “If you have two senior associates, one of whom works 9 to 5 and the other works 15-hour days and weekends, can you say out loud that you decided who will be made partner on that basis?”

Or: “If you have a temporary job to offer, and a woman applies who is pregnant and due to give birth the day the job starts, is it legal or illegal not to employ her on those grounds?”

The discrimination laws served a purpose — they helped to get women into the workplace. But they are beginning to look as anachronistic as the Mad Men world they sought to change. Figures this month show that 44 per cent of women earn at least the same as their partner. The world has changed.

The old approach of legally entrenched silence works on the automatic assumption that a woman will be the one to scale back her working life. Perhaps, if the Eversheds partner had been allowed to ask the question, the female applicant could have replied: “I want to be 100 per cent committed. My husband is going to stay at home to look after the children.” Instead, the rational assumption echoing in the silence is that she would be a liability, a maternal drag on the company’s profits, leaking breast milk all over the boardroom table.

Discrimination laws are social engineering in action: governments wanted more women in work, and therefore made generous maternity provision. By enshrining universal protection for pregnant women in discrimination law, the State shifted the burden on to the private sector — with all the costs. This would be fair enough, if the laws did not also demand that employers, particularly smaller ones, behave irrationally and in ignorance.

None of this helps women. Without knowing a woman’s intentions, it’s an easier call just not to hire her. The blunt edges of the rules and their dissonance with real life create false barriers of resentment, which both sides would prefer to see demolished.

As David Cameron, Gordon Brown and Nick Clegg clamour to be on Mumsnet, spewing platitudes about nappies and biscuits, is it too much to ask for an honest conversation on working motherhood?

The Equality Bill, which enshrines these absurdities and adds a few more such as legal positive discrimination, must be ripped up. Each plank in the discrimination rule book must be stress-tested on the basis of two criteria — is this so broad and open to abuse that it is meaningless, and is it actually harming women’s ability to make open, informed choices? Because, sometimes. these days, women are employers too.

SOURCE



Miscarriages: A good news story from Britain



A woman who suffered 18 miscarriages has given birth to a healthy baby girl named Raiya, thanks to a pioneering technique of diagnosing and treating multiple miscarriages developed at Epsom and St Helier University Hospitals NHS Trust.

Angie Baker (33) had been trying to have a baby for 13 years, but although doctors could not diagnose what was causing it, she repeatedly suffered a miscarriage in the early stages of pregnancy. But Angie refused to give up hope. She said: "I just knew that I was meant to be a mother. Every time I miscarried I felt more determined. I never felt like giving up. "Even though doctors couldn't tell my why it was happening, I felt sure there was a cure. I just knew I had to persevere."

After years of trying and 17 miscarriages, Angie read about Dr Hassan Shehata, a consultant obstetrician and gynaecologist at the Trust, who has spent the last ten years researching and helping women who suffer recurrent miscarriages. She got in touch and made an appointment with him.

Dr Shehata had been working with an immunologist at the Trust, Dr Amolak Bansal, to find out why some women's bodies reject their pregnancies. Their work focused on 'natural killer cells', which are found in everyone's white blood cells (which defend your body against infections and foreign bodies).

They found that some women's natural killer cells are so aggressive they attack the pregnancy, which is exactly what was happening to Angie.

Dr Shehata said: "About ten years ago, a doctor in the states proved that there was a link between these natural killer cells and infertility. I became interested in the subject and we began work to further study the link. "After three years of hard work, we mastered it. We knew how to test the function of the natural killer tests to see how aggressive they were and we knew how to treat it. By giving suitable women steroids, we can lower the number of natural killer cells and increase their chances of having a baby."

Speaking about Angie's experience, Dr Shehata added: "Angie is an amazing woman. She is a very strong woman, and had such a great sense of belief. The odds of having so many miscarriages are miniscule, but she was so determined to carry on. I am so happy that she has got her dream - a healthy daughter.

Angie added: "I can't explain how I feel. I have to pinch myself sometimes because I just can't believe it's happened - she's perfect in every way. Being a mum is everything I thought it would be, and I'm just so happy that Dr Shehata could help me. I cannot thank him enough."

Source



The worst cold snap for 20 years is turning Britain's lawns PINK... and there's more snow to come



Just to prove that the other man's grass isn't always greener, lawns throughout the country are turning pink. The harsh winter has led to the worst outbreak of snow mould for more than 20 years. The fungal disease exists on many lawns without usually causing any problems. But when under a blanket of snow, it starts to thrive. Patches of grass rapidly die, then when the snow melts the characteristic candy-floss pink or grey blotches come to light.

The Fusarium nivale fungus has wrought destruction from Surrey to Scotland, with Northumberland and Yorkshire particularly badly hit. The nationwide blight came to light as forecasters warned of 'another blast' of winter today. Up to two inches of snow will fall across much of the country, with central England and south-east Wales being the worst affected. The wintry weather will continue until late tomorrow and may well cause widespread disruption to commuters returning home in the Friday evening rush-hour.

The Met Office has issued a weather warning for a 60 per cent chance of heavy snow affecting South West England, Wales, western and eastern parts of the Midlands today, with two inches expected widely and up to four inches on higher ground.

A further weather warning has been issued for widespread icy roads across the Midlands, Eastern England, London and the South-East. Tim Thorne, from the Met Office, said: 'It's great news for the kids on half-term. But for everybody else the novelty of snow this winter seems to have worn off. The snow will start off in the south-west and move up over the Midlands where we are expecting it to linger. 'It will then hit eastern parts by Friday and could cause some disruption to roads and rail connections. February is generally the coldest month so it shouldn't come as too much of a surprise. 'Many parts are likely to see a bitterly cold Friday night. 'We are hoping it will all be over by the weekend when many areas should see some sunshine. It is fair to say it has become something of a nuisance.'

Last month was the coldest January in Britain for 20 years, and February hasn't been a lot better.

Britain's biggest lawn care company, GreenThumb, says the combination of snow and lack of wind have made this year's outbreaks of Fusarium nivale the worst in the firm's 25-year history. Technical manager Steve Taylor said: 'For grass to survive and stay healthy, you need air to keep blowing across the surface of the plant. 'Snow keeps the grass warm but it suffocates the air and it is the catalyst that allows the disease to take hold and blight your lawn. 'We have been called out to treat cases all over Britain but the east side of the country has been particularly badly hit.'

SOURCE



Free speech about homosexuality upheld in Britain (for once)

We read:

"A complaint about Daily Mail columnist Jan Moir’s articles on the death of the Boyzone singer Stephen Gately has not been upheld by the Press Complaints Commission.

Mr Gately’s civil partner Andrew Cowles complained about an article headlined ‘A strange, lonely and troubling death’, and a second column headlined ‘The truth about my views on the tragic death of Stephen Gately’. Mr Cowles said the articles, which also attracted 25,000 third party complaints through social networks Facebook and Twitter to the PCC, were inaccurate, intrusive at a time of grief and had made a number of pejorative references to Mr Gately’s sexuality.

But, in a judgment released yesterday, the PCC said that, while it was legitimate for there to be criticism of the articles, Mr Cowles’s complaint was not upheld on any of the issues he had raised. The Commission said it should ‘be slow to prevent columnists from expressing their views, however controversial they might be’.

The PCC also said that, as a result of the huge public response to the article on social networking sites, and on the Mailonline website, both the newspaper and Ms Moir had been ‘confronted with the impact of what had been published’. The Commission said this showed a ‘healthy system’ for challenging a columnist’s opinions.

Source

Previous coverage of the matter here





18 February, 2010

Britain's immigration boom is stretching schools and hospitals to breaking point, council chiefs warn

Town hall chiefs yesterday condemned the Government's immigration figures, saying high and uncounted numbers of new residents are putting too much strain on services. A string of local authorities said few of the 1.5million Poles and other Eastern Europeans who came after 2004 had gone home.

Ministers say they arrived in Britain for only short-term stays and more than 700,000 have left, but councils in Peterborough, Slough and Westminster in London claim otherwise. The councils are challenging official reports that suggest people from eastern Europe stay in Britain for a short time before returning home.

Supported by their umbrella body, the Local Government Association, they argue eastern European couples are settling down to stay and placing an intolerable burden on services. Ruth Bagley, chief executive of Slough, said: 'They may not be arriving as quickly, but the anecdotal evidence is that more people are still coming, and staying.'

Peter Hiller, Peterborough's councillor with responsibility for social services and policing, said: 'We have coped thus far but as immigration continues the cracks are beginning to show.'

In Westminster, borough leader Colin Barrow said: 'The handling of migrant figures has been highly ineffective and at huge cost to local authorities. 'Thousands of migrants are not being counted because of the flawed population methodology used by the Office of National Statistics.'

But Immigration Minister Phil Woolas insisted: 'The number of Eastern Europeans leaving the UK is increasing and the number coming here to work is falling.'

SOURCE



NHS safety failings 'kill 40,000 a year' as patients pay price of target culture

More than 40,000 deaths a year could be avoided if the NHS improved its safety record, campaigners say. They claim the Health Service is ruled by a 'widespread culture of fear' which puts patients at risk. Managers are more concerned with hitting targets than improving systems known to be flawed, said the centreright think-tank Policy Exchange. NHS funding has nearly tripled from £39.9billion to £102billion in 11 years but there are concerns the cash has failed to raise standards.

Using new data from U.S. and European research, Policy Exchange says 78,400 NHS patients a year die as a result of 'adverse events' - brought on by accidents or caused by medication or treatment. More than half of these deaths - 43,000 - could be prevented if hospitals were inspected more rigorously and recommended safety changes were installed. The figure for deaths is based on ten studies suggesting that 6.6 per cent of hospital admissions each year, around 700,000 patients, suffer adverse events - with 11 per cent of them ending in death.

Policy Exchange used Freedom of Information requests to uncover reports showing that patients became a low priority during a string of organisational reforms. They were prepared in 2008 as the Department of Health undertook a major restructuring of NHS regulation. One report, Quality Oversight In England, by the highly-respected Joint Commission International, identified 'the pervasive culture of fear in the NHS and certain elements of the Department of Health'.

Another, by the Institute of Healthcare Improvement, said the 'NHS has developed a widespread culture more of fear and compliance than of learning, innovation and enthusiastic participation in improvement'.

An NHS worker who was interviewed for the report said: 'The risk of consequences to managers is much greater for not meeting expectations from above than for not meeting the expectations of patients and families.'

The revelations follow high-profile failings at health trusts in Tunbridge Wells, Basildon and Mid-Staffordshire, where managers' obsession with targets was blamed for filthy wards and nurse shortages which led to up to 1,200 deaths at Stafford Hospital.

Henry Featherstone, of Policy Exchange, called for hospital death rates to be made public. He said: 'The reports detail a frightening catalogue of flaws in patient safety procedures. Government has dragged its feet over implementing a robust system of inspection and improvement, even after these flaws have been highlighted in the strongest terms. 'Under a proper system of inspection and oversight, coupled with a continual process of performance improvement, hundreds if not thousands of lives would be saved.'

Tory health spokesman Andrew Lansley said the Tories would fight the 'closed culture' in the NHS. He said: 'Labour's obsession with targets has led to many hospitals being forced to prioritise ticking boxes over caring for patients'.

The Department of Health said: 'England is one of the world leaders in the international drive to improve the safety of healthcare. 'We have set up, and work alongside, the National Patient Safety Agency to encourage medical staff to report and learn from incidents, even when no harm was caused. 'Every death or serious injury due to mistakes in medical care must be investigated and the lessons acted upon.' [Blah! blah!]

SOURCE



What British women want in 2010: A husband who'll be the main breadwinner

Young mothers are turning their backs on high-powered careers to raise their children, a study has found. Their mothers, or even grandmothers, lived through a time when women fought for full-time work and better pay. But today's generation is returning to the traditional values of home and family - and looking to men to be the breadwinners.

The about-face was highlighted yesterday in research presented by leading sociologist Geoff Dench, who has analysed responses to questions asked in the annual British Social Attitudes survey. His analysis comes against a background of growing political pressure on mothers to go out to work. It revealed a striking change in values in the decade since New Labour swept to power.

The number of mothers with children under four who thought that family life would suffer if women worked full-time fell in the years before Tony Blair took office, dropping from 43 per cent in 1990 to 21 per cent in 1998. But by 2002 it was rising and in 2006 had soared to 37 per cent. Similarly the number of women in the same category who agreed that most women want a home and children fell between 1994 and 2002 to 15 per cent.

But in 2006, the last time the question was asked in the survey, that number had rocketed to 32 per cent - higher even than back in 1986 when it stood at 20 per cent. By far the biggest leap came when women were asked whether they agreed that men and women should have different roles.

In 1986, 40 per cent of women with children under four said 'yes', four years later that had plummeted to 13 per cent and by 2002 it had dropped still lower to 2 per cent.

In 2006, however, that had jumped back up to 17 per cent. Last night Mr Dench, who completed his analysis for the right-leaning Centre for Policy Studies in association with the Hera Trust, said: 'Women with young children are going back to the very traditional division of labour in which they want the husband as the breadwinner. 'Having tried full-time working themselves they have found the home much more interesting and want to be enabled to have that - especially if the only job they have access to is a dull job.' He said there had been a gradual move back towards 'more positive evaluations of women's traditional "work" in the family and informal community'.

While mothers have increased the amount of paid work they do, he said this was mostly part-time work, enabling them also to spend time in the home.

He said evidence pointed to the group fuelling the switch being young mothers aged 18 to 34 - the same age as their mothers were when they fought for the right to work on a par with men. 'They are rocking against the Baby Boom generation, in many cases their own parents,' he added. 'Just as young women led the movement into higher levels of paid work, it seems to be young women who are leading a return to more traditional values.'

The number of mothers with children under four working part-time has risen from 10 per cent in 1983 to 1986, to 28 per cent from 2005 to 2008. In the same category the number working full-time has risen from 9 per cent to 19 cent. Mr Dench said that the women who said they were happiest appeared to be those who valued the housewife role but also did some paid work.

The analysis follows a report from a prominent liberal commentator which also revealed that far from wanting to be 'superwomen who manage everything, plus a high-profiled career', many women just want to be stay-at-home mothers with their husbands taking the role of breadwinner.

Cristina Odone, a former deputy editor of the New Statesman and editor of the Catholic Herald, said millions of women had been left frustrated and miserable by Government policies that push them back into jobs and their children into nurseries.

Ministers have redoubled efforts to persuade mothers to take jobs in the face of evidence that a big majority of the poorest families are two-parent families in which only the father works.

Meanwhile the Equality and Human Rights Commission and equal pay pressure groups say that mothers are often anxious to go back to work but are pressured into a caring role by lack of flexible working hours, a shortage of affordable daycare and reluctance of men to take over a share of the childcare.

SOURCE



British government school rejects educational excellence in favour of Leftist ideology

Labour Party member Joanna Leapman became a governor at her children's school to make state education better for everyone. Here she explains how the system has failed and why she ended up resigning

The appointment of our new junior school head teacher in 2008 seemed too good to be true. For the last few years, I had slowly come to accept my children would never benefit from the same sort of education that I had had in a small village school. The school my three children attend, in a multiracial London neighbourhood, has its fair share of problems, and head teachers had long brushed off its below-average results with excuses of 'pupil mobility’, 'high need area’ and 'vulnerable children’. Everyone had seemed too busy dealing with discipline to give anyone a chance to shine, flourish or even enjoy their education.

In 2006, I had been elected on to the governing body which served both the infant and junior schools – but I soon felt I was banging my head against a brick wall. In our area of London, there are a fair number of middle-class families but many opt for church schools or private education instead. Yet my ideas for attracting more of these parents were ignored. I was told it was not the done thing to compete with other schools or play the same game as private schools by selling ourselves. I had eventually persuaded the infant school, which had a separate head teacher, to host open days for prospective new parents but when they turned up they received a lengthy presentation on our 'strong inclusion agenda’, meaning that we catered well for children with special needs or behaviour problems. Got a bright child? Look elsewhere.

The number of disruptive and violent children in our children’s classes was high. They were never excluded — even temporarily. And their behaviour was made worse by disruptions to their learning, such as job-shares often used to accommodate weak teachers whom the head couldn’t bring herself to get rid of.

But suddenly in 2008 we had a new head at the junior school. A former banker turned teacher, he was full of determination and spark. His language was refreshingly jargon-free and optimistic. He ripped the school budget apart, weeded out ineffective staff, came down hard on poor behaviour with temporary exclusions, reorganised the classes to put similar children together, introduced setting in Year 6, brought in excellent teachers and built a science lab.

More importantly, he gave children an enthusiasm for learning. For the first time in a long time, my eldest child, aged eight at the time, had a smile on her face. And it wasn’t just our child. Other bright children such as our daughter felt they were being challenged, not just biding their time while the teacher dealt with the difficult kids. For once, I saw children leaving the school gates enthused, excited and motivated. Even parents of the 'difficult kids’ were pleased. They told me they were happy their children were finally being dealt with, not being given a series of mixed messages by a stream of educational welfare officers, educational psychologists and behaviour specialists.

Within a year, the junior school’s SAT results had turned round. With a 17 per cent increase in maths results, it was ranked the fourth most improved primary in Croydon. The authority’s own inspectors had moved it from a 'notice to improve’ school to 'good’ in just two terms of his headship.

And the head’s new projects and ideas were just flowing in. Now a specialist science school, we had a school house system named after Galileo, Newton and Darwin, with children competing to sit on top table at lunch. Enlisting a local inventor, pupils pitched their ideas to join a mini Dragon’s Den club and became the only school to take inventions to the Inventors’ Fair in Alexandra Palace last year. The best scientists in the school were treated to an astronomy day at University College London. And money was coming in left, right and centre too. The head knew how to draw up a bid and attracted sponsorships for a variety of projects including a new amphitheatre in the school grounds. And there was talk of a deal with a coffee shop to put in a quiet area for staff and parents.

He just did things. When he needed a classroom, he found a disused area and created one. Storage areas and medical rooms were not being used, so he brought in a builder during the holidays to knock them through. He even sold an unused kiln on eBay for school funds.

Parents at neighbouring schools pulled their children out and put them into ours, some even moved from private prep schools. Suddenly we were full, with a waiting list. The school was on a fast track to being outstanding. And at last, as a senior governor, my work with the new head was starting to make a difference.

It was in stark contrast to our sister infant school, whose head teacher – like many others – went along with the institutionalised box-ticking and consultation exercises that are squeezing the creativity and excellence out of our public services. Several highly disruptive and violent children were still in the school in the name of 'inclusion’ and had contributed to the resignation of a couple of excellent teachers. Many classes were being run by supply teachers or job-shares, as teachers took time out to train or help out at a nearby struggling school, as part of some new Government strategy.

The needs of higher ability pupils were never a priority in the infant school. The Government’s Gifted and Talented scheme was set up to address this but were never fully implemented. Under the scheme, the top 10 per cent of children are supposed to be identified, tracked and specially catered for in every lesson. But the infant school’s most able pupils attend a 10-week course run by a teaching assistant and are then taken off it to give the less able a chance. Run properly, a good Gifted and Talented programme should keep the more academic children challenged and enthusiastic about school but many teachers don’t believe in it, and now, it seems the Government is following their lead. As The Sunday Telegraph revealed last month, the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) intends to scrap the scheme entirely.

So, when our governing body took the decision last year to merge both our infant and junior schools under one head teacher, and both head teachers competed for the job, some of us parents assumed there could only be one winner. This new superhead should have just walked into the job, right? Wrong.

Instead the governing body chose the head teacher who had been at the infant school for 14 years but had not worked with junior schoolchildren since at least 1995, predating the introduction of SATs. Our chance of becoming something very special had just been snatched away. The superhead will be out of a job this summer – after just two years in the post.

Here was fresh life being breathed into a stale education system weighed down by paperwork, statistics, targets and policies. But the governors, and ultimately the local authority, who had to verify the appointment, didn’t want it.

But I had seen it coming. Other governors didn’t like his ideas because they were not in keeping with “the way things are done in education”; his confidence and determination for excellence was put down as 'arrogance’; and they were angry that things such as the House System had happened without endless weeks of consultation with every parent and 'stakeholder’.

Instead they were happy to congratulate the infant head teacher for signing off policies, involvement in Government initiatives, producing the right graphs, analysing the performance of every minority group and gaining an Inclusion Charter Mark – an enormous box-ticking project that was a pat on the back for accommodating difficult kids at the expense of other children. This new logo that can be added to our headed paper is just one of a number of awards that have become part of the culture, including Healthy Schools Award, Arts Mark, Investors in People, Sports Award, Basic Skills Award and the Eco-schools Green Flag. All of these take teachers away from the business of teaching – not to mention the misdirection of DCSF resources....

During my time as chair of the personnel committee, I was astonished at the lack of commitment to tackling poor teaching standards and practice. The calibre of candidates at interviews was very low. Four candidates applying for a deputy headship had two A-levels between them. The people running our schools should at least be reasonably bright, not people who have cobbled together Mickey Mouse GCSE passes in textiles and media studies and then took conversion courses at the local college. David Cameron was on to something when he announced last month that Tory policy would not allow graduates with a Third to enter the profession. Many primary schools are lucky to attract graduates at all.

My case is not unique. Throughout the system we see new targets being pushed instead of the actual job of teaching. The inclusion agenda has turned many of our state schools into places preoccupied with the needs of difficult and disruptive kids. Teaching has become second-place, with many senior teachers seeing themselves as social workers. Heads are even fined in some areas for excluding troublemakers.

I’m a Labour Party member who became a school governor because I had a firm belief in state education and was determined to do my bit to make it better for everyone. But the system has let me down. Some of our local head teachers are hell-bent on pushing inclusion but have their own children in private schools. They seem happy to accept state schools as sink schools which should not be catering for the middle classes.

But the ones who suffer most are the bright kids from working-class families who can’t afford to move or go private. They are the ones left behind, along with those heads who accept mediocrity instead of pushing for excellence.

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C. of E. now stand for "Church of the Environment

Saving souls is no longer what the Church of England is about

Today's bishops are always encouraging us to ask "Why?" So let's oblige them. Part of the answer, when it comes to this annual fast-fest, seems to be that the climate-change lobby has hi-jacked Lent and that the Church has wholeheartedly gone along for the ride. It turns out that that the iPod ban is only a one-day contribution – Day 20 – to the Christian relief agency Tearfund's annual Carbon Fast. This also enjoins us to "choose an energy supplier that sources all its energy from renewable sources" (Day 3), ask "what your MP is doing to tackle climate change" (Day 17) and to refrain from flushing the loo (Day 43), which might fill the house with the air of the medieval mystic, but is actually aimed at saving water.

Tearfund describes itself as a bunch of "Christians passionate about the local church bringing justice and transforming lives – overcoming global poverty." Which is fair enough, but tellingly it offers its Carbon Fast as "daily actions that will help people reduce their carbon emissions, become 'greener' and have fun at the same time." There are some Bible passages and prayers thrown in, but the whole thing does appear to be an environmental and quasi-political agenda imposed on the holiest season in the Christian calendar.

Traditionally, the self-denial of Lent, even the foreswearing of life's little pleasures, is meant to remove self-indulgences so that we can concentrate on spiritual preparation for Good Friday and Easter. Spend less time carousing and you might actually read a book, or listen to music that transports the soul. It has to be said that you might even have more "fun at the same time" than you'll get from "sustainable furnishings" (Day 11) or from not flushing the lavatory.

