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31 January, 2010

“Turkeys voting for Christmas”

That's what the intellectual elite think of working class conservative voters. They think that voting Left is OBVIOUSLY in the best interests of the workers and cannot understand that the base of support for the GOP is mainly among the less affluent. They think that working class people are cutting their own throats by voting conservative. It's an old claim but an extended version of it has just appeared -- where else? -- on the BBC.

So what is the reason for this incredible folly among conservatives? Mental illness, emotional disturbance etc., of course. I can't be bothered to excerpt any of the nonsense this time. Suffice it to say that Drew Westen and Thomas Frank -- the usual suspects -- are trotted out to give their versions of the "explanation". How the BBC missed out on getting a comment from George Lakoff is the only mystery.

To give the author -- David Runciman -- his due he does point to the elitism and arrogance of the Democrats as a reason why ordinary people might not vote for them and he does reject the old but very extreme Hofstadter claim that it is all "paranoia". But, even, so, the explanation he gives is that conservatives are voting with their emotions and not their reason.

I am confident that in ten minutes I could give Runciman enough reasons for the rationality of conservatism to jar even him but why stray into politics when we are discussing political psychology -- which is my academic specialty? As some measure of how long Runciman's nonsense has been around my paper on the subject dates back to 1972! and it appeared in The British Journal of Political Science. So if Runciman -- who claims to be a political scientist -- were a competent scholar he would already be aware of it and would mention the evidence in it. But what Leftist is bothered about evidence?

What I found was that it was the working class conservatives who were "normal". It was the working class Leftists who were particularly rebellious and haters of the society in which they lived. That characterization of Leftist voters is of course not at all surprising but it does put the boot on the other foot for Runciman. It is the Leftist voters who are emotion-driven, not the conservatives. And my conclusions were based on carefully validated survey research using a representative general population sample, not the vague inferences of Thomas Frank, Drew Westen etc.

What a laugh they are!



More Britons die as lone NHS GPs cover thousands after hours

SOME parts of Britain are relying on just one out-of-hours GP at night to serve more than 240,000 residents. An investigation by The Sunday Times into the inadequacy of round-the-clock cover has established two further deaths, including that of a three-year-old boy, after failures in the system.

Brighton, Bolton and Wigan are among the areas where a lone doctor is responsible for dealing with late-night emergencies. The news follows revelations last weekend that just two GPs provide cover for Suffolk and its 600,000-strong population on some nights.

Mark Simmonds, the Tory health spokesman, said repeated warnings about out-of-hours cover had gone unheeded by ministers: “It’s disgraceful that the government hasn’t taken action over this before.”

Brighton and Hove primary care trust (PCT) has one GP to cover an area with 248,000 residents on most nights. It claimed the doctor can receive as few as 10 calls each evening. However, in one case involving the trust, a three-year-old boy from Hove died from blood poisoning after the failure of the out-of-hours service. The frantic parents of Joseph Seevaraj phoned the duty doctor at 11pm on a Sunday and asked whether they should take their son to hospital because he was vomiting and suffering from diarrhoea. Joseph was already taking antibiotics for tonsillitis and the doctor advised his parents, Jean and Nicola, to wait for those to take effect. They watched over the toddler closely, but he died a few hours later.

A consultant in paediatric intensive care later said she believed the child would have survived if his parents had received proper advice from the out-of-hours service. “He needed basic medical attention,” said Veronica Hamilton-Deeley, the coroner, at the inquest. “The failure to provide it was gross failure.” South East Health, which provides round-the-clock services for Brighton and Hove PCT, said it had learnt from the incident in January 2008.

This weekend it emerged that only one GP serves 310,000 residents in the Wigan area on most nights, while 270,000 residents in the Bolton area also have to routinely rely on a single out-of-hours doctor. In North Somerset there is just one GP for 200,000 residents on a week night. Cambridgeshire has three GPs at night, Norfolk has four and Cumbria has six.

Such skeleton cover was introduced when GPs negotiated new contracts in 2004, boosting their average salary to more than £100,000 and allowing them to opt out of providing round-the-clock care.

This week a coroner is expected to conclude the inquest into the death of David Gray, a 70-year-old from Manea, Cambridgeshire. Gray died in February 2008 after being given a massive overdose of diamorphine by Daniel Ubani, a locum doctor from Germany who had flown in for his first out-of-hours shift.

While some PCTs say that just one or two GPs can adequately cover a population of more than 250,000, others have more doctors available for home visits. Under South Birmingham PCT there are 11 doctors on overnight duty, each covering an average population of about 35,000. Hampshire has 13 GPs on duty at night and Devon has eight, working at medical centres across the county.

Patients are often unaware if their local service is in crisis because most trusts do not publish performance reports. NHS Bristol said last week that a report on the quality of its out-of-hours GPs’ service was “confidential” and “commercially sensitive”.

Most round-the-clock services struggle to fill shifts with local GPs. Instead they use doctors from other parts of the country or foreign GPs who fly in for their shifts. A parliamentary debate was told last week of a case in Cornwall in which a patient had been confronted with a foreign doctor who used “an electronic word converter” to communicate. Other patients have complained of waiting eight hours for a doctor to arrive.

There have also been complaints that out-of-hours GPs do not have access to patient notes and sometimes fail to diagnose serious conditions. In one case, a doctor working as a duty GP in West Yorkshire was suspended from the General Medical Council register after he failed to examine an elderly patient properly. She died the next day. Dr Krzysztof Robak, 62, commuted more than 175 miles from Surrey, where he worked for a diet clinic, to his Yorkshire employer, Local Care Direct. When he visited the 86-year-old patient, he failed to check her blood pressure or take her temperature and did not consider her seriously ill.

Robak said yesterday that he had drunk two bottles of wine four days earlier and was suffering from the medication he took for his gout. He told the family of the woman: “Look what two bottles of wine can do to you” — a comment they considered inappropriate. Robak said he had told his employer he had been feeling unwell. “I felt guilty because I failed this woman,” said Robak. “I did not refer her to the hospital because she appeared to be over the crisis.”

He said he felt he had been treated harshly over the mistake and plans to appeal against his suspension. Local Care Direct, a nonprofit organisation which provides out-of-hours care services for 2.5m people in Yorkshire, said it had vetted Robak rigorously before employing him. It said it did not consider that he had contributed to the patient’s death in July 2007, but it had raised concerns about his conduct.

SOURCE



British teacher fired for offering to pray for sick girl gets job back

Only after the intervention of a national newspaper, though

A Christian teacher who was sacked after she offered to pray for a sick child has won her job back. The case of Olive Jones was highlighted by The Mail on Sunday just before Christmas. After a case review council bosses now say she can return as supply maths teacher.

At the time Mrs Jones, 54, said she had been a victim of religious persecution, having been told her behaviour was akin to bullying. Last night she said she was ‘delighted’, adding: ‘I am hugely relieved. I feel I’ve been vindicated. 'But I wouldn’t have been able to do it without The Mail on Sunday.’

Mrs Jones was dismissed within hours of discussing her religious beliefs and offering to pray for the sick girl during a home visit. The family lodged a formal complaint, saying they were nonbelievers and the girl had been ‘traumatised’ by Mrs Jones’s attempts to impose her beliefs. As she worked only about 12 hours a week without a formal contract, Mrs Jones’s job with North Somerset Tuition Service in Nailsea, near Bristol, could be ended with immediate effect.

However, Mrs Jones said she had been unaware that the family were unhappy with her attempt to comfort them. It emerged during the case review that the mother had made a previous complaint when Mrs Jones had spoken of her belief in miracles. However, Mrs Jones was not told about the criticism. On a later visit, she talked about Heaven and asked if she could pray for the child, but did not do so after she learnt the family were not believers. She thought she had left the family on good terms.

‘My bosses assumed I knew about the complaint,’ she said. ‘But had I known I would never have offered to pray.’ North Somerset Council agreed it could be appropriate for a teacher to share his or her faith, but a spokesman added: ‘A careful judgment has to be made. We have now offered Olive further work.’

Andrea Williams, director of the Christian Legal Centre, which advised Mrs Jones, said she was ‘delighted’.

SOURCE



Ethnic minority staff paid 10% less than white workers at British "equality" watchdog

The Government’s controversial equality watchdog was last night accused of ‘rank hypocrisy’ for flouting its own policies on fair pay. The Equality and Human Rights Commission has angered business leaders by ordering a crackdown on hard-pressed companies that fail to pay the same rates to employees doing similar work.

But official figures show that more than two years after it was set up to stamp out discrimination, the commission is paying its own ethnic minority workers almost ten per cent less than white staff – an embarrassment for its black chairman Trevor Phillips. And disabled workers at the quango, which employs more than 500 staff, have slipped behind their able-bodied colleagues by nearly nine per cent.

Moreover, the figures show the pay gap for both minority groups has worsened over the past year, and female staff also face pay discrimination compared to male counterparts.

Tory MP Philip Davies, who elicited the pay-gap figures in questions to Women and Equalities Minister Angela Eagle, said: ‘This is rank hypocrisy. They should be ashamed of themselves.

‘We have the ludicrous situation where the taxpayer-funded body that goes around lecturing everyone else about fair pay is one of the worst offenders themselves.’

The details have emerged after a period of turbulence at the commission, which last summer saw the resignation of six commissioners, criticism of the management style of Mr Phillips and calls for his resignation.

In 2008, The Mail on Sunday revealed that the £112,000-a-year equality chief was paid by Channel 4 to give it advice on the fallout of the Big Brother racism row involving Indian actress Shilpa Shetty, provoking accusations of a conflict of interest.

The EHRC – which received more than £61million from the Government last year – encourages companies to carry out equal-pay audits to compare the earnings of staff doing the same job or similar work that requires equivalent skills, effort and decision-making. A commission spokesman said: ‘We recognise we should have published these gaps,’ adding that it was now planning to do so within the next few months.

The latest available figures up to the end of October show that the quango is paying 9.66 per cent more to white staff than to ethnic minority staff, 8.9 per cent more to able-bodied than to disabled employees and 3.04 per cent more to men than women. The commission spokesman said that its salary inequalities were far lower than national averages, while they employed higher than average numbers of women and minority groups. Referring to the new pay-gap figures, the spokesman said: ‘These gaps are largely due to the process of creating the commission by bringing together three different legacy commissions, each with their own pay and conditions. ‘We are determined to address the issue and we are carrying out a review of our pay and reward systems.’

SOURCE



Terror suspects exploit the British system to stay anonymous

Terror suspects are wrongly exploiting the British legal system to try to "hide behind a cloak of anonymity", the country's most senior judges warned yesterday. The identities of some suspects have been kept secret by the courts without "the slightest justification", the Supreme Court ruled.

In a significant ruling which lawyers said had implications for other high profile criminal cases the judges appeared to criticise courts for granting anonymity too freely without sufficient consideration of whether it is truly in the public interest. The practice is now so commonplace that it is "ingrained" among court officials, the judges said.

Lord Rodgers warned concealing the identities of suspects "casts a shadow over entire communities" and said the public had a "legitimate interest in not being kept in the dark". The comments came as Lord Rodgers ruled the identity of four terror suspects who appealed against assets-freezing orders made by the Treasury could be made public. A fifth suspect had already been named. He launched a thinly veiled attack on the fact lawyers for some of the individuals had issued a press notice attacking the assets order using "highly charged language" against the Government but then, at the same time, demanded anonymity.

In a separate ruling, the Supreme Court said the Treasury had acted unlawfully in freezing the assets.

But in a far-reaching ruling on whether the men could be identified, Lord Rodgers described an "efflorescence of anonymity orders" in recent years and they had become an "ingrained habit". He highlighted that in 2007 eight out of 58 appeals in House of Lords involved at least one party had anonymity, while 15 of 74 cases did in 2008.

In a decision hailed as a victory for press freedom, he signalled they were only justified in an "extreme case", such as when a party or witness in proceedings or their family might be in peril of their lives or safety as a result of being identified. But none of the terror suspects could show that identifying them would put anyone at risk of physical violence, the Supreme Court said.

The Justice said his concerns over anonymity could also apply to suspects on control orders, who are all granted anonymity, but stressed other factors could be involved in such cases.

One leading lawyer suggested the ruling could even have implications for anonymity surrounding criminal cases such as the recent Edlington torture case where the two culprits have been kept secret because they are children.

As a result of the ruling, the men were identified as brothers Michael Marteen, formerly known as Mohammed Tunveer Ahmed, Mohammed Jabar Ahmed and Mohammed Azmir Khan, who the Treasury alleged they had reasonable grounds for suspecting they were or might be, facilitating the commission of acts of terrorism. The fourth is Hani El Sayed Sabaei Youssef also known as Hani al-Seba’i an Egyptian lawyer who arrived in Britain in 1994 claiming that he had been tortured by the police because he represented Islamist clients.

A fifth man was already identified as Mohammed al-Ghabra, after having been identified through a Bank of England press release. He is alleged by the US authorities to have “backed al-Qaeda and other violent jihadist groups, facilitating travel for recruits seeking to meet with al-Qaeda leaders and take part in terrorist training.”

In the case of Youssef, Lord Rodgers said the public would be "astonished" to learn that the courts, up until now, had prevented them from knowing he had successfully sued the Home Office for wrongful imprisonment in an openly reported case. He also expressed concern that courts were being misled, saying that Youssef was named in a Bank of England press release in 2005 and had featured in press articles.

Lawyers for Youssef and Marteen had argued they should remain anonymous because identifying them would have a serious effect on their private lives and their families, and expose them to suspicion to which they would be unable to respond.

Lord Rodgers said there "never was the slightest justification" for anonymity orders, and pointed out that "the courts below appeared to have granted anonymity orders without any very prolonged consideration and without explaining their thinking". In the case of Marteen, he added that "what he really objects to is being identified as a person who the Treasury suspects, on what it regards as reasonable grounds, facilitates or may facilitate terrorism".

He also highlighted the fact that the three brothers, along with al-Ghabra, had "sought to enter the debate about the merits of freezing orders.

Solicitors for Marteen had issued a press release which attacked the Government for sacrificing "fundamental rights and liberties" and had "dishonoured their pledge of accountability".

Lord Rodgers said: "It is unusual, to say the least, for individuals to enter a debate, using highly charged language and accusing the Government of dishonouring a pledge, but at the same time to insist that they should have the right to hide behind a cloak of anonymity. It is also unusual for someone to assert the need for the press to respect his private and family life by not reporting his identity while simultaneously inviting them to report his version of the impact of the freezing orders on himself and members of his family."

He said while allowing the media to identify the men could lead to "outrageously hostile" coverage about them, that was "not sufficient reason for curtailing that freedom" for all members of the press.

As a result of the separate ruling on the unlawfulness of freezing orders, the Treasury has promised fast-track legislation. The court had ruled in favour of the five men who have had their assets frozen under an order brought in by the government without a vote in Parliament. A Treasury spokesman said: "The Government is committed to maintaining an effective, proportionate and fair terrorist asset freezing regime that meets our UN obligations, protects national security by disrupting flows of terrorist finance, and safeguards human rights. "It's important to be clear that this ruling does not challenge the UK's obligations under the UN Charter to freeze the assets of suspected terrorists, which we will continue to meet. "We will introduce fast-track legislation to ensure there is no disruption to our terrorist asset freezing powers."

SOURCE



Criminal prosecution against Phil Jones?

Dr Phil Jones – the (suspended) head of the Prince of Wales’s favourite AGW-promotion institution the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia – had a narrow squeak the other day. Though the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) found his department in breach of Freedom of Information laws (Jones and his team had deliberately withheld or conspired to destroy data), Jones was able to escape prosecution on a technicality.

Next time, he may not be so lucky. Our friend John O’Sullivan at Climategate.com has been looking closely at the Climategate emails and reckons there is still a very strong case for a criminal prosecution, which could see Dr Jones facing ten years on fraud charges.

O’Sullivan argues: "What is not being intelligently reported is that Jones is still liable as lead conspirator in the UK’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) and may face prosecution under the United Kingdom Fraud Act (2006). If convicted of the offense of fraud by either false representation, failing to disclose information or fraud by abuse of his position, he stands liable to a maximum penalty of ten years imprisonment."

As to exactly what the Crown Prosecution Service’s case might be, I recommend you read O’Sullivan’s shrewd and thorough analysis.

SOURCE



Using biofuel in cars 'may accelerate loss of rainforest'

Using biofuel in vehicles may be accelerating the destruction of rainforest and resulting in higher greenhouse gas emissions than burning pure petrol and diesel, a watchdog said yesterday.

The Renewable Fuels Agency also warned that pump prices could rise in April because of the Government’s policy of requiring fuel companies to add biofuel to petrol and diesel. More than 1.3 million hectares of land — twice the area of Devon — was used to grow the 2.7 per cent of Britain’s transport fuel that came from crops last year.

Under the Renewable Transport Fuels Obligation, a growing proportion of biofuel must be added to diesel and petrol. This year fuel must be at least 3.25 per cent biofuel on average. By 2020 the proportion will be 13 per cent.

The agency’s first annual report revealed that fuel companies had exploited a loophole to avoid reporting the origin of almost half the biofuel they supplied to filling stations last year. The origin of fuel from land recently cleared can be described as “unknown”. Last year Esso reported the source of only 6 per cent of its biofuel and BP reported 27 per cent. Shell was the best-performing of the main oil companies but still failed to report the origin of a third of its biofuel.

The agency said: “The large proportion of unknown previous land use is of concern. If even a small proportion of this was carbon-rich grassland or forestland, it could have substantially reduced the carbon savings resulting from the renewable transport fuels obligation as a whole, or even resulted in a net release of carbon.”

Most companies met part of their biofuel obligation by buying palm oil, one of the cheapest fuels but potentially the most damaging to the environment because of the carbon released when forest is burnt down to create plantations.

Expansion of the industry has made Indonesia the third-largest CO2 emitter after China and the US. A litre of palm oil produced on land converted from Indonesian forest produces roughly three times as much CO2 as ordinary diesel.

The agency said oil companies had failed to invest in slightly more expensive certified sustainable palm oil. Only 0.5 per cent of the 127 million litres of palm oil added to petrol and diesel last year came from plantations certified by the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil, an international monitoring body.

Chevron, Murco, Topaz and Grangemouth refinery had “failed to demonstrate the sustainability of their biofuels”, the report said. ConocoPhillips was the only big oil company to meet the three voluntary targets the Government set the industry: for 30 per cent of the biofuel to meet a minimum environmental standard, for it to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 40 per cent compared with fossil fuel and for the source of at least half the biofuel to be reported.

The agency said the end of the 20p a litre fuel duty discount for biofuel from April could cause prices to rise, though probably only by less than 1p per litre.

From March 2011 companies will be required under a European directive to report the previous use of all the land from which they derive their biofuels. However, they will also gain an additional loophole because they will not have to admit using rainforest land if the trees were removed before 2008.

SOURCE



Sexy British game for kids in trouble



We read:

"A new web craze where young girls make their virtual characters adopt children as fashion accessories has outraged parents' groups. The controversial My Minx game also sees girls as young as seven giving their characters contraceptives and morning-after pills.

Players clothe their virtual minxes in sexy lingerie and other revealing outfits and buy 'trophy orphans' - named after children already adopted by celebrities.

The adoption clinic in a virtual Style City features girls called Pax and Maddox and a boy named Zahara after Angelina Jolie's children. The virtual youngsters have the same nationalities as Jolie's with Maddox, three, said to be Cambodian and a fan of eating cockroaches.

The controversial game, by a North London firm, sees players take their minxes binge drinking and clubbing as they try to pull men. Once they have paid the adoption fees, players style their new children in over-the-top designer gear and can then try to sell image rights for them to celebrity magazines.

For minxes that succeed in one night stands, there are virtual condoms and morning after pills....

My Minx was launched shortly before Christmas and has already attracted 20,000 members – with some as young as seven. But parents' groups are horrified to see the game taking off and have accused the game's creators of ‘exploiting children for profit’.

But the game's creator, Blighty Arts director Christopher Evans, insisted that the game was ‘harmless, tongue-in-cheek entertainment’. Mr Evans, 30, said: ‘It is nonsense to suggest our game is a bad influence on young children. ‘We try to protect children too much from the real world for too long in this day and age. They cannot be wrapped up in cotton wool. ‘We should let them grow up making their own decisions about the games they play. ‘The game teaches children about the world while poking fun at celebrity adoptions.

‘Every time they turn on the TV they will see the likes of Madonna adopting African children anyway.

Source

The Big Fat Lies about Britain's obesity epidemic

I am not totally persuaded by all the arguments of the writer below. Total calorie intake seems to me the only dietary determinant of weight. But she certainly makes a good case that British government hectoring has been counterproductive. ANY attempt at dieting seems more likely to increase weight long-term rather than reduce it. All the successful dieters I know have eventually "fallen off the wagon" and ended up fatter than ever

We are all getting fatter. We know this because the Government tells us all the time, in every report, health warning and advertising campaign it issues. For the past 30 years we've been told to eat less and exercise more, to cut back on calories and on saturated fat and, on the whole, we're doing it. Our calorific intake between the years 1974 and 2004 decreased by 20 per cent. We are eating about 20 per cent more fruit and vegetables than in the Seventies. We are doing approximately 25 per cent more exercise than we were in 1997.

But are our waist lines shrinking? No. So what is really behind this obesity epidemic? I'll tell you.

We're following Government advice on how and what to eat, but that advice is so wrong it is actually making us fatter. The endless message of 'eat less, do more' has never been proven using proper clinical trials. And we've only started to get really fat since governments started promoting the current low-fat health messages, back in the early Nineties.

I'm a lawyer by training and I became convinced that the rise in obesity must be partly due to bad guidance. So I set out to look at the research studies on which government advice is based. What I found has shocked me. The Government's Food Standards Agency (FSA), among others, is pumping out a template of a balanced diet that is based on flawed science that I believe is responsible for thousands of people developing health problems.

The co-defendant in the dock with the Government is starch. While we've all been brainwashed into thinking that fat is the killer we must avoid and food manufacturers bring out more and more profitable 'low-fat' versions of foods, starch - in the shape of pasta, bread, cereals, potatoes and rice - has been quietly adding on the pounds, while we are being told that it's good for us.

The problem, I believe, is threefold. First, we are being given dietary advice that is completely out of keeping with our current lifestyles. In a world where we sit at computers instead of toiling in the fields, we simply don't need the sort of high-energy, starchy foods we are told to eat, and certainly not in the proportions we are advised. The central issue is that starch is converted to glucose very quickly, which then triggers the release of the hormone insulin. Insulin triggers the storage of excess glucose into fat, which is stored mainly around our middles.

If you constantly produce too much insulin, your body goes into a permanent fat-storage mode. This means people who are overweight get into a cycle of weight gain. The starchy foods that we are encouraged to eat at almost every meal - such as rice, bread or pasta - also contain very few of the essential nutrients we need for a healthy, balanced diet. Because they're nutrient poor, manufacturers have to enrich them with added vitamins and minerals.

The second problem is that the Government vendetta against fats, because of their apparent link to heart disease, is based on highly debatable studies.

And third, although exercise is undoubtedly good for us all, there is growing evidence that shows sweating away in the gym won't actually make you any slimmer.

And to add insult to injury, it's hard to get any research money to counter these arguments, because most research is funded by the very food conglomerates that stand to benefit most from these lies.

So, the first big fat lie we are fed is that we should eat less. The FSA itself says we should not eat as much, and eat fewer calories. But while calorie-counting tells us how much energy there is in food, it doesn't distinguish between the effect those foods will have on our insulin response - which dictates how much fat we store in the body. The FSA tells us that we should base our meals on starchy foods, and this message is repeated by the NHS and British Diabetic Association.

The FSA says: 'Starchy foods such as bread, cereals, rice, pasta and potatoes, are a really important part of a healthy diet. Starchy foods should make up about a third of the food we eat. 'They are a good source of energy and the main source of a range of nutrients in our diet. 'Most of us should eat more starchy foods - try to include at least one starchy food with each of your main meals. 'Some people think starchy foods are fattening, but gram for gram they contain less than half the calories of fat.'

But does starch or starchy food give us a significant amount of those important nutrients, which are defined as essential? No, it does not. Starch does not contain any significant amounts of amino-acids or fatty-acids, which are an important part of a healthy diet. And most starches, in their natural state, are low in vitamins and minerals. So the food manufacturer (not nature) adds vitamins and minerals to the food concerned. In fact, what the Government is actually doing with 'fortification' - that's adding vitamins - is giving the general population vitamin and mineral tablets in a different form.

The Government also states that starch is 'a good source of energy'. Starch is not just a good source, it's a very efficient source of energy. Unlike protein, which turns to energy slowly and requires energy to break it down, starch turns to energy quickly and efficiently. This is fantastic if you intend to run a marathon, but how many of us are doing that?

By the Government's own logic, the obesity problem is to do with an imbalance between the amount of energy that we consume and the amount of energy we expend. It is quite illogical to want to encourage a nation that is already getting fatter due to excess energy intake to eat more starch. Remember, the Government confirms its belief in calorie-counting: 'Some people think starchy foods are fattening, but gram for gram they contain less than half the calories of fat.'

But recent studies have shown that there are serious issues with the measurement of calories as a means of weight loss. In fact, a higher-calorie diet that is low in starch has been shown to improve weight loss, mainly because of the impact of insulin on fat storage. Most experts agree it's the hormone insulin which makes the body store fat. Over time, people can start to overproduce insulin, which can lead to insulin resistance and eventually Type 2 diabetes. The foods that trigger insulin are primarily starch and sugar.

People who over-produce insulin are more than likely to gain fat, particularly around the tummy - hence the rise of the 'muffin top' in the past ten years. Surely it must follow that overeating starch is, in part, causing the obesity crisis?

Another big fat lie we are fed is that we should eat less fat. Low-fat yoghurts, skimmed milk and cheese, virtually fat-free desserts - the supermarket shelves are full of these 'healthy' low-fat alternatives (although many are actually high in sugar) as we all absorb the Government's message to cut back on saturated fat. The simple message is: saturated fats are high in calories and are making us fat. Saturated fats cause heart disease. And most people believe that the fear of saturated fat is based on robust science - why else would the Government be putting out this advice?

Let's look at the scientific evidence. When studies have been done with high saturated fat levels combined with low levels of starch and sugar, the subjects not only lost weight faster than the low-calorie, low-fat option but - perhaps more interestingly - the cholesterol profile of the subjects on the high-fat diet was better.

Which leads us to question the link between saturated fats and heart disease. Since the Fifties, there has been an unrelenting wave of studies trying to prove this connection. By the Eighties, we had a consensus of opinion that the connection between saturated fats and heart disease was sufficiently compelling to start issuing dietary guidelines. At this stage, there had not been any major clinical trials clearly pointing the finger at saturated fat.

However, in 1984, the Lipid Research Clinics Study was published. This was a study looking at cholesterol-lowering drugs and the incidence of heart attacks. While it showed some benefits from cholesterol-lowering drugs, the assumption made by the researchers was that if you eat a diet low in cholesterol, that would have the same effect as taking cholesterol-lowering drugs. This conclusion prompted various agencies in the U.S. to start a campaign to lower the amount of saturated fats in our diet. At no time did this study look at the effect of saturated fats on heart attacks or heart disease. So, on the basis of a study looking at drugs lowering cholesterol, we ended up with a message to eat less saturated fat.

This plea for sanity over the advice on fats is not a lone cry. Several very influential experts such as Dr Laura Corr, consultant cardiologist at Guys and St Thomas' Hospital in London, and Dr Michael Oliver, from the National Heart and Lung Institute, have asked those in power to stop propagating an unproven message.

Where does the FSA find such certainty among the pile of published science which is not conclusive in its findings? In fact, there are some statistics showing quite the contrary, especially when mixed with a low- starch and low-sugar diet. One report looked at 27 individual studies into the link between fats and heart disease and no link could be found. The largest study on lifestyle factors and heart disease was published in The Lancet medical journal in 2004 and it did not list saturated fat as a factor.

We really need more clinical studies looking at saturated fat in our diet with and without the effect of starch and sugar. But, unfortunately, the world of health is now so obsessed with the fear of saturated fats it won't even let us carry out trials. Back in 2004, I asked a well-known research body in the UK to carry out a clinical trial into saturated fats combined with a high and a low-starch diet. But I was turned away with the explanation they would not get ethical approval and they claimed no one wanted to know more about saturated fats anyway.

And the other lie we are fed: exercise more. There is no doubt that exercise is an excellent tool for weight maintenance and is fantastic for our general health. But what is really misleading is the idea that exercise will significantly help you to lose weight. I attended the European Obesity Conference in 2006, at which Sir Neville Rigby, the former director of policy on the International Obesity Taskforce, referred to several major European studies showing categorically that exercise had no significant impact on the weight of the participants.

Since the conference, one of the studies that has added fuel to the doubters' fire is the Early Bird Study in Plymouth. This lost its Government financial backing because it showed that exercise made no difference to the weight or weight loss of children.

In a significant study carried out by the World Health Organisation into the obesity problem in the U.S., it was concluded that exercise is not a factor of any influence.

The UK Government has suggested that to stop further weight-gain and help reduce weight, people need to do about 60 to 90 minutes of light exercise a day. The average person with children and a job will, realistically, struggle to fit in this amount of exercise every day or even every week. A little bit here and there is not enough to make any real difference to weight loss, especially if you are on a starch-rich diet.

So the Government's advice to eat a starch-rich, low-fat diet and to exercise more is based on inconclusive science, while the evidence we see all around us is that we are getting fatter following this advice. It's time for a wholesale review of the way in which we eat.

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30 January, 2010

SOCIALIZED MEDICINE IN BRITAIN

Four current horror stories below

Is this the worst diagnosis and treatment of all time? NHS told dying woman she was lying and locked her up in a mental hospital!

I had chronic fatigue syndrome once but luckily I have a very good immune system and it only lasted a month. It was a very real debility, though -- JR

As Criona Wilson knelt beside her dying daughter’s bedside, she promised her that her death would not be in vain. Before the frail body of 32-year-old Sophia finally succumbed to the medical complications and ravages of ME, she replied in a whisper: “Then it’s all worth it.” In the years that followed, Mrs Wilson, 66, a former midwife, dedicated her life to proving that her daughter’s condition was not a figment of imagination, nor one that merited her youngest child’s incarceration in a mental hospital.

Her battle saw her take on the medical profession and accepted thinking about the diagnosis and treatment of ME, also known as chronic fatigue syndrome. Eventually, in 2006, a coroner ruled that Sophia’s death was the result of myalgic encephalomyelitis — the first such ruling at an English inquest.

The fierce debate over ME has been highlighted once again by the case of Kay Gilderdale, who admitted assisting her daughter, Lynn, to kill herself after suffering from ME for 17 years. When she walked free from Lewes Crown Court on Monday, having been cleared of murder, Mrs Wilson was among those cheering her from the public gallery. “I had to be there,” said Mrs Wilson yesterday. “It was such an important case. And the verdict was a vote for common sense in a trial that highlighted what people suffering ME and their carers have to face.”

Her daughter, Sophia Mirza, was a talented and popular arts graduate living with her mother in Brighton in 1999 when she contracted ME at the age of 25. She became confined to her bedroom and, just as Miss Gilderdale had, needed round-the-clock care. In 2003 she was visited by a psychiatrist, even though Miss Mirza complained only of physical discomfort. The psychiatrist told her that she was making up her symptoms and if she continued to pretend to be ill he would section her under the Mental Health Act. Mrs Wilson said: “I knew my daughter. There was no way she was mentally ill or pretending.”

When the dread knock on her door finally came in 2003, there was little she could do. A policeman forced the door open and the psychiatrist and a social worker locked themselves into Miss Mirza’s room to prepare her for her trip to a psychiatric ward. Her condition took a dramatic turn for the worse. After 13 days she was released and taken back to the care of her mother. “That spell in a mental hospital set her back terribly. We lost all faith in medical professionals. We were alone,” said Mrs Wilson.

In 2005 Miss Mirza could barely muster the energy to speak, eat or drink. She and her mother had already agreed that no doctors should be called in case she would be sectioned again. On November 25, 2005, Miss Mirza died in her bed at home.

Wiping tears from her eyes, Mrs Wilson said: “We did everything we could.” Determined to get to the bottom of why her daughter’s treatment had been so bad, she got hold of her medical records. After being contacted by the 25 Per Cent ME Group, which campaigns for those with the most acute form of ME, she agreed to her daughter’s body being examined.

At the inquest the next year a neuropathologist told the court that Miss Mirza’s spinal cord was inflamed and three quarters of her sensory cells had abnormalities. It was, the court heard, a clear physical manifestation of ME. The coroner ruled that she had died from “acute renal failures as a result of chronic fatigue syndrome”.

A year later, the National Institute of Clinical Excellence (NICE) issued its first guidelines on the diagnosis and treatment of the illness, describing it as “relatively common”, affecting up to 193,000 people in Britain. At the heart of that guidance is the need to take into account the opinions of the patients. Mrs Wilson is campaigning to get the Government to fund research into ME. “It’s not over yet.”

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NHS doctors can kill people but that's OK

A doctor who prescribed “potentially hazardous” levels of painkillers to elderly patients who died has escaped being struck off the medical register. Jane Barton will be allowed to continue working as a doctor, despite being found guilty of serious professional misconduct, a fitness to practise panel ruled.

She was accused of a series of serious failings in her care of 12 elderly patients at Gosport War Memorial Hospital, in Hampshire, in the 1990s. These included prescribing prescription drugs at “excessive” and “inappropriate” levels, a hearing at the General Medical Council (GMC) was told.

The fitness to practise panel found that Dr Barton was guilty of putting patients at risk of premature death at the hospital between January 1996 and November 1999. She was found to have prescribed diamorphine, the opiate painkiller, at varying levels “and created a situation whereby drugs could be administered which were excessive to the patients’ needs” the panel found. However, it said that it had taken into account her ten years of safe practice as a GP in Gosport and 200 letters of support and ruled that she could continue working under certain conditions.

Relatives of the patients who had died reacted furiously to the verdict and walked out of the hearing in central London today. Iain Wilson, the son of Robert Wilson, one of the patients who died, shouted at the panel: “You should hang your head in shame.”

The GMC, which regulates the work of 150,000 doctors in Britain, had recommended that Dr Barton be struck off and also criticised the decision. Niall Dickson, the council’s chief executive, said: “We are surprised by the decision to apply conditions in this case. “Our view was the doctor’s name should have been erased from the medical register following the panel’s finding of serious professional misconduct. “We will be carefully reviewing the decision before deciding what further action, if any, may be necessary.”

The case will now be reviewed by the Council for Healthcare Regulatory Excellence, an ombudsman of misconduct cases. If found to be unduly lenient the decision could be referred to the High Court and possibly overturned.

In April last year a jury inquest at Portsmouth Coroner’s Court ruled that at least five elderly patients who died at a hospital in Hampshire were overprescribed strong painkillers that hastened their deaths.

In the cases of patients Robert Wilson, 74, Geoffrey Packman, 66, and Elsie Devine, 88, the use of painkillers was found to have been inappropriate for their conditions. Arthur Cunningham, 79, and Elsie Lavender, 83, were prescribed medication appropriate for their condition but in doses that contributed to their deaths, the jury found.

Dr Barton, who worked as a clinical assistant at the hospital, was the only individual to be investigated by police in connection with the deaths but was not charged with any offence.

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Grandmother disgusted at filthy NHS hospital nursed and bathed other patients on her ward

A grandmother was so disgusted by the filthy conditions and neglect on a hospital ward that she bathed and cared for the patients herself. Janet Halsall, 74, was admitted to Hinchingbrooke Hospital in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire, for three days to have a scan on her liver, when she was shocked to see staff repeatedly ignore pleas for help and leave fellow elderly patients to ‘fend for themselves’. The kind-hearted pensioner was so appalled by the conditions in the hospital that she bathed, washed and tucked in the frail elderly patients herself.

The grandmother-of-seven said fellow patients were distressed after being left without water, and when she went to the pantry to clean their glasses, she found it in a ‘disgusting state’. When one elderly lady got no help after repeatedly complaining to staff she was cold, Mrs Halsall was moved to search a store cupboard for a blanket. The former hairdresser even washed and bathed one lady who needed help to clean herself and took another pensioner to the toilet after staff continually ignored her requests because they were ‘too busy’. When she was discharged on Monday afternoon, her fellow patients cheered and clapped her - branding her their 'guardian angel'.

Speaking from her home in Little Staughton, Beds., she said: ‘I was absolutely disgusted when I entered the ward. ‘At 7pm I arrived in the ward and was appalled to find the bed was unmade and the water jug and glass were on the floor. ‘There was no locker or table to put my things on or bag to dispose of rubbish. ‘The patient in the next bed to me kept asking staff if she could go to the bathroom to have a wash and clean her teeth before breakfast. The reply was always “in a minute”. ‘She was really upset so I found her a bowl and washed her from head to toe and made her feel better. She was so grateful.

‘Never before have I seen so many people rushing around, working so hard but achieving nothing.’

Mrs Halsall, whose partner Eric died five years ago, blames the shoddy treatment on a shortage of staff. She added: ‘There simply weren't enough staff looking after the ward. People were asking for help and it was falling on deaf ears. ‘The poor nurse was running around and didn't have time to help everyone. I couldn't just sit there and watch so, being quite agile, I got up and helped them myself. ‘When I left the ward on Monday they all cheered me out and said I was their guardian angel.’

Mrs Halsall was referred to the Hinchingbrooke Hospital at around 11am on Friday amid fears she was suffering a liver complaint. She was told she could not have the scan until Monday and was later transferred to the Appletree Ward for the weekend. But within minutes of arriving, she became angry after spotting a number of patients who were not being cared for. Pensioner Joyce Bates, who was also on the Appletree Ward as she underwent physiotherapy for rheumatoid arthritis in her legs, hailed Janet a 'heroine'. Widower Mrs Bates, from March, Cambs., said: ‘I don't know what we would have done without Janet. The place was an absolute disgrace and our treatment was even worse. ‘I've stayed in hospital 38 times and I've never watched as a patient is forced to give another a bed bath because the nurses won't. ‘She truly was magnificent in what was a nightmare situation.’

Director of the Patients Association Katherine Murphy said: ‘Unfortunately we hear far too many examples of the kinds of things described by Janet Halsall. ‘It is completely unacceptable for patients not to be treated with dignity and respect and not to receive the help they need with things like personal hygiene. ‘That should be fundamental to NHS care-whenever it's not it's an appalling indictment of our treatment of some of the most vulnerable users of our health services.’

A spokesman for Hinchingbrooke said: ‘Hinchingbrooke Health Care NHS Trust takes all complaints extremely seriously. ‘We would ask Mrs Halsall to contact us directly so that a full investigation can be conducted into her experience on the ward. ‘Until we can look into these incidents in more detail it would be inappropriate to comment further at this time.’ [Blah, blah, blah!]

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Don't fall sick out of hours in Britain: GPs refusing to work nights and weekends claimed boy's life

Like so many proud parents, Jean and Nicola Seevaraj meticulously recorded the milestones in the life of their first child, Joseph. He smiled when he was a month old, stood up on his own four days before his first birthday and loved the movie Madagascar. And there was so much more to look forward to - his first day at school, learning to read and to ride a bike. Instead, at the age of three years, one month and 19 days, Joseph was dead. 'I remember checking on him around 4am,' says Mr Seevaraj, 33, a church minister from Hove, East Sussex.

'I went back to bed and the next thing I knew it was 7.30am and my wife was screaming. She was absolutely frantic and I knew something terrible had happened. She was next to Joseph's bed. His eyes were open, but he wasn't responding to anything she did or said. 'It was the worst moment of my life. We called 999 and they told us to try to resuscitate him, but I knew inside myself that it was too late. He'd already passed away. 'The paramedics arrived and rushed him to hospital, but it was hopeless. And that was the beginning of our nightmare.'

It was a nightmare that would be made all the more ghastly because of the fact that Joseph's death had been avoidable. His parents had sought medical help for their son, who had tonsillitis. Joseph was prescribed antibiotics, but when he started to vomit and had diarrhoea, Mr Seevaraj phoned for further help. Because it was a Sunday, he could not talk to the family doctor. Instead, he was connected to the out-of-hours service and was put through to a German-trained medic. The locum doctor, who Mr Seevaraj claims struggled to understand what was being said to him, told him there was nothing to worry about and that, no, it wasn't necessary to bring in the child for further treatment.

Mr Seevaraj followed that advice - and the following morning woke to find that his son was dead. An inquest would later hear that had Joseph been taken to hospital, then the septicaemia that claimed his life could have been treated. 'He needed basic medical attention,' the coroner said, ruling that neglect had contributed to Joseph's death. 'The failure to provide it was gross failure.'

Mr Seevaraj says: 'If we had been able to speak to our family GP that weekend, I believe Joseph would still be alive. There are lots of holes in the out-of-hours system - it needs to be sorted out.'

And he is not alone in that view. New figures show that serious complaints about out-of-hours care have shot up by 50 per cent in just two years. The Medical Defence Union, the leading insurance company that covers most GPs, reported a sharp rise in the number of grievances against doctors following deaths, misdiagnoses and negligence. In 2007 and 2008, there were 517 complaints related to consultations at evenings and weekends - up from 337 over the previous two years. Seventeen insurance claims followed the deaths of patients.

And then there is the shocking case of David Gray, a 70-year-old kidney patient, who died in February 2008 after being injected accidentally with ten times the maximum recommended dose of morphine. It was administered by Dr Daniel Ubani, a locum who had travelled to Britain from Germany and had slept for just three hours before going on his first out-of-hours weekend shift in Cambridgeshire. As well as giving the fatal injection to Mr Gray, an 86-year-old woman died of a heart attack after the Nigerian-born Dr Ubani failed to send her to hospital.

While the deaths of Mr Gray and young Joseph may differ in their circumstances, both serve to shine a spotlight on the growing scandal of British doctors' refusal to work nights and weekends, with their places too often being filled by doctors from abroad, some of whom speak poor English.

All this, of course, is the result of one of the Government's most disastrous pieces of meddling, which allowed British doctors to opt out of out- of-hours duties - and meant they were no longer responsible for the care of their patients 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

That's why, six years on, Suffolk - a county of 600,000 people - has just two British doctors on call overnight and at weekends. Similarly poor coverage is offered elsewhere, as sick patients are fobbed off with telephone assessments or forced to make their own way to overloaded Accident & Emergency hospital departments.

Before the introduction of the new contracts in 2004, GPs were responsible for providing out-of-hours care to their patients. Since then, however, the responsibility for in-hours and out-of-hours care was split, so that primary care trusts took on responsibility for patients at nights and on weekends. As a result, despite the fact that British GPs are the highest-paid in the developed world - average earnings are £106,000 - they earn their crust during office hours.

Under pressure to return profits and cut costs, primary care trusts introduced ways of dealing with patients that reduced the need for time- consuming home visits while looking for 'cheaper' doctors from elsewhere. Though precise figures are not available, research by the Daily Mail suggests that a third of primary care trusts are flying in GPs to fill these posts. The doctors come from as far away as Lithuania, Poland, Germany, Hungary, Italy and Switzerland, and are attracted by the comparatively good rates of pay.

While the NHS has a long history of employing foreign doctors, their presence on the front-line of healthcare has raised specific concerns. Top of these are question marks over the foreign medics' qualifications and language skills.

It's something that 66-year- old Renee Forrow discovered when her husband Derek died at their Suffolk home two years ago after a longterm illness. It was a Saturday evening and, with her GP surgery closed, she called the out-of-hours service - Suffolk Doctors on Call (Sufdoc) - to request that a doctor be sent to certify the death. But what should have been a dignified process quickly degenerated into what Mrs Forrow describes as a 'Monty Python farce'. First, the Polish doctor and his driver could not find the house and took two hours to arrive.

When he did arrive, there were no sympathetic words. Instead, the doctor asked the stunned widow to fill in a form with her husband's name, address and other details. 'When he came in, he didn't say anything to anybody,' she says. 'He just scuttled in, pointed at my husband on the bed and said: "Accident?" 'He then examined him, gave me a form and said: "You say, you do. You fill in. I don't understand." I felt it was wrong that I had to fill in the details myself, but it was impossible to have a proper conversation with him. He simply could not converse in English adequately.'

As if that was not distressing enough, the doctor then pointed at her husband's morphine pills and asked: 'How many you give him?' Mrs Forrow said: 'It sounded insensitive because it almost suggested that he could have overdosed. It was almost as if I had done my husband in.' Just minutes after his arrival, the Polish doctor left. Shocked by what had happened, Mrs Forrow decided to speak out. She is concerned by what might have happened had the doctor been called to treat a complicated case.

'Suppose he visited an ill, old lady and was trying to pick up the nuances of what she was saying,' she says. 'Communication is half of diagnosis and he was like a little scared rabbit caught in the headlights.' A letter of apology subsequently arrived from Sufdoc. It stated: 'There is no question about his (the doctor's) competence as a clinician. It is just an issue about communication.'

It is these twin issues - competence and communication - that are at the heart of concerns over the role being played by foreign doctors in the out-of-hours service. While concerns over the competency of foreign doctors are pressing-there is a growing belief that the way to address them is by a fundamental overhaul of the outofhours system that would make their presence unnecessary.

This would be achieved by handing back responsibility for roundthe- clock care to family GPs. In this way, continuity of care between patient and doctor would be ensured, as would direct accountability. Perhaps unsurprisingly, doctors' leaders oppose these suggestions, saying that it would be 'unsafe' to make GPs work longer hours.

It is not an argument that cuts much ice with the likes of Dr Frank Newton, who worked as a GP for 25 years in rural Northamptonshire before retiring in 1989. 'When I started, there were two of us and we covered 200 square miles with about 4,500 patients,' the 80-year-old told me. 'I worked every hour the other guy didn't work. We took it in turns during the week for the nights, and in turns for the weekends. 'We took a fortnight's holiday each, so if the other guy was away you would be on for two weeks in his absence and he would do the same when you took your fortnight. 'I can tell you that we weren't on our knees with exhaustion and we were not unsafe - we were used to it. We wanted to be involved because we were part of the community and that is what the job was about. 'I find it very sad the way things have gone today, because I think that the people who are missing out are the practitioners themselves as well as the patients. What pleasure can you get from doing only half a job?'

So, should GPs be involved in arranging out-of-hours care for their own patients? As providers or commissioners of this care, they would not necessarily be obliged to return to outofhours work themselves, but they would be obliged to organise it (experts predict that if this happened, more local doctors and nurses would get involved). Even the NHS Alliance - an independent body that represents NHS professionals working outside hospitals, including some GPs - is calling for doctors to take back at least some of the responsibilities they cast off in 2004.