The Rev Joanna Jepson, chaplain to the London School of Fashion, an institution that might be expected to be rooted in some worldly idolatries, encourages her students to give up something "really important to them" for Lent, such as "trash TV and shopping." She goes on the wagon too, but describes that as "dull and boring" compared with removing the real barriers to spiritual reflection.

"Consumerism is meant to fill us today. It's our modern-day daily bread," she says, albeit sipping a fashionista's pink "rhubarb gin and tonic" as it was Shrove Tuesday yesterday. "Consuming is our distraction." She goes on to describe shopping as "the modern stone that we turn into our daily bread" as a hat-tip to Jesus's 40 days of temptation in the desert, which provides the Christian model for Lent.

This rather more scriptural view of Lent and Tearfund's Carbon Fast aren't mutually exclusive. Apostles of the Carbon Fast will argue that turning off the iPod or "blocking unused fireplaces" (Day 23) turn its disciples from selfish and sinful people, who concentrate on themselves and their own needs, into communal creatures who consider the welfare of the planet and the less fortunate who live on it.

Similarly, Rev Jepson's no-retail therapy may have the added benefit of questioning the rampant consumption that allegedly threatens the planet (though if everyone did it, it would also threaten our fragile retail economy).

All that pre-supposes, as the Carbon Fast unquestionably does, that the Lenten priority is to save the planet. That itself may be a distraction from the idea that Lent, or rather the climax at its end which changes human history forever, is about saving people. That's a prospect worth preparing for, which means getting some of the stuff which obscures that vision out of the way.

Again, the Carbon Fast has more to offer in that regard than taking the iPod's soundtrack to your life out of your ear. It suggests (Day 8) eating by candlelight. That suggestion, rather boringly, will have energy-saving at its root. But someone who shares food (and even wine, since you're giving up so much else) by the ethereal light of a candle may find that it illuminates simple human pleasures that go missing in the gluttony of the rest of the year.

And where could that glimpse lead? One destination could be a church like mine, where this evening the choir will sing Allegri's Miserere, its repeated soprano refrain like an angel's wail from heaven and the transcendental beauty and spiritual re-assurance of which moves the undistracted listener to tears. It's certainly worth turning your iPod off for.

SOURCE



"Cholesterol-busting" statins increase diabetes risk

Yet another unhealthy side-effect. How odd that there is no mention below of other common statin side effects -- such as muscle pain, muscle weakening and muscle wasting. See here for more statin skepticism

Cholesterol-busting wonder drugs taken by millions to prevent a heart attack also increase their chances of developing diabetes, according to a new study. A comprehensive review of the available evidence shows that statins raise the risk of becoming diabetic by around 9 per cent.

However, experts warn that the absolute risk of developing the condition remains low and is heavily outweighed by the protection from heart problems provided by the drugs. Around 2.5 million people in Britain currently take the medication every day.

Lauded as a “wonder” drug, statins work by reducing cholesterol levels in the body, a major risk factor for heart attacks. Studies have shown that they can also dramatically reduce the risk of suffering a blood clot and there have even been suggestions that they could be used as a treatment for rheumatoid arthritis.

However, researchers who looked at 13 studies involving more than 91,000 patients found that there was also a small increased risk of developing diabetes associated with the drugs. The increased risk mainly affected the over 60s.

However, the authors of the review, from the University of Glasgow, warn that people prescribed statins should not stop taking their medication. They write: “In view of the overwhelming benefit of statins for reduction of cardiovascular events, the small absolute risk for development of diabetes is outweighed by cardiovascular benefit in the short and medium term in individuals for whom statin therapy is recommended."

That view was backed by diabetes and heart charities. Dr Iain Frame, from Diabetes UK, said: "This small increased risk is heavily outweighed by the benefits of statins in those at high risk of heart problems. “This research, therefore, should on no account be taken as a reason for those over 60 at high risk of heart disease to stop taking statins."

The findings, published by The Lancet medical journal, show that 255 patients would have to be treated with statins for four years to result in one extra case of diabetes. In the same group of patients over that time around five deaths or heart attacks would have been prevented and around the same number of strokes.

The authors stress that their findings do not show any biological reason why statins increase the chances of developing of diabetes, although they say it is possible that there is one. They suggest that older people on the drugs be monitored by their doctor for warning signs that they are developing the condition. The increased risks should also be taken into account if doctors are considering prescribing statins to those at a low risk of heart problems.

In Britain only those at high risk of developing heart disease are prescribed the medication. However, some experts have suggested that statins could be included in a so-called polypill, a five-in-one drug which would also include aspirin and three blood pressure-lowering medications and which could be given even to healthy people to help protect them.

More than 2.5 million people in Britain are thought to have diabetes, although experts predict that that could rise to as many as four million by 2050 because of lifestyle factors, including obesity.

Source



Prostate cancer breakthrough drug 'to be available next year'

A prostate cancer 'wonder pill' could be on the market next year. Abiraterone hit the headlines two years ago, with stunning trial results in which it shrank tumours in 80 per cent of men whose cancer had spread throughout their body. The once-a-day drug also eased pain in many and was hailed as the biggest breakthrough in the field for 60 years.

Now further tests have underlined its potential and larger trials are under way. If they are successful, it could be prescribed to men in the advanced stages of the disease as early as next year, giving them the hope of precious extra months with their families.

Abiraterone is a 'home-grown' drug, discovered by scientists funded by Cancer Research UK and working at the Institute for Cancer Research at London's Royal Marsden Hospital. It works by blocking testosterone, including any made by the tumour itself, from fuelling the cancer's growth. In the latest study, it was given in pill form to 47 men in advanced stages of the cancer who had exhausted all other treatment options, including a drug called docetaxel.

Researcher Johann de Bono said: 'Docetaxel is an important drug but it extends life for an average of just two to three months, so there is a desperate need to improve options for late-stage patients. Abiraterone shrank or stabilised tumours for an average of almost six months, which is a very impressive result.'

Levels of PSA, a blood protein used as a measure of tumour growth and spread, fell in 75 per cent of the men, the Journal of Clinical Oncology reports. Any sideeffects were mild and easily treated.

Dr Helen Rippon of the Prostate Cancer Charity, which is also funding research into the drug, said: 'These findings are particularly important as they offer new hope to men who can quickly run out of treatment options once their tumour stops responding.'

Prostate is Britain's most common cancer among men and the second highest killer, after lung cancer. Some 35,000 people a year are diagnosed with it - and 12,000 die. There are two types, aggressive and non-aggressive. Two-thirds of victims have the non-aggressive variety and can often lead a healthy life. But those with the aggressive version usually die within 18 months of diagnosis. Abiraterone can shrink aggressive tumours, although the effect does not last indefinitely.

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17 February, 2010

NHS hospitals accused of putting patients' lives at risk

Hospitals have been accused of ignoring NHS orders designed to prevent the deaths of patients from accidents involving drugs, surgery or equipment. According to information released by the Department of Health, hospitals have not introduced safety alerts from the National Patient Safety Agency (NPSA).

Research revealed that a number of trusts have not confirmed they have followed steps set out to improve hygiene, increase the safety of medical procedures and ensure that operations are performed on the correct part of the body. The alerts were designed to ensure that staff were properly trained to use injectable medicines and to force hospitals to have adequate numbers of bed rails to prevent patients falling out of bed and injuring themselves. Another alert was supposed to end practices used to test whether the position of feeding tubes was correct, but which had proved unreliable, such as monitoring for bubbling at the end of the tube. The hospitals' behaviour was criticised as "unacceptable" by the NPSA's chairman, who said their actions could endanger the health of patients.

The figures showed that 104 hospitals and other NHS care providers did not confirm they had taken measures to ensure the safe use of injectable medicines issued in an NPSA alert in 2007. The alert – which was supposed to have been implemented by next month – was issued after 25 patients died and 28 suffered significant harm in an 18-month period.

Twenty five NHS bodies did not confirm they had acted on safer-practice measures to prevent patients from falling out of bed which were introduced after 90 patients fractured their neck or femur rolling out of bed, 11 of whom died.

Eighty one hospitals and NHS care providers were found not to have taken the "required actions" detailed in safety alerts about the use of painkilling medicines, while 10 NHS trusts had not acted on a 2005 alert on nasogastric feeding tubes, which can be wrongly inserted into the lungs and caused 11 deaths before the alert came out.

Lord Patel of Dunkeld, chairman of the NPSA, told The Guardian: "It's not good enough. What's the point of us developing these alerts if they don't pay any attention to them? "Alerts are produced to reduce risk and hopefully avoid many deaths, so not to implement them to me is alarming. If they aren't implemented then they run the risk of harm occurring and the danger will continue."

Peter Walsh, chairman of Action against Medical Accidents, who initiated the research, said: "The fact that so many NHS bodies are failing to act on potentially life-saving alerts from the NPSA is shocking. "It is putting lives at unnecessary risk and adds insult to injury for patients who have been harmed or lost loved ones as a result of NHS lapses in safety."

The Department of Health said it expected all NHS trusts to comply with safety alerts and to record and action them. It will issue the health service with a reminder about the need to update the alerts system reliably and as soon as possible, a spokeswoman said.

SOURCE



More evidence that there is a general syndrome of good (or bad) biological function

Mental fitness and physical fitness are linked again. The correlation is far from 100% but seems strong nonetheless. The other side of the report below is that high IQ people tend to be healthier and live longer

Babies who are unable to crawl at nine months face falling behind at school and struggle to get on with their classmates, a study has revealed. It found that an inability to reach milestones such as sitting upright or crawling is linked to learning and behaviour problems.

The researchers, who tracked 15,000 children over the first five years of their lives, said a simple screening test before a child reaches their first birthday could prove crucial in preventing youngsters falling behind.

The finding comes from the Millennium Cohort Study, which is looking at 18,818 babies born between 2000 and 2001. The study by the University of London, Institute of Education, has already shown children from poor families are a year behind their wealthier counterparts when they start school. Now it has revealed for the first time in the UK that developmental problems are directly linked to success at school, and can be identified at a young age.

Academics performed a series of simple tests on babies aged nine months to check both their gross and fine motor skills. Youngsters who struggled with tasks such as crawling had a significantly increased risk of falling behind at school when they were five

A motor skill is an action that involves muscles in your body. Gross motor skills are larger movements including crawling and running, while fine motor skills are smaller actions such as picking up an object between the thumb and finger. In tests of gross motor skills, 96 per cent were able to sit up without support, 92 per cent were able to crawl and 69 per cent could stand up if they were holding on to something. Only 4 per cent could take a few steps.

In the assessment of fine motor skills, 99 per cent of children were able to grab an object, 95 per cent could pass a toy from one hand to the other, and 89 per cent could pick up an object using their forefinger and thumb.

The researchers concluded developmental 'delays' affected about 10 per cent of children. Youngsters who struggled with the tasks had a significantly increased risk of falling behind at school when they were five. They were also more likely to demonstrate anti-social behaviour such as refusing to share.

Professor Ingrid Schoon, who led the study, said that all children develop at different rates and some who are struggling to sit or crawl may simply catch up. However, in other cases, the problems can point to a developmental delay that may need specialised help, she added. 'Each child is different,' she said. 'All children have their own developmental pace. If parents are concerned they should go to their GP or health visitor.'

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16 February, 2010

Another British false rape accuser -- but this one escapes jail, for no obvious reason

She was after money from her false claim -- and too bad about the effect on the guy she accused

A woman who accused a student of rape after dragging him into a public toilet for sex was spared jail yesterday. Bisexual Sarah-Jane Hilliard, 20, seduced Grant Bowers when the two bumped into each other during a night out clubbing.

Yesterday Mr Bowers, also 20, attacked the 'ridiculous' sentence after Hilliard received 12 months in jail, suspended for two years. She had denied perverting the course of justice.

Mr Bowers - who says he is now afraid to speak to women - said: 'It's absolutely ridiculous. That's not even a slap on the wrist. She's been let off and I'm still having to sneak around because there are still people after me who think I did it.'

It was more than a week after his arrest that Mr Bowers discovered he was not to be charged. But during that time Hilliard, who was in a relationship with a woman, contacted the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board in the hope of claiming up to £7,500.

Mr Bowers's father Tony, 48, said: 'My son was facing up to ten years in prison for rape on the strength of her lies. The least I expected was for her to have been given a prison sentence. 'My son is the victim and he has lost his freedom yet she has still got hers.'

Hilliard, from Basildon in Essex, told police she bumped into Mr Bowers at a nightclub called Liquid in the town in July 2008. She claimed to have shared a taxi with him before stopping at the railway station to use the toilet. The telephone sales worker, who had been drinking, said she went into a cubicle and the next thing she remembered was waking to her underwear and trousers around her ankles. She claimed to have realised she had been raped only when Mr Bowers sent her a text the following day in which he mentioned they had 'gone all the way'.

Hilliard's lie began to unravel when police were unable to find CCTV footage of the pair leaving the club. A friend admitted they had been at another nightclub called Colors and detectives found CCTV evidence of Hilliard and Mr Bowers, who was 19 at the time, kissing and holding hands.

Hilliard was convicted in May last year after Mr Bowers told a jury at Basildon Crown Court he had walked to the station with her and she pulled him into a cubicle for unprotected sex. Afterwards she warned he had 'better be there for the baby' if she became pregnant.

Her sentencing was delayed for psychiatric reports and yesterday Judge Christopher Mitchell ordered Hilliard to carry out 300 hours of unpaid work and pay £2,000 costs. After hearing she had 'deeply personal issues' including suffering abuse from a relative, he said: 'False allegations of rape have a terrible knock-on effect.'

Jacqueline Carey, defending, revealed that since her conviction Hilliard had been assaulted by two men, had the word 'bitch' scratched on to her car and lost her partner and friends.

SOURCE



British government uneasy with criticism of health care

I wonder why?

The task of ensuring decent standards in hospitals is being undermined by ministerial sensitivity to criticism, England’s former health regulator has warned. Baroness Young of Old Scone said that her brand of “rugged independence” had collided with the Department of Health’s desire for someone “much more emollient” to scrutinise the NHS and social care system. In her first interview since unexpectedly resigning as chairman of the Care and Quality Commission (CQC) in December, she also said that the health-check ratings system must “change radically” and signalled that dozens of underperforming trusts should face “pretty stringent conditions” when new licences are awarded in April.

Her abrupt departure followed criticism of the CQC for failing to spot significant problems in highly rated hospitals. Senior government sources later claimed that the “volatile and hot-headed” regulator had sent abusive e-mails to colleagues. She told The Times, however, that she had decided to resign as early as September — only five months after the CQC started work as the super-regulator of health and social care.

Lady Young denied that there had been a personality clash with Andy Burnham, the Health Secretary, but suggested that her notion of what was required of an independent regulator sat uneasily with the Department of Health. Describing the vetting before she took up the post, Lady Young said that MPs had emphasised the importance of “not being in the pocket of government” and of being candid.

She added: “It became clear to me, as we went through the whole process, that government knew it should want an independent regulator but in practice didn’t feel very comfortable about that . . . Rugged independence is not what they are looking for, they are looking for something much more emollient and collaborative. “[The CQC] is one of the few fields where the regulator — for saying anything that is unsatisfactory in terms of a service — is actually saying directly that the service being run by a minister is unsatisfactory, and ministers find that quite difficult.”

She suggested that ministers might be braver, particularly in cases where trusts are independent foundations. Instead, in the most controversial cases last year, “it was kick the regulator time — and life is too short. I think the idea that the regulator can prevent every leaf fallen is nonsense.”

Lady Young said that she hoped the vital role of robust, independent regulation would not be compromised by future politicking — which too often turned the identification of problematic hospitals into a blame game with the regulator as the scapegoat.

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The Train Wreck Continues: Now UN IPCC hurricane data is questioned?

More trouble looms for the IPCC. The body may need to revise statements made in its Fourth Assessment Report on hurricanes and global warming. A statistical analysis of the raw data shows that the claims that global hurricane activity has increased cannot be supported.

Les Hatton once fixed weather models at the Met Office. Having studied Maths at Cambridge, he completed his PhD as metereologist: his PhD was the study of tornadoes and waterspouts. He's a fellow of the Royal Meterological Society, currently teaches at the University of Kingston, and is well known in the software engineering community - his studies include critical systems analysis.

Hatton has released what he describes as an 'A-level' statistical analysis, which tests six IPCC statements against raw data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric (NOAA) Administration. He's published all the raw data and invites criticism, but warns he is neither "a warmist nor a denialist", but a scientist.

Hatton performed a z-test statistical analysis of the period 1999-2009 against 1946-2009 to test the six conclusions. He also ran the data ending with what the IPCC had available in 2007. He found that North Atlantic hurricane activity increased significantly, but the increase was counterbalanced by diminished activity in the East Pacific, where hurricane-strength storms are 50 per cent more prevalent. The West Pacific showed no significant change. Overall, the declines balance the increases.

"When you average the number of storms and their strength, it almost exactly balances." This isn't indicative of an increase in atmospheric energy manifesting itself in storms.

Even the North Atlantic increase should be treated with caution, Hatton concludes, since the period contains one anomalous year of unusually high hurricane activity - 2005 - the year Al Gore used the Katrina tragedy to advance the case for the manmade global warming theory.

The IPCC does indeed conclude that "there is no clear trend in the annual numbers of tropical cyclones." If only the IPCC had stopped there. Yet it goes on to make more claims, and draw conclusions that the data doesn't support.

Claims and data

The IPCC's WG1 paper states: "There are also suggestions of increased intense tropical cyclone activity in some other regions where concerns over data quality are greater." Hatton points out the data quality is similar in each area.

The IPCC continues: "It is more likely than not (> 50%) that there has been some human contribution to the increases in hurricane intensity." But, as Hatton points out, that conclusion comes from computer climate models, not from the observational data, which show no increase.

"The IPCC goes on to make statements that would never pass peer review," Hatton told us. A more scientifically useful conclusion would have been to ask why there was a disparity. "This differential behaviour to me is very interesting. If it's due to increased warming in one place, and decreased warming in the other - then that's interesting to me."

Hatton has thirty years of experience of getting scientific papers published, but describes this one, available on his personal website, as "unpublishable".

"It's an open invitation to tell me I'm wrong," he says. He was prompted to look more closely by the Climategate emails, and by his years of experience with computer modelling. All code and data on which policy conclusions are made should be open and freely downloadable, he says - preferably with open tools.

Bootnote

The IPCC's AR4 chapter lead was Kevin Trenberth, who features prominently in the Climategate emails. In 2005, the National Hurricane Center's chief scientist Chris Landsea resigned his post in protest at the treatment of the subject by Trenberth.

"I personally cannot in good faith continue to contribute to a process that I view as both being motivated by pre-conceived agendas and being scientifically unsound. As the IPCC leadership has seen no wrong in Dr. Trenberth’s actions and have retained him as a Lead Author for the AR4, I have decided to no longer participate in the IPCC AR4."

Critics point out that an increase in low-intensity storms being recorded is due to better instrumentation. Most are at sea, and thanks to radar and satellites, more are now observed.

SOURCE



British High School league tables 'skewed by vocational courses'

Secondary schools are dramatically inflating their positions in league tables by entering more pupils for practical courses, despite fears they lack quality, it has been claimed. New figures show that results for 16-year-olds taking vocational qualifications has improved twice as fast as those for pupils only studying GCSEs. The disclosure – in data published following a Parliamentary question by the Liberal Democrats – prompted claims that pupils were taking “easier” courses just to boost rankings.

Some vocational qualifications in subjects such as computing and travel and tourism are worth the same as four GCSEs, despite taking half the time to teach. Last month, it emerged that the number of pupils taking a course in information and communication technology (ICT) had soared six-fold in just two years, despite being branded of “doubtful value” by Ofsted. The watchdog found that qualifications – such as the OCR National in ICT – were “often less demanding” than other mainstream exams.

David Laws, the Lib Dem schools spokesman, said: “These new figures raise some serious concerns about the real causes of the increase in take-up of some qualifications. “The Lib Dems are passionate about enabling more students to access vocational courses, but we should not be encouraging schools to push pupils towards certain qualifications simply to improve their school’s league table position.”

The Tories have pledged to remove vocational qualifications from GCSE league tables to stop schools attempting to manipulate official rankings. Mr Laws rejected the move, but added: “It must now be time for a fundamental review of the equivalence of different qualifications to remove the present perverse incentives.”

Official league tables show the number of pupils gaining five GCSEs graded A* to C. It also counts “equivalent” qualifications – such as BTECs and GNVQs – which are converted into GCSE points to give a comparable score. According to figures, some 45.1 per cent of pupils who took GCSEs in 1997 gained five good grades – the same as the number taking GCSEs and equivalent courses. A year later, 46.2 per cent of GCSE pupils gained five good grades, but when equivalents were added the score increased to 46.3 per cent.

According to official data, the gap between raw GCSE results and those including other qualifications has widened ever since. By 2009, some 57.5 per cent of GCSE pupils gained five A* to C grades, but it jumped to 69.7 per cent when equivalents were added. It means the pass rate with practical courses has increased twice as fast as the score without.

Last month, the headmaster of Harrow warned that poor children were being deceived into taking “worthless qualifications” that failed to prepare them for the world of work. Allowing teenagers to apply for jobs armed with “soft” GCSEs and A-levels was the same as allowing an X-Factor contestant to believe she could be the next Britney Spears when she could not sing, it was claimed. Barnaby Lenon warned that the drive to arm pupils will growing numbers of specially-tailored qualifications was simply “dumbing down” the education system.

SOURCE



Cocktail of five vitamins may give cancer patients an extra two years (?)

No control group! This garbage should never have been published in an academic journal. I seem to recollect seeing previous garbage from this "London Metropolitan University". It does resist outside evaluation

Cancer patients with terminal disease who take a daily cocktail of vitamins could extend their lives by two years or even longer, claim researchers. Three out of four in a pilot study survived an average of five months longer than the expected one year, and some were still alive three years after treatment started.

Dr Bob Lister, co-author of the study by British and Danish researchers, said the results were similar to the survival gains from new drugs and in some cases better. But the important difference was there were no side effects reported by patients taking vitamins, he said.

Dr Lister, chairman of the Institute of Brain Chemistry and Human Nutrition at London Metropolitan University, said: 'We believe these results are meaningful and justify trying to get backing for a proper clinical trial.

'People with cancer are constantly asking what can we do, not necessarily to beat the cancer but to have a better quality of life whatever the length of survival. 'Most importantly, taking these supplements is extremely safe, and there were no adverse reactions among the patients.'

The study followed patients suffering from breast, lung, brain, colon and other forms of cancer in Denmark between 1990 and 1999 who continued taking conventional cancer medication.

During the nine-year period, the patients were treated with coenzyme Q10 - a vitamin-like compound-essential for producing energy made naturally in the body - and six other antioxidants including vitamins A, C and E, selenium, folic acid, and beta carotene (which was not given to lung cancer patients for safety reasons). The patients were predicted to live for an average of 12 months, but 76 per cent lived an average of five months longer. The doses of the supplements, supplied by manufacturers Pharma Nord, were large but were within recommended safety limits, said Dr Lister. In addition, patients received small amounts of other nutrients including fish oil and B vitamins.

The findings are published in the Journal of International Medical Research.

However Dr Joanna Owens of Cancer Research UK said: 'This very small study tells us nothing new about supplements and cancer. 'All the patients in this study took the supplements so it is impossible to judge if they had any effect. 'It is no surprise that in a group of people with different types of cancer, some survived for longer than might have been expected, while others sadly did not.

'As yet, there is not enough evidence to know whether supplements are helpful or harmful during cancer treatment. 'We know that high doses of some supplements can increase the risk of cancer and it's possible that high doses of antioxidants can make treatment less effective. 'Until we know for sure, our advice is to try to get the vitamins you need through a balanced and varied diet rather than through vitamin supplements.'