Many patients who have experienced the shortcomings of the system - such as negotiating complex phone systems or being forced to take a sick child to a dropin centre in the middle of the night - would go further and demand that, in return for their increased salaries, doctors would be available when they were most needed.

As Katherine Murphy, director of the Patients Association, points out, ill-health can strike at any time. 'There should be no less emphasis put on the out-of-hours care than there is on the care on offer between 9am and 6pm,' she says. 'No one decides when they get ill, so the same importance should be given to the provision of care whatever the time of day.'

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British local authority snoopers question five-year-olds on home life

Children as young as five are being told to fill in Big Brother-style forms which let councils snoop on intimate details about their home lives. The questions - which have been attacked as exploitative - ask about junk food, television habits, family time and even whether the youngsters 'like themselves'. Results are stored on a database, allowing families deemed to be 'at risk' to be referred to social services or doctors.

Children are asked to colour in answers to questions such as how much fruit they eat each day compared to crisps and fizzy drinks. Hundreds of the 'lifestyle' quizzes, which are backed by the Department of Health, have been handed out in an attempt to build a picture of the health and wellbeing of individual households.

But privacy campaigners last night condemned the forms. Alex Deane, of Big Brother Watch, described it as 'an unbelievable intrusion into private life'. He said: 'The state doesn't bring up children, parents do. There is an important distinction between teaching and nannying - or even bullying - and this steps way over the mark.'

The lifestyle quizzes were piloted in Erewash, Derbyshire, where children filled in the forms at 'healthy living' after-school clubs, to which parents are invited. Although the survey was not compulsory, pupils were strongly encouraged to fill it in. The forms will now be sent out to 200 schools across the county and other councils are monitoring the scheme closely.

Daniella Yeo, of Erewash council, said the after-school clubs were very popular and that the questions followed guidelines set by NICE, the NHS's regulatory body. She added: 'They will help us target families at risk of obesity. We can then encourage parents to attend sessions with social services or GPs.'

Other questions for five-year-olds include whether they eat breakfast, how much water they drink and how they get to school. They are also asked 'how much to do like yourself?' - and told to tick a thumbs-up or thumbs- down sign that matches how they feel.

Seven-year-olds are being given an even more detailed quiz in which they say exactly how many hours they spend with their family, watching television and playing computer games. Civil liberties campaigner Josie Appleton, of the Manifesto Club, said: 'Councils and schools should concentrate on providing everyone with a good education. 'But they should keep their noses out of children's lunchboxes and away from the family dinner table.'

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A Savage attack on free speech in Britain

The UK government’s border ban on an American shock jock reveals its utter disdain for freedom of speech and its fear of a volatile public

Imagine this: a man is banned from entering the UK. Not because he intends to hurt someone, or because he is fleeing a crime committed some place else. No, he is prevented from ever putting a foot on British soil because of the things he says. That’s it. No other reason.

This is the situation in which the American ‘shock jock’ Michael Savage currently finds himself. More shocking, however, is that barely anyone in Britain has batted an eyelid on his behalf. That freedom of speech can be so flagrantly disregarded and merit barely a murmur of comment in response reveals just how normal we consider restrictions on free speech today.

Perhaps the indifference to Savage’s plight owes more than a bit to the nature of the protagonist, a rent-a-chauvinist dj with a not-so-nice line in liberal-baiting. Here’s a sample: ‘Only a devastating military blow against the hearts of Islamic terror coupled with an outright ban on Muslim immigration, laws making the dissemination of enemy propaganda illegal, and the uncoupling of the liberal ACLU can save the United States. I would also make the construction of mosques illegal in America and the speaking of English only in the streets of the United States the law.’

When Savage is not labelling the Koran a ‘book of hate’, he’s having a pop at the ‘gay and lesbian mafia’ for wanting to ‘homosexualise the whole country’ – an unprecedented feat of seduction by any standards. Savage by name, a bit ridiculous by nature. Abortion, Mexican immigrants, Barack Obama: there are few things the potty-mouthed dj hasn’t built a politically incorrect tirade around. No liberal causes, sentiments, or, as Savage portrays them, sacred cows, are out of bounds.

It’s probably fair to say that he’s not exactly the most progressive of guys. In fact, a lot of the stuff he spouts is undoubtedly offensive. But then again, as his ‘shock jock’ appellation suggests, he’s meant to be offensive. One thing he probably never meant to be, however, was a threat to UK national security. Yet, as the latest attempt to overturn his ban from entering the UK was defeated in the House of Lords, this, it seems, is exactly how the Home Office views him: a man who, with a few illiberal rants, might shock the British public into a gay- or Muslim-bashing frenzy.

The Savage case first came to light in May last year, when the then-home secretary Jacqui Smith announced that this polar opposite of Simon Mayo was banned from entering the UK. ‘He is someone’, she said, ‘who has fallen into the category of fomenting hatred, of such extreme views and expressing them in such a way that it is actually likely to cause inter-community tension or even violence if that person were allowed into the country’. Savage isn’t alone. Since 2005, 21 other people have also been barred from the UK on the grounds of inciting hatred and violence, including a motley crew of neo-Nazis like Erich Gliebe and former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard Stephen Donald Black, a few ‘hate preachers’ such as Amir Siddique, and a couple of Russian skinheads convicted of 20 racially motivated murders. Given the last two are currently serving 20-year prison sentences, one suspects that their freedom of movement might already be limited.

Last week, following the failed attempt of UK Independence Party leader Lord Pearson to have Savage’s ban overturned, security minister Lord West reiterated Jacqui Smith’s original position: ‘Mr Savage was banned for… unacceptable behaviour and making clear comments that might lead to civil violence [and] community violence.’ In other words, he was banned because he says things - really, really rude things. In fact, the things he says are so rude, and yet so magically persuasive, that Lord West wasn’t prepared to give any examples. Presumably in case the Lords and Ladies of the UK’s upper house were spurred to ‘civil and community violence’.

One of the absurdities of this, the UK’s list of banned people, is that quite a few of those on the list, including Savage himself, had neither tried, nor intended, to enter the UK. This was because the list, compiled by Whitehall types using Google and a little help from the intelligence services, was never really a practical measure. It was, as Smith herself said at the time, a way to showcase ‘the sorts of values and sorts of standards that we have here’. ‘It’s a privilege to come to this country’, she continued: ‘There are certain behaviours that mean you forfeit that privilege.’

And, in a way, Smith was right. This list of people exemplifying ‘unacceptable behaviours’, whether a shocking dj or a maverick cleric, did represent something about contemporary Britain: it showed just how low is the esteem in which the government holds its citizens. All it takes, apparently, is for someone to say something, in this case an invective-filled rant by Savage, and hundreds of people will automatically, unthinkingly act upon it. If that is all that is necessary for a race riot or a spate of homophobic violence, then far from showing ‘the sorts of values and sorts of standards’ we hold in the UK, it reveals their absence. We are barbarians in the making, a powder keg of bigotry just waiting for the shock jock’s spark. If we’re not racist homophobes, then we’re potential victims of racist or homophobic words, wallflowers in need of the state’s protection. Either way, as censor or protector, the state cannot trust the people.

This shouldn’t be a surprise. A ban on unacceptable behaviour, on offensive speakers, is never a testament to the strength of a society’s norms and values. It is always its opposite, a sign of weakness. Indeed, how weak must the British establishment be that it fears that a few utterances from a really rude dj might cause ‘inter-community tension or even violence’. If the government really believes in the strength of the values and standards it would like Britain to hold dear, why are a few people with dissenting, sometimes offensive views deemed such a problem?

It is precisely when speech is offensive that its freedom needs to be defended. This is not to give the okay to violent attacks on Muslims, homosexuals, or any other constituency the Home Office deems is at risk. And that’s because actions – actions which, in the case of killing or beating people up, have long been illegal – are not the same as words and thought. The fact that the government and its cronies in the House of Lords are happy to elide this distinction reveals the disdain with which they view the reasoning abilities of the British public. And that, not the un-PC shtick of Savage, is really shocking.

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Free speech on campus? Yes. A free ride? No

There should be full freedom of speech for ‘extremists’ in British universities – and also for those who want to slate or ridicule them

In our era of dumbing down, where the academy risks turning from a hotbed of Platonic debate and Truth-seeking into a conveyor belt that churns out jobsworths, it isn’t often one can agree with the words uttered by a university provost. But yesterday Malcolm Grant of University College London (UCL) made a statement that spiked can get behind. In response to claims that the ‘Pants bomber’, Abdul Farouk Abdulmutallab, was radicalised during his spell as a student at UCL, and therefore that ‘extremist speech’ on campus should be curtailed, Grant said it is not a university’s job to ‘police’ its students’ beliefs or speech.

‘We must continue to regard students as adults’, he said. ‘Campuses should be safe homes for controversy, argument and debate.’ Hear hear. In defending the free exchange of ideas on campus, Grant is taking a stand for rigour and honesty in university life against the anti-extremist camp that wants students to be protected from ideas judged to be too ‘toxic’. One of the academics concerned about extremism says that when universities ‘tolerate on their campuses organisations which seek to radicalise, they hammer another nail in the coffin of the idea of higher education’. In fact, banning organisations on the basis that their ideas are dangerous and that students are easily brainwashed would be the real funeral pyre of higher education, turning universities into thought-policing institutions and redefining students as overgrown children.

Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian-born rich boy who allegedly tried to blow up a jet flying from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas Day with explosives hidden in his underpants, studied at UCL from 2005 to 2008. He was president of UCL’s Islamic Society which often held meetings to discuss (and denounce) the ‘war on terror’. He helped to organise a ‘War on Terror Week’ which included debates such as ‘Jihad or Terrorism?’. Radical Islamist preachers and members of the controversial Islamic group Hizb ut-Tahrir spoke at UCL while Abdulmutallab was there, and this has led some to argue that UCL, by tolerating such discussions, was ‘complicit’ in the failed Christmas Day bombing and that there should now be tighter controls on who can speak in universities.

There are many problems with the demand to curtail so-called inflammatory speech. First, it transforms the university from a place where asking questions (yes, even off-the-wall questions) is positively encouraged, where students are provided with access to Knowledge and the space in which to interrogate and doubt such Knowledge, into a place where only certain, non-extreme, vetted ideas are allowed to leak on to campus and into students’ heads. And that can, and already has, led to the exclusion not only of Isalmist rants but also of other ideas considered dangerous these days: climate change ‘denial’, alternative views of history, lecturers who are too right-wing or too left-wing. Erecting an intellectual forcefield around universities changes the whole nature of university life, turning it into a place where students are provided with nuggets of wisdom, the correct ideas and thoughts, rather than a place that nurtures a way of thinking, independent thought, the sharing of Knowledge through expertise but also through debate and interaction.

Second, filtering out ‘extremism’ infantilises students. University is meant to be an arena where boys become men and girls become women, demonstrating an ability to think, work and act independently as well as with professors and other students. The academy is built on the idea not only that its students are thirsty for Knowledge but that they are also capable of weighing it up and understanding it; that is, their minds are healthy and robust. The expulsion of ‘extremism’, by contrast, sends the message that students are fragile creatures, with minds like sponges, who might be easily swayed by some loony cleric or Holocaust denier. One reporter said of Abdulmutallab’s ‘War on Terror Week’, ‘It was brainwashing’. This is a judgement not so much on the nonsense that Abdulmutallab’s speakers were no doubt spouting but more fundamentally on students’ own ability to decipher right from wrong, Knowledge from gibberish. The censorship of so-called extremism would denigrate the very idea of the student.

And third, trying to shut up hotheaded Islamists is an extraordinary displacement activity. It is true, as spiked has argued many times, that al-Qaeda-style terrorists are more likely to be radicalised in the West than in Kabul, Kandahar or Baghdad, where the disastrous ‘war on terror’ is still focused. The evidence shows that most wannabe Muslim martyrs are middle-class, well-educated and tend to be either from Western cities or to have lived and studied in them. Often they seem more influenced by the woe-is-me politics of victimhood and identity than by Taliban-style traditionalism. Yet chasing the preachers who might possibly exacerbate such feelings is about avoidance: instead of getting to grips with what is missing in, or wrong with, Western society, to the extent that some young people are drawn towards shallow anti-Westernism and reject the ‘evils of integration’, such censorship pins the blame for social problems on a handful of men in frocks. It discourages open, honest debate; it leaves burning political issues unresolved.

For these reasons, Malcolm Grant’s comments are welcome. However, while it is sweet relief to hear a provost defend freedom of thought and speech, it is also worth asking what lies behind the idea today that ‘Colleges must let extremists speak’, as the front page of the London Evening Standard declared yesterday, reporting Grant’s comments as if they were shocking and disturbing. Because often, I fear, the ‘let the extremists speak’ argument springs not from an unflinching commitment to freedom of speech but rather from a deep-seated crisis of authority in the modern academy. It seems to me that it is not so much universities’ love of openness and rigour that leads them sometimes to tolerate extremists but rather their doubt about what is True, what is Right, what is Good, so that they provide platforms to all-comers who might have something ‘valid’ to say. It is relativism that underpins the tolerance of ‘extremists’, rather than freedom. And we should insist that having free speech on campus does not mean giving everyone a free ride. In fact it means the opposite.

That relativism has been elevated over liberty can be seen in the fact that at the same time that more ‘extremists’ are allegedly running riot on campus, there are more and more codes of speech governing the extent to which other people can question, ridicule or mock these ‘extremists’, or even moderate religious and political speakers. At the end of last year I was invited to debate the head of the UK wing of Hizb ut-Tahrir at Queen Mary Westfield College in London. But under pressure from censorious student groups and the university’s administration, the debate was banned. It was moved to the University of Westminster a couple of weeks later, and there, both me and the representative of Hizb ut-Tahrir were informed about what we could and could not say. The university’s religious affairs liaison – a white convert to Islam – told us that before being allowed to speak we would have to read a document telling us not to insult or ridicule anyone else’s religious beliefs, political affiliations, sexual preferences and so on.

I read it, and ignored it, and later got booed for saying ‘Sharia law is inferior to Enlightenment-derived laws’. Yet this experience reveals much about the crisis of freedom in British universities. In one serious London university a debate is banned outright because the ‘extremist’ might corrupt the pathetic students, and in another serious London university the debate is allowed to go ahead but is severely governed by informal codes designed to preserve ‘respect for identities’. Such codes now exist on campuses across the UK. The extremist is allowed to speak, but no one is really allowed to say to him: ‘You’re talking bollocks, mate, and here’s why…’ Such informal rules protecting all belief systems and granting equal weight to all lifestyle choices really demonstrate what lies behind the ‘let the extremists speak’ argument: a relativistic climate in which universities doubt whether it is their job to assert Truth with a capital T over madder, weirder small-t ‘truths’, and where what looks like free speech is actually something very different.

If a student at a British university starts believing that some radical form of Islam is ‘the Truth’, it is most likely as a result of this intellectual cowardice rather than the strength of conviction of some visiting preacher. It is the climate of non-debate, of listening and nodding along to everyone, that can make things seem like the Truth by default. This creation of a relativistic mishmash of equally valid views sells students short as surely as does the outright censorship of ‘extremists’: it, too, creates a climate of conformism and question-avoidance, where the extremists are allowed to speak but only because ‘everyone must be heard and treated with respect’.

John Stuart Mill said the Truth can only be worked out through free and open debate, and ‘on no other terms can a being with human faculties have any rational assurance of being right’ (6). Absolutely. That remains the essence of freedom of thought and freedom of speech. But Mill didn’t mean creating an unsightly, unchallengeable public parade of ‘many truths’ showing us their wares – he meant a rigorous arena in which everything is sayable and in which some ideas will inevitably be defeated and sidelined by other, better ones. Just such an atmosphere should prevail in British universities, rather than the dire choice between outright censorship or a relativistic pseudo-free-for-all that they are faced with today.

SOURCE



Ridiculing the obese is the new gay bashing

British society has become far more enlightened over sexuality and race. Now we reserve our contempt for the underclass

My son begged me to switch the show off. “It’s too cruel,” he said. But that seemed to be the point of Fat Families. “You make me feel sick,” said the smug presenter as the obese couple looked forlornly at their takeaway supper. Later they were stripped naked — she weeping, he head bowed — while the camera boggled obscenely at their bodies. I hope they were well paid, this good-hearted pair, who clearly loved their kids and each other. What price to be paraded as an object of hatred and disgust.

A public health message? No, this was the All-New Fat & White Minstrel Show. The obese are the last group — should you feel enraged today by a parking penalty or Blair — at which you can vent your fury with legal and social impunity. A friend mentioned, en passant, chastising a man for letting his dog pee copiously over her doorstep. “P*** off, you fat bitch,” was his automatic response. I was aghast, she was nonplussed: as a largish lady she dealt with this (and worse) every day.

This week the British Social Attitudes survey revealed our greater toleration of homosexuality: only a third of us now think gay love is wrong. Which still seems mighty high to me, yet only 20 years ago this figure was double. Gay men are still violently assaulted, name-calling is too infrequently challenged in schools, but these days homophobia is rarely given full vent in the national media. And if it is — as with Jan Moir’s article — a powerful and righteous lobby will unleash all hell.

But sometimes it feels as if the anger and intolerance upon our angry, always up-for-a-fight island, is just being funnelled to other targets: the fat, the poor, the white trash, the chavs and pikeys, the underclass on the fringes of society who we loathe almost as much as we fear.

Outsiders are always easiest to hate. When gay culture was confined to the margins, it was simple to caricature and condemn. After all, it was unlikely you’d meet anyone to disprove your view. The great progress of the past decade was gay relationships ceasing to be subject to saucy speculation but becoming normal, banal even. The once-separate straight and gay worlds have meshed. When my lovely lesbian sister-in-law had a baby with a gay man, I’d wondered how to explain this scenario to my elderly northern parents, so sheltered were their lives. I was stupid to worry.

Love and babies, the warmth of real human contact, breaks down suspicion of The Other. After one hilarious Christmas karaoke night my eightysomething mother reflected simply: “Well, I’d never met any gays before. But they all seem very nice.” And when I was interviewing the American writer David Sedaris recently he marvelled at how parents bring 14-year-old sons along to his book signings: “Meet Doug,” they might say. “He’s gay.” Sedaris’s own tortured, confused and utterly closeted teenage self would have marvelled at this casually acknowledged truth.

At this time when our respect for the political process has never been lower, few will acknowledge the wonder when government does something right. The creation of civil partnerships in 2005 not only dignified and formalised gay relationships but acted as a catalyst for further change. Moreover, it signalled that the British culture war was over. Run up the flag: the forces of tolerance had won.

It was a long, bitter conflict, fought all through the Thatcher years, when it was the ugly, snarling, bullying tap-room bigotry more than any economic policies that made many loathe our Government. This was not so much a clash of policies, but about what constitutes full humanity. Peter Lilley was getting belly laughs with his conference ditty against single mums; disgust against homosexuality led to the creation of Clause 28, banning discussion of same sex relationships in school for fear that predatory gays would stalk our kids.

That the Tory party is run now by social liberals sometimes boggles the mind. Can people change that easily? Only seven years ago David Cameron voted to keep Clause 28, but now he has apologised, declared his intent to reward not only marriage in the tax system but civil partnerships too.

And Baroness Warsi who, when I asked her why she sent out anti-gay literature when she was standing in Dewsbury in the 2005 election, said: “I have learnt, read more; my views have matured since then.” Maybe they have. Even Elton John’s arch tormentor, the former Sun Editor Kelvin MacKenzie, claims these days to be a friend of the gays.

Or maybe Cameron realises that laissez faire morality is so deeply entrenched that there is no point in fighting it. And besides, why go against the grain when you can go with the flow? While our social attitudes have grown more liberal, our economic views have hardened into conservatism: only a bare majority now believe it is the Government’s job to secure employment for all or to ensure the unemployed have a decent standard of living.

Indeed, as racism and homophobia have become ever more verboten, there has been a corresponding growth in intolerance for the poor, a disgust at their lifestyle, an ugly, lazy disdain for those who live in council estates, who have scary dogs and babies too young, a licensed mocking of their yeah-but-no-but speech and culture. I grow tired of arguing with well-brought-up children of liberal parents that “chav” is a disgusting, reductive label, that the kids who live in the flats behind our house are not — apart from the amount of stuff they own — so different from them. How depressing that even 12-year-olds see society set into two separately entrenched tribes.

But it is fine now to believe that the underclass only has itself to blame for its educational failures, and laziness keeps families on the dole. And there they are, paraded on those circuses of disgust: Big Brother and Jeremy Kyle. Or on that whole new TV genre, the obesity freak show: Fat Families, The World’s Fattest Man, Too Fat Too Young ... All feign concern when their only object is to poke ridicule at the stupid chavs unable to stop shoving kebabs into their face even when it’s killing them.

Obesity is, above all, a mark of poverty: a handy melding of our social and bodily disgust, No, these days we may not bash so many poofs. But there is still plenty of sport to be had watching a 20st woman in a wedding dress that will never fit, weeping her heart out with shame.

SOURCE





29 January, 2010

British prosecutors grab the first excuse to drop a prosecution for REAL hatred

But just deny the holocaust and you can spend years in jail. Witnesses in court cases often become very upset for one reason or another but that normally leads only to an adjournment. The judge certainly thought that the prosecutors were off-beam. What merits the most severe punishment in Britain is being middle class. The underclass can virtually do no wrong

A teenager who branded Francecca Hardwick, the disabled girl found dead with her mother in a burnt-out car, a “freak” who “deserved what she got”, walked free from court yesterday. The 16-year-old boy grinned and punched the air after prosecutors decided to halt the trial when the main witness collapsed while giving her testimony.

In dramatic scenes at Hinckley Youth Court, the trial of one of the teenagers accused of waging a local hate campaign against the neighbours of Fiona Pilkington and her daughter Francecca was abandoned “in the public interest”.

It was alleged the youth, who cannot be named for legal reasons, had been harassing Hazel Smith, 48, a friend of Ms Pilkington, who also worked as a lollipop lady and parish councillor, because he believed she had reported him to the authorities. Mrs Smith told the court the boy had branded Francecca, who had a mental age of 4, “Frankenstein”, and said she and her mother both “deserved what they got”.

No one has been prosecuted over the deaths of Ms Pilkington, 38, who killed herself and her 18-year-old daughter after suffering years of abuse from local gangs at their home in Barwell, Leicestershire. Their bodies were found in a burnt-out car in October 2007. A coroner severely criticised police and council officials for failing to protect the vulnerable pair from the abuse, after an inquest last October.

Mrs Smith told the court that he had confronted her on two occasions, after she caught him shooting at her pet guinea-pigs with an air gun. “He said that I was a neighbourhood watch bitch, a copper’s nark and that I get people into trouble. “He said he was going to smash my windows at the house and he hated me. I didn’t reply to him and he then swore at me and stuck his two fingers up and started to ride off. “That made me feel terrible, like I was a troublemaker causing problems for everyone around Barwell. I was frightened in case I should say something I shouldn’t.”

Moments later she collapsed. She appeared to be having a fit, and paramedics were called. Mark Williams, for the prosecution, said that it was in the “public interest” to end the trial.

District Judge David Meredith said he was unhappy about the Crown Prosecution Service’s (CPS) decision: “I am backed into a corner from which I have no escape. There are particular aspects of this case that have caused me grave concern by the alleged response to Fiona Pilkington and her daughter’s death. The alleged comment that Fiona Pilkington deserved what she got is a matter I would view as significant. I view the [CPS] decision not to proceed as a little hasty.”

The judge ordered that not guilty verdicts be entered to the charge of harassment and a separate charge involving a public order offence. Addressing the youth, he said: “For reasons better known to them than to me, the prosecution has come to the conclusion it is not in the public interest to pursue these matters against you.”

Earlier at the same court two youths, aged 16 and 17, were convicted of harassing another neighbour of Mrs Pilkington. The judge took 30 minutes to convict the teenagers of conducting a campaign of intimidation against Carol Sainsbury, 46, a disabled grandmother, who lived on Bardon Road, between August 1 and October 7 last year. A third teenager Billie-Joe Kenney, 19, was cleared of the charge.

SOURCE



Fall of ‘dishonest’ doctor who started MMR scare

Note that the crap was published in "Lancet" -- another reason not to trust that once-fine journal

The doctor who sparked a worldwide panic over the MMR vaccine could be struck off after being found guilty yesterday of a series of misconduct charges related to his “unethical” research. Andrew Wakefield, who in 1998 claimed an unfounded link between the vaccination and autism, “showed a callous disregard” for the suffering of children, subjecting them to unnecessary, invasive tests, a hearing found.

The General Medical Council (GMC) ruled that he abused his position of trust as he researched a possible link between the MMR vaccine, bowel disease and autism in children. It found that Wakefield and two colleagues acted dishonestly and irresponsibly in carrying out research on children against their best interests and without official permission.

The GMC ruled that Wakefield, who was working at the Royal Free Hospital in London as a gastroenterologist at the time, did not have the ethical approval or qualifications to oversee the study, which involved children undergoing colonoscopies, lumbar punctures, barium meals and brain scans. He was also found to have brought the medical profession into disrepute after taking blood samples from youngsters at his son's birthday party in return for payments of £5 and failing to disclose vital conflicts of interest.

He received £50,000 to carry out the research on behalf of solicitors acting for parents who believed that their children had been harmed by MMR, but could not account for how at least half this money had been spent. He also did not declare any conflict of interest to The Lancet medical journal, which published the research.

The GMC found the charges against Wakefield, and the professors John Walker-Smith and Simon Murch were “sufficient to amount to serious professional misconduct”.

But as he delivered the verdicts, Dr Surendra Kumar, the panel’s chairman, was repeatedly heckled by distraught parents who support Wakefield and his former colleagues. One woman shouted: "These doctors have not failed our children. You are outrageous." She called the panel of experts "b******s" and accused the GMC of being a "kangaroo court". All three doctors deny any wrongdoing.

The study prompted a massive drop in the number of children being vaccinated against measles, mumps and rubella. Uptake of the MMR vaccine was 91 per cent before 1998, but by 2003 this had fallen to 79 per cent. In 2008 there were nearly 1,400 confirmed cases of measles in England and Wales — compared with 57 in 1997 — and nearly a dozen deaths had been officially linked to the illness. Subsequent studies involving millions of children found no evidence of a link between MMR and autism.

The hearing sat for 148 days over a two-and-a-half year period, at a cost to the GMC, funded by doctors, of more than £1 million. It is the longest running medical misconduct case in the Council’s 147 year history.

Before yesterday’s hearing, 12 organisations, including the Medical Research Council, the British Medical Association and Faculty of Public Health, released a joint statement reaffirming their confidence in the jab. “The undersigned believe that the MMR triple vaccine protects the health of children,” they said. “A large body of scientific evidence shows no link between the vaccine and autism.”

SOURCE



British bureaucracy and the baby

By Meegan Cornforth

Why do British politicians think that their National Health System is so wonderful? Braving the snow and icy conditions one recent afternoon on Christmas holidays in London, I visited a doctor’s surgery near my sister’s home to make an appointment for her newborn baby. Rather than being a simple endeavour of securing the next available timeslot, it was an annoyingly bureaucratic experience.

It began with a stern lecture from the receptionist for not following the rules. The NHS requires patients to be formally registered with the practice before the doctor sees them. Appointments must be made in the morning for the same day only. In addition, you cannot make phone appointments but must visit the surgery in person. This particular rule appears to have been established by the practice itself to sidestep confusion with the Appointments Line – an NHS telephone booking system so complicated that it requires an 18-page user guide!

The complexity of NHS regulations means that everyone is confused about procedure – patients and practices alike. And although many British surgeries are over-burdened, the NHS prevents patients from visiting GPs outside their designated catchment zone. In effect, the NHS would rather keep you in a crowded waiting room than let you see an available doctor.

In the world of the NHS, the patient is treated like an errant child whose punishment is to wade through a quagmire of bureaucracy to receive treatment. Fortunately in my case, the receptionist decided that given my colonial ignorance and argumentativeness, it was easier for her to break the rules ‘just this once, mind’ and give my little niece an appointment that very evening. A cherished victory of common sense over bureaucracy.

In an increasingly authoritarian Britain, the ill-functioning NHS is just one example of the difficulties imposed on the lives of citizens by too much regulation and government involvement.

At the forthcoming UK elections, Conservative Party leader David Cameron looks set to oust embattled Prime Minister Gordon Brown from 10 Downing Street. But don’t hold your breath for a Conservative victory to loosen the state’s bureaucratic grip over the country. Although Cameron has occasionally mused on leading Britain into a new ‘post-bureaucratic age,’ this supposed big government sceptic has just plastered Britain with campaign posters promising: ‘I’ll cut the deficit, not the NHS.’

Any British child could tell him that there is plenty of NHS red tape waiting to be cut.

The above is a press release from the Centre for Independent Studies, dated January 29. Enquiries to cis@cis.org.au. Snail mail: PO Box 92, St Leonards, NSW, Australia 1590.




British scientists in stolen e-mail scandal hid climate data illegally

The university at the centre of the climate change row over stolen e-mails broke the law by refusing to hand over its raw data for public scrutiny. The University of East Anglia breached the Freedom of Information Act by refusing to comply with requests for data concerning claims by its scientists that man-made emissions were causing global warming.

The Information Commissioner’s Office decided that UEA failed in its duties under the Act but said that it could not prosecute those involved because the complaint was made too late, The Times has learnt. The ICO is now seeking to change the law to allow prosecutions if a complaint is made more than six months after a breach.

The stolen e-mails , revealed on the eve of the Copenhagen summit, showed how the university’s Climatic Research Unit attempted to thwart requests for scientific data and other information, and suggest that senior figures at the university were involved in decisions to refuse the requests. It is not known who stole the e-mails. Professor Phil Jones, the unit’s director, stood down while an inquiry took place. The ICO’s decision could make it difficult for him to resume his post.

Details of the breach emerged the day after John Beddington, the Chief Scientific Adviser, warned that there was an urgent need for more honesty about the uncertainty of some predictions. His intervention followed admissions from scientists that the rate of glacial melt in the Himalayas had been grossly exaggerated.

In one e-mail, Professor Jones asked a colleague to delete e-mails relating to the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He also told a colleague that he had persuaded the university authorities to ignore information requests under the act from people linked to a website run by climate sceptics.

A spokesman for the ICO said: “The legislation prevents us from taking any action but from looking at the emails it’s clear to us a breach has occurred.” Breaches of the act are punishable by an unlimited fine.

The complaint to the ICO was made by David Holland, a retired engineer from Northampton. He had been seeking information to support his theory that the unit broke the IPCC’s rules to discredit sceptic scientists.

In a statement, Graham Smith, Deputy Commissioner at the ICO, said: “The e-mails which are now public reveal that Mr Holland’s requests under the Freedom of Information Act were not dealt with as they should have been under the legislation. Section 77 of the Act makes it an offence for public authorities to act so as to prevent intentionally the disclosure of requested information.”

He added: “The ICO is gathering evidence from this and other time-barred cases to support the case for a change in the law. We will be advising the university about the importance of effective records management and their legal obligations in respect of future requests for information.”

Mr Holland said: “There is an apparent Catch-22 here. The prosecution has to be initiated within six months but you have to exhaust the university’s complaints procedure before the commission will look at your complaint. That process can take longer than six months.”

The university said: “The way freedom of information requests have been handled is one of the main areas being explored by Sir Muir Russell’s independent review. The findings will be made public and we will act as appropriate on its recommendations.”

SOURCE



Britain: It is not elitist to nurture gifted pupils

When it comes to education, the Government persists in looking through the wrong end of the telescope – and with an ill-fitting, short-sighted lens

Its latest blunder is to close the national programme for the gifted and talented. We are told that the money saved will be used to support gifted young people who come from deprived backgrounds. The Government hopes this will lead to an increase in social mobility. That is a fine aim. Many of us, my family included, have worked hard to achieve it.

I have no argument with financial support for disadvantaged young people; my concern is whether there is to be any money set aside for the other gifted students. The decision to abandon this programme sits awkwardly with Schools Minister, Vernon Coaker’s determination ‘that each and every child gets a world-class education, regardless of their background’.

Whatever their home circumstances, gifted children need to be fed more than the standard school diet. If we do not help every one of them to flourish, not only their futures but our country’s prospects will be diminished.

Gordon Brown, speaking to the Fabian Society recently, repeated the undeniable importance of education in providing ‘the rungs on the ladder of social mobility’. He spelt out plans for widening educational opportunity. Excellent. But there was no mention of how the Government plans to support all those with exceptional ability. Its claim elsewhere that provision for all gifted students will be covered effectively through the new Pupil and Parent Guarantees, outlined in the latest Schools White Paper, is far from reassuring. Requiring schools to put their plans for gifted students in writing is no answer at all without sufficient resourcing.

In the same speech, appealing to the middle classes and promoting aspirations of ‘owning a bigger house, taking a holiday abroad, buying a new car or starting a small business’ the Prime Minister struck a jarring note. The vast majority of parents want their children to be stretched, and raised to the highest levels of which they are capable. That desire is classless, and applies to the gifted child as much as any other. Parental aspirations for their children are greater than any desire for a new car or a fleeting foreign trip.

The abandonment of this particular educational programme reveals that Brown’s appeal to the middle class is hollow, his definition of aspiration faulty, and his dedication to maximising the potential of all gifted children questionable.

What can schools do? I have no doubt that they will continue to do their utmost. I have never met a good teacher or head who was not dedicated to bringing the best out of every pupil. However, the demands on maintained schools to respond to countless different imperatives and an endless stream of new initiatives are already enormous.

At the Girls’ Schools Association conference last November, Liz Allen, the inspirational headmistress of the maintained Newstead Wood School for Girls, spelt out the needs of the gifted in the state sector and the barriers faced in helping them to achieve. Her concerns are shared by Teach First and by Ofsted. The emphasis on the achievement of five A* - C grades in maintained schools focuses on those on the C/D borderline, rather than those at the upper end who have the potential to go further. In the independent sector, we know that bright students relish the ‘hard’ subjects, like sciences and modern languages.

Independent schools have long engaged with the issue of supporting the gifted, not only by the quality of education they provide and the attention they pay to challenging the most able, but through bursaries for bright young people from disadvantaged backgrounds. In addition, there are long-standing arrangements to share expertise and work in collaboration with maintained schools. Many of our schools are involved in joint activities such as master-classes, preparation for Oxbridge entry, Saturday schools, mentoring, science days, summer schools or projects that range from ‘The Thames and Shakespeare’ to Model United Nations and management training exercises.

Underlying this latest Government decision I sense a fear of the charge of elitism. This is not an attitude we find, say, in sport: how very odd it would be for Manchester United to scout anything but the best young talent. No, it seems to apply only to brain power. The country needs world-class brains, dare I say it, even more than world-class footballers. We must do all we can to nurture them, wherever we find them.

SOURCE



eBay bans history



The TV program is set in WWII and is about RESISTANCE to the Nazis

"Auction website eBay has banned a board game based on popular UK television sitcom Dad's Army for being "offensive" and "associated with Nazis". A spokesman for the site said the game could "promote violence, hatred and racial or religious intolerance" because it bore swastikas on the box cover.

Stunned seller Dave Davidson, from Worcestershire in England said: "I couldn't believe it when they sent me an email telling me my Dad's Army board game could incite violence and hatred. "Its so annoying because any human being with an ounce of common sense can see Dad's Army is the most harmless TV programme in the world." "But instead of making a few quid and clearing some space, I've been made to look like I'm a racist or Nazi sympathiser. I'm very annoyed."

But Jenny Thomas, of eBay UK, said: "eBay will remove listings that bear the marks of organisations that promote hatred and racial intolerance and we are strict and unapologetic in adhering to this policy. "With 100 million listings globally we have to apply this rule to any item bearing such insignia, regardless of whether it is an innocent item like a board game."

The box of the 1970s game shows the famous cast of the comic TV show, such as Captain Mainwaring and Sergeant Wilson, alongside arrows of swastikas and one of a Union Flag, as seen in the opening credits of the programme [and above].

Source

So we must not be intolerant of Nazis now????



Libertarianism and the British Conservative Party: "Mark Wallace on ConservativeHome argues that based upon British Social Attitudes Survey the people of this country are becoming increasingly libertarian. This would certainly be a welcome development, which if it were to continue would leave the Conservative Party in need of another rebranding.”





28 January, 2010

British Leftist logic

Employer told not to post advert for 'reliable' workers because it discriminates against 'unreliable' applicants. Publicity brings the usual backpedalling, however



When it comes to hiring staff, there are plenty of legal pitfalls employers need to watch out for these days. So recruitment agency boss Nicole Mamo was especially careful to ensure her advert for hospital workers did not offend on grounds of race, age or sexual orientation. However, she hadn't reckoned on discriminating against a wholly different section of the community - the completely useless. When she ran the ad past a job centre, she was told she couldn't ask for 'reliable' and 'hard-working' applicants because it could be offensive to unreliable people.

'In my 15 years in recruitment I haven't heard anything so ridiculous,' Mrs Mamo said yesterday. 'If the matter wasn't so serious I would be laughing out loud.

'Unfortunately it's extremely alarming. I need people who are hardworking and reliable - and I am pleased to discriminate in that way. If they're not then I really can't use them. The reputation of my business is on the line. 'Even the woman at the jobcentre agreed it was ridiculous but explained it was policy because they could get sued for being dicriminatory against unreliable people. 'She told me they'd had lots of problems with people taking them to court for adverts stating something like "would suit school leaver".'

Mrs Mamo, 48, of Borehamwood, Hertfordshire, runs Devonwood Recruitment, which supplies hundreds of cleaners, caterers and porters to hospitals across the country. She filed the advert for a £5.80-an-hour domestic cleaner at a hospital in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, through the Jobcentre Plus online service last Thursday.

However, when she rang the nearest branch in Thetford, Norfolk, to make sure details would be available to jobseekers who turned up in person, she was transferred to a woman who said the wording was unacceptable. Mrs Mamo, a divorced mother of two, added: 'I had to battle to have "must speak English", which they also said was discriminatory. 'In the end, I had to write "must speak English due to health and safety reasons" because they're dealing with hazardous materials.'

The diktat was widely criticised yesterday. A spokesman for the Campaign Against Political Correctness said: 'This is absolutely ridiculous. 'Of course people want reliable workers and employers should be able to ask for them. If they can't advertise for what they want then the system is broken.'

The Equality and Human Rights Commission added: 'This is in no way in breach of any discrimination law. 'Mrs Mamo should consider very unreliable any advice that she may have received implying that this aspect of her advert was discriminatory.'

Yesterday the Department for Work and Pensions said it could not comment on the conversation Mrs Mamo had with the member of staff at Thetford. However, a spokesman insisted her original advert had run on the Jobcentre Plus website and on computer terminals in branches. She added: 'Reliability is important to employers and we welcome ads seeking reliable applicants.' [Apparently The 'offensive' advert was eventually allowed on the website but not on the instore display]

SOURCE



Britain's Gestapo-style bureaucracy reined in by High Court

No punishment until you are found guilty of an offence would seem basic to justice but it's not so in modern Britain. You may not even be told why you are being punished or allowed to speak in your defence. And the government now aims to entrench that

Ministers will rush anti-terrorist legislation through Parliament after the Supreme Court yesterday quashed measures introduced by Gordon Brown to freeze the assets of al-Qaeda suspects. In a landmark decision seven Supreme Court justices ruled that ministers acted unlawfully in imposing financial restrictions on individuals without a vote in Parliament. They allowed a challenge by five men who had their assets frozen.

The orders were Britain’s response to UN Security Council resolutions calling for action to halt the financing of international terrorism. The justices ruled, however, that if the Government “considers that such far-reaching measures are necessary or expedient for combating terrorism or honouring the United Kingdom’s international obligations it must obtain approval for them from Parliament”.

The Treasury said that it was seeking cross-party support to pass emergency legislation before the election.

The justices condemned the Terrorism (United Nations Measures) Order 2006 and the Al-Qaida and Taliban (United Measures) Order 2006 as oppressive and paralysing. Lord Hope of Craighead, the deputy president of the court, said that those affected were in effect “prisoners of the state”. He added: “This is a clear example of an attempt to adversely affect the basic rights of the citizen without the clear authority of Parliament.”

The justices said that those affected by the orders had not had the opportunity to challenge the grounds on which they were suspected, but not charged, of financing terrorism. The court will rule today on when the quashing of the orders should take effect. It may delay the move to allow Parliament to pass legislation denying the men access to their funds.

In a second ruling the court lifted the anonymity orders granted to the men after a challenge by media organisations, including The Times. Lord Rodger of Earlsferry said that there was “never the slightest justification” for the orders and called for the growing phenomenon of giving anonymity to litigants to stop. One of the men was named in an earlier decision as Mohammed al-Ghabra. The others are: Mohammed Jabar Ahmed, Mohammed Azmir Khan and Michael Marteen, known previously as Mohammed Tunveer Ahmed. The fifth was Hani El Sayed Sabaei Youssef, who was granted anonymity to protect his family in Egypt. The court heard he gave interviews regularly.

Mr Justice Collins, in the High Court, originally outlawed the Treasury’s powers to freeze assets as unfair and a breach of fundamental rights. That was overruled by the Court of Appeal and the case became the first to be heard in the Supreme Court.

The justices said that the issue was whether Parliament intended to give the Treasury power to make orders that “interfere so profoundly with individuals’ fundamental rights without parliamentary scrutiny”. Parliament “did not so intend” and in making the orders the Treasury exceeded its powers, they said.

Terrorist financing orders were supposed to give effect in British law to UN Security Council resolutions requiring member states to freeze the assets of Osama bin Laden, the Taleban and their associates.

Eric Metcalfe, of Justice, the law reform and human rights group, said: “It is right that the Government takes action to prevent the financing of terrorism. But it was wrong for the Treasury to do so by side-stepping Parliament and violating basic rights.”

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It's not the middle classes but social engineering zealots like Ms Harman who are to blame for Britain's inequality gap

The comments below amount to an extended version of what I said on DISSECTING LEFTISM yesterday

After 62 years of the welfare state and 13 of New Labour, Britain is becoming a less equal society. The Government's National Equality Panel reported this week that the gap between rich and poor has widened since 1970. Deputy Labour leader Harriet Harman immediately took to Radio 4 to assert that 'persistent inequality of social class perpetuates disadvantage'.

The Government proposes to attack this by placing a new legal burden upon public bodies 'to address socio-economic equality'. It is fascinating to speculate about her meaning. Will travellers be represented on the board of Railtrack? Should sink estate dwellers have a statutory voice on the BBC Trust? Ms Harman is a boundlessly foolish woman, so it would be rash to rule out any extravagance.

Class, not patriotism, is the last resort of political scoundrels. Labour, on the ropes electorally, is playing the card for all it believes it to be worth. Between now and polling day, we shall hear much more about alleged social discrimination, the shocking advantages the rich somehow steal from the poor. The tragedy is that Harman and her kind are pursuing cheap tactical advantage amid one of the horror stories of our time.

The National Equality Panel is a silly name for a meretricious quango. We do not need its report to show that the bottom section of British society, the underclass, lead miserable lives from which their children have pathetically little chance of escape. It is heartbreaking to see mid-teen mothers in supermarkets, clusters of idle kids on city street corners, knowing they are probably doomed to join Britain's one-in-six workless households and the dependency culture.

But Ms Harman's resentment focuses upon the haves; the people who earn large incomes, rear their children in comfort and, above all, educate them privately. Harmanism has launched Labour stalwart Dame Suzi Leather, chairman of the Charities Commission, on her war against independent schools. Harmanism is reflected in a thousand Government initiatives to fight alleged unfair disadvantage - one of them revealed this week by the Norfolk Jobcentre, which rejected an advertisement specifying that applicants should be 'reliable' workers. This, asserted the Jobcentre, discriminated against unreliable workers. The recruitment agency placing the ad had to fight to be allowed to request an English speaker, lest this disadvantage non-English speakers.

Harmanism seeks to attack every cause of unemployability save the most obvious: the catastrophic failure of the state education system. Professor John Hills, a member of the National Equality Panel, said yesterday: 'The challenge our report puts down to all political parties is: how do you create a level playing field when there are such large differences between the resources that different people have available to them?' Just so. But a host of social surveys show that 40 years ago more of the children of the poor escaped from their environment, through the grammar school system and a far more rigorous teaching and exam culture, than do their successors today.

Shirley Williams and Anthony Crosland, education ministers under Harold Wilson and Harriet Harman's spiritual forebears, deliberately destroyed the grammar schools. It has taken half a century for the damage inflicted on social mobility by their 'level playing-field' policies to be fully understood.

A new pamphlet for the Civitas think-tank by former university teacher David Conway analyses the decline in Britain of 'liberal education'. The Victorians proudly called it 'liberal' because its purpose, through subjectbased teaching, was to liberate children from ignorance. They promoted the classics, science and literature not merely to cram facts but to broaden horizons, teach children to think and to reach conclusions on the basis of evidence.

In 1919, the Oxford historian H.A.L. Fisher declared: 'The business of a university is not to equip students for professional posts, but to train them in disinterested intellectual habits, to give them a vision of what real learning is, to refine taste, to form judgment, to enlarge curiosity and to substitute for a low and material outlook on life a lofty view of its resources and demands.' How many universities today still cherish such noble objectives?

Even at Oxbridge, thanks to the Harmanites' insistence on admitting quotas of state school pupils heedless of attainment, most students now spend their first year being taught to write essays. First-class honours are distributed like popcorn, to one in five graduates.

I occasionally talk to Eton sixth-formers. It is painful to perceive the contrast between their literacy, curiosity and capacity for self-expression and the limp, passive, inarticulate students one often meets at universities. The Etonians are supremely privileged young men.

But the old grammar schools also possessed some great teachers who produced remarkable pupils, to which Alan Bennett's enchanting play and film The History Boys bear witness. Today, and admittedly in part because of the Tories' 1988 Education Act, we have a schools system which denies the brightest their chance to excel, and merely teaches millions the minimum necessary to pass innumerable tests.

Where are the vaulting ideals of Matthew Arnold, the great Victorian educationist, who asserted in 1873 that the true purpose of schooling was 'to provide children with knowledge of human capability and achievement and the workings of nature'?

If the Tories gain power later this year, one of their biggest problems will be to overcome the Harmanism of the mighty educational establishment. One of its standard-bearers, John White, of London's Institute of Education, argued in a 2007 lecture: 'The academic, subject-based curriculum is a middle-class creation - whose effect, if not intention, has been to make it difficult for many children not from a middle-class background to adjust to a highly academic school culture.'

Likewise, Martin Johnson, head of education policy for the Association Of Teachers And Lecturers, said: 'Most people are not intellectuals and do not live their lives predominantly in the abstract.' He attacks conventional teaching 'because mass education systems developed in the 20th century copied the curriculum considered necessary for social elites: leisured classes who could afford and valued such attitudes'.

Though Messrs White and Johnson would never admit it, their view is rooted in fantastic condescension: teach the underclass what little it is capable of learning, and leave higher things like science to the rich b******s whose parents pay fees.

Civitas's David Conway argues: 'Unless the provision of liberal education is once again made the central purpose of state schools, it will increasingly become the exclusive preserve of the few privileged enough to attend independent schools. That is not the way of social progress.'

It would be naive not to recognise the near-unteachability of the most disadvantaged of our children. But there are many, many more who have the brains and energy and supportive parents to propel themselves upwards in society - if only their schools give them the chance. We need fewer bog-standard tests and more exams that mean something; teachers committed to competition and enabling clever children of all classes to fulfil their potential.

Yet Harmanism is about levelling down, stuffing the middle classes. Oh yes, and with the dollop of hypocrisy that allowed the minister (herself educated at the famously elitist St Paul's Girls' School) to choose a grammar school outside her constituency for her children.

It is no longer a class divide which disadvantages Britain's poor. Nobody is denied a job or promotion because they don't speak proper or hold a knife and fork right. The educational chasm is the one that matters, and Labour's social engineers bear an overriding responsibility for it.

Until state schools revive the cult of excellence, until teachers are obliged to teach and pupils to learn, the underclass will indeed remain tragic victims - of Harmanism, not social discrimination.

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British centrist party calls for tighter rules on foreign doctors

The Liberal Democrats have launched new proposals to tighten rules on the employment of foreign doctors after the death of a 70-year-old man treated by a doctor from Germany. Norman Lamb, the party's health spokesman, called for a series of reforms including a national language and competency test for every doctor wishing to work in Britain.

The demand comes after David Gray, from Manea, Cambridgeshire, died after he was given more than 10 times the recommended daily dose of diamorphine by Daniel Ubani, a locum doctor from Germany. Dr Ubani, 67, had been on his first shift working for an out-of-hours medical service when the overdose was administered on February 16, 2008, an inquest into Mr Gray's death has heard.

The Liberal Democrats said the reforms should include making sure that a suspension in one country is effective across the European Economic Area - covering the European Union, Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway.

There should also be a criminal offence created for a primary care trust to allow a doctor to operate without ensuring compliance with regulations, the Liberal Democrats said. Mr Lamb said: "The tragic death of David Gray raises serious concerns about the safety of out-of-hours care in this country. "We cannot allow a situation to continue where we are reliant on tired, overworked foreign doctors to cover out-of-hours care.

"Patients' lives are being put at risk because standards across Europe are not uniformly good and foreign doctors can practice in the NHS without a test of competence and language. "Ministers have known for some time that the safeguards in place were not adequate but they have completely failed to take action. "These proposals will ensure that every doctor working in this country can speak English, is familiar with our health service and is well trained."

The General Medical Council (GMC) currently applies a test for English language proficiency and clinical skills to doctors from outside the European Economic Area before granting registration to work in the UK. But it cannot apply the same set of tests to doctors from within the EEA - a situation described as "profoundly unsatisfactory" by Niall Dickson, chief executive of the GMC.

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Uphill battle to conceive after 35

Lots of women turn a blind eye to this so it cannot be stressed enough

THE speed at which female fertility declines has been highlighted by the first study to track a woman's supply of eggs from conception to the menopause. The average 30-year-old will have just 12 per cent - barely an eighth - of her eggs left, the research shows. By her 40th birthday the situation is even more bleak, with just 3 per cent of the two million or so eggs she was born with remaining.

Only about 450 of the two million eggs will fully mature over a woman's lifetime. Many others will start to mature before dying off. The more eggs the woman has, the greater the odds of one maturing enough to allow her to become pregnant.

Researcher Dr Tom Kelsey, of St Andrews University, said there were "women waiting for the next promotion or waiting to meet Mr Right". "Women often do not realise how seriously their ovarian reserve declines after the age of 35," he said. "Every year that goes by you are losing a big proportion of your ovarian reserve. A lot of people get to their menopause in their mid or late 40s."

The rapid decline of a woman's store of eggs - and fertility - was known before, but this study is the first to trace its entire path, from before birth through to the end of child-bearing years. Working with Edinburgh University experts, Dr Kelsey counted the number of eggs in the ovaries of 325 women of a variety of ages. The information was then fed into a computer program which worked out how the supply declined with time.

The analysis, which is reported in the journal PLoS ONE, also showed that until the age of 25 lifestyle factors such as smoking or alcohol have little effect on a woman's fertility. But after this point the way a woman looks after her body has a marked effect on fertility.

He said unlocking the workings of female biological clocks could help doctors better advise young cancer patients on how to preserve their fertility.

Source



Britain is no longer free: "It’s official — the UK is no longer a free country. Well, semi-official, because the judgement comes from the independent Heritage Foundation, based in Washington DC, which has been compiling its influential Index of Economic Freedom for a decade and a half. … Sure, we are better than North Korea, Zimbabwe, Cuba, Eritrea and Burma, which make up the tail end of the Index. But in any index of free countries, it is a bit galling to fall behind Chile. Galling, but certainly fair.”





27 January, 2010

Britain to get even softer on crime

With a few exceptions, the only people much threatened by the law in Britain these days are people who defend themselves. You can get more time in jail for defending yourself than you would for rape. Rapists often walk free

Tens of thousands of criminals will spend less time in prison under Government plans to limit the ability of judges to set jail sentences, an official document has disclosed. It suggests that officials are alarmed that judges are giving criminals longer sentences than proposed by ministers, which they refer to as “upward sentencing drift”. From April, a new Sentencing Council will effectively force judges to follow sentencing guidelines drawn up in Westminster.

An official assessment of the impact of the move concludes that if judges follow guidelines set down by the council it will avoid the need for more than 1,000 future prison places. This represents tens of thousands of criminals being spared jail time over the next few years. However, one think-tank claimed that the document meant that the Government would need 8,000 fewer places than currently projected and accused ministers of trying to cut the prison population by the back door.

The Sentencing Council will become the body providing sentencing guides for judges and magistrates when it replaces the Sentencing Guidelines Council and Sentencing Advisory Panel. It has greater powers because legislation says courts “must follow” guidelines and have a “duty” to impose sentences within an identified range. Under the previous bodies, courts needed only to “have regard” to any guidelines.

An “impact assessment” for the new council drawn up by the Ministry of Justice said a “closer adherence to sentencing ranges could arrest historical trends in upward sentencing drift”. “Arresting sentencing drift could potentially mean avoiding the need to build some 1,000 additional prison places,” it said.

The document was unearthed by Max Chambers, a research fellow at Policy Exchange’s Crime and Justice Unit. “The Government repeatedly claimed that these changes were not an attempt to reduce the prison population by the back door,” he said. “The reality is that because of a failure to provide adequate capacity in the first place, the Government is going to try to manage down the prison population by up to 8,000 places over the four years. “The right way to cut the prison population is to rehabilitate prisoners properly and cut reoffending rates, not to undermine the long-standing principle of judicial discretion.”

Simon Reed, the vice-chairman of the Police Federation, had concerns that sentencing was being determined by ministers rather than magistrates and judges. “Any sentence imposed is already affected by remission for guilty pleas and half-point release,” he said. “I’m sure that there will also be pressure applied for any sentence to be set at the lower end of the band rather than the upper limit.”

Dominic Grieve, the shadow justice secretary, said it was important that sentences were not “driven by the Government’s failure to provide enough prison places”.

Although the Government has pledged to provide 96,000 prison places by 2014, an increase of about 10,000, the Commons justice select committee has suggested that the number of inmates be cut by a third, with courts using jail as a last resort.

A spokesman for the Ministry of Justice said: “The Sentencing Council will develop sentencing guidelines, monitor their use and play a key role in influencing a wide range of decisions relating to sentencing. “The council will also be required to assess the impact of sentencing practice and promote awareness of sentencing matters.”

SOURCE



Stupid British Leftist policies have been self-defeating

More equality is the declared British Leftist aim but after 12 years of Labour Party rule, social mobility has DECREASED. The major road out of a poor background for capable kids was the Grammar school system: Government schools run on private school lines that took only academically brighter kids. They were a great success but the Labour government has done its best to destroy them because they were "elitist". So you mostly have to be rich to get a good (private) education in Britain these days. Even a bright working class kid now has to go to a sink school which will teach him virtually nothing and ensure that he stays mired in the poverty he grew up in. So the latest Labour Party idea is to FORCE barely-educated kids into positions where they are unlikely to cope

The gulf between the richest and poorest in society is at its widest since the Second World War, an official report has found. The National Equality Panel, set up by ministers to investigate inequality, says there are “very large” differences in wealth between the classes. Britain is now one of the world’s most divided countries with children born into a wealthy family having far more advantages than those who are not. The report shows that, while gender and ethnic background are all factors in determining a child’s success, it is the social class into which they are born that is still most important.

The report is an embarrassment for the Government as it shows how the gap between rich and poor has failed to narrow under Labour. It will be seized upon by Harriet Harman, the Minister for Women and Equality, who commissioned it two years ago. She is pushing for equality legislation designed to give the working classes better career opportunities.

The report sets out big differences between the haves and have-nots. It says: “It matters more in Britain who your parents are than in many other countries.” It suggests that the “scale of differences in wealth, for instance, may imply that it is impossible to create a cohesive society.” The report finds:

* Parents of public school-educated sons can expect their children to be paid eight per cent more by their mid-20s than boys educated at state schools;

* At school poor British white boys are well below the national average by the time they are seven, deteriorating further after they are 11.

* Women are paid 21 per cent less than the national average, despite women into their 40s having better qualifications than men;

* Britain has one of the most unequal societies in the world, with income inequality ahead of Ireland, Japan, Spain, Canada, Germany and France. Inequality is worse in England than Wales and Scotland;

* A typical professional on the verge of retiring is worth nearly £1?million compared with just £59,000 for someone who is long-term unemployed.

* Poverty rates are among the worst in Europe, with only Italy, Spain and Greece faring worse.

* Average and below average White British children are less likely than those from minority ethnic groups to go on to higher education.

* More than half of children educated at private schools, andmore than 40 per cent of those with professional parents, go to thetop Russell group of universities.

* Two-thirds of those with professional parents receive firsts orupper seconds, but only half of those with unskilled parents.

The panel identifies a number of areas, ranging from education and pensions to taxes and neighbourhood renewal, where action is needed to tackle inequalities.

Theresa May, the Conservatives’ women and equalities spokesman, said: “It is unbelievable that Labour thinks it can claim to be the party of aspiration when its failure to tackle the causes of poverty has let down so many lives.”

Miss Harman said: “We have made progress over the last 13 years, especially in tackling poverty, and halted the rising growth of inequality that dates back to the 1980s. "But we will do more to increase social mobility and tackle the barriers that hold people back unfairly.”

Brendan Barber, the TUC’s general secretary, said that while inequality “took hold” in the 1980s “even in recent years the best that can be said is that it hasn't got any worse”. He added: “We have now tested to destruction the theory that wealth trickles down - it doesn't. Politicians of every party must meet the challenge set by this devastating analysis."

Neil Kinghan, director general of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, said: "The value of this report is how it pinpoints the combinations of circumstance that create the most acute instances of disadvantage: that as well as socio-economic class, race, gender, disability and other factors still matter very deeply."

SOURCE



British seven-year-olds taught politically correct sexual attitudes

Seven-year-olds will be taught to oppose sexist and homophobic bullying in schools. A shake-up of sex education will also see children learning to ' recognise and challenge stereotypes'. The guidelines on 'promoting equality, inclusion and acceptance of diversity' are a key part of Labour's push to spread sex education to more children. Ministers have ordered that all primary schools should run sex education lessons because of a failure to hit a target of halving the number of teenage pregnancies.

The Government also wants to make sex classes compulsory for 15-year-olds. Ed Balls, the Children's Secretary, launched the guidelines yesterday, saying they would help young people 'understand the importance of marriage and other stable relationships'. They would also equip children to cope with television, the internet, films and magazines which persuade them toward having early sex, he said.

But parenting groups accused Mr Balls of social engineering, saying that lecturing about sexism or homophobia was not required when tackling bad behaviour by children.

The draft guidelines sent out yesterday say that children should be told from the age of five about the difference between bodies of boys and girls. They should also learn ways of keeping safe. Among questions children in their first terms in school will discuss to help them avoid abuse is: 'What is the difference between good touch and bad touch?'

Teaching on diversity will become more specific for pupils from the age of seven. The guidelines said: 'Many people still face unacceptable prejudice and discrimination on the basis of their sexuality or what they look like, and intolerance towards difference needs to be challenged. 'Sex and relationships education is an opportunity to explore the different views that children and young people hold, guided by a welltrained teacher.'

Labour introduced rules in 2000 saying that school sex education should support stable relationships and marriage. Mr Balls said: 'We want to give young people the facts so they can stay safe and healthy. 'We also want young people to understand the importance of marriage and other stable relationships - these are the bedrock of family life, the best way to bring up children and the kind of relationships we want young people to develop as they get older.'

But Norman Wells of Family and Youth Concern said: 'This guidance will confirm the fears of many parents that compulfromsory sex education will be used to indoctrinate their children into thinking that there are no moral absolutes when it comes to sexual expression. 'The vast majority of parents don't want their children's schools to present positive images of homosexuality under the guide of combating homophobic bullying. 'Nor do they want teachers to deny the differences between men and women in the name of addressing sexist bullying. 'It is not necessary to engage in social engineering in order to deal firmly with harsh or unkind words and actions, regardless of what motivates them.'

Mr Balls used the phrase social engineering this month to describe Tory pledges of tax support for married couples.

SOURCE





26 January, 2010

The House of Lords is once again the last defender of freedom in Britain

Lords defeat for British government over forcing churches to hire homosexuals

Church leaders claimed a victory for religious freedom last night after defeating the Government's attempts to force them to hire homosexuals or transsexuals. The House of Lords voted down the plans after arguing that the move would go against the tenets of their faith.

The result is a humiliating blow for Harriet Harman's controversial Equality Bill, which is going through Parliament. It would have required churches and religious groups to take on candidates who do not fit in with their religious doctrine when recruiting key staff such as faith school headteachers or youth workers.

Organised religions have a special status that lets them turn down applicants whose lifestyles conflict with the churches' beliefs, even if they are otherwise well qualified for the job. Churches and mosques can reject candidates for jobs as ministers or priests if they are actively homosexual, if they have changed their sex or are women. It also extends to key staff who promote the religion, such as faith school heads.

A powerful coalition of bishops and Conservative peers last night voted to maintain the 'status quo' by 216 to 178.

Ministers insisted that the Equality Bill merely clarified existing laws, but a string of influential peers last night argued that churches could find themselves vulnerable to legal challenges in the future. The Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu, warned peers that forcing religious leaders to choose between the law and their beliefs was the 'road to ruin'. He said: 'You may feel that many churches and other religious organisations are wrong on matters of sexual ethics. 'But, if religious freedom means anything it must mean that those are matters for the churches and other religious organisations to determine for themselves in accordance with their own convictions. Where are the examples of actual abuses that have caused difficulties? 'Where are the court rulings that have shown that the law is defective? If it ain't broke, why fix it?'

Baroness O'Cathain, who tabled the successful amendment, said: ' Organisations should be free to choose their staff on whether they share those beliefs. 'How would a rape crisis centre operate if it was forced to employ male counsellors? This is the state trying to tell people who they can and can't employ.'

But Keith Porteous Wood, executive director of the National Secular Society, said: 'This amendment gives churches the absolute right to legally discriminate against gay administrative workers. 'We are very disappointed that the law has not been clarified. 'Religious agitation in the House of Lords has forced the Government into a humiliating defeat and on to a collision course with the European Commission.'

SOURCE



British government pulls the plug on "gifted and talented" academy

The moronic old "all men are equal" dogma rises to dominance once again

The Government has abandoned a flagship policy to provide vital support to the brightest schoolchildren. The national academy for gifted and talented pupils, a central element in Tony Blair's drive to make state schools attractive to middle class parents, is to be scrapped next month. Since it was created in 2002, the academy has provided support, master classes and summer schools for more than 200,000 children and training for thousands of teachers in how to identify and support able pupils.

The U-turn will see much of the academy's £20 million funding targeted instead on deprived teenagers as part of the Government's bid to improve social mobility and get more poor students into top universities.

Critics accused the Government of failing pupils and parents of bright children and said the move was "anti-intellectual". When it was launched, David Miliband, the then schools minister, described the academy as being as radical a reform as the creation of the Open University in the 1960s. The scheme was designed to ensure that the brightest pupils reach their full potential, giving them the kind of help normally only provided by the private sector. But now almost every plank of the scheme is to be dismantled.

* Separate funding for out-of-school master classes, workshops and summer schools will be withdrawn.

* The national gifted and talented register, a database of able pupils identified by their schools, will be abolished.

* The post of director of gifted and talented education at the Department for Children, Schools and Families has disappeared.

* Schools, many of which are ambivalent about giving extra help to gifted pupils because they consider it elitist, will be expected to improve provision for gifted children but with no ring-fenced funding.

* No out-of-school help will be given to high achieving primary schoolchildren

The changes follow Alan Milburn's report on social mobility which said that gifted children should no longer be identified and that a new programme should be "open to all pupils who could benefit from help in "communication skills, IT and developing the right attitude", while providing "bright disadvantaged students" with new opportunities.

Experts said last night that frustrated parents with talented children had been let down by the Government. "From the parents perspective, we are extremely worried about what is happening," said Denise Yates, chief executive of the charity the National Association for Gifted Children. "We are worried that out-of-school provision is going to disappear. There are schools that believe in specific support for gifted and talented children but unfortunately, at the other end of the spectrum, there are some schools who don't. "The national focus on gifted and talented children will be lost and there is nothing in the new plan for primary age children." ...

Deborah Eyre, the former director of the National Academy for Gifted and Talented Youth (NAGTY) and professor of education at Warwick University, said: "The policy direction has changed substantially. "It looks more like a social mobility programme that doesn't have much to do with gifted and talented. It looks intellectually incoherent and in some respects, anti-intellectual....

Professor Eyre said Labour's attempt to reassure middle-class parents that the state sector could perform as well as independent schools had been jettisoned. "There was a policy position that in a developed country we should be ambitious about education above and beyond the private sector. "There was a sense that if you were a middle class parent and your child was very bright, they would be safe in the state sector. "I don't think that ambition is there now. There is a much stronger priority on making sure that all children achieve minimum standards and very little attention is given to ensuring we get a very high performing system."

Although gifted and talented pupils are supposed to be at the heart of Labour's education policy, Heather Williams, from Poole, in Dorset, had to battle to get support for her son Matthew, five. "I knew Matthew was different because when I was doing sums with his older sister in the bath, she might not get it right but the number would come out of Matthew's mouth. He was about two," said Mrs Williams, a chartered accountant.

But when Mrs Williams initially spoke to Matthew's primary schoolteacher about his ability, she didn't get very far. "Her reaction was very negative," she said. After pushing the point and mentioning it at every parents evening, Matthew was eventually set extra work. But it was intermittent and not challenging enough.

In desperation, Mrs Williams took Matthew to see child psychologist Peter Congdon, who runs the Gifted Children's Information Centre, in Solihull and paid £360 for an assessment. "The conclusion was that the child was "super-bright – brighter than we even expected". The report got things moving. At school, Matthew has been put on the top table in the year above for maths. "He's loving it," said Mrs Williams. "The excitement I saw when he was younger, and he used to ask for three sums before he went to sleep, has come back. I'm really happy with what the school are doing now."

A lack of action is the norm in the school system, said Mrs Williams. "I recently visited a middle school and when I asked what they did for gifted and talented, the teacher said "I hate those words". "But all parents are asking for is that the child has the school work that is suitable for them.

More here



Stern review also undermined by the flawed IPCC version of science

More proof that Stern is just a political hack who does what he thinks his government will reward

There is another important story in involving the Muir-Wood et al. 2006 paper that was misrepresented by the IPCC (See here) as showing a linkage between increasing temperatures and rising damages from extreme weather events. The Stern Review Report of the UK government also relied on that paper as the sole basis for its projections of increasing damage from extreme events. In fact as much as 40% of the Stern Review projections for the global costs of unmitigated climate change derive from its misuse of the Muir-Wood et al. paper.

I documented this in a peer reviewed paper published in 2007, which you can see here in PDF. In that paper I wrote:

Furthermore, the Stern Review uses the Muir-Wood et al. (2006) as the sole basis for projecting future global losses from extreme events (see Table 5.2, p. 138). This means that the Stern Review's conclusions on the costs of future extreme events under conditions of climate change are based almost entirely on projections of future hurricane losses, which Stern projects somewhat mysteriously will increase to 1.3% of global GDP or higher. Its reliance on estimate of tropical cyclones losses is both direct and indirect. Its summary Table 5.2 on p. 138 indicates that increasing losses from hurricanes are one or two orders of magnitude larger than other losses that it has examined. . . inexplicably, the Stern Review concludes that US tropical cyclone losses will increase from 0.6% of GDP today to 1.3% of GDP under 2[degrees] of warming (Table 5.2). Yet, on page 130 the Stern Review cites Nordhaus (2007) to suggest that 2-3[degrees] of warming could double tropical cyclone losses from 0.06% of GDP (2005 losses) to 0.13% (future losses). There is no justification provided for increasing the Nordhaus (2007) values by a factor of 10. This apparent error (simply a typo?) is consistent with the Stern Review's overstatement of future economic losses from extreme weather events more generally.

As I was preparing this post, I accessed the Stern Review Report on the archive site of the UK government to capture an image of Table 5.2. Much to my surprise I learned that since the publication of my paper, Table 5.2 has mysteriously changed!

[...]

There is no note, no acknowledgment, nothing indicating that the estimated damage for hurricanes was modified after publication by an order of magnitude. The report was quietly changed to make the error go away. Of course, even with the Table corrected, now the Stern Review math does not add up, as the total GDP impact from USA, UK and Europe does not come anywhere close to the 1% global total for developed country impacts (based on Muir-Wood), much less the higher values suggested as possible in the report's text, underscoring a key point of my 2007 paper.

Consequently, anyone wanting to understand or replicate my analysis from the original source would no doubt be confused because evidence of the error in Table 5.2 was quietly changed after the publication of my paper. Had they noted the error it would have obviously led to questions about the implications, and ultimately the bottom line estimates of the costs of unmitigated climate change. Rather than rewrite the report, apparently, it was decided instead to rewrite history. Fixing facts to fit a policy conclusion is not a good idea for any government, but to do so with the quiet participation of leading academic advisors is doubly bad.

More HERE (See the original for links, graphics etc.)



Official Greenie vandalism coming to Britain

Huge expanses of British town and city centres built in the Sixties and Seventies may have to be torn down to meet carbon emission standards for buildings.

In an interview with The Times, the Government’s new chief construction adviser said that there may be no choice but to demolish buildings put up in those decades because it is impossible to refurbish them to a sufficiently high standard.

Paul Morrell, who took up his new post at the Department for Business, Innovation & Skills at the end of November last year, said: “In the Sixties, everything was built cheaper, faster and nastier. If you are going to try to fix buildings, then really you won’t have too many problems with anything built earlier than the Fifties or after the Eighties. Although you can do some things to buildings from the Sixties and Seventies, like replacing the roofs, there are probably some places that need to come down entirely.”

Mr Morrell has been charged with ridding the construction industry of carbon to meet a government target to cut UK carbon emissions by 80 per cent by 2050, compared with levels in the Nineties. He said that problem areas were likely to be places such as Newcastle city centre, where a lot of buildings went up in the Sixties and Seventies. Other towns that could undergo an eco-makeover could include Slough and Aylesbury, visited by Janet Street-Porter for Channel 4’s Demolition programme, broadcast in 2005.

Mr Morrell said: “The buildings that pose the most difficulties are semi-industrialised, highly inefficient, badly insulated and so ugly that they are not worth refurbishing.”

Property is responsible for 50 per cent of the UK’s carbon emissions, according to the British Property Federation. The Government has a target for all new commercial buildings built from 2018 to be zero-carbon, but a strategy for how to deal with existing stock has yet to be established.

The Policy Exchange, the public policy think-tank, has estimated that Britain would need to spend about £400 billion on new and refurbished infrastructure by 2020 to address historic underinvestment and to kick-start transition to a low-carbon economy.

Mr Morrell’s comments will be a blow to fans of retro architecture. The brutalist style that characterised the Sixties and Seventies has gained a following in recent years, as more such buildings have been torn down.

Its devotees may be reassured to learn that listed buildings from any era are likely to remain exempt from carbon targets, according to English Heritage. The listing authority said that many modern refurbishment measures, such as plastic windows and wall insulation, were not suitable for historic buildings because the measures do not allow the buildings to breathe, increasing the risk of mould and rot. However, many adaptations — such as better boilers and loft insulation — are equally applicable to new and most historic houses.

Property landlords are starting to deal with incoming requirements that will force them to spend millions of pounds to improve energy efficiency in their buildings, or to redevelop them. Increasingly owners favour refurbishing stock rather than starting from scratch, according to GVA Grimley, the property consultancy, partly because it is usually cheaper. Mr Morrell, who cited the refurbishment of Hampshire County Council’s Elizabeth II Court building in Winchester as a successful example of how a property can be improved, said: “The problem is weighing up whether it is more energy-efficient to knock something down and start from scratch, or refurbish it. We don’t have the methodologies for weighing that up in all cases.”

Francis Salway, the chief executive of Land Securities, Britain’s biggest commercial landlord, said that the company was using a combination of both approaches. He said: “We have refurbished some smaller buildings, but it is quite high-risk to refurbish larger stock. It is generally cheaper to refurbish, rather than redevelop, but sometimes the numbers come out surprisingly close. Refurbishing is sometimes more complex and less effective than starting from scratch.”

The Government committed itself last week to a consultation on the introduction of display energy certificates (DECs), which show offices’ and shops’ energy use. Responding to the Committee on Climate Change’s first progress report, ministers said that DECs should be rolled out to give everybody a better understanding of carbon emissions. The British Property Federation said that DECs were necessary because they were based on actual energy use.

SOURCE



Britain becomes a nation of conservatives for the first time in 20 years

People's views are becoming more conservative and there has been a mass move away from tax-and-spend values, an influential annual study said yesterday. Even Labour supporters have weakened in their belief in equality and redistribution of wealth, said the British Social Attitudes report. It said that after a dozen years of New Labour, 'British public opinion now has a more conservative character'.

For the first time in 20 years, more people called themselves Conservative than Labour, 32 per cent against 27 per cent. The large-scale survey, carried out every year since 1983, points to a hardening of views on many issues. People are less willing to consider legalising cannabis than they were just a few years ago and more than half think a single mother with a school-age child has a duty to go out to work to support the household. But there has also been a liberal swing on family life, with increasing numbers tolerating homosexuality and fewer condemning cohabiting couples.

The survey also found a declining sense of civic duty, with only 56 per cent believing everyone should vote in an election, down from 68 per cent in 1991.

The report says the shift of thinking against high public spending and the use of the tax system to redistribute wealth is the first resurgence of conservative values since Margaret Thatcher's premiership was nearing its end in 1989.

The survey, taken among nearly 5,000 people by the social research group NatCen, found that only two out of five back higher taxation, down from nearly two-thirds in 1997. However, the public remains devoted to spending on health and education - only eight per cent think those areas of spending should be cut.

Only 38 per cent now back spending to move wealth from the well-off to the poor, down from 51 per cent in 1994. Just one in five think unemployment benefits are too low, down from half in 1994.

The shift has been especially pronounced among Labour supporters who have followed the Blairite rejection of Old Labour values. Their belief in redistribution of wealth has dropped from 68 to 49 per cent since the mid-1990s, while Tory views have hardly changed. John Curtice, one of the authors of the report, said: 'Labour's increased public spending on health and education was an astute recognition of the public mood in the late 1990s. But the public's thirst has now been satisfied.'

The survey was funded by Whitehall ministries and quangos including the Economic and Social Research Council.

SOURCE



Eye test that spots Alzheimer's 20 years before symptoms

A test that can detect Alzheimer's up to 20 years before any symptoms show is being developed by British scientists. The simple and inexpensive eye test could be part of routine examinations by high street opticians in as little as three years, allowing those in middle age to be screened. Dementia experts said it had the power to revolutionise the treatment of Alzheimer's by making it possible for drugs to be given in the earliest stages.

The technique, being pioneered at University College London, could also speed up the development of medication capable of stopping the disease in its tracks, preventing people from ever showing symptoms.

Rebecca Wood, of the Alzheimer's Trust, said: 'These findings have the potential to transform the way we diagnose Alzheimer's, greatly enhancing efforts to develop new treatments.' Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia blight the lives of 700,000 Britons and their families, and the number of cases is expected to double within a generation. There is no cure and existing drugs do not work for everyone.

Current diagnosis is based on memory tests, and expensive brain scans are also sometimes used. However decisive proof of the disease usually comes from examination of the patient's brain after death.

The eye test would provide a quick, easy, cheap and highly-accurate diagnosis. It exploits the fact that the light-sensitive cells in the retina at the back of the eye are a direct extension of the brain. Using eye drops which highlight diseased cells, the UCL researchers showed for the first time in a living eye that the amount of damage to cells in the retina directly corresponds with brain cell death. They have also pinpointed the pattern of retinal cell death characteristic of Alzheimer's. So far their diagnosis has been right every time.

With research showing that cells start to die ten to 20 years before the symptoms of Alzheimer's become evident, it could allow people to be screened in middle age for signs of the disease. However, some may not want to know their fate so far in advance. There is also the fear that insurance companies could increase premiums for those who test positive while still young.

The experiments, reported in the journal Cell Death & Disease, have been on animals but the team are poised to start the first human trials. Researcher Professor Francesca Cordeiro said: 'The equipment used for this research is essentially the same as is used in clinics and hospitals worldwide. 'It is also inexpensive and non-invasive, which makes us fairly confident that we can progress quickly to its use in patients. 'It is entirely possible that in the future a visit to a high street optician to check on your eyesight will also be a check on the state of your brain.'

The technique could also improve the diagnosis of other conditions, including glaucoma and Parkinson's disease. In the short term, an early diagnosis would give patients and their families much more time to prepare for the future. In the longer term, it would allow new drugs that stop the disease in their tracks to reach their full potential. Professor Cordeiro said: 'If you give the treatment early enough, you can stop the disease progressing, full stop.'

Dr Susanne Sorensen, of the Alzheimer's Society, cautioned that the test was still experimental but added: 'This research is very exciting. If we can delay the onset of dementia by five years, we can halve the number of people who will die from the disease.'

SOURCE





25 January, 2010

Insane Leftist Britain again

Iraqi who killed two British doctors wins right to stay in UK, under Britain's perverse "human rights" laws

An Iraqi immigrant who stabbed to death two NHS doctors has won the right to stay in Britain, it has been confirmed. An immigration judge ruled Laith Alani, a 41-year-old paranoid schizophrenic, could pose a danger to people in his homeland, the Sunday Telegraph reports. It says the tribunal found deportation would also breach his human rights. The government said it must accept the immigration court's judgement.

Alani has spent 19 years in a secure hospital for the 1990 killings. Cosmetic surgeons Kenneth Paton and Michael Masser were attacked at Pinderfields Hospital in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, after Alani claimed to have received "a command from Allah". Alani, who was 24 at the time, was sentenced to an indefinite term of imprisonment in a maximum-security unit at Rampton Hospital, near Nottingham, in 1991.

He appealed to the Asylum and Immigration Tribunal (AIT) where a panel led by senior immigration judge Lance Waumsley ruled he could remain in the UK, the Telegraph reports.

If discharged, restricted patients are subject to intensive supervision by doctors and mental health professionals. It is understood one of the reasons given was that if Alani was sent back to Iraq, he would be unlikely to receive the drugs needed to keep his mental illness under control.

Immigration minister Phil Woolas said: "The UK Border Agency vigorously opposes any appeal against deportation, but when the courts insist an individual cannot be removed, we have to accept their judgement."

The Ministry of Justice would not comment on the individual case but said restricted patients were carefully managed for public protection and underwent rigorous risk assessment. "They can be discharged from secure hospitals by the Mental Health Tribunal which is entirely independent of government," a ministry spokesman said. "If discharged, restricted patients are subject to intensive supervision by doctors and mental health professionals. "The Secretary of State has the power to recall a conditionally discharged patient to hospital immediately if he receives information that the patient's risk to others is increasing as a result of his mental disorder."

The Home Office said a record 5,400 foreign criminals were deported in 2008. All foreign national prisoners were now considered for deportation before release, and over the past three years about a quarter have gone before the end of their sentence, it added.

SOURCE



British police provoke violence at patriotic demonstration

They deliberately did the opposite of good police practice -- which is to keep rival groups as far apart as possible

Police will study CCTV footage today of violent scenes involving far-right protesters after clashes broke out at an anti-Islamic protest.

The violence flared after members of the English Defence League (EDL) descended on Stoke-on-Trent in Staffordshire for the latest in a series of demonstrations. Seventeen arrests were made at the rally on Saturday and six police officers were hurt.

Demonstrators battled with officers as they tried to push their way past cordons separating them from anti-fascist protesters. One member of the public was injured and five police vehicles were damaged.

Supporters congregated at the Reginald Mitchell pub before heading on to the streets. The protesters, many in balaclavas, carried placards that read “Patriotism is not racism” and “Terrorists off our streets”. They sang Rule Britannia and the national anthem, waved St George flags and shouted chants abusing Muslims.

“Our officers will now be reviewing CCTV, video and other evidence,” said Superintendent Dave Mellor.

A YouTube video of the rally showed EDL supporters breaking into a police van and stealing riot shields. The EDL criticised police for positioning anti-fascist protesters opposite the main demonstration.

Ian Dalziel, 53, a joiner from Stoke, was not part of the march but showed his support for the EDL at the protest. “These demonstrations are helpful because at some stage the Government has got to turn around and listen,” he said.

Staffordshire Police said that those arrested were aged between 17 and 49 and linked to the EDL protest. Five men, from Cheshire and Yorkshire, have been charged with racial and public order offences. Seven have been bailed pending further inquiries. Four men were in custody yesterday.

SOURCE



More politically-correct inability to see the obvious

Both sides of the debate below seem to be assuming that it is upbringing that is responsible for the difference in children's intellectual achievement -- when all the research shows that genetics is the major influence -- with upbringing of negligible importance. Smart people tend to get rich and pass on their smart genes to their children -- and that is all there is to it. The finding is in fact just another confirmation of Charles Murray's well-known scholarly work that showed a strong link between social class and IQ. To be very blunt about it, the poor tend to be dumb and the rich tend to be smart. There are of course exceptions but that is the general tendency that is being detected below

A CHILD’S reading age and ability to count develop a month earlier for every extra £100 a month in family income, according to a government-funded study to be unveiled this week. Gaps in the development of children from different socio-economic backgrounds appear by the age of three and widen until 14. The findings, written by a panel chaired by Professor John Hills, are based on the Millennium Cohort Project which tracks 19,000 youngsters.

It will fuel divisions between Labour and the Tories over the link between a child’s prospects and household income.

Harriet Harman, Labour’s deputy leader, said last night: “[The report] provides an incontrovertible basis for us to move beyond inaccurate assertions made by the opposition ... David Cameron says that the differences in child outcomes between a child born in poverty and a child born in wealth are statistically insignificant when both have been raised by confident and able parents. “But what he fails to say is that you can’t separate out good parenting skills from family income. The two are so strongly correlated. So this is an utterly misleading portrayal of the evidence.”

The report says inequalities are exacerbated by differences in the mother’s education, the father’s job and deprivation in the area where they live. Details of how far up the salary scale the effect occurs are expected in the report.

SOURCE



The £100 billion schools scandal in Britain

The British Labour Party has doubled spending on schools since 1997. But critics say this tidal wave of money has achieved little

For Richard and Jan Brearley, from Lichfield in Staffordshire, the choice was clear: they had to employ a private maths tutor. Their daughters weren’t falling behind their classmates, but the girls’ comprehensive school was failing to provide the teaching they needed. Celia, 14, and Esther, 17, now receive an hour’s tuition a week, costing £15 each, to compensate for the shortcomings at their school.

Their father, Richard, 57, a homeopath, said: “In maths, Celia in particular has suffered from bad teaching, but the tutor can show her the things in private she doesn’t understand and have them clarified.”

The Brearleys are far from exceptional. Last weekend it emerged that private tuition is one of the few industries to have boomed during the recession. Some agencies report a doubling in business — largely fuelled by parents who are disenchanted with the quality of education provided by their local state schools.

This should not be happening — certainly if the picture painted by the official figures told the whole story. Earlier this month Ed Balls, the schools secretary, published figures for GCSEs that suggested more than a decade of unstinting improvement under Labour. More than 600,000 more pupils than in 1997 were leaving school with five GCSEs at grades A*-C, considered the basic level of qualifications. Grades in both GCSEs and A-levels have also risen consistently under Labour. “The entire system has shifted up a level and we are determined to keep it shifting,” said Vernon Coaker, Balls’s deputy.

As public spending cuts begin to bite in the face of the downturn, Balls has been one of the few ministers to keep his budget intact so far — indeed, few ministries have benefited as much as Balls’s since Labour came to power. In real terms, spending on schools has almost doubled to more than £42 billion a year since 1997. By some measures, Labour has provided a cumulative total of more than £100 billion extra to schools.

However, many within the educational establishment dispute ministers’ rosy picture of the system. On Friday, Barnaby Lenon, the head master of Harrow, launched a broadside against the quality of GCSEs and A-levels. “Let us not deceive our children, and especially children from poorer homes, with worthless qualifications so that they become like the citizens of Weimar Germany or Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, carrying their certificates around in a wheelbarrow, or produce people like those in the first round of The X Factor who tell us they want to be the next Britney Spears but can’t sing a note,” he said.

Education is set to be one of the most bitter battlegrounds of the election campaign, with Balls fighting off claims by Michael Gove, his Tory shadow, that Labour has failed the poor and presided over a dumbed-down education system.

Amid all the claims and counter-claims, what are children, parents and taxpayers getting now from the extra billions that the government has ploughed into our schools? At the heart of Tony Blair’s mantra of “education, education, education” was the pledge to bring decent schooling to sink comprehensives. New schools sprang up across the country and complaints about rotting roofs and leaking lavatories were replaced by accusations that too much was being spent on shiny new designer buildings, such as Norman Foster’s £46.4m Thomas Deacon academy in Peterborough. Hundreds of millions of pounds have also been poured into computers and, more controversially, into management consultancy firms, who were paid £61m in fees in 2008 alone.

To keep teachers in the profession and attract new ones, salaries were increased sharply — the average of about £32,000 is 20% higher than in 1997, even allowing for inflation. Labour insist that the results justify the money spent. Earlier this month ministers boasted that 50.7% of state school pupils had gained at least five GCSEs — including English and maths — at grade C or above. A-level grades have shown a similarly relentless rise, with 26.7% of papers awarded an A grade last year.

The government and the teaching profession insist the rise in grades shows that teaching is better and pupils are working harder. It is the claim that has been made annually by parties of both stripes since the seemingly inexorable rise in grades began in the 1980s.

Experts, however, argue that, while there has been progress, grades are easier to achieve than they once were. Robert Coe, reader in education at Durham University, tracks the value of grades by comparing pupils’ results with their performance in a series of tests whose difficulty is kept constant from year to year. “The grades have gone up, but the amount you have to do to get each grade has clearly gone down,” said Coe. “At Alevel the story is of a steady slide, about a tenth of a grade a year over the past 20 years in terms of what you get for what you do.” In simple terms, those who received a B in 1997 would now be awarded an A.

More here



British expert says parents must be given more data to compare schools

Comments by Sir Cyril Taylor:

PARENTS and the public need to be given far greater access to basic data about schools if they are to be able to judge their performance, hold them to account and drive them to improve. While the government has proposed that civil servants or Ofsted draw up an annual “report card” to judge every English school, I believe the approach of giving a single grade for performance is mistaken.

Schools should instead be legally required to publish a wide range of indicators, ranging from staff turnover to truancy rates. This would enable parents to assess a school’s performance and make an informed choice of school for their child.

After discussions with those drawing up Conservative education policy, I am confident that, if they win the general election, they will require schools to publish almost all this information. This is just a selection of the data schools should be required to publish:

* For secondary schools, all GCSE and A-level results. Not only should the raw score — the proportion of pupils obtaining at least five A*-C grades at GCSE, including maths and English — be published but also Professor David Jesson’s “value-added” measure, which compares the measured by their primary test results of pupils entering the school with their GCSE grades. Crucially, results should be published for the past three years to indicate what progress is being made.

* Average daily attendance. Computer-based swipe cards should routinely be used to record attendance and truancy. Most good schools achieve a 95% attendance rate, but at some as few as half of pupils attend regularly.

* Turnover of staff and vacancies. If a school has a high turnover or high vacancy rate, this may indicate that all is not well.

* The proportion of pupils who stay on in full-time education at age 16.

* The proportion of pupils who gain entry to university.

* The numbers of excluded children.

* The ratio of applications to places in the previous year. Popular schools are usually good schools.

Sceptics might say that some schools would supply inaccurate data. However, Ofsted could be required to check the data periodically to ensure it is accurate. Transparency and accountability are vital to ensure all children can attend a good school.

SOURCE





24 January, 2010

No NHS doctors available -- so British baby dies

No diagnostic tests when the baby was first seen of course. Tests are expensive -- and babies are expendable, apparently!

One of England’s biggest counties has only two GPs on call on some nights to cover a population of more than 600,000. Doctors admit the out-of-hours service in Suffolk is so stretched that it is threatening patient safety. On some occasions, residents have resorted to summoning an ambulance after failing to get hold of a GP.

In one case, a couple whose baby was seriously ill were told to wait up to four hours for a telephone call from a doctor. The nine-month-old boy, who was in fact suffering from meningitis, died later that night.

The GP skeleton service from 11.30pm to 8am is provided by Take Care Now (TCN), a private company that uses foreign doctors to cover some shifts. Three doctors are supposed to provide cover, but one is sometimes replaced by a nurse.

The situation in Suffolk is reflected across rural England, with the number of doctors on call plummeting in the past five years. The pressures on the service are revealed in a new report by the Primary Care Foundation, an independent body, which found that only 16 of the 80 primary care trusts it examined met the target of clinically assessing 90% of urgent calls within 20 minutes.

TCN has been under scrutiny since the death of David Gray, 70, from Manea, Cambridgeshire, in February 2008. Gray died after being given a huge overdose of diamorphine by Daniel Ubani, a German-based doctor who was on his first shift for the company.

TCN won the contract to provide out-of-hours services for NHS Suffolk, the primary care trust, in 2004 after GPs were permitted to opt out of providing round-the-clock care. The NHS trust covers the entire county, apart from one surgery that did not opt out and the Waveney district, which is covered by a separate trust.

Other out-of-hours providers in England also provide a skeleton night staff compared with the 1990s. However, GPs have written to the trust, complaining that patient safety could be at risk. Dr Claire Giles, chairwoman of Suffolk’s Local Medical Committee, which represents GPs, said: “The patches covered by these doctors have got bigger and bigger as the funding has been cut.”

TCN says most people are satisfied with its services and it hits all the NHS’s out-of-hours targets. But residents say the targets fail to reflect the delays in the system.

One couple, Mark and Jennifer Smith, from Kesgrave, Ipswich, lost their nine-month-old son to meningitis after being told they faced a wait of up to four hours to speak to an out-of-hours doctor. The couple visited an out-of-hours clinic at the Riverside centre in Ipswich at about 6pm on Saturday, March 14, last year with their sick baby, Taylor. The doctor there told them he was suffering from a bug.

When Taylor awoke at 2am that night with a bright rash, the couple telephoned NHS Direct and were told they would have to wait up to four hours for the doctor to call back. At 5am, the out-of-hours doctor rang and the Smiths explained the symptoms. Clearly concerned, the doctor advised the couple to check the baby. It was too late, however — their son had died of the blood poisoning that accompanies meningitis. “Our beautiful little boy had gone,” said Mark Smith.

He said the family had been failed by the NHS during the night. “It should not take four hours to get a call back from a doctor when you have a sick baby.”

Other residents say they have been forced to call ambulances rather than wait for an out-of-hours GP.

TCN, which is being investigated by the Care Quality Commission, had its contract with NHS Cambridgeshire terminated last November. It is also being replaced by a new out-of-hours service in Suffolk in April. The company is, however, defended by some GPs who say it is underfunded and that its problems are shared by similar providers.

NHS Suffolk said: “We are continually monitoring patient safety and experience and will continue to do so.” [Blah! blah!]

SOURCE



A British death panel at work again

Fertility regulators are allowing doctors to screen out embryos that could lead full lives despite having a genetic condition

FERTILITY regulators have triggered a new row over designer babies by allowing doctors to destroy embryos affected by more than 100 genetic conditions, including many illnesses that are not life-threatening. The genetic “defects” that can now be routinely screened out include conditions carried by a number of leading figures, such as Pete Sampras, the tennis champion, and Sergei Rachmaninoff, the Russian concert pianist and composer. In some cases it will mean the elimination of an embryo that has been identified as carrying genetic material inherited from a stricken grandparent, but which may not necessarily develop the same illness.

The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), has published a list of 116 inherited conditions that fertility clinics can screen out without requiring special permission. Although many of the conditions can cause gross deformity, protracted pain and premature death, the list also includes illnesses, including cancer and blindness, which can strike late in life after a victim has enjoyed decades of good health.

A number of the conditions are not life-threatening or can be readily treated because of advances in medicine. The disorders include Marfan syndrome, a congenital weakness of connective tissue that can lead to abnormal growth. Among the people thought to have suffered from the illness are Rachmaninoff, who was noted for his large hands, Charles de Gaulle, the French leader, and Abraham Lincoln, the American president.

Another condition that the HFEA allows to be screened out is the blood disorder thalassemia. Sampras, who won 14 Grand Slam singles titles during his career, has a version of the trait that can cause mild anaemia.

Sion Simon, the minister for creative industries, suffers from choroideremia, an inherited form of progressive blindness that is also on the HFEA list. Simon, 41, rarely speaks about the condition, but writing in The Spectator eight years ago, he said: “Being approximately half-blind now, I know perfectly well that the diurnal exigencies of deteriorating vision are no fun. They are tedious. And yet going blind carries a certain prestige that other losses of faculty do not. There are many much worse things.”

The HFEA said it takes into account the age of onset and the variability of physical and intellectual impairment when deciding which genetic conditions can be screened. The unpleasantness of medical treatment available for a given condition is also considered when deciding whether an affected individual will have a worthwhile life.

However, David King, director of Human Genetics Alert, a pressure group, said he was concerned about the use of selection for non-fatal conditions. “It contributes to a social climate in which even minor deviations from ‘normality’ are seen as unacceptable,” he said.