SOURCE



More evidence that the poor are less healthy -- quite a bit so, in fact

With some predictable spin by the Marmot

People living in the poorest areas of England can expect to suffer about 17 more years of ill health and disability than those in wealthier areas, a major review of health inequalities concludes today. The tax and benefits system “needs overhauling” in order to encourage more people to find and stay in work, Professor Sir Michael Marmot, according to Professor Sir Michael Marmot, who led the Government-commissioned review.

Sir Michael, a Professor of Public Health at University College London and an advisor to the World Health Organisation, found that the equivalent of up to 2.5 million years of life are being lost through people dying prematurely in England each year. But people are more likely to suffer illness or an early death if they are unemployed or poorly educated, so getting people into work is of “critical importance” to reducing the gap in outcomes between rich and poor.

Life expectancy in Britain is now 77.4 years for men and 81.7 years for women, but people in the most deprived neighbourhoods die on average seven years younger than those in the richest.

The report said between £31 and £33 billion worth of productivity losses each year is down to poor health while up to £32 billion is lost in taxes and in making higher welfare payments. While tax credits have lifted half a million children out of poverty since 1998, it is “imperative” the benefits system does not act as a disincentive to working, it adds. The income tax system should be revised, with possible cuts to encourage more people on low incomes to work.

Another recommendation is for parents to be at home in the first year of a child’s life, perhaps by the mother taking six months of paid leave, followed by six months for the father.

The Fair Society, Healthy Lives review was commissioned by the Department of Health after slow progress towards a target to reduce health inequalities — defined by life expectancy rates and infant mortality — by 10 per cent this year. Although average life expectancy for the worst off has improved in the last decade — by an extra 2.9 years — Sir Michael adds that more needs to be done to offer children a fair start in life, adults a chance at fair employment and pensioners a long and active retirement. “Reducing health inequalities is a matter of fairness and social justice,” it says. “In England, the many people who are currently dying prematurely each year as a result of health inequalities would otherwise have enjoyed, in total, between 1.3 and 2.5 million extra years of life.”

The review highlights the effect of education on health — predicting there would be 202,000 fewer premature deaths each year if everyone over 30 without a degree had their death rate reduced to that of people with degrees.

Sir Michael also suggests developing standards for a minimum income for health — which could include the cost of a healthy diet, opportunities to exercise or money for telephone rental. Other recommendations are for more work-based learning schemes alongside closer links between schools, families and the community.

Ministers welcomed the report, but made no commitments on its “challenging” recommendations.Experts writing today in the British Medical Journal questioned whether “there is sufficient genuine and sustainable political will to tackle health inequalities.”

David Hunter, Professor of Health Policy at Durham University and colleagues warn there are few votes to be gained in public health, and “although the report is at pains to point out, as others have, that we are all adversely affected and our lives diminished by the growing health gap, this message could easily get lost.”

Peter Carter, chief executive of the Royal College of Nursing, warned that continued investment for midwives, health vistors, community nurses and other areas was needed to bring about improvements. “As a nation we simply must not tolerate the difference in life expectancy shown in this report, or the many years spent in preventable poor health,” he said. “Of course individuals need to make healthy choices for themselves, but to tackle this inequality government, public services and communities need to work together.”

An editorial by the Lancet comments: “The Marmot Review is a pivotal document for future policy on health equity. The question for voters later this year in the UK’s general election is what sort of society do they want?”

Source



British hairdresser not allowed to advertise for "junior" employee

We read:

"As an experienced hairdresser, Michelle Hilling has employed scores of junior stylists at her busy high street salon. Their age has varied and the key quality required has been keenness to master the skills of the profession. But when Mrs Hilling tried to find another willing recruit, she ran into a problem in the form of jobcentre officials. They refused to place her advert for a new junior stylist - because the word 'junior' discriminated against older applicants. The salon owner was warned that she would have to drop the offending term if she wanted the vacancy to be displayed.

Yesterday she accused the Government of stifling small businesses with political correctness. 'This country has gone completely mad,' she said. 'Businesses are having to tread more and more carefully to avoid offending anyone. It is really quite offensive to suggest that someone older would be bothered by this. 'I have never come across anyone who was bothered about a job title like this. 'All I wanted was a junior stylist and even that proved to be wrapped in red tape. It doesn't matter what age they are. I've had a 45-year-old junior stylist before. The term has been used for years in hairdressing.'

Mrs Hilling, who has owned U Hairdressing in Newcastle's upmarket suburb of Gosforth for the last three years, phoned Jobcentre Plus last week to advertise the post. 'The lady told me I couldn't use that term because it discriminated against old people,' said Mrs Hilling who has 14 employees, all of different ages. 'I explained that within the hairdressing industry the term was widely used and known. People working in the industry would know you didn't have to be a teenager to be a junior stylist - it refers to your level of qualification.'

SOURCE

15 February, 2010

Sick political correctness in Britain again

Fireman facing disciplinary action after he 'breached health and safety rules' while saving dog from frozen lake. Obeying official rules trumps all else. Must not use your initiative. Must not be heroic. Too bad if people or animals die meanwhile

A fireman who saved a pet dog from a frozen pond is now facing disciplinary action for allegedly breaching healthy and safety rules. Stevie Logan rescued a cocker spaniel called Matt who ran on to ice and then become trapped in the water. The 42-year-old jumped into a nearby canoe and paddled out to the distressed animal, encouraging it to swim towards a ladder other firemen had laid across the ice. After the successful rescue, Mr Logan was hailed a hero by Matt's owner.

His bosses however have ordered an investigation into his conduct, saying that Mr Logan - who is commander at Kilmarnock Fire Station - broke force guidelines by putting himself unnecessarily at risk when he paddled out to the stranded pet.

Last night, Sheila Johnstone said the decision by Stathclyde Fire and Rescue chiefs to investigate the incident in which her dog was rescued beggared belief. Miss Johnstone, 78, of Kilmarnock, said: ‘I have never heard such nonsense in all my life. ‘He went out to rescue my dog and I take my hat off to him. ‘Matt is fine now, but he wouldn’t be here today if it wasn’t for the firemen saving his life and I am very grateful. ‘I think they should definitely reconsider this as I think it is a piece of nonsense. ‘Carrying out rescues is what firemen are on the job for. What are they supposed to do the next time there is a fire? Stand by and watch?’

The rescue took place at Dean Castle Country Park in Kilmarnock, Ayrshire, at the end of December, on one of the coldest days of winter. Matt was being walked by one of Miss Johnstone's neighbours when he ran off. After the neighbour called 999, a fire crew from Kilmarnock was rushed to the scene and was soon joined by another crew from Ayr who had specialist rescue equipment. In total, 17 firefighters attended the scene. But Matt was rescued by Mr Logan and was then hauled on to a inflatable walkway and taken to shore to be reunited with his owner.

Last night, a friend of Mr Logan said: ‘He is facing the high jump for doing what any firefighter would do to rescue an animal in distress. ‘Bosses are claiming he broke the rules because he jumped into a canoe and used his initiative. ‘They are claiming that because he was in charge he shouldn't have risked his own safety or that of his men. ‘It beggars the question what if we were talking about a kid and not a dog?’

However, a fire brigade source said Mr Logan was risking the lives of his own men by ignoring important safety procedures. He said: ‘There were a number of rescues carried out to save pets that had fallen into water during the cold snap. ‘When the ops director saw there had been three or four carried out, he issued guidance warning that firemen should not be unnecessarily risking their lives by going on to the ice without the proper equipment. ‘He didn’t want staff risking their lives because dog owners are not keeping their dogs on a leash.

‘By all accounts the staff on the scene were trying to help from the sidelines. ‘This is when the station commander, ignoring the warnings from other firefighters, commandeered a canoe from somewhere and went out to try and save the dog. ‘Despite the guidance he said he was the boss and that he was going to have a crack at it. ‘It worked out OK this time, but if it hadn’t worked out and the canoe had capsized other firefighters would have had to go in and try and rescue him and it could have been a tragedy. ‘The bosses aren’t looking to hang the guy out to dry or anything like that, but because he ignored procedures it has been decided something has to be done about it.’

A Strathclyde Fire and Rescue spokesman said: ‘An investigation is taking place.’

SOURCE



The Israel-hatred of the British Left on view

A swift change to the law promised by ministers to prevent Israeli politicians and generals being arrested when they visit Britain is in doubt. A Cabinet split over timing threatens to postpone any alteration of the rules until after the election, The Times has learnt, even though ministers assured Israel that it was a priority. Such a delay would leave visiting Israelis at risk and could worsen an already sour dispute with Jerusalem.

Tzipi Livni, the Israeli opposition leader whose threatened arrest sparked the dispute, indicated last night that she was prepared to travel to Britain and “take the bullet” if that was the only way to shame the Government into action. “Britain has obligated itself to me personally that this subject will be taken care of and fixed,” she said. “Now is the time.”

Ministers promised to act after a magistrate in London issued a warrant for the arrest of Ms Livni last year, for alleged war crimes in Gaza when she was Foreign Minister. The warrant was withdrawn after she cancelled her planned trip.

The issue embarrassed the Government, and David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, said that ministers were looking urgently at changing the law so that Israeli leaders felt free to visit the UK. It would mean rewriting the principle of universal jurisdiction, under which private citizens can secure arrest warrants for offences such as war crimes committed abroad. Under one proposal, the Attorney-General, rather than just a magistrate, would have to authorise such a warrant.

Baroness Scotland of Asthal, the Attorney-General, went to Israel to reassure political and military leaders that the Government was taking the issue seriously. But it has now become snarled up in the end of the parliamentary session.

Jack Straw, the Justice Secretary, is privately warning against remaking the law over such a fundamental issue in haste. He believes that it ought to be explored by a body such as the Justice Select Committee. That would delay any new law until the next Parliament.

Parliamentary counsel have drafted clauses that could be attached to the Crime and Security Bill currently before Parliament, for its Commons committee stage on February 25 or its report stage in March. But there are fears that it may fall victim to horse-trading at the end of the parliamentary session, which would be even more embarrassing to the Government in its relations with Israel.

A further complication is that 119 MPs, most Labour, have signed a Commons motion against any change, and some Labour strategists do not want to be dealing with a rebellion as the election campaign starts. Mr Miliband wants the issue to be resolved before the election, and officials insisted last night that much work was being done to that end.

Yigal Palmor, the Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman, said: “If Israeli dignitaries cannot travel unhindered to Britain, than they will not travel. Automatically the political dialogue between the two countries will be reduced. This is not something that London or Jerusalem wants.”

SOURCE. (Links about antisemitism in 21st century Britain here and here and here and here)



Children of the British poor a year behind when they start school, study says

Children from poor families are already a year behind in vocabulary tests when they start school, according to research published today. It reveals the full impact of upbringing and home life on attainment [Utter rubbish. It is another confirmation of the amply documented fact that the average IQ is lower among the poor. A smart kid from a poor background usually doesn't stay poor. He usually moves into the middle class one way or another -- and then his kids mostly stay outside the ranks of the poor too], and how those from troubled or impoverished homes can fall behind at a young age. Many never catch up with better-off classmates and become stuck in a cycle of underachievement.

The report, by the Sutton Trust, highlights the importance of activities such as bedtime stories and taking children to museums and libraries. In isolation, these appear to have a bigger impact on progress than wealth.

It shows that home environment has an overwhelming influence on children’s academic achievement and raises questions in the build-up to the general election about whether social mobility has declined under Labour. [It certainly has some influence but genetics is the main influence. I come from a poor background but I was reading Homer in my teens and have never looked back --JR]

Researchers from the trust, a charity that aims to cut inequality in education, said that politicians had oversimplified the problem by using phrases such as “Broken Britain”, and polarising the argument of whether poverty or parenting was the root cause.

They tracked the performance of more than 12,000 five-year-olds, and found that the poorest fifth were almost a year behind pupils from middle-income families and 16 months behind those from rich backgrounds when they started school.

The report said: “Parenting style, for example rules about bedtimes and factors like parental reading and trips to museums and galleries, contribute up to half of the explained cognitive gap between the lowest and middleincome families.”

Forty-five per cent of children from the poorest backgrounds were read to every day at age 3, compared with 78 per cent from the richest families. When all other factors were equal, those read to daily had a vocabulary two months ahead of peers. Children taken to the library regularly were 2.5 months ahead, as were those who had regular bedtimes. Parenting and home environment were responsible for almost half of the gap in achievement, the report said. Material possessions such as internet access, cars and good living conditions, or lack of them, caused about 30 per cent of the difference. Maternal and child health accounted for about 10 per cent, and whether the mother was employed and the type of childcare was responsible for the other 10 per cent. [No mention about how much each of those factors was influenced by IQ]

However, there was an overlap between wealth and home life. A third of children from the most impoverished homes were born to parents without a good GCSE, and the parents of two thirds had split up by the time the child was aged 5.

The report said: “In some poor households, good parenting can still overcome these limitations and lead to high-achieving children.”

It recommended setting up children’s centres to offer effective parenting programmes. It also said that the funding intended to pay for free nursery places for all three and four-year-olds should be diverted to provide 25 hours of nursery education for all two to four-year-olds from the most disadvantaged families.

Lee Elliot Major, research director at the trust, said: “We suspect parenting is an even bigger factor than the statistics show. Good parenting trumps adversity in terms of poverty, but at the same time poverty is a big factor in this. There’s a political debate; David Cameron was quoted as saying it’s warmth not wealth that matters in parenting. But sometimes these are nuanced issues that get politicised and polarised to parenting vs poverty, which is an oversimplification.”

Michael Gove, the Shadow Children’s Secretary, accused the school system of failing the most deprived children. According to analysis by the Tories, only 45 children on free school meals get into Oxford or Cambridge each year, but an average of 82 pupils a year went to Oxbridge from one leading independent school, Westminster.

SOURCE



IPCC ex-chairman Robert Watson calls for review of climate change mistakes

THE UN body that advises world leaders on climate change must investigate an apparent bias in its report that resulted in several exaggerations of the impact of global warming, according to its former chairman. Robert Watson said that all the errors exposed so far in the report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) resulted in overstatements of the severity of the problem.

Professor Watson, currently chief scientific adviser to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, said that if the errors had just been innocent mistakes, as has been claimed by current chairman Rajendra Pachauri, some would probably have understated the impact of climate change.

The errors have emerged in the past month after simple checking of the sources cited by the 2500 scientists who produced the report. The report falsely claimed that Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035 when evidence suggests that they will survive for another 300 years. It also claimed that global warming could cut rain-fed North African crop production by up to 50 per cent by 2020. A senior IPCC contributor has since admitted that there is no evidence to support this claim. The Dutch Government has asked the IPCC to correct its claim that more than half the Netherlands is below sea level. The environment ministry said that only 26 per cent of the country was below sea level.

Professor Watson, who served as chairman of the IPCC from 1997-2002, said: "The mistakes all appear to have gone in the direction of making it seem like climate change is more serious by overstating the impact. That is worrying. The IPCC needs to look at this trend in the errors and ask why it happened."

He said that the IPCC should employ graduate science students to check the sources of each claim made in its next report, due in 2013. "Graduate students would love to be involved and they could really dig into the references and see if they really do support what is being said."

He said that the next report should acknowledge that some scientists believed the planet was warming at a much slower rate than has been claimed by the majority of scientists. "We should always be challenged by sceptics," he said. "The IPCC's job is to weigh up the evidence. If it can't be dismissed, it should be included in the report. Point out it's in the minority and, if you can't say why it's wrong, just say it's a different view."

Dr Pachauri has not responded to questions put to him by The Times, despite sending a text message saying that he would do so.

Professor Watson has held discussions with Al Gore, the former US Vice-President, about creating a new climate research group to supplement the work of the IPCC and to help restore the credibility of climate science. He said that the scheme to create what he called a "Wikipedia for climate change" was at an early stage but the intention was to establish an online network of climate science research available to anyone with access to the internet and subject to permanent peer review by other scientists. He said that the project would allow scientists to "synthesise all of the observational record in real-time, not every 5-7 years like the IPCC".

He rejected concerns that the project would undermine the IPCC's authority. "It would have to be done so it was complimentary and not a challenge to the IPCC," he said. A spokesman for Mr Gore's office in Nashville, Tennessee, declined to comment on the project.

Meanwhile, a member of the inquiry team investigating allegations of misconduct by climate scientists has admitted that he holds strong views on climate change and that this contradicts a founding principle of the inquiry. Geoffrey Boulton, who was appointed last week by the inquiry chairman, Sir Muir Russell, said he believed that human activities were causing global warming.

Sir Muir issued a statement last week claiming that the inquiry members, who are investigating leaked e-mails from the University of East Anglia, did not have a "predetermined view on climate change and climate science".

Professor Boulton told The Times: "I may be rapped over the knuckles by Sir Muir for saying this, but I think that statement needs to be clarified. I think the committee needs someone like me who is close to the field of climate change and it would be quite amazing if that person didn't have a view on one side or the other." [These guys don't seem to be able to keep their story straight. The Muir Russell FAQ states: "Professor Geoffrey Boulton has expertise in fields related to climate change and is therefore aware of the scientific approach, through not in the climate change field itself." So is he a climate science expert or is he not? He seems to say he is but Muir-Russell says he is not]

SOURCE



Another laughable appointment to an "impartial" climate inquiry

Only 24 hours after another panel member quit, questions emerged over Professor Geoffrey Boulton because of his previous views that climate change is caused by human activity. The investigation was set up to look into whether scientists at the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU) covered up flawed data.

But some have cast doubt on whether the inquiry results can be trusted if Prof Boulton, general secretary of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, remains on the panel. The leading geologist was one of five people chosen by former University of Glasgow principal Sir Muir Russell to carry out the high-profile investigation. A statement released at the launch of the inquiry on Thursday said none of the panel members had a "predetermined view on climate change and climate science". It added: "They were selected on the basis they have no prejudicial interest in climate science."

However, The Scotsman can reveal that only a few months ago, Prof Boulton, from the University of Edinburgh, was among a number of scientists who, in the wake of the climategate scandal, signed a petition to show their confidence that global warming was caused by humans. And for at least five years, he has made clear his strong views on global warming. He has given interviews and written articles – including in The Scotsman – that have spelled out his firmly held beliefs.

In one article for Edinburgh University, he wrote: "The argument regarding climate change is over." And for 18 years, he worked at the University of East Anglia (UEA) – the establishment at the centre of the scandal.

Last night, on being questioned by The Scotsman, Prof Boulton insisted he was a "sceptical scientist" prepared to change his views "if the evidence merited".

The controversy follows the resignation of another panel member, Dr Philip Campbell, editor-in-chief of Nature magazine, just six hours after the inquiry launch. He stepped down after it emerged he had given an interview to Chinese radio about the climategate scandal, defending the behaviour of the scientists at the CRU.

Dr Benny Peizer, director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a think tank which claims the debate on climate change has become distorted, called for Prof Boulton to step down, too. He said: "Prof Boulton obviously is a very distinguished geologist. The problem is, he is a very outspoken campaigner on this issue and he's given talks calling for galvanising public opinion. He also worked at the very institution that he is now going to be investigating. That, we think, is a conflict of interest."

He said he was "speechless" about why Prof Boulton and Dr Campbell had been appointed in the first place. "It looks like a shambles and it looks like the chairman of this panel hasn't really thought this through," he said. "Everyone must have told him (Sir Muir] that it's a very contentious issue and he should make sure the panel members have no bias at all." He added that he thought it was "impossible" that Prof Boulton could remain in post.

The UEA, one of Britain's leading climate-change research centres, helps compile a global temperature record published by the Met Office. This data is used by the government to justify its targets for cuts in carbon emissions. The university appointed Sir Muir in December to head an inquiry into a series of allegations over manipulated data.

Prof Boulton said he had been open about having worked at the School of Environmental Sciences at UEA between 1968 and 1986. "Since then, I have had no professional contact with the University of East Anglia or the Climatic Research Unit," he said. He added that he had "declared my current view of the balance of evidence: that the earth is warming and that human activity is implicated. These remain the views of the vast majority of scientists who research on climate change in its different aspects".

But he added: "As a sceptical scientist, I am prepared to change those views if the evidence merits it. They certainly do not prevent me from being heavily biased against poor scientific practice, wherever it arises."

A spokeswoman for the inquiry said Sir Muir was "completely confident each member has the integrity, expertise and experience to complete the task."

More HERE



A secretive inquiry

The more things change .... Comment below from Nigel Lawson

As the first person to call for an independent inquiry into 'climategate', I regret that what has been announced today is defective in a number of ways. The inquiry will wholly lack transparency, with the hearings held in private, and no transcripts to be published.

The terms of reference, while better than nothing, are inadequate in a number of ways, not least the failure to include the question of the efforts made by CRU scientists to prevent the publication of papers by dissenting scientists and others, contrary to the canons of scientific integrity. And the objectivity and independence of the inquiry is seriously called into question by the composition of Sir Muir Russell's team, in particular the Editor in Chief of Nature, who has already published an editorial on the matter strongly supportive of the CRU scientists and accusing their critics of being 'paranoid'.

SOURCE



Some big backdowns from Phil Jones

He admits that there has been no global warming since 1995 and that the Medieval warm period may have been worldwide

The academic at the centre of the ‘Climategate’ affair, whose raw data is crucial to the theory of climate change, has admitted that he has trouble ‘keeping track’ of the information. Colleagues say that the reason Professor Phil Jones has refused Freedom of Information requests is that he may have actually lost the relevant papers. [Rubbish! They are computer files, not papers]

Professor Jones told the BBC yesterday there was truth in the observations of colleagues that he lacked organisational skills, that his office was swamped with piles of paper and that his record keeping is ‘not as good as it should be’. The data is crucial to the famous ‘hockey stick graph’ used by climate change advocates to support the theory.

Professor Jones also conceded the possibility that the world was warmer in medieval times than now – suggesting global warming may not be a man-made phenomenon. And he said that for the past 15 years there has been no ‘statistically significant’ warming.

The admissions will be seized on by sceptics as fresh evidence that there are serious flaws at the heart of the science of climate change and the orthodoxy that recent rises in temperature are largely man-made.

Professor Jones has been in the spotlight since he stepped down as director of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit after the leaking of emails that sceptics claim show scientists were manipulating data. The raw data, collected from hundreds of weather stations around the world and analysed by his unit, has been used for years to bolster efforts by the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to press governments to cut carbon dioxide emissions.

Following the leak of the emails, Professor Jones has been accused of ‘scientific fraud’ for allegedly deliberately suppressing information and refusing to share vital data with critics.

Discussing the interview, the BBC’s environmental analyst Roger Harrabin said he had spoken to colleagues of Professor Jones who had told him that his strengths included integrity and doggedness but not record-keeping and office tidying. Mr Harrabin, who conducted the interview for the BBC’s website, said the professor had been collating tens of thousands of pieces of data from around the world to produce a coherent record of temperature change. That material has been used to produce the ‘hockey stick graph’ which is relatively flat for centuries before rising steeply in recent decades.

According to Mr Harrabin, colleagues of Professor Jones said ‘his office is piled high with paper, fragments from over the years, tens of thousands of pieces of paper, and they suspect what happened was he took in the raw data to a central database and then let the pieces of paper go because he never realised that 20 years later he would be held to account over them’.

Asked by Mr Harrabin about these issues, Professor Jones admitted the lack of organisation in the system had contributed to his reluctance to share data with critics, which he regretted. But he denied he had cheated over the data or unfairly influenced the scientific process, and said he still believed recent temperature rises were predominantly man-made.