The established procedure for identifying inherited genetic abnormality is to remove one or two cells from an eight-cell embryo three days after fertilisation. The cells are then put through pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), a search for one or more defective characteristics. Abnormal embryos are discarded, while healthy ones are kept for implantation into the mother’s womb.

The HFEA is now considering adding a further 24 inherited disorders to its list of genetic conditions. Decisions on eight of them are expected this week. They include porphyria, a potentially painful condition caused by overproduction of red blood cell pigment that was linked to the “madness” of George III. Karen Harris, of the British Porphyria Association, said: “I have porphyria, so does one of my three children and so does his child.” Although Harris said she would not have used PGD to select her own children, she would not condemn its use by other families. “If you have lived with someone unable to function and on constant morphine because of the pain, you would take a different view.”

Joyce Harper, co-founder of the PGD centre at University College London, said the selection procedure is expensive and seldom available on the NHS. However, she has agreed to use the technique for a couple who want to ensure their child is not affected by a family gene causing deafness. She admitted: “It’s controversial and it’s going to get more controversial.”

SOURCE



British government hypocrite won't send his kid to one of his own government schools

Avowed atheist (of Jewish background) David Miliband sends son to Church of England school

Foreign Secretary David Miliband has secured a highly coveted place for his eldest child at a Church of England school – even though he is an avowed atheist. Mr Miliband’s wife, Louise, started attending a church attached to the school two years before their five-year-old son gained his place.

The school is nearly two miles from the couple’s home, but its grades and Ofsted reports are only marginally better than a primary school just 80 yards from their front door.

The Milibands’ adopted son won a place at the school despite his father’s public assertion that he does not believe in God. It is understood that Mrs Miliband was brought up a Lutheran in the United States. However, the couple are following a growing trend among the middle classes to choose faith schools over other local primaries. It is understood they considered, but rejected, the possibility of their son attending the non-faith Primrose Hill Primary just yards from their £1.5million house in Primrose Hill, North London.

The local school’s recent Ofsted inspection was only slightly less favourable than that of the school their child now attends, which was described as ‘exceptional’.

Father Graeme Rowlands, the chairman of governors at the CofE school, said Mrs Miliband had regularly attended his church over the past two years. He admitted that he rarely saw Mr Miliband, whose atheism stems from his Left-wing secular upbringing. He is the son of Ralph Miliband, a Jewish immigrant and celebrated Marxist sociologist.

There is no suggestion that the Milibands broke any rules in securing a place for their child. However, Mrs Miliband’s decision to attend the church came some five years after she moved into the area. Yesterday Father Rowlands was unable to name the church where Mrs Miliband, a concert violinist, previously worshipped. He said: ‘I am sure I did know, but I can’t remember.’

Last night, Cecile de Toro Arias, a parent-governor at Primrose Hill Primary, said: ‘I know Mr Miliband did consider Primrose Hill school. He attended a winter festival in 2008 and did a tour of the school. He was with his wife and child. ‘He was very nice. At the time we wanted him to come but it is probably for the best that he didn’t, what with all the security involved. ‘Perhaps he decided to go with the other school because it is smaller, with more discipline. We don’t feel snubbed. It is probably for the best.’

Faith schools dominated last month’s league table of the best primaries in England. About two-thirds of the schools with ‘perfect’ SATs results were Anglican, Roman Catholic or Jewish schools, despite their making up only a third of schools nationally.

Critics claim that faith schools perform better because they cherry-pick the best pupils from a wide area.

Mr Miliband’s son started attending the CofE school in September. In its ‘outstanding’ Ofsted report, inspectors found no areas in need of improvement and described the school as ‘exceptional’. Primrose Hill Primary also received an ‘outstanding’ grade in its most recent Ofsted report, but inspectors criticised its attendance record.

According to the Ofsted results, the CofE school fared better in English, with 100 per cent of students gaining level four or above. In comparison, 95 per cent of Primrose Hill pupils achieved the same level. In maths, 96 per cent of pupils at the Milibands’ chosen school gained level four or above, compared with an almost identical 95 per cent at Primrose Hill. But the latter has a higher percentage of pupils with learning difficulties.

Local Liberal Democrat councillor Jo Shaw, who is deputy chairman of the board of governors at Primrose Hill Primary, said: ‘It’s disappointing when parents don’t choose to send their children to our school, especially when they live so close. ‘It’s a very good school. It achieved an outstanding Ofsted report. It’s a microcosm of Camden because the kids are so diverse. They’re incredibly well behaved.’

A statement from the Church school said: ‘In line with all state schools, initial priority is given to all 'looked-after' children [children in care]. As a voluntary-aided school, priority is then given to children who, with their parents, are committed members of the Church and regular worshippers. 'Mrs Miliband had been a practising member of the congregation in this parish for over a year prior to her application for a place at the school and still attends regularly.’

The Milibands have adopted two sons, one in 2004 and one three years later. Both were adopted in the US, where Mrs Miliband enjoys dual citizenship. In a Mail on Sunday survey conducted when Tony Blair converted to Catholicism shortly after leaving Downing Street, Mr Miliband was one of just two Cabinet Ministers who said categorically that they did not believe in God. The other was Home Secretary Alan Johnson.

A Foreign Office spokesman refused to comment.

SOURCE



UN wrongly linked global warming to natural disasters

An article from Leaky Jonathan below. Another worm that is slowly turning?

THE United Nations climate science panel faces new controversy for wrongly linking global warming to an increase in the number and severity of natural disasters such as hurricanes and floods. It based the claims on an unpublished report that had not been subjected to routine scientific scrutiny - and ignored warnings from scientific advisers that the evidence supporting the link too weak. The report's own authors later withdrew the claim because they felt the evidence was not strong enough.

The claim by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), that global warming is already affecting the severity and frequency of global disasters, has since become embedded in political and public debate. It was central to discussions at last month's Copenhagen climate summit, including a demand by developing countries for compensation of $100 billion (£62 billion) from the rich nations blamed for creating the most emissions. Ed Miliband, the energy and climate change minister, has suggested British and overseas floods - such as those in Bangladesh in 2007 - could be linked to global warming. Barack Obama, the US president, said last autumn: "More powerful storms and floods threaten every continent." Last month Gordon Brown, the prime minister, told the Commons that the financial agreement at Copenhagen "must address the great injustice that . . . those hit first and hardest by climate change are those that have done least harm".

The latest criticism of the IPCC comes a week after reports in The Sunday Times forced it to retract claims in its benchmark 2007 report that the Himalayan glaciers would be largely melted by 2035. It turned out that the bogus claim had been lifted from a news report published in 1999 by New Scientist magazine.

The new controversy also goes back to the IPCC's 2007 report in which a separate section warned that the world had "suffered rapidly rising costs due to extreme weather-related events since the 1970s". It suggested a part of this increase was due to global warming and cited the unpublished report, saying: "One study has found that while the dominant signal remains that of the significant increases in the values of exposure at risk, once losses are normalised for exposure, there still remains an underlying rising trend." The Sunday Times has since found that the scientific paper on which the IPCC based its claim had not been peer reviewed, nor published, at the time the climate body issued its report.

When the paper was eventually published, in 2008, it had a new caveat. It said: "We find insufficient evidence to claim a statistical relationship between global temperature increase and catastrophe losses." [i.e. it reversed its conclusions]

Despite this change the IPCC did not issue a clarification ahead of the Copenhagen climate summit last month. It has also emerged that at least two scientific reviewers who checked drafts of the IPCC report urged greater caution in proposing a link between climate change and disaster impacts - but were ignored.

The claim will now be re-examined and could be withdrawn. Professor Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, a climatologist at the Universite Catholique de Louvain in Belgium, who is vice-chair of the IPCC, said: "We are reassessing the evidence and will publish a report on natural disasters and extreme weather with the latest findings. Despite recent events the IPCC process is still very rigorous and scientific."

The academic paper at the centre of the latest questions was written in 2006 by Robert Muir-Wood, head of research at Risk Management Solutions, a London consultancy, who later became a contributing author to the section of the IPCC's 2007 report dealing with climate change impacts. He is widely respected as an expert on disaster impacts. Muir-Wood wanted to find out if the 8% year-on-year increase in global losses caused by weather-related disasters since the 1960s was larger than could be explained by the impact of social changes like growth in population and infrastructure. Such an increase, coinciding with rising temperatures, might suggest that global warming was to blame. If proven this would be highly significant, both politically and scientifically, because it would confirm the many predictions that global warming will increase the frequency and severity of natural hazards.

In the research Muir-Wood looked at a wide range of hazards, including tropical cyclones, thunder and hail storms, and wildfires as well as floods and hurricanes. He found from 1950 to 2005 there was no increase in the impact of disasters once growth was accounted for. For 1970-2005, however, he found a 2% annual increase which "corresponded with a period of rising global temperatures,"

Muir-Wood was, however, careful to point out that almost all this increase could be accounted for by the exceptionally strong hurricane seasons in 2004 and 2005. There were also other more technical factors that could cause bias, such as exchange rates which meant that disasters hitting the US would appear to cost proportionately more in insurance payouts. Despite such caveats, the IPCC report used the study in its section on disasters and hazards, but cited only the 1970-2005 results. The IPCC report said: "Once the data were normalised, a small statistically significant trend was found for an increase in annual catastrophe loss since 1970 of 2% a year." It added: "Once losses are normalised for exposure, there still remains an underlying rising trend."

Muir-Wood's paper was originally commissioned by Roger Pielke, professor of environmental studies at Colorado University, also an expert on disaster impacts, for a workshop on disaster losses in 2006. The researchers who attended that workshop published a statement agreeing that so far there was no evidence to link global warming with any increase in the severity or frequency of disasters. Pielke has also told the IPCC that citing one section of Muir-Wood's paper in preference to the rest of his work, and all the other peer-reviewed literature, was wrong.

He said: "All the literature published before and since the IPCC report shows that rising disaster losses can be explained entirely by social change. People have looked hard for evidence that global warming plays a part but can't find it. Muir-Wood's study actually confirmed that."

Mike Hulme, professor of climate change at the Tyndall Centre, which advises the UK government on global warming, said there was no real evidence that natural disasters were already being made worse by climate change. He said: "A proper analysis shows that these claims are usually superficial"

Such warnings may prove uncomfortable for Miliband whose recent speeches have often linked climate change with disasters such as the floods that recently hit Bangladesh and Cumbria. Last month he said: "We must not let the sceptics pass off political opinion as scientific fact. Events in Cumbria give a foretaste of the kind of weather runaway climate change could bring. Abroad, the melting of the Himalayan glaciers that feed the great rivers of South Asia could put hundreds of millions of people at risk of drought. Our security is at stake."

Muir-Wood himself is more cautious. He said: "The idea that catastrophes are rising in cost partly because of climate change is completely misleading. "We could not tell if it was just an association or cause and effect. Also, our study included 2004 and 2005 which was when there were some major hurricanes. If you took those years away then the significance of climate change vanished."

Some researchers have argued that it is unfair to attack the IPCC too strongly, pointing out that some errors are inevitable in a report as long and technical as the IPCC's round-up of climate science. "Part of the problem could simply be that expectations are too high," said one researcher. "We have been seen as a scientific gold standard and that's hard to live up to."

Professor Christopher Field,director of the Department of Global Ecology at the Carnegie Institution in California, who is the new co-chairman of the IPCC working group overseeing the climate impacts report, said the 2007 report had been broadly accurate at the time it was written. He said: "The 2007 study should be seen as "a snapshot of what was known then. Science is progressive. If something turns out to be wrong we can fix it next time around." However he confirmed he would be introducing rigorous new review procedures for future reports to ensure errors were kept to a minimum.

SOURCE



Butter now in the gun

I have been expecting this for ages. Apparently overlooked is the fact that butter is an important source of many nutrients. The case for that is made here. It is probably a bit overstated but does show that butter should not lightly be demonized

Butter should be banned to protect the nation's health, according to a leading heart surgeon. Shyam Kolvekar says only radical action can save growing numbers of young adults from heart attacks and clogged arteries. Warning of the dangers of other foods high in saturated fat, he advises people to eat less red meat, take low-fat milk and switch to olive and sunflower oil. Saturated fat is blamed for a third of the 200,000 premature deaths from heart disease a year. [But that is an unsubstantiated theory]

Adults are eating an average of 800 grams of it a month - 20 per cent more than the recommended limit. Hitting the recommended level could save 3,500 lives a year.

Mr Kolvekar, a consultant at University College London Hospitals, said: 'By banning butter and replacing it with a healthy spread the average daily sat-fat intake would be reduced by eight grams. 'This would save thousands of lives each year and help to protect them from cardiovascular disease - the UK's biggest killer. 'When a patient comes to me, they have established coronary heart disease. We are the last resort. 'The frustrating thing is that often the need for heart surgery could have been prevented by following a healthier, lower sat-fat diet.'

Historically, heart bypass operations were needed by patients near retirement age, but those in their thirties now appear regularly on operating lists, Mr Kolvekar said. However, his views sparked a fierce backlash from the farming industry and TV chefs.

A spokesman for Jamie Oliver, who has championed improved nutrition in schools, said: 'He is completely against a ban on butter. He uses butter in his recipes, for example for roasting potatoes in his Christmas programme. 'He doesn't like the whole kind of food police, we must ban everything, point of view. Butter can be eaten in moderation.' David Halhead, who has a dairy farm in Lancashire, said: 'There is far more evidence out there that dairy products are good for you. Milk and butter are full of important minerals.

'The public get fed up with various people firing off theories that have no facts behind them. We are going back to the nanny state. 'There are a hell of a lot of things that are likely to kill you before butter. I eat butter and milk every day and I am still here.'

Mr Kolvekar's comments were issued by KTB, a public relations company that works for Unilever, the maker of Flora margarine. However, a KTB spokesman said there were no financial ties between the consultant and Unilever and he was not receiving any payment. 'These are his views,' added the spokesman.

The surgeon timed his comments to coincide with the Food Standards Agency's campaign to promote the virtues of low-fat milk. Dr Clair Baynton, the FSA's head of nutrition, said: 'One per cent fat milk still gives us all the nutritional benefits, including calcium, protein, minerals and vitamins but with half the fat of semi. 'Something that simple but beneficial has got to be worth trying.' ˜

Mars UK announced yesterday it is to cut saturated fat levels in Mars bars, Snickers, Topic, Milky Way and Flyte products by the use of sunflower oil.

SOURCE



Even the British Left think Obama is wrong about the banks

It's just an obvious stunt on Obama's part to distract attention from the meltdown of Obamacare. He's unlikely to get new laws through the Sanate anyway so it is just more of his usual hot air

Alistair Darling warns today that President Barack Obama’s proposals for shaking up the banks would not have prevented the crisis and risk undermining the international consensus on reforming the financial system.

In an interview with The Sunday Times, the chancellor made clear that he saw serious shortcomings in the American approach. “It is always difficult to say ex ante that you would never intervene to save a particular sort of bank,” he said. “In Lehman, for example, there wasn’t a single retail deposit, but the then American administration allowed it to go down and that brought the rest of the system down on the back of it.

“You could end up dividing institutions and making them separate legal entities but that isn’t the point. The point is the connectivity between them in relation to their financial transactions. “Equally, the large-small thing doesn’t run. Northern Rock was very small in global terms but systemically it was quite important when it got into trouble.”

The chancellor said Britain would continue to work with America on financial reform but that any proposals would have to be “workable and deliverable” and that he would not do anything to “disadvantage London relative to the rest of the world”.

Darling’s big worry is that Obama’s bombshell proposals, based on ideas set out last year by Paul Volcker, former chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, will shatter the consensus within the G20 nations on banking reform. “If everyone does their own thing it will achieve absolutely nothing. The banks are global — they are quite capable of organising themselves in such a way that if the regime is difficult in one country they will go to another one, and that doesn’t do anyone any good.”

More HERE



British judges see through parental alienation syndrome

Mothers often set their children against their estranged husbands but this time the judges were having none of that

A boy of 11 has been ordered to leave his mother and move more than 100 miles to live with the father he hates. Appeal Court judges accepted last week that the boy was thriving with his mother, enjoying a life full of activities. Yet they still ruled that he should live with his father, whom he has not seen for nearly four years.

Experts said the judgment reflected the emphasis the courts were now putting on the role of fathers and on the need for children to have contact with both parents. The boy’s parents split up before he was born and the father has been striving to win access for years. He works in the City of London, lives in a £1million Stockbroker Belt house, has remarried and has two more children, who are educated privately. He said he would also send the boy to private school. The mother, a professional woman, had said she was happy for the boy to have contact with his father – when he was ready to do so.

But the Appeal Court upheld an earlier ruling at Coventry Crown Court, where Judge Clifford Bellamy said he was unconvinced that the mother really wanted contact to resume. The appeal judges called the boy’s feelings of hate for his father ‘irrational’ and said he would suffer long-term emotional and behavioural problems if they were not reunited. Judge Bellamy said ‘no stone had been left unturned’ to re-establish contact between father and son, but even indirect attempts through gifts and Christmas cards had failed utterly.

Despite the father being ‘devoted’ to his son, the boy was stubbornly resistant to ever seeing his father again. The judge added that the mother’s arrangements for the boy to have extra-curricular activities every day of the week left no space for his father, adding: ‘All of this strongly suggests that, in truth, the mother has no real wish to see contact restart.’ Judge Bellamy said she had ‘significant influence and power’ over the boy.

He added that the animosity felt by the boy would quickly disappear once he was living under his father’s roof.

The boy’s guardian, an expert appointed to provide an independent view of his best interests, told the court: ‘I feel pretty ferocious in protecting him. Never have I come across such a strong sense of fighting for a child.’ But the judge said she had become too emotionally involved in the case and lost her sense of objectivity.

At the appeal, Lord Justice Thorpe said it was the third time recently that the court had upheld properly reasoned decisions in favour of fathers. Miranda Fisher, of London solicitors Charles Russell, said later that the activities of groups such as Fathers 4 Justice had tipped the balance – and courts were taking a tougher line on parents who denied contact between their children and their ex-partners. She explained: ‘Twenty or 30 years ago it was not the normal expectation that fathers should be involved in looking after the children. Now more mothers have full-time careers and fathers are increasingly wanting to share in caring.’

SOURCE



Britain's windfarm subsidies top £1 billion a year

Britain's energy policy faces new controversy as it can be revealed that electricity customers are paying more than £1 billion a year to subsidise windfarms and other forms of renewable energy. The hidden levy is part of a Government scheme to force energy companies to fund green energy. The companies bear the cost but pass it on to consumers in the form of higher bills. The amount raised has climbed steeply since the introduction of the levy in 2002.

Next month's annual report from Ofgem, the energy regulator, will show that it has risen above £1 billion for the first time, according to analysts at the Renewable Energy Foundation (REF), a green energy think-tank. It means that renewable energy added an an estimated £13.50 to the average household electricity bill last year. An additional burden fell on industrial users of electricity, who in turn passed on costs to their customers.

Critics claimed that the subsidy scheme unfairly penalised consumers and was being used to fund "unrealistic" plans to increase the use of wind power.

Countryside campaigners have expressed concerns at the number of wind farms being built around the country, as the Government tries to meet its target that 30 per cent of the UK's energy should be generated from renewable sources by 2020.

The Ofgem report will show that over the past three years the subsidies have added a total of £32.50 to the average household's electricity bills. The annual cost has steadily risen from £7 in 2007 to £13.50 in 2009. The proceeds of the levy, known as the Renewables Obligation (RO), are divided between the main renewable energy sources, with wind receiving 40 per cent, landfill gas 25 per cent, biomass 20 per cent, hydroelectric 12 per cent and sewage gas 3 per cent.

Dr John Constable, director of policy and research at the REF, said: "The fundamental problem with the RO is that the cost to the consumer is extremely high. "Since the cost of the scheme is passed onto businesses as well as households, there will also be a significant impact on the economy. "The Government's plans for wind are wildly unrealistic. Wind power is going to be very expensive, very difficult and ultimately very costly." The cost to consumers of the RO scheme has risen from £278 million in 2002/3 to £1.04 billion last year, the Ofgem report is expected to say - a total of £4.4 billion over seven years.

The scheme works by requiring energy suppliers to obtain a set percentage of the electricity they provide to consumers from renewable sources. In 2008/9 this figure was 9.1 per cent, compared to 7.9 per cent in 2007/8. For each megawatt hour of renewable energy bought by a supplier from a generator, suppliers must also buy a certificate as proof. If suppliers fail to meet their obligation by presenting enough certificates, they must pay a fine known as a "buy-out". The cost to energy suppliers is passed on to consumers through their bills.

Ofgem predicts that the total cost of the RO to consumers between 2002 and 2027, when the scheme is set to end, will amount to £32 billion. By 2020 it is estimated that the annual cost will be running at over £5 billion.

Prof Ian Fells, emeritus professor of energy conversion at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, said money that was being invested into wind farms through the RO scheme needed to be diverted elsewhere. He said: "Consumers simply don't realise the cost to them of supporting the renewable energy industry. Not only is there a cost to consumers but there is a cost to businesses as well. "So people will not only see the huge cost of the RO scheme in their household bills but also on the High Street, as they see shops put up prices to meet the rising cost of electricity. "Subsidising wind farms is far too expensive, and the money could be better spent by investing in other forms of power."

A spokeswoman for the Department of Energy and Climate Change said: "To ensure we meet our climate change goals we need a massive increase in low carbon energy and that includes renewables. "The RO is helping that expansion happen with the amount of electricity generated from renewables trebling since 2002. "We also need to make sure we have continued secure energy supplies in the future and renewables are part of that too. There's no high-carbon low-price alternative – we must move to low-carbon sources."

There are currently 270 wind farms with 2,775 turbines in operation, with plans for a further 10,000 on and around Britain's shores. It has raised concerns in communities that hundreds of acres of rural landscapes will have wind farms built on them. Last week The Sunday Telegraph revealed how 14 of the UK's officially-designated beauty spots could soon be blighted by turbines, which can reach more than 400ft in height.

SOURCE



Church of England congregations fall again, and half are retired people: "The Church of England has been hit by a new slump in its congregations, with the latest figures showing its fifth year-on-year decline. Also, the Church’s first analysis of its worshippers showed that nearly half are pensioners. The established Church has lost more than 40,000 worshippers since 2003, shortly after Dr Rowan Williams became Archbishop of Canterbury in December 2002. Average weekly attendance fell from 1.187 million in 2003 to 1.145 million in 2008. In spite of a rise in the number of children and young people at services, the average age of a member of a Church of England congregation is 61, according to statistics published yesterday. The figures also show a slight acceleration in the rate of decline in the past 12 months, indicating that there may be even worse news in years to come... Just under 3 per cent of the population, or 1.7 million people, go to a Church of England service at least once a month. The average Sunday attendance is down to 960,000, with the worst Sunday showing 611,000 adults in a Church of England service that week." [Not mentioned is that the more fundamentalist congregations remain strong]

Britain to cut public employee pay? "Alistair Darling, the chancellor, today warns public sector workers they need to follow the example of the private sector and accept wage cuts if they want to hang on to their jobs. Signalling an assault on public sector pay and bonuses, starting with the highest-paid employees, Darling said it was time for a change of culture. “What is being paid has sometimes lost the relationship it ought to have with what someone actually does. Once that happens, it’s not only unfair, it’s actually grossly inefficient,” he said in an interview with The Sunday Times. He cited the example of private sector firms, two-thirds of which are planning wage freezes or cuts this year as an alternative to redundancies. “There’s a lot of evidence that people in the private sector have taken pay cuts and held on to their jobs,” he said. He is drawing up plans to slash remuneration for some posts and end the routine awarding of extra “performance” payments. It follows an outcry over bonuses in Whitehall and among council and quango staff". [We'll believe it when we see it]





23 January, 2010

British woman sent to a maternity unit with no doctor despite 'disastrous' family history of birthing problems

A girl who suffered brain damage at birth after her mother was sent to a maternity unit with no doctor despite a “disastrous” family history of birthing problems has been awarded more than a million pounds. Colchester Hospital University Trust, in Essex, who have not admitted liability, have agreed to pay the child £1.25m in damages. The trust will also make annual inflation–linked payments currently set at between £96,000 and £130,000 to the girl, now aged five and named only as X.

Her mother, aged 21 when she gave birth, had a family history of troubled labours, including stillbirths and haemorrhages. She insists that she was not told about the lack of medical facilities at Clacton Hospital, which is staffed only by midwives and not doctors.

The birth was difficult and X was eventually delivered "blue and floppy" in the back of an ambulance as her mother was being rushed to Colchester General, 16 miles away, on May 5, 2004. She suffered brain damage at birth, is severely physically disabled, cannot see or talk and will require 24-hour care for the rest of her life.

A spokesman for the Trust said: “There remain significant differences between the parties, but the Trust acknowledges some failings for which it apologises and, as a consequence, made improvements. “We are sorry that this girl sustained a brain injury at birth and wish her and her family best wishes for the future."

Approving the settlement in the High Court, Mrs Justice Slade praised the child’s parents, describing them as "devoted". Late last year the chairman of the trust was fired after a health watchdog found that it was failing patients and had mortality rates 12 per cent above the national average.

SOURCE



British doctors repeatedly treat a healthy boy just on his mother's say-so

They clearly were not mentally involved -- just bureaucrats filling in their hours

A "SADISTIC" mother has been jailed in England for subjecting her healthy son to "24 hour-a-day torture" by pretending he was severely ill to gain publicity and cash. Lisa Hayden-Johnson, from Brixham, Devon, was said to have "reveled" in the national attention her young son received. The mother-of-two conned charities out of dream holidays and donations and secured meetings with royalty, celebrities and former UK prime minister Tony Blair. She even successfully lobbied for her son - who she falsely claimed suffered from cerebral palsy, cystic fibrosis and dysphagia among a litany of illnesses - to receive a Child of Courage Award in 2005.

The 35-year-old was jailed for three years and three months at Exeter Crown Court, having previously admitted child cruelty and perverting the course of justice.

Prosecutor Andrew Macfarlane said Hayden-Johnson "organised, orchestrated and ensured a regime of medical, physiological and psychological mistreatment amounting to 24 hour-a-day torture that touched on every aspect of his young vulnerable life".

She frequently described her son "as the most ill child in Britain", the lawyer told the court. He continued: "As a result of her sadistic fabrication of non-existent symptoms, the defendant achieved much publicity and national attention, including an encounter with royalty and the then prime minister."

Hayden-Johnson subjected the child to a total of 325 medical encounters, during which he was subjected to a series of "physical intrusions and interventions", Mr Macfarlane said. These included blood tests, intravenous treatments and a gastrostomy, and he was fed through a tube and confined to a wheelchair. He still believed he was seriously ill, more than two years after his ordeal ended, Mr Macfarlane said.

SOURCE



Negligent British health bureaucracy: Nigerian doctor who killed British patient 'avoided English test'

A German doctor who gave a patient a fatal overdose of drugs had failed an English test at one NHS health care trust before being accepted to work by another, an inquest heard.

Dr Daniel Ubani was told he had not passed the language exam in June 2007, but a month later successfully applied to a different trust for formal registration as a GP. The Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly PCT did not enforce the test because he was an EU doctor and subsequently placed him on the nationwide performance register. This meant Dr Ubani could work anywhere in England and Wales and never worked in the south west, accepting his first job in Cambridgeshire, the hearing was told.

On his first out of hours NHS shift on February 16, 2008, he gave 70-year-old David Gray up to 20 times the recommended dose of diamorphine, killing him within hours.

It emerged yesterday that the out of hours’ company which used Dr Ubani’s services told him to return to Germany that day after he killed Mr Gray, who had suffered from kidney stones. Dr Ubani, 67, has since been suspended by the General Medical Council in the UK but continues to practice in Germany.

At the inquest into Mr Gray’s death, held at Wisbech Magistrates Court in East Cambridgeshire, the different level of medical scrutiny between NHS trusts across the country was exposed. Dr Ubani was accepted on the GMC register in October 2006 because he held a Certificate of Good Standing in Germany. Shortly afterwards, the Nigerian-born doctor, who specialises in cosmetic surgery, applied for a place as a GP on the performance register at Leeds PCT.

Without registration, he would not be allowed to practice medicine in the UK, the hearing was told. He was asked to take part in the International English Language Testing System (IELTS) through the West Yorkshire NHS Central Services Agency. On the form, Dr Ubani stated that his first language was Igbo, a Nigerian language, but later told officials that he had been taught in English at school. In May 2007, his results showed that he got 4.5 for his listening, 4.5 for his reading, seven for his writing and seven for his speech. This gave him an overall mark of six, but Leeds PCT demanded a pass mark of seven, the inquest heard.

Concerns were also raised about his references, one of which was from a medical professional who had never worked with him. Dr Ubani was told that his application would not be successful and so he withdrew his form on July 2.

He immediately applied for registration with the Cornwall and Isle of Scilly PCT and 16 days later, on July 18, 2007, his application was accepted. Adrian Tyas, the former director of Cornwall and Isles of Scilly Primary Care Support Agency, was responsible for placing doctors on the performance list. He said the PCT was not aware that Dr Ubani had failed a language test because he had withdrawn his application from the Leeds PCT and therefore had not been formally rejected. “The PCT did not carry out test on the competency of English for EU nationals,” he said.

David Locke, representing the Cambridgeshire PCT, responded: “But Mr Tyas, if you cannot speak English, you cannot function as a doctor in England, can you?” “That is correct,” he conceded. “Do you think you should have at checked at the least that a doctor could speak English?” Mr Tyas replied: “I think the PCT has a responsibility, but so do the people employing someone as a locum doctor.”

The inquest heard that Dr Ubani was paid by the company Cimarron, which supplied his services to Take Care Now, an out of hours’ company subcontracted to the Cambridgshire PCT.

Mr Tyas admitted that Dr Ubani had not given any detail about his experience as a GP. “You had no idea if he treated children, had any experience in palliative care, you had no idea if he had three patients or 3,000?” asked Mr Lock. “No,” replied Mr Tyas.

Sharon Brooks, from Cimarron, said Dr Ubani was told to return to Germany the day after he killed Mr Gray. She said Dr Christopher Browning, clinical governance lead at TCN, had advised the doctor to go home. Mrs Brooks told the inquest: “I got a phone call from Dr Ubani telling me that he had spoken to Dr Browning at TCN who told him it was best to go back to Germany. “I told him that if Dr Browning had told him to go home, that is what he should do.”

Mrs Brooks, who does not have a medical background, said Dr Ubani was registered with the GMC and the NHS performers' register before they employed him. However, she conceded that his specialisation in cosmetic surgery including botox, was in no way relevant to his job as a GP.

SOURCE



Britain's lazy political police again

Police under fire over ignored murder call

BRITISH police faced criticism for failing to respond to an emergency call made by a woman who was subsequently stabbed to death in front of her young daughter, Sky News has reported. Rabina Bibi, 35, called the police at 7.36 pm (local time) on September 3, 2008, to report that her ex-partner, Zakarya Rezaie, was banging on the door of her home in Coventry, England.

Five minutes later, she called to say he had left and she no longer required police assistance. The court was told that in fact Rezaie was already in the house then and had forced her to call police and say he had gone.

Less than 30 minutes after that, the emergency services received a call from Bibi's terrified seven-year-old daughter, Ayesha. A jury heard that Ayesha asked for the police and said, "He's my mummy's friend and he's trying to kill her with a knife ... She's bleeding everywhere."

Police officers then went to the house and found Bibi with multiple stab wounds. Despite calling for an ambulance, she died at the scene.

The UK's Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) said the West Midlands Police "failed" Bibi by not sending out an officer when she made the first call. Police should have arrived within half an hour. IPCC commissioner Len Jackson, said: "She was entitled to a police response within 30 minutes based on the information she provided, and it failed to happen. "It will never be known whether she would still be alive today had police officers been dispatched to her in accordance with force policy."

The IPCC said Bibi's second call was treated correctly in not cancelling a police response to what was logged as a domestic incident, despite the caller's request. "The grading of Ms Bibi's first 999 (911) call as an 'early response incident,' classified as there being genuine concern for a person's safety, was appropriate on the information she provided," the commission said. "It meant that police officers should have attended her within 30 minutes. However, no such police resource was deployed to the first call logged."

The IPCC investigation was unable to establish with certainty whether the cause was due to "an IT failure or human error." West Midlands Police said it agreed to review its IT systems and staff training to avoid a repeat of the failings. Rezaie, 29, was last year sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder.

SOURCE

But they swung into action over 3 dead goldfish!

And bungled that, too, of course

As any rookie detective knows, if you're going to get a result you need a watertight case. The Norwich goldfish killings looked straightforward enough: Three dead, the stench of bleach and an obvious prime suspect. It should have been open and shut - but sadly it wasn't. When the case reached court, an exasperated magistrate was alerted to a glaring omission in the prosecution's evidence and threw the matter out.

It seemed the long arm of the law hadn't extended to testing the fish tank water for bleach. Police had decided not to because the analysis would have cost too much.

Last night as all concerned were counting the cost of the case - likely to be thousands of pounds - a legal source said: 'It begs the question why on earth it got to court in the first place if the evidence was not sorted out.'

Chantelle Amies, 19, had been accused of poisoning the pet fish, which belonged to a neighbour's four-year- old son, by pouring bleach into their water following a dispute. The shocked teenager, who denied killing the £7 pets last September, was arrested and charged with criminal damage. Susanna Chowdhury, prosecuting, said Miss Amies's fingerprints had been found on a bottle of bleach in the house and on the fish tank. The prosecution had three witnesses saying they had smelled bleach in the fish tank. But the court was told that although the fish water had been taken by police they had not sent it away for testing.

It is believed the decision was taken after the Crown Prosecution Service suggested the evidence of witnesses who smelt bleach was strong enough to secure a conviction. But Philip Farr, defending, said they could not prove there had been bleach in the tank or whether the fish had been killed by bleach. As a result, chairman of the bench, Mary-Anne Massey, decided there was no case to answer.

The average magistrates' trial is estimated to cost at least £2,000. But this was the third time the case had been listed in court requiring parties to be present, meaning the final bill could be much higher.

Matthew Elliott, of the TaxPayers' Alliance, criticised the CPS for bringing the matter to court. He said: 'Regardless of the type of offence being alleged, it is wasteful and unjust to bring a case all the way to court without sufficient evidence. Given that there are plenty of stronger cases that never get fully pursued, the CPS need to work harder at securing good value.'

The CPS refused to say how much the saga had cost. A spokesman said: 'We obviously felt we had enough evidence for a conviction and that it was in the public interest to bring the case to court.'

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Why the BBC will always be wrong on Climate Change

Today I had another go at the BBC for its biased coverage of ‘Climate Change’, this time venturing into the belly of the beast itself for an interview on Radio 4’s Media Show. (God I hate doing programmes on the BBC. If you want to hear me on form, listen to me on US radio where my dangerously conservative views get so much more sympathetic a reception – here, say, from my old mate Greg Garrison).

Anyway, the BBC is clearly very het up about the notion that it’s in breach of its code of impartiality – as it most definitely is in its science coverage. But trying to explain to the BBC why its coverage is skewed in a painfully left-liberal, eco-fascist direction is bit like trying to tell Attila the Hun that he errs on the side of pillage and rape: for both Attila and the BBC it’s all just instinctively right and normal.

The BBC’s current policy (thanks Yaoxx) on its climate change coverage was discussed in a recent report (June 2007) by the BBC Trust – Safeguarding Impartiality in the 21st Century:

“The BBC has held a high-level seminar with some of the best scientific experts, and has come to the view that the weight of evidence no longer justifies equal space being given to the opponents of the consensus. But these dissenters (or even sceptics) will still be heard, as they should, because it is not the BBC’s role to close down this debate. They cannot be simply dismissed as ‘flat-earthers’ or ‘deniers’, who ‘should not be given a platform’ by the BBC. Impartiality always requires a breadth of view: for as long as minority opinions are coherently and honestly expressed, the BBC must give them appropriate space. ‘Bias by elimination’ is even more offensive today than it was in 1926. The BBC has many public purposes of both ambition and merit – but joining campaigns to save the planet is not one of them. The BBC’s best contribution is to increase public awareness of the issues and possible solutions through impartial and accurate programming. Acceptance of a basic scientific consensus only sharpens the need for hawk-eyed scrutiny of the arguments surrounding both causation and solution. It remains important that programme-makers relish the full range of debate that such a central and absorbing subject offers, scientifically, politically and ethically, and avoid being misrepresented as standard-bearers. The wagon wheel remains a model shape. But the trundle of the bandwagon is not a model sound.”

How, though, did it reach these conclusions? Tony Newberry at the Harmless Sky blog has been doing some digging and come up with some useful stuff about this “high-level” BBC Seminar. Despite Freedom of Information requests, the BBC refused to divulge which experts attended. But Newberry did find out this:

It was attended by ‘30 key BBC staff and 30 invited guests who are specialists in the area of climate change’. The event was called ‘Climate Change - the Challenge to Broadcasting’ and it was hosted by Jana Bennett (then Director of Television, now Director of Vision) and Helen Boaden (Director of News BBC). The ‘key speaker’ was Lord May of Oxford. Among the aims of the seminar were ‘to offer a summary of the state of knowledge on the issue’ and ‘to consider the BBC’s role in the public debate’. The chairman was Fergal Keane.

He goes on:

Further research on the internet revealed that the seminar was one of a number of similar events organised jointly by the BBC, The International Broadcasting Trust (the IBT, an environmental lobby group), and the Cambridge Media and Environment Programme (CMEP), a rather shadowy organisation of which the BBC’s Environment Analyst, Roger Harrabin, is a co-director. The other director is an academic and ‘environmental consultant’ called Dr Joe Smith.

Stranger still, the IBT’s website describes the invited guests at the 2006 climate seminar as ‘Policy Experts[1]’. It is difficult to know how policy experts could authoritatively (in the words of the BBC’s letter) ‘offer a summary of the state of knowledge on the issue’ of climate science to senior BBC staff who were present, or how they could also be described as ‘the best scientific experts’ in the BBC Trust’s report. In the context of the climate change debate, ‘policy experts’ usually means environmental activists, politicians or policy wonks from think tanks and the eNGOs.

The IBT describes its mission as ‘lobbying Government, regulators and broadcasters’[2] as well as ‘dialogue with the main public service broadcasters’. It has represented Friends of the Earth, Christian Aid, Oxfam and Tearfund,[3] all of which have played a high profile role in climate change activism.

It has been far more difficult to obtain information about CMEP. However this organisation has received funding from:

* Defra, the ministry responsible for promoting government policy on global warming.

* WWF, a leading environmental pressure group.

* The Tyndall Centre, a climate research institute based at the University of East Anglia.[4]

But the most damning observations were provided on a guest post at Harmless Sky by the (mildly sceptical) writer Richard D North (not to be confused with the Eureferendum blogspot Dr Richard North, who is much more strongly sceptical of AGW):

I did attend the BBC climate change seminar and my impression is that it was part of the ongoing efforts by Roger Harrabin (environment analyst at the BBC) to help the corporation wrestle with the problem of balance and impartiality and robust reporting of the climate change debate.

I think Roger Harrabin has not been a good reporter or analyst of climate change. He is not the worst by any means, but he has in my view missed many tricks. However, he has been serious if not very effective (actually often rather poor) in tackling the nature of the debate itself.

By the way, my own view is that the biggest media failure has been in discussing the policy response to the science of climate change. I mean that though the discussion of the science has been bad the discussion of the policy response has been mostly abysmal. The BBC is only the worst of the offenders on this score because (a) they are paid to be the best and (b) their efforts have fallen so far short of their stated ambitions in this area.

I found the seminar frankly shocking. The BBC crew (senior executives from every branch of the corporation) were matched by an equal number of specialists, almost all (and maybe all) of whom could be said to have come from the “we must support Kyoto” school of climate change activists.

So far as I can recall I was alone in being a climate change sceptic (nothing like a denier, by the way) on both the science and policy response.

I was frankly appalled by the level of ignorance of the issue which the BBC people showed. I mean that I heard nothing that made me think any of them read any broadsheet newspaper coverage of the topic (except maybe the Guardian and that lazily). Though they purported to be aware that this was an immensely important topic, it seemed to me that none of them had shown even a modicum of professional journalistic curiosity on the subject. I am not saying that I knew what they all knew or thought, but I can say that I spent the day discussing the issue and don’t recall anyone showing any sign of having read anything serious at all.

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‘Stop deceiving British children with worthless qualifications’, says private school headteacher

The headmaster of Harrow has accused many state schools of deceiving children by entering them for “worthless” qualifications. Barnaby Lenon said that grade inflation and a shift to vocational qualifications was masking a failure to teach enough pupils to a good standard. “Let us not deceive our children, and especially children from poorer homes, with worthless qualifications so that they become like the citizens of Weimar Germany or Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, carrying their certificates around in a wheelbarrow,” he told a conference. “[Let’s not] produce people like those girls in the first round of The X Factor who tell us they want to be the next Britney Spears but can’t sing a note.”

He cited media studies as an example of a soft subject, for which many schools were keen to enter students because it was easier for them to get a good grade. The real route to a good job in one of the professions, he said, was good grades in traditional academic subjects such as maths, sciences and languages.

Mr Lenon, addressing a conference of leading independent and state school heads in Beckton, East London, attacked a report by Alan Milburn, the former Labour minister, on social mobility. He said that this should not be the primary objective of a good education system. “The main aim should be to educate every child really well to the standards that we see in places like Finland and Singapore in the knowledge that if you do that, of course, social mobility ought to be a by-product,” he said. “Making social mobility a main aim is a mistake in my view because it can so easily lead to dumbing down.”

Mr Lenon pointed to the abolition of CSEs and O levels in 1988, which was intended to end a two-tier school system and, he said, led to a fall in standards in education at 16, with a knock-on impact in A levels and universities. “If we want the brightest children from our poorest homes to fulfil their potential we must not deceive them with high grades in soft subjects or allow them to believe that going to any old uni to read any subject is going to be the path to prosperity, because it is not.”

For this reason independent schools had deliberately adopted harder qualifications such as the IGCSE, International Baccalaureate and Pre-U, he said.

Mr Lenon told the conference: “The road to social mobility is not a downhill stretch on an empty motorway; it’s an agonisingly steep path up a mountain whose summit is never quite in view.”

Addressing the same conference Michael Gove, the Shadow Schools Secretary, responded to criticism of his policy to prevent graduates with a third-class degree from training to be teachers with public funds. Mr Gove said that it was a fallacy to say his policy implied that those with higher degrees would automatically make good teachers. A good degree was only the first step and teachers needed an ability to continue to learn and to stimulate curiosity in others, he said.

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22 January, 2010

British hospitals must cut services to stay afloat, watchdog warns

Hospitals will have to reduce services, sell off buildings and move into smaller premises to cope with financial pressures in the next few years, the head of the foundation trusts’ regulatory body has warned. William Moyes, who steps down from his role as executive chairman of Monitor after six years next week, told The Times that too many hospitals were not grasping the economic challenges ahead. While political parties have promised to protect NHS funding and avoid service cuts, Mr Moyes said it was inevitable that some hospitals would have to reduce services and sell off assets to keep afloat.

Any hospital department that was treating too few patients to cover its costs risked compromising the quality of care, he said. Some maternity and paediatric units, which are very costly to run, might be merged or relocated, while A&E departments could be downgraded to minor injury units if they had a small number of serious cases that could be sent elsewhere. “People need to know where they are making money or losing money. If you find a service where the income can’t cover the cost, you may eventually have to question whether the income is ever going to be sufficient, and whether this is in fact the wrong activity for the hospital. “In quite a lot of places the number of births is too small to support the cost of giving a high-quality service. You have three choices: increase the flow of patients, move the service elsewhere or stay as you are and risk compromising the care.”

Mr Moyes, who oversees the regulation of finances and governance of England’s 125 flagship foundation trusts, said that as well as focusing on core departments, trusts would need to consider stripping out “uneconomic” facilities such as pathology laboratories and scanning units in some hospitals that were being used for very small numbers of patients. “There may be surplus assets — buildings, land, equipment, stuff they think they might need in years to come under their development plans — and in some cases working in a much smaller physical space and disposing of all the hospital penumbra that can be brought into the main building.”

Mr Moyes said he had requested that foundation trust chief executives resubmit a “downside assessment” — stripping back their budgets — to get a more realistic grasp of the funding pressures they faced. He said that he was disappointed when, on being asked to revise their financial predictions in September, a number of trusts had resubmitted even more rosetinted forecasts of growth. “You can’t assume everything will go well and if a problem arises the Department of Health will bail you out,” he said.

His warnings were echoed yesterday by Sir David Nicholson, the chief executive of the NHS, who described the coming years as “extremely challenging”. Giving evidence to the Commons Health Select Committee, Sir David warned of pay cuts and service reorganisation. “It is going to be very tough,” he said, adding that tighter budgets would mean the 1 per cent pay cap demanded by the Treasury would be treated by NHS managers as a maximum rise, not an entitlement. His comments came a day after inflation hit 2.9 per cent when unions are already angry over a pay freeze on council workers. “There is essentially a trade-off between pay and numbers of jobs,” he told the committee. “In a cash-limited system, that is the big unknown for us. We need to talk through with the trade unions and staff associations about what that trade-off is.”

Sir David has previously warned that the NHS would have to find productivity and efficiency savings of between £15 billion and £20 billion over the three years 2011-12 to 2013-14.

The head of the Audit Commission added to the debate, saying that political pledges to safeguard spending on health and education were “insane”. Steve Bundred told the Commons public administration committee that billions would have to be saved. “It seems to me absurd to imagine that the only services where no efficiencies can be found are those that have been the most generously funded for ten years,” he said.

Mr Moyes said he thought that an “unintended benefit” of future economic turbulence would be to heighten hospitals’ understanding that they had to operate with a robust business model. “A lot of hospitals, even the very good ones, are at the stage of learning how to think long-term,” he said. “We are good at strong visions, big pictures, but we need to learn to be very good at pessimism and what will happen if things are not going to turn out well.”

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A record 10,000 British public hospital patients hit by malnutrition IN HOSPITAL

At least 10,000 patients left hospital last year after becoming malnourished while under NHS care - the highest number on record. Official NHS figures show that in 2008/09 175,003 patients were victims of malnutrition or another nutritional difficulty when they were admitted to hospital. But 185,446 were suffering the same conditions when they were discharged. The difference between the figures, obtained by the Tories, is 10,443, a 27 per cent rise on the previous year's 8,229.

Critics said it was almost unbelievable that hospitals were routinely sending people home in a worse condition than when they arrived. In 1997/98, Labour's first year in power, just 75,431 patients were discharged in a malnourished state, of whom only 4,773 had become malnourished while in NHS care. The total of 185,446 patients discharged in a malnourished state last year is 18 per cent more than the 157,175 the year before. This is the sharpest rise on record, largely because the number of patients admitted with nutritional difficulties was itself 17 per cent higher.

The continuing problems come despite years of Labour promises to improve hospital food. The Daily Mail's Dignity for the Elderly campaign has highlighted the scandal of old people not being fed properly in hospital. The food is often so unappetising that patients do not eat, and sometimes placed out of their reach and taken away untouched.

Nurses often claim they are too busy to help patients eat. Age Concern says 60 per cent of older patients, who occupy two thirds of hospital beds, are at risk of worsening health or becoming malnourished.

Andrew Harrop, head of policy, said: 'It's scandalous to see that malnutrition is still a huge problem. 'Nutritious food and help with eating are an essential part of basic care which must be recognised by all staff. 'Despite a commitment from the Government, many NHS trusts are yet to introduce protected mealtimes and one in three haven't introduced red-tray systems to identify those who need help. 'Until nutrition is given top priority in every ward, older people will continue to be needlessly malnourished, putting their health at risk.'

Tory health spokesman Stephen O'Brien said: 'These figures are of serious concern. 'It has been a growing problem for a number of years and yet Labour has done very little to protect these vulnerable people. 'Nutrition is important for people who aren't ill: how much more for those recovering from serious illnesses and operations? 'It is scandalous that people come out of hospital in a worse state than when they go in, particularly due to something as basic as being given decent food.'

The Department of Health said last night: 'It is misleading to suggest that an increase in patients discharged with malnutrition is due to poor care or the quality of food. 'Many patients who are admitted to hospital are already malnourished. Malnutrition can be a consequence of serious illness or medication. 'Many patients who have malnutrition and are discharged from hospital continue their care through primary care and social care. 'In 2009 a survey found that 94.5 per cent of NHS hospitals achieved an excellent or good rating for quality, choice and availability of food.'

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The groan-inducing letter from my son's school that shows everything that is wrong with teaching today

By Tom Utley, in Britain

Every sentence, every phrase, almost every word of the latest letter we've had from our 16-year-old's comprehensive school fills me with the deepest gloom. 'Dear Parent/Carer,' it begins, and already my heart begins to sink. Yes, I understand the use of the singular, since so many of the letter's recipients are indeed single.

And family arrangements being what they are in my part of South London, I dare say that some of my boys' schoolmates are being brought up by their grannies, aunts or people unrelated to them.

But there's something about the word 'carer', with its undertone of the social services, that I find profoundly depressing. Why not the more traditional and dignified title 'guardian' - or has that, for some mysterious reason, become politically incorrect?

But I'm letting my fuddy-duddy prejudices run away with me before I've even begun. On, then, with my grim letter, jointly signed by the deputy principal and the director of the sixth form at Dunraven School (oxymoronic motto: 'Excellence for All'). The groans, by the way, are my own additions - but the rest is a faithful transcript:

'In line with recent government guidance [groan] to tackle inequalities [groan] and improve health outcomes for young people [groan], NHS Lambeth and the Children and Young People's Service of the London Borough of Lambeth [groan] are rolling out [groan] a service for sixth-form students [groan].'

From here on, I'll let readers insert their own groans where they think appropriate: 'This is part of a wider area programme led by the local Teenage Pregnancy & Parenthood Partnership to reduce under-18 conceptions... 'In keeping with good practice, Dunraven has an up-to-date Sex and Relationship Education Policy and programme of work. Building on this, it is proposed that a specialist outreach nurse will offer a school-based health drop-in including the provision of confidential sexual health advice available directly to students on a weekly basis . . .'

You get the idea, so I'll spare you the rest. Before I go any further, let me make it absolutely clear that this is not an attack on Dunraven School. Despite all the Government's efforts to make their lives impossible, the teachers there are doing a heroic job for my son, for which I'm extremely grateful. No, my boy's school is just one of hundreds all over the country which have had to send out very similar letters over the past few days or weeks, couched in the same deadly jargon, raising groans from countless parent/carers who received them.

Nor am I blaming the deputy principal, Gloria Lowe, or the sixth-form director, Safras Cuffy, for those leaden, New Labour buzzphrases ('in keeping with good practice', 'rolling out', 'school-based health drop-in', 'outreach', 'local area safeguarding guidelines', 'clear pathway to health services').

The tragedy is that they're forced to spend half their lives churning out this bilge by a Government that regards their venerable profession as merely a minor branch of the state bureaucracy - charged not with educating pupils (sorry, 'students') but with 'tackling inequalities' and 'improving health outcomes'.

My letter, and the weekly blizzard of others like it, is just a hideously graphic illustration of what it's increasingly coming to mean to be a teacher in Labour's Britain. I confess I don't know what attracted Ms Lowe and Mr Cuffy to the profession. I don't know, either, which subjects they teach - and I daren't ask my son, because he'll rumble that I'm breaking his strict ban on embarrassing him yet again by mentioning his school.

So I'll let fancy take flight, and imagine the deputy principal as a classicist, enraptured in her youth by Virgil's glorious rhythms and cadences and determined to pass on her enthusiasm to the next generation. I see Mr Cuffy as a mathematician, marvelling at the beauty of Fermat's last theorem, tortured by the difficulty of proving it and yearning to awaken young minds to the boundless wonder of numbers and the way they behave.

Or perhaps they're both specialists in English literature, who during their own childhoods struck upon Oliver Goldsmith's lines about the village schoolmaster, and resolved on the spot that this would be the life for them: 'And still they gazed, and still the wonder grew/ That one small head could carry all he knew.'

Of course, like so many of their colleagues these days, Ms Lowe and Mr Cuffy may indeed have gone into teaching with a view to 'tackling inequalities', in the sense of giving deprived children a leg-up by laying before them the opportunities offered by knowledge. Thoroughly worthy, too. In my experience, some of the most inspiring teachers (though by no means all of them) lean to the Left.

But it's surely fair to guess that it was no part of teaching's attraction to them that it would mean spending hours every week writing groan-inducing letters to 'Dear Parent/Carer', outlining the latest fatuous social-engineering scheme dreamed up by the wretched Ed Balls or Harriet Harman. (By the way, I've just noticed that Mr Cuffy begins another of his letters this week, about student ID cards and on-site security, with the words: 'Dear Parent/Guardian.' Good for you, Sir!)

I can't help thinking of some of the teachers who inspired me most during my own, privileged childhood: Noel Wilkinson, who sparked my lifelong love of Latin; the extraordinary Theodore Zinn, who could reel off vast tracts of Homer and Horace and ignored the books on the A-level curriculum if there were others he liked better; Jim Cogan ('slide your scripts down the aisle and pin back your lug'oles') who opened my ears to Shakespeare; even dear old Ted Craven, who taught us very little about the subject on the timetable, but an awful lot about his wartime experiences in the Royal Navy. . .

Would they have gone into the profession if it had meant carrying out Mr Balls's edicts about what and how they were allowed to teach? I can only guess. But one thing's for sure: I can't see any of them sitting down willingly to write to parents about school-based health drop-ins.

Indeed, I strongly suspect that if Mr Zinn had been asked to do any such thing, he would have resorted to his favourite technique for silencing an over-animated classroom - which was breaking down in tears.

So, yes, David Cameron is right to worry that teaching is becoming less attractive to the best graduates. But if he wants to make it more so, he'll have to do a great deal more than raising the profession's entrance requirements (and never mind that his plan to demand at least a 2:2 degree would disqualify some excellent teachers who came to learning late). Nor will it be enough to introduce performance-related pay, negotiated by individual heads - even if he manages to persuade the unions to accept it.

What makes the profession increasingly unappealing these days is the constant interference from Whitehall, which makes drudges of all teachers - and not just those like poor Ms Lowe and Mr Cuffy who have to deal with the admin. In Mr Balls's pursuit of 'Excellence for All' (which means dumbing down exams until it's A-stars all round), they're forced to follow a narrow and often politically motivated curriculum that's more about indoctrination than education.

I'd rather hoped that when our boy embarked on his A-level course, his teachers would be given a little more freedom to pass on their own enthusiasms, rather than the Government's. That was until I asked him what he was studying in English. He came out with a word that was unfamiliar to me. I've forgotten what it was - and, again, I dare not ask him. But I vividly remember his reply when I asked him what it meant. 'Well, it's basically about racism and sexism,' he said.

Like Mr Zinn, I felt like shedding a manly tear. Has Mr Cameron the energy and determination it will take to set teachers free?

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The British Labour Party has been dreaming up 33 new crimes a month

Labour has created 4,300 new crimes since taking power - including a ban on swimming in the wreck of the Titanic and on the sale of game birds shot on a Sunday. Gordon Brown has been the worst offender in this unprecedented 'legislative splurge', with his Government creating new offences at the rate of 33 a month. Under Tony Blair, Labour invented 27 new ways of criminalising the public every month.

The 'crimes' range from swimming in the hull of the Titanic without the permission of a Cabinet Minister to 'disturbing a pack of eggs' when instructed not to by an authorised officer. In total, between 1997 and 2009, 4,289 new criminal offences were created - approximately one for every day ministers have been in office. It is twice the rate at which new crimes were created under the last Tory administration.

They include offences - such as carrying out a nuclear explosion - which could easily be covered by existing laws. Others are simply bewildering, such as the ban on the sale of game birds shot on a Sunday-or Christmas Day. This stems from the fact it is illegal, for ancient religious reasons, to shoot the birds on a Sunday - so the Government felt the need to also make it illegal to sell birds shot on a Sunday, to reinforce the point.

Liberal Democrat home office spokesman Chris Huhne, who uncovered the figures, will attack the Government's law-making frenzy in a speech tonight. He will say: 'Over the past 12 years, this Labour Government has been suffering from the most acute and prolonged bout of legislative diarrhoea. 'We have had 69 Home Affairs Bills in 12 years, an average of almost six per year. This is a staggering-volume to have added to the statute books in such a short time, and this is just the two departments of the Home Office and the Justice Department. 'The "bill teams" in departments are possibly among the most productive parts of the public sector. Unfortunately, the product is in too many cases virtually worthless.'

Many of the new laws are backed by powers to enter people's home without a warrant to check they are not being breached.

Mr Huhne wrote to Justice Secretary Jack Straw urging him to repeal some of the laws. But, in reference to the crime of 'disturbing a pack of eggs', Mr Straw said: 'Egg marketing inspectors must be able to ensure that eggs suspected of being marketed in contravention of EU regulations are not tampered with.' He added: 'I am sorry that you regard these offences as unnecessary. In their different ways they are important pieces of legislation.'

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British swimming pool users banned from showering naked 'in case children are offended'

Swimmers have been banned from showering naked at their local pool - in case they offend children. Bathers have been told to keep their swimming costumes on while using the showers following complaints from local schools that pupils were offended by 'open nudity' and needed 'a certain amount of privacy.'

Swimmers who regularly use the Torridge Pool in Northam, Devon, described the rule as 'health and safety gone mad.' Local councillor Hugh Bone said the decision was 'ridiculous' and vowed to fight the ban by continuining to showering in the nude. Grandfather-of-four Hugh said: 'This surely is ridiculous. People should not believe that we are all perverts. 'Boys and men as well as girls and women have always changed in front of each other and this is part of the growing up experience.'

One mother-of-two added: 'We all want our children to be safe but this a step too far. I don't think we should teach them that nudity is something to be ashamed of. 'We are all born naked and have our imperfections. This strikes me as health and safety gone mad.'

The lido is used by 13 primary and junior schools in the area who have exclusive use of the pool at certain times of the week. But members of the public can still use the changing rooms at the same time as the pupils, either from a previous swimming session or after the gym.

But some of the schools say they want Parkwood Leisure, which runs the facility, to allow them exclusive use of the changing rooms. Torridge Pool's general manager Bob Demott said asking members to wear a swimsuit during school visiting times was a reasonable compromise. He said there had never been any incidents at the leisure centre and the measure was a safeguard for both the children and adults.

Mr Demott said: 'We do have a private room in both the male and female changing rooms that the public can request the key for should they wish to shower naked when the pupils are there.'

Local councillor Gaye Tabor added: 'Children need to learn to swim for their own safety, they also have a right to a certain amount of privacy.'

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21 January, 2010

British judge frees man jailed for attacking knife-wielding burglar

Britain's top judge sent out a powerful message yesterday that a householder has a right to defend his family. The Lord Chief Justice freed a father jailed for attacking an armed burglar, saying the case demanded mercy in the face of a national outcry. Millionaire businessman Munir Hussain went home from prison after Lord Judge ruled at the Appeal Court that he had lashed out because the robber's gang had threatened to kill his wife and children.

His two-and-a-half-year term was changed to a suspended sentence while his brother Tokeer, who was also involved in the incident, had his 39-month sentence reduced to two years meaning he could be released within months.

Lord Judge said his decision came because of the exceptional nature of the case and the public outrage it has provoked. 'There are some situations which guidelines cannot and do not cover. This is one of them and today the sentence of the court must address and balance the ancient principles of justice and mercy. In this case the call for a merciful sentence is intense.'

Lord Judge insisted that his ruling did not represent a green light for homeowners to mete out vigilante justice against burglars. But his judgment will be seen as bolstering the right of householders to protect their home and family against attack.

Mr Hussain, 53, was jailed last month for attacking a knife-wielding burglar who held his family hostage in their own home and threatened to slit their throats. His case provoked nationwide fury when he and his brother were jailed for injuring career criminal Walid Salem, while the convicted burglar was allowed to walk free.

Following the Appeal Court decision, his son Awais, 22, and his brother Qadeer collected him from HMP Bullingdon, a Category C prison in Oxfordshire, and he returned home to High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, for an emotional reunion with his wife and family. Looking shaken and drained, Mr Hussain hugged relatives and thanked the nation for the support he and his brother had received. He said: 'First of all thank you to the country for supporting us while we were away. I am very happy but obviously my brother is still there.'

The court heard that his ordeal had left Mr Hussain, who runs a soundproofing company, is a race relations campaigner and chairman of the Asian Business Council, suffering from flashbacks, panic attacks and post-traumatic stress.

Awais said: 'We have been through hell. Your life doesn't go back to normal - you can't even imagine what your life used to be like. I don't think my family will ever fully recover, although it is a big relief that we will now have my Dad back. We respect the law and always will. But in this case we didn't feel it had done us justice.'

The case has reignited public debate over the rights of householders to protect themselves from attack. The Home Secretary has pledged to review the law and the Conservatives have made a manifesto commitment that 'have-a-go heroes' should be protected from prosecution.

Britain's top policeman yesterday said home owners who injured others while defending themselves, their families or their homes should not be prosecuted. Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson said: 'I have got worried on occasions that we have got the advice slightly wrong.'

The family's ordeal began on September 3, 2008 when Mr Hussain, Awais and his other son Samad, then 15, were ambushed by a masked robbers at the family home. The gang, who wore balaclavas and carried 12-inch knives, had disabled security lights at the house and hid in bushes until the Muslim family returned from Ramadan prayers at their mosque. The knifemen forced their way into the house and ordered Mr Hussain, his wife Shaheen, 47, and their sons and 18-year-old daughter Arooj to lie on the floor with their hands behind their backs. Screaming that they were going to kill them, the gang ordered the sobbing and terrified family to crawl from room to room.

Mr Hussain managed to break free and chased one of the burglars, career criminal Walid Salem, into a neighbour's garden. Salem, 57, was attacked by a group of Asian men who beat him with a cricket bat and a metal pole, leaving him with a fractured skull and brain damage.

Mr Hussain and his brother Tokeer, who lives nearby, denied they were involved in that group attack, but admitted they had fought with Salem, who has more than 50 previous convictions.

Lord Judge, who sat with two other Appeal Court judges, refused to overturn the brothers' convictions for causing grievous bodily harm with intent. He said they had used an unlawful level of violence and were not acting in self defence because the burglars had left Mr Hussain's home and the family were no longer in danger. He said no court would condone 'mob violence', adding: 'This is not and should not be seen as a case about the level of violence which a householder may lawfully and justifiably use on a burglar.'

But he ruled that Mr Hussain had been 'provoked beyond endurance' because he had feared the men were going to rape his wife and daughter and kill the entire family. 'The plain, simple reality is that Munir Hussain was acting under the continuing influence of extreme provocation,' Lord Judge said. 'His involvement in this serious violence can only be understood as a response to the dreadful and terrifying ordeal and emotional anguish he had undergone.

'His relief that he and his family were safe and his fury at what had happened combined to make a decent and peaceful man act entirely out of character, in hot blood.'

Ruling that Tokeer Hussain should remain in jail, the court said his case was different because it was his brother's home and family which had been threatened by the armed robbers, and not his.

However Lord Judge praised both men, saying they had 'impeccable positive good character', and described Munir Hussain as 'a hard-working, peaceful, dedicated family man'. He added: 'It is rare to see men of the quality of these two appellants in court for offences of serious violence.'

Mr Hussain's brother Qadeer, 45, said their 80-year-old father Zaman Ali had suffered two heart attacks since the break-in. He added: 'We all ate together as a family that night at 9pm. Two hours later our lives changed completely. 'That's very difficult to come to terms with. It's been our first experience in the legal arena. The most we had ever had before, within the whole family, was a parking ticket.

'For a time I was afraid this was going to destroy our father's faith in the British justice system. He came here in the 1950s because he believed Britain was the right place to raise a family.'

The armed thug's ex-wife and his son said it was 'ridiculous' that Munir and Tokeer Hussain had been jailed for assaulting Salem, while he was allowed to walk free. The burglar has 54 previous convictions but was given a two-year supervision order after doctors said he was too brain damaged to enter a plea to charges of false imprisonment. Prosecutors have called for him to undergo another medical assessment and warned he could still stand trial for false imprisonment, which carries a maximum life sentence.

His first wife, who asked not be named, said: 'Walid has always been a thief, and a leopard never changes his spots. He was always in and out of jail for stealing and even stole from shops that he worked in. He was also violent and once he punched me unconscious in front of my son. 'He's got what's coming to him because he is an evil, evil man.'

Egyptian-born Salem, 57, has a shameful list of more than 50 convictions stretching back to 1980. Despite crimes including possessing a firearm, 22 fraud offences and 27 of theft, the longest prison sentence he received was 42 months. He posed as an upstanding member of the community, even helping to organise a Neighbourhood Watch group near his home in Borehamwood, Hertfordshire.

He married for the first time in 1976, after a whirlwind romance, and they had a son, Marc. But after years of abuse and Walid being in and out of prison, he left his wife for another woman, whom he married in 1983. They have since had twins.

Mr Hussain's family said he had been contacted in prison by a woman who claimed Salem and his gang had burgled her home and kept her family hostage. She said the Crown Prosecution Service had dropped the case, which happened before the Hussain family were targeted. A CPS spokesman said there was no record of any such case. Mr Hussain's son Awais said he was 'disgusted' that Salem had been free to target the family, despite his history of convictions.

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The false rape accusations just keep coming in Britain

An innocent man who was arrested after a woman he had never met made a false rape allegation spoke of his continuing ordeal after she was jailed yesterday. Rosanne England, 21, tore her underwear, scratched her own face and then told police she had been attacked by a stranger who knocked on her door.

Retired engineer Derek Cummings matched the description of her 'attacker' and had no alibi because he had been walking his dog in woods alone at the time England said she was raped in May last year. He was arrested and detained for 28 hours before being released on bail. After 24 days England finally admitted the allegation was untrue and Mr Cummings, 59, was exonerated.

However after England was jailed for 18 months yesterday, Mr Cummings said he still had trouble from people around his home in Fawley, Hampshire, who wrongly believe 'there is no smoke without fire'. He said he could not go into certain pubs. 'My family has been through hell,' he said. 'I have two teenage daughters who were doing their A-levels at the time. I do not want to see a 21-year-old woman jailed but she knew I had been arrested and I was totally innocent. I have mixed feelings about her.

'I do not blame the police - they had to do a job. They were heavy-handed with me initially but they realised I was innocent and I knew DNA tests would clear me.'

Mr Cummings's estranged wife Cheryl, 41, described the family's ordeal as 'a nightmare'. Mrs Cummings, an office cleaner who separated from her husband before the rape claim, said: 'Derek has been through hell and it's likely to haunt him for ever. It's ruined his life and he's changed because it's affected him so much. 'But it's still hard for us because mud sticks and we've both had to put up with comments and so have our children.'

Winchester Crown Court heard that 73 staff were involved in the investigation and the costs of forensic work and overtime alone totalled £14,000. England, a former care worker who suffered from mental health problems, admitted perverting the course of justice at an earlier hearing and the court was told she was remorseful for the trouble she had caused. Sentencing England, of Holbury, near Southampton, Judge Keith Cutler said: 'You made a convincing complaint and as a result an innocent man was arrested, a man of good character, a family man.'

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Britain’s dirty secret: class still matters

The article below is perfectly correct, though I personally encountered very few barriers whilst I was in England. What the author touches on very lightly, however, is the hostility of the British Left towards the one really good ladder out of a deprived background: The Grammar (intellectually selective) schools. That hostility has made class barriers worse during the years of Labour party rule. The Labour party talks the talk but refuses to walk the walk. They live in a dream world with little connection to reality. Amazing though it is, they will not admit that some people are inherently smarter than others. And if your theories are wrong, you will not get the results you expect

On rare days I feel sorry for members of the government. Running the country must be as frustrating as being a parent: it’s only in retrospect that you realise where you went wrong. But your new-found wisdom is of no use because the crucial moments have passed, and you can’t have your time again.

That’s what’s happened with the government’s belated engagement with the question of class. For years new Labour avoided the word. It was too divisive. It threatened the party’s delicate position in the centre ground. It was too easily linked with the uncomfortable word “struggle”. It was much better to talk instead of aspiration and disadvantage, inclusion and social mobility.

In Labour’s view of the world, anyone could get on as long as they raised their sights and worked hard. The twin problems facing the less privileged were those of money and ambition. The government would provide more of the first through redistribution, and more of the second through educational reforms and exhortation. Schools would drive up standards, the poor would pass more examinations, educational inequality would be redressed and we would enter a new age of meritocracy.

The strategy hasn’t worked. True, people from the lower and middle-income groups have more qualifications, but it’s done nothing for their relative position. Inequality has widened slightly, social mobility remains among the worst in Europe, and the well-off dominate top universities and the professions just as they always did. It failed because it ignored the truth. Labour acted as if social disadvantage was largely a practical problem. For a long time it avoided addressing the barriers that divide Britons from one another and make attempting to move out of one’s group as risky and as psychologically difficult a process as emigration.

The apparent emergence of a classless society, in which anyone might wear jeans, watch The X Factor or speak in a variant of estuary English, disguises the fact that Britain is still a highly stratified society, in which different classes are brought up to follow different rules about how to think, talk and behave. These classes prefer to socialise and work with those who share their values. Joining these groups is not a simple matter of gaining the right academic qualifications. They will admit and promote only those who can read all their unwritten and unspoken rules of behaviour.

This fact makes any attempt at social mobility a hazardous business. The ambitious have to abandon the culture they know for one that may not welcome them. They may end up belonging in neither world.

The oddity of Labour’s ignoring this for so long is that the difficulty of making this journey used to be explicitly understood. Grammar schools were created to give clever children a path out of one culture and into another. A while ago I talked to a retired grandee of the British arts world who grew up in poverty in two rented rooms in north London. He told me that his life was transformed by his teachers’ role in guiding him into a new world. Their advice went far beyond the classroom. They recommended books to read, lectures to go to, concerts he should attend. At 18 he went to university in London, where he learnt to argue and have intellectual conversations.

As a postgraduate he moved on to Oxford, which was a cultural leap he could never have made any earlier. A near-contemporary of his, a retired diplomat who followed a similar path, says that getting to Cambridge was what made him. He worked furiously hard to pick up all the clues about how to dress, walk, talk and think. Both men knew that their success depended on moving through classes.

None of that clarity has been possible in recent years. The widespread pretence that these barriers no longer exist, and the vagueness about what is needed to overcome them, has made social mobility even more difficult. At the same time, Labour’s attempts to liberate children from class by giving them a better academic education has added to the problem. The relentless focus on exam results has meant that many state schools have opted out of the activities that used to socialise pupils and give them the manners, self-control and teamworking skills that they need to progress outside. That has left a great many children, and particularly the most deprived, at a hopeless disadvantage.

It has been only in the past year or so that parts of the government have suddenly woken up to the fact that the strategy to create a fairer society isn’t working. Alan Milburn’s blistering report on social mobility recognised how split Britain was becoming, divided between those who had networks and social skills and those without. It pointed out that the ordinary middle classes were now also losing out to those in the upper middle, who had the connections. It called for national mentoring schemes and internships and for schools to be judged on whether they educated the whole child. Harriet Harman produced the Equality Bill, aimed among other things at reducing discrimination on the basis of class. And last week John Denham, the communities minister, said class was now as likely a cause of discrimination as race used to be.

This is difficult territory because it involves uncomfortable issues. It is not a simple story about prejudice. On the one hand, there are issues of power and exclusion. On the other, society is now becoming so divided that in some poor areas people are being raised without developing the character and attitudes they need to survive. They are emerging without basic manners and skills. One former Downing Street adviser says that it remains hard to have an honest conversation about this. Labour doesn’t want to look too closely at behaviour and character. The Tories, on the other hand, don’t want to confront the realities of structural privilege.

That seemed ominously true last week when David Cameron praised social mobility while confirming that he will not aim to close the income gap between the richest and the poorest. He didn’t acknowledge that the second would make the first far more difficult. In the same way, while the Tories’ Centre for Social Justice has produced some impressive and convincing analyses of what keeps people poor, class is not one of the factors mentioned. A spokesman told me that class was no longer one of the things that held people back. Society was more fluid, and to think otherwise was backward and sterile.

This is so far from the truth that it leaves one with no hope that the Tories will be any more effective at securing social mobility than Labour has been.

The depth of the divisions, and the difficulties of bridging them, were made clear to me by a man who has journeyed from a northern council estate to a blue-chip company via Cambridge. He wrote to me that it had been a grinding, exhausting climb, and yet he was still not fully accepted. “I’ve never had the ease which comes from knowing that there are family connections, or land, or money to fall back on. And that lack of ease will prevent me from getting to the board in my company, because that gracious ease can’t quite be learnt, even though I’ve observed all the rules, changed the accent, it’s still not enough. Larkin wrote about his inability to ‘climb clear of ... wrong beginnings’, and that’s as true in 2009 as it was 50 years ago.”

Social mobility matters because it is the small gesture we make towards fairness. If it is to get any easier, politicians must be more honest about what’s needed to move from one class to another, and they have to create pathways to achieve it. Without that, their constant talk of aspiration will be meaningless, because all we’ll be left with is the entrenchment of privilege.

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It isn't elitist to insist on teachers who can spell

Britain's conservative Party wants to upgrade teaching standards. They've got an uphill battle ahead. To have any chance of success, they would have to fix school discipline first. You have to be desperate to take a teaching job in a British State school these days -- and "desperate" usually means "dumb"

A teaching assistant I know finds herself in an embarrassing dilemma. She really likes the young teacher she works with, but every time the teacher writes on the board, she winces. The teacher's spelling and grammar are dodgy to say the least. For instance, this recent graduate, working in a decent comprehensive, thinks 'theirs' has an apostrophe. 'I don't know whether to point out her mistakes,' the teaching assistant Diane says, 'because I worry she'll get upset. But the children are seeing really poor English and they think that it's OK because the teacher does it.'

David Cameron is in the same fix as Diane. The Tory leader says he wants to make teaching a noble profession that is, once again, capable of attracting the best brains. Dave has already upset certain commentators by promising a future Tory government will pay off the student loans of top maths and science graduates to entice them to teach. It will also refuse to fund training for those who get a third-class degree.

Oooh, snobbery! Elitism! Listen to the predictable howls of outrage from the snarling guard dogs of our education system. An education system so desperately far from elitist that British teenagers have plummeted down the international league table, dropping from eighth to 24th in maths, behind countries where they still write with sticks in the mud.

The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development reports that science students in the UK are 'handicapped by a lack of well-qualified teachers'.

How dare people criticise any politician for trying to raise the bar? Believe me, these days it's a remarkable achievement to get a third-class degree. Being bad will no longer suffice. You have to be bloody awful. Merely writing your name on a dumbed-down exam paper will get you a third. Anyone who gets a third from a British university today is either too lazy or too thick to teach hamsters, let alone humans.

It is not elitist to suggest that children would be better off without a teacher who has not managed to distinguish himself in Deckchair Management at the University of Billericay. Private schools would never employ such a dunce; why should state schools, where the needs of children are far greater?

Gordon Brown talks grandly about an Age of Aspiration. Sorry, Gordon, but in order to aspire, children first need to come into contact with teachers who have been to the best universities and studied the most rigorous subjects: Teachers who know the difference between 'their' and 'there'. Teachers who can show children from poorer backgrounds not just how to learn, but how to live.

When I was 16, my English teacher, Linda Richardson, squeezed some of us into her green Deux Chevaux and drove several hundred miles to Stratford-upon-Avon to introduce us to this bloke called Shakespeare.

Thirty years later, it's still as fresh as paint in my memory. Seeing Judi Dench on stage was fantastic, but something even more dramatic was happening inside me. Suffice to say, I wouldn't be doing this job if a brilliant English graduate had not dedicated her life to educating her ignorant young charges in the fullest sense.

Tragically, there are precious few Lindas in our classrooms today. If you were that good and that able, why would you want a job where some gobby little horror can call you a stupid bitch without fear of reprisal?

Every year, thousands of talented teachers quit. They give up their dream of nourishing children with the best that has been thought and said, because our idiot Government insists they have to dole out reheated nuggets from the McCurriculum. That's not a profession, it's a battery farm.

When I did teacher training, I had a romantic notion I would send a class into raptures with W.B. Yeats's beautiful sonnet, An Irish Airman Foresees His Death. Within a few weeks, it became clear that the only poem I'd be reciting is An English Teacher Foresees Her Nervous Breakdown.

Obviously, you don't have to be a genius to teach. Some of the biggest brains can't communicate for toffee. Nonetheless, David Cameron is absolutely right. Shiny new buildings, greater parental involvement, smaller classes; none of these can make the schooling of our children world class. It's the teachers, stupid.

Can you believe that England's primary teachers need only C grades in GCSE Maths and English to be admitted onto a teacher-training course? If you can only get a C in Maths, how on earth are you qualified to prepare a pupil who is capable of getting an A?

David Cameron most certainly gets my vote in the epic battle ahead to turn teaching back into the intelligent, creative, noble profession it deserves and needs to be. You've got your work cut out, Dave.

Recently, a couple of very bright students on the Teach First programme (the innovative scheme that pays top graduates to join schools in poor areas) reported back to their tutor at Cambridge on their experiences in inner-London schools. The tutor told me the students had been shocked by the appalling ignorance, dreadful English and bolshy behaviour.

They weren't talking about the kids. It was the teachers.

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It’s not breast-milk that makes babies brainier. It’s clever mothers

Wow! I almost feel that someone has been listening to me

Breastfed babies are smarter because their mothers are clever, not because of the nutritional benefits of breast milk, a study suggests. Previous trials have shown that infants fed on formula milk tend to have lower intelligence and the IQ difference has frequently been put down to a deficit of an omega 3 fatty acid, known as DHA, that is normally found in lower concentrations in formula milk.

However, scientists at the Univerisity of Southampton, found no evidence of a link between intelligence and breastfeeding once the mother’s social class and IQ were taken into account.

Dr Catharine Gale, from the University’s MRC Epidemiology Resource Centre, who led the study said: “This study helps to dispel some of the myths surrounding DHA. We do know that there are clear health benefits to breast feeding but DHA, which is naturally present in breast milk and added into some formulas, is not the secret ingredient that will turn your child into an Einstein.”

The link between DHA and intelligence was first proposed after studies showing that when animals were deprived of DHA during infancy they showed abnormal neuronal development. However, trials in babies have given conflicting results.

"There’s been a quite inconsistent picture on the link between breastfeeding and intelligence,” said co-author Sian Robinson. According to Dr Robinson, breastfed children have tended to score more highly on intelligence tests since the earliest studies in the 1920s, but they also tend to come from more privileged backgrounds. In the UK 76 per cent of mothers breastfeed initially, but only about 50 per cent continue to breastfeed beyond six weeks.

The researchers analysed data from 241 children and their mothers in the UK, dividing the babies into three groups — breastfed, those fed with formulas fortified with MHA and those fed unfortified formulas.

A detailed history of the babies’ feeding routines was kept and a variety of IQ tests were carried out at the age of four including measures of verbal abilities and attention span. IQ tests at the age of four are strongly predictive of social and professional attainments later in life. In addition, the mothers took an IQ test and gave details of their social class and the baby’s weight at birth.

The breastfed babies performed significantly better than those given unfortified milk. But once the impact of social class and inherited IQ were taken in to account, breastfeeding appeared to have no affect on intelligence.

Since the babies given fortified milk were fed with a number of brands, with a range of concentrations of MHA, the researchers also looked for a direct correlation between total MHA intake and IQ at the age of four, but again found no link. “Factors in the home, such as the mother’s intelligence and what mental stimulation children receive, were the most important influences on their IQ,” said Dr Gale.

However, the researchers said that other health benefits from breastfeeding remain compelling and they support the NHS recommendation to breastfeed babies up until the age of six months. “We’d absolutely stand by that guidance,” said Dr Robinson.

Dr Michael Kramer, a paediatrician at McGill University in Montreal, said that there was a growing consensus that purported links between DHA and IQ had been overplayed. “Some people would still argue that there’s a link, but it’s in the face of very convincing evidence to the contrary,” he said.

However, he said that the latest research did not definitively rule out there being a small effect of breastfeeding on cognitive development. “The physical act itself can encourage emotional bonding between the mother and baby, which could foster healthy development. It could also be that breastfeeding takes longer so those mothers talk to their children more,” he said. [He's good at speculation]

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Wind turbines on homes are just ‘eco-bling’

Home turbines and solar panels have little effect

Roof-mounted wind turbines and solar panels are “eco-bling” that allow their owners to flaunt their green credentials but contribute very little towards meeting Britain’s carbon reduction targets, according to the Royal Academy of Engineering. Developers will waste millions of pounds installing such micro-generation devices unless the Government revises its building regulations on carbon-neutral homes and offices.

Doug King, Professor of Building Engineering at the University of Bath and the author of a report on low carbon buildings published today, said that far greater savings could be made by installing better insulation and methods of trapping the Sun’s rays. He proposed that the government target for all new homes to be carbon-neutral by 2016 should be relaxed in return for developers making equivalent contributions to wind farms and other large-scale renewable energy projects. “Wind turbines and solar cells on the roof achieve little or nothing and are what I describe as eco-bling. It’s just about trying to say to the general public, ‘I’m being good, I’m helping the environment’. “The things that save the money are not done, because they are not sexy.”

Dr King said that wind turbines on urban homes often consumed more energy than they generated. Field trials carried out last year by the government-funded Energy Saving Trust found that the most productive building-mounted wind turbines in urban or suburban areas generated only £26 of electricity a year. Many of these turbines, which cost about £1,500, were net consumers of electricity because their controls drew power from the grid when the wind was low.

David Cameron installed a wind turbine on the roof of his home in West London but was forced to remove it because he had not obtained planning permission. His spokeswoman said yesterday that the turbine had been returned to the architect. “The technology has moved on so there was no point in putting it back up,” she said.

Professor King said that for wind turbines on urban homes to be effective, they would have to be so big that their vibration would damage the building. He said that installing microgeneration devices could cost £10,000 to £12,000 per home and reduce its emissions by only a few per cent. He proposed an alternative policy under which developers would offset the entire emissions of new homes by contributing £3,000 per dwelling towards a wind farm on a hilltop.

Professor King said that offices would need to be redesigned to reduce energy use and cope with regular power cuts caused by the failure to replace ageing power stations. He accused the Government of failing to practise what it preached on emissions. A recent National Audit Office report found that 80 per cent of government buildings opened since 2002 fell below minimum environmental performance standards.

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BRITAIN'S MET OFFICE DESERVES TO BE SHOWN THE DOOR

God, how embarrassing. The Met Office is on the verge of being dumped by the BBC, because it keeps getting forecasts – especially long-term ones – wrong. Worse, its place as the supplier of TV forecasts to the nation may be usurped by Metra, a New Zealand operation.

For a quasi-governmental organisation (it's part of the Ministry of Defence) that was founded 150 years as a service to seamen and which has supplied BBC with forecasts since 1920, this is a matter of head-hanging shame. If the UK's national weather service is disowned by the UK's national public broadcaster, where on earth can it go? Who's going to trust it, after its own family has rejected it? And does this mean that the BBC may dispense with all Met Office productions and dump the – gulp – Shipping Forecast as well?

I can't say I'm surprised by this turn of events, though. Last year the Met Office forecast a "barbecue summer", and we spent July and August huddling in the rain, trying to coax some fire out of the sodden charcoal. In autumn, there wasn't nearly enough shouting from the Met Office about the Arctic ice and biblical snowfalls that were heading our way, so we wound up sleeping in freezing cars, stranded on the A3, and cursing the birdbrains who predicted a 66 per cent likelihood that winter would be warmer than average (cheers, guys). Then you take a closer look and find that the Met failed to predict wet summers for the past three years; and that its annual global forecast predictions were wrong for nine of the last 10 years. It's been running a "warm bias" for a decade.

You could forgive it some errors of computation in what is, of course, an imperfect science, where words like "probability" and "projections" sometimes seem to mean "guesswork". But medicine is an imperfect science too (my father, a GP, used to refer to his stethoscope as "the guessing tubes") and you suspect that, if the Met Office was a doctor, his surgery would be littered with dead bodies. Its actual head office is in Exeter, Devon, a purpose-built £80m glass-and-steel beauty (opened in 2004) that dazzles in the sunlight but fails to shine when it comes to supplying useful medium-term information. Fifty years ago last summer, the success of the D-Day landings and the lives of millions depended crucially on weather forecasters accurately predicting the weather on the day of the invasion. If they could get it right weeks in advance, why can't the Met, half a century later?

Some climatologists hint that the Office's problem is political – its computer model of future weather behaviour habitually feeds in government-backed assumptions about climate change that aren't borne out by the facts. To the Met Office, the weather's always warmer than it really is, because it's expecting it to be, because it expects climate change to wreak its stealthy havoc. If it really has had its thumb on the scales for the last decade, I'm afraid it deserves to be shown the door.

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Does Monckton go too far?

Writing from Australia, Janet Albrechtsen says that Lord Monckton should not call Warmists Nazis and Communists even though Warmists frequently abuse skeptics that way. She may be right

IS it too much to ask for a measured climate change debate in 2010? Looking back at 2009, it's hard to think of a more frustrating debate than the one about anthropogenic global warming.

One side says the science is settled and will not countenance dissent. Within that group sit the alarmists who preach death and destruction, those who define humanity as the problem and those who have long harboured an ideological grudge against Western progress. Those on the other side of the debate say man-made global warming is all bunkum. Though they describe themselves as sceptics, for many of them the science is equally settled: in their favour.

And in between is a far larger group of people, those who are open-minded and genuinely sceptical, who are trying to understand the debate as best they can. Yet frustration only grows at the extremism on both sides.

So what will Christopher Monckton bring to this exasperating state of affairs? The former adviser to Margaret Thatcher is in Australia next week, speaking about the flaws of the push for a global solution to global warming. Last year, Monckton blew the whistle on a draft Copenhagen treaty that political leaders seemed keen to keep away from the prying eyes of taxpayers, who will fund the grand promises.

While nothing concrete came out of Copenhagen, the push for global commitments and a foreign aid bonanza continues. And in this respect, Monckton has plenty more to say. He has written to the Prime Minister outlining legitimate concerns that billions of dollars will be wasted on a problem that does not exist.

When Monckton talks about the science he is powerful. Watch on YouTube his kerb-side interview of a well-meaning Greenpeace follower on the streets of Copenhagen last month. With detailed data behind him, he asks whether she is aware that there has been no statistically significant change in temperatures for 15 years. No, she is not. Whether she is aware that there has in fact been global cooling in the past nine years? No, she is not. Whether she is aware that there has been virtually no change to the amount of sea ice? No, she does not. Whether, given her lack of knowledge about these facts, she is driven by faith, not facts. Yes, she is driven by faith, she says.

To those with an open mind, Monckton's fact-based questions demand answers from our political leaders. To this end, he will impress his Australian audience over the next few days. Unfortunately, while Monckton has mastered the best arts of persuasion, he also succumbs to the worst of them when he engages in his made-for-the-stage histrionics. In Copenhagen, when a group of young activists interrupted a meeting, he berated them as Nazis and Hitler Youth. Elsewhere he has called on people to rise up and fight off a "bureaucratic communistic world government monster". This extremist language damages his credibility. More important, it damages the debate. You start to look like a crank when you describe your opponents as Nazis and communists. You can see how it happens. Talking to a roomful of cheering fellow travellers, the temptation is to hit the high gear of hyperbole. But if your aim is to persuade those with an open mind, this kind of talk will only turn people away. Warning people about the genuine threat to national sovereignty from a centralised global-warming bureaucracy is one thing. Talking about a new front of communists marching your way is another. It sounds like an overzealous warrior fighting an old battle.

The debate about global warming is as much a political debate as it is about the science. Writing in Macleans earlier this month, Andrew Coyne highlighted the errors made by the global warmists who deride their opponents. "If your desire is to persuade the unpersuaded among the general public, the very worst way to go about it is to advertise your bottomless contempt for your adversaries. That the IPCC scientists reacted in this way shows how unprepared they were, for all their activist enthusiasm, to enter the political arena."

The great shame is that those on the other side of the debate are making precisely the same error. And that is why Monckton's fact-based concerns are left unaddressed by our political leaders. They have sidelined him from debate. Kevin Rudd has not responded to his letter. Tony Abbott will not meet him. Neither should he. There is no political gain for the Opposition Leader in doing so.

And the reason is clear enough. Inflationary language deflates an argument. Moreover, Monckton is making the worst political error at the worst possible time, right when this debate is slipping from the control of those determined to punish countries for their carbon emissions. Even The Guardian's resident alarmist George Monbiot admitted last November, "There is no point in denying it: we're losing. Climate change denial is spreading like a contagious disease."

It's neither denial nor a disease, of course. Just healthy scepticism. And it's growing in all the right directions for all the right reasons. Scepticism about the science: the revelation that scientists massaged data to suit their case has damaged the public's trust in the scientific community. Scepticism about the costs: after Copenhagen, we now know more about the grab for a new gravy train of foreign aid from developed nations set to flow to developing countries under the cloak of climate change. Scepticism about the government: the Rudd government will come under increased pressure to explain its rush to implement an emissions trading system ahead of the rest of the world. And scepticism about the role of a campaigning media: even the BBC Trust has called for a review of the BBC's cheerleading coverage of climate change. What took it so long? Large sections of the Australian media are no less complicit in the same kind of climate change advocacy.

In 2010, healthy scepticism will continue to rise against the global warming alarmists. But only if those such as Monckton treat the public with respect by sticking to the facts and using measured language, not fanciful claims and name-calling.

SOURCE



Where is the famous BBC "sensitivity" when it comes to Sikhs?

Are Muslims the only ones whose beliefs must be treated "sensitively"? An Indian Prime Minister lost her life over the sensitivities concerned but, "Hey, who cares?" the BBC seems to say. Could it be that Sikhs are traditional enemies of the Muslims?

"A BBC News presenter has been subjected to a deluge of personal abuse after fronting a documentary about one of the most controversial events in recent Indian history. Sonia Deol was forced to delete her page on the Facebook website amid a barrage of criticism from fellow Sikhs over her film about the Indian army storming the Golden Temple in Amritsar, one of the faith’s most holy shrines, in 1984.

Now protesters are planning a mass boycott of the licence fee in disgust at what they see as a slur on the controversial religious leader Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, who was killed in the raid. Many Sikhs consider him a saint and are furious that in Ms Deol’s documentary, 1984: A Sikh Story, he was described as a militant. They also claim he was depicted in the film in a similar way to Osama Bin Laden.

Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi ordered the assault on June 4, 1984, after Bhindranwale and up to 500 armed supporters took refuge in the holy site, apparently fearing arrest amid rising Sikh-Hindu tensions. Around 500 people died in the ensuing battle, which some Sikhs now refer to as ‘our 9/11’.

Operation Blue Star is believed to have led to the assassination of Mrs Gandhi, who was killed by two of her Sikh bodyguards four months after the attack. Her death triggered three days of attacks on Sikhs across India, in which 3,000 people were killed.

Source

20 January, 2010

Children’s lives 'being put at risk by high rate of prescription errors in British hospitals'

Children’s lives are being put at risk in hospitals across the country, according to a new study which found mistakes in one in eight drug prescriptions. Experts warned that although many of the errors would not have caused serious harm, some could have proved fatal. Much more needs to be done to improve prescribing, especially when children are involved, they said.

The study is the largest to look at errors in prescriptions given to children in British hospitals. One in 10 of the mistakes uncovered involved youngsters being given either too much or too little of a drug. “Some of these errors could have ended up being fatal,” said Dr Maisoon Ghaleb, from the University of Hertfordshire, who led the study, carried out in five London hospitals.

In one case the researchers found that a six-month-old had been prescribed 5mg of the powerful painkiller morphine, more than 50 times the 96mcg dose that should have been prescribed. The mistake was picked up by the nurse administering the drug. “The nurse intervened and questioned the prescription, but if she had not it could have been fatal,” said Dr Ghaleb.

The researchers also found cases where doctors had forgotten to write down how much of a drug a child should be given, or whether it should be administered as a pill or as an intravenous drip.

Giving drugs to young people often involves complex calculations based on a child’s weight and their medical condition. By contrast, many adult patients are given standard doses.

Overall, mistakes were made in 13 per cent of prescriptions given to children, the study found. However, on one hospital ward the rate of errors was much higher, 32 per cent or almost one in three. Most of the errors, 41 per cent, involved incomplete prescriptions, including those where no dosage was given. In almost one in four cases of errors, 24 per cent, doctors used an abbreviation, the research also found, while 11 per cent of mistakes involved the wrong dose.

The study also found that mistakes were commonly made when the drugs were being given to the children. These included errors in how the drugs were prepared or the rate at which they were given intravenously. Overall there was some kind of mistake in 19 per cent of cases, the study found. On five occasions the researchers intervened to prevent the patient suffering harm.

During the study pharmacists reviewed almost 3,000 prescriptions written on children’s wards in the hospitals, which agreed to take part on the condition of anonymity, over a two-week period. Trained observers on the wards also watched how 1,554 doses of medicine were given to children, mainly by nurses. In all the study, carried out in 2005, picked up 391 prescription errors and 429 administration errors. Of these only one mistake was reported to the hospital’s risk management department, in charge of preventing errors.