Asked about whether he lost track of data, Professor Jones said: ‘There is some truth in that. We do have a trail of where the weather stations have come from but it’s probably not as good as it should be. ‘There’s a continual updating of the dataset. Keeping track of everything is difficult. Some countries will do lots of checking on their data then issue improved data, so it can be very difficult. We have improved but we have to improve more.’

He also agreed that there had been two periods which experienced similar warming, from 1910 to 1940 and from 1975 to 1998, but said these could be explained by natural phenomena whereas more recent warming could not.

He further admitted that in the last 15 years there had been no ‘statistically significant’ warming, although he argued this was a blip rather than the long-term trend.

And he said that the debate over whether the world could have been even warmer than now during the medieval period, when there is evidence of high temperatures in northern countries, was far from settled. Sceptics believe there is strong evidence that the world was warmer between about 800 and 1300 AD than now because of evidence of high temperatures in northern countries. But climate change advocates have dismissed this as false or only applying to the northern part of the world.

Professor Jones departed from this consensus when he said: ‘There is much debate over whether the Medieval Warm Period was global in extent or not. The MWP is most clearly expressed in parts of North America, the North Atlantic and Europe and parts of Asia. ‘For it to be global in extent, the MWP would need to be seen clearly in more records from the tropical regions and the Southern hemisphere. There are very few palaeoclimatic records for these latter two regions. ‘Of course, if the MWP was shown to be global in extent and as warm or warmer than today, then obviously the late 20th Century warmth would not be unprecedented. On the other hand, if the MWP was global, but was less warm than today, then the current warmth would be unprecedented.’

Sceptics said this was the first time a senior scientist working with the IPCC had admitted to the possibility that the Medieval Warming Period could have been global, and therefore the world could have been hotter then than now.

Professor Jones criticised those who complained he had not shared his data with them, saying they could always collate their own from publicly available material in the US. And he said the climate had not cooled ‘until recently – and then barely at all. The trend is a warming trend’.

Mr Harrabin told Radio 4’s Today programme that, despite the controversies, there still appeared to be no fundamental flaws in the majority scientific view that climate change was largely man-made.

But Dr Benny Pieser, director of the sceptical Global Warming Policy Foundation, said Professor Jones’s ‘excuses’ for his failure to share data were hollow as he had shared it with colleagues and ‘mates’. He said that until all the data was released, sceptics could not test it to see if it supported the conclusions claimed by climate change advocates. He added that the professor’s concessions over medieval warming were ‘significant’ because they were his first public admission that the science was not settled.

SOURCE



World may not be warming, say scientists

The significance of this article lies principally in the fact that it was written by Leaky Jonathan and published in "The Times" of London. Journalists are now beginning to smell blood in the water. Are we seeing the beginning of a feeding frenzy?

The United Nations climate panel faces a new challenge with scientists casting doubt on its claim that global temperatures are rising inexorably because of human pollution.

In its last assessment the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said the evidence that the world was warming was “unequivocal”. It warned that greenhouse gases had already heated the world by 0.7C and that there could be 5C-6C more warming by 2100, with devastating impacts on humanity and wildlife. However, new research, including work by British scientists, is casting doubt on such claims. Some even suggest the world may not be warming much at all.

“The temperature records cannot be relied on as indicators of global change,” said John Christy, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, a former lead author on the IPCC. The doubts of Christy and a number of other researchers focus on the thousands of weather stations around the world, which have been used to collect temperature data over the past 150 years. These stations, they believe, have been seriously compromised by factors such as urbanisation, changes in land use and, in many cases, being moved from site to site.

Christy has published research papers looking at these effects in three different regions: east Africa, and the American states of California and Alabama. “The story is the same for each one,” he said. “The popular data sets show a lot of warming but the apparent temperature rise was actually caused by local factors affecting the weather stations, such as land development.”

The IPCC faces similar criticisms from Ross McKitrick, professor of economics at the University of Guelph, Canada, who was invited by the panel to review its last report. The experience turned him into a strong critic and he has since published a research paper questioning its methods. “We concluded, with overwhelming statistical significance, that the IPCC’s climate data are contaminated with surface effects from industrialisation and data quality problems. These add up to a large warming bias,” he said.

Such warnings are supported by a study of US weather stations co-written by Anthony Watts, an American meteorologist and climate change sceptic. His study, which has not been peer reviewed, is illustrated with photographs of weather stations in locations where their readings are distorted by heat-generating equipment. Some are next to air-conditioning units or are on waste treatment plants. One of the most infamous shows a weather station next to a waste incinerator. Watts has also found examples overseas, such as the weather station at Rome airport, which catches the hot exhaust fumes emitted by taxiing jets.

In Britain, a weather station at Manchester airport was built when the surrounding land was mainly fields but is now surrounded by heat-generating buildings.

Terry Mills, professor of applied statistics and econometrics at Loughborough University, looked at the same data as the IPCC. He found that the warming trend it reported over the past 30 years or so was just as likely to be due to random fluctuations as to the impacts of greenhouse gases. Mills’s findings are to be published in Climatic Change, an environmental journal. “The earth has gone through warming spells like these at least twice before in the last 1,000 years,” he said.

Kevin Trenberth, a lead author of the chapter of the IPCC report that deals with the observed temperature changes, said he accepted there were problems with the global thermometer record but these had been accounted for in the final report. “It’s not just temperature rises that tell us the world is warming,” he said. “We also have physical changes like the fact that sea levels have risen around five inches since 1972, the Arctic icecap has declined by 40% and snow cover in the northern hemisphere has declined.” [He should look out his window]

The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts has recently issued a new set of global temperature readings covering the past 30 years, with thermometer readings augmented by satellite data.

Dr Vicky Pope, head of climate change advice at the Met Office, said: “This new set of data confirms the trend towards rising global temperatures and suggest that, if anything, the world is warming even more quickly than we had thought.”

SOURCE



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





14 February, 2010

NHS managers numbers rise at twice rate of doctors, report finds

Hopefully they do something useful but spending the money on doctors and nurses would surely do a lot more good -- considering the constant stories of insufficient medical personnel -- see the story after this

Numbers of senior managers in the NHS have almost doubled in a decade compared with a 35 per cent increase in doctors and nurses as 'fixation' with the market means health service is bogged down in red tape, a report said.

The British Medical Association highlighted the figures as it launched a campaign to 'Look after our NHS' and end the commercialisation of the health service, with treatments contracted out to independent healthcare providers.

Official data shows that since 1995 the number of senior managers has increased by 91 per cent while the combined numbers of doctors and nurses rose by just 35 per cent. Other 'market driven' health care policies have wasted around £220 million since 2003 as private companies were given contracts to carry out operations on NHS patients which included clauses that they would be paid for a set number of procedures even if they were not carried out....

NHS trusts have been ordered to cut management costs by 30 per cent this year as the health service faces reduced growth funding and is faced with cost savings of £20 billion to find over the next five years. However, Health Service Journal published its own research showing NHS organisations which increased the number of senior managers scored highly on quality scores.

The magazine found that the average trust which received a weak rating on quality of services from the regulator had lost four managerial posts while trusts with an excellent rating gained 12 managers.

Mike O'Brien, the Health Minister, said: "We oppose the privatisation of the NHS. The government is committed to an NHS funded by taxation, with equal access to care, free at the point of use, based on clinical need and not ability to pay. We want to ensure that patients receive the best quality care and tax payers the best value for money. "Independent and third sector organisations were used successfully to get down waiting lists for operations and can make a contribution to this by helping to add capacity and increase patient choice."

SOURCE



Dozens of British children's wards must close

Dozens of children’s wards in Britain will have to close under European rules limiting doctors’ working hours, and because of the need to save money, the President of the Royal College of Paediatrics has said. The combined impact of the European Working Time Directive and the £20billion savings the NHS must make to plug its budget deficit over the next five years mean some children’s in-patient wards will have to close and merge with others, Prof Terence Stephenson told The Daily Telegraph.

He said there was already a shortfall of about 600 consultant paediatricians and 200 top-level trainees before the directive came into force last August, and now the workforce was under “unsustainable pressure”.

Junior doctors are limited under the directive to a 48-hour week, making it harder to ensure proper staffing levels in the wards at all times, Prof Stephenson said. Too many small hospitals provide in-patient children’s services and some of these should close so that doctors can staff the rest round the clock, he added. He also warned that the Department of Health had cut the number of trainees entering hospital specialities by five per cent this year to push more doctors into GP training. The latest figures show that 230 hospitals provide children’s in-patient services.

Michael Summers, vice-chairman of the Patients Association campaign group, said: “Far too many hospital services are closing to save money. It leaves patients having to travel vast distances.”

A Health Department spokesman said a Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health survey last year indicated more than 100 extra paediatric consultant posts were created as a Working Time Directive solution, adding: “Service levels are constantly under review. Changes should only happen when they deliver quality improvements for patients.”

SOURCE



Political correctness allowed a crook to flourish in the British police

The only thing black about Commander Ali Dizaei is his hair dye. Yet this Iranian-born policeman, the most senior officer to be jailed for corruption in more than 30 years, was a president of the National Black Police Association. The NBPA was not the only organisation to have been made a fool of by this arch-manipulator of racial politics: the BBC had made his dishonest memoir its Radio 4 Book of the Week, and The Guardian was also a willing media partner in his campaign to become the country’s most powerful policeman.

It is difficult for any organisation to admit to an error of judgment, and the bigger that error, the harder it is. So perhaps it is not so surprising that the NBPA’s immediate reaction to Dizaei’s guilty verdict was to say that his conviction had “come as a surprise”. Meanwhile, this bent copper’s newspaper of choice seemed to have an exclusive post-trial interview, reporting that “Dizaei, 47, remained defiant and told The Guardian the case was ‘completely outrageous and a fit-up’. He said that he had been pursued by the authorities, who had a ‘vendetta’ against him”. Amazing, given that Dizaei had in fact been found guilty himself of fitting up an innocent man who had crossed him, that any newspaper could publish such comments without its pages turning red with embarrassment.

The point, however, is that Dizaei — author of a PhD thesis on “racial discrimination within the police” — wasn’t just a bent copper. He was a politician, brilliantly playing on the fashionable belief that racism is the defining characteristic of British society to advance his career — and his alone. Not everyone was taken in: David Michael, a founder of the original Black Police Association, said last week that Dizaei “subverted the movement for his own ends”. Detective Chief Inspector Michael may have found it easier to say that than some might: he would not fear being described as a racist for attacking Dizaei. After the 1999 Macpherson report’s devastating labelling of the Metropolitan police as “institutionally racist”, its senior ranks had developed an understandable pathological fear of further accusations of bigotry.

Nowadays, if you receive any email from the Metropolitan police, it will contain a lengthy disclaimer at its foot, stating that the message you have just read must not contain “racist, homophobic, transphobic, sexist, defamatory, offensive, illegal or otherwise inappropriate material”. The fact that the police have “illegal” at the bottom of the list and “racist” at the top tells you something about their state of mind, all of 11 years after Macpherson.

Such caution would definitely have prevented any Met officer from observing that Dizaei’s behaviour — acting as if he were untouchable — was possibly cultural in its origins. He comes from a family of Iranian policemen, a body of men not known for their reluctance to throw their weight around. Indeed, if a police commander in Tehran had been embarrassingly confronted in his favourite restaurant, as Dizaei was by a young man — Waad al-Baghdadi — to whom he owed money, the consequences would hardly bear thinking about. A sudden loss of fingernails while in custody would have been the least of it.

It’s fair to say that there have been old-style British cops who in years gone by would have got away with behaving as Dizaei did — although it is uniquely characteristic of the vain and egocentric Dizaei that the dispute was about a bill for work on his personal website. In one sense Dizaei owes his downfall to the discrediting of the police in which he himself played such a part (for example by accusing its most senior officers of “ethnic cleansing”). The mixed-race jury spent little more than two hours in finding Dizaei guilty on all counts; they found it immensely easy to trust al-Baghdadi’s word over that of a commander of the Metropolitan police — and it was an additional irony that his defence lawyer, Michael Mansfield QC, is a man who built his lucrative career on ridiculing the police.

After Dizaei’s conviction, it is not just his supporters who have expressed outrage. Amid the exultation on the right at the humiliation of the blue-eyed boy (so to speak) of the anti-racist movement, many have furiously argued that it was a mark of the Metropolitan police’s enslavement by the forces of political correctness that it promoted such an obvious chancer as Dizaei to the coveted rank of commander.

This, however, is where the politicians have got away with it (which is not usually the case in the British media). The fact is that ever since the Metropolitan Police Authority was set up in 2000, in the wake of the Macpherson report, it has not been in the power of the Met to control its senior appointments. In the name of political “accountability”, all titles of commander and above have been put entirely in the gift of a group of local political figures.

It was not Dizaei’s senior officers at the Met, the “ethnic cleansers” of his imagination, who had made him a commander — I imagine they were appalled by the prospect — but what had been a Labour-dominated political claque. Dizaei was a politician after their own fashion, someone who spoke their language with great fluency and apparent conviction. The same crowd — led by Ken Livingstone — adored the former Metropolitan police commissioner, the inept Sir Ian Blair: Sir Ian, too, was an intensely political figure, whose public utterances were disfigured by the jargon of that trade, appealing to his (temporary) elected masters much more than to his officers.

Sir Ian was forced to resign by Boris Johnson in the week the new London mayor had taken over leadership of the Metropolitan Police Authority. This seems to have been legally valid — and you will immediately see the problem for any current or future Metropolitan police commissioner. As the system currently works (or doesn’t) he can be sacked by the MPA for making a mess of things; but he lacks any authority or right to appoint the men (and women) to the most senior ranks — the very people he needs at his side to ensure the Met is run well, according to his own best judgment.

To put it in the language that new Labour politicians might understand: there is a fatal dislocation between the Metropolitan commissioner’s rights and his responsibilities. Amazingly, the Met chief, Sir Paul Stephenson, can’t even strip Dizaei of his rank as commander; he must wait for the MPA to make up its collective mind.

Worst of all, this much-vaunted democratisation of the Metropolitan police has ensured that plausible “anti-racists”, such as an Ali Dizaei, are promoted to ever more senior ranks, while police officers with no ambition to nurture a personal political constituency are less favoured — doubtless to their resentment and frustration.

For all its corruption in the past — Ali Dizaei was a mere dilettante crook compared with some police officers who have entered the dock over the years — one glory of British policing had always been its absolute independence from the political process. Its best officers understood that they were accountable to the public simply in what they did every day, neither requesting political guidance nor offering it.

One of the most depressing aspects of the racial politics of modern policing, as demonstrated by the career of Ali Dizaei, is that it has deliberately divided the public it serves into the “white community” and the “black community”. It is racism by another name.

SOURCE



Amnesty shows its claws

Its long-standing Leftism is having predictable results. I was a member of Amnesty once -- until I found out about its anti-Israel bias -- JR

When Gita Sahgal questioned the human rights group’s links to Islamic radicals, it suspended her. Now she fears for her safety. Sahgal argues that Amnesty should not be associated with Cageprisoners, which appears to give succour to militants who believe in global jihad

Amnesty International has made its name as a champion of free speech, campaigning on behalf of prisoners who have spoken out against oppressive regimes around the world. But when it comes to speaking up about the organisation itself ... well, that seems to be a different story.

Last week Gita Sahgal, a highly respected lifelong human rights activist and head of Amnesty’s gender unit, told The Sunday Times of her concerns about Amnesty’s relationship with Cageprisoners, an organisation headed by Moazzam Begg, a former Guantanamo internee. Since his release in 2005, Begg has spoken alongside Amnesty at a number of events and accompanied the organisation to a meeting at Downing Street last month. Sahgal felt the closeness of the relationship between Amnesty and Cageprisoners — which appears to give succour to those who believe in global jihad — was a threat to Amnesty’s integrity. “To be appearing on platforms with Britain’s most famous supporter of the Taliban, whom we treat as a human rights defender, is a gross error of judgment,” she wrote to Amnesty’s leaders following the Downing Street visit.

Feeling her concerns were not being addressed, she decided to go public. Hours after our story appeared she was suspended. Sahgal’s phone started ringing off the hook with news organisations seeking interviews. The story also lit up the blogosphere, partly because of Amnesty’s importance — it has some 2.8m members and a raft of glamorous supporters — but also because what Sahgal was talking about touched that raw nerve, the naivety of white middle-class liberals in dealing with Islamic radicals.

To say the past week has been a difficult one for Sahgal would be an understatement. She fears for her own and her family’s safety. She has — temporarily at least — lost her job and found it almost impossible to find anyone to represent her in any potential employment case. She rang round the human rights lawyers she knows, all of whom have declined to help citing a conflict of interest. “Although it is said that we must defend everybody no matter what they’ve done, it appears that if you’re a secular, atheist, Asian British woman, you don’t deserve a defence from our civil right firms,” she says wryly.

So no one in the human rights world wants to cross swords with Amnesty: that’s no surprise and least of all to Sahgal. “I know the nature of what I’m up against,” she says. “I didn’t do what I did lightly.” She is feisty, unrepentant and by no means without support: we meet, for instance, in an office lent to her by a family friend of Peter Benenson, the lawyer who founded Amnesty in 1961. She has had many private messages from former colleagues. “People are shocked,” she says. “There is a lot of disquiet in the organisation and that’s been quite heartening.”

Amnesty and Begg have taken issue with what Sahgal, 53, has to say. Claudio Cordone, Amnesty’s interim secretary-general, wrote to The Sunday Times to say it was “preposterous” to accuse Amnesty of being linked in any way to the Taliban. “Amnesty International works with Moazzam Begg as a former detainee of Guantanamo Bay and as a victim of the human rights violations suffered there . . .” he said. “Moazzam Begg has never been tried or convicted of any terrorism-related offences and has publicly rebutted accusations against him in this respect.”

Cordone objected to people like Begg being subjected to “trial by media”, but part of Sahgal’s point is that human rights organisations have to be super-scrupulous not only in the people they choose to support, but also about the company those people keep — and any decisions they make must stand up to public scrutiny.

The treatment of Guantanamo detainees keeps making headlines, the latest last week when the government was forced to publish evidence showing MI5 knew that Binyam Mohamed was being tortured at the United States’s behest. “Amnesty underscores the importance of Binyam Mohamed’s case and of course that’s right,” says Sahgal. “Moazzam Begg has ongoing cases and I hope he wins them. But that’s not the issue.”

Given the sensitivities involved it seems reasonable to ask where Begg’s sympathies lie. In his autobiography he describes becoming interested in Islamic politics in his twenties and he later ran a bookshop that stocked Islamist writing. He travelled to Bosnia and Afghanistan and admits giving money to Muslim combatants, but denies being involved in any fighting.

In 2001 he took his wife and young children to live in Afghanistan in order, he says, to fulfil a dream of being a teacher. He helped to establish a school with sections for boys and girls and installed water pumps. When the allied attack on Afghanistan started later that year, the family fled to Pakistan where Begg, now 42, was picked up. His family have always insisted it was a case of mistaken identity.

In his book he says the Taliban were better than anything Afghanistan had had in the past 25 years. “I was talking about something I believed at the time,” he says now. “That’s what I understood from my knowledge of the country, that there had been no law and order, there had been warlords that had taken over the country, children used as sex slaves, drug production was very high and the Taliban put a stop to all this. That was the reality on the ground. It was the best of the worst.”

He believes it is right to be talking to the Taliban now. “Because the Taliban are Afghans and we are not,” he says. “The British are not Afghans and neither are the Americans. And as much as you might not like what they stand for, they have more right in that land than anyone else. “Ultimately, what we’re doing now as part of our foreign policy is we’re talking to the Taliban, we are engaging with the Taliban, the people we’ve been demonising for the past nine years, and that is precisely what we did in Northern Ireland. “I’ve never said we should give the Taliban money — that is what the government is doing. But we need to be engaging with people who we find most unpalatable. So the dialogue with the Taliban is something I not only welcome but something I have been saying for a long, long time.”

As for human rights abuses committed by the Taliban, Begg says he has seen and written about them himself: “I’ve seen them because I lived there. But I’ve seen Americans commit more human rights abuses, I can promise you. But I haven’t said we shouldn’t talk to the Americans.”

He counters Sahgal’s view by saying she is, in her own way, a fundamentalist: “She advocates the government shouldn’t even be engaging with the Muslim Council of Britain. It’s not a normal position.” And he rejects her description of him as Britain’s most famous supporter of the Taliban: “That is a ridiculous thing to say. I have toured the country with former US soldiers several times ... that doesn’t seem to be a very Taliban Al-Qaeda thing to do, does it?”

Indeed it does not. But when Asim Qureshi, one of Begg’s senior colleagues at Cageprisoners, appeared on a radio programme with Sahgal last week and was reminded of a speech he had given at a rally organised by Hizb ut-Tahrir, an Islamist political party, in which Qureshi supported “jihad” against oppression of Muslims, he did not distance himself from the sentiments. Cageprisoners not only campaigns on behalf of those detained without trial, but also for Islamic radicals who have been through the due process of the British courts, such as Abu Hamza and Abu Qatada. Sahgal believes the organisation has an agenda “way beyond being a prisoners’ rights organisation”.

The bigger picture is how human rights organisations — and society more widely — should view Islamic radicals. There has been much debate over whether, spurred by a sentimental knee-jerk anti-Americanism, white liberals have sympathised with Islamic radicals, thereby implicitly tolerating their intolerance, particularly towards women. “For me that’s a form of racism,” says Sahgal, “because what it does is wipe out the experiences of the people they oppress. And it’s not helped by a discourse about a ‘clash of civilisations’, which elides jihadi ideologies and treats them as normal Muslim thinking. That’s devastating for ordinary Muslims.”

If the men incarcerated in Guantanamo were white fascists, she says, “I hope we would defend them. We would have to defend them — but we wouldn’t necessarily put them on 50 or 100 platforms after that”. The problem, she believes, is that human rights organisations want to believe they represent “perfect victims”. “But a victim can also be a perpetrator,” she says. “It’s a very simple thought.”

This is something that has troubled her for many years. Some years ago, before she joined Amnesty’s staff, she was asked by the organisation to speak alongside a man whose son had been arrested during an insurgency in northern India: “His son had disappeared and he’d gone from police station to police station looking for him. It was a very moving story and it was hard not to cry. He was coming to thank Amnesty for the postcards they’d written and the letters they’d sent to the government. He felt his son owed his life to that, and that, of course, is the power of our work.

“The problem was that he was surrounded by men who were clearly Sikh political activists, allied to the group which assassinated Indira Gandhi. A perfectly well-meaning person had invited me to speak on a platform beside a perfectly genuine victim but hadn’t paid any attention to who accompanied him.”

Now, for flagging up this sort of error, Sahgal finds herself out in the cold. She says she needs to keep talking about this issue because she feels it won’t solve itself. She’ll be watching with interest to see if there is a cooling of relations between Amnesty and Cageprisoners. “The signs are that there won’t be,” she says. “The signs are that the cool relationship is with me.”

SOURCE



"New Scientist" becomes Non Scientist

In her article below, Joanne Nova appears to be unaware that "New Scientist" has always been Left-leaning and that their present bias is nothing new. It is not a peer-reviewed academic journal. Its editor has described it as "an ideas magazine". It would be more accurate to describe it as a "no idea" magazine. It is in fact neither new nor scientific

You might think journalists at a popular science magazine would be able to investigate and reason. In DenierGate, watch New Scientist closely as it does the unthinkable and tries to defend gross scientific malpractice by saying it’s okay because other people have done other things (that were not related) a little bit wrong and a long time ago. Move along ladies and gentlemen, there’s nothing to see…

The big problem for this formerly good publication is that it has decided already what the answer is to any question on climate change (and the answer could be warm or cold, but it’s always ALARMING). That leaves it clutching for sand-bags to prop up its position as the king-tide sweeps away any journalistic credibility it might have had. I’ve added my own helpful notes into the New Scientist article, just so you get the full picture.