The research team, which also included experts from the University of London School of Pharmacy believe that their findings show a general picture across Britain. They called for a system of electronic prescribing to be introduced in hospitals, which could pick up signs of mistakes being made, as well as better education for doctors on how to prescribe drugs.

The hospitals which took part included one specialist children’s hospital, three general teaching hospitals, and one non-teaching general hospital.

The study suggests that errors are more common when drugs are given to children than adults. A study last year by the General Medical Council warned that almost one in ten prescriptions for hospital patients contained mistakes.

Norman Lamb, the Liberal Democrat health spokesman, said that the study raised “serious concerns” about the safety of children in hospitals. “Everyone understands that occasional mistakes will be made but the scale of errors reported here is very worrying," he said. “Many parents will now fear that proper safeguards have not been put in place to ensure the safety of their children in hospital.”

SOURCE



Six-year farce of asylum seeker who wants to go home and has been trying to escape FROM Britain

Unlike the many asylum seekers desperate to remain in Britain, all Rashid Ali wants is to leave and get out of the cold. The 31-year-old Moroccan has spent the past six years trying to escape and has stowed away on cargo ships at least six times. Yet more than 12 months after a judge vowed to 'kick some backsides' and get him deported, he remains stuck in the system. He is being held in a detention centre costing taxpayers more than £100 a night.

Immigration officials say they will not send him home until he produces his passport, as the authorities in his native country will not allow him in without proof that he is one of its citizens. But Ali ripped up his passport and identity papers on arriving in Britain in 2004, hoping he would have more chance of gaining asylum if he pretended to be Algerian.

It was in December 2008 that Judge Michael Hubbard, QC, vowed to 'kick some backsides', saying he would write to government ministers to make sure Ali was promptly repatriated. But with border officials still at an impasse with Moroccan authorities, there appears little prospect of Ali being allowed to leave, even though the saga has cost the public more than £300,000.

As the chairman of MigrationWatch UK, Sir Andrew Green, put it: 'This is the stuff of Alice in Wonderland. How can it possibly take so long to get a passport from the Moroccan authorities?'

Ali had dreamed that Britain would be a land of opportunity, but his illusions were shattered soon after his arrival and he began his unsuccessful attempts to stow away on ships. Eventually he was jailed for nine months in June 2005 after stealing a coat to keep warm. North Somerset magistrates ordered him to be deported after serving his sentence.

But on release from Horfield Prison in Bristol he was sent to a detention centre for almost three years, despite constant pleas to go home. In October 2008, when he was finally freed, immigration authorities offered Ali his own flat for fear he would harm himself hiding on board vessels. But he refused the offer and two days later was found hiding on another boat leaving Bristol. He was charged with stealing a mobile phone and jacket and damaging a door at the docks, which he admitted.

At Bristol Crown Court in December 2008, Judge Hubbard called for an inquiry, saying it beggared belief that the Home Office had failed to repatriate him. 'The sooner he gets back to Morocco, the better for everybody,' said the judge. 'It beggars belief that during that time in detention it wasn't sorted out for him to return home.'

Since then Ali has been held at Colnbrook Removal Centre, near Heathrow, as officials fear he will abscond. Immigration staff are liaising with Moroccan authorities to find some documents that will prove his nationality. It costs around £43,000 a year to lock up failed asylum seekers - more expensive than sending them on a world cruise. Figures obtained by the Tories show it costs £119 a day to hold a detainee compared to £90 for a prison cell. Removal centres cost so much to run because they must follow rules including providing failed asylum seekers with activities, TVs and health care.

Tory immigration spokesman Damian Green said it was 'appalling' that nothing had changed since Judge Hubbard's demand for action. A UK Border Agency spokesman said: 'There are countries where we can have difficulty returning people.'

SOURCE



British Conservatives wavering on Greenie laws

Australia's conservatives are now firmly opposed to new Greenie taxes and charges -- and are benefiting in the polls. Can Britain be far behind? Australian political advisers are influential in London

DAVID Cameron was given a stark warning yesterday that his enthusiasm for green policies is unlikely to be shared by the coming influx of Tory MPs. A poll of the 240 Conservativecandidates best placed to win seats at the election found most ranked tackling climate change as their lowest priority. Reducing Britain’s soaring deficit was rated the most important issue facing the country.

The poll, published by the conservativehome website for Tory supporters, will come as a blow to the party leader. Mr Cameron has repeatedly campaigned on the slogan “vote blue, go green” and was famously pictured with huskies in the Arctic to highlight the threat of global warming. He is under increasing pressure from within party ranks to scrap plans for swingeing green taxes.

The poll found that 144 Tory candidates in marginal seats ranked “reducing Britain’s carbon footprint” as the least important from a list of 19 priorities for the next government. Only eight candidates thought climate change was top priority for an incoming Tory candidate, compared with 112 most worried about the borrowing crisis.

Tim Montgomerie, of conservativehome, said: “This is a hugely controversial issue for the Conservative Party.” He said there was little support among the centre-right think tanks that influence Tory policy for action to tackle climate change. He said: “I’m confident the sceptics are going to win. It’s for Cameron to decide how he’s going to get out of this. He’s lost the battle already.”

Many Tory activists fear campaigning on climate will antagonise voters who fear the issue is simply an excuse from politicians for more tax and meddling. A recent poll suggested about half the public do not believe that climate change is caused by human activity. For the conservativehome poll, Tory Parliamentary candidates were asked to rate 19 political issues on a scale of one to five in importance.

Candidates gave climate change an average rating of 2.8, significantly below “more help for marriage” with a 3.6 rating and “protecting the English countryside” with a 3.5 rating. Top of the list were “cutting the budget deficit” with an average rating of 4.7 and “cutting red tape and regulation, particularly for small business” with an average rating of 4.3. It follows another recent poll that found 76 per cent of Tory supporters thought the cost of energy bills was a more important issue than climate change.

SOURCE



More Greenie-inspired harassment of ordinary people in Britain

Householders will soon have to keep food waste in the modern equivalent of a slop bucket, the Government said yesterday. Hilary Benn, the Environment Secretary, said that instead of being thrown away on landfill sites, food waste would be used for composting or turned into energy. Britain throws away 8.3 million tonnes of food each year, costing families with children £680 a year, according to government figures. Food waste at landfill sites is also estimated to generate about 18 million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year, the equivalent of emissions from four million cars.

The ban, which could be introduced in two years, will apply to businesses and the public sector as well as homes. The bulk of commercial food waste comes from retailers and wholesalers — about 12.7 million tonnes a year, nearly half of which is sent to landfill. The plan will be published next month but details were disclosed before a demand by MPs that such a ban be introduced as quickly as possible.

Michael Jack, Conservative chairman of the Select Committee on Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, said that he hoped it could be achieved within two to five years and that it should be a priority for the next government. Although the proposals are for England, it is expected they will be adopted by the devolved administrations.

Mr Benn has written to supermarkets, urging them to hand over out-of-date food that is still safe to eat to feed the homeless, the elderly and those on low incomes.

He has decided to press ahead with the food-waste ban after Defra found that 78 per cent of people supported the separate collection of food waste. In a survey of 4,000 households two thirds said that they were already sorting food leftovers and peelings from other rubbish. However, only 137 out of about 400 councils in the UK have weekly food waste collections. The Government has not yet decided on a timetable for the ban.

In their report on waste strategy MPs demand a tougher approach to recycling. The select committee wants half of household waste to be recycled or composted within five years and 60 per cent by 2020. The current proportion is just over a third.

As well as calling for a ban on food waste, MPs are demanding urgent action to tackle the “Primark effect” of people discarding cheap clothes. High street fashion chains are urged to provide more bins to recycle old clothes and new labels on clothes to identify recyclable fabric, while consumers are encouraged to give away their old clothes to charity shops.

The inquiry also calls for a “clean-up” levy on manufacturers of cigarettes, chewing gum, drinks, chocolate bars and crisps, which make up the bulk of litter on Britain’s streets. The idea is for manufacturers to pay a tiny fraction of a penny on every item produced into a fund that could be allocated to local authorities and help to bring down council taxes, Mr Jack said.

Julian Kirby, of Friends of the Earth, said that recycling rates should be even more ambitious: “The Government should ban the landfill and incineration of recyclable material, stop funding wasteful incineration schemes and provide support to expanding recycling and food waste collections.”

SOURCE



British schools still held back by Leftist dogma

Vouchers recommended by his own advisers but for the hard-Left heart of Britain's Prime Minister that is a step too far. His faith in his crappy and ever-worsening government schools is immovable

We are all middle class now, as John Prescott said before the 1997 election. It was the new Labour mantra, a symbolic statement that the party had moved beyond its working-class base. Tony Blair wooed Worcester Woman and Boden Man, from the daytime TV sofa, with his sun-dried tomato pasta recipe, his people carrier and his promise to promote aspiration. “The class war is over,” he told voters and his party, with a Hugh Grantish smile that sent Middle England into a swoon.

Now, sitting at the knee of Lord Mandelson — champion of the filthy rich and lover of Britain’s finest stately homes — Gordon Brown has turned his back on years of Eton-bashing, Bullingdon-baiting and unspoken disapproval of the conservatory-building classes. In a speech to the Fabian Society conference on Saturday, he declared his allegiance to the “squeezed middle”, on whom his future depends. “My predecessor and friend Tony Blair said that we had campaigned as new Labour and would govern as new Labour,” he said. “Let me say to you today, we have governed as new Labour and now we will campaign as new Labour.” ...

The real test is not rhetorical flourishes, but the policy reality. Yesterday, the Government issued its response to Alan Milburn’s report on social mobility. The former Health Secretary’s analysis, Fair Access to the Professions, is a manifesto for promoting aspiration from the Billy Elliot of politics who started out in a northern mining village and ended up in the Cabinet. Mr Brown accepted 83 of the 88 recommendations, including plans to promote internships for poor children, encourage universities to accept more state school pupils and to create army cadet forces in comprehensives. But he rejected the one proposal that could really break down social divisions by shaking up the education system.

Mr Milburn’s most radical idea was that parents with children at a failing school should be able to remove their offspring and get a voucher for 150 per cent of the cost of a pupil’s education, which could be used at another school. Parents would have more choice, and schools get a financial incentive to take extra pupils, creating a virtuous circle, he argued, that would create a market and improve standards across the board. This would be a far more effective way than the creation of a social mobility commission to level the playing field (of Eton, or anywhere else). But it was a step too far for Mr Brown and Ed Balls, his Schools Secretary, who want local education authorities to keep control of admissions. Their view is that this is the way to ensure equality — but is the current system really fair?

It is scandalous, more than a decade after Mr Blair said that “education, education, education” was Labour’s priority, that last year more boys from Eton gained three As at A level than all boys on free school meals in state schools. Despite all the money poured into education, too many children still do not get the results they need to have the chances in life that they deserve. According to Lord Patten of Barnes, the Chancellor of Oxford University, leading universities want to widen their intake but some applicants just don’t make the grade and “we shouldn’t have to pay for the inadequacies of state schools”.

In 1997, Lord Adonis, now the Transport Secretary, wrote a book, A Class Act, in which he argued that “the comprehensive revolution has not removed the link between education and class but strengthened it”, creating “apartheid” between state and private schools.

It was, he said, a “tragic irony” that “comprehensive schools have largely replaced selection by ability with selection by class and house price”. Of course, there are some brilliant exceptions, and primary schools have greatly improved, but in too many areas the analysis still holds true. “If you really want to increase social mobility, you have to sort the schools out,” a Blairite minister admits. “And that means challenging the assumptions of the Left.”

There is no more direct route to middle-class hearts than education. If Mr Brown wants to end social division while appealing to the squeezed middle, he should be braver about school reform. Otherwise he will find this centre-ground territory seized from him by David Cameron.

SOURCE



Diabetes caused by genes and not by overeating? How pesky!

Diet undoubtedly has a role in controlling the effects of diabetes once you've got it but that is a long way from saying that diet causes diabetes. Yet that is the constant claim. I have looked at the "evidence" for that claim previously

One of the largest genetic studies ever undertaken has discovered nine new genes linked to type 2 diabetes, opening a door to new understanding and possible treatment. Scientists from 174 research centres around the world, who studied the genes and blood glucose level of more than 120,000 volunteers, were able to identify a set of genes that control the body’s response to glucose in the blood.

It is hoped the discovery could lead to new treatments for diabetes, which affects more than 220 million people worldwide. Ninety per cent of those have type 2 diabetes, also known as late-onset diabetes because it typically develops later in life. It occurs when the tissues of the body become resistant to the effects of insulin, needed to regulate glucose. Sufferers may control the disease with diet and exercise but often have to take drugs and in more serious cases have to inject insulin.

Jim Wilson, a geneticist from Edinburgh University who heads the Scottish cohort study, said: “This is an incredibly important finding. The discovery of these new genes influencing blood-sugar levels is the first step on the important journey to developing new therapies for diabetes. “It opens up a whole new area of research to find which proteins are ‘druggable’. Genetics is like a can-opener: it allows us to get inside and understand what’s going on.”

The hope is that in five to ten years scientists will be able to pinpoint which individuals are genetically susceptible to developing type 2 diabetes, and that there will be a drug available which can prevent its onset. “What we have found may not contribute to personalised medicine becoming a reality today, but it will contribute to it happening tomorrow,” Dr Wilson said.

The work, published today by Nature Genetics and the Sanger Institute in Cambridge, involved an unprecedented degree of collaboration. The 122,743 research subjects came from 50 population studies, in the US, Canada, Iceland and Europe, including Scotland, England, Germany, Netherlands, Finland, Italy, Spain, France, Switzerland, Iceland and Sweden. The work, called MAGIC (Meta-Analyses of Glucose and Insulin-related traits Consortium), is the largest association study published to date. The Scottish research focused upon the ORCADES (Orkney Complex Disease Study) cohort, involving up to 2,000 healthy volunteers from Orkney. The work was funded by the Chief Scientist Office of the Scottish Government and the Royal Society.

The nine new genes include those that influence blood sugar levels and also the first gene influencing levels of insulin. A subset of the genes was associated with diabetes itself.

Dr Wilson said the biological pathways that the genes highlighted were those involved in the control of blood sugar and might point to novel drug targets for glycaemic control. The pathways included not only glucose transport and sensing and pancreatic cell development, but also circadian rhythms and fatty acid metabolism.

To find out which genes are involved in glucose control, the team studied the genes of 50,000 healthy volunteers, also measuring glucose. It then sought to replicate the findings in approximately 75,000 more people.

SOURCE



Church sermons still valued in Britain

Sermons, history shows, can be among the most revolutionary forms of human speech. From John Calvin to Billy Graham, preaching has had the power to topple princes, to set nation against nation, to inspire campaigners to change the world and impel people to begin life anew. In many churches this most vibrant of moments has withered to little more than 20 minutes of tired droning that serves only to pad out the gap between hymns and lunch.

Yet some ember still seems to burn in Britain’s 3.6 million regular churchgoers, for almost all of them feel a sense of expectation for the Sunday sermon, according to researchers at Durham University. Fully 96.6 per cent of those surveyed “look forward” to the sermon, with 60 per cent saying it gave them a sense of God’s love. At a time when churches are agonising about how to move to a “digital” from an “analog” age, the results suggest that there is life in the old forms yet.

The College of Preachers of Durham University admits that the results are “counter-intuitive” — particularly in an age where “sermonising” is seen as a deadly sin. The college plans to carry out a larger study to discover why people like sermons so much. The most recent survey, carried out by Durham’s Codec research centre to mark the 50th anniversary of the College of Preachers, offers preliminary suggestions.

Evangelical Christians looked forward most to sermons — hardly surprising in a movement begun by the preaching of John Wesley and spread to a new world by the urgent sermons of the American Great Awakening.

Roman Catholics were most keen on sermons that educated rather than challenged them. Baptists wanted sermons to convert them, Anglicans wanted to be entertained and members of the new, independent evangelical churches wanted to be challenged and encouraged. Baptists and Catholics were also more enthusiastic about the Bible being mentioned in sermons than were Anglicans and Methodists.

The ideal length of a sermon also seems to divide the denominations. While many Anglicans wanted less than ten minutes — although up to 20 minutes was fine if there was no “waffle” — some Baptists wanted to sit through at least an hour and a quarter. Catholics, by contrast, wanted their homilies to be completed within ten minutes.

The results of the survey of 300 worshippers came as a surprise to church leaders. In spite of frequent exhortations from commentators for the Churches to “get with it” and embrace modern communications technology, many clergy do not use Facebook or Twitter and some even spurn the mobile phone. They prefer old-fashioned methods of communicating with parishioners, face to face on pastoral visits or preaching to them from their pulpits.

Most sermons are still structured along the lines laid down centuries ago by preaching pioneers such as John Donne and Wesley. The best are inspirational invocations on how to live a better life in the grace of God; the worst, soporific ramblings that remind the congregation merely of how uncomfortable the pews are.

Dr Rowan Williams, who as Archbishop of Canterbury is patron of the College of Preachers, is among the church leaders who have signed the college’s jubilee pledge. This commits them to “forward-looking preaching, engaging faithfully with the Bible, directly with the congregation and prophetically with the world, to proclaim Jesus as Lord”.

In their report the Durham researchers admit to puzzlement that so many people looked forward to the sermons, and confess that more work was needed to find out why. The report questions whether people look forward to the sermon so much for the content, the engagement, the entertainment, the theology or simply that it gives them time to switch off.

The Rev Katie Bruce, Fellow of St John’s Durham and director of preaching at Codec, said: “The results were not what we expected. Part of me wonders whether it was just that hope springs eternal.”In 2001 the Rev Chris Sterry, vicar of Whalley in Lancashire, set a new record for for sermon length when he spoke for 28 hours and 45 minutes.

SOURCE





19 January, 2010

Greenie-inspired nuisances never stop

EU regulations are now disabling iconic British stoves -- in pusuit of some will-o-the-wisp. Why is producing more soot a good thing? An Aga is more than a stove, of course. It is also a domestic heating system



It’s a story of traditional British pluck in the face of an assault from across the Channel: the nation’s Aga owners are uniting in the face of a Brussels directive that they believe is playing havoc with their pilot lights. Thanks to European Union insistence on lower sulphur levels in domestic kerosine, oil-fired Agas are said to be caking up with soot, and in some cases conking out. It’s been a particular problem in the recent cold weather, when many people rely on these iconic ranges to heat their homes.

“We have to literally drill out the carbon build-up from the burner every six to eight weeks, and relight the Aga,” complains Catherine Lewis, who runs a thatching business in Hertfordshire.

“Our oven either just tails off, or else fails to respond,” complains fellow sufferer Richard Sowerbutts, of London. “When you look inside, it’s completely clogged up with gunge.”

Nor are these just teething problems with new ovens. “For 20 years, our Aga worked perfectly, then it started to splutter and cut out completely,” laments long-time Aga owner Janet Strode, of Halton, in Lancashire. “Eventually, our engineer resorted to putting in a complete new burner and controller, which has at least stopped it from cutting out, but the temperature still veers wildly, and we still get the smell of oil. This after spending £800 trying to solve the issue.”

And with engineers charging £80 a time to fix the ovens, many other afflicted Aga folk are clocking up similarly sized bills. The full extent of the problem only became clear when Peter Anslow, director of the 19,000-strong Listed Property Owners Club, recently sent an email to members, asking if they were having the same oven problems as him. “The response has been instant and sizeable,” he reports. “Agas are going out all over the country, causing disputes between our members and their heating engineers and oil suppliers.”

In which latter category comes John Weedon, director of Cornish-based oil distributors Mitchell and Webber: “Every week, at least one of our customers’ Agas goes wrong. I hate to think of the number of hours I’ve spent trying to sort it out.” His company has now conducted a chemical analysis of the oil it is supplying. “Because of the new EU requirement for lower sulphur levels, the oil is being subjected to a treatment which increases what’s known as its 'char value’,” he says. This is a figure that refers to the level of sooting up that occurs, once the oil has been vaporised and burned.

“The oil still meets the relevant British Standard,” says Bob Hall, whose firm Fuel Additive Science Technologies did the analysis. “The trouble is, the increased char value seems to cause problems for Agas.”

The extent of those problems is, however, questioned by Aga. “There has been a new oil recipe that has caused difficulties, although my own Aga engineer in Norfolk says he hasn’t come across any,” says Laura James, Aga “ambassador” and spokeswoman for the company. “Sometimes, problems can be down to people having their oven serviced by someone who’s not an accredited Aga engineer. Sometimes, too, the Agas can be a little old. After all, a car from the Thirties wouldn’t run on today’s fuel.”

Celebrated chef Mary Berry, author of many an Aga cookbook, says she’s only heard of one case of oven-malfunction: “A friend rang the other day to say she was having problems. There again, in my experience, the temperature can suddenly drop on an oil-fired Aga. Mine runs on gas.”

And fellow celebrity chef Antony Worrall Thompson’s runs on electricity. According to the Aga website, his cat Nigel loves to lie in front of it, and there’s a long list of other A-list Aga-users quoted on the same site who are equally passionate about their cooking ranges.

“We had an Aga when I was growing up,” says food writer Tom Parker Bowles. “My mother won’t cook on anything else.”

“There’s something about an Aga that makes it like a best friend,” purrs actress Susan Hampshire, and her feelings are echoed by many fellow Aga lovers who feel their oven is the heart of their home.

“An Aga is so much more than an oven,” says Mary Berry. “That’s what people should bear in mind when they’re moaning about the cost.”

Indeed, many owners do seem prepared to dig deep, rather than abandon their oven: “My Aga has dried out sodden rugs, shivering ducks and damp dogs on numerous occasions,” says architectural salvage dealer Amanda Garrett, from Oxfordshire. “I’m having to get it serviced at least four times a year now, but I’m still prepared to persevere. A true Aga owner never gives up.”

It remains to be seen, though, if this latest test of Aga owners’ loyalty – and their bank balances – will prove too much for others in this cold spell of weather.

SOURCE



'AGW? I refute it THUS!': Central England Temperatures 1659 to 2009

James Delingpole (below) has discovered the Central England temperature dataset and rightly sees it as a huge poke in the eye to the Warmists. Warmists generally rely on tree rings for their highly dubious conclusions about climate history but with this dataset we have actual thermometer readings. The raw dataset concerned is graphed immediately below. It is clearly a random walk and any trend up or down is statistical jiggery pokery rather than anything real -- JR



If there’s anyone left you know who STILL believes in Anthropogenic Global Warming, you might want to show them this chart.



The Central England Temperature dataset is the oldest in the world – with 351 years of temperature records drawn from “multiple weather stations located both in urban and rural areas of England, which is considered a decent proxy for Northern Hemisphere temperatures – not perfect, but decent.” Climate Cycles Change provides the analysis.

The first characteristic of the graph to note is the green trend line. That line indicates an overall warming of 0.26°C per century rate since 1659. So, for some 350 years central England, and the world, have been warming. No big surprise there since Earth has been continuously warming since the end of the Little Ice Age; and, at the end of that 350 year trend line of warming is the first decade of the 21st century.

The second characteristic of the graph is that temperatures just seem to have this habit of going up and down, for extended periods. What’s really amazing is that they did this consistently before the large increase of human CO2 emissions, pre-1946. Okay, maybe that’s not so amazing since this is called temperature variability and represents the natural, dynamic nature of our climate….That variability, as displayed by the CET data in the graph, has experienced temperature changes as much as 2.5°C from one year to the next. A change of 2.5°C in a single year! Keep that figure in mind as we further analyze the dataset. Please note, the graph also reveals very similar temperature variability post-1946, after the huge atmospheric input of human CO2 emissions.

The Climate Cycles Change post was inspired by an analysis of CET done earlier this month by Czech physicist Lubos Motl, which is well worth reading. Because Climate Fear Promoters make such a big deal of warming trends in the last 30 years, Motl applied the same technique to the full dataset. Was the recent warming trend, as we’re so often told, dramatic and unprecedented?

Not at all. Here’s what Motl found:

In the late 17th and early 18th century, there was clearly a much longer period when the 30-year trends were higher than the recent ones. There is nothing exceptional about the recent era. Because I don’t want to waste time with the creation of confusing descriptions of the x-axis, let me list the ten 30-year intervals with the fastest warming trends:

1691 – 1720, 5.039 °C/century
1978 – 2007, 5.038 °C/century
1977 – 2006, 4.95 °C/century
1690 – 1719, 4.754 °C/century
1979 – 2008, 4.705 °C/century
1688 – 1717, 4.7 °C/century
1692 – 1721, 4.642 °C/century
1694 – 1723, 4.524 °C/century
1689 – 1718, 4.446 °C/century
1687 – 1716, 4.333 °C/century

You see, the early 18th century actually wins: even when you calculate the trends over the “sufficient” 30 years, the trend was faster than it is in the most recent 30 years.

Climate Cycles Change confirms this with some charts of its own. They all show that, far from being dramatic, dangerous and unprecedented, Central England Temperature changes in the late 20th and 21st Century have in fact been quite tediously uneventful.

What about all the 40 and 50-year temperature change periods, which have been influenced by all those human-made CO2 emissions since 1946? Glad you asked. The ten largest 40-year period temperature changes did include year 2002 in 8th place. But alas, the largest 50-year temperature changes did not include any years from the ‘oughts’ decade. (See below the years with the largest 40-year and 50-year changes.)

Climate Cycles Change’s conclusion:

Summary: Unprecedented warming did not occur in central England during the first decade of the 21st century, nor during the last decade of the 20th century. As the CET dataset is considered a decent proxy for Northern Hemisphere temperatures, and since global temperature trends follow a similar pattern to Northern Hemisphere temps, then the same conclusion about recent warming can potentially be inferred globally. Based on the CET dataset, the global warming scare has been totally blown out of proportion by those who can benefit from the fear.

Amen to that.

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Another desperate attempt to blame cooling on warming

The old Gulf stream scare revived. Pesky fact: The research shows that the Gulf Stream's not slowing

THIS winter's prolonged cold spell could be a taste of things to come for Wales - with glaciers a possibility within 40 years. That's the chilly message from a leading Welsh climate expert who has warned that global warming could paradoxically trigger a collapse in temperatures in western Europe. According to the expert, future Welsh winters could be similar to those in Iceland and southern Greenland now.

Environmentalists pounced on the warning as a sign of how vital it is that we reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. The weather's icy grip on Wales since before Christmas is unrelated to global warming or other climate trends - but it shows what life will be like in Wales every winter if the Gulf Stream weakens or moves south.

The Gulf Stream transports warm water from the tropics to the north Atlantic, where the water cools and flows back to the tropics. As global warming melts more of the polar ice cap, more freshwater is entering the north Atlantic. This could impair the Gulf Stream because of the different densities of brine and freshwater. If the northern end of the Gulf Stream moves further south, it will no longer bring the mild temperatures which residents of western Europe take for granted.

Dr Alun Hubbard, a reader at Aberystwyth University's Centre for Glaciology, said it was impossible to predict when this would happen during the next 10,000 years, but there were signs that the system could be changing. "It could start happening next year," he warned. "There are signs that the Gulf Stream is slowing down, but the measurements don't go far enough back. If you've been measuring for 10 years, you can't really extrapolate." Once started, the cooling process could be rapid. In the last glaciation 10,000 years ago - possibly caused by the Gulf Stream responding to melting of North America's ice sheet - took just 30 or 40 years to create glaciers on Ben Nevis and Snowdon.

Dr Hubbard, 40, said: "Within my lifetime we could have glaciers on Snowdon. If I live for another 40 years, it's conceivable." Such a change could lead to temperatures at least 10°C colder than now, with snow and ice all winter, every winter.

More HERE



LORD DONOUGHUE: ON GLOBAL WARMING, LET'S NOT RUSH INTO PANIC MEASURES

From Britain's House of Lords, 14 January 2010. Bernard Donoughue (Labour) was Senior Policy Adviser to the Prime Ministers Harold Wilson and James Callaghan (1974-79)

My Lords, I also thank the noble Lord, Lord Stone, for the opportunity to discuss the Copenhagen conference. Personally, I am not sure whether its failure was a disaster for the future of the planet or a fortunate rescue from dangerous commitments. Time will tell. I want to focus today on global warming, which is allegedly occurring on an unprecedented scale and is allegedly caused by man-made carbon emissions - the majority view is certainly that way.

First, I should declare that I have no training in physical science, although I have in social science from I was when an academic at the LSE, and I am aware of the use and misuse of statistics. I should also emphasise that I believe it is of prime importance to protect our planet from pollution of its earth, skies and oceans. I am also convinced that climate change is, indeed, taking place; it always has. There is nothing new there, although the volatility may now be much greater. However, climate change may not be the same as unprecedented global warming, although there is of course a link.

I am not yet convinced that such warming is, in fact, occurring on an unprecedented and catastrophic scale-although I am aware of the weight of scientific opinion being that way-nor has it, to me, been convincingly forecast to continue in a devastatingly upward curve as the global warming alarmists claim. I am neither a "flat earther" nor a so-called denier-a nasty word, being linked with Nazis denying the Holocaust. The facts of the Holocaust are tragically well established. However, the facts of onward global warming seem less secure. I am not a neo-Nazi but a questioner. It is about those facts of global warming that I wish to ask a few brief questions.

First, on the state of global warming science, would the Government and the preachers of global warming orthodoxy please stop asserting that the scientific evidence is decisively settled and that virtually all scientists support the warming orthodoxy? The science is not yet settled, and some questions are unsettled; nor are all scientists unanimous in support of the orthodoxy or its theology. Five hundred scientists, for instance, gathered recently at a conference in Washington to express their dissent. Their views can be found massively on the internet, although no British media and especially not the BBC reported the conference. Their dissenting views should be addressed, not suppressed.

Secondly, concerning the conclusions of the scientific evidence, specifically, is the global warming of the late 20th century demonstrably different and more threatening than the natural cycles of earlier times? The 300-year long medieval warming period was as hot, or hotter, than our recent experience. Grapes grew on Hadrian's Wall and the Vikings cultivated the green fields of the then green Greenland. Is the recent warming significantly different and sure to rise continuously and catastrophically? Related to this question, what has actually happened in the first decade of the 21st century, when the Met Office constantly forecast mild winters and barbecue summers, which did not materialise, and we currently have the worst winter in at least 30 years? That may be a blip-and I suspect that it is-but it raises questions.

Even more worrying questions have been raised about the integrity of some statistical sources for future global warming forecasts. The University of East Anglia's climatic unit, a major source of the world's global warming forecasts, has been exposed in practices which may not display the best values of objective science. Why did it perform a trick -its description- to "hide the decline in recent temperature"?

It admits using "adjustments" to data, but one man's adjustments can be another's manipulation. It is particularly worrying that it strove to resist freedom of information requests and so have prevented scrutiny of its data.

In relation to the media coverage of this important issue, the BBC should follow its charter and cover global warming impartially, not as a cheerleader for the alarmist side. It is counterproductive and provokes, like manipulation of statistics, the kind of public scepticism which the noble Lord, Lord Giddens, fears. As for the Met Office, it should go back to objective science and try to get its forecasts right and cease blatant campaigning for one side. I note that it has just inevitably forecast that 2010 will be a very hot year-noble Lords should stock up on their long-johns and fur boots.

Why should we be wary of forecasts? One reason is that meteorology is clearly a very difficult science and the data are inevitably imperfect, but there are two other reasons. First, for too many this issue has become more a question of faith than of science. I am wary of zealots. Secondly, the forecasting black boxes are unreliable. We should remember the banks forecasting that their toxic debt had no risk. As a former Minister of Agriculture I recall that the black boxes forecasted thousands of human dead from CJD.

In conclusion, this debate should not be between those who allegedly nobly wish to save the planet by radical decarbonisation and the selfish deniers who do not care for the future of the world. We must continue seeking practical ways to cleanse our environment. Above all, we must seek for objective science to establish what is happening to our ever-changing climate. I hope that we will not rush into panic measures that fatally damage our western economy. We must make sure that we get the scientific facts right and that our policy responses are ones of proportionate adaptation.

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The Finnish education system

Britain's conservatives think it is a good model but would it work with large and disruptive "minority" populations dragging down the standards of government schools? The Conservatives are being Pollyannas

The success story of Finland’s schools has one overarching lesson for policymakers in Britain. It is that sustaining high standards requires stability and, eventually, consensus.

Since Finland embarked on its education reforms in 1967, it began with tight state controls over the school curriculum, but it has gradually ceded power to local authorities, schools and teachers.

But parallels with schools in Britain can be taken only so far. Finland is a tiny country of 5.3 million people, and beyond Helsinki, sparsely populated: good local schools are a practical necessity in rural areas, as are its free school meals. Strict controls on immigration mean that it is a much more homogeneous society, with fewer of the pressures faced by inner-city schools in Britain.

Finland, sometimes described as a “middle-class society”, also has fewer disparities in wealth, making comprehensive schools a simpler concept. Parents in Finland look puzzled when asked whether they considered private education.

Nevertheless, Finland’s reforms are remarkable. Fears that it lacked a sufficiently skilled workforce prompted the abandonment of a two-tier school system in the late 1960s. Lower-attaining children were given a more demanding education; some parents and politicians protested this was at a cost of lowering academic standards for brighter pupils. In 1985 came an even bolder step with the scrapping of streaming for under-16s was scrapped, creating a pure comprehensive model.

Some caution may be advisable when considering Finland’s stellar performances in OECD tables of educational performance, however. Finnish is a phonetic language, making reading — and arguably learning — simpler. And while Britain and Finland spend a similar proportion of GDP on education — 5.9 and 5.8 per cent respectively — Finland spends much more on those aged 12-15: $9,241 (£5,660) per pupil, compared with $8,868 in Britain. This is the group whose performance is measured in OECD tests, but evidence suggests that all ages have benefited.

Finland offers a second lesson, too, which is particularly apt for England. Central government prescription, national school inspections, tests and league tables are not the sole means to safeguard quality. Finland has prospered by taking a different path.

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Freedom must apply to all faiths and to no faith

The Christian’s right to wear a cross must be defended as fiercely as any other religious liberty, says the director of "Britain's ACLU"

Today Liberty returns to court. After the victory last week of personal privacy over blanket stop-and- search powers in the Court of Human Rights, we go to the Court of Appeal to protect freedom of thought, conscience and religion from unjustified intrusion and prejudice.

You may remember the story of Nadia Eweida, the British Airways check-in worker who was banned from wearing a small cross on a chain. This modest manifestation of her faith was as important to her as a turban or hijab to other workers. Yet the airline accommodated these other items without, perhaps, embracing the underlying values that would have protected Ms Eweida and anyone else from the blundering assertion that “rules is rules is rules”.

After a public outcry that included secular, religious and political voices from across the spectrum, the airline modified its uniform policy. But not before Ms Eweida had been off work for months without pay, and crucially, without accepting the ethical and legal principle that would protect her and others of all faiths and none in the future. Worse still, BA instructed an international law firm strenuously to resist her claim of religious discrimination.

What followed was an extremely disappointing employment appeal tribunal that found no discrimination, because “Christians generally” do not consider wearing a cross as a religious “requirement”. This fundamentally misunderstands the idea of individual rights and freedoms, which do not depend on how many people agree with your conscience or speech. It also opens up secular courts to lengthy arguments as to what is a theological necessity. Making windows into men’s souls is as pointlessly complex as it is dangerous.

Predictably, this case and others like it, have provided fuel for the fire of those wanting to portray tolerance and the laws of non-discrimination as inherently anti-Christian, or as skewed in favour of some communities and not others. Public confidence as well as individual justice demands that liberal values be applied with an even hand.

It seems to me that any society has three choices in dealing with this small question of religion.

The first is to elevate an approved faith to the point of dominant status over all other belief systems. It is formally woven into the legal, political and social system, every sphere of public life and as much of private life as possible. An extreme example might be Afghanistan under the Taleban; a more moderate one, Britain at earlier and less enlightened times in its history.

The second option is, in many ways, equal and opposite. It is based on the view that faith is all dangerous, divisive mumbo-jumbo. No good can come of it so, if it cannot be eradicated altogether, it must be chased from the public sphere, confined to a place of worship or the home, upstairs under the bed with the pornography. An extreme example would be Stalin’s Russia; a more moderate one, the French Republic.

You will have guessed that I favour a third approach that is based on human rights and resonates well with a society such as Britain’s. Here the struggle for religious freedom has been strongly connected with the struggle for democracy itself.

I believe that human beings are creatures of both faith and logic, emotion and reason and it is as well that the law reflects this. It may be true that religion has caused much war and prejudice but it has also inspired much art, music and compassion. And it is also true that scientists and engineers have produced some of the greatest advances in human history, but also some of the stuff of nightmares.

If we really believe in freedom of thought, conscience and religion, this must include the right to the faith or belief of one’s choice, the right to no faith and to be a heretic. Proportionate limits on this precious liberty don’t arise because a minority causes irritation or even offence. We interfere when someone is harming others, or in the workplace when, for instance, their faith or clothing prevents them doing their job.

The public seem to agree. A Liberty-ComRes poll published today shows that 86 per cent of British Christians polled disagreed with BA’s treatment of Ms Eweida and 80 per cent agreed that her case sets a dangerous precedent. Even more encouragingly, 96 per cent think that everybody should have freedom of thought, conscience and religion as long as they do not harm others; 85 per cent say that regardless of your faith, the law should protect the right to wear its symbols as long as they do not harm others.

If Nadia Eweida were a surgeon refusing to remove her cross in theatre, a reasonable employer would intervene to prevent jewellery dangling over the patients. Similarly, there are a number of medical and security contexts where a woman in a burka might be asked to unveil in a respectful and discreet manner.

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Migrants to Britain ARE driving down wages of the poor

The 'almost unprecedented' influx of 1.5million Eastern European workers into the UK in recent years is likely to have driven down the wages of less well-off Britons, the equalities watchdog said yesterday.

Poorer parts of the country may become locked in a 'vicious circle' where the only jobs which are created are low-skilled and likely to be taken by migrants, the Equalities and Human Rights Commission said in a landmark study.

The research also found that, overall, Eastern Europeans had better employment rates than British workers and had received dramatically bigger pay rises from bosses who value their 'excellent work ethic'.

'Their wages have grown by an average of 5 per cent a year compared with 1 per cent for natives', the study says. Many are highly skilled but downgrade their 'occupational status' when they come to the UK, making them more attractive to employers.

Researchers for the EHRC examined dozens of studies into the 'almost unprecedented scale and speed' of migration from Eastern Europe since 2004 when the UK's labour market was thrown open to workers from Poland and seven other former Eastern Bloc countries.

They estimate that 1.5million people have arrived here, although only 700,000 remain, and found that the 'new EU citizens' overall fiscal impact is probably small but positive'.

But their report adds: 'Perhaps more significant is the impact on local areas: local public services have had to adjust to concentrated increases in population and larger numbers of non-English speakers.'

The warning that wage levels for poorer Britons may have been hit will worry the Government - particularly coming just after Communities Secretary John Denham was forced to admit that many working class whites had been left struggling to adapt to the new Britain.

Ministers had always denied that pay to British workers had suffered from the influx of Eastern Europeans predominantly doing low-skilled jobs.

But the report, written for the EHRC by the Migration Policy Institute, says: 'The recent migration may have reduced wages slightly at the bottom end of the labour market, especially for certain groups of vulnerable workers, and there is a risk that it could contribute to a "low-skill equilibrium" in some economically depressed areas.' It defines this as 'a situation in which the local labour force has low skill levels and so local employers only create low-productivity jobs'.

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Class prejudice to be enshrined in Britain

Leftists usually say that it is wrong to discriminate against people just because of whom they are. So why is it bad to discriminate against Muslims, blacks and homosexuals but OK to discriminate against middle-class whites?

Middle-class students will have to pay more in tuition fees and win higher grades than the less well-off to get into university. Ministers announced yesterday that they are backing plans for a 'radical reshaping' of the fees system, aimed at targeting resources at poorer students. Universities will also face demands to widen the social mix of their students by accepting lower grades from those from deprived homes.

The proposals - buried in a Labour blueprint on social mobility - last night drew a furious response from the Conservatives and independent schools, who branded the scheme a 'travesty'. They claimed the measures sit uneasily with Gordon Brown's attempts to move away from Labour's 'core vote' election strategy and pose as a friend to the middle classes.

The Tories also pointed out that Labour had failed to close the gap between rich and poor students despite being in power for almost 13 years.

But the Prime Minister and Business Secretary Lord Mandelson insisted the plans would 'unleash aspiration' and allow those from poor backgrounds to get into top jobs. The blueprint comes after a report on social mobility, published last year by former health secretary Alan Milburn, called for an end to the middle classes' dominance of the professions.

Mr Brown said while society was 'already fairer': 'We can't be a truly aspirational society if some people are still denied the chance to get on. Although we have raised the glass ceiling, we have yet to break it.'

But the prospect of higher tuition fees will horrify students, already facing average debts of more than £20,000 to fund a three-year degree.

Ministers are to accept in full Mr Milburn's recommendation that higher fees for some could 'provide higher levels of financial support for students who need it most'. But with no extra funding available, it means that middle-class students are likely to be charged more to fund bursaries for the less well-off.

Universities would also be encouraged to accept lower grades from poor pupils. Lord Mandelson has suggested elite universities such as Oxford and Cambridge would be made - possibly through financial incentives - to set targets to widen the social mix of students.

Yesterday's report was unveiled at St George's Medical School in London, which has been praised for increasing its proportion of state school students from 48 per cent in 1997 to 71.2 per cent last year. Its standard offer of three As can be dropped as low as two Bs and a C if candidates outperform others at their school and can demonstrate aptitude.

Although the report said universities were free to set their own admissions policies, it warned it was 'in every university's best interests to attract students with potential'.

The plans drew an angry reaction last night. David Hanson, of the Independent Association of Prep Schools, said: 'We should be asking why state schools cannot deliver the high standards of education we see from independent schools. 'It would be a political and economic travesty if we turn our backs on meritocracy and it is outrageous to jeopardise the future success of the UK because politicians won't admit the education system they have such a strong hand in is failing to deliver.'

Other measures in the report include moves to make the professions subsidise work experience and internships for those from poorer backgrounds.

Ministers will also use the new Equality Bill to allow the civil service and local authorities to discriminate against middle-class job applicants.

David Cameron sought to hit back against 'class war' attacks on his party yesterday by unveiling plans to make 'good education the right of the many and not the privilege of a few' by allowing parents, businesses and charities to run their own schools using state funding.

David Willetts, Tory universities spokesman, said: 'The poorest and most fragile families have fallen further behind. 'Ministers claim they are concerned about mobility but after 13 years they are still only dealing with the symptoms.'

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Patients in England and Wales denied powerful drug available in Scotland

Patients in England and Wales are being denied a powerful new arthritis drug on the NHS despite a decision by Scottish health authorities to provide it to sufferers for free. The Government’s drugs rationing body, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice), has provisionally said that it does not intend to recommend the use of the drug, called Tocilizumab, or Roactemra. Nice claims that the £9,000 a year drug, for rheumatoid arthritis, has not proved that it is cost effective.

But patients in Scotland are to receive the treatment after it was recommended by the body which regulates drugs on the Scottish NHS, the Scottish Medicines Consortium (SMC). The move will reopen accusations of medical ‘apartheid’ within Britain. It follows an outcry after patients in Scotland were given access to expensive cancer drugs denied on the NHS in England and Wales.

Roactemra has been described as a “life changing” drug because it can be taken after other medications have failed, a common problem in the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis. Patients groups last night said that denying the medication to tens of thousands of patients with the crippling condition in one part of the country was “cruel”. Ailsa Bosworth, chief executive of the National Rheumatoid Arthritis Society (NRAS), said: “I have heard patients stories that would make you weep. “People are virtually suicidal because they have nowhere else to go and yet they know that there are other drugs out there that they could have access to but cannot because of Nice.” She added that it was “ludicrous” that the drug would be available in Scotland “and yet two miles on over the border you can’t get it.”

The drug - the first new arthritis treatment for a decade - is already used in most other European countries, including France and Germany. It offers another option for patients for whom other treatments have failed or no longer work and is used in combination with a standard anti-inflammatory drug, called methotrexate. Currently many rheumatoid arthritis patients receive methotrexate as a first-line treatment to ease their symptoms. In later years they are offered another class of drugs, called anti-TNFs, together with methotrexate, but even combined the effects of the drugs can wear off.

In combination Roactemra has been found to improve the rates of remission of the illness sixfold in comparison with just methotrexate alone.

The SMC - set up in the aftermath of devolution to make decisions about drugs north of the border - has agreed that the drug can be used for patients suffering from moderate to severe forms of the disease for whom other medications no longer work.

Prof John Isaacs, from Newcastle University, said: “This is fantastic news for people in Scotland who suffer from this disabling, lifelong disease. “However, it also highlights the disparities in accessing treatments between Scotland and the rest of the UK. “Because Roactemra works in a completely different way to the existing drugs it is likely to be effective in some patients where the other drugs don’t work or have stopped working, providing an extremely important option for these individuals.” ...

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The new paternalism: "We’ve all heard about this new paternalism, haven’t we? You know, Cass Sunstein and ‘Nudge’ seems to have got David Cameron all excited, there are even those calling the whole idea libertarian paternalism. We. the populace, are such confused little baa lambs that we need the wise and the good to tell us what to do. But instead of actually insisting we do something we’ll just get a few nudges from taxation or regulation to get us through the right five bar gate. You know the sort of thing, maybe the collie dog will bark at us, perhaps even nip our heels, but we won’t be forcibly beaten into our pens.”





18 January, 2010

Muslim peer: rising immigration is 'damaging race relations' in Britain

Lord Ahmed of Rotherham, a leading Muslim peer, has urged the Government to keep a tight rein on immigration and warned the issue is damaging race relations. Lord Ahmed, who was Britain's first Muslim member of the House of Lords, accused ministers of aiding the rise of Far Right extremists by neglecting the white working class. He said that many people believed immigration was damaging their chances of getting a job or accessing public services.

The outspoken peer, formerly a Labour member, said: "I honestly think that we have got to see what increased migration does to our economy, our resources, our race relations in this country. "People say Europe needs 50 million immigrants in the next 30 or 40 years. Of course there are all these arguments, but this perception that foreigners are coming in and taking all the jobs creates difficulty in communities and has a detrimental impact on community relations in this country. "As a result you have people looking towards the BNP and other right wing fascist groups."

Lord Ahmed, who was born in Pakistan, is a member of the Cross-Party Group on Balanced Migration, which also features Lord Carey and Frank Field, and which has called for the UK population to be capped at 70 million.

The peer said: "It is better for learned people to be driving this debate, which is needed for our country, rather than those who are racist and fascist. It is important that we discuss this. "There is this perception that people are coming in from Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia as well as Eastern Europe. There is the perception that they are taking all the resources and that British white working class people are not getting them. That perception is bad. More needs to be done to make sure that the white working class are not in the position and the condition that they are."

He accused the Government of neglecting education and training in white working class areas of Britain. "I think it is very clear that the white working class communities, particularly in the north, have not economically benefited over the years because the gap between the rich and the poor has increased, so the opportunities have diminished, and because of the lack of achievement and education they have not been able to get the jobs that are available to more qualified people from abroad who are fitter and more educated.

"The government should have done more to provide incentives for white working class citizens to engage in these employments. "Most of the white working class people in these areas are not equipped, they are not trained, they are not empowered."

Lord Ahmed said he did not agree with Lord Carey's view that immigrants should be predominantly Christian. But he did want to see controls put on immigration. "I honestly think that to maintain our country in good economic and political and social health, to make sure that there are not problems in terms of unemployment and also to make sure that there is no race relations problem, that you need to have control [of immigration]. "I want to make sure that we have a balanced migration policy which is looking at the need of Britain and why we need migrants coming in."

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Cap on immigration an election winner in Britain

[Conservative leader] David Cameron could clinch a general election victory by placing a cap of 50,000 on net immigration, a new opinion poll shows. A YouGov poll in 43 Labour marginals shows that nearly half the respondents were more likely to vote Tory if Cameron backed a 50,000 cap. The poll is significant because it suggests for the first time that immigration curbs could have a decisive impact on the general election result. The Conservatives need to win the marginals to help to secure an effective working majority at the election.

With 85% of voters worried about the population reaching 70m by the end of the next decade, the poll indicates that Cameron’s pledge to cut net migration to ensure the population remains below that figure could reap benefits.

The Tories will seize on the poll as evidence that placing immigration centre stage in their coming campaign will not backfire , as it did when Michael Howard led the Tories to defeat in 2005.

Then, any talk of a cap on migrants was considered political suicide by most MPs. But the recession and the pressure that record migration has put on jobs and public services has transformed the debate. Last year Alan Johnson, the home secretary, broke the mould when he became the first Labour minister publicly to acknowledge voter alarm. He admitted the government had been “maladroit” in dealing with the issue. But Labour has so far been reluctant to spell out how it would keep the population under 70m, a figure that the Office for National Statistics predicts will be reached by 2029.

Cameron last week went further than before in marking out the immigration battleground. Speaking after Lord Carey of Clifton, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, had called for a cap on net migration of 40,000 a year, partly to protect Britain’s Christian ethos, the Tory leader said he did not “support our population going to 70m” and that his concern was to relieve pressure on public services. “In the past decade net immigration in some years has been sort of 200,000, so implying a 2m increase over a decade, which I think is too much,” Cameron said. “We should see net immigration in the tens of thousands rather than the hundreds of thousands.”

The poll, commissioned by Migrationwatch, a right-wing think tank, found that only the economy is more important than immigration to voters in Labour seats. When asked which issue was most likely to influence them, 36% of voters in Labour seats named the economy while 13% said it was immigration. Taxation, at 8%, and health, at 6%, were next.

YouGov found that 85% of people in the Labour marginals were worried about the population reaching 70m, with 49% saying they were “very worried”. The poll found that 44% in Labour marginals would be more likely to vote Conservative if Cameron were to say outright that a Tory government would reduce immigration to 50,000 or below.

Sir Andrew Green, the chairman of Migrationwatch, said the poll showed how the issue could change the balance of power. “The polling numbers tell us yet again that immigration is a matter of deep concern to a large majority of the population and that they are likely to respond very positively to parties that seriously address them,” he said.

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Britain's war on the middle classes: Labour's drive to recruit the poor to top jobs

Labour will declare war on middle-class families today as Gordon Brown spells out the latest steps in his Government's equality crusade. Lawyers, accountants, bankers and doctors will be ordered to ensure their professions become less elitist - by taking on fewer middle-class recruits. Professionals will be told that poor children must be helped into the top jobs, at the expense of those who have gained from personal connections or education.

Universities will also be told to give the benefit of the doubt to poorer applicants if they attended less illustrious schools.

The Prime Minister will also unveil plans for 10,000 less well off children to get work placements in the top professions. The policies are a response to a damning report which last year found that social mobility has declined under Labour.

The Prime Minister will personally announce the plans with former cabinet minister Alan Milburn, who wrote the report last year. It found that 75 per cent of top judges and 45 per cent of senior civil servants went to independent schools - when just 7 per cent of children are privately educated. Mr Brown says he wants to 'unleash a wave of social mobility'.

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If you must get ill in Britain, make sure it’s before 6pm

As GPs reap the rewards of their 2004 pay deal, patients are dying. It’s time to rethink our contemptible out-of-hours cover

Warm, fuzzy escapism is one honourable role of popular fiction, so Friday’s Coronation Street was justified in offering us a heart-warming medical vignette. A child had a fever; anxious divorced parents called their GP, who shortly turned up in their home, smiling, familiar, articulate and reassuring. At no point did anyone have to explain themselves repeatedly to NHS Direct “information handlers” on the phone, or wait four hours for an outsourced “provider” to send round a jetlagged foreign doctor they couldn’t understand. Nobody had to bundle the shaking child into the car to A&E, after scrabbling down the back of the sofa for change for the hospital car park.

Bless the warm nostalgia of it! Leave gritty realism to the newspapers, with the grimly unsurprising inquest reports about the day David Gray, a retired engineer, was killed by a tenfold overdose of diamorphine. It was administered by Dr Daniel Ubani, fresh in from Germany for his first dawn shift on the disgraceful, wasteful gravy train of British bought-in care. Now serving a nine-month suspended sentence back home, he freely admits that when he answered Mr Gray’s call he was in a state of “tremendous stress”, after only three hours’ sleep. Moreover, Ubani had never actually used diamorphine (his own clinic in Westphalia advertises “anti-ageing” and cosmetic services).

But you have to feel a bit sorry for the chap, as for all those who can’t resist golden temptations. UK primary care trusts, saddled with responsibility for “out-of-hours” services formerly provided by GPs, have been known to pay £800 per shift. One foreign doctor observed that he earns more in a couple of nights in the UK than in a whole month back home. European law means that a doctor certified in any EU country — even the newest and least familiar — must be automatically accepted as fit to practice here (the rest of the world is, at least, tested). Locum agencies need not make certain that the incoming doctor speaks English properly, or has had any sleep. Evidence has been given that the UK doctor who “inducted” and signed off Ubani wrote on his form that he was too busy to give him a proper assessment.

Mr Gray’s tragedy is an extreme, like the earlier death of a 41-year-old mother from undiagnosed septicaemia after six phone calls and two locum examinations. But the problem is far wider, and not confined to foreign doctors. Only 6 per cent of trusts hit the official target for prompt attention to urgent cases, and tales of incompetence abound. Try our own extended family: one serious injury to a teenager, bone exposed, met hours of indifferent delay and finally a trip to hospital (lucky they had a car. Plenty don’t). Another relative, with a nursing background, caught an incomprehensible foreign locum injecting her with a wholly inappropriate drug as a “painkiller”. Personally I can just offer one serious, basic misdiagnosis of a small post-op problem (English doctor this time, but clearly rubbish). The entry-level crassness of what he told me visibly shocked the real consultant when, after a terrified weekend, I got to a proper clinic.

Meanwhile, among the very elderly — such as my late mother — after 2004 it became axiomatic never to try for a doctor at weekends. You struggle on with your breathing problems or worsening pain until Monday, when you can see someone who speaks English, and knows you.

And so it goes on. Why? Because, in 2004 the Government blithely signed a new contract with family doctors — admittedly an undervalued service before. It boosted their pay by 30 per cent (with extra bunce for paperwork, such as making lists of fat patients) while crucially allowing them — by losing a small increment — to opt out of any responsibility for their patients outside surgery hours. Most GPs jumped at the chance. primary care trusts had to find cover: profit-seeking locum providers, such as Take Care Now which hired Ubani, mushroomed, undercut each other, and used the vast expansion of the EU and the ban on vetting or testing to keep things speedy and cheap, even with high shift fees. As to UK doctors who choose agency work, even their professional websites carry warnings that “lack of continuity and follow-up can be vocationally barren in the long run and could contribute to disillusionment and burn-out”. In other words, it’s a dehumanising and impersonal way to practice medicine. Which doesn’t bode well for the patients, either.

It has been a disaster, a thoughtless, formulaic governmental incompetence that ignored the daily realities of citizens’ lives (as does the still chronic shortage of NHS dentists, another contractual foul-up). Its effect has been condemned by Action Against Medical Accidents and the Care Quality Commission; even the Royal College of General Practitioners is uneasy. It has certainly put extra pressure on the 999 service and A&E departments. The Tories say they will reverse the contracts and make GPs collectively responsible for organising reliable care: heaven knows whether they can achieve this against BMA resistance.

And yes, doctor, I know that before the change you were often persecuted by stupid, selfish, unnecessary night calls. Yes, we do live in a society where some people dial 999 because their cat is annoying them, or ring the GP at 3am because their eyebrow tickles. But there were other ways to tackle those idiots, if only governments were not so terrified of offending voters and tabloids by bringing in sharp penalties or charges. Instead, by stealth and without much thought about consequences, they inflicted on us all a degraded and degrading service, and the BMA did nothing to stop it. The fact is that normal, considerate, responsible people do sometimes get ill and afraid after 5pm and at weekends. They deserve better than the cavalier, dangerous contempt they are currently offered.

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Even the BBC is getting dubious about Britain's incompetent official weather forecasters

BUFFETED by complaints about its inaccurate weather forecasts, the Met Office now faces being dumped by the BBC after almost 90 years. The Met Office contract with the BBC expires in April and the broadcaster has begun talks with Metra, the national forecaster for New Zealand, as a possible alternative.

The BBC put the contract out to tender to ensure “best value for money”, but its timing coincides with a storm over the Met Office’s accuracy. Last July the state-owned forecaster’s predictions for a “barbecue summer” turned into a washout. And its forecast for a mild winter attracted derision when temperatures recently plunged as low as -22C.

Last week the Met Office failed to predict heavy snowfall in the southeast that brought traffic to a standstill. This weekend a YouGov poll for The Sunday Times reveals that 74% of people believe its forecasts are generally inaccurate. By contrast, many commercial rivals got their predictions for winter right. They benefit from weather forecasts produced by a panel of six different data providers, including the Met Office.

Despite criticism, staff at the Met Office are still in line to share a bonus pot of more than £1m. Seasonal forecasts, such as the one made in September, are not included in its performance targets. John Hirst, the chief executive of the Met Office, insisted last week that recent forecasts had been “very good” and blamed the public for not heeding snow warnings. He received a bonus of almost £40,000 in 2008-09.

Metra already produces graphics for the BBC, including the 3-D weather map that made some viewers feel sick when it was introduced in 2005. Weather Commerce, Metra’s UK subsidiary, has already usurped the Met Office in supplying forecasts to Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Marks & Spencer and Waitrose. Metra has been negotiating with the BBC since September, when a new tender document, seen by The Sunday Times, was sent to forecasters. It stated that the corporation was seeking a single forecaster to provide meteorological data and presenters for five years. Only companies with a turnover of more than £10m have been invited to apply. The Met Office is still likely to be a strong contender.

A source close to Metra said: “The BBC is not happy with the service it has been getting from the Met Office; it thinks it’s too expensive. We have the ability to provide a bespoke service that will undercut it. Because we already produce the graphics we’ve got a foot in the door, so we’re optimistic.”

During its time on the BBC the Met Office has produced a series of unlikely stars, including John Kettley and Michael Fish, as established meteorologists were thrust before cameras. Many commercial rivals have been put off bidding by the requirement to provide presenters. A source at one rival said: “Where are we going to find 20 weather presenters? It’s a huge burden. The Met Office has an unfair advantage.”

A BBC spokesman said: “It is common practice to look at the options available when a contract is about to expire to ensure we get the best value for money for our licence fee payers.”

The Met Office was bullish, though, saying: “We have always been in the strongest position to provide the BBC with accurate and detailed weather forecasts and warnings for the UK.”

SOURCE



Met Office computer models accused of 'warm bias' by BBC weatherman

Perish the thought!

A BBC weather forecaster has suggested that the Met Office's super-computer has a 'warm bias' which has stopped it predicting bitterly cold spells like the one we have just endured. Paul Hudson said the error may have crept into the computer's climate model as a result of successive years of milder weather.

His claim was rejected by the Met Office but other experts said there could be flaws in the system, which was first developed 50 years ago.

In a blog, the BBC Look North presenter writes: 'Clearly there is the rest of January and February to go, but such has been the intensity of the cold spell...it would take something remarkable for the Met Office's forecast (of a mild winter) to be right. 'It is also worth remembering that this comes off the back of the now infamous barbecue summer forecast. 'Could the model, seemingly with an inability to predict colder seasons, have developed a warm bias, after such a long period of milder than average years?'

The Met Office produces its forecasts by feeding information from sources, including satellites and weather stations, into a 'climate model'. A set of complex equations then predict weather changes.

Mr Hudson appears to be suggesting that data recorded over the past decade of warmer winters could be unduly influencing the computer's calculations. However, the Met Office denies this, saying 'any small biases' are automatically corrected before it issues seasonal forecasts.

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British taxpayers' millions paid to Indian institute run by UN climate chief



Millions of pounds of British taxpayers' money is being paid to an organisation in India run by Dr Rajendra Pachauri, the controversial chairman of the UN climate change panel, despite growing concern over its accounts. A research institute headed by Dr Pachauri will receive up to £10 million funding over the next five years from the Department for International Development (DfID).

The grant comes amid question marks over the finances of The Energy and Resources Institute's (TERI) London operation. Last week its UK head called in independent accountants after admitting 'anomalies' – described as 'unintentional' – in its accounts that have prompted demands for the Charity Commission to investigate. The decision to resubmit accounts follows a Sunday Telegraph investigation into the finances of TERI Europe, which has benefited from funding from other branches of the British Government including the Foreign Office and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.

Dr Pachauri, TERI's director-general, has built up a worldwide network of business interests since his appointment as chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2002. The post, argue critics, has given him huge prestige and influence as the world's most powerful climate official.

The decision by DfID to fund Dr Pachauri's institute, based in Delhi, will add to growing concern over allegations of conflict of interest with critics accusing Dr Pachauri and TERI of gaining financially from policies which are formulated as a result of the work he carries out as IPCC chairman – a suggestion he strongly denies. But Lord Lawson, the former Chancellor who now chairs the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a think tank which challenges the prevailing scientific view on climate change, said: "It is now a wholly legitimate concern to ask questions about possible conflicts of interests. The IPCC is a very influential body and he is obviously very involved in its leadership."

Ann Widdecombe, one of only a handful of MPs who have openly declared themselves climate sceptics, said: "I would have thought that in the interests of transparency and for the avoidance of doubt he probably should not perform both roles. It makes me uneasy."

Because Dr Pachauri's role at the IPCC is unpaid – although he does receive tens of thousands of pounds in travel expenses – he is exempt along with other panel members from declaring outside interests with the UN. But he is paid an undisclosed salary by TERI while the institute has also received payments from a number of organisations and businesses he has advised in recent years including 100,000 euros (£88,400) from Deutcshe bank, $80,000 (£49,000) from Toyota Motors and $580,000 (£357,000) from Yale University, where he serves as head of its new Climate and Energy Institute.

The deal with DfID was announced in September at the British Council in Delhi with Dr Pachauri and Development Secretary Douglas Alexander in attendance. According to a press release issued by the British High Commission at the time, the "partnership will enable TERI to improve knowledge, policy analysis and development practice across a broad range of issues critical to growth, poverty reduction and environmental sustainability in India".

Dr Pachauri, who lives in a mansion in Delhi on the most valuable stretch of residential real estate in India, declared at the time: "This partnership will assist in creating capacity within TERI to undertake efforts by which poverty can be addressed through resource efficient solutions." Asked last week what the money was actually for, a DfID spokesman said it would help "bring electricity and clean energy to millions of the world's poorest people". The spokesman added: "TERI is a globally respected institution. Their accounts are externally audited and annually submitted to the Government of India. As is routine, DFID is undertaking a full Institutional Assessment of TERI as part of our due diligence process."

Mystery surrounds the financial affairs of TERI, which now has five overseas branches in North America, Japan, South East Asia, Dubai and Europe, since it does not make its accounts public even though it is a not for profit organisation. Its annual report only shows two pie charts representing its main areas of income and expenditure although these include no figures. After two weeks of requests by the Sunday Telegraph, TERI revealed income for 2008 to 2009 of £10.7m, up from £6.8 million the year before. DfID said the first year funding of £2 million amounted to about 15 per cent of TERI's annual turnover.

TERI Europe has also attracted British Government and private funding and although no overall figures have been made available for the value of the contracts, they are reckoned to be worth substantial sums over several years. But latest available Charity Commission accounts show income of £8,000 and expenditure of £3,000 in 2008 while separate accounts lodged at Companies House show a little over £60,000 in cash at the bank in June 2008.

Ritu Kumar, who runs TERI Europe, said in response to inquiries by this newspaper she had called in independent accountants Mazars. Dr Kumar wrote: "As a result of this, Mazars has advised us that there are anomalies in the accounts filed with the Charity Commission. As soon as we learned of these anomalies, which were unintentional on our part, we informed the Charity Commission and immediately asked the accountant to prepare revised accounts, which will apply the correct accounting treatment."

In a letter published in today's Sunday Telegraph, Dr Pachauri denies any conflict of interest. He writes: "I am proud of my association with various organisations, of which I am happy to provide a complete list, but such associations are limited to me providing them with advice essentially on clean technologies and sustainable practices. There is no question of them influencing the functioning of TERI, the IPCC or myself. "There is no conflict between these roles and my position as chairman of the IPCC. I advise several organisations on sustainable energy and related subjects, and any remuneration that is due to me from these organisations is paid to TERI, not to me. "This is not for reasons of tax evasion or money laundering, but, to keep within the practices of TERI, of which I am a full-time, salaried employee. No part of these payments is received by me from TERI either directly or indirectly."

SOURCE



Britain to discourage university study among those best qualified for it

It will have a disastrous effect on standards if only dummies and the very rich can afford to go to university

STUDENTS from middle-class families may be denied grants and cheap loans and be charged higher tuition fees under a “double whammy” to be considered by a government review of university funding. It could add nearly £7,000 a year to the cost of university for a student from a family with an income of £50,000 a year. The higher charges are being advocated after Lord Mandelson, the first secretary of state, announced £950m of cuts to higher education. Costs are expected to increase, whoever wins the general election.

Lord Browne, the chairman of the government review, has the task of producing more money for universities without extra cost to the taxpayer and is expected to look favourably on cuts to what critics claim are middle-class subsidies. The Conservatives are also expected to favour cutting grants and loans for those on higher incomes after George Osborne, the shadow chancellor, said last week that the party would slash benefits for the better-off to tackle the public-sector deficit.

In addition, Browne, who will report after the election, has come under pressure to recommend raising annual tuition fees to at least £5,000 from the present ceiling of £3,225. Critics of the grants and loans system — which subsidises students on family incomes of up to £60,000 — believe some of the money should go to poorer students and some to university coffers to help recoup the Mandelson cuts.

Browne’s recommendations on grants and loans will have as much importance for family finances as increases in fees — more than half the average £23,000 student debt derives from living costs, and accommodation fees are rising at an estimated 10% a year. “That is the issue — that in the design of the student loans system, whether we lost sight of directing it at those families that were most in need,” said Paul Wellings, vice-chancellor of Lancaster University and chairman of the 1994 Group of research institutions. “The subsidy falls virtually on everybody rather than being directed to the very poorest families.”

Steve Smith, president of Universities UK, added: “[Universities] get what is left after students receive their support. “Pulling back support to those on higher incomes is an obvious area [to recoup money]. The current arrangements are a major subsidy to the middle class as it comes out of taxpayers’ receipts.”

The strongest opposition to cutting grants and loans has come from the Million+ group of new universities, which believes they should instead be extended to part-time students. Only those on full-time courses are currently covered.

Browne will also consider plans to claw more money back by ending subsidised interest rates, which reduce the amount graduates have to pay back. The taxpayer loses one third of all the money given out in student loans because of subsidised interest rates. This proposal will be presented to Browne by Professor Nicholas Barr of the London School of Economics, who designed the present funding system. Barr also supports restricting grants to families on incomes of less than about £25,000.

Much of the crisis in university funding was caused when Gordon Brown came to power in 2007 and increased the entitlements to student support of families on middle incomes. All students are entitled to loans to cover tuition fees. In addition, those on family incomes of £25,000 may now claim grants for living costs of £2,906 and loans of £3,497. Even those on incomes of £50,020-£60,000 are entitled to loans of at least £3,564 a year. These costs are now seen as increasingly unaffordable, taking 28% of all higher education funding.

However, Smith warned that the government should not rely on changes to grants, loans and fees to fill the gap caused by the slashing of higher education funding. “They think they can make the spending cuts because Lord Browne will come up with an answer,” said Smith. “I am not clear that he will.”

Pam Tatlow, the chief executive of Million+, said: “Students and the fees review cannot be expected to square the circle of spending cuts either through reductions in student support or increases in fees.”

SOURCE



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





17 January, 2010

An odd old saying

There is an old tripartite saying that sticks in my mind -- mainly because I don't understand the second part, I think. It was said to be fatherly advice given by a British aristocrat to his son:

1. Never drink port after champagne.

2. Never hunt south of the Thames

3. Never give your lady one in the morning. You never know what might come up during the day.

I would be interested if anybody knows other versions of that advice and if anybody knows who first uttered it. I remember reading it long ago in a book but have quite forgotten which one.



Toddler dies after NHS doctors dismiss meningitis signs

Meningitis is so dangerous that it should always be treated as likely

A TODDLER died of meningitis after doctors dismissed a temperature and rash as an ear infection and sent her home from hospital. Within hours of being turned away from A&E, 17-month-old Kyra Davies developed bruise-like rashes in her eyes and on her head that did not vanish under a glass – a classic meningitis symptom.

Her parents dialled 999 and she was rushed back to Pinderfields Hospital in Wakefield, West Yorkshire. But by the time she arrived she was covered in black bruises and her body was swelling up. She died of meningitis and septicaemia just four hours after being transferred to another hospital.

Now Kyra’s parents, Shelley Budby and Mark Davies, are suing hospital bosses and say she would still be alive if they had not sent them away with a bottle of infant paracetamol. Mr Davies said: ‘I’m so angry. I feel like I’ve been ripped in half.’

Mid Yorkshire Health Trust expressed sympathies and is investigating.

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Busy British maternity units turn away hundreds of women in labour

Women in labour are being turned away from overstretched maternity units amid Britain’s continuing baby boom

Hospitals across the country closed their doors to expectant mothers on more than 350 occasions last year because they could not cope with demand, sending women to other units to give birth. Reasons for the temporary closure or suspension of services included shortages of midwives or beds, despite government pledges to improve staffing levels and choice for women giving birth. Maternity wards in at least six out of ten regions in England closed at some point in 2008-09, figures reported to the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC), the independent regulator, showed yesterday.

The NMC warned that staffing levels of midwives were “still playing catch-up” with the rising birthrate, now higher than it has been for more than 36 years. Increasing numbers of complicated births, because of problems such as obesity, substance abuse, domestic violence or mothers not speaking English as a first language also placed a strain on services, the watchdog said.

The Government promised in 2007 that all pregnant women in England would have a choice of where to give birth. Campaigners said that in many cases this choice could not be guaranteed and that it could be terrifying for women to be turned away at the last minute by a hospital or maternity unit.

Reports submitted to the NMC by Local Supervising Authorities, which oversee the work of all registered midwives, found that units in the North West of England closed on more than 219 occasions last year. There were also 60 closures or suspensions in the East of England, 46 suspensions or attempted suspensions in London, 15 in the South East and 13 in the East Midlands.

Jay Francis, of the National Childbirth Trust, said that the Government’s choice guarantees were “clearly not being met”. “It is terrifying for a woman to go into her chosen unit in labour and to find the doors are closed,” she said. “While temporary closures may occasionally be necessary on the grounds of safety these should be rare events. Women rely on maternity services being open for them 24 hours a day, seven days a week.”

Anne Milton, the Conservative health spokeswoman, said: “The Government have not adequately planned for the rising birthrate. The Government claims it has increased maternity funding yet it appears that more units are closing.”

The Department of Health said that funding for maternity services had almost doubled since 1997 to just under £2 billion and that it had set a goal to recruit an extra 4,000 midwives by 2012.

Case Study

When Kate Goode, 31, went into labour at 35 weeks at 10pm on July 3, 2006, her husband Jack took her to The Grange Birth Centre in Petersfield.

The couple knew that the centre was due to close the following day, but it was officially still open. Nurses advised them to go home and relax but when Mrs Goode returned five hours later, 7cm to 8cm dilated, she was turned away.

Because she was a first-time mother, they were told to drive 20 miles to St Mary’s Hospital, Portsmouth, where her son Jacob was born three hours later. The Grange reopened in 2007 but was too understaffed to be the choice when her daughter, Maisie, was born a year later.

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Britain's Met Office to review forecasts after failing to warn public of fresh snow

They keep getting it wrong because their Warmist-influenced models are wrong and their faked climate history is wrong

The Met Office has admitted that it failed to warn the public of the heavy snow that brought swaths of Britain to a standstill on Wednesday. Forecasters conceded that they did not spot the widespread snow storms that caused transport disruption and a surge of weather-related accidents until it was too late. Up to six inches fell in parts of the South West, with drifts of 7ft in Wales.

Even when the full extent of the threat was realised, flaws in the Met Office's bad weather warning system meant that the public were not adequately informed, officials said. The system will now be reviewed.

Thousands of Britons endured nightmare journeys to work after waking up to several inches of snow despite reassurances that their regions would escape the worst of the latest flurries. Hundreds of flights were cancelled at Heathrow, Gatwick and regional airports, while schools that had only just reopened were again forced to shut their doors. Accident and emergency departments reported "unprecedented" numbers of patients, many suffering suspected fractures after slipping on ice.

An 18-year-old college student who died after locking himself out was last night feared to be the latest casualty of the weather. Police believe Nathan Jobe froze to death after falling from a window while trying to gain access to his home in Mountnessing in Essex.

In the Peak District, pregnant 40-year-old gave birth to a healthy baby boy after a mountain rescue team transported a midwife to her snowbound home. Melanie Pollitt had sought advice on the Mumsnet website about her labour pains before calling for help.

Gordon Brown yesterday promised a full review of how the country had coped with the coldest winter for 30 years, after councils were forced to cut their gritting by a half to conserve dwindling stocks.

Last night the Environment Agency warned that rising temperatures brought a risk of flash flooding in many areas this weekend as the snow and ice melts.

While the Met Office had been warning for days of overnight snow in the South West, Wales and parts of the Midlands, its forecasters were taken by surprise by how much of the country was affected on Tuesday night. Severe weather warnings were not issued for London & South East, the West Midlands and the North West until the early hours of Wednesday morning, leaving train operators with little time to ensure lines were cleared.

Barry Grommet, a Met Office forecaster, said: "We put our hands up and concede that we did not expect the snow to spread so far east, and with the intensity that it did." The office had issued snow advisories – which are one step down from warnings – for Surrey and Berkshire around 11am on Tuesday but did not release a higher alert because the amount of snow forecast fell just below the required threshold. "We are in a situation where some of the advisories did not get picked up and were not presented strongly enough," Mr Grommet said. "In these circumstances we need to sit around a table and look at the thresholds to see if they should be made more flexible."

The Met Office's latest mea culpa follows widespread criticism of the accuracy of its seasonal forecasts. Predictions of a "barbecue summer" last year were hastily revised after heavy downpours, and early forecasts that we were in for a mild winter this year proved similarly wide of the mark.

After two days of thaw, the snow on Tuesday night and Wednesday appeared to catch much of the country off guard, with passenger groups warning that the patience of commuters was being pushed to the limit. Problems were particularly bad in the South West where dumps of six inches stranded thousands of motorists on impassable roads.

Police and gritting authorities were forced to apologise to drivers who abandoned their cars on Haldon Hill near Exeter in Devon – the scene of problems during last February's cold snap – after becoming stuck for up to six hours.

Rail passengers also endured fresh cancellations and delays, with 12 major train operators including Virgin, Southeastern, First Great Western, Southern and Southeastern reporting severe disruption. Overall 34 per cent of trains across the country were delayed or cancelled, according to the Association of Train Operating Companies.

Airports were also severely affected with Gatwick cancelling at least 114 flights after its runway was closed until mid-afternoon. Heathrow remained opened but 300 flights were cancelled, while Birmingham, Southampton, Cardiff and London City airports were all closed for part of the day.

More than two thousand schools were closed in Wales, the South West, Hampshire in the Home Counties, although most secondary schools made special arrangements to accommodate pupils who were due to sit GCSE and A Level exams.

As the snow spread north yesterday afternoon ambulance services said their resources were being stretched to the limit. Yorkshire Ambulance Service NHS Trust saw a fourfold increase in call-outs with 600 calls in an hour, principally due to falls on icy surfaces and road traffic collisions. A spokesperson said the service had to call in extra staff to cope with the backlog of calls, but said "all the staff in all the world could not prepare for an increase of this nature." The East Midlands Ambulance Service said there was an "unprecedented" 50 per cent rise in 999 calls on Wednesday, while emergency calls also spiked in the West Midlands and south.

Accident and emergency department were also affected, with the Queen's Medical Centre in Nottingham said it was under "extreme pressure".

The Federation of Small Businesses yesterday issued a report warning that the country must be better prepared for bad weather in future, estimating that cold spell is costing the economy £600 million a day.

Experts have also warned that there will be more gas rationing in future because Britain lacks sufficient storage facilities. Last week the National Grid had to cut off 100 companies because of increased demand in the cold weather.

Meanwhile, Westminster City Council has sought legal advice to establish that people have "nothing to fear" by clearing snow themselves, after health and safety organisations told homeowners could be sued for attempting to clear paths around their properties.

Despite their recent problems, Met Office forecasters are confident that most of the country will see no more snow this week. Temperatures are expected to creep up today and Friday, reaching 10C (50F) in the South West, although motorists have been warned to expect early morning fog. Councils have warned that organised grit thieves who plan their raids on salt bins using online maps were making conditions even more perilous. [Now just why would people be stealing something as cheap as salt? Because bad bureaucratic planning has created a shortage of it]

SOURCE



Special privileges for Muslim schools in Britain

Double standards row as government refuses to ban spanking at mosque schools to avoid 'upsetting Muslim sensitivities'. Yet the Muslim schools are probably the ones most likely to inflict real child abuse

Schools Secretary Ed Balls has been accused of refusing to ban Islamic schools from smacking children for fear of upsetting Muslim 'sensitivities'. Mr Balls was last week urged to close a legal loophole which gives teachers in Britain's estimated 1,600 schools associated with mosques the right to smack children - even though it is banned in other schools. He refused, prompting claims that he is allowing an alleged 'culture of physical abuse' in some of the mosque schools - or madrasahs - go unchecked.

Smacking is banned in all State and private schools. However, it does not apply to madrasahs, where pupils usually study in the evenings or at weekends, because the ban exempts schools where children attend for less than 12.5 hours per week.

Lib Dem schools spokesman David Laws, who is spearheading the campaign to close the smacking loophole, said: 'The Government needs to legislate to protect children - not leave an opt-out simply because it fears some ethnic or religious backlash.' He was supported by Labour MP Ann Cryer, who said it would be 'bonkers' if the Government did not act. She said: 'I suspect people are frightened of upsetting the sensitivities of certain members of the Muslim faith.'

A report just over a year ago warned that madrasah students had been slapped, punched and had their ears twisted. Irfan Chishti, a former Government adviser on Islamic affairs, said that one madrasah student was 'picked up by one leg and spun around' while another pupil said a teacher was 'kicking in my head like a football'. In a separate report in 2006, leading British Muslim Dr Ghayasuddin Siddiqui raised fears that physical abuse in madrasahs was 'widespread'.

MPs have been told some of the alleged abuse of children in the Islamic schools may be the result of ignorance of laws on the treatment of children among Muslim parents and teachers.

Mrs Cryer, whose Keighley constituency in Yorkshire has a large ethnic community, claimed some of the children being illtreated in Islamic schools were those with special needs. She said she was alerted to the problem by a local schoolteacher-I had a lot of problems in a madrasah in my constituency,' said Mrs Cryer. 'They don't seem to have any understanding of special needs children. If a kid isn't learning their Koranic verses terribly well, they think it's because they are being naughty, not because they have an incapacity. 'It isn't always a question of just beating. They have a particular punishment called the "chicken position" where a child must squat on the floor until they get very uncomfortable.'

She denied she was biased against Islamic schools and said classes run by 'strange Christian sects' should also be covered by the smacking ban. The corporal punishment exemption also covers Sunday schools, home tutors and other people who are considered to be acting 'in loco parentis'. They can still smack children as long as the punishment is 'reasonable' - the same rule as applies to parents.

But experts suspect the real problems occur in madrasahs, although they believe it also an issue with some fundamentalist Christian Sunday schools.

Last night, Dr Siddiqui said the mistreatment of children was not restricted to Islamic schools and insisted that mosques had improved. Some had now introduced 'recognised child protection' policies, he said.

A spokesman for Mr Balls' department denied that his refusal to change the law was based on fears of upsetting Muslim opinion. 'We have no evidence the law is being abused or that children are being abused in these circumstances,' he said. He also claimed that if the Government banned madrasahs and Sunday schools from smacking children, it would then have to ban grandparents and other relatives from doing the same. [Why?]

SOURCE



Breast cancer chemotherapy can be cut to six weeks -- in mice

A new drug course could beat breast cancer in six weeks and eliminate the need for months of chemotherapy. Scientists have found that a combination of drugs regularly given to breast cancer patients destroyed tumours in a shorter period of time. Researchers at the University of Sheffield found a combination of treatments given over a period of six weeks was as effective as six months of treatment.

Around 45,000 women in Britain each year are diagnosed with breast cancer. Less exposure to chemotherapy would reduce the risk of side-effects, such as hair loss, nausea and, in some cases, permanent infertility.

The research team had already proven the effectiveness of using doxorubicin, a chemotherapy drug commonly given to stop tumour growth, and zoledronic acid, a well-tolerated treatment given to protect bone in advanced breast cancer. Senior lecturer Dr Ingunn Holen and her team treated a group of mice with the combination every week for six months and another group for six weeks.

The International Journal of Cancer said that in both groups tumours shrank from their original size and became barely detectable. Dr Holen said: 'These findings are very promising. Clinical studies in patients are now needed.'

SOURCE





16 January, 2010

Businessman sues British airline 'for treating men like perverts'

Given his "human rights" -- as Britain defines them -- he should win this one

A businessman is suing British Airways over a policy that bans children from sitting next to male passengers they don't know - even if their parents are on the same flight. Mirko Fischer has accused the airline of branding all men as potential sex offenders and says innocent travellers are being publicly humiliated.

Mr Fischer, a 33-year-old hedge fund manager, became aware of the policy while he was flying from Gatwick with his wife Stephanie, 30. He was in the middle seat between her and a 12-year-old boy. After all passengers had sat down a male steward asked Mr Fischer to change his seat.

Mr Fischer refused, explaining that his wife was pregnant, at which point the steward raised his voice, causing several passengers to turn round. He warned that the aircraft could not take off unless Mr Fischer obeyed. Mr Fischer eventually moved but felt so humiliated that he is taking the airline to court on the grounds of sex discrimination.

If he wins at the hearing next month at Slough County Court, BA will have to change its policy. Mr Fischer, who lives in Luxembourg with his wife and their daughter Sophia, said: 'I was made to feel like a criminal in front of other passengers. It was totally humiliating.'

BA declined to comment.

SOURCE



Those waging war on society shouldn't have access to its law

Wootton Bassett is a model English town. The name is redolent with connotations of village life, farmers' markets, tiled roofs and doughty values. It is near the Lyneham RAF base, where planes bring back the bodies of British servicemen killed in Afghanistan.

Spontaneously, people in the town began demonstrations of respect for the hearses from the base as they passed through the main street. People simply stood to attention in silence whenever a hearse went by with its glass sides revealing a coffin draped in the Union Jack.

The spontaneous gesture grew organically, until hundreds of people became involved. The gesture became a silent community demonstration, a ritual where the main street stood still. Unhappily, it became a common ritual. The number of British military personnel killed in Afghanistan over the past three years stands at 241, more than during the invasion of Iraq.

After the media heard about the ritual it became an event. Inevitably, some parasites were attracted to the phenomenon. In Western society there is no greater parasite than the Islamic fundamentalist, who exploits everything from the West while respecting nothing. One such parasite is Anjem Choudary, an Englishman born and bred, and a lawyer. He is also an enemy of the state, protected by the freedoms he is committed to destroy.

Choudary has long supported Islamic militancy and separatism. He wants Islamic law for Muslims living in Britain. He has set up a system where Muslims in Britain can marry under sharia, bypassing civil law. He claims to have married 1800 couples and conducted hundreds of divorces.

Choudary saw an opportunity at Wootton Bassett. Last week, he announced a plan to lead supporters carrying 500 coffins through the main street to signify the Muslim civilians ''murdered'' in Afghanistan by ''merciless'' coalition forces.

The response was predictable. Prime Minister Gordon Brown said: ''I am personally appalled by the prospect of a march in Wootton Bassett . . . Any attempt to use this location to cause further distress and suffering to those who have lost loved ones would be abhorrent and offensive.'' Home Secretary Alan Johnson chimed in: ''It fills me with revulsion.'' And so the reaction rippled out through the media and into cyberspace, where hundreds of thousands responded. Leaders of the hard-right British National Party vowed to physically block any march by Islamists in Wootton Bassett.

Mission accomplished. Choudary says he chose Wootton Basset to attract ''maximum attention''. His goal was to detonate a cultural bomb, and he succeeded. This provocation from a fringe-dweller in the wider Muslim ranks should never have been dignified with a response from the Prime Minister.

Once again, the West's political, legal and media systems keep feeding the deluded and the perverted with the power of publicity. This is a cultural struggle that pits a large, wealthy and evolved Western civilisation against a relatively small and dispersed core of murderers and religious fanatics. The cost of containing and responding to the threat runs to billions of dollars, while the cost of imposing the threat is minute.

For the marginal and the fanatical, the idea of being feared in the West is an end in itself. It is a victory. This challenge thus needs to be fought with more subtle and practical intellectual weapons: better language, better legal responses, better security intelligence and more stealth.

The greatest single burden in making a more effective response is the West's own legal system. The most recent example was the near-murder of 278 people on board a US airliner on Christmas Day, in the name of Islamic jihad. MI5 has been accused of failing to alert US authorities to the extremist links of Nigerian student Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab who attempted to bomb the plane in mid-flight using a device secreted in his underwear.

Even though he had come to the attention of MI5, The Sunday Times yesterday reported the agency was advised by its legal department to withhold its file on Abdulmutallab out of concerns about breaching his human rights and privacy. The fear of a potential civil rights lawsuit by an African Muslim outweighed security concerns. The files were released only after he attempted to blow up the plane.

This is human rights gone mad.

One of the most damaging intellectual legacies of George Bush was his declaration of a ''war on terror'' and its invitation for jihad. Now we have Barack Obama deciding to try the surviving protagonists of the September 11 bombings in a civil trial in New York. It will be a legal three-ring circus. It is a political risk of the highest order. More insidiously, it is a conceptual blunder.

The decision also plays into the concept of ''lawfare'', where the laws of the West are used by those who despise the West and do not play by the rules of the West. The tactic is to clog up the courts, governments and media with lawsuits about human rights violations. The burgeoning and amorphous field of human rights has been a paradise for this practice, both in international and domestic law.

But those who seek to wage war against a society should not have recourse to the civil laws of that society. Their activities should be examined by a tribunal, where the sifting of all evidence has primacy and the distractions and dissembling of a public trial have no audience and thus no point.

We have the capacity to create such a system, but not yet the will. It would be anathema to the human rights industry, and a winner with the electorate.

SOURCE



Isn't the aim of the lunchbox to make sure that children eat?

British mother Anna Maxted on the research that shows that most parents fail to comply with nutritional standards when they make their children's lunchboxes

Every morning I sling the same four items into the seven-year old's lunchbox and feel like a rotten mother. From Monday to Friday throughout term, my son eats the same boring, nutritionally suspect lunch: Marmite sandwich, yoghurt drink, carton of juice, Shape bar.

I am in bad company, as it turns out that ninety nine per cent of British mothers are equally slack in regard to their darlings' diet. Research at Leeds University – out this week in an associate publication of the British Medical Journal – finds that if nutritional standards were applied to packed lunches, only one per cent would comply. Of the 1,300 seven and eight-year olds surveyed, more than a quarter had a lunchbox containing sweets, crisps and a sugary drink. Only one in ten had a portion of vegetables.

The nanny state is, of course, alert to the fact that we slipshod parents will feed our kids any cheap fatty rubbish. The School Food Trust (slogan: Eat Better, Do Better), established by the Department of Education and Skills in 2005, actually provides "menus to help parents" who are seemingly incapable of filling a lunchbox without adding Haribos. This term, my sons' school newsletter issues a stern reminder that "children should not bring sweets or chocolates in their packed lunch".

The truth: we slapdash mothers have begged, then forced, our children to trot to school with a flask of home-made broccoli soup, tomatoes, a banana, an organic flapjack, a peanut butter sandwich on granary bread, dried chopped apricots and a peach smoothie.

The following morning, we retrieve the lunchboxes from the hallway floor to find: a bruised yet untouched banana, squashed tomatoes, spat-out apricot. The soup flask has been opened and promptly shut, but not fully, and has leaked. The flapjack, lovingly baked at midnight, is crumbled into a thousand pieces. Even the peanut butter sandwich has failed. "We're not allowed nuts," the seven-year old informs me crossly. "I got told off."

The no-nut policy also rules out the organic Bombay mix I discovered while frantically scouring the health food store for non-harmful, government approved ingredients. I don't want to give my seven-year old a Shape bar (7g of sugars in 21g), but the Granola bar was rejected by the food police on no-nut grounds too – "Mrs Kent said I had to eat it at home time." Furiously, I checked the packet. The Granola contains "traces" of almond and hazelnut. The Shape bar only contains fructose, dextrose, sugar, sorbitol and glycerol, so it's permitted.

I surrendered to the Cheese String – but that fad ran its course. Organic yoghurt tubes are rejected as "babyish". The five-year-old is just as picky. The only way I can sneak fruit into his lunchbox is via the extortionate Innocent "Squeezie" – £2.19 for a few squirts of mango puree – and an Ella's Kitchen "squished organic fruit" pouch. If I chance a satsuma, it remains uneaten, desperate fingernail marks in its peel telling a sad tale of failure and frustration.

It was all so different, of course, when the first child started reception. We parents were half-crazed with optimism. One Japanese mother I know would rise at dawn to make fresh sushi. Another friend had her four-year-old schlep in daily with half an avocado plus bottle of vinegarette. This regime lasts until the child claps eyes on a Hula-Hoop.

Last week, in desperation, I scanned the online list of lunchbox ideas by children's cook Annabel Karmel, and wanted to cry; Spanish omelette? Chicken Caesar salad? Sign on back saying "kick me"? And before anyone mentions hummus, know this: unless you want your children to be bullied, don't send them to school with food that smells.

Dietician Dr Sarah Schenker, of the British Nutrition Foundation, knows, despite the alleged evidence, that most parents yearn to trick their angels into eating the nutritionally perfect lunch – even pouring Cornflakes into a plastic bag and trying to pass them off as crisps – but that we inevitably have to compromise. "You can make a packed lunch super healthy but if it's coming back untouched, that is more serious than if something has been eaten that is not your ideal choice," she says.

This morning, staring dolefully at its meagre contents, I ask Oscar, "is there anything I can add to your lunchbox?" and he replies no, thank you, that he is "the fastest" at eating his lunch.

The government is perhaps unaware that when you are seven, it is less important to be full than to be finished. They may also be ignorant of the fact that when our poor, malnourished children return home, they gorge on grapes, carrots, cucumber and apples all evening, without a squeak of protest.

SOURCE



Head of high-performing British school calls for tougher exams

The head teacher of England's top-ranked school has called for the introduction of tougher exams and said GCSEs failed to stretch the brightest pupils. Invicta Grammar, an all-girls school in Maidstone, Kent, rose from third place last year to top the league table. All of its 162 pupils achieved five A*-C grades including English and Maths, with an average total point score of 764.5. Every entrant also scored two or more science GCSEs at grade C or higher.

Kirstin Cardus, the Head of School, said that GCSEs no longer challenged her pupils. She said rather than make them take ever more GCSEs like some schools, Invicta allowed its girls to sit eight or nine “core” subjects as quickly as they liked. This then freed them to study AS-levels at 16, a year earlier than normal, or even spend time teaching in local primary schools.

“The students take their examinations when they’re ready and not due to their age,” Ms Cardus said. “They take a core eight or nine subjects at the end of year 10 or 11, or a combination of these. “Then they can look at doing one or two AS-Levels in year 11. “Most choose to take GCSEs early and are very competitive. It’s about them getting As and A*s first time round. It’s not about a resit culture, trying them many times.

Ms Cardus also called on the Government to start recognising international GCSEs, which are seen as more rigorous but do not precisely follow the National Curriculum. “Some of our students take international GCSEs in mathematics just for fun, because they can,” she said. “We’re very interested in them and will be looking to implement more in the future.”

Invicta was one of seven selective girls’ schools in the top 10 this year, as female pupils continued to outperform their male counterparts. The other three comprised two mixed grammar schools and a mixed private school, meaning there were no all-boy institutions among the very best. However the tables showed that in general the gender performance gap narrowed slightly. The total proportion of girls scoring five A*-Cs was 7.3 per cent higher than the proportion of boys. In 2008 the figure stood at eight per cent.

SOURCE



British Conservative councillor declares there are 'too many Pakis' in his town

"Paki" is a common abbreviation of "Pakistani"

"A Tory councillor has embarrassed David Cameron by complaining that there were 'too many P***s' in his home town. Smith Benson made the racist remarks during a regeneration meeting to discuss a drop in visitors to Colne, a market town in East Lancashire. He told shocked committee members: 'The problem with Colne is that there are too many takeaways. And too many P***s, that's why people don't come to Colne.'

The comments are sure to infuriate the Tory leader who has been desperate to rid the Conservatives of their 'nasty party' image since he took over the helm five years ago. He has previously declared racism to be 'disgusting' and said it had 'no part to play in our society.'

Despite widespread revulsion at Cllr Benson's comments, Cllr Tony Beckett, leader of the Conservative group on Pendle Council, East Lancashire, has so far refused to discipline him.