NS (New Scientist): “Climategate” has put scientists on trial in the court of public opinion.

JN (Joanne Nova): Since there’s evidence of falsification, hiding data, artificially altering results, and deleting records, a trial sounds entirely appropriate. How about the Supreme Court kind?

NS: If you believe climate skeptics, a huge body of evidence* involving the work of tens of thousands of scientists over more than a century–

JN: I’d hate to exaggerate, but the IPCC can only name 60 scientists who reviewed the evidence on causation in the Fourth Assessment Report, and most of them were either reviewing their own work, had a vested interest, or are themselves caught up in the Climategate scandal …

NS: –should be thrown out on the basis of the alleged misconduct of a handful of researchers, even though nothing in the hacked emails has been shown to undermine any of the scientific conclusions*.

JN: Nothing? So for New Scientist, it is normal practice to refuse to provide data, refuse FOI’s, and then delete data? Maybe this is the normal practice for a religion, but it sure isn’t normal for science.

And spot the appearance of the mythical “HUGE body of evidence”. Can anyone at New Scientist find that one mystery paper with empirical evidence showing that carbon causes major warming? Just ONE? That’s major warming, not minor. And that’s empirical, i.e., by observation, not by simulation. This is the paragraph where New Scientist proves it has become Non Scientist:

“If we are going to judge the truth of claims on the behavior of those making them, it seems only fair to look at the behavior of a few of those questioning the scientific consensus. There are many similar examples we did not include. We leave readers to draw their own conclusions about who to trust.”

Alarm bells are ringing from Galileo’s grave. We’re trying to figure out if the world is warming due to man-made carbon right? New Scientist’s method is not to look at the evidence, but to look at the behavior of the sceptics. Did you see the black hole of ad hominem that this once esteemed journal just stepped into? Logic and reason were reduced in a flash to a naked singularity. Follow its reasoning through the black hole, and you don’t emerge on the other side.

Who to trust indeed? Let’s trust people who can reason, and scientists who don’t hide their data. It doesn’t matter how “sceptics behave”; it matters whether the data can be independently analyzed and interpreted; whether the conclusions are robust. But, since the data is g-o-n-e , no one can verify anything. So in a way, it does come down to “trust”: In the new quasi-religious form of science, you have to trust those who hold the global data. Isn’t postmodern “science” an awful lot like the old religions?

Did they make the right “adjustments”? Who the heck knows?

So does New Scientist publish the most significant e-mails to let readers make up their own minds, or does it hide the damning lines, and feed in some old distractions it found in a festering mess of bias called the New Scientist Archive? Choose B. Go for an eighteen-year old paper by people not mentioned in the hacked e-mails. Of course. Then have another go at a science documentary that didn’t mention the hacked e-mails, but got part of a graph wrong. (And don’t mention that Al Gore’s movie made nine significant errors as determined by a British Court.)

Then, take another swipe at the unpaid scientists who arranged a petition that attracted thousands of signatures. New Scientist briefly notes the latest version of this petition, but since it really can’t find any flaws with this new version, which has an astounding 31,000 signatures on it, New Scientist spends several paragraphs on the earlier version, which could have been done a bit better, but was obviously mainly right, as shown by the second round… Remember the petition was done by volunteers and done twice. It’s the largest grassroots movement of scientists on any topic anywhere in the world, and New Scientist is attacking the 31,000 volunteer scientists, while it defends the 60 corrupt paid ones.

It’s beyond silly. The mindless irrelevant attacks go on. New Scientist attacks Nigel Lawson for using a misleadingly short time–eight years–to argue that the world is not warming (which is exactly what the satellite data shows). Eight years is too short for New Scientist to announce a flat trend, but in every other article with a single flood, a single cyclone, or a single heat wave, one week is long enough for New Scientist to imply that global warming might be to blame. So a season of hurricanes is significant, but years of cooling is misleading. Righto. (And Amen!)

New Scientist attacks Christopher Monckton’s paper–not because it can summarize why it is in error, but because another group disagrees with it, and there are some technicalities about whether it jumped through the right hoops called peer review. Attack the man and not the message, eh? New Scientist stands up for the bureaucratic details of “peer review” (only certain peers count), but won’t stand up for the independent scientists, the whistleblowers, who want access to data just to make sure those “peer reviewed papers” don’t turn out to be baseless frauds like the Hockey Stick.

More HERE



Let’s pick apart this politics of doom

‘Climategate’ confirms what many of us already knew: that claims of future catastrophe are political, not scientific

A sixth of the world’s population – the billion or so people who live downstream of Himalayan glaciers and depend on them for water – must surely be relieved. Just a few months ago, ‘consensus science’ held that these vast tracts of ice would be gone in just a few decades. The implications were stark. Water wars and climate refugees would spread out from the region, consuming society in Gaia’s revenge. If the direct effects of climate change didn’t kill you, the social chaos they unleashed would.

Now that the death of the Himalayan glaciers has been deferred by some three centuries, we can take a sober look at the situation facing people living in the region. The truth is that they have more years ahead of them to find alternatives to relying on Himalayan meltwater than have passed since the Industrial Revolution began to transform our own landscape. That should be plenty of time.

For the furore around ‘Glaciergate’, we didn’t actually need to know that Himalayan glacial retreat was exaggerated to know that the disaster story it seemingly produced was pseudo-scientific bunk. The plots of such disaster stories are written well before any evidence of looming doom emerges from ‘science’. What really underpins the climate change panic is the way in which politicians have justified their own impotence by appealing to catastophe.

This helps to explain the reaction of the political establishment to the various scandals that have beset the IPCC and leading climate scientists in recent weeks. In response to the allegations levelled at individuals and institutions in the climate establishment, the UK climate change secretary, Ed Miliband, has declared war on climate sceptics on both Channel 4 News and in the Observer. But the ironic consequence of Miliband’s intervention has been to acknowledge that disagreement exists. Miliband now recognises an enemy that only a few months ago consisted of a tiny number of ‘flat-earthers’, according to his boss, Gordon Brown. Given that sceptics are not usually engaged, just ignored, a declaration of war is a sure sign that he is on the defensive.

Miliband says, ‘I think the science and the precautionary principle, which says that there’s at the very least a huge risk if we don’t act, mean that we should be acting’. This use of the precautionary principle puts the position of climate alarmists back by a decade. The argument for action on climate change once depended on just the possibility that changes in climate could cause devastating problems for humans. Scientists had not yet produced a consensus. The political stalemate seemingly ended after the infamous ‘Hockey Stick’ graph was published in the IPCC’s Third Assessment Report (TAR) in 2001. It was held to be, at last, the conclusive evidence that man indeed had altered the climate. Here was the fingerprint on the ‘smoking gun’ that pointed towards our imminent demise.

By retreating to the precautionary principle rather than simply defending the notion of scientific consensus, Miliband concedes a lot. The scientific consensus around climate change has stood as a powerful source of political authority in lieu of democratic legitimacy. In the light of events and arguments which undermine this authority, Miliband is fighting for his government’s credibility, not to save the planet.

He protests that, in spite of the new climate scandals, the ‘overwhelming majority’ of scientists nonetheless still hold with the idea that mankind has altered the climate. The recent revelations are just dents, caused by procedural oversight, in an otherwise robust case, he seems to say. But actually, this does not really get to the heart of the discussion about climate. A scientific consensus about the climate’s sensitivity to greenhouse gas emissions is not equivalent to a scientific consensus about human society’s sensitivity to climate. There is a huge difference between these two ideas, yet Miliband’s argument rests on the idea that they are equivalent. And it is on this point that sceptics have not yet made much progress. While banging away at the science of climate change, they have failed to tackle the wider argument about our capacity to deal with the unexpected. What sceptics need to explain is how climate and society have become so confused.

This confusion has other ramifications, for example in the familiar claim that Miliband makes, that ‘climate change will be worse for the poor’. This in turn depends on the reinvention of ‘social justice’ as ‘environmental justice’, as if inequality is a natural phenomenon as inevitable as wind or rain.

But poverty is not a natural phenomenon. It is a tragic conceit to believe that by not driving our cars we will somehow make life better for those who cannot even dream of owning a car – much less having a road to drive it on. The problem is that people are poor, not that their climate is slightly different. We can see this fact demonstrated in the horrific scale of devastation in Haiti. An event of similar magnitude in a more economically developed country would not have claimed so many lives. It is not enough to say that carbon emissions cost lives, or anything like it, because the principal factors that determine the outcome of natural phenomena relate to an area’s level of development.

However, as Miliband’s words reveal, world leaders have given up on the idea of development as the means through which people can enjoy better protected and more rewarding lives. This can only have the consequence of producing and sustaining poverty, making greater numbers of people vulnerable to nature’s indifferent whims. The way in which the political class has surrendered to climate panic is a comprehensive admission of our leaders’ own impotence. Only if we take their inability to produce domestic or international development for granted can we conceive of changes in weather patterns as inevitably catastrophic.

For example, over the next three centuries, the people living beneath Himalayan glaciers might construct dams to collect the rain or snow that falls there, but which does not remain as ice. It is not inconceivable that Asians might also provide a greater proportion of their water needs through desalination plants. The world has been reorganised around the tenets of environmentalism precisely because the notion of using development to provide protection from natural disaster is now deemed to be impossible.

World leaders have projected their catastrophic sense of impotence on to the world. Just to make sure that politics cannot intervene, they have brought forward the date of the ecopalypse, to render any alternative and any debate impossible. It can’t happen soon enough for them. A failure of imagination has been passed off as the conclusion of ‘climate science’ and as the opinion of ‘the overwhelming majority of scientists’, but as we can see, the premise of impotence and catastrophe is a presupposition that is political in its character and not a conclusion produced by science.

In turn, if the notion of catastrophic climate change is reduced to a mere article of (bad) faith, the institutions of climate politics – all of which have been constructed on the premise of catastrophe/impotence – cease to have a legitimate basis. The IPCC, the Stern Review, the Kyoto treaty, Copenhagen, the Climate Change Committee and the legislation and reorganisation of public life that have followed in their wake have not been created to save the planet from climate catastrophe, but to save politicians from the collapse of their own authority. That is what Miliband’s war is about.

The scandal is not really in the fraud, exaggeration, or deceit – if that is what they were – committed by particular researchers, or the failure of the IPCC process to identify that certain claims were false. The scandal is that politicians seek moral authority in crisis. It was not ‘science’ that produced stories of imminent catastrophe; it was the bleak doom-laden politics of this era. Scientists merely extrapolated from this scenario, into the future, taking the logic of the political premises to their conclusion. The politics exists prior to the science. In reply, sceptics, with a more positive vision, ought to demonstrate the gap that exists between the science and the story, and how it might end differently if we start from more positive ground.

If Miliband wants a war, he can have one. But the battle lines should recognise that the politics of catastrophe is prior to the science of catastophe, and that another outlook that emphasises our ability to control events is possible. Environmental problems will always occur, but it is how they are understood that counts. We cannot understand ‘what science says’ until we understand what it has been told, and what it has really been asked. Science has been put to use to turn the billion people living beneath Himalayan glaciers into political capital by the IPCC to prop up the likes of Ed Miliband. It is only now that he has been deprived of the authority that those billion lives – or deaths – gave him, that he wants a war.

Today’s politicians need catastrophes because they have no other way of creating authority for themselves. But the catastrophe is in politics, not in the atmosphere.

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Dishonest British exam marks betray kids

Grades are so inflated that real ability can only be guessed at. I am not entirely sympathetic with the kid below, though. Why would he want to study English? He can read all the poems and novels he likes on his own and where is it going to get him anyway? English was by far my best subject but I did not major in it as I could not see the point of wasting a university education on it. My worst subject was always mathematics but I ended up teaching statistics for most of my university teaching career. Reality is often far from the ideal but it pays to recognize it

A new A-level grade intended to help universities pick the most able applicants risks falling victim to the grade inflation it was meant to solve. Candidates are being rejected by universities despite being predicted to score at least three A*s in their A-levels this summer, when the grade is awarded for the first time.

With about one in eight A-level candidates now scoring straight As and thousands rejected each year by Oxford and Cambridge alone, it had been hoped that the A* would identify the academic elite. Figures released last week showed applications to degree courses were up by 23% on last year and the A* has increased the pressure on pupils.

Among those who have been turned down is Robert Kehoe, 18, a grammar school pupil from Lincolnshire, who says he has been rejected by Cambridge and three other universities despite being predicted to win three A*s and an A. To gain an A*, candidates must achieve an average of 80% in exams across their two years of A-level study and 90% in exams in the second year.

Only a handful of universities include A*s in their offers — most successful applicants to Cambridge are told they must gain at least one of the grades this summer. The university is understood to have made its first three A*s offer within the past few days.

Research by the university suggests that even three A*s may not set candidates apart from the crowd. Cambridge analysed the A-level marks scored by present undergraduates and found that 45% of science students and a quarter of those in arts subjects would have gained three or more A* grades. At least 70% of science students and 55% of those in the arts would have merited at least two A*s.

Tutors believe this is likely to be an underestimate of the numbers who will obtain the grades this summer.

“We are told by teachers that students are working much harder than they used to when they knew they were on target for an A grade,” said Geoff Parks, director of admissions at Cambridge.

Tim Hands, master of Magdalen College school in Oxford, who co-chairs the main independent schools universities committee, said his school had been advised by Cambridge that applicants to study medicine might need A*s across all their subjects to stand out. He added that Cambridge was being “commendably open and helpful”, in contrast to other universities which had said they would not even acknowledge the A*, potentially magnifying the injustice to pupils. “Students should be aware that admissions systems are heading for a dishonourable and confusing meltdown,” Hands warned.

Kehoe is a pupil at Queen Elizabeth’s grammar school in Horncastle. His application to read English has been rejected by Christ’s College, Cambridge, by two other colleges at the same university and by Durham, Warwick and University College London. In addition to his predicted A-level A*s, he obtained 10 A*s at GCSE. Kehoe does not know how much better he is expected to do. “I was determined not to lose hope and felt gently reassured by my four As at ASlevel,” he said. “Unfortunately, at present, my Ucas form serves only to depress me.” He is now hoping for success from his remaining university choice, Leeds.

The universities that rejected Kehoe would not comment on his case this weekend, but all said that entry to their English courses was highly competitive. This meant that many candidates with impressive academic credentials had to be turned away. University College London said it had received 1,500 applicants and interviewed 300 for just 70 places. “There are some very good people who fall by the wayside,” it said.

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British Mathematics teachers fail primary level test

If you were good at mathematics, why would you want to teach in a British school? To get better teachers you need a more civilized school environment, for starters. Many schools are now so dysfunctional that you would have to be a dummy to work there

Primary school maths teachers are failing to attain the standard of arithmetic expected of 11-year-olds, new research has claimed. Only 20% of the teachers tested for a Channel 4 television documentary were able to work out that the solution to 4+2x5 is 14, not 30 — multiplication takes priority over addition.

The results have led to renewed calls from business leaders for the government to improve standards of maths teaching — last year, more than 20% of pupils left primary school without reaching the expected level of maths in their Sats tests. Justin King, chief executive of Sainsbury, tells tomorrow’s edition of Dispatches: “Any system that only succeeds 80% of the time in terms of achieving its basic result needs changing. If we saw that in our business we would be working out how we close that gap. “I don’t think it is about inherent skill. I genuinely don’t believe that many, if any, of our youngsters need to be left in a position of not having basic skills in maths.”

His comments follow those last year by Sir Terry Leahy, chief executive of Tesco, who attacked “woefully low” standards in schools which leave private sector companies to “pick up the pieces”; and Sir Stuart Rose, executive chairman of Marks & Spencer, who said many school-leavers were “not fit for work”.

For its programme Kids Don’t Count, Dispatches used a test devised by Richard Dunne, a maths consultant and former Exeter University academic. The test comprised 27 straightforward questions, most of which, according to Dunne, were of the standard required of an 11-year-old. On average, the teachers answered just 45% of the questions correctly. Only a third knew that 1.4 divided by 0.1 is 14. Currently, primary school teachers in England need only C grades in GCSE maths to be admitted on to teacher training courses.

Dunne said the tests showed that teachers “know so little maths that they cannot be conveying mathematics to their children”. However, Vernon Coaker, the schools minister, denied the claims of poor standards. He said: “The fact is that 100,000 more 11-year-olds are reaching level 4 in maths compared with 1997 because of record investment, great teaching and a strong focus on the basics for all pupils.”

Alison Wolf, professor of public sector management at King’s College London, said she was “horrified” by the Channel 4 findings and that teacher training was to blame. “Our obsession with generic teaching skills has crowded out time in which we could be making sure that [teachers] have the basic knowledge,” said Wolf. “I don’t think you can teach maths if you can’t do it either.”

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"Paddy" an offensive word in Britain?

We read:

"It began in December 2007, when Cllr Ken Bamber (Con) told an 'Irish' joke during a break in a meeting to discuss an appeal against dismissal. Union official Brian Kelly took offence at the use of the word "Paddy" and filed an official complaint.

Now agreement has finally been reached between the two and Medway Council has agreed to pay compensation to Mr Kelly, who was its full-time Unison official.

Details are being kept private, but it is thought the agreement was reached at the conciliation service, ACAS, after it was referred there by the Employment Tribunal.

Cllr Bamber was chairing the appeal hearing when the joke was told during a break in proceedings. The Irish-born union representative said he considered "Paddy" was an offensive word and racist in intent. Cllr Bamber scribbled a note saying he apologised, but it was alleged he would not sign it or say for what he was apologising.

The offending joke:

"A man walked into a Dublin bar and saw a friend sitting with an empy glass. 'Paddy can I buy you another', he asked, to which Paddy replied - 'now what would I be wanting with another empty glass?'"

Source

Blue chip companies running from Leftist Britain's tax greed: "Half of Britain’s 30 largest companies have studied shifting their tax base offshore, with a handful saying they are actively considering a move, a survey by The Sunday Times has found. The findings underline the threat of an exodus that could cost the state billions of pounds. They come a week before a crucial meeting at the Treasury where reforms to the taxation of foreign profits — a bone of contention for multinationals based here — will be thrashed out. Of the top 30 companies in the FTSE 100 index, 15 said they were keeping their tax domicile status under review. Three — speaking on condition of anonymity — said they were actively considering a move. Some, such as Xstrata, the mining group, are already offshore, while others, like BAE Systems, the defence contractor, are unlikely to move because of their involvement in large government contracts."





13 February, 2010

British Parents forced to call emergency number from outside GP surgery 'because doctors were too busy to see dying baby'

A couple whose baby was dying of meningitis were forced to dial 999 for an ambulance from outside their GP surgery - after being told doctors were too busy to see him. Lee Freeman and Shaunna Bent sprinted more than a mile to their local GP surgery with five-month-old Jaydon in their arms after he was struck down with classic meningitis symptoms. But when they arrived, a receptionist told them no doctor was available and they could leave their number so someone could call them back.

Convinced that Jaydon was seriously ill, the couple dialled 999 on their mobile phone from the pavement outside and an ambulance arrived within eight minutes. But the critically ill baby died from meningococcal septicaemia just hours later at Gloucestershire Royal Hospital.

Now father Lee wants to know why there was no doctor available to help his dying son. He said: ‘The surgery rang us back while we were in hospital to ask how he was getting on and I just said he'd passed away and put the phone down. I did not know what to say to them. ‘We want people to know what happened to us so it does not happen again.’

The couple became concerned about little Jaydon on January 25 because he was sick and whimpering. They rushed more than a mile from their house in Littledean, Gloucestershire, to nearby Dockham Road Surgery in Cinderford to try to see a GP but a receptionist told them to leave a contact number because no doctor was available. After they called an ambulance, a doctor rushed out of the surgery to examine Jaydon but could do little to help him.

Shaunna, 19, said: ‘He was really strong and kept fighting but in the end they said it was best to let him go.’

Now the couple cannot bear to go back to the home where they enjoyed such a happy first Christmas with Jaydon. Shaunna added: ‘I was so chuffed when he was born. ‘He was a lovely bubbly baby who was always laughing. He was so happy that he used to wake up smiling.’

The couple are planning to make an official complaint after Jaydon's funeral, which takes place today. Dr Simon Silver, lead doctor at the surgery, said: ‘Meningococcal septicaemia is an absolutely devastating illness. Prompt treatment as in this case can sometimes be powerless. ‘This must surely turn the parents' life upside down and we hope they do not suffer too much in their grief. Our thoughts and sympathies go out to them.’

A spokesman for NHS Gloucestershire said that they would look into the complaint. He said: ‘A child's death is always a terrible tragedy and our hearts go out to the family concerned. ‘We recognise that this must be an extremely distressing time for them. ‘We have a robust complaints process in place and we would urge the family to make contact with us so we can look in to the individual circumstances of this case.'

Asked what prompted the doctor to run outside the practice, both Dockham Road Surgery and NHS Lothian refused to give any more information, before the investigation. The couple were unavailable for further comment today as they were attending the funeral.

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Now three MORE female patients kept in British hospital store cupboard surrounded by blood-stained bins

A flagship hospital is facing an investigation as patients told of their nightmare stays in tiny windowless ‘broom cupboard’ treatment rooms. Elderly women described being transferred to 12ft by 16ft store rooms in the middle of the night – where they were surrounded by blood-stained bins, bandages and shelves of medical supplies. Some missed meals because they were not on proper wards while others described sleepless nights as nurses continually entered to collect stores.

It has emerged that Norwich and Norfolk University Hospital has 27 cupboards – labelled ‘treatment rooms’ and regularly used to house patients – attached to wards.

NHS watchdog the Care Quality Commission has launched an investigation into the £229million hospital, built less than a decade ago with private funding, after a flood of complaints. The scandal came to light when 80-year-old Doris McKeown this week told the Daily Mail how she spent two days in one of the rooms as she awaited surgery for compressed nerves in her spine.

Now 85-year-old Rhoda Talbot has told how she was admitted to the hospital last month with a hair line fracture to her spine and was moved into the ‘stock cupboard’ the night before her discharge. Her son Rod said: ‘It was literally a store room. There was shelf racking filled with stuff used to run the ward, green buckets with dirty, bloody needles in them and oxygen cylinders.’

When Mrs Talbot, from Wroxham near Norwich, was collected by her family, she said: ‘I’m absolutely shattered. They [nurses] were in and out all night. Every time they came in they turned the light on.’ Mr Talbot is planning a formal complaint and wants an apology to his mother over her ordeal.

Another woman, Helen Howes, 35, complained to the ward sister after spending the night in a similar windowless room before urgent surgery on an abscess. She was hemmed in by dressing packs, catheter bags and other medical supplies and her handbag was put on a medical waste bin. ‘Even in the night I was having my bed moved across because the nurses needed to get to something on the left-hand side and my bed was too close for them to open the drawers,’ she said.

The mother of one, who lives near Norwich, doesn’t blame nursing staff. ‘They are powerless,’ she added. ‘They knew it was common practice. I wanted to highlight the completely unacceptable manner in which vulnerable patients, who perhaps feel too ill at the time to complain or feel they don’t have a voice to raise these issues, are treated.’

Katherine Murphy, director of the Patients Association, condemned the cupboards. She said: ‘It’s so undignified. Families shouldn’t put up with it.’