Cllr Mohammed Iqbal, leader of the Labour group on Pendle council, said the Tories should sack Cllr Benson for the comments, which he described as 'deplorable and disgusting'.

Source

Military language under attack in Britain

We read:

"Eyes bulging with fury, cheeks purple and moustache bristling, the sergeant major draws himself to his full height and yells: 'You 'orrible little man!' This is the memory for generations of cowering recruits who have incurred the displeasure of the dreaded tyrant.

To the dismay of traditional disciplinarians, however, such scenes are being consigned to history. Commanders have decided that, in a changing society, a gentler approach is required. Young soldiers, they say, should be coaxed, reasoned with, and allowed to think for themselves.

Rather than simply shouting and screaming orders, military instructors are encouraged to 'be progressive' and discuss tasks with recruits. But veterans raised concerns that the new touchy-feely approach could lead to a lack of discipline.

Ex-recruiting sergeant Fred Burden, vice-chairman of the National Malaya and Borneo Veterans' Association UK, said: 'The Army is getting too soft on recruits. 'The British Army has been the finest in the world for years, so what is the point of changing now? If you don't shout orders at recruits there's a risk they won't concentrate.'

Source

If the men can't stand someone shouting at them, how are they going to face the enemy??





15 January, 2010

Gutless British police chief afraid to go into a supermarket

The modern British police are just political police. They are not a real policeman's a*hole. Read out loud in public the first chapter of the epistle to the Romans and you will be in big trouble but steal a car and you have no worries

Like countless office workers, he enjoyed popping out to buy a sandwich at lunchtime. But a newly appointed chief constable has astonished colleagues by appearing to suggest that the supermarket is now too dangerous for him. Peter Vaughan has been Chief Constable of South Wales for two weeks and is not — at least yet — a household name, even in his own patch. It is unclear how many people would recognise him if they bumped into him in the aisles. And, if they did, is it likely they would attack him, possibly pelting him with breakfast rolls, as happened to Camilla Parker Bowles in Sainsbury’s before her marriage to the Prince of Wales?

These may be odd questions. But they are being asked because Mr Vaughan was quoted in Jane’s Police Review lamenting that “security considerations” meant someone would have to do his shopping for him in future. Mr Vaughan, 46, took up his job on January 1, succeeding Barbara Wilding, Britain’s longest-serving woman police officer. In an odd coincidence, she also commented on the state of South Wales’s supermarkets in her last interview.

In his interview with the respected police journal, Mr Vaughan pointed out that his promotion from deputy to chief meant “additional pressures”. “I used to be able to walk around my local supermarket but now someone else will do my shopping for security reasons.” He missed doing his own shopping, he said. “It sounds strange, but I liked going for a walk and taking a breather.”

The interview caused an astonishment at South Wales Police headquarters in Bridgend. Among the first to read it was Alan Fry, the chief executive of the police authority, who had been instrumental in Mr Vaughan’s appointment. He said: “I was surprised and I was shocked. I could not believe those were Peter Vaughan’s words. The first thing I did was to contact him and he was extremely concerned and annoyed about it, because he had not said them.”

Mr Fry contacted all the members of the authority to reassure them that their new chief constable would not be sending a minion out to do his shopping for fear of encountering a hostile response.

He said: “He was misquoted and the word security was never used. The headquarters in Bridgend is directly opposite a large Tesco and he was used to popping out to buy a sandwich and he was saying he may not be able to do that now because he does not have time.” Mr Vaughan moved into the £144,500-a-year top job after serving in every rank in South Wales Police, starting as a PC in 1984. He spent two years as an assistant chief constable with Wiltshire Police before returning to his home force.

If he does venture to the supermarket the chances of his being mugged have diminished dramatically in the past year, with the number of recorded crimes dropping 12 per cent from 9,398 in November 2008 to 8,221 in November 2009.

Mrs Wilding was also concerned about supermarkets, claiming that the Co-op no longer sold fresh fruit because “there’s no demand for it” in the depressed valleys. She said: “There is no hope in the valleys. I have worked in some of the worst inner-city areas in London and the deprivation here is different. The girls’ aspiration is to get pregnant as quickly as possible and get a council property.”

Speaking after his promotion, Mr Vaughan, who is in charge of 5,300 officers and a £248 million budget, said he was thrilled. He said: “I am honoured and proud to be the new chief constable for South Wales, my roots and family are in this area.”

A spokesman for South Wales Police said that Mr Vaughan had written to Jane’s Police Review asking it to publish a correction. Chris Herbert, the editor of the magazine, stood by his story. He said: “We don’t make quotes up. If it is in the story he said it, and there will be a shorthand note. “It sounds as though he didn’t like it when he saw it in print and is back-pedalling. We haven’t yet heard from South Wales Police.”

SOURCE



Muslim Child Brides in Britain

It is heartbreaking, even as it is unsurprising. In Britain, the authorities are now reporting the forced marriage of girls as young as nine years old on British soil. We are not talking about one case, but several, which take place under official protection. We are not speaking, then, about parents or “husbands” who are being charged with a criminal offense. The situation, in other words, is completely unacceptable and makes clear that we have a crying need for a new approach to these matters. Government must put its foot down – and powerfully so – so that there will be no doubt as to the way in which such grotesque crimes will be addressed.

First, when I say that the marriage of nine-year-old girls in today’s Britain (and the rest of the EU, for that matter) is unsurprising, my statement is based on my own 17 years of experience in the field of immigration: forms of assault based on tradition and religion – including child marriage, forced marriage, genital mutilation, so-called honor-related offenses such as rape and murder – have become established here as a result of immigration, mostly from Muslim countries. Instances of these offenses have been documented in countries such as Norway (where, to be sure, there have been no recorded cases of marriage to girls as young as nine, but where the marriage of an 11-year-old came to light in a TV documentary that I worked on as journalist; such cases have also been known in Sweden). The only phenomenon that has not been documented in Norway thus far is forced eating by girls before they are to be married off. I was told about this practice by feminists in Paris in 2003, and the phenomenon had been imported into France by immigrants, mostly from Mali. Girls are locked up and fed like geese before being married, because in their culture being fat is considered beautiful.

This being said, the news from Britain, which has been reported in the Times, deserves widespread attention. Because the authorities are obviously aware of very serious information about actual children who are supposedly under the protection of those very same authorities. In other words, Britain’s Ministry of Justice, if the Times is to be believed, knows who these children’s parents are, parents who have attempted to arrange for the rape of their own children. For this is what we are talking about here: the deprival of children’s freedom, plus countless years of repeated rape. Such phenomena must force authorities to sit down with a cool head and a warm heart and ask themselves: who are we, and where are we going? What are we doing to ourselves as a nation, to our heritage, to our culture, to our future? According to the Times, however, British authorities are not doing anything of the kind. Here comes the proposed initiative, and before you read this sentence you had better take a deep breath. The Ministry of Justice says that the children’s parents are receiving help from the authorities “to solve the problem.”

I must admit that the principal methods being used in such cases in Norway and in Europe generally – namely, information and dialogue – no longer hold a particularly cherished place in my heart. In my view, the methods must be appropriate to the crime. By far the majority of parents in Europe understand that marriage to children is not “good”; it is precisely for this reason that such weddings do not take place in display windows. The same goes for the husbands with which these children are compelled to tie the knot – and by whom they are raped. As a consequence of the very high levels of immigration from majority-Muslim countries to Europe, we have seen the establishment in European cities of more or less closed enclaves which live according to the norms and values of the residents’ countries of origin. These enclaves, as a rule, have turned their backs on the countries of which their residents are citizens; you might say that they close their blinds. My view is that the current situation calls for stronger measures. Because we are entirely behind the times.

The political establishment has allowed things to go too far. What is happening within extended families and within these immigrant communities is out of control, and the victims of this state of affairs are the most vulnerable people of all. If one is to have any hope whatsoever of regaining control of the problem, it must be answered back with firm and uncompromising demands and measures: in cases of child marriage, first with a long prison term and then, most important, after the prison term has been served, with expulsion from the country.

I mean this very seriously: if we do not begin to make use of such methods immediately in serious cases such as child marriage, genital mutilation, the dumping of children, so-called honor killing and honor rapes, then we will simply continue to be tilting at windmills for the rest of this century. These grotesque practices will not peter out over time – as our leading politicians quite seriously believed was the case, in the last decade, with both genital mutilation and forced marriage. (I could provide the names of actual politicians with whom I have discussed this, but these have been conversations in closed rooms which one does not write about if one hopes to maintain their trust. I can, however, say this: that they believed that the problem would disappear in the generation of immigrants’ children, their reasoning being that this ”second generation” was born here and would therefore behave like other Norwegians.)

Allow me to give a specific example from a criminal case in Norway that is currently under litigation. In August 2005, Human Rights Service reported to the police a couple whom we suspected, with good reason, that four of their then six daughters had been genitally mutilated. All of the children had been born in Norway (meaning that they had not been genitally mutilated as children before immigrating to Norway, which is not a crime), and the four oldest, who were then aged 5 to 11, were sent to one of the parents’ three exquisite properties in Gambia “to learn about their parents’ culture and religion,” as they so nicely put it. When I visited the girls at their parents’ residence, they had already been there for two years, under the “care” of their father’s second wife (he now has three wives). The girls were not only emotionally mistreated by this woman; an adult individual told me that they had also been genitally mutilated in the jungle in the Gambian interior shortly after their arrival in 2003. They were to be “disciplined,” as this source put it, and the girls were “totally disciplined,” according to the source, when they were returned to wife #2 a week after their mutilation.

After we filed our report in 2005, the police in Norway worked intensely – and the case went entirely up to the top prosecutorial levels in both Norway and Gambia – to get the four little Norwegian citizens back to Norway. Now we are writing in 2010, and the girls are still ”imprisoned” in Gambia, while their parents live freely – and supported by the government – in Norway. In short, the police have made several unsuccessful efforts to persuade the courts to allow them to hold on to the parents’ passports while their case is being investigated, so that they, for example, would not be able to travel to Gambia (where the oldest girl, age 15, is waiting for her parents to come and marry her off to a cousin, according to sources in Gambia).

In 2008, Norwegian authorities decided to investigate the parents’ two youngest daughters, who lived with their parents here in Norway. The three-year-old girl was not genitally mutilated, but the five-year-old was. (The latter had also been in Gambia, while the former had not.) The father was taken into pretrial custody (a historic imprisonment in Norway), while the mother escaped punishment on the grounds that she was once again pregnant. After a few weeks, the father was a free man again, but has still refused to bring his daughters back to Norway. So far he has not been punished.

What do you think would have happened in this case if the father’s citizenship could have been revoked? The case would most likely never have been a case at all. The parents would never have played Russian roulette with what appears to be the only thing they love, their Norwegian citizenship and the financial bounty it affords. For that’s all that Norwegian citizenship means to parents like this: money. In their minds and hearts, they are still back in Gambia.

If someone now comes along waving international human-rights conventions in defense of such parents, I can reply with the same conventions, for example the convention on children’s right to live with their parents, and as long as the parents deny their children this right, Norway can ensure that the children are given this right by sending their parents back to Gambia. Also, if we allow us to use our critical common sense, what matters more: an adult’s right to retain a citizenship he has acquired in his adulthood when in fact he could just as easily live in his country of origin, or a child’s right to be protected from ritual mutilation, and then from forced marriage with rape to follow – not to mention right to be brought up with the care and love he or she deserves?

We have seen the development in Europe through the 1990s and up to the present time, and it can no longer be denied: larger and larger groups from the Muslim world are living in self-imposed isolation and practicing criminal traditions that negatively affect the health of children, young people, and women. No one can answer the question of how many of these practices have become more common, precisely because they take place “in the dark, on the inside.”

I believe that the practices have increased in frequency and will continue to do so in line with the rate of immigration, the number of Muslims living in Europe, and the resultant increase in the isolation of these minorities. In any event, we cannot “sit and wait for better times” – because this is about the destruction of human life, and the sustainability of our welfare state. Simply the fact that women’s rights are now going in reverse (see also Aftenposten’s report on the Muslim moral police who operate in the Oslo neighborhood of Gronland, and who among other things deprive women and gays of their freedom) is completely intolerable.

To sum up, I think that it is alarming that we should be so extremely naive as to believe that the conditions will suddenly become so much better in this decade. We need for the police to take an entirely different approach. We need to speak and act in such a way that no one can misunderstand that things have crossed the limits of patience. A society based on humanism cannot live with such conditions. It is, after all, about helpless and defenseless children and teenagers, and marginalized women.

My last word on these matters, then, is this: the thoughts that govern official policy in these areas are about ten years out of date. At the same time I am quite certain that it is only a matter of time before citizenship will not be so sacred anymore as to be untouchable.

SOURCE



Black doctor from Germany employed by the NHS was a disaster for several patients

A locum doctor who gave a patient a fatal dose of painkillers on his first shift in Britain was “dithery” and “muttering to himself”, the dead man’s partner told an inquest yesterday. David Gray, 70, was given more than ten times the recommended daily dose of diamorphine [heroin] by Daniel Ubani, who had flown from Germany to provide out-of-hours GP cover.

Mr Gray’s partner, Linda Bubb, told the inquest in Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, that Dr Ubani arrived four hours after she called for a doctor when Mr Gray began experiencing acute pain from kidney stones. She described Dr Ubani, who could speak only limited English, as “very tired and not as alert as he could have been”. She added: “The doctor seemed a bit dithery. He was muttering to himself.”

Rita Prchlik, from the country’s Department of Health, said he contacted the authorities two weeks after the incident. “He said, ‘I have made a mistake in England due to tiredness which resulted in a death’,” she said in a statement read to the court.

Dr Ubani had been on his first shift for the out-of-hours service provider SuffDoc, now called Take Care Now, when he injected Mr Gray in February 2008 at his home in Manea, Cambridgeshire. Ms Bubb said she told him Mr Gray usually received 100mg of pethidine as pain relief. “I knew they did not carry pethidine so I said it needed to be diamorphine,” she said. “To my knowledge he did not physically examine David. I did not see him take his pulse or blood pressure, but I was out of the room for a short time.”

Ms Bubb said that Dr Ubani gave Mr Gray two injections. “David then took the doctor’s hand and said, ‘thank you’.” Ms Bubb said that she checked on her partner after half an hour and he appeared to be asleep. “Some time later I realised there was something wrong. He did not seem to be moving.” He was pronounced dead after emergency services arrived.

The inquest was told that Dr Ubani’s care of another patient was described by her GP as “unusual and not correct”, while a third patient started vomiting after he gave her an injection. The hearing was told Dr Ubani read the British National Formulary, the guide to medicines, between call-outs.

Phyllis Fletcher, who had a severe form of the lung condition COPD, was given a linctus by Dr Ubani. But in a statement to the inquest, her GP, Carol Walcott, listed seven alternative courses of action that she felt should have been taken. Another patient, Sandra Banks, said in a statement that she had begun vomiting after Dr Ubani gave her an injection. She was later admitted to hospital. Her partner Stephen Cowley said in a statement: “There was something about Dr Ubani I wasn’t quite sure about. The main thing was a breakdown in language.”

Mr Gray’s family say the case raises questions over the use of overseas doctors for out-of-hours cover.

The non-jury inquest is also examining the death of another of Dr Ubani’s patients, Iris Edwards, who died a day after he treated her.

Mr Gray’s case prompted the Care Quality Commission to investigate Take Care Now. An interim report raised questions about the standard of GP out-of-hours services.

Dr Ubani was charged in Witten, Germany, with causing death by negligence over Mr Gray’s death, given a nine-month suspended sentence and ordered to pay ¤5,000 (£4,400) costs, according to the law firm Anthony Collins Solicitors, which is acting for Mr Gray’s family. The prosecution means he cannot be charged in Britain. Dr Ubani is supposed to give evidence tomorrow but is not expected to attend.

SOURCE



Betrayal of a Spitfire hero: NHS withdraws care home funding for war veteran struck down by dementia

As a Spitfire pilot in the Second World War, John Mejor risked his life for this country. He went on to devote his working life to conservation, helping to preserve the nation’s heritage and landscape. But in his hour of need, when he might have expected something in return, the state he gave so much to has betrayed him. The 88-year-old grandfather, who requires round-the-clock nursing at a home because of dementia and diabetes, has had the funding for his care withdrawn despite the advice of his GP.

His family now fear they will have to sell the house where his 94-year-old wife Cecile lives to cover the care home costs. On Thursday his daughter Sally Mejor, 54, said: ‘My father made great sacrifices for his country, he is a war hero and deserves better than this. I feel totally let down and hurt that he has been treated in this way. ‘It is a complete nightmare, a disgrace and an insult. He was, and still is, a very dignified man.’

Mr Mejor was moved from his house in Exmouth, Devon, to a care home 18 months ago because his family could no longer look after him following a series of mini-strokes. At first his NHS Trust paid the £800-aweek costs at the nearby Linksway Care Home under its ‘continuing health care’ scheme. Mr Mejor was eligible for the scheme, which is not means tested, because of the assessment of his GP.

But now his health needs have been reviewed by a different doctor acting for the trust. Officials say he is no longer considered a ‘severe’ case and will only receive £106 per week towards his care. Miss Mejor, however, says her father’s condition has not improved and his GP does not agree with the findings.

Miss Mejor, who lives at the family home in Exmouth as her mother’s full-time carer, said: ‘I cared for him myself for the first five years of his illness and if I could manage to continue I would. At no point was it said there would be any timeframe or, that should his condition improve, even slightly, it would be pulled from us. ‘If there was plenty of money to cover it, I would be willing and happy to pay. But because there isn’t, I have to stand up for him.’

Mr Mejor was born in Belgium but moved to Britain as a young boy and was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for bravery in the war. During a mission over Malta in 1942, in which he shot down German bombers, he was forced to bale out over the sea after his plane was hit – but returned to battle the very next day. His last operational flight was on D-Day, and after the war he rose to the rank of wing commander, in charge of a squadron of Vampire fighters. He retired in 1964 and set up the Devon Conservation Forum and the Devon Historic Buildings Trust.

Miss Mejor said: ‘What worries me is the money we are going to have to find for his care is going to have an effect on my mother’s life. ‘I’m fearful for her future, too, because we’re going to have to sell this house and she very much wanted to spend the rest of her life here.’

The family could apply for the NHS to pay for the residential care, but this is means tested and it is highly likely they would be unsuccessful. A health care source said that because Mr Mejor’s health was thought to have improved, extra funding would be an issue of social care – such as help with washing and dressing – rather than health care. This would make it a matter for the local authority, not the NHS.

On Thursday NHS Devon said the cost of Mr Mejor’s care would still be covered while an appeal was heard. This could take several months. Parveen Brown, who is responsible for continuing health care funding at NHS Devon, said: ‘There is no question of funding being suddenly cut off, or of houses having to be sold abruptly. ‘We deal with these issues as sensitively as we can and we will offer our support throughout.’

The Daily Mail’s Dignity for the Elderly campaign has repeatedly highlighted the unfairness of the system. Means test rules in England state that anybody who has been assessed as ineligible for nursing care must pay for residential care if they have assets worth more than £23,000. Last month it was revealed that at least 3,000 elderly people a year are forced to sell their homes to pay for residential care. There are fears that cash-strapped health trusts will use public spending cuts as an excuse to reduce funding further.

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Islamic extremist teaches at one of Britain's most prestigious universities

A senior figure in Hizb ut-Tahrir, a hardline Islamist group that the Government keeps “under continuous review” and the Conservatives want to ban, is teaching and preaching at a top university. The Times has learnt that Reza Pankhurst, who was imprisoned in Egypt for membership of the group, is a teacher at the London School of Economics and regularly preaches to students at Friday prayers.

The group is supposedly barred from organising and speaking on campuses under the National Union of Students’ policy of “no platform” for racist or fascist views. The presence of one of its prominent members as a university teacher raises new concerns about Islamist radicalisation on campus.

A new review of campus extremism began last month after it was discovered that the alleged Detroit airline bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, was a former president of the Islamic Society at University College London. The Times understands that at least two London university lecturers are either supporters or members of Hizb ut-Tahrir.

Mr Pankhurst is a postgraduate student in the LSE’s government department and teaches classes for the course “States, Nations and Empires”. On Fridays he is one of the regular speakers at prayers organised by the students’ union Islamic Society in the college gym. A society member told The Times: “He preaches every other week and is constantly bringing the subject around to politics, talking about Afghanistan and the need to establish the Caliphate [Islamic state]. “Only last week he was talking about the Detroit bomber and saying the guy was not radicalised in London and it was all to do with foreign policy. “Last year he recommended we should attend a conference which I later discovered was organised by Hizb ut-Tahrir, but he never mentions the party by name.”

In 2002 Mr Pankhurst was one of three British Hizb ut-Tahrir members arrested in Egypt for attempting to promote the movement. They were held for four years and tortured before being released in 2006. He remained active in the movement after his return and, according to well-informed sources, is still a senior figure. Last month a meeting at Queen Mary College, London, at which Mr Pankhurst and Jamal Harwood, another member of Hizb ut-Tahrir, were due to speak, was cancelled after student protests about the speakers’ views.

The Times made repeated attempts to contact the group and Mr Pankhurst yesterday but without success. The group states on its website that its “political aim is the re-establishment of the Islamic Caliphate as an independent state”. It says that it rejects forcing change “by means of violence and terror”. Hizb ut-Tahrir is banned in Germany for anti-semitic activity but, despite Tony Blair announcing plans to proscribe it in 2005, it remains legal in Britain.

In a speech last month Chris Grayling, the Shadow Home Secretary, said that the Conservative Party would ban the group if elected to Government. Mr Grayling said: “Within the UK it takes extreme care about how it words its propaganda ... But anyone who doubts its true character should take a look at the website for its sister organisation in Bangladesh, which talks about evil American plans to subjugate Muslims and about mobilising armed forces to eliminate the Jewish entity. We cannot allow such views free rein in our society.”

The LSE confirmed that Mr Pankhurst was a research student and a graduate teaching assistant. A spokesman said: “No concerns about his conduct have been raised with the school and we are not aware that he is a member of any proscribed organisation or has broken any laws or LSE regulations.”

The students’ union said that Mr Pankhurst was a member of its Islamic Society. Aled Dilwyn Fisher, general secretary of the union, said: “As far as we are aware, Mr Pankhurst is not currently a member of an illegal extremist group.”

A spokesman for the anti-extremism think-tank, the Quilliam Foundation, said: “Hizb ut-Tahrir, an organisation which has a long track record of promoting intolerance, has not abandoned its efforts to infiltrate British universities in order to spread its destructive, confrontational message. “Its infiltration of internationally renowned universities such as the LSE make a mockery of universities’ claims to be tackling extremism on campus.”

A Home Office spokesman said “Hizb ut-Tahrir is kept under continuous review. As and when new material comes to light it is considered and the organisation reassessed as part of that process.” [Translation: "We do nothing unless pushed"]

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14 January, 2010

Why did it take foreign judges to stand up for British liberties?

Pause for a moment if you will, and think: when did you last hear a British politician talk about the idea of English liberty; or refer without irony, apology or malice to the rights of a freeborn Englishman or woman? How quaint those concepts now sound. For little by little we have become so inured to the erosion of our of traditional liberty - that is, our freedom from an overbearing state and its subordinate outriders - that we scarcely notice what we have lost any more.

How that complacency would have horrified our ancestors. World War II was fought, in our national consciousness at least, explicitly in defence of our tradition of individual freedom against authoritarianism. But two generations on from our victory over Nazism, and in the most bitterly ironic twist of all, we had to be saved this week from our own authoritarian impulses by Europe, in the form of a unanimous, scathing repudiation by seven judges on the European Court of Human Rights of random 'stop and search' powers handed to our police by our own Parliament.

Their judgment comes after an appeal by two feisty young people who were not prepared to be pushed around. Kevin Gillan and Pennie Quinton were making their way to a demonstration outside an international arms fair at the ExCeL Centre in London's Docklands in 2003 when they were separately stopped by police under section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000. Miss Quinton, a journalist, was carrying a valid press card as she went to cover the event, but that did not satisfy the police who told her to stop filming. Mr Gillan was stopped on his bicycle and detained by police for some 20 minutes.

The police did not try to suggest that either of them had, or was about to, commit a crime. Neither was carrying a brick or a bottle with a view to making a Molotov cocktail. But both were detained and searched by police for no other reason than the police knew they could do so, thanks to powers awarded to them by section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000. This is what policing policy has become in Britain - crowd control masquerading as being 'tough on terrorism'.

Those who spoke up at the time about the sinister potential of this oppressive law, whipped through Parliament without proper review, were accused of scaremongering. Don't be absurd, the sceptics were told, it is not as though the police are going to start stopping and searching thousands of innocent people. And at first, of course, they did not. But how the figures soon climbed. In the first year of section 44, 6,400 people were stopped and searched. By 2005 it was 37,000 and last year it was a staggering 197,000. So much for that complacent phrase beloved of every control freak: 'If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.'

How did this sorry state of affairs come about? Section 44 allows 'areas' of the country to be designated for stop and search without a police officer having even to claim any grounds for suspicion. Designation can be made by an assistant chief constable, and may be made secretly without judicial or Parliamentary oversight, and can be rolled over almost indefinitely. Hence why it has taken a few years for its widespread use to become apparent.

Yet as the numbers of those stopped and searched has soared, how many of them do you think went on to be convicted of terrorist offences? Answer: precisely zero. In other words, this sweeping new power has contributed nothing whatsoever to national security, while provoking rising mistrust of those charged with our protection.

For the consequence of nearly 200,000 innocent people being humiliated and inconvenienced by young police officers with nothing better to do can be seen in the growing public contempt for the police.

And because Asian and black people are more likely to be stopped, the police then have to stop white members of the public for no reason other than statistical balance. My sister-in-law was stopped in central London driving her Volvo estate car. As the young officer gingerly picked through the mess in the boot from a camping holiday, he made no effort to pretend he thought this mother of three was a likely terrorist suspect. Indeed, he showed no urgency in the matter until he asked if he could put her down on the form as 'white', and then she realised what the game was.

The constable could go back to the station with the paperwork to satisfy his sergeant that he was being even-handed, and the Home Office would be happy that while no terrorists are being caught, at least we are not being racist about it. No wonder the middle classes now view the police with the contempt that black Britons felt for them in the 1970s.

In truth, if our police had not become so infatuated with modish political fashions, none of these extravagant legal powers would matter so much. But increasingly the police cannot be trusted to exercise restraint, show sound judgment or simple common sense.

On the same day the Strasbourg ruling was handed down, the Chief Constable of Kent, Allyn Thomas, was forced in the High Court to concede that 11-year-old twins had been held during a demonstration at a coal-fired power station. These youthful potential terrorists were searched under 1984 legislation which requires officers to have reasonable grounds for believing an individual is carrying a weapon. Predictably, the twins had no weapons, though their mother said both were understandably upset, thinking they were about to be carted off to a prison cell.

Exactly the same process has happened with another piece of flagship legislation, the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA). When it was spirited through Parliament, some warned this law, designed to crack down on serious offences such as money laundering, gave huge powers to numerous public bodies.

The sceptics were accused of scaremongering. But the history of RIPA has shown that when institutions are given theoretical powers, they grab them with both hands and use them to the full. Hence we now have local councils up and down the country routinely using a law designed to counter organised crime to deal instead with such trivial issues as dog fouling, fly-tipping and taxi overcharging.

Even the taxman has jumped in on the act. An anti-surveillance pressure group published claims yesterday that officials at HM Revenue and Customs are using anti-terror laws up to 15 times a day to snoop on taxpayers and small businesses suspected of breaching the rules.

In this legal and administrative nightmare, it is a sad reality that we, the supplicant citizens of an expanding European superstate, have no more to hope for than to be saved by the Strasbourg court, a pan-European institution that has done so much damage to the stature of Britain's judicial system.

After 13 years of Labour rule have been so destructive of our individual freedoms, how shameful that only foreign judges sitting on foreign soil are now willing to make a stand for the liberties we could once all take for granted.

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Leftist Britain big on propaganda

Government spending on “good news” campaigns about policing, education and jobs has jumped by almost 50% during the past four years to a record £214m.

Ministers have used the money to fund a series of high-profile adverts to trumpet the success of Labour policies. However, several attracted complaints for bias and misleading the public. Critics claim much of the advertising blitz amounts to little more than backdoor electioneering and political propaganda and have accused the cash-strapped Labour party of using public funds to boost its general election campaign.

Ofcom is investigating public complaints about a TV advert for the Home Office’s “policing pledge” that claimed neighbourhood police officers spent 80% of their time patrolling the streets. It was undermined by Jan Berry, a Home Office adviser and former chairman of the Police Federation, who said officers were overloaded with red tape and so spent an average of just 13.6% of their shift on the beat.

Last year the Department for Children, Schools and Families spent £2.7m advertising a new diploma, claiming it was “accepted by all universities”. The advert was pulled in October when it emerged that some institutions, including Cambridge, did not recognise the qualification.

Francis Maude, the shadow cabinet office minister, said: “Labour seems to have forgotten that taxpayers’ money is not there to bankroll its propaganda.”

Figures collated by Nielsen, an organisation that monitors advertising budgets, shows the government spent £145m in 2006, rising to £160m in 2007 and £193m in 2008. In 1997, when Labour first came to power, spending was just £45m.

The Central Office of Information, which co-ordinates the government’s advertising strategy, said: “There are checks in place to ensure government communications are not liable to being misrepresented as party political.”

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Dementia sufferers being failed by NHS

Dementia patients are being failed by the NHS as doctors and nurses lack knowledge and training, a highly critical report by the National Audit Office has found. Improvements to dementia services are not being given priority in the NHS despite repeated assurances from officials. In addition £60m handed out to local organisations in the last year has disappeared, the NAO said in an interim report.

GPs knowledge of dementia has not improved in the last five years although family doctors are more confident in diagnosing the condition, the report said. There is no basic training in the care of patients with dementia even though three quarters of patients in hospital are over the age of 70 and cases of the condition are expected to double in the next 30 years to reach more than 1.2 million in England, largely fuelled by an ageing population.

Karen Taylor, director of health at the NAO, said: "In 2007 we found value for money for dementia services was poor. The Department of Health published the dementia strategy in February last year and whilst it was comprehensive and welcome, it was delayed and the response since then is that it has not been given the priority or addressed with the urgency that both we and the Public Accounts Committee was led to believe it would be." She said 'a couple of years at least' has been lost.

Mr Amyas Morse, head of the National Audit Office, said: “The action has not so far matched the rhetoric in terms of urgency. "At the moment this strategy lacks the mechanisms needed to bring about large scale improvements and without these mechanisms it is unlikely that the intended and much needed transformation of services will be delivered within the strategy’s five year time frame.” Dementia is set to cost the country £15.9 billion this year, rising to £34.8 billion by 2026, the report said.

The estimated £1.9 billion that the dementia strategy, which sets out objectives to improve care, will cost to implement over the next ten years is expected to come from efficiency savings in the NHS and social care but this is at risk because of a lack of co-ordination. Dementia care is likely to cost a lot more than estimated after recent court cases which mean many patients with the condition who were paying for their care home place, should be funded by the NHS, the report said. Savings could be made if people were supported to stay in their own homes for longer, the report said, as specialist dementia care home places could £1,000 a week, around double a normal place.

Local NHS organisations do not even know how much they currently spend on dementia services and have not mapped out future need in their areas so cannot plan effectively, the report said. The first £60m given to local NHS organisations to improve dementia services has been absorbed into their bottom line and it is not clear what it has been spent on, the report said.

Edward Leigh, chairman of the Committee of Public Accounts said: "The Department of Health is in danger of not being able to follow up on its dementia strategy which it announced nearly a year ago. Dementia has not been made a national priority. "Almost every doctor, nurse and care home worker will at some point look after people with dementia and still there is no basic training for staff; GPs knowledge of dementia has not improved in five years; and the speed with which people are diagnosed with dementia varies across the country and so many are mossing out on the care that they should be receiving."

Andrew Ketteringham, Director of External Affairs of Alzheimer’s Society said: "This influential report shows just how big the dementia crisis is. "Change can't come soon enough for the millions of families battling daily with this devastating condition. The strategy will transform lives but only if local health authorities are compelled to give dementia the priority it deserves. Millions depend on the Strategy succeeding. It's a race against time."

Phil Hope, Care Services Minister, said: “We welcome this report, however it is important to remember that the field work was done five months after the National Dementia Strategy was published. Our implementation plan is on track. “Improving the quality of care and treatment for people with dementia is fundamental to our work to improve the lives of those affected. We will give careful consideration to all the recommendations made in this report. “We are in the first year of our ambitious five year National Dementia Strategy - change will not happen immediately. There is still much more to be done and we are working hard to put the plans outlined in the strategy into place.

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British councils trying hard to cut back care for the elderly

Council officials are attempting to force through plans to abolish round-the-clock wardens in housing for vulnerable elderly people despite the worst winter in decades. A High Court judge ordered Portsmouth City Council to restore 24 hour staffing for hundreds of residents of sheltered housing schemes after a landmark High Court case last month. Judge Milward Jarman QC said that there were “serious failings” in the cost-cutting plans to replace overnight wardens with a “mobile” team of just two people patrolling the city, covering seven separate housing blocks. But officials have now secured a temporary order allowing them to continue with the cheaper scheme while the council appeals last month’s decision.

Replacing the wardens with two-man teams is expected to cut costs by an estimated £365,000 a year. But residents said that they felt frightened and vulnerable without round-the-clock staffing and claimed that the cuts could lead to tragedy. “If they win and I hope and pray they do not we are going to have deaths on our hands, I can see it coming, especially with this weather,” said Ron Smith, one of the residents, in whose name the original legal challenge was brought. “Our own staff who used to do the nights knew the residents, knew what is wrong with them, what pills they need, everything like that."

Just under 350 residents, some aged in their 90s and others suffering from illnesses including cancer, were told last summer that overnight wardens were being withdrawn as part of a plan to “improve” the service. Almost half personally signed up to support judicial review proceedings brought by Yvonne Hossack, the campaigning solicitor, in a joint case which also challenged a similar scheme in Barnet, north London, supported by hundreds more residents. But although they won the case, the Portsmouth residents are now facing the prospect of a fresh attempt by the council to abolish 24-hour wardens.

With roads across the city blocked by snow, the council was forced to abandon its mobile teams last week, hiring in agency staff to temporarily restore overnight staffing during the extreme weather. But it plans to revert to the two-man teams as soon as possible while it prepares to appeal last year’s ruling. “We believe that this is an essential service it is a matter of life and death,” said Miss Hossack.

David Mearns, the council’s assistant housing manager said: “We have always maintained that the mobile night service provides a safe, effective service that meets residents’ needs. “To date, the service has run for 64 nights, and received very positive feedback from the residents who have requested their help. “This has been supported by scheme staff, who say the night service is working extremely well.”

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Why computers should be banned from British schools

Have you been inside a primary school recently? The old blackboards are gone, and so are the wooden desks with those little inkwells. No great loss, perhaps, but what has replaced them is frightening. Those handsome, Victorian red-brick board schools, set up under the 1870 Education Act, might look pretty much unchanged on the outside. But on the inside they have become little offices. Whiteboards, hooked up to computers, are the main teaching tool in the classroom. Whole areas are given over to ranks of gleaming screens. In one North London classroom I visited recently (to deliver a lecture on journalism) every single child had their own laptop.

I was astonished - and not a little dismayed - by this wholesale reliance on technology. Yes, the children were on the whole polite, attentive and curious; the teachers committed and good at keeping discipline. But the moment the teacher's attention was diverted for more than a minute, the children all turned to their computer games.

And, just like in any office, the school IT system then went on the blink (while the children's computer games kept on going). The pupils were unable to complete their work (they had to produce a mock newspaper) because the printers had gone down. Cue another half an hour of computer games, while the teacher tried and failed to get the printers working again.

That's why I was so dismayed by Gordon Brown's latest misguided wheeze. At the beginning of the week, he announced he's going to give away £300million worth of free laptops and broadband access to 270,000 poor families, with priority for those with educational needs. His aim is to make every family a 'broadband family', in the naive belief that the internet, because it's modern, is some kind of magic wand that will help lift them out of poverty.

It's no such thing. For the moment you hand a laptop to a child, the child will treat it the way most adults do - as a device beautifully designed to waste their time, avoid long periods of concentrated work, play games on, indulge their obsessions, narrow their horizons and reduce their attention span.

This might not matter so much were it not for the fact that widespread use of computers and the internet now lie at the heart of our education system. There is no doubt technology can be a wonderful tool in the classroom. But I'd argue there is a pretty neat equation showing that the greater the use of computers in teaching, the less likely the pupils are to concentrate on what they are being taught, or retain information. After all, the very nature of computerised learning involves 'surfing' from one page to the next, from one subject to another, flicking through reams of material in seconds; only pausing on subjects that instantly seize your attention; never needing to memorise anything because it's all stored digitally. That, surely, is anathema to the academic rigour that was once the foundation of a worthwhile education.

The simple truth is that sticking children in front of the internet, whether at school or in the home, is like sticking them in an enormous library - with every book in the world; and every computer game, too. Yes, as Gordon Brown hopes, they might be reading War And Peace on their laptop - or even writing on it - but, much, much more likely, they'll be playing Grand Theft Auto IV or emailing each other graphic definitions of rude words.

It's not the children's fault. Us grown-ups are just the same. That man tapping on his laptop throughout the train journey to Norwich might be finding a cure for cancer. More likely he's sending his wife a YouTube clip of a panda waking up. Surely, though, we adults (especially teachers) should be encouraging children away from such time-wasting temptations, not driving them headlong towards them?

My fear is, as schools become increasingly dependant on computerised learning tools, so their teachers will become too lazy or uninspiring to seize their pupils' attention by traditional methods. That would not only be a terrible sadness, it would be an educational disaster. For the increasing use of computers for schoolwork has led to widespread plagiarism: copying other people's work is the easiest thing in the world with the internet, making it almost impossible for teachers to assess their pupils' true ability. Even for those pupils who resist the temptation to cheat, the luxury of constant self- correction has undermined-intellectual discipline.

I count myself lucky to belong to the last generation that had to do my essays at university by hand - I graduated in 1993. Now, if I make a mistake, I can hit the backspace key. I can make up an argument on the hoof, and restitch my line of thought. In pre-laptop days, it was fatal to put pen to paper before you had gone through the mental process of first constructing a pretty good argument in your mind or on paper.

I am no Luddite who wishes we could return to the days of chalk-on-blackboard. Modern technology - used sparingly and wisely - can enhance the learning experience. But wide-eyed Gordon Brown treats it with absurd reverence, ignoring the evidence that its influence is harming the way children interact with the world around them.

Only this week, the Government's adviser on children's speech, Jean Gross, warned that teenagers are becoming unemployable because they use a vocabulary of just 800 words. Although most of them have a vocabulary of 40,000 words by the age of 16, they choose to limit themselves to the smaller range they use for texts and electronic media.

This is an example of how limiting computers can be. Precisely because everything under the sun is on the internet and you pick what you want, you end up tailoring your content to yourself and what you know. You rarely venture into the odd, obscure or the difficult but worthwhile.

That's why Gordon's latest political gimmick is so flawed. Throwing money at the poorest children, and filling their schools and homes with expensive hardware, is an abdication of responsibility.

Go to the best schools in the country - independent and state - and, yes, they'll be using computers. But only in the way they use books, pens and paper: as tools to guide children away from childish interests and into more difficult areas. That is what teachers are for, as the inspirational teacher in Muriel Spark's The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie put it. 'Education,' she says, is from the Latin 'ex, out, and duco, I lead - education is a leading out of what is already there in the pupil's soul'.

A computer, however high-tech, remains an inert object; it can only follow what it is instructed to search for. Only another, older, better, human brain can do the best sort of 'leading out'.

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Teachers attack British government for subjecting schools to an ‘initiative a week’

A leading headmistress has criticised Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary, for subjecting schools to an “initiative a week” without any sense of a coherent plan. Gillian Low, the president of the Girls’ Schools Association, cited last week’s announcement that all pupils should be offered lessons in Mandarin. This came on top of proposals for lessons on debt management, parenthood and domestic violence. In an interview with The Times, she said: “I think we need time to pause and actually think, ‘Is there a cohesive plan here?’ Because it doesn’t come across that way.”

Mrs Low appealed to politicians to use the general election as an opportunity to rethink the demands placed upon schools and the impact on their core mission of education.

Her comments, which coincide with the publication today of school league tables of last summer’s A-level and GCSE results, were echoed by other head teachers. Andrew Grant, the chairman of the Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference, said: “This Government has been hyperactive in heaping responsibilities onto schools ever since it came to power and crowding the curriculum with bright new ideas. Something has to give.” John Dunford, the general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said: “We have had wholesale changes to the curriculum for 11-14 year olds ... Whatever merits these changes have, they have presented a huge burden on schools.”

Mrs Low, whose association represents 186 independent schools, said that private schools had to take account of government initiatives. Referring to Mandarin lessons, she said: “While independent schools may choose not to do that, we need to take note of it because, in simply a commercial way, our parents may be saying to us, ‘Why aren’t you doing Arabic? They can do Arabic in the school down the road’. “But, also, we need to think is it appropriate? I have a big, big question about how far they get in those languages, particularly Mandarin, which is an incredibly complex language.”

She added: “I am hoping that the election, whether we get a change of government or not, will give people time to think, ‘Right, what are we trying to do in education? What are the priorities? How do we best achieve those ends?’.”

Mrs Low, the headmistress of Lady Eleanor Holles School in Hampton, West London, said that the intervention trend began under the Conservatives, with the introduction of the national curriculum in 1992, but had increased, particularly under Mr Balls.

Mrs Low began her career in state schools before moving to the independent sector. The biggest change, she said, has been to give schools a greater role in what she called a “socialising agenda”. “These are all important issues,” she said. “I am not suggesting for a moment that these are not important things in our society to deal.” But she added: “As more is going in, the length of the day and the school year remain the same. What is either going out or getting less attention?”

Pupils might learn some skills better beyond the classroom, such as by being given a budget to run a school club or society, and learn values though a school’s “hidden curriculum”, she said.

Mr Balls’s ministry was unrepentant. The Department for Children, Schools and Families said: “We make no apology for providing the modern and diverse education that parents demand, while maintaining our focus on traditional subjects such as maths, English and the sciences, which are all seeing record results. “Parents can choose to send their children to independent schools but, with record investment, record numbers of school staff and sustained improvements year on year, state schools are better than ever.”

Bright ideas

January 11 Consultation on personal tutors for all secondary pupils

January 4 “Aspiration” that all secondary pupils have chance to learn Mandarin, right, Japanese or Arabic

January 3 Savings, credit cards, mortgages, financial markets to be compulsory in curriculum from the age of 5

December 31 All secondary schools to get 15 new books for libraries from department list of 260 titles

December 16 Parents of children with special needs given more rights to complain if dissatisfied with schools

December 10 Schools given new requirement to record and report serious or recurring bullying to local authority

November 26 Smart meters for every school to help them to cut electricity use as part of efficiency drive

November 19 Theory of evolution to become compulsory part of science curriculum in primary schools

November 13 New guidance says that schools need clear plans to educate pupils about drugs, alcohol and smoking

November 6 New guidance for teachers leading school trips

November 4 Sex education to be compulsory for all pupils, ending parents’ rights to withdraw children once they reach 15

November 2 Consultation on new complaints system over admissions to academies

October 20 New programme to help school pupils who stammer

October 16 All new secondary school buildings to be subjected to £6,000-a-time acoustic tests

September 30 All schools to have good or outstanding behaviour rating from Ofsted by 2012

September 16 One-to-one tuition pledged for pupils who fall behind in English and maths from this school year

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Black British councillor could face jail after calling Asian opponent a 'coconut' during budget debate

We read:

"A black councillor who called an Asian colleague a ‘coconut’ during a meeting is facing a possible prison sentence after being charged with racially aggravated harassment. Liberal Democrat Shirley Brown, 47, used the term to describe Jay Jethwa at a Bristol City Council budget debate last year. The jibe is used to accuse someone of betraying their native culture and pandering to 'white' opinion - as the coconut is brown on the outside and white in the middle.

Conservative Mrs Jethwa, 41, said she had not experienced such a severe insult since she came to the UK from India 24 years ago. Mrs Brown used the term after Councillor Jethwa championed a Tory motion to cut funding for the Legacy Commission, which commemorates the abolition of slavery.

The incident on February 24 plunged the council into a race row and prompted a formal complaint by the Conservative Party to the council's head of legal services. In July last year, Mrs Brown was suspended for a month by the council's Standards Committee for using ‘offensive and abusive language’.

But this was overturned on appeal by the Adjudication Panel for England Tribunal Service in September and Mrs Brown remains in her post pending the outcome of her appeal. Avon and Somerset police began investigating the incident in March 2009 and Mrs Brown has now been summonsed to appear before Bristol Magistrates Court on February 15. If the case goes to crown court, the maximum sentence is two years in jail.

Mrs Brown insists the comment was not racist and says it was intended to mean that Mrs Jethwa was ‘in denial of her roots’.

Source

It is a sad day when it is considered insulting to say that someone has values regarded as characteristic of whites.





13 January, 2010

Global Warming Fully Covers the UK with Snow and Ice

So NASA does a coverup

ISLAND SNOW: Last week when NASA's Terra satellite orbited over Europe, it saw something very unusual. The normally temperate British Isles were completely covered by snow. On Jan. 7th, from an altitude of 420 miles, Terra's MODIS (Moderate-resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) camera snapped this picture:



Quite an embarrassment for the NASA "Global Warming" team, which seems never to cease its efforts to obscure and contort the facts of nature. If you go to their website right now, you'll see they actually have scrubbed this same photo, and replaced it with one showing only part of the UK, so you won't get the "wrong" impression that ALL of the UK was under snow and ice when the photo was made. But it was.

It's not only Britian. Heavy snowfall and record-low temperatures have spread across Europe, closing schools, paralyzing airports, and downing power lines. Much of North America and parts of Asia are experiencing the same brutal cold.

SOURCE



It's 15 below zero as weathermen go witch-hunting

By Frank Furedi, professor of sociology at the University of Kent

It is snowing big time in my town in Kent. The family sits in front of the television to discover whether there is more of the white stuff to come. However, instead of an informative weather forecast we are offered a political broadcast.

A dramatic sounding voiceover informs us that David Shukman, who is the BBC's environment and science correspondent, will report "on how one of the longest cold snaps for a generation fits in with theories of a warming planet and global climate change". Adopting a solemn tone that hints at catastrophes to come, Shukman announces that it is minus 15C in the Pennines and five cars are stranded before stating, "No wonder many are asking, `What about global warming?' "

Just in case the cold t