Mrs McKeown, of Bungay, near Lowestoft, Suffolk, was moved to a ‘treatment room’ at 2am on October 22 and spent 48 hours there before surgery. The 80-year-old missed out on meals and medication because she wasn’t on a proper ward and described the room as ‘like a broom cupboard’. Her daughter Dr Helen McKeown, a GP, added: ‘My mother needed emergency surgery and she ended up in a cupboard. Where’s the dignity in care?’

Liberal Democrat health spokesman Norman Lamb branded the rooms unacceptable. Norwich and Norfolk University Hospital responded that all its treatment rooms were used strictly on a short-term basis.

Director of nursing Christine Baker said: ‘Our interest is in making sure all our patients get the best possible care and that their dignity and privacy is protected. 'We carefully assess any patient’s needs before they are placed in a ward clinical treatment room.’ Hospital spokesman Andrew Stronach claimed many hospitals followed the same procedure.

SOURCE



British private school pupils 'being rejected from university'

Leftist class war still raging in Britain. Karl Marx would be proud

Private school pupils with straight-A grades are being rejected from elite universities in unprecedented numbers, it can be disclosed. Headmasters are blaming a shortage of university places caused by funding cuts, combined with the effect of Labour’s “social engineering” drive that prioritises bright children from under-performing comprehensives.

Two out of three top independent schools approached by The Daily Telegraph said teenagers were finding it harder to get into higher education this year compared with 12 months ago. In some cases, pupils predicted to get three A*s at A-level – along with a string of perfect GCSE results – are being turned down from all five of their choices. Entry to Oxbridge is especially hard this year, heads claim. Some schools reported a drop of around three-quarters in the number of students with offers from Oxford and Cambridge.

Heads said the squeeze was being exacerbated by the Government’s “widening participation” policy. It encourages universities to give lower grade offers to bright pupils from poor schools showing the most potential. It is also feared that universities are prioritising foreign students who can be charged far higher fees.

Richard Cairns, head of Brighton College, said: “The financial pressures and the social mobility agenda are leading to a situation where children who have worked very hard to get the grades that their forebears got are finding it more difficult than their predecessors to get into university.”

One student from Brighton – rated among Britain’s top 20 schools in a recent league table – has been rejected from Oxford, University College London and Durham, despite being predicted three A*s at A-level, on top of straight As at GCSE and AS level.

The Telegraph interviewed the heads of 30 leading independent schools and two-thirds reported concerns over the admissions process. In many cases, they said universities imposed last-minute rises in A-level entry requirements – often after students had applied.

The disclosure follows the publication of figures this week showing applications to degree courses are up 23 per cent compared with 2009. More than 100,000 extra applications have been made and demand for places at some institutions has doubled in just 12 months. The rise is being driven by students reapplying after being turned down last year combined with a dramatic increase in demand from mature students returning to education because of a shortage of jobs in the recession.

Despite the surge, separate research from the Telegraph suggests that as many as a quarter of universities are actually cutting the number of places for British undergraduates after a drop in budgets. Last week, universities were told that spending would be slashed by £449m in the autumn, including a £215m reduction in cash for teaching and warnings of further reductions in the future.

Steve Smith, the president of Universities UK, which represents vice-chancellors, told the Telegraph that admissions tutors still had a “duty” to identify good students with poorer grades despite the admissions crisis – potentially placing further pressure on places for independent school pupils. “Many students who have shown a desire to go to university are going to be very disappointed this year,” he said. “But data shows that people often do better coming in with lower grades from a poorly-performing school then if they come in with higher grades from a well-performing school.”

Antony Clark, the head of Malvern College in Worcestershire, said outstanding candidates who would have received five offers from top universities were now lucky to receive one or two. “I think admissions tutors are looking closely for the rough diamond who has not been through the private school system but is showing huge potential,” he said.

Peter Roberts, the head of Bradfield College, Reading, said: “We will have some boys and girls who are turned down for all five universities they apply for in the upper-sixth and that’s very hard for a young person who has worked hard and done well.”

Many independent schools send a small number of students to Oxbridge every year. But some told the Telegraph that numbers had plummeted in 2010. Woodhouse Grove School, West Yorkshire, said it usually had three offers, but only received one this year. Elizabeth Enthoven, head of sixth form, said: “I think the competition is much fiercer, and they have their agenda about open access.”

Sunderland High School said it had no Oxbridge offers, despite normally receiving around two. One boy had three A* predictions and straight As at GCSE and AS level but was rejected.

Queen’s College, Taunton, said the three or four places pupils normally gained had dropped to one, while Emanuel School, Battersea, said numbers dropped from around three a year to one in 2010.

Mark Hanley-Browne, Emanuel headmaster, said: “It’s harder to get into the top universities in 2010. We had very good students that didn’t make it who in previous years would have done - people with 10 A*s at GCSE and four As at AS level.”

Other schools told how students were finding it significantly harder to get into other universities, suggesting that the squeeze is being felt across the sector.

In a separate disclosure, the Telegraph surveyed 30 top universities. A quarter said they planned to cut student numbers. This included Lancaster, Leicester, Manchester and the West of England. At least half said numbers were being frozen. In all, between 750,000 and 800,000 students are expected to compete for around 480,000 places. Graham McQueen, head of sixth form, Warminster School, Wiltshire, said: “It’s never been more competitive to get into the Russell Group universities.”

King’s School, Rochester, said the grades offered for red brick universities were noticeably higher. Kevin Jones, head of senior school, said: “My main concern is what happens in the summer. The people who miss their grades by a whisker are going to have problems. “It’s going to be much more difficult to negotiate on results day.”

A spokesman for the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, denied that private school pupils faced discrimination. “Although admissions are rightly a matter for individual institutions, the Government is committed to ensuring that entry to university is determined by aptitude, potential and merit, not where a student was educated,” she said. “There are a record number of students – over 2m – at university. That’s 390,000 more than in 1997 and next year we expect there will be more students than ever before. “But getting a place at university has always been, and should be, a competitive process. Not everyone gets the grades and some decide university is not for them. “But, it is early days and students haven’t even sat their A-levels yet.”

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The Leftist British establishment's intense hatred for self-defence again

Final victory in court for father who stabbed axe thug to protect family

A father who stabbed a thug threatening his family with an axe won a crucial victory for homeowners yesterday after the government's top lawyer failed to have him jailed. Kenneth Blight, 51, walked free from the Appeal Court after the country's most senior judge threw out an application from the Attorney General to increase his original sentence.

Baroness Scotland QC pursued the father-of-three after he was given a two-year suspended jail term for stabbing drug-crazed teenager Andrew Nelson in a bid to protect his partner and children in their home. She argued the original sentence was 'unduly lenient'.

But in a stinging judgment that could signal greater rights for homeowners to protect themselves from intruders, her application was dismissed by the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Judge. Describing Mr Blight as a 'decent' and 'mild natured' man, Lord Judge said the decision to let him walk free last October was 'humane and justifiably merciful'. 'This man feared for his life and initially picked up the knife to defend himself,' he ruled. 'He retaliated momentarily and in the most extenuating and exceptional circumstances. 'This was a decent middle-aged man in his own home, goaded beyond endurance by an attack on him with an axe by a much younger man. 'This was not an ordinary case - this was an exceptional one.'

In a further swipe at the Attorney General, the judge allowed an appeal against the length of Mr Blight's suspended term, cutting it from two years to one.

Last night Mr Blight - who served four and a half months in jail on remand awaiting trial - slammed the Attorney General for 'wasting' taxpayers money. The case against him is thought to have cost £30,000. He said: 'Obviously I am relieved it is over. But I am disgusted how much taxpayers money has been spent on the case. I was just trying to protect myself. 'At the end of the day you should have the right to defend yourself in your own home. My attacker should have gone to court rather than me.'

His case will bolster the argument that householders have a right to protect their home. The Home Secretary has pledged to review the law and the Tories have made a manifesto commitment that 'have-a-go heroes' should be protected from prosecution.

Mr Blight was charged with wounding with intent to cause grievous bodily harm after he stabbed 19-year-old Nelson on May 30 last year. He pleaded guilty at Teesside Crown Court. Nelson, the son of his partner, was high on drink and drugs when he tried to use the family home in Thornaby, Teesside, as a hideout from drug dealers to whom he owed money. Mr Blight confronted the teenager after he spent the day drinking and smoking cannabis and told him that he wanted him out of the house. He did not want drug dealers endangering his three children with threatening visits to the home.

Nelson reacted furiously and picked up an axe that Mr Blight had loaned him for a camping trip, striking him twice on the leg with the blunt side and causing the older man 'massive bruising'. The teenager was bundled into the garden by a friend and his mother, while still brandishing the axe and threatening Mr Blight. Mr Blight then took up the knife, fearing that Nelson would break back into the house and went into the garden intending to scare him into giving up the axe. But when he tried to grab the axe Nelson swung it at him, inflicting a cut to his elbow and several cuts to his hands.

Mr Blight lashed out and stabbed the teenager once in the base of the neck, severing major blood vessels. He later told police he had forgotten he was holding the knife. Mr Nelson underwent emergency surgery and survived.

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The false rape claims never stop coming in Britain

Even though the British are pretty good about jailing the women concerned. False rape claims never happen according to some feminists but Britain is vivid disproof of that

A woman who stripped and tied herself up before telling police she had been sexually assaulted was found guilty of perverting the course of justice, police said. Gail Sherwood told officers she was dragged off to woods by a man with a weapon who then raped her as she returned to her car from walking her dogs on April 25 2008. On June 1 2008 she said she was hit over the head and taken in her car to a remote spot where she was raped. She was found naked from the waist down on one occasion with gaffer tape over her mouth and her hands tied behind her. A police helicopter also found her half-naked behind a fence on another occasion.

The 52-year-old told detectives a stalker was harassing her and then blamed a motorist after they were involved in a minor car crash. He was arrested on suspicion of harassment but released without charge after being held for 20 hours.

Sherwood, of Thrupp, Stroud, Gloucestershire, was caught after police set up a security camera outside her house. The mother of two initially admitted making up the harassment and stalking claims after her arrest but she denied three charges of perverting the course of justice at Bristol Crown Court. A jury today found her guilty of all three counts and she is due to be sentenced on March 4, police said.

Detective Chief Inspector Paul Shorrock said outside court: "Gloucestershire Constabulary take all reports of sexual assaults very seriously and following Ms Sherwood's allegations an in-depth and thorough investigation was launched. "Ms Sherwood has wasted significant police time and resources with these false allegations but what is most upsetting is the way a false claim such as this completely undermines those people whose lives have been devastated by genuine crimes of this nature.

"We are pleased that justice has been done but most importantly we want to reassure genuine victims that each case is treated in a sensitive manner by specially trained officers. "We work in close partnership with the Sexual Assault Referral Centre (SARC) at Gloucestershire Royal Hospital and would like to encourage victims to report their experience to ensure they are given support and that everything possible is done to bring offenders to justice."

SOURCE



It is Britain's liberal elite that feels tortured

Why has torture become a flashpoint political issue today when it was so flagrantly ignored in the past?

The British government’s loss in the Court of Appeal yesterday, where three judges ruled that it must make public a report on the alleged torture of British resident Binyam Mohamed while in US captivity for seven years, has delighted anti-torture campaigners. But while it is always satisfying when government censorship is overturned, it is worth asking what lies behind today’s radical and media distaste for torture. It might look like an edgy campaign, but there is something distinctly narcissistic and even conservative about it.

Binyam Mohamed is an Ethiopian national who moved to Britain in 1994. In 2001, he travelled to Afghanistan, for disputed reasons, and he was arrested in Karachi in 2002 while attempting to fly to Britain on a false passport. He was detained in Afghanistan, allegedly tortured in Morocco, and eventually flown to Guantanamo Bay, where he was held prisoner from 2004 to February 2009.

The UK Foreign Office redacted information pertaining to America’s alleged ‘cruel, inhuman and degrading’ treatment of Mohamed, but the Court of Appeal has now insisted that the censored text be published. Anti-torture campaigners have welcomed the court’s implication that the UK government, as one headline summarised it, was ‘devious, dishonest and complicit in torture’ (1).

Yet one question remains: when and why does torture become a flashpoint political issue and a concern for the liberal elite? Recent history tells us that torture does not always make the front pages of the papers and does not always agitate radical and liberal campaigners to the extent that they will build campaigns against it. It is not the acts of torture themselves that determine whether or not torture becomes a big issue, but the political circumstances surrounding them and the question of whether the conflict in question is considered legitimate and the government of the day is seen as ‘decent’ or ‘decadent’.

This was brought home by a headline in the Guardian in December last year. After years of frontpage splashes on America’s torture of suspected Islamic militants, on 21 December 2009 the Guardian ran a headline saying: ‘British army waterboarded suspects in 1970s.’ (2) It was a report on Liam Holden’s appeal against his 1973 conviction for killing a British soldier in Northern Ireland, a conviction that was based on an unsigned confession extracted from Holden by members of the Parachute Regiment who put a ‘towel over his face before pouring water from a bucket over his nose and mouth, giving him the impression that he was drowning’. In other words, they ‘waterboarded’ him.

This is extraordinary – no, not that waterboarding and other forms of torture took place in Northern Ireland, which many of us have known about for years, but the fact that it took until 2009 for an act of torture that took place in Britain in 1973 to be covered by a British newspaper. What is more extraordinary is that over the past five years, liberal campaigners have spent a great deal of energy trying to uncover evidence of America’s waterboarding of terror suspects, and Britain’s knowledge of this fact, while there remain in recent British history unexposed and unexplored instances of waterboarding.

Torture was widespread during the conflict in Northern Ireland between 1969 and 1994 – but it was rarely, if ever, covered by the British press, and it certainly did not generate indignant campaigns. Irish republicans and Catholics arrested by the police or picked up by the army were subjected to sleep deprivation, ‘white noise’ tactics, waterboarding, ‘death scenarios’ (in which they were made to believe that they were about to die, such as being held out of low-flying helicopters), threats of violence and actual violence.

Suspects were stripped naked – to ‘enhance their vulnerability’ – and had ‘opaque cloth bags with no ventilation’ put over their heads. They were subjected to ‘wall-standing’, which involves forcing a suspect to adopt the search position by leaning against a wall – one suspect was kept like this for 43.5 hours. Other suspects were kept in close proximity to machinery that made a continuous, monotonous whine and were kept awake for days on end. This reportedly drove one man to try to commit suicide by banging his head against the metal pipes running though his cell (3).

There were some complaints about these activities. The Republic of Ireland complained to the European Court of Human Rights in 1971. Amnesty International carried out some investigations. The British government launched the Compton Inquiry into torture in 1971, which found, unsurprisingly, that there had definitely been ‘ill-treatment’, but no torture. But the use of torture in Northern Ireland did not galvanise British liberals and it certainly did not stir the media to send investigative reporters to find out as much as possible for the purposes of frontpage splashes.

The disparity between today’s coverage of the torture of suspected Islamic militants and yesterday’s non-coverage of the torture of suspected Irish republicans is not only striking because it reveals a double standard in British liberal angst. More fundamentally, it shines a light on the politics of torture and the question of when and why torture becomes a problem for a certain section of society.

The use of torture in a conflict normally becomes a flashpoint issue only when that conflict has lost its legitimacy in the eyes of the government’s critics and when a government itself is seen as decayed and past its sell-by date. In other words, the obsession with torture is quite often a proxy for expressing angst about the governments that rule over us and about our values and way of life. Torture is rarely focused on as a way of criticising military interventionism per se or as part of a campaign to support the right to self-determination of other peoples, but mainly as a means of self-criticism and self-exploration, of expressing a broader feeling of weariness with our own ruling bodies.

Fundamentally, the reason why torture in Northern Ireland was never uncovered is because the vast majority of British liberals and radicals considered Britain’s war in Ireland to be legitimate. They might have occasionally expressed concerns when things went too far – such as with the massacre of 13 unarmed Catholics on Bloody Sunday in 1972 or the use of plastic bullets against protesters or allowing 10 republican prisoners to die in the Hunger Strike of 1981 – but their acceptance of Britain’s right to govern Northern Ireland, and therefore to suppress the opponents of British rule, meant they approached that conflict with no serious critical zeal. By contrast, the ‘war on terror’ is seen by many as illegitimate, or at least as questionable, which means they are more likely to ask awkward questions.

Even then, however, the focus on torture as the worst possible aspect of the ‘war on terror’ launched by America and Britain is revealing. Torture specifically is taken up because it is the issue through which the liberal elite’s main grievance about the ‘war on terror’ can be expressed: no, not that it is a reckless, ill-thought-through foreign venture that has denigrated the sovereign and democratic rights of the people of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq, but that certain aspects of it bring shame on British society.

It is instructive to look back at another time in history when torture became a major focus of liberal and radical campaigning – during France’s Algerian War of 1954 to 1962. For some French intellectuals, the worst thing about France’s war against the Algerian independence movement was not the massacres of Algerians or the suppression of the Algerian people’s self-determination, but the French military’s use of torture against Algerian prisoners (as depicted in the brilliant 1962 film The Battle of Algiers). French intellectuals described the torture as ‘la gangrene’, a disease that would infect French society. Jean-Paul Sartre admitted to feeling ‘uneasy’ about the FLN, the main national liberation army fighting against the French colonialists, but said of the French military: ‘But the torture? Can someone retain a friendship with someone who approves of it?’ (4) Many of the French campaigners against torture in Algeria made clear that they didn’t support the Algerian independence fighters but were concerned about the impact that the use of torture would have on ‘French integrity and the reputation of the French military’ (5).

Discomfort with torture became a way of expressing concerns about the state of French society itself. Today, too, torture has become more about us than them. Contemporary anti-torture campaigners also refer to torture as a ‘disease’ (echoing the French ‘gangrene’) that is undermining what it means to be British (6). But today’s myopic focus on torture is history repeated as farce. At least Sartre and other French intellectuals opposed torture in an attempt to recapture ‘the France of the Rights of Man and Citizen’, and of course others went further still and questioned France’s suppression of African people’s democratic rights (7). Today’s anti-torture campaigners, by contrast, merely want to expose Britain’s alleged slavishness to the evil Bushites and generate a Love, Actually-style world in which floppy-haired British PMs stand up for fair play and decency. It is really they who feel tortured, morally and politically.

The usefulness of the torture issue today is that it allows campaigners to focus on the acts of one military man against one suspect, thus removing broader national and democratic questions and replacing them with narrow discussions of fairness and individual morality. They have disgracefully distilled the entire ‘war on terror’ and the destruction of Afghanistan into What Was Done To Binyam Mohamed.

SOURCE



Tofu can harm the environment more than meat, finds WWF study

Becoming a vegetarian can do more harm to the environment than continuing to eat red meat, according to a study of the impacts of meat substitutes such as tofu. The findings undermine claims by vegetarians that giving up meat automatically results in lower emissions and that less land is needed to produce food.

The study by Cranfield University, commissioned by the environmental group WWF, found that many meat substitutes were produced from soy, chickpeas and lentils that were grown overseas and imported into Britain. It found that switching from beef and lamb reared in Britain to meat substitutes would result in more foreign land being cultivated and raise the risk of forests being destroyed to create farmland. Meat substitutes also tended to be highly processed and involved energy-intensive production methods.

Lord Stern of Brentford, one of the world’s leading climate change economists, caused uproar among Britain’s livestock farmers last October when he claimed that a vegetarian diet was better for the planet. He told The Times: “Meat is a wasteful use of water and creates a lot of greenhouse gases. It puts enormous pressure on the world’s resources. A vegetarian diet is better.”

However, the Cranfield study found that the environmental benefits of vegetarianism depended heavily on the type of food consumed as an alternative to meat. It concluded: “A switch from beef and milk to highly refined livestock product analogues such as tofu could actually increase the quantity of arable land needed to supply the UK.” A significant increase in vegetarianism in Britain could cause the collapse of the country’s livestock industry and result in production of meat shifting overseas to countries with few regulations to protect forests and other uncultivated land, it added.

Donal Murphy-Bokern, one of the study authors and the former farming and food science co-ordinator at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, said: “For some people, tofu and other meat substitutes symbolise environmental friendliness but they are not necessarily the badge of merit people claim. Simply eating more bread, pasta and potatoes instead of meat is more environmentally friendly.”

Liz O’Neill, spokeswoman for the Vegetarian Society, said: “The figures used in the report are based on a number of questionable assumptions about how vegetarians balance their diet and how the food industry might respond to increased demand. “If you’re aiming to reduce your environmental impact by going vegetarian then it’s obviously not a good idea to rely on highly processed products, but that doesn’t undermine the fact that the livestock industry causes enormous damage and that moving towards a plant-based diet is good for animals, human health and the environment.”

The National Farmers’ Union said the study showed that general statements about the environmental benefits of vegetarianism were too simplistic. Jonathan Scurlock, the NFU’s chief adviser for climate change, said: “The message is that no single option offers a panacea. The report rightly demonstrates the many environment benefits to be had from grazing pasture land with little or no other productive use.”

The study also found that previous estimates of the total emissions of Britain’s food consumption had been flawed because they failed to take account of the impact of changes to the use of land overseas.

SOURCE



Biased British climate "inquiry" member resigns

A member of the panel set up to investigate claims that climate change scientists covered up flawed data was forced to resign last night, just hours after the inquiry began. Philip Campbell stood down after it was disclosed that he had given an interview in which he defended the conduct of researchers at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU), insisting that they had done nothing wrong.

He said in a statement that he was stepping down to ensure that the ability of the review team to carry out its investigation would not be called into question. The inquiry, led by Sir Muir Russell, was set up after stolen e-mails from the CRU scientists prompted accusations that they had been manipulating and concealing the data.

The panel members said in a statement yesterday morning that they did not have a “predetermined view on climate change and climate science”. However, it then emerged that Dr Campbell, the editor-in-chief of the journal Nature, had told Chinese state radio last year that he did not believe that the e-mails had shown any evidence of improper conduct. “The scientists have not hidden the data. If you look at the e-mails there are one or two bits of language that are jargon used between professionals that suggest something to outsiders that is wrong,” he told the station. “In fact, the only problem there has been is on some official restrictions on their ability to disseminate data. Otherwise they have behaved as researchers should.”

In his statement Dr Campbell said that he had made the remarks in good faith on the basis of media reports of the leaked e-mails. “As I have made clear subsequently, I support the need for a full review of the facts behind the leaked e-mails,” he said. “There must be nothing that calls into question the ability of the review to complete this task and, therefore, I have decided to withdraw from the team.”

Sir Muir said: “I have spoken to Philip Campbell and I understand why he has withdrawn. I regret the loss of his expertise but I respect his decision.”

The University of East Anglia announced yesterday a second inquiry that would investigate the validity of the CRU’s reports, which present evidence that man-made emissions are causing global warming.

The decision to hold a second inquiry is an admission that Sir Muir’s investigation will not be sufficient to restore trust in claims that the world is at grave risk from rising temperatures. The university is one of Britain’s leading research centres on climate change and helps to compile the global temperature record published by the Met Office. This record is used by the Government to justify its targets for heavy cuts in carbon emissions.

The Royal Society, a fellowship of leading scientists, has agreed to help the university to choose the team that will conduct the new inquiry. However, the university itself will have the final decision on who is selected. It pledged that the members would have “the requisite expertise, standing and independence”.

SOURCE



Climategate: the official cover-up continues

If there’s one thing that stinks even more than Climategate, it’s the attempts we’re seeing everywhere from the IPCC and Penn State University to the BBC to pretend that nothing seriously bad has happened, that “the science” is still “settled”, and that it’s perfectly OK for the authorities go on throwing loads more of our money at a problem that doesn’t exist.

The latest example of this noisome phenomenon is Sir Muir Russell’s official whitewash – sorry “independent inquiry” into the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) scandal. The inquiry has not even begun and already it has told its first blatant lie – seen here on its official website: "Do any of the Review team members have a predetermined view on climate change and climate science? No. Members of the research team come from a variety of scientific backgrounds. They were selected on the basis they have no prejudicial interest in climate change and climate science and for the contribution they can make to the issues the Review is looking at."

By what bizarre logic, then, did Sir Muir think it a good idea to appoint to his panel the editor of Nature, Dr Philip Campbell? Dr Campbell is hardly neutral: his magazine has for years been arguing aggressively in favour of the AGW, and which published this editorial in the wake of Climategate:

The e-mail archives stolen last month from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (UEA), UK, have been greeted by the climate-change-denialist fringe as a propaganda windfall (see page 551). To these denialists, the scientists’ scathing remarks about certain controversial palaeoclimate reconstructions qualify as the proverbial ’smoking gun’: proof that mainstream climate researchers have systematically conspired to suppress evidence contradicting their doctrine that humans are warming the globe.

This paranoid interpretation would be laughable were it not for the fact that obstructionist politicians in the US Senate will probably use it next year as an excuse to stiffen their opposition to the country’s much needed climate bill. Nothing in the e-mails undermines the scientific case that global warming is real — or that human activities are almost certainly the cause. That case is supported by multiple, robust lines of evidence, including several that are completely independent of the climate reconstructions debated in the e-mails.

Dr Campbell has since resigned his post – and rightly so, as the Global Warming Policy Foundation makes clear. But are we to feel any more confident about the alleged neutrality of another of Sir Muir’s appointments, Professor Geoffrey Boulton?

Bishop Hill certainly doesn’t think so. He notes that Professor Boulton….

* spent 18 years at the school of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia

* works in an office almost next door to a member of the Hockey Team

* says the argument over climate change is over

* tours the country lecturing on the dangers of climate change

* believes the Himalayan glaciers will be gone by 2050

* signed up to a statement supporting the consensus in the wake of Climategate, which spoke of scientists adhering to the highest standards of integrity

* could fairly be described as a global warming doommonger

* is quite happy to discuss “denial” in the context of the climate debate.

You wonder, if Sir Muir really is that determined to keep his inquiry totally unbiased, independent, above-board and scrupulously neutral why he just doesn’t go the whole hog and appoint Al Gore, James Hansen and Rajendra Pachauri. I doubt the conclusions they’d reach would be any different.

SOURCE





12 February, 2010

Amnesty collaborates with a Muslim extremist who has supported jihadi movements

Amnesty was taken over by the left years ago

If you were a prisoner of conscience, a dissident, hounded by the authorities, imprisoned without proper process, shut up, shut in and shut down, then an organisation such as Amnesty International might be your one breath of air. Those Amnesty postcards, which seem like flinging a dart from a mountainside, may keep someone from despair. So the news that there is trouble at Amnesty is not welcome, except to tyrants. And yet it is hard not to see these ructions as being Amnesty’s own fault.

The problem came to prominence at the weekend when The Sunday Times reported that one of Amnesty’s senior officers, Gita Sahgal, had circulated a memorandum extremely critical of the organisation’s collaboration with a group called Cageprisoners. Cageprisoners’ most famous figure is the former Guantánamo inmate Moazzam Begg, a man whose three years’ incarceration without trial has helped, for many liberals, to turn him into a kind of Muslim Mandela — an embodiment of the wrongly accused.

Saghal does not dispute Begg’s ordeal. She objects to Begg, however, being used as a kind of poster boy for important Amnesty campaigns when, in her view, he is not a great stickler for the rights of others.

Amnesty, by promoting Begg, she argues, has misled people about his jihadi politics, and been blinded to the nature of his organisation, which “actively promotes” anti-woman Islamic ideas and individuals. Yesterday, probably inevitably, Sahgal was suspended from her job.

Readers of this column possibly know that I don’t believe all the millenarian twaddle about Eurabia, the innate anti-democracy of Islam, or that most Muslims somehow don’t want what most non-Muslims want: respect, equal rights and happy children. But that said, it seems to me that there are parts of our right-thinking establishment that are too cowardly or aesthetically unwilling to separate the religious sheep from the jihadi goats.

A couple of years ago I was invited to debate with Moazzam Begg, but in the event he pulled out. I wasn’t surprised. It was clear to me, and I had suggested it, that while there was no evidence that he was a al-Qaeda sympathiser, there certainly was plenty of reason to believe that he was a political extremist who supported jihadi movements abroad.

In the wake of the Sahgal statement, that strangely likeable but unreasonable Muslim convert, the former journalist Yvonne Ridley, complained that Begg was being “demonised” and asserted that he was “a great supporter of women and a promoter of their rights”.

Consider. By his own account, in 1993, Begg had gone to a training camp in Afghanistan. There he was addressed by the camp’s leader who told him: “To me jihad is a drug I’m allowed to take and I always come back for more ... As long as Muslim lands are occupied I have vowed to fight for their liberation.” The leader mentions several such lands, including Kashmir and Israel, and quotes approvingly a Chechen fighter whose credo was “much of mankind has chosen life as a path to death, but I have chosen death as a path to life”.

Is Begg horrified by this commitment to never-ending war? Not a bit. “The Afghan visit was a life-changing experience for me. No few days have ever affected me like that. I had met men who seemed to me exemplary in their faith and self-sacrifice, and seen a world that awed and inspired me.”

So Begg ends up taking his family, including two daughters, to live in Taleban-run Afghanistan in the summer of 2001. This must be about two months after the blowing up of the Bamiyan Buddhas, two years after the televised execution of a woman in the football stadium in Kabul, and in the full knowledge that Taleban police were beating women for improper dress, had fired all women in public service, would not permit women to see male doctors and had more or less abolished education for women.

Yet Begg writes: “I believed that the Taleban had made some modest progress — in social justice and upholding pure, old Islamic values forgotten in many Islamic countries.” As far as one can tell, Begg has never recanted this belief.

According to Begg, his organisation exists to represent (Muslim) prisoners who, in his words, have neither been charged nor been sent to trial. But the Cageprisoners website demands solidarity for several jihadis who have been both tried and convicted, and for several more who are at large. One wonders whether Amnesty has perused the full list, which includes Aafia Siddiqui, the Pakistani- American currently on trial for shooting US soldiers. Also there are Abu Hamza, Sajid Badat, who confessed to being part of the plot to blow up an aircraft with a shoe-bomb, and was sentenced to 13 years in 2005, and Andrew Rowe, the convert also given 13 years for acts preparatory to terrorism.

Then there is Begg’s dalliance with Anwar al-Awlaki, the man whom the recent pants bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, has fingered as being his practical inspiration. Awlaki has called for the killing of the Danish cartoonist, Kurt Westergaard, praised the Somali girl-stoners and murderers of al-Shabaab for “giving us a living example of how we as Muslims should proceed to change our situation” and described hatred of the unbeliever as being a “central element to our military creed”. In a recorded interview with al-Awlaki from two years ago Begg says to this man: “Obviously many people want you to come here to the UK to give lectures ... a lot of your supporters, mashallah.” “Mashallah” is an expression of approval.

As if all that were not enough a video exists of a senior researcher at Cageprisoners, Asim Qureshi, addressing a rally of Hizb ut-Tahrir. Qureshi says: “When we see the example of our brothers and sisters fighting in Chechnya, Iraq, Palestine, Kashmir, Afghanistan then we know where the example lies. When we see Hezbollah defeating the armies of Israel, we know what the solution is and where the victory lies.” The brothers and sisters in Afghanistan are the Taleban.

When he was putting together his week of lectures on the war against terror at UCL in 2007, the would-be bomber Abdulmutallab invited Begg, Qureshi, Ridley and that dangerous idiot George Galloway to speak. He did so because he knew that the cumulative effect of their commissions and omissions would be to radicalise his audience. Not in defence of human rights. Not in favour of Western agendas such as Amnesty’s, but against democracy, women’s rights and peace. You have to be a something of a fool not to see it.

SOURCE



13 years of Climategate emails show tawdry manipulation of science by a powerful cabal at the heart of the global warming campaign

Having now read all the Climategate emails, I can conclusively say they demonstrate a level of scientific chicanery of the most appalling kind that deserves the widest possible public exposure.

The emails reveal that the entire global warming debate and the IPCC process is controlled by a small cabal of climate specialists in England and North America. This cabal, who call themselves “the Team,” bully and smear any critics. They control the “peer review” process for research in the field and use their power to prevent contrary research being published.

The Team’s members are the heart of the IPCC process, many of them the lead authors of its reports.

They falsely claim there is a scientific “consensus” that the “science is settled,” by getting lists of scientists to sign petitions claiming there is such a consensus. They have fought for years to conceal the actual shonky data they have used to wrongly claim there has been unprecedented global warming this past 50 years. Their emailed discussions among each other show they have concocted their data by matching analyses of tree rings from around 1000 AD to 1960, then actual temperatures from 1960 to make it look temperatures have shot up alarmingly since then, after the tree rings from 1960 on inconveniently failed to match observed temperatures.

The emails show that some of them at least concede in private that the world was warmer 1000 years ago (in the Medieval Warm Period) than it is today, but the emails also show they had to get rid of the MWP from the records to claim today’s temperatures are unprecedented.

They show Team members becoming alarmed and despondent at global temperatures peaking in 1998, then slowly falling to the present, while publicly trying to hide the fact that there was a peak and now a decline.

Revealingly, they show them even smugly nominating each other for prestigious awards, using factually wrong details in the information sent in nominating letters in support of the awards.

The Climategate emails (and accompanying computer data) were almost certainly leaked by a whistleblower inside the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (the “CRU” — the supplier of much key IPCC historic climate data), not hacked from there by an outsider, as initially thought. Their sheer volume and content makes that clear, as do postings to some websites made by the still anonymous leaker. They are a treasure trove that begins on March 7 1996 and runs to November 12 2009, just before they were released and first publicised in an incredulous post on the Watts Up With That blog, which had been sent a link to them.

Don’t take my word for what their contents reveal. Read the emails for yourselves. They have been conveniently posted online in full and in date order. My article here looks at a range of them to back up the assertions I have made about what they reveal. It would take a book to discuss all of them, and you can be sure several books are already being written.

Much more HERE



History of England starts at 1700, says British university

Academics have attacked a decision by a top university to scrap research into English history before 1700. It was claimed that the move by Sussex University risked jeopardising the nation’s understanding of the subject and “entrenching the ignorance of the present”. Under plans, research and in-depth teaching into periods such as the Tudors, the Middle-Ages, Norman Britain, the Viking invasion and the Anglo-Saxons will be scrapped, along with the Civil Wars.

The university will also end research into the history of continental Europe pre-1900, affecting the study of the Napoleonic wars and the Roman Empire.

The university said it was “reshaping” its curriculum and research following a £3m cut in Government funding. Last week, universities across the country were told their budgets were to be slashed by £449 million next year, including a £215m reduction in teaching funding, with threats of further cuts in the future. Lord Mandelson, the Business Secretary, has claimed that institutions can use the opportunity to focus resources on their strongest areas.

But in a letter to The Daily Telegraph, 17 leading historians said the move was short-sighted and risked undermining the public’s understanding of the past. “To cut everything but the most modern puts in peril the public function of history, entrenching the arrogance of the present and making a mockery of the claim by the minister behind these cuts that 'we also wish to keep this country civilised',” said the letter.

The academics, who all trained at Sussex, said that the decision to sever ties with European history before 1900 was a particularly retrograde step. “For a university which has long prided itself on its European links to abandon the serious study of such pivotal areas of modern history as the French Revolution will mean depriving Sussex graduates of the mental furniture of educated Europeans,” said the letter. “The university risks damaging its reputation as a centre of knowledge for European culture and history more widely.”

The letter to the Telegraph was signed by historians from universities including Nottingham, Southampton, Trinity College Dublin, Michigan, Sydney University and the University of London Institute in Paris.

Sussex is among dozens of universities being forced to make savings following savage budget cuts announced by the Government. The University and College Union estimated that more than 15,000 jobs – the majority academic posts – could disappear in the next few years. Positions are being cut at King’s College London, Westminster, Leeds, Sheffield Hallam and Hull, while entire campuses belonging to the universities of Cumbria and Wolverhampton are being shut. Several loss making courses are also being scrapped across the country. The University of the West of England has already scrapped French, German and Spanish, and Surrey has dropped its BA in humanities.

The letter called on the university to stop proposals to withdraw from “research, and research-led teaching, in English social history before 1700 and the history of continental Europe before 1900”.

Prof Paul Layzell, deputy vice-chancellor, said: “The proposal put forward by the University of Sussex to withdraw from certain areas of research and specialist teaching in history reflects three factors: first, a strategic determination to focus our research in areas of sustainability and strength; second, to align undergraduate provision with areas of demonstrable demand; and, thirdly, a need to reflect the Government’s financial policy for higher education. “The history degree at Sussex, as befits a programme offered by one of the top 20 departments in the country, will continue to be broad based and intellectually challenging.”

He insisted there were no plans for teaching to be “entrusted with non-specialists”.

SOURCE



Muslim hate speech to be prosecuted for once?

We read:

"Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister is considering pressing charges against a pro-Palestinian protester who allegedly hurled racist abuse at him during an address at the Oxford Union.

Danny Ayalon was addressing the student audience on Monday evening when protesters waving Palestinian flags began shouting in Arabic and English. One was alleged to have shouted the Arabic phrase “Idhbah al-yahud”, meaning “kill the Jews”, before being ejected by security.

The Israeli Embassy in London was examining video footage of the incident yesterday to determine whether the phrase was uttered. If so, it could lead to hate crimes charges. Mr Ayalon, a member of the right-wing nationalist party Yisrael Beitenu, said he had a moral duty to press charges against the protesters, believed to be a member of a pro-Palestinian student society at Oxford.

Source

Because “kill the Jews” is an incitement to violence, it might not even be protected speech in the USA. And British law is much more restrictive than American law.



The stupid British Left set to destroy more British jobs: "Unilever become the latest company to threaten to pull out of UK over rising taxes. The boss of Unilever has warned the company could be forced to move abroad if hit with further tax rises. The loss of the firm that makes PG Tips and Hellman's mayonnaise would be a major embarrassment for the Government and the biggest casualty to date. Unilever can trace its history in the UK back to the 1890s. A number of companies tired of constantly changing tax regimes and onerous regulations introduced under Labour have already moved abroad. And many business leaders have become increasingly infuriated with the Government for hitting hardest those British firms that make large slices of their profit overseas. The UK has one of the highest corporation tax rates in Europe, while the return to 17.5 per cent VAT will also deal a blow to firms. High-earners from April will be hit with Gordon Brown's 50p tax rate, a move which some critics have said will trigger an exodus of workers. Mr Polman said: 'We do have choices where we put research laboratories, choices for manufacturing facilities and choices where we put our senior management. In Ireland corporation tax is 12.5 per cent and the basic 2009 corporate federal rate of tax in Germany was 15 per cent."





11 February, 2010

Confirmed: The Labour Party deliberately threw open the doors to mass migration in a secret plot to make Britain multicultural

Labour threw open the doors to mass migration in a deliberate policy to change the social make-up of the UK, secret papers suggest. A draft report from the Cabinet Office shows that ministers wanted to `maximise the contribution' of migrants to their `social objectives'. The number of foreigners allowed in the UK increased by as much as 50 per cent in the wake of the report, written in 2000.

Labour has always justified immigration on economic grounds and denied it was using it to foster multiculturalism. But suspicions of a secret agenda rose when Andrew Neather, a former government adviser and speech writer for Tony Blair, Jack Straw and David Blunkett, said the aim of Labour's immigration strategy was to `rub the Right's nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date'. Mr Neather said he helped to write the 2000 report which outlined a strategy to `open up the UK to mass migration'.

The document was not published in its original format over fears of an adverse public reaction. Instead it was released a year later as a research document on the economic benefits of migration.

Mr Neather's claims last October were denied by ministers, including Justice Secretary Jack Straw, who said they were nonsense. A draft of the original Cabinet Office report has now been published following a freedom of information request by Migrationwatch. It contains six references to social policy, all of which were removed from the later, published version. One deleted paragraph said a framework was needed to `maximise the contribution of migration to the Government's social and economic objectives'.

Another says that migration pressures will intensify because of demographic changes across Europe but that this `should not be viewed as a negative'. It states: `The entry control system is not closely related to the stated policy objectives. This is particularly true in the social area, where in the past the implicit assumption has largely been that keeping people out promotes stability.'

Also cut out was a statement that `in practice, entry controls can contribute to social exclusion'.

Damian Green, Tory immigration spokesman, said: `This is a very significant finding because it would mean that Labour's biggest long term effect on British society was based on a completely secret policy. `This shows Labour's open-door immigration policy was deliberate and ministers should apologise.'

Mr Neather's claims were made in a column for the London Evening Standard. He said Labour's relaxation of immigration controls was a deliberate attempt to engineer a `truly multicultural' country and plug gaps in the jobs market. He remembered `coming away from some discussions with the clear sense that the policy was intended - even if this wasn't its main purpose - to rub the Right's nose in diversity'.

Whitehall research shows that the number of foreigners arriving in the UK rose from 370,000 in 2001 to 510,000 in 2006. The figures for net foreign immigration- the number of non-British citizens arriving, less the number leaving - are even more dramatic. In 2001, this figure stood at 221,000 but by 2007 it had risen as high as 333,000 - up 50 per cent. The number fell to 250,000 in 2008 mainly because of a decline in arrivals from Eastern Europe.

It had already emerged that the Cabinet Office report was censored to remove details of possible links between immigration and organised crime, street fights and begging. One of the sections missing from the final report said: `There is emerging evidence that the circumstances in which asylum seekers are living is leading to criminal offences, including fights and begging.' A second section warned: `Migration has opened up new opportunities for organised crime.'

Last night, immigration minister Phil Woolas said there was `no open door policy on migration'. He said the draft report made clear that migration was `not a substitute for Government policies on skills, education and training of British citizens - which the Government has invested in over the past decade'.

Source



What a scandal that this guy was prosecuted: British police and prosecutors hate those who defend themselves

A father who defended his family from drug-crazed thugs by wounding one with a Samurai sword has been cleared by a jury. David Fullard, 47, was prosecuted for attacking the two strangers who forced their way into his home and threatened to rape his partner and kill his two teenage children.

He insisted he was a desperate man acting legally in self-defence and struck out once with the ornamental sword, because it was the only weapon to hand.

The blow almost sliced off the ear of Michael Severs, one of the thugs. The prosecution refused to accept that his actions amounted to lawful self-defence and argued it was 'over the top' to attack a man armed with a knuckleduster by using a 'battlefield weapon'. The two thugs were both high on a cocktail of drink and drugs at the time, the court heard.

But after a five-day trial at Hull Crown Court, Mr Fullard, a builder, broke down in tears as he was found not guilty of unlawful wounding. It ended a nine-month ordeal for a man described by neighbours as 'honest and caring'. He had faced the threat of a long prison term. The case represents another landmark in the debate over how far a householder should be allowed to go in defending his home from an intruder.

Yesterday jobless Severs, 22, and Michael Smith, 19, escaped with a suspended prison sentence and 100 hours of community work after admitting affray at the court. Judge Michael Mettyear then lifted a reporting restriction on the case.

Outside court Mr Fullard criticised the judge for allowing the men to get away with a 'slap on the wrists'. He added: 'You cannot stand around and do nothing when someone-comes to your house and starts threatening your family.' Mr Fullard has been supported throughout by partner Susan Neal, 53, and his sons Danny, 14, and Tom, 17, who were in the house during the incident in March last year. He added: 'I only struck one blow with the sword. If there had been a walking stick or umbrella by the door I would have hit him with that.'

The court heard Severs and Smith, who both have previous convictions for violence, vaguely knew Mr Fullard's elder son and knocked on the door of the family home in Brough, East Yorkshire, claiming he owed them £5 from earlier in the day. It was a ruse to get cash but Smith barged into the living room while Mr Fullard was upstairs and threatened Miss Neal. She told the jury he picked up the ornamental sword and said: 'Do you want some of this?' She said: 'They threatened to rape me, burn the house down, kill the kids and kill Dave.'

Smith then ran out and Mr Fullard was confronted by Severs in the garden. The thug was armed with a spade and a knuckle-duster. Mr Fullard told the jury he picked up the sword and 'hit him once' and intended for the 'flat of the sword' rather than the blade to connect. He then called police. Mr Fullard was arrested and only later did police arrest Smith and Severs, who had his ear re-attached in hospital.

SOURCE



Elderly British patient was abandoned for two days in hospital store cupboard with little food or medication



Confused and in pain, 80-year-old Doris McKeown is kept in a hospital cupboard while she awaits emergency surgery. The pensioner was stored away for 48 hours in a tiny windowless room, with only shelves of hospital supplies for company. On the door outside was a sign saying 'Dignity in Care'.

But inside the store cupboard - called a 'treatment room' by management but a 'broom cupboard' by Mrs McKeown - she suffered the indignity of being overlooked for medication and meals.

She was taken to Norfolk and Norwich Hospital last October needing an urgent operation for compression of the nerves in her spine, which can lead to paralysis. The mother of two said: 'It was a relief to be in hospital as I knew it was a serious condition, but in the middle of the night I was transferred to a storeroom off the main ward because they hadn't got enough beds. It was like a broom cupboard.'

When she was seen by the consultant, he had to squeeze in with two other doctors and Mrs McKeown's daughter Dr Helena McKeown, a GP who is also chairman of the community care committee at the British Medical Association. ' The consultant didn't seem surprised, it seemed to happen regularly,' said Mrs McKeown, whose late husband Joe was a newspaper photographer. 'I had nurses coming in all the time to pick up the supplies and they were very good, but as I wasn't on the proper ward I missed out on some of the rounds for meals and medication. 'I didn't get put on the ward until after the operation two nights later. 'It's extraordinary that patients have to be looked after in a cupboard because the hospital doesn't have enough beds.'

Dr McKeown said: 'My mother needed emergency surgery and she ended up in a cupboard. Where's the dignity in care?' The family is appalled that patients are routinely housed in such rooms as a result of a controversial scheme using private companies to build NHS hospitals for a profit. They claim the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital not only has fewer proper beds than the old building it replaced but that the public will be paying for it for decades.

Dr McKeown has raised her concerns with the hospitals' watchdog, the Care Quality Commission, and last week gave evidence to MPs. She said the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) scheme that funded the hospital was undermining the NHS. 'The PFI scheme is being used throughout the NHS, which pays private companies for a period of 25 to 30 years,' she said. 'It's like a mortgage with a very high rate of interest and maintenance costs that my four children will be paying for 30 years - and they can't even build a hospital with sufficient space for local patients.'

The £229million Norwich hospital, opened in 2001, pays an annual rent of £40million a year. Figures show the NHS will pay out £63billion for privately financed hospitals - £52billion more than they are worth. The first payments for hospital Private Finance Initiatives began in 1999 and the NHS still owes £58billion on 106 contracts over the next three decades. The BMA will today launch a campaign against the 'commercialisation' of the NHS, which it says is putting profits ahead of patients.

Andrew Stronach, of the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital, said it has 1,010 beds - more than the 952 replaced in two old hospitals. But he admitted that 27 wards had such 'treatment rooms'. He added: 'They are not cupboards, they are treatment rooms. They are normally used for patients who are risk assessed before being discharged.'

SOURCE



Christian teacher 'forced out' of British school after complaining Muslim pupils praised 9/11 hijackers 'as heroes'

Hate speech and racism from Muslims is OK, apparently

A Christian teacher yesterday claimed he was forced out of his job after complaining that Muslim pupils as young as eight hailed the September 11 hijackers as heroes. Nicholas Kafouris, 52, is suing his former school for racial discrimination. He told a tribunal that he had to leave his £30,000-a-year post because he would not tolerate the 'racist' and 'anti-Semitic' behaviour of Year 4 pupils.

The predominantly Muslim youngsters openly praised Islamic extremists in class and described the September 11 terrorists as 'heroes and martyrs'. One pupil said: 'Don't touch me, you're a Christian' when he brushed against him. Others said: 'We want to be Islamic bombers when we grow up', and 'The Christians and Jews are our enemies - you too because you're a Christian'.

Mr Kafouris, a Greek Cypriot, taught for 12 years at Bigland Green Primary School in Tower Hamlets, East London. According to Ofsted 'almost all' its 465 pupils are from ethnic minorities and a vast proportion do not speak English as a first language. The teacher claims racial discrimination by the school, its headmistress and her assistant head after they failed to take action about the comments made by pupils to him.

He said there was a change in attitude of the pupils after the atrocities of September 11, 2001. They told him: 'We hate the Christians' and 'We hate the Jews', despite his attempts to stop them. He said he filled out a Racist Incident Reporting Sheet but claimed headmistress Jill Hankey dismissed his concerns.

In a statement submitted to the Central London Employment Tribunal he said: 'Miss Hankey proceeded to excuse and justify the pupil's behaviour, conduct and remarks to me as if I had no right to be offended by the child's remarks and conduct. 'Amongst Miss Hankey's justifications for the child's remarks, she said, "If the child was older, say 15, I might take it more seriously. He's only nine - he's only doing it to wind you up".' He added: 'I felt the head's behaviour and conduct towards me amounted to direct religious discrimination. I was intimidated in the way she spoke to me which indicated "Don't come back with such issues again".'

Mr Kafouris, a bachelor, said the comments became more frequent after the head did nothing about the initial incidents. 'In late November and December 2006, a number of unacceptable and blunt racist, anti-Semitic and anti-Christian remarks were being made by various children in Year 4 where I taught, such as, "The Twin Tower bombers are heroes and martyrs". 'Some children were expressing delight at the death and killing of people of other cultures and religions.

'In the last week of November 2006 a child was talking about stabbing another child and I told him this was dangerous talk and that a lawyer had recently been stabbed by teenagers. His reply was, "I'm glad that man died". "Why?" I asked. "Because he's a Christian and English and we're Muslim".'

He claimed that during a religious education lesson about Jonah and the whale, one of the pupils asked if Jonah was a Jew, before shouting: 'I hate the Jews, they're our enemies.'

Mr Kafouris said he again tried to speak to Miss Hankey about it. 'The head's response was hostile and offensive again. The very first thing she said to me was, "Oh, you again! You're the only teacher that reports these things! Nobody else does!" 'Four times she repeated, "It's because of your lack of discipline that they're saying these things".'

Mr Kafouris was signed off with stress by his GP at the end of February 2007 after assistant head Margaret Coleman warned him not to challenge the pupils in class about their remarks. He says the lack of support from the school has made him clinically depressed and unable to work. He was sacked in April last year.

SOURCE



The final humiliation from Climategate

When the Climategate material was made public the warming crowd circled the wagons, insisted they meant nothing, and claimed they were the victims of climate skeptics acting as criminals who "hacked" into their sites. As the material made the rounds of the media, reports defending the warming advocates were replaced with more skeptical reports. Media outlets now saw a pattern of abuse. While the media was still on-board about warming panic the top warming scientists had lost their luster in the ideas of the press. The result has been more skepticism about the entire process and how material is being reported, as this blog has reported on recently.

When the material first materialized the scientists, whose actions were exposed, screamed criminal conspiracy. They were sure they were the victims of some sophisticated hacking effort. Recently the David King, a political appointee and a scientist, claimed that some foreign intelligence agency must have been behind the exposure. The hints were that it was the Russians.

But the U.K.'s left-0f-center Guardian newspaper, says that police investigations aren't turning up evidence of a hack job at all: "So far, the police investigation has got nowhere. It is not even clear whether the crime of computer data interception has actually occurred." The Guardian says that the University of East Anglia "has confirmed that all of this material was simply sitting in an archive on single backup CRU server, available to be copied."

The article notes that previously a warming skeptic had posted some data from the Climate Research Unit, which had been denied to him by the CRU. It was assumed that he, or someone helping him, had hacked the data. It later turned out that the data was on-line but that the CRU had deleted the links but leaving the data up for anyone to browse through if they stumbled upon it. In other wrods, there was no hacking, just the CRU was as careful with storing data as they appear to be with analyzing it.

One of the nasty skeptics stumbled across something similar. In an attempt to go to the CRU's site he came to the directory of all material on the site istead. This was due to an error at the CRU. This horrible skeptic then called the CRU and informed them that their own site was basically leaking information that they were hiding from the public. The Guardian says that after that warning the "CRU failed to batten down the hatches."

The Guardian quotes one skeptic on how such things happen. He said that files get put "in an ftp directory which was on the same central processing unit as the external webserve, or even worse, was on a shared driver somewhere to which the webserver had permissions to access. In other words, if you knew where to look, it was publicly available."

If true that is the final humiliation for the warmers from Climategate. As the warming loyalists at the Guardian put it, if this proves to be the case, as it is increasingly starting to look like, then "UEA may end up looking foolish. For there will be no one to arrest." This is precisely the reason this blog refused to call the release "hacking" as the mainstream media rushed to do. I stated that all we knew was that the data was out there. We had no proof it was hacked. It could have been intentionally leaked as well. We just didn't know. But since the media was quite anxious to make the warmers look good, and skeptics look villianous, they rushed to an unwarranted jugment—and not for the first time either. As a final precaution, we STILL DON'T KNOW.

SOURCE



Drivers of "green" cars let down by yet another British government policy change

Drivers who took the Government’s advice and chose a low-emission car could be left with a white elephant after a U-turn by ministers. Britain’s biggest supplier of biofuels will announce today that it is closing its pumps because the Government is ending financial support from April.

It is the second time in five years that the Government has changed its mind and cancelled subsidies after encouraging motorists to invest in a particular type of green car. In 2005 it withdrew grants for drivers to convert their cars to LPG. Now motoring groups are advising drivers to think very carefully before accepting Government grants for electric cars because ministers’ current enthusiasm for them may not last.

Morrisons will withdraw pumps at 144 filling stations that dispense B30, a blend of 30 per cent biodiesel and 70 per cent ordinary diesel, which is used in 5,000 vehicles.

The supermarket group is also considering withdrawing E85, a blend of 15 per cent normal petrol and 85 per cent ethanol. Businesses and individuals which have adapted their vehicles to use the high blends of biofuels will find that their investment has been wasted. They will have to revert to using ordinary petrol and diesel and will no longer be able to claim any environmental advantage.

Avon & Somerset Police, Somerset County Council, Wessex Water, Wessex Grain and the Environment Agency all bought fleets of flexible-fuel vehicles on the assumption that the Government would continue its 20p a litre duty discount on ethanol. This will be withdrawn on April 1.

Edmund King, the president of the AA, said: “People who invested in these vehicles capable of taking these high blends of biofuel are being left high and dry.”

SOURCE



Isn't that "alternative" medicine great?

A civil servant suffered cancer and kidney failure after taking pills containing a banned substance sold by a Chinese herbal shop to clear up spots on her face, a court heard today. Patricia Booth took the medicine bought at a shop in Chelmsford, Essex, for five and a half years, a jury was told. The Chinese Herbal Medical Centre advertised its products as ‘safe and natural and without side effects’, the Old Bailey heard.

But Mrs Booth was taken ill just months after she stopped taking the pills, which were found to contain the banned substance aristolochic acid, the court was told. Mrs Booth's health deteriorated to such an extent that her kidneys ‘were destroyed’, she developed cancer, and suffered a heart attack. She now visits hospital three times a week for dialysis and was be unable to attend court, instead giving evidence via videolink, jurors heard.

Ying ‘Susan’ Wu, 48, of Holland-on-Sea, Essex, denies a series of charges relating to the sale of the medicine to Mrs Booth. She and shop owner Thin ‘Patrick’ Wong, 47, of Southend, deny further counts of possession of medicines without authorisation.

Julian Christopher, prosecuting, said Wu was employed as a ‘Chinese doctor’ at the shop, which was in business from late 1996 until August 2003. He said: ‘The case is concerned with pills which the prosecution allege were given by Susan Wu to one particular patient to take every day to clear up spots on her face and which the patient continued to take for five and a half years. ‘They did indeed clear up her skin but turned out to have disastrous consequences. They completely destroyed her kidneys and gave her cancer.’

Mr Christopher said Mrs Booth was in her mid-40s when she first started taking the pills in 1997. ‘She was the manager of a Government office in charge of 50 to 60 people and in good health save that she was troubled by unsightly patches of spots similar to acne," he said. ‘She had seen various NHS doctors but all they could offer was more antibiotics and she didn't like the idea of taking antibiotics long term.’

He said Mrs Booth was walking past the Chinese medicine shop when she saw a leaflet advertising its products. The court heard that in February 1997 she and her husband went into the premises for a consultation and met Wu. Mrs Booth was taken to a consultation room where an elderly Chinese man was introduced to her as a doctor. He asked her questions in Chinese, translated by Wu, jurors were told.

The court heard she was given herbs to boil up and drink but did not like the ‘horrible’ taste and on returning to the shop was given some pills instead by Wu, and did not see the elderly male ‘doctor’ again. She was told by Wu to take a cap full - about 30 pills - three times a day, Mr Christopher said.

‘The pills did clear her spots and she went back to the shop again every 10 days or so, buying two or three bottles each time from Susan Wu, with the dose decreasing over time as her skin got better.’ Mrs Booth carried on taking them until around November 2002, the court heard.

Mr Christopher said: ‘She wasn't feeling well then. She thought she had flu and she hadn't been feeling well for some considerable time. ‘She didn't get better and went to hospital in February 2003 for a blood test. There it was discovered she was suffering from chronic long-term kidney failure. Sadly her condition has got worse since then.’ Mrs Booth has been on dialysis since 2003, the court heard.

She was initially supposed to have the treatment at home and was put on the list for a kidney transplant until 2006, when she developed cancer, Mr Christopher said. Mrs Booth had to have ‘major surgery’ to remove her urinary tract and kidneys, the court was told. She must now go to hospital three times a week for dialysis, and in August 2008 had a heart attack. She has undergone further surgery and is still waiting to go back on the kidney transplant list, jurors heard.

Source





10 February, 2010

Note to EYE ON BRITAIN readers

I have been trying to find a Wordpress template (theme) for this blog which I like -- without much success. A couple of themes that I rather liked looked good in Firefox but were a mess using IE8 or Google Chrome! Amazing. The Wordpress people must use Firefox only. I have now reverted to what I think is the most legible theme and will stick with that for the foreseeable future. It's pretty plain but at least it seems to be fine regardless of which browser you use.

For users of non-Windows operating systems (such as the various versions of Linux), however, it's a different ball-game. If Linux users have any difficulty, they should probably try different browsers until they find one that works (or maybe use Debian instead of Fedora etc.).



Expert backs Conservatives on figures that show violent crime in Britain is increasing

Under the Labour Party ALL British statistics have become about as reliable as Stalin's

Tory fears over the true scale of violent offences have been backed by a leading crime expert. Criminologist Roger Graef said official surveys were 'incomplete' and hid the 'dark figure of violent crime'. He cast doubts on Labour claims that violence was declining, saying: 'Most violent crime is associated with alcohol and consumption is going up.'

Tory Home Affairs spokesman Chris Grayling was rebuked last week for misusing Home Office statistics to argue that the number of violent crimes had soared under Labour.

In an interview, Mr Graef, below, voiced his 'worries' that official crime figures did not reveal the true scale of violence affecting women and children. He warned that attacks on children not reported to police were absent from the official British Crime Survey (BCS) - other areas of unreported crime are included to get a wider picture of trends. Mr Graef said: 'We did our own survey of 1,800 schoolchildren aged 14 and 15. One in three had been kicked or hurt. One in four admitted to kicking or hurting somebody else in a month and that's not recorded anywhere.'

He also pointed out the Home Office-compiled BCS did not include unreported assaults at hospitals and prisons. And Mr Graef highlighted the limitations of official police crime records - based on his own research. He said: 'We spent two weeks in Oxford and watched how much crime, how much violence, how much harm was happening.' Out of 12 incidents that ended with the victim attending hospital, only seven were reported to police.

Mr Graef also disclosed how domestic violence goes unreported. 'Women's groups say that 35 assaults are made on the victim before they call the police. That means there's a dark figure of violent crime which we simply cannot know for sure.'

Sir Hugh Orde, president of the Association of Chief Police Officers, said Mr Graef was 'absolutely right' to say the BCS was incomplete, and that 'some crimes will not end up on a police computer'.

SOURCE



Politically correct British cartoon is boring

When Dennis the Menace had a politically correct makeover last year, his creators aimed to remove 'any traces of nastiness'. But according to at least one young reader of The Beano, the new watered-down Dennis is now devoid of all fun, too. Eight-year-old Jacob Rush was so upset by the changes that he sent an email to the comic's bosses, begging them to bring back the old menacing Dennis. He wrote: 'I don't like Dennis because he doesn't have his catapult or water pistol any more and he's not menacing enough - I want the old Dennis back.' When no one replied, he called the comic's Dundee HQ and received a letter blaming a newly sanitised BBC cartoon version.



The cartoon first aired on the CBBC channel in September, but to comply with BBC guidelines, out went Dennis's peashooter, catapult, water pistol and even his scowl, replaced by a boyish grin. Instead of picking on Walter the Softy, Dennis - thankfully still wearing his red and black jumper and accompanied by his dog Gnasher - now lands himself in scrapes through his everyday life.

The PC Dennis has appeared in the weekly comic ever since the television launch, after bosses decided not to have different Dennises in print and on TV.

Jacob's parents Mark, 33, and Virginia, 39, of Ipswich, said he had been reading The Beano for two years but had noticed the changes to Dennis - who first appeared in 1951 - over recent months. Mr Rush, an IT project manager, said: 'Jacob was concerned about the way Dennis looked and the fact he doesn't seem menacing any more because he is not allowed to have a peashooter or bully Walter. 'For Jacob it means Dennis is boring. He doesn't want to read Dennis the Menace any more because he's not interested in him.'

Mrs Rush, 39, a teacher, said: 'Jacob loves reading my husband's Beanos from the 1970s. Dennis is just not as naughty as he was and that was the whole point of Dennis, children can live out their naughtiness through him.'

Beano editor Alan Digby admitted there had been 'a number of' complaints, adding: 'There are certain compliance rules relating to the way things like bad behaviour can be depicted on children's television, particularly on the BBC. 'I would not say Dennis has been watered down, he has evolved as the character has done throughout his lifetime. He still has his catapult and peashooter, but does not use them against people any more.'

SOURCE



British Border Agency long way from target of removals, says watchdog

The border agency is “a very long way” from removing failed asylum seekers from the country promptly, according to a highly critical watchdog report published today. The report discloses that two further immigration backlogs built up as the organisation struggled to deal with hundreds of thousand of old asylum cases and the deportation of foreign prisoners. Ann Abraham, the Parliamentary Ombudsman, is scathing about the poor standard of service provided to some migrants by the agency which in 2006 was described by the Home Secretary at the time as “not fit for purpose”.

Unsuccessful asylum applicants should promptly leave the country or be removed as soon as practicable, Ms Abraham said. She added: “In our experience the agency are a very long way from achieving this.”

Ms Abraham found many cases where the agency failed to meet the most basic standards of administration including keeping customers informed, meeting promised standards of service and dealing with the public helpfully. She said: “Indeed there are numerous examples where the agency has been unable to perform at even a basic level of administration, such as reading and replying to letters, keeping proper records, keeping case files together and in the proper place, and notifying the applicant of their decision.”

Many of those suffering the worst service are migrants in two new backlogs that emerged as the agency diverted staff to deal with 440,000 old asylum cases and tackle the deportation of foreign national prisoners who had served their sentences. Backlogs of 77,000 applications for residence from European nationals and 33,000 cases of people seeking leave to remain in the country built up. Ms Abraham said that she had found numerous instances when the agency failed to reply to letters or deal with complaints from applicants or even give migrants an indication of when they would receive a decision.

In the past three years, the ombudsman received more than 1,300 complaints from from MPs about the work of the agency and of those she investigated 97 per cent were upheld.

One man received a refund of £755 in fees and £2,500 compensation for severe distress and inconvenience caused by failings in handling his case. The man, known only as Mr P, was a Jamaican who was given indefinite leave to remain in 1990. It took the agency 3½ years to provide a stamp confirming his right to stay for his new 2004 passport. During that time, Mr P was threatened with deportation and missed funerals in Jamaica because he was afraid he would not be able to re-enter Britain, the report said.

Ms Abraham said that the agency had made significant progress in recent years towards clearing backlogs but she said, given the scale of its problems, there could be no short term fixes. She said that the agency still had a long way to go to meet principles of good administration and dealing with complaints.

Lin Homer, chief executive of the UK Border Agency, said: “We take the ombudsman’s recommendations seriously and welcome the assessment that our complaints systems are improving.” She said that the agency, which has a budget of £2 billion a year and 24,500 staff, was continuing to make progress in dealing with the legacy backlog of 450,000 older asylum cases and had already concluded more than 235,000 cases. “I am confident we are on course to conclude these cases by the summer of 2011.”

SOURCE



The Olympics: Top people dominate in sport too

Interesting analysis by Matthew Syed -- a British table tennis champion -- below. He has Labour party sympathies but it is amusing that he himself is an example of that which he describes. He got a First in PPE from Balliol. His explanation for the high sporting achievements of rich people is reasonable but probably incomplete. There does seem to be a syndrome of general biological fitness such that intelligence and good health go together and usually lead to material success -- much of which is hereditary and thus leads to an upper class of broad accomplishments overall. Shockingly "incorrect" of course

I am often asked what it is like to be a part of Team GB at the Olympic Games. My answer is always the same. Look beyond the obvious stuff — the rivers of testosterone, the insane ambition and the lust for glory. Look beyond the postcompetition fraternising, so widespread and competitive that it could be a medal event all on its own. Look beyond that and what are you left with? Well, in a word, Posh. With a capital P.

How can I describe it? Imagine a strawberry and Pimm’s garden party with lots of oversized pectorals and gluteals bustling for space and you get a sense of the ambience in the Great Britain section of the athletes’ village. I played at my first Olympics in Barcelona in 1992 and the pre-competition reception hosted by the Princess Royal was more formal than a Bullingdon Club bash. This may sound a little strange if you accept the notion that sport has nothing to do with social class; that the Olympics is a meritocracy in which individuals succeed on the basis of hard work and talent rather than cash and privilege.

But look at the statistics and you will see instantly the connection between Posh and podium. According to a report leaked last week, more than a third of British competitors at the London Olympics in 2012 will hail from private schools — a staggering number when you consider that only 7 per cent of children are educated in the independent sector. But consider this, too: a full 58 per cent of athletes who won gold at the 2004 Olympics in Athens were educated at private schools, including a good few from the super-elite public schools such as Eton.

I’m sure we are all terribly proud of our medal-winners wherever they hail from, but isn’t it extraordinary that state schools are so chronically underrepresented? Isn’t it disquieting that, after hundreds of millions of pounds have been splurged in an attempt to get kids from inner-city comprehensivess on the podium in 2012, the whole thing is still dominated by the fee-paying minority? Isn’t it curious that an arena as seemingly transparent and objective as sport is as class-ridden as the judiciary?

Although the figures for the Winter Olympics this month have not been published, one imagines that things are not so terribly different in Vancouver, where the Games start at the weekend — at least in the blue-riband event of Alpine skiing.

It is estimated that the hotel, travel and coaching costs of Chemmy Alcott, Britain’s best-known skier and a medal prospect, are about £300,000 a year — not a figure easily affordable for most Brits (Alcott, incidentally, went to a private school, Surbiton High). Of the top under-16 skiers, one is a relative of the former England cricket captain David Gower and another is the son of an hereditary peer. If the Olympic slopes are not quite Méribel, perhaps they are not far off.

Even the bureaucrats at the British Olympic Association are super-posh. The chairman is Colin Moynihan, a decent cove otherwise known as the 4th Baron Moynihan. Simon Clegg, the long-serving chef de mission who left the organisation a year or so ago, is a public school-educated former military man. And its president is the ultimate blue-blood: the Princess Royal, winner of the European Eventing Championships in 1971 and mother of Zara Phillips, who is one of the leading contenders for gold in 2012 (Zara was educated at Gordonstoun, the Scottish boarding school, since you ask).

I remember arriving at the Team GB block of the Olympic village in Barcelona in 1992 and having the impression that I had walked into an Oxford or Cambridge college (in fact, the Oxbridge intake is more socially balanced than Team GB’s Athens gold medal-winners, with about 60 per cent of students coming from the state sector). It was all very pleasant and polite, with lots of joshing and laughter — but, as a product of the comprehensive education system, I couldn’t suppress the feeling that this fine group of athletes was unrepresentative of our nation. And to be honest, despite my respect for them all, I couldn’t help feeling just a little sad about that.

So, the question is: why are those who went to state schools failing to punch their weight in Team GB? Is there an inherent bias in the selection policy? Has some super-sporty genetic mutation spread among the private schools without touching the comps?

In fact, the answer is both simple and depressing: the Olympic Games is chock-full of rich men’s sports — the kind that are difficult to play and all but impossible to excel in without oodles of cash.

More here



Low intelligence among top heart health risks

Wow! I never thought I would have a report from Reuters agreeing with me. I seem to remember reading good stuff from David Batty before, though. He's not so batty. The idea of programs to increase IQ is a big laugh, though. It would have been done ages ago if it were possible. There have been attempts, but any improvements have been transitory. See HERE

Intelligence comes second only to smoking as a predictor of heart disease, scientists said on Wednesday, suggesting public health campaigns may need to be designed for people with lower IQs if they are to work. Research by Britain's Medical Research Council (MRC) found that lower intelligence quotient (IQ) scores were associated with higher rates of heart disease and death, and were more important indicators than any other risk factors except smoking.

Heart disease is the leading killer of men and women Europe, the United States and most industrialised countries. According to the World Health Organisation, cardiovascular diseases and diabetes accounted for 32 percent of all deaths around the world in 2005.

It is well known that people with poorer education and lower incomes often face higher risks of ill health and a range of diseases. Studies have pointed to many likely reasons, including limited access to healthcare and other resources, poorer living conditions, chronic stress and higher rates of lifestyle risk factors like smoking.

The MRC study, which analysed data from 1,145 men and women aged around 55 and followed up for 20 years, rated the top five heart disease risk factors as cigarette smoking, IQ, low income, high blood pressure, and low physical activity.

The researchers, led by David Batty of the MRC and Social and Public Health Science Unit in Glasgow, Scotland, said there were "a number of plausible mechanisms" which might explain why lower IQ scores could raise the risk of heart disease -- in particular a person's approach to "healthy behaviour." Those who ignored or failed to understand advice about the risks of smoking or benefits of good diet and exercise for heart health would be more